Surfacing - Book One in the Swans Landing Series

Chapter 21

Chapter Twenty-One

The first thought that crossed my mind as I drifted in that space between sleep and awake was that I could hear the ocean. The steady swoosh of the water sounded much closer than it usually did and I wondered if I had slept with my window open last night.

I rolled over to look at the clock on the floor next to my mattress. But instead, an unfamiliar blue lamp and a stack of books on a table I’d never seen before greeted me.

I sat up, rubbing away sleep from my bleary eyes. I lay tangled in strange sheets in a bed—an actual bed, not just mattresses on the floor—in a bedroom that was not mine. The swirls of cream and blue on the wallpaper made me think of the ocean, and the pictures on the walls were of people I didn’t know, except for the photo of Sailor tucked into the mirror over the dresser across from me.

The ocean sound stopped and I turned my head toward a door to my right. The sound of a shower door opened and then closed in the room beyond.

Oh my god, I had spent the night with Dylan. In his bed. Had we...?

I still wore his clothes, an old T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Memories of the day before came flooding back as I stared down at the unfamiliar clothes.

I wasn’t human. Not fully, anyway. My entire life had been a lie. Everything I thought I knew about the world was dead wrong. And, oh yeah, I had kissed Dylan.

That just about summed up all the catastrophes of my life.

The bathroom door opened and Dylan emerged, shirtless, with his long hair wet and sticking to his shoulders. He smiled when he saw me.

“You’re up,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned forward before I had a chance to react. His lips felt foreign on mine, though I remembered that this wasn’t the first time we had kissed. It wasn’t even the second. After we had reached his house to find his parents not home from work yet, we’d hidden out in his room and talked for a long time about what being finfolk meant. And then when I couldn’t stand talking or thinking anymore, we’d kissed and let our hands explore each other’s bodies. It had felt good and I had desperately needed a distraction.

But in the reality of the morning light, I only now realized what I’d done. We hadn’t had sex—at least, I was pretty sure I’d fallen into a restless sleep before it had gotten that far—but Dylan obviously thought last night meant something, judging from the way his fingers trailed gently up and down my arm.

But what had it meant to me? And what did it mean that it wasn’t Dylan’s body I had imagined touching last night?

I pushed these thoughts out of my head. I could only handle one thing at a time and right now, I needed to get out of Dylan’s house without his parents knowing that I’d spent the night in their son’s bed.

“What time is it?” I threw back the covers and pushed myself from the bed, knocking Dylan aside.

“Almost seven-thirty,” he said, nodding toward the alarm clock on his other nightstand, opposite from the side where I kept mine. “I was getting ready for school.”

School. I remembered suddenly that I was suspended. There would be no school for me today.

There would be no school for me ever again, I reminded myself. I couldn’t go back there now that I knew what I really was.

I ran a hand over my hair, trying to smooth down the wild pieces.

“Or I could skip,” Dylan offered as he watched me search for my shoes. “I could stay with you and make sure you’re okay.”