Becoming (7 page)

They looked around together in the
afternoon’s dwindling light. The area appeared relatively
unscathed. Outside of some pond water dripping from the surrounding
trees and some extra sediment and debris floating along the pond’s
surface, no one would have ever suspected what had just occurred.
Amber stared at the center of the dark pond and shuddered. As if
sensing her thoughts, he turned her away from the water until she
was looking at him.

Reaching up, he plucked a wet leaf from her
hair. Pulling away from her slightly, he looked down the length of
her. “You look like you drowned in a pond,” he observed.

She couldn’t help laughing. “Well, hot shot,
I’ve got news for you—”

He cut her off by hooking her behind her neck
and pulling her close for another kiss. She was amazed that she was
still standing when they parted. Her legs felt rubbery.

“Honest to goodness, every one of those
romantic clichés is true,” she marveled.

“With the right person,” he amended. “It
makes all the difference, believe me.”

“Oh, I believe you. I felt absolutely nothing
when I kissed that one guy earlier. Didn’t even catch his
name.”

A corner of his mouth lifted in response to
her jest. “Well, I’m sure
he
wouldn’t have kissed you when
you were looking like you had rolled around in a mud pit,” he
responded, grabbing her hand and starting to walk back to the
Brewer house.

“No?” She batted her eyelashes at him.

“Gotta have standards, you know.”

“Standards?” Now she glowered at him.

“Mm-hmm. Standards. I, after all, have seen
you every morning before a brush touches your hair or your teeth,
when you’re still shuffling around in your ratty Led Zeppelin
T-shirt and boxer shorts. So for me, this look is—”

“Don’t you dare say it’s an improvement,
Gabriel Reid. I swear I’ll make you eat the words. I don’t care how
good you kiss.”

“You like my kissing?” He looked thoughtful.
“That’s good. As it happens, since the feeling is mutual, I’m quite
sure I’ll want to do that a lot.”

“Even when I’m in my Led Zeppelin T-shirt and
boxer shorts?”

“Oh, especially then. I’ve found over the
years that I’m rather attracted to the ratty T-shirt and boxer
look. Especially when it comes attached to a gal with a cranky,
opinionated, smart-ass attitude.”

Trying not to get her feelings hurt and
failing miserably, she frowned. She started to tug her hand free of
his grasp. “It’s a wonder you would even consider kissing someone
whose style and personality are so obviously lacking.”

Firming his grip on her hand, he stopped
walking. She stumbled to a halt beside him but couldn’t seem to
lift her gaze from the ground.
You can add insecure to that list
of character flaws
, she silently added, embarrassed with
herself.

“Haven’t you listened to a word I said?” he
asked, his voice laced with exasperation. “Amber, look at me.”

Sighing, she did. He brushed a hand across
her cheek and tucked a damp strand of hair behind her right
ear.

“You have so many wonderful qualities. You’re
smart, talented, loyal and funny. You’re lovelier than you will
ever know. But those other traits I mentioned, the ones you
consider flaws, are what make you so much
you
. I didn’t fall
for just the good stuff.”

Now her cheeks burned for another reason. She
cleared her throat and said, “Well, I reserve the right at some
later date to point out all of your many flaws. Just so we’re
clear.”

Grinning, he gave her a quick kiss and then
started walking again. “Seems fair to me. Now, we’re really going
to have to come up with a good story for why we both look like
we’ve been, well, slopping around in a muddy pond. The car is
buried in the parking area, so we can’t leave yet. From the look of
things, the party is going to last a while, so the car could be
buried for hours.”

The mere thought of her classmates walking
out to move their cars and seeing her deplorable condition made her
wince. “Can’t we just wait it out until the car is free?”

“You mean…sit out in the hot,
mosquito-infested woods for a couple hours?”

“Okay, okay. Let me think.” She frowned and
looked around. “Geez, this kind of thing is harder than I thought.
What does it look like we’ve been doing? Maybe we can build on
that.”

Raising an eyebrow, he said neutrally, “I can
think of one or two things.”

She looked at him expectantly.

After staring at her for a moment and seeing
her blank look, he shook his head and grinned. “Never mind,” he
said, patting her on the arm. “I have another idea.”

Gabriel’s plan to rinse themselves off with
the Brewers’ garden hose and sneak into the party from the poolside
ended up working like a charm. Michelle and Cynthia had been so
freaked by their encounter with Amber that they gave her a wide
berth for the rest of the party. It was midnight by the time Amber
and Gabriel got home.

Although she should have been exhausted after
the incident at the pond and having to socialize for hours on end,
her energy was at full-throttle. She took a shower and donned her
PJs (the Led Zeppelin T-shirt and boxers, of course) in an effort
to wind down. It didn’t help much.

While Gabriel took his turn in the shower,
she headed to the kitchen to get a glass of water. After she heard
the shower shut off followed by the telltale sound of the pipes
running indicating that Gabriel was brushing his teeth, she set her
glass down on the counter and reached into the cabinet for a second
one.

A minute later, Gabriel appeared in the
kitchen’s doorway wearing his usual night ensemble of a well-worn
gray T-shirt and navy blue cotton shorts. His dark, wavy hair was
still damp from his shower.

Spotting the glass in her hand, he gave her a
shocked look. “Is that for me?”

Rather than answer, she held his glass up for
him and nodded her head toward the front door. He moved ahead of
her and opened the door followed by the screen door, holding them
so she could walk past with both glasses. They settled on the
wooden porch swing, much as they had many other nights. Only this
time, Gabriel lifted up his arm to encourage her to sit against
him. She did so, once again waiting for a feeling of weirdness that
never came.

“Why does this feel so…I don’t know?
Natural?”

He swallowed some water and gave her shoulder
a squeeze. Since she had settled on the swing with her legs
half-curled under her, he started them moving with one push of his
leg. “Well, for me, I’ve had lots of time to get used to the
idea.”

“Hmm.”

Her brow wrinkled in thought. She supposed
his obvious welcome of her attentions might have something to do
with her own ease with the sudden change in their relationship. She
had been thinking all afternoon of the many signs she had ignored
over the years regarding his true feelings for her. There were all
the times she had caught his gaze slipping almost guiltily from her
face when she looked at him, for example, as well as his irrational
annoyance whenever someone referred to her as his sister, among
other things. If she was being honest with herself, she knew she
had harbored the same feelings for him for quite some time and had
purposefully minimized them. It had been easier than expressing
them and risking losing his friendship.

She sighed. She certainly wasn’t someone who
had to overanalyze something, especially when it made her happy.
Very few things had that distinction.

After sipping her water, she asked, “When did
you first start thinking of me…”

“As more than a friend?” he offered.

“Yeah.”

He sat quietly for a minute. Very used to him
gathering his thoughts before speaking, she remained silent and
gazed out at the front yard. A light, warm breeze and the songs of
night birds and insects filled the air. The dark sky was carpeted
with sparkling stars.

“Do you remember the day you came to Mrs.
B’s?” he asked at last.

“Of course I do,” she said automatically.

“What do you remember?”

Loneliness. Rejection. Fear.
Devastation.

The thoughts somersaulted through her brain,
one on top of another. They had never really talked about this. It
wasn’t a topic she wanted to discuss, and he must have always known
and respected that. Even, now, she felt herself shrinking away from
the conversation.

She frowned. He deserved an honest answer,
and she wasn’t a coward.

“I remember wondering what my new foster home
would be like,” she began, laying her head against his chest. “This
was my fifth placement, if you don’t count the stays in the
emergency homes and shelters between placements, and I had only
just turned twelve. I’m pretty sure my DFCS worker was about to
give up on me. There had been talk about sending me to a group home
or a therapeutic foster home, but I guess I didn’t really fit those
standards. So eventually Mrs. Harris drove me up here to interview
with Mrs. B.”

When she paused, he asked gently, “What was
that like?”

She drank some more water and listened to his
heart beat. The steady, vital sound helped ease some of the
tightness that had settled in her chest. “I was nervous,” she
admitted. “I had already been to two interviews with Caucasian
families and the match didn’t work for one reason or another. Mrs.
Harris thought that I was deliberately sabotaging the interviews,
but that wasn’t true. I hated the shelter, but I didn’t want to end
up someplace worse.”

She paused again. He rubbed her arm and
kissed the top of her head.

“Mrs. B was great,” she continued after a
moment. “She was very matter-of-fact. I’m pretty sure I said some
smartass thing to her in the interview. I was twelve and felt like
I knew my way in the world. Mrs. B was quick to inform me that I
did not. And she took me in.” Now, she smiled slightly. “I was
happy when Mrs. Harris told me the news, but...”

“You were also afraid that it would end like
all of your other placements,” he finished.

She nodded.

“Anyone would tell you that’s perfectly
understandable.”

Finishing her water, she leaned over to put
her empty glass on the small plastic table beside the swing. Then
she settled back into her position beside him.

“That first day in a new home…it’s full of
tension and hope,” she said. “You want to be absolutely perfect so
your caregiver will like you, but of course you can’t. No one is.”
After a pause of reflection, she said, “I walked into Mrs. B’s
kitchen that first day with all of my worldly possessions and saw
you sitting at the kitchen table eating a sandwich.”

“It was peanut butter and jelly,” he said
helpfully. “Grape.”

She lifted her head to look at him. “How do
you remember that? That was nearly six years ago!”

“I remember everything about that day.”

Not sure what to say, she continued to stare
at him.

“I want to hear your version,” he
encouraged.

Giving him a thoughtful frown, she relented
and eased back against his chest. Recalling the memory, she
continued, “When I saw you, I remember thinking, ‘God, I’m hungry’
and ‘God, he’s cute’ almost at the same time. It was the first time
I remember thinking about a boy that way, actually.”

He chuckled, the sound rumbling through his
chest. It made her smile. “And you offered me half of your sandwich
before you even knew anything about me,” she remembered now.

She hadn’t known what to make of that. After
so many years of forming connections with people only to have those
connections severed, her faith in humanity had been all but
extinguished. Likewise, she had come to the only possible
conclusion that she was simply not worth loving and keeping around.
Gabriel’s offer of half of his sandwich when they first met had
been the first of many steps toward helping her regain some of the
faith she had lost.

And she realized now she had also lost a
piece of her heart to him even then.

“Do you remember your response to my offer?”
he asked.

Thinking back, she couldn’t recall exactly
what had been said. She shook her head.

“You said, ‘Who are you?’” He gently ran his
fingers through her hair. “I remember the sight of you standing in
the kitchen, looking around with an expression that said you liked
what you saw, and that it seemed to worry you. You had a big, dark
bruise under your left eye. I’ve often wondered how you got
it.”

Oh, yeah. She had nearly forgotten about
that. Sensing that he wanted an explanation now, she fidgeted
uncomfortably. “I was in a fight. At the shelter.”

“Mm-hmm.”

There was another long pause. Sighing, she
continued, “There was this boy, Phillip. Everyone called him
Porkchop. I don’t know how old he was, but he seemed huge to me…too
old to be in the same dorm with the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds.
He cornered me in a bathroom.”

“
What?
” Gabriel’s hand stilled on her
head. There was a tone to his voice that she couldn’t ever remember
hearing before. It was chilling.

The words came out in an anxious rush now.
“He had followed me inside while everyone was out on the
playground. I had to use the bathroom. Usually one of the staff at
the shelter escorted us, but I hated it when they stood outside the
bathroom listening to me pee, so I slipped away when they weren’t
paying attention. When I opened the bathroom door to go back
outside, Porkchop was there. He clocked me before I even noticed
him. Then he dragged me back into the bathroom.”

Gabriel’s body was now rigid with tension.
She hated that she was the cause of it. “I swung and managed to
break his nose, and just about that time, one of the shelter staff
came in with another kid and saw what was happening. That was
it.”