Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,72
After all, she’d signed up for it. “Not so much. I can be there for the next one. And I won’t mess it up. I promise.”
“Yeah? Okay, cool.”
She looked up at me, and we were standing pretty close to each other, so I thought it would be a good time to kiss her. I mean, beach, romantic sunset, et cetera. But I didn’t know how to go in for the kill. I had a vision of me gnashing my teeth against hers and I couldn’t tell if that was real or me being paranoid. So I just said, “Your grandmother … when she gave up the practice for a lot of years … do you think she did it because of my mom? Because she found out she’d given a Touch to a pregnant woman and infected an innocent kid?”
“Oh,” Taryn said, thinking it over. “Yeah. Maybe. That makes sense. I think Grandma would hate that. She always talks about her subjects taking responsibility for their actions. But to give it to someone who didn’t ask for it …”
I laughed again and sucked in a mouthful of cool sea air. “Wow.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I just realized how much I’ve ruined your life.”
She stared at me, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Well, if your grandmother hadn’t given it up for all those years, because of me, she would have most likely been able to dispense with all the Touches left in the book way before now. And didn’t you say that once the book is done, your family curse is over? You wouldn’t have had to …”
Her eyes widened. “Oh.”
She started walking another few steps, and all the while I let it sink in. Whatever attraction we felt for each other, it was dangerous. All this time, I was thinking that my attraction to her was endangering me. But first I left her to a lifetime of slavery under the Book of Touch. And then I went ahead and stopped her from performing the Touch she needed to perform in order to stay alive. Not to mention that we were going to die together. Even if we vowed to stay away from her Jeep, something else would probably get us. We were bad for each other. Bad. Sure, it felt good being with her, but that was the problem. In my life, bad always accompanied the good. Always.
Suddenly she grabbed my hand and said, “Let’s go,” pulling me in the opposite direction.
Her pace quickened, and I had to pick it up to follow. At first I thought maybe she saw it, too. The writing on the wall in capital letters that we were going to be the death of each other and needed to separate as quickly as possible. When we got to the boardwalk, I caught her looking over her shoulder. I followed her gaze to two forms in the gazebo. Two men, it looked like, standing on the wooden seats and smoking cigarettes. They were staring at us.
Maybe it was just because of the chill in the air, but the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. “Who are they?” I asked.
They were standing in our way. To get by on the boardwalk we would have had to walk right past them. And from the way Taryn stood there, frozen, it was like she was facing a rabid dog. The men stubbed out their smokes and started walking our way. The only thing I could tell was that they were wearing all black, and in movies the bad guys always wear black from head to toe. She tugged on my sleeve. “Let’s go another way.”
I was not really in the mood to get my ass whipped in front of her, so I followed her. “Who are they?” I repeated.
“No one,” she replied, hustling down the ramp on Third Avenue.
I looked over my shoulder. They were coming closer. “More weak people with an unexplained attraction to you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Bryce is an old … family friend.”
“Bryce?” I swallowed and looked back. It was dark, but the taller guy looked vaguely familiar, from photos I had seen at the Reese home, and from the cemetery. I hadn’t been able to get that picture of him, standing over Emma’s grave, out of my mind. He wasn’t much bigger than I was, but grief did things to people, which was how he’d been able to knock me down at the cemetery. He hated me. And he had every right to. I picked up the