Chasing the Browns

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

I’d had another dream about Nick that night.

We’d gone to the lake to play the game with the bouncing pebbles in the dark.

‘I assume you already know the rules,’ he’d said to me with a smile, handing me a pebble.

‘Yeah,’ I’d smiled, remembered the first time I’d gone to the lake with Jack.

‘One is a quick kiss. Two is a more kind of…well, you’ll know when we get there. Three is more hands on. Four is a getting-a-little-carried-away-kind-of-kiss. Like, maybe the guy takes off his shirt or something. Five is, well…five is “mind-blowing,” according to Nick. He never specified his definition of mind-blowing. Six is the Ultimate Make-out Session.’

‘But I’m rubbish at this. I’ll probably get, like, two, or something.’

He’d taken the pebble in hand, held me close by the waist, and whispered in my ear, asking me which number I wanted him to throw.

I’d looked back at him and whispered, ‘Five.’

A wistful smile came to his face and he’d pulled me closer. ‘Five it is,’ he said, and he threw the pebble.

Before the pebble had even hit the water for the fifth time, I’d woken up. A feeling of disappointment washed over me.

I hadn’t wanted the dream to end.

But it had.

I lay down in the dark, breathing deeply, trying to sort out my feelings. Some days, I absolutely hated the guy. Other days – days when I saw him with Rita, holding her, laughing with her, kissing her – I felt the total opposite. Like I cared about him. Too much. Then there were the days when he was nice to me, when he saw me as me and not as Rita, and yet he was in love with her.

How did that work?

I called up Poppy. She picked up sounding very angry, and very, very tired. I glanced at the time on my phone and realised why. Oops.

‘What the hell, Lea!’ she hissed.

‘Well, hello to you, too,’ I said, smiling.

‘It’s three in the morning, which is way too early for hellos.’ I heard her groan as she shuffled around in her bed on the other side of the phone. ‘Anyway, this better be super important, or else I will kill you.’

‘Kill me?’ I laughed. ‘Poppy, you can’t even see properly when you’re tired!’

‘Shut up,’ she mumbled. ‘What’s the emergency?’

‘You know what? Never mind,’ I said.

There was a long silence.

‘Are you kidding me? You woke me up at unearthly hours of the morning, just to tell me that it didn’t mind?’

‘Um…’

‘You are so going to pay for this, Lea. I’m going to take you rollerskating tomorrow.’ I could tell that she was trying to sound angry, but I could still hear the smile in her voice.

‘Today, you mean,’ I corrected.

She hung up and I laughed.

When I woke up in the morning, I ate my toast and watched the news.

They talked about Angel a little.

They said she was still missing.

*