CHAPTER THREE

UNSETTLING UNDERCURRENTS 

 The days that followed took on a rhythm that should have felt familiar, coffee in the morning, the lake in the afternoon, dinner as the fireflies emerged but Anna couldn't shake the sense that she was learning her hometown by heart all over again, every sense heightened, every moment slightly too sharp.

 It was Chris. It was undeniably Chris.

 She noticed it on Tuesday, when they met at Henderson's for ice cream and he laughed at something Carly said, his head tipping back, throat exposed,. The sound vibrated through Anna's ribcage like a tuning fork struck against bone.

 She'd had to grip the metal table to keep from reaching toward him and claiming his neck line with kisses.

 She noticed it on Wednesday, walking through the fields behind his house. The wind shifted, carrying his scent to her, not cologne, nothing so artificial, but something earthy and warm, like sunbaked stone and pine needles and the faint, electric tang of a summer storm building on the horizon.

 She'd stopped mid-step, inhaling without meaning to, and Carly had turned back to ask if she was okay.

 "Allergies," Anna had lied, though she'd never had allergies in her life.

 And she noticed it on Thursday, during a water fight at the lake, when Chris surfaced near her, shaking water from his hair, and their eyes caught and held. Just for a second.

 Just long enough for Anna to see something flicker in his gaze, confusion, want, fear, before Carly splashed between them, shrieking with delight, breaking the spell that bound them.

 Each time, Anna retreated into herself, shamed by the heat pooling low in her stomach. She wrote lists in her head of all the reasons this was wrong. He is Carly's. He is happy. You are his girlfriend's best friend. You are better than this.

 But the lists crumbled every time he entered a room, every time the air seemed to thin and she found herself orienting toward him like a flower following the sun.

 "You've gone quiet again," Carly said. They were sprawled on Anna's front porch, sharing a pitcher of Maddie's lemonade. It was Friday evening, the sky bleeding pink and orange above the wheat fields.

 "You're doing that thing where you stare into space and forget I'm talking."

 "Sorry I'm just..." Anna stirred her lemonade with a straw, ice clinking against the glass. "I'm Just tired. You know college sleep debt catching up."

 "Or you're bored of us already." Carly stuck out her bottom lip in an exaggerated pout. "I knew it. Small-town life can't compete with... whatever it is you do at college. Parties? Philosophy discussions? Wild campus orgies?"

 "Mostly laundry," Anna said, grinning despite herself. "And dining hall food that looks like it was scraped off the highway."

 "Romantic."

 Footsteps crunched on the gravel driveway, and Anna didn't need to look up to know who it was. Her spine straightened of its own accord, her pulse kicking up tempo. The straw bent between her teeth.

 "Evening, ladies," Chris said, dropping onto the porch step beside Carly. He was close enough that Anna caught that scent again, storm and stone and something uniquely him and she shifted back in her chair, putting inches between them that felt like miles.

 "Chris was going to grill tonight," Carly said, threading her arm through his. "His dad's old Weber. Burgers, corn, the whole Americana fantasy. You in?"

 Anna should have said no. She should have invented a headache, a family dinner, a sudden fascination with reorganizing her closet.

 "Sure," she heard herself say. "Sounds great."

 ******** ******** *******

 Saturday became movie night.

 Chris's house sat at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by trees that pressed close and whispered against the windows.

 It was small, a rental, Carly had explained, cheap because the roof leaked and the plumbing sang opera at midnight but someone had strung fairy lights across the porch, and the living room smelled like popcorn and wood polish and the ghost of whatever Chris had cooked for dinner.

 Anna perched on the edge of the worn couch, clutching a bowl of popcorn like a shield. Carly had claimed the middle cushion, her legs tucked beneath her, her head resting against Chris's shoulder.

 He sat stiffly, one arm draped behind Carly, his attention fixed on the television where some action movie was exploding its way through the second act.

 "Pass the M&Ms?" Carly asked, not looking away from the screen.

 Anna reached for the bag on the coffee table at the same moment Chris did.

 Their hands collided. His fingers brushed her wrist, sliding against the sensitive skin there, and Anna felt it again, that jolt, that white-hot current that had crackled between them at the lake.

 But this time, in the dim light, with Carly pressed against his side and the movie's blue glow painting them all in shades of midnight, it felt heavier. Intentional.

 Chris didn't pull back right away.

 For a fraction of a second, less than a heartbeat, his thumb traced the inside of her palm. A question. A confession. Then he grabbed the M&Ms and handed them to Carly, his movements careful, controlled.

 "Thanks, babe," Carly murmured, already tearing into the bag.

 Anna's hand burned. She tucked it against her stomach, fingers curling into a fist, and risked a glance at Chris. He was watching the screen, jaw tight, a muscle ticking in his cheek.

 But his free hand, the one not holding Carly, rested on his knee, and his fingers were pressed so hard into the denim that his knuckles had gone white.

 He felt it too. Whatever this was, he felt it too.

 The knowledge should have comforted her. Instead, it terrified her.

 She spent the rest of the movie curled into herself, popcorn growing cold and stale in her lap, hyper-aware of every breath Chris took, every subtle shift of his body. When Carly laughed at a joke, Chris smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes.

 When Carly reached for his hand, he laced his fingers through hers easily, too easily, he planted a kiss on her forehead which made her look up with gooey eyes, Anna thought, like a performance he'd rehearsed until it looked like love.

 Once, when Carly got up to use the bathroom, the silence between Anna and Chris grew teeth, Anna could hear her heart thumping loudly in her ears.

 "Anna..." he started, his voice barely audible over the movie's soundtrack.

 "Don't." She didn't look at him. She couldn't look at him for the fear she'd let her heart melt away in his gaze. "Please don't."

 She didn't know what she was asking him not to do. Admit it? Deny it? Say her name in that rough, honeyed voice that made her want to crawl out of her skin?

 He didn't say anything else. When Carly returned, bubbling with a story about the bathroom's ancient plumbing, Chris was more reserved than Anna had ever seen him, answering in monosyllables, his gaze fixed firmly on the television, never once drifting to the corner of the couch where Anna sat dying by inches.

 "I think I'm going to head home," Anna said as the credits rolled, standing too fast, nearly knocking over her water glass.

 "But it's still early," Carly protested softly. "We were going to make s'mores on the porch."

 "So sorry Carl. I'm just... really tired."

 She felt Chris's eyes on her back as she fled, but she didn't turn around.

 **** ******* ******* ********

 "Mom?"

 Maddie looked up from the kitchen table, where she'd been sorting through a mountain of fabric samples for the Hendersons' new curtains.

 The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and yeast, Maddie had been baking, stress-baking probably, the way she always did when her hands needed to outrun her thoughts.

 "Hey, baby." Maddie pushed the swatches aside, patting the chair beside her. "You look pale. Was the movie not fun?"

 "It was fine, mum." Anna sank into the chair, wrapping her hands around a mug of tea her mother must have set out. Chamomile, with honey. The taste of childhood, of sick days and thunderstorms. "Carly's good. Chris's house is... nice."

 "Just fine?" Maddie asked with a raised brow.

 Anna stared into her tea. The steam curled upward, ghosting against her face, and she wished it could carry her words away before she spoke them.

 "Did you ever feel... weird? After you left home? I mean, after you'd been away and came back?"

 "Weird how, honey?"

 "Like everything's the same but your skin doesn't fit right. Like you're noticing things you never noticed before, and you don't know if they were always there or if you changed or if..." Anna stopped, pressing her lips together.

 She couldn't say or if it's him. She couldn't say or if I want something I have no right to want.

 Maddie reached across the table, covering Anna's hand with her own. Her mother's hands were soft, scented with lotion and fabric starch, and they anchored Anna in a way that made her eyes sting.

 "Adjustment periods are real," Maddie said gently. "You spent a year building a whole life somewhere else. Different rhythms, different people. Coming home can feel like trying to wear your old prom dress. The dress didn't change, but you did."

 "I don't feel like I changed. I feel like the town changed. Or like I'm seeing it through a different lens."

 "That's growing up, sweetheart. It sneaks up on you." Maddie squeezed her fingers. "Give it time. The weirdness fades. You'll find your footing again."

 The back door creaked open, and Pete stepped in, work boots leaving dust on the linoleum. He stopped when he saw them, his gaze moving from his wife's hand on Anna's to Anna's face, pale and drawn in the overhead light.

 "Everything alright?" he asked, his voice carefully neutral.

 "Anna's feeling a bit off," Maddie said. "The transition home, you know how it is."

 Pete didn't say anything for a long moment. He hung his keys on the hook by the door, methodical as always, but Anna saw the way his shoulders had gone rigid, the way his jaw tightened beneath his beard.

 "Transition," he repeated, almost to himself. Then, softer: "Yeah. I know how that is."

 He crossed to the refrigerator, pulling out a beer with a practiced hand, but his eyes found Anna's in the reflection of the microwave door.

 There was something there, recognition, understanding, a depth of knowledge that made Anna's breath catch.

 He knows, she thought, the idea rising unbidden and impossible. He knows something.

 "Get some sleep, Anna-bug," Pete said, not turning around. "Things always look different in the morning."

 "Different better, or different worse?"

 Pete took a long drink from his bottle. When he finally looked at her, his expression was shuttered, careful, but his eyes held a weight that made her think of warning signs at the edge of dark woods.

 "Just different," he said.

 Anna finished her tea, but the chamomile did nothing to quiet her heart. She went upstairs and lay in her childhood bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling the house settle around her like a cage lined with velvet. Somewhere out there, in the dark at the end of the dirt road, Chris was probably kissing Carly goodnight. Holding her. Being hers.

 And somewhere in Anna's traitorous chest, a small, terrible voice whispered, He should be holding you. He was made to hold you, You know you want him badly.

 She pulled the pillow over her face and screamed into it, muffling the sound until her lungs ached. When she finally surfaced, gasping, the moon had risen above the wheat fields, fat and full and impossibly bright.

 Anna rolled toward the window, pressing her palm against the cool glass, and for one wild moment, she thought she saw a shadow move at the tree line, something large, unmistakably human, watching her window with the stillness of a predator.

 She blinked. The shadow was gone.

 But her hand still burned where Chris had touched her, and

 the full moon hung in the sky like a promise, and Anna knew with a certainty that thrummed in her bones that the weirdness wasn't going to fade.

 It was only beginning.