Reclaimed Read online

  RECLAIMED

  Sarah Guillory

  SPENCER HILL CONTEMPORARY

  Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Guillory

  Sale of the paperback edition of this book without its cover is unauthorized.

  Spencer Hill Press

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Contact: Spencer Hill Press, PO Box 247, Contoocook, NH 03229, USA

  Please visit our website at www.spencerhillpress.com

  First Edition: October 2013.

  Sarah Guillory

  Reclaimed: a novel / by Sarah Guillory – 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary:

  A girl determined to flee her small town finds a reason to stay when she falls in love with twin brothers, one who can’t remember his past and the other who doesn’t want him to remember.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this fiction: Band-Aid, Boy Scouts of America, Coca-Cola, Canopy, Crock-Pot, Diet Coke, Disneyland, Floaties, Ford Bronco, Formica, Frankenstein, Humpty Dumpty, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Jeep Cherokee, Little League, Peter Pan, Scooby Doo, Sheetrock, Shell, Technicolor, Walmart, Wonderland

  Cover design by Jennifer Rush

  Interior layout by Marie Romero

  ISBN 978-1-937053-88-8 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-937053-89-5 (e-book)

  Printed in the United States of America

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR RECLAIMED

  “Painfully beautiful, swoony, and full of surprises. A must-read debut novel… Sarah Guillory has managed to make us shout, cry, swoon, and most importantly… fall in love.”

  — Meg, Swoony Boys Podcast

  “Reclaimed is smart, intelligent and very well done, and packs a mind-bending punch!”

  — Jen, Young Adult Books Central

  “Reclaimed left me speechless, awed by an unexpected plot unlike anything I have ever read… I was totally sucked in, mesmerized by the story that I lost track of time until I read the last word. Without a doubt, Reclaimed has claimed a spot on my top reads list of 2013!”

  — Liza, WhoRu Blog

  For Josh

  BEFORE

  JENNA

  October had tremendous possibility. The summer’s oppressive heat was a distant memory, and the golden leaves promised a world full of beautiful adventures. They made me believe in miracles.

  The crisp air smelled like wood smoke, and I longed to lace up my running shoes. Fall was the best time to run—the air tasted better and was easier to move through.

  In the fall, I could fly.

  Instead, Mom and I were making the hour-long drive from our house in Solitude, Arkansas, to the hospital in Middleton. I drove. Mom kept picking at her cuticles and wishing I would do something with my hair other than a ponytail, and surely I had a pair of jeans that didn’t have holes in them. Mom had a tendency to come apart in a crisis—or a minor inconvenience, for that matter.

  I understood Mom’s worry, but Pops was going to be fine. He’d promised. Just yesterday, he’d been sitting up and flirting with the young nurse who was checking his IV. Mom had poured him some juice and snapped at Mops for not doing it first, and Pops had told the joke about the bear, which had stopped being funny when I was six. I’d laughed anyway.

  But today, when I got to his room, I knew Pops was worse. Instead of telling jokes, he gasped like there wasn’t enough oxygen on the entire planet. I couldn’t stand seeing him like that. Pops was supposed to be strong. He’d carried me on his shoulders until I was seven years old. Pops wasn’t old, or sick, or frail. This wasn’t Pops.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Mom shouted at Mops. “We would have been here sooner.”

  Pops spoke up so Mops didn’t have to. He was good at smoothing things over. “I’m fine,” he said, but he barely got the words out, and I didn’t know if he was.

  I was glad when the nurses told us we had to wait outside. I stood in the hallway, grateful to be away from the beeping machines.

  “This wouldn’t have happened if you’d been at home with him,” Mom said, glaring at Mops.

  “Or if you’d answered your phone when he called you,” Mops answered.

  Mom paled, turning away. Mops ran a hand over her face and looked guilty. But neither of them apologized. They sat on opposite sides of the waiting room.

  “I’m going outside,” I said. I needed to breathe.

  I escaped the tension into a cold north wind. I tried to convince myself that Pops was going to pull through. He always did. He’d been in the hospital three times in the past year, and he’d always come out in a couple of days, ranting about how they’d tried to starve him. He’d told me he was too ornery to die, and I believed him. Pops couldn’t die in October. There was too much promise.

  I grabbed my writing notebook from the car and sat at a cracked picnic table nestled in a cluster of trees. The ground was golden with pine needles, and the wind through the trees sounded like rushing water. I opened to a blank page and tried to change my worry into words, but I hadn’t yet mastered that kind of alchemy.

  “Ian!”

  I turned to see a woman leaning out of the back door of the building, then noticed a guy about my age sitting on the ground behind the hospital. He was almost invisible in the shadows. When he saw me staring, he put his finger to his lips.

  The woman shouted for Ian again, but neither the boy nor I moved, and she finally went inside. I tried to focus on my writing, but his behavior left me with a curiosity as deep as the gloom the boy was sitting in. I wrote a few words and crossed them out. I looked back at the boy. His head was bowed, and it took me a minute to realize what he was doing—whittling. Strange.

  When he looked up, I dropped my head back to my notebook, embarrassed that he’d caught me staring. After another minute of gazing at the mostly blank page, I ventured another look. He was whittling again. This time, when he glanced up, he grinned, and I had to laugh.

  The boy stood and peeked around the building. When he was sure the woman was gone, he walked over.

  He was tall, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans and his dark hair curling at the edges of his collar. He gave me a crooked half-smile, and his blue eyes crinkled at the corners. “Thanks for that.”

  “No problem. What are you hiding from, anyway?” I asked.

  His smile slipped away. “Everything. You?”

  I admired his honesty. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t hiding, but it was a lie I wasn’t sure I could pull off. I gave him the easiest piece of truth. “I just needed some air.”

  He nodded like I’d said something witty and wise instead of avoiding his question. The wind kicked up, and I hugged my notebook tighter to my chest.

  “What’s in the notebook?” he asked, sitting beside me on the picnic table.

  Words and wishes and a way out. “My plan for world domination,” I said instead.

  “Does yours include the Bond girls?” His voice was deep, and the way he spoke made me think he wasn’t from Arkansas. That made me even more curious.

  I laughed. “No.”

  He looked surprised. “Must be just mine, then.”

  “You’re Ian?” I asked. He nodded, his eyes seeming to ask a question I didn’t know if I could answer. “I’m Jenna. What were you working on?”

  He pulled a small piece of wood out of his pocket. At first it didn’t look like anything at all, just some wood with the bark still on it. But
when he turned it over, I saw it was a bird—a seagull.

  “Whoa,” I said, reaching for it without thinking. I stopped myself and looked up at him.

  He handed it over. He obviously wasn’t finished with it yet. The bird had one wing and just the beginning of a head and beak. It looked like it was trying to escape the wood and was halfway between capture and release.

  “Where did you learn how to do that?” I asked.

  “Boy Scout camp.”

  I looked up at him. His mouth was twisted in a mocking way. There was something about the stubborn set of his jaw and the way he’d hidden in the shadows that made me think he had a hard time playing by someone else’s rules. “You don’t really seem the Boy Scout type.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh really? And how do Boy Scouts look?”

  I thought about it for a minute. “Clean-cut.”

  “And I don’t?”

  His hair was dark and disheveled and made his eyes even bluer. But there were shadows underneath them, and his shoulders were stooped, like he was bracing himself for a blow. He looked cut, but not cleanly.

  I handed the bird back to him. “I plead the fifth.”

  The wind tangled my hair, and I pushed it out of my face and shivered. I’d forgotten to bring a jacket.

  Ian stood up. “Let me buy you coffee,” he said, jerking his head toward the diner across the street. “Since you didn’t give me away earlier.”

  “I don’t know.” Leaving the hospital grounds was probably a bad idea. I should have been keeping the peace between Mom and Mops. I needed to check on Pops, but I didn’t want to see him hooked up to all those machines. He was supposed to be in his shop, fixing an old chair, or sitting on the bank of the pond with a beer and a pole. I didn’t want to see him any other way. I was such a coward.

  Ian put his hands in his pockets and looked at me from underneath thick lashes. “I’m infinitely better company than that notebook.”

  “Are you sure about that?” I had to admit, he was much less intimidating than the blank page.

  He laughed. “What? You don’t trust me?”

  “I don’t know you,” I said.

  He gave me a crooked grin. “But you want to.”

  Maybe. Wasn’t October all about possibility?

  “Is that the best you got?” I asked.

  “It usually works on most girls.”

  “Probably not as much as you think it does.” But I was lying, because he was almost as charming as he thought he was. His grin was arrogant, but his eyes were sad. I was intrigued. Besides, I was cold and not yet ready to go back inside the hospital. I stood up. “I’m buying my own coffee.”

  “My kind of girl.”

  We trekked through the trees to the busy highway that ran next to the hospital. I stopped, but Ian stepped off the curb. When he saw I wasn’t following, he stepped back at the same time I started to walk. He laughed and grabbed my hand, pulling me forward as we ran across the street. I wanted to be shocked that I was holding hands with a guy I barely knew, but the connection was nice.

  Ian dropped my hand as soon as we made it to the other side, but the warmth remained. We each bought coffee before sitting at one of the few open tables at the back of the crowded diner.

  “Where are you from?” I asked, dumping in three packets of sugar. Ian drank his black.

  He ran his hand through his hair and leaned back. “What makes you think I’m not from here?”

  I grinned. “Your accent.” Ian finished his words instead of dropping the endings. And his one-syllable words stayed that way.

  He laughed. “You’re one to talk.”

  “Oh please,” I said, wrapping my hands around my cup to warm them. “You should hear my Pops.” His thick Southern drawl was one of the things I loved about him. It added depth to his already colorful stories. He’d be better tomorrow. Maybe they’d even let him go home.

  “Are you okay?” Ian asked. His voice was soft and full of concern.

  “Sure,” I said, taking a sip of my coffee. “Why?”

  “You looked sad for a minute.”

  I didn’t want to be. I sighed. “My grandpa’s over there.” I jerked my head toward the hospital.

  There was something about the way his eyes found mine that made me think he knew what it was like to lose someone. “I’m sorry.”

  I looked away. I wasn’t ready to accept sympathy for something that hadn’t happened yet, something that might not happen for a very long time. “He’ll be fine.” I hoped saying the words out loud would make them true.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  I glanced at my phone and realized it was well past lunch and I still hadn’t eaten. I never missed a meal. “A little.”

  “Be right back.”

  He walked over to the counter with his hands in his pockets. I could just see his eyes as he leaned over to study the pastry case, a tiny crease between his brows. He was taking his selection seriously.

  His phone buzzed, bouncing around on the table where he’d left it. I couldn’t help but glance at the screen. Dr. Benson is waiting. Where are you?

  Ian returned with four different pieces of pie. “I couldn’t decide,” he said, “so I thought we’d better try them all.”

  “Best idea I’ve ever heard.” I took two of the plates from him. “I love pie.”

  “Better than cake?”

  “Much better. I actually don’t like icing.”

  He froze, holding one of his plates in mid-air. “I’m sad for you.”

  I laughed. “Don’t be. For my birthday my grandma always makes me apple pies. They’re my favorite.” And Mom’s. Our birthdays were three days apart, and we celebrated every year by eating apple pie and ice cream for dinner for an entire week. We also had matching birthday tiaras, but I’d stopped wearing mine when I was nine. Mom hadn’t outgrown hers yet.

  “Perfect.” His phone buzzed again, but he ignored it, pointing instead at each of the desserts in turn. “I have apple, coconut cream, pumpkin, and pecan.”

  “We need more coffee.” I picked my way across the diner, which was cozy and warm and filled with students and those trying to escape the October chill. Those of us trying to escape reality, too.

  I returned with the refills. “You never answered my question,” I said, setting the coffee on the table.

  “Which one?” He took a bite of the pumpkin pie before sliding the plate toward me.

  “Where you’re from.”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? My dad’s in the Army, so we move around all the time.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t imagine. I’d been born in the Middleton hospital and lived in Solitude all my life. “Where else have you lived?”

  “Colorado. Florida. Germany.” He rattled these off like they were no big deal, but I envied people who’d actually seen the world instead of just imagining it. “Right now we live in Massachusetts.”

  “You’re kidding.” I wanted to go everywhere, only I’d never really been anywhere—a fact I was planning on changing as soon as I graduated. “Why in the world would you come here?”

  “My mom’s a nurse,” he said, “and she’s visiting a doctor friend.”

  “She made you tag along?”

  “Long story. But we’re leaving tomorrow.” His mouth turned down at the corners, and I couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

  “Where was your favorite place to live?” I asked.

  “Colorado,” he answered without hesitation.

  “Not Germany?” I’d always wanted to go to Europe, and I imagined Germany was something out of a fairy tale, all dark forests and twisting castles. Florida would have been a cool place to live too. I’d only seen the ocean once, when I’d gone with my best friend Becca’s family to the beach two years ago, but I’d fallen in love with it—the way it smelled, the way it whispered, the fact that it reached out and touched the other side of the world. I loved that the ocean stretched from exotic places to wash against my fee
t, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine all the stories it carried.

  “I was pretty young when we lived in Germany,” he said. “I only remember pieces of it.”

  “Why Colorado?”

  “It’s open and clean,” he said. “There’s so much to do there, and there’s not a whole bunch of people right on top of you. You can spread out in Colorado.”

  It sounded amazing. I could see him there, framed by mountains, his eyes the color of the open sky. I couldn’t help being fascinated by this boy who had been to all the places I’d only ever dreamed about. I realized I was staring—and that he was staring back.

  His phone buzzed again.

  “I think someone is looking for you,” I said. I was surprised my mom hadn’t called yet. Hopefully Pops was better. Mom was probably too busy resenting Mops to realize I was even gone.

  He picked the phone up and turned it off. “Maybe I don’t want to be found.”

  I knew exactly what he meant.

  We talked ourselves through all four pieces of pie. Ian let me have the last bite of apple. It wasn’t until a siren wailed around us that I realized it was getting darker. Time seemed to have raced past me instead of plodding along like it normally did.

  “I’d better get back,” I said. I didn’t want to go, but Mom and Mops had probably started another war in my absence.

  Ian’s hand hovered over the small of my back as we left the coffee shop, and I felt warm even though he wasn’t touching me. We crossed the street and strolled through the pines that covered the hospital grounds. There was a tension, a drawing out of the conversation as we realized we were soon going to have to go our separate ways. Tomorrow, he would be going back to Massachusetts, and I would be back in Solitude.

  “Have you ever felt like you were standing on the edge of something?” I asked.

  He leaned closer to me, his hair falling in his eyes. “I feel like that right now.”

  My face flushed under his scrutiny, and I wondered if Ian and I could talk so honestly because we knew we’d never see each other again. “I just feel like I’m waiting for something great to happen. I don’t know what it is yet, but sometimes I wake up and I’m excited for no reason.” I smiled. “You know how you felt on Christmas morning when you were a kid?”