He pulls me to my feet. “I didn’t know at first, how I felt about it. I didn’t want to be forced, you know? I wanted it to be my choice. But every time I’m around you, it feels right,” he says. “I feel stronger. Braver, even. I feel the glory inside me, this power moving through me. I feel like I could do anything, face anything. With you.” I wish he would stop talking. I wish the forest would stop spinning around me, wish I could step outside of my body right now and ask myself, So, Clara, what do you think?

But I don’t know.

I love Tucker, I think.

His eyes grow sober. “I know.”

“You do?”

“I loved Kay. Whatever that says about me, I did love her. Part of me still does. My uncle says it’s because she was my first love. He says we never really get over our firsts.” Right. But Tucker’s not just my first love. He’s my present.

“I had to choose,” Christian says. “Last year, when I started to understand that my vision was more than a search and rescue for some mystery girl.” The side of his mouth hitches up briefly. Me. His mystery girl. “When the vision showed me how it was supposed to be, the way we took hands, and . . . touched, and how I felt in that moment, I knew then that I had to choose.

It wouldn’t have been fair to Kay. So I broke up with her.” He closes his eyes for a second, and I catch a hint of the turmoil he still feels when he thinks of Kay.

There must be something I’m not seeing in that girl. There must be.

“I had to choose,” he says again. “And it wasn’t like I had to choose between you and Kay; I hardly knew you then. I had to choose who I was going to be. But now . . . Clara, I think . . .”

“I have to go,” I say, pulling away from him abruptly. “I can’t think. I can’t choose.” To my bewilderment, he smiles, this completely sweet, sinful smile that sends a flock of butterflies straight to the pit of my stomach.

“What?” I demand to know. “What is it now?”

“You’re not going to go,” he says.

“Watch me.”

“I’ve been having a vision of this place, too.” This stops me from my wild, cowardly (how can he think I’m brave?) retreat back to the road. I turn. He’s still standing there by his mother’s grave, hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking at me with such heat behind his eyes that a tremble works its way through me from my head to my toes.

“You’re having a new vision, too?” I ask.

“It’s right here.” He walks toward me, his strides long and purposeful across the grass.

“Right now. I’ve been seeing it for weeks, and it’s happening right now.” He stops in front of me.

“This is the part where I kiss you,” he says.

And that’s when, there under the swaying pines, the trembling aspens on Aspen Hill, in the waning sunlight of that late spring day, with birds singing over our heads, traces of earlier tears still drying on my face, and the faint smell of roses in the air, Christian Prescott kisses me for the first time. He pulls me in.

I’ll never, if I live to be my full hundred and twenty years, forget the way he tastes. It’s not anything I can describe, it’s just Christian, a little sweet and a whole lot of spice, and it feels, in that moment, absolutely right. His fire and mine combine, and it’s greater than any forest fire, hotter than the hottest part of flame. Any walls I’ve tried to build between us crumble down. His heart pounds beneath my palm. He wasn’t lying to me just now. This is his vision, his dream literally coming true, and it is everything he thought it would be. More. I am more than he ever could have hoped for, ever could have dreamed. His mystery girl. The girl he was meant to find.

And now I belong to him like he has always belonged to me.

It’s this thought that brings me back to myself. I reel backward, breaking the contact between us with an agonizing force of sheer will.

“I’m not yours,” I gasp up at him, and then I run. Because if I stay one more second I will kiss him back. I will choose him.

So I push away, tear off through Aspen Hill Cemetery like the devil is chasing me, and then I fly, not caring if anybody sees me, shooting like a falling star across the sky, toward home.

Chapter 18

The Alternative to Me

I stay home from school the next day, and no one gives me grief about it.

After school Angela calls me.

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing out of her mouth. “I’m really, really, ridiculously sorry, okay?

It was stupid to get jealous. I’m so over it.”

She thinks I cut school to avoid her.

“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have read you. You kind of deserve what you get, when you read what somebody else feels about you.”

“Still, it wasn’t cool. I shouldn’t have felt that way.”

“We can’t always control what we feel,” I tell her. Boy, is yesterday the perfect example of that. “Hey, I’ve been jealous of you, too, occasionally. And this thing with my dad was a big surprise. You’re only half human.”

This last bit was meant to be a joke. Only she doesn’t laugh.

“So you . . . forgive me?” she asks. It’s strange whenever Angela sounds vulnerable, when she’s usually so strong. It lets me see through a tiny window into her world, where I’m her only real friend. If she screws it up with me, she’s totally alone.

“Sure. Water under the bridge,” I tell her.

She sighs. Relief. “Want to come over?”

“I can’t. I have something I have to do today.”

I’m going to see Tucker.

The regional high school rodeo competition this year is being held in the Jackson Hole Rodeo Arena, one of the few times this year the team is competing at home. At the entrance the owner, Jay Hooper, waves me by when I try to pay admission. I’d almost forgotten he’s an angel-blood.

“Because you’re Maggie’s kid,” he tells me.

I don’t argue.

I pick a seat way in the back of the bleachers. I shouldn’t be here, I know, shouldn’t be away from home right now, when no one else knows where I am. But I want to see Tucker. Part of me thinks that if I can just lay eyes on him, I’ll find myself again. I’ll know.

I watch the rodeo as they start up with the calf-roping section, but I can’t concentrate.

Ever since yesterday I’ve felt lost in a sea of my own guilt, and it truly feels like I’m underwater.