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I truly believe that every person on this earth has one special talent.

Some people are naturally gifted when it comes to athletics. Others are better at performance arts, or painting, or composing classical music. I once read a news article about a guy who recited, like, fifty thousand digits of pi. It took him three days. The Guinness world record officials wouldn't even let him go to the bathroom by himself incase he had the digits written inside his underpants or something. Sometimes I can't even remember my parents' cell phone numbers, so I sort of wish that I'd been born with a useful gift like that.

But no, my special talent is something far less helpful. My brain has the unique ability to calculate the exact combination of words which is least appropriate for a situation.

Basically, I'm really good at sticking my foot in my mouth.

Blake Hamilton blinked at me. The smile he'd had when he'd turned to face me from the driver's seat, still completely and utterly unaware of the verbal punch I was about to unleash on him, was still on his face. Only, it kind of looked more like a grimace than a smile now.

I'd never wanted to disappear so badly before in my life. I wanted to push open the Jeep door, army roll out of the vehicle, and hurtle myself over the nearest cliff.

Which, conveniently, was only a couple of steps away.

It felt like a small eternity had passed before Blake made a strangled noise at the back of his throat. He suddenly straightened his spine, faced forward in his seat, and flattened his lips into a thin, expressionless line. Then he reached out to turn the keys in the ignition and grabbed hold of the steering wheel.

He didn't look at me again as he pulled out of the parking space.

He didn't look me as we started down the street, either.

He still wasn't looking at me when we rolled up to a stop sign.

"Is that your second question?"

I hadn't been expecting him to say anything, so I jumped a little at the sound of his voice. My head snapped towards him, hoping to gauge his state of mind. He'd spoken in monotone, his words slow and deliberate, cautious even. His face didn't give away anything, either. I thought I could see a pinch between his eyebrows, but it was hard to tell when I was staring at his profile.

Please, don't do this, I pleaded in my head. Don't shut me out.

He'd been so open in the restaurant, so willing to welcome me in. Maybe, if I hadn't been so tactless with my last question, he'd still be smiling. I clasped my hands together in my lap, squeezing my fingers until the bones ached and my skin stung.

I shook my head, feeling breathless.

"That's not, um—I mean, I know she drowned, I just..."

Damn it. I was sinking like the Titanic here.

I squeezed my eyes shut, desperately trying to grasp onto any idea as to how I could close the distance I felt growing between Blake and me.

"I'm not here by choice," I blurted.

For a second, silence hung in the air.

"I didn't force you to come." Blake's tone was dark, somewhere bordering on angry, but his voice cracked a little.

"No, no, that's not what I meant!" I cried, clamping my hands over my face and sinking into my seat. "I meant I didn't ask to be in Holden this summer, to see Rachel. It wasn't my choice. I'm only here because my parents couldn't stop screaming at each other long enough to decide who got custody for the summer."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Blake's hands tighten on the steering wheel. But now that I'd started to speak, the words just kept bubbling up in my throat and spilling over.

"My dad got a new job in New York last year, and he said housing in the Big Apple was tight and that there wouldn't be enough room for me to live with him. But I know that's bullshit, because I Googled his apartment complex and the smallest studio they have was like two thousand square feet. Two bedrooms, too. I bet he has a freaking foosball table in the second one. And my mom's still back home in Alaska, but she adopted one of those stupid Pomeranian dogs and she knows I'm allergic. I was breaking out in hives the whole time I was packing to come down here. Neither of them has called me yet to ask how my summer's going. I don't think they care. I could probably drown in the Atlantic Ocean and they'd—"

The car jerked to a stop.

I blinked out through the window for a moment before I realized the front wheel of the Jeep was two inches from the curb.

Blake had pulled over.

Shit.

I'd thought that maybe, if I opened up a little, Blake would feel more comfortable telling me about his mother. Friendships are about trust, after all. I couldn't just sit there and interrogate him. But I'd dug a little bit too deep into my own story, and somehow I'd ended up telling him exactly how fucked up my family dynamic was.

God, I'm such a wreck.

I kept my hands clasped together in my lap, refusing to look anywhere else but out through the window. My breathing was rapid and a little uneven—the same way it was after I tried to do anything that involved running farther than the distance between the living room couch and the refrigerator—and I sounded like I was panting in the silence of the car. For what felt like the longest time, it was just the sound of my erratic breath in that beat-up Jeep.

Finally, Blake shifted in the driver's seat.

I squeezed my eyes shut, half expecting him to unlock the doors and tell me to take a hike.

"Hey," he said.

The word was spoken softly, but not in that gentle tone people use to comfort you at someone's funeral. It was calm, asking for a moment of my attention. I peeled my eyes open and took a deep, steadying breath before I meet Blake's gaze. There were no signs of pity in his expression, like I'd been both expecting and dreading.  

Instead, he looked determined; sure of himself.

His hand came out over my lap and I felt his fingertips brush against my clenched fists. Almost immediately, the tension in my muscles unraveled. The fingers on my right hand untangled themselves from my left, only to be replaced by Blake's.

His palms were hot and a little bit sweaty, but I didn't mind.

"I wanna show you something," he told me.

His fingers tightened around my hand just a fraction, silently asking me if that was okay.

I nodded.

Blake nodded back, and then he slipped his hand from mine and grabbed the steering wheel. The warmth of his skin lingered, though. He pulled Jesse Fletcher's Jeep away from the curb and started back down the street, but took a left turn at the next intersection. We drove for another two minutes before I spotted a large, clinical blue and white sign emerging up on the left.

Marlin Bay Hospital.

I bit my tongue as we turned into the hospital parking lot because even though I was really curious about where he was taking me, I didn't want to end up saying anything stupid. Again.

Instead of blurting out all the questions I had, I turned to peer through the car window. The hospital at Marlin Bay looked like it'd been painted white when it first opened, but had since then faded to a slightly muddy shade of cream. The building wasn't anything fancy, really, just a pair of rectangular blocks stacked atop one another—the bottom horizontally, the top vertically. There was blue trim around the windows and a blue awning out over the front sliding glass doors, but other than that, the whole structure looked pretty bland.

Blake didn't stop to park in the front lot.

Instead, he kept driving. It was only once we'd started down a little street that ran along the side of the building that I noticed the rest of the hospital, which had been completely concealed by the main building from my view back in the parking lot out front. There was another large building, just as cream-colored and plain as the first, which appeared to be connected to the front building by a fully enclosed bridge lined with glass walls.

Blake turned the Jeep down the street between the two halves of the Marlin Bay Hospital. The road was wide enough so that perpendicular parking spaces ran along both sides of the road, but two cars could still drive past one another without clipping mirrors. The two structures flanking us weren't all that tall—maybe five stories tall, at most—but if the small trees planted at the back of the front building were any indication, the buildings blocked out most of the wind.

I gripped the seatbelt across my chest with one hand as Blake slowed the Jeep. Most of the parking spaces along the street were empty, so he didn't have any trouble pulling into one. He cut the motor, pulled the keys from the ignition, and went to open his door without so much as turning to face me.

I figured I should follow him, so I popped open my own door and scrambled out of the Jeep.

And then I saw it.

I don't know why I hadn't spotted all the bright blue tarps on the sidewalk across the street, or the three ladders propped up against the wall at varying heights. But there, on the flat façade of the back building, was a gigantic, half-completed mural.

Rachel's mural. It had to be.

My feet began to move as if they had a mind of their own, and I walked around to the rear of Jesse Fletcher's Jeep so I could get a better look at the artwork. The colors were so vibrant. At least twenty slightly cartoonish children of various ages and ethnicities were depicted larger than life, laughing together and playing soccer and basketball and tennis and what seemed like every other sport offered at a public school. Each child wore a different colored shirt and a huge grin, but some of them were in wheelchairs and others had limbs missing. One of them, the farthest to the right, had a surfboard tucked under his good arm and was facing the open expanse of wall where I could make out the faint outline of seaweed tendrils and a giant sea turtle.

"Wow," I breathed.

I glanced to my side to find that Blake had walked around the back of the car to stand next to me. But he had his back to the mural, and his eyes were trained up on the other building behind me.

"Psst, Blake," I whispered theatrically, "mural's this way."

Blake didn't respond for a moment.

"Third floor, second window from the left," he told me, nodding his head up at the building behind me. "That was my room."

It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about, but when my idiot brain finally processed his words, I took a couple steps until he and I were both standing away from the Jeep. My eyes flew up to the building, counting out three floors and two windows over. I waited to feel some sort of all-encompassing feeling of knowledge wash over me. When it didn't, I looked towards Blake.

My eyes locked on the little white scar above his left eyebrow.

"What happened?" I asked, my voice quiet but not soft. I knew Blake Hamilton well enough to know he'd hate it if I suddenly started treating him like some kind of wounded baby animal.

"My mom was a competitive swimmer," Blake said, his eyes still locked on that window. "She almost made it to the Olympics back in her twenties, actually. But then she met my dad, and she sort of gave it all up to settle down and raise a family. She kept swimming, though. She was still really good at it. She just didn't compete."

There was a knot forming in my stomach.

"When I was about, uh, twelve or thirteen, Hurricane Dean went through the Caribbean. We all thought it'd completely missed Florida, so there wasn't any reason to worry about it. My mom went out swimming one morning, like she usually did, and, uh..."

I was going to throw up.

Blake seemed to have trouble starting another sentence. He looked down at the ground for a minute and shook his head.

"We—my dad and I—heard about all the residual rip currents that afternoon on television. Hurricane Dean didn't even brush us, and we'd thought maybe the gulf would get some weird tides, but we had no idea... God, there was this horrible moment when we just both looked at each other and went, mom's usually back by now."

I'd started shaking, but I didn't dare move.

"Dad called the coast guard right away. But I couldn't just sit there and wait to hear if mom was alive or not, so I sprinted to the harbor and I just jumped in Mr. Fletcher's boat—you know, Lena and Jesse's dad, he had this dinky little sailboat—and I took it out to sea."

He shrugged then.

"That's where this came from?" I asked hesitantly, reaching up to brush my fingertip along the little white scar on his forehead. Blake shivered under my touch, and I realized my hands must've been cold.

"It was so fucking stupid," Blake said, squeezing his eyes closed and letting out a single huff of bitter laughter. "I thought I could just sail out there and I'd find mom and everything would be okay. I didn't even make it out of the harbor; currents pulled me right into a wall of rocks along the shore. Mr. Fletcher's boat flipped and I ended up pancaked."

Blake shook his head again.

"So fucking stupid," he breathed.

"It wasn't stupid," I insisted, "it was brave."

Blake winced at my words.

He turned, so his back was to the hospital building where he'd no doubt received a couple of stitches, and eyed the mural. It was obvious he didn't want to talk about his mom anymore, by the slump of his shoulders and the weary look on his face. So I turned towards the mural, my shoulder brushing against his, and decided to change the subject.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" I prompted.

Blake nodded wordlessly.

"I mean, I knew Rachel was a pretty good artist, but I had no idea she was this good. Then again, I've only ever seen her doodle some stuff on napkins. Not exactly her best work, I guess."

My captive audience nodded again.

For what felt like the millionth time since I'd arrived in Holden, I felt that ridiculous urge to keep talking.

"You know, I really wish I'd inherited some of these artistic genes my family supposedly has. I can't draw for shit. Sometimes I think Rachel must've made a deal with Satan to get her talent, because my dad is like the least creative person I've ever met. I mean, I guess neurosurgeons don't exactly have the freedom to get creative when they're operating, because that'd probably result in a whole lot of lawsuits—"

Blake's soft, barely-there chuckle rang in my ears.

"But the man can't even draw stick-figures—"

"Waverly."

"Really, sometimes it's like the entire right side of his brain never fully developed—"

"Waverly."

"You'd think a neurosurgeon would be the first to realize he might have some sort of actual, diagnosable brain problems..."

"Waverly!"

I jumped as Blake's elbow shot out and prodded me in the ribs, knocking me a little off balance. When I turned to ask him what his problem was, I practically lost all the air in my lungs.

Blake's smile was devastating.

He was smiling. Actually smiling. Almost laughing, in fact.

"What?" I asked, breathless and completely caught off-guard by the fact Blake Hamilton was grinning at me like I was the most entertaining thing he'd ever seen in his life.

Blake let out a laugh at the baffled look on my face.

"I know what you're doing," he said, then added, "so thank you."

I was distracting him.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I lied, barely able to keep from smiling.

Blake rolled his eyes and nudged me in the ribs with his elbow again.

"Do you always talk this much?" he teased.

And I'll never be sure why I said what I said next.

I guess I must've felt like Blake had just entrusted me with something sacred. Because, really, that's what he'd done. He'd willingly given me a part of him I had a feeling very few people knew about—a part of him that was young and helpless and had been so brave but hadn't been able to save his mother. And I guess I felt like, since Blake had been so honest with me, it was only right that I was honest, too.

"Only around you," I admitted.

Blake's smile seemed to freeze.

I ducked my head and stared down at an imaginary pebble at the toe of my sneaker, hoping my windblown hair was polite enough to cover the way I was flushing red as a tomato. Had I really just said that? Jesus. It was like my brain knew the exact combination of words that would make Blake feel completely uncomfortable and ruin the—

A couple of large, tan fingers slipped underneath my chin and tilted my head up, so I locked gazes with a pair of blue eyes. And then, heaven help me, Blake Hamilton stepped so close to me that our chests were pressed together and bent his head down to meet mine.

Our lips collided.

And it was completely intentional.

Which meant that, mother of all that is holy, Blake Hamilton was kissing me. On purpose. His right hand was warm against my cheek and his other hand was a gentle, supportive pressure against my lower back and—good God—it was all I could do to keep my knees locked so I didn't turn into a pile of Jell-O in his arms.

Nobody ever tells you that when you're kissing someone you really want to kiss, you find out that you'd rather die of asphyxiation than tear your lips away from theirs for even one minute. And nobody ever tells you what to do with your hands, either, so you'll stand there for a moment doing a perfect impression of a block of wood before you end up throwing your arms around his neck and dragging him into you with so much enthusiasm that you worry, for a second, that you might've broken both your noses. But he'll keep kissing you anyway, and you'll be so caught up in how soft and warm his lips are that you'll completely forget about the world around you and how inappropriate it is to be full-on making out with someone in a hospital parking lot.

This I know from first-hand experience.

Blake Hamilton's lips tasted like hot fudge sauce and, if we're being honest, his abdominals were rock-solid. I didn't realize the two of us were backing up a few steps until I whacked my head on something. Blake pulled back at my exclamation of surprise—okay, more like a swear—and looked over my shoulder. Somehow we managed to keep our arms tangled together as I glanced behind me to find that Jesse's Jeep was the culprit.

Damn. Even when they weren't there, the Fletcher twins managed to ruin the moment.

"Are you alright?" Blake chuckled. "Sorry, I didn't see that there."

"What, the Jeep?"

"I was a little busy," he admitted, rolling his eyes and tightening his arms around my waist. "You'll have to forgive me."

I rolled up onto my toes and planted a kiss on the tip of his nose, realizing, belatedly, that we probably looked like one of those annoying couples who were always in the midst of a public display of affection. To my surprise, I also realized that I didn't care who saw us or who rolled their eyes and fantasized about running us down with their car—the way I always did whenever I saw two lovers who seemed a little too interested in swallowing each other's tongues for my liking.

Blake Hamilton had kissed me.

You could've punched me in the face, and I'd still be smiling like a love-struck idiot while my nose bled. I was pretty damn sure that, in that moment, nothing could've brought me down from cloud nine.

That was, until Blake suddenly went rigid in my arms.

I looked up, ready to tease him about not needing to flex for me and to reassure him that his biceps were indeed bigger than his ego, but his eyes were locked on something over my shoulder and his face had gone very pale. When I finally managed to twist around in his grip, I saw the reason for his alarm. There was a car driving down the little street between the two halves of the Marlin Bay Hospital, heading towards us at a reasonable five miles per hour.

I recognized the big, white Range Rover instantly.

It was Alissa Hasting's car.

Somewhere, in the back of my mind, my severely fucked-up sense of humor was doing its best wrestling announcer voice.

Ding, ding, ding.

Smackdown!

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