Covet (Clann)

He’d just gotten out of the hospital! How could you go on dates wearing two casts and covered in staples and stitches?
    For a few seconds, I couldn’t even move from the doorway, the slapping of the waves of water against the pier doing nothing to soothe me or cover up Bethany’s voice as she chattered on about how she was driving him to his physical therapy sessions three times a week and home from school every day in between, and where they’d eaten lunch together, and how bravely he was fighting through the physical therapy to recover as fast as he could for football training season.
    If I’d eaten any lunch, I would have lost it all over the pier right then and there.
    Tristan was dating Bethany. Not just taking her to a single dance. Actively, continuously dating her.
    A few heads turned my way, and someone nudged Bethany’s shoulder. She looked up, saw me standing there, blushed, and stopped talking.
    Feeling too many eyes on me, I pasted on a smile, waved hello to everyone then went to sit at the edge of the pier with the two girls who had been managers with me this year until they’d re-auditioned and made the team for next year. I pretended to listen to them, though I actually had no clue what they were talking about.
    Bethany resumed recounting all her recent dates with Tristan, this time in a whisper. But of course my stupid vamp hearing had no trouble picking up every word.
    I’d thought I knew Tristan, but lately I couldn’t figure him out. Even before the wreck, Tristan’s decision to take Bethany to the dance had confused me. First he’d promised to find a way for us to be together and even asked my dad to turn him. A week later he was taking someone else to the dance. At the dance, I’d thought I heard him telling me to have faith in us, that we’d find a solution. I’d helped his sister save his life. And then, right after he got out of the hospital, he was back to dating someone else again. To make me jealous? As a decoy to make his parents think he was moving on?
    Or maybe he really had given up on us and was moving on.
    I stayed at the lake party for an hour, which was as long as I could stand to sit around forcing a smile. Then I made up an excuse about my dad being sick and needing to get home to take care of him. It was all I could do not to run to my truck and speed the whole way home.
    Parked once more in the driveway, I took long, deep breaths and tried to think it through.
    Okay. So he was dating someone else.
    You knew this could happen. That it probably would happen, I thought, resting my forehead on the steering wheel as the heated air from the cab finally began to warm my clammy skin. Maybe I’d imagined hearing him at the dance because some instinct had made me realize he was in danger, and it just got all twisted and crazy for a few seconds. Then my abilities sorted themselves out, and I felt his physical pain instead.
    If that was true, then he’d never done a spell to tell me to have hope that we’d find a way to be together again. He really had moved on.
    There was zero reason for me to feel betrayed. I’d broken up with him, not once but twice. Now that he understood it was truly over, he was dating someone new, trying to find some happiness in life again.
    And I would be happy for him. I would. Because it could be so much worse, couldn’t it? Would I rather he be dead, or alive and happy with someone else?
    When I texted Anne at church camp with the news, her reaction wasn’t quite so nice. In fact, it was filled with a whole lot of four-letter words I was pretty darn sure the church camp counselors wouldn’t be thrilled to see her typing if she got caught.
    She was convinced he should never date again. She wanted him to spend the rest of his life moaning about the love he’d lost with me, and die a miserable and lonely old man.
    While her staunch loyalty was appreciated and did make me smile, and maybe a teeny tiny part of me might agree with her, the larger part of me knew we were both being unreasonable.
    Thankfully I had two and a half months to make my heart agree with my head before I would be forced to see him again at school.
    Then I got a strange call that totally changed my summer plans.
    “So how did your final exams and Charmers party go?” Mom asked when she called during the first week of summer.
    “Um, okay I think.”
    Actually, I was finding out that this choosing to be grateful and happy business was a heck of a lot harder than it