Before the bachelor handed out his final rose, a deluge was upon us, the rain hammering down on the house.
“The trees are going to love this storm,” Joy commented, always finding the positive in any situation.
As I walked outside, I quickly hopped into my truck, and hell, I couldn’t help myself. I drove past the new girl’s driveway and checked out the car sitting outside. My chest tightened as the unique vehicle clicked in my mind, and my jaw dropped.
“No way,” I muttered, looking at the car that was more than familiar to me.
It couldn’t be.
There was no way…
Fuck.
Putting my truck into park, I hopped out and hurried over to the vehicle, trespassing like the dumbass I was, but I couldn’t help it. I moved around the car, looking at all the drawings on it, and then I paused by the back, near the trunk. Right above the tire, there it was—a heart with the initials JK + KL inside. The words ‘friends forever’ was written below it.
“No way,” I said breathlessly, stumbling backward. My hand raked through my dripping wet hair as shock almost knocked me out. I should’ve known. I should’ve connected the dots instantly, but it’d been over fifteen years since I’d last seen her—the girl who had obviously grown up to be quite a woman.
Kennedy Lost.
Kennedy Lost was the new girl on the block, and she was living right between the Jeffersons and Joy. How? How was that even possible? There was no way. No fucking way. What in the world had brought her here? How had it ended up that she landed in my hometown? What did it mean? What the hell was I supposed to do with this new information? Did I do anything?
No.
Of course not.
It was a long time ago. We were just two stupid kids. She was just a part of my past—nothing more, nothing less.
But still…
I thought a part of me knew it was her the moment I locked eyes with her in the woods. I had felt a tug at my frozen heart the minute she looked my way, but I’d done my best to deem it heartburn because I didn’t want it to be her. Not after all the years that had passed. Not after the changes that had taken place in my life. Not with the man I’d become over time because I was not the boy she used to know.
I didn’t need visitors from my past to come back to haunt my present day. My mind was already a professional at haunting me with past regrets every single day. I didn’t need more ghosts coming back to me. But damn…
Kennedy Lost.
Not only was she this beautiful individual who had curves in places that hadn’t existed when we were kids, her hair was longer, and her curls were sun-kissed as they fell in front of her face. Her skin glowed as if she bathed beneath the sun, and her eyes…
Fuck, Kennedy and those eyes.
Leave, I told myself.
I needed to pull away from her house and not allow my brain to let her in. I needed to stop thinking about her. I couldn’t travel down that road.
After seeing that beat-up yellow car proved who she was, my frozen heart tried to do the stupidest thing in the world—it tried to beat, but the stone-cold crystal sitting in my chest couldn’t perform the task. It didn’t know how.
I got into my truck and I drove away. I had to drive away. As I made it back home, I didn’t head straight to bed. Instead, I walked in the rain through the darkened woods I knew like the back of my hand, heading toward the field of flowers. Dozens I’d planted throughout the years that were in full bloom. The most common flower was the daisy.
I walked to the bench in the middle of the field and sat down as the water washed over my skin. The flowers drank up the water droplets as I closed my eyes and looked up at the sky. I was soaked head to toe, but I didn’t mind. Truthfully, I always felt renewed when I was able to sit out in a storm.
I felt as if it regenerated me the same way it did the flowers.
Taking a few silent breaths, I allowed my mind to still, like always. I was alone out there in those abandoned woods, like always. Then I headed home and crawled into my bed, like always.
The only difference this time was no matter how hard I tried to stop it from happening, Kennedy kept crossing my mind. In an instant, I wasn’t the man I had become. I was back to the time when I was a scared little boy who wanted a damn friend to make the shitty days go away.
8
Jax
Eleven years old
Year one of summer camp
I talked to myself a lot.
Not loudly or anything, just mumbles every now and again. Dad said he hated when I mumbled, but my mumbles were for me and no one else to hear. Sometimes I wished I had a friend who mumbled too so we could mumble together for only us to hear, but for the time being, the only person I could mumble to was myself.
Currently, my mumbles were about Kennedy Lost.
“What a weird girl,” I murmured.
Kennedy was sitting in a mud pile, building what looked like a castle while everyone else was doing arts and crafts inside during our free time. The rain poured down on her, making her look like a wet mop, and she sang some kind of song as she bounced her head back and forth.
That girl was always singing. She probably sang even more than she talked, and she talked—a lot. Her talking wasn’t mumbling; it was the loudest thing ever, her words never seemed to run out. She was like the longest run-on sentence ever.
She talked nice and loud to anyone and everyone who would give her a minute of their attention. She was the definition of an Energizer Bunny—she went on and on and on, and her batteries never ran out. I would have bet she even talked in her sleep at a million miles per minute.
She was such a strange person. I’d never seen a stranger person when I met Kennedy Lost at summer camp that year. She was always getting into trouble, wandering off and doing her own messy thing even though she’d get yelled at for it.
I was sure the moment Miss Jessie saw Kennedy, she’d be in big trouble.
Kennedy wouldn’t even care, though. Her messy, tangled, honey-colored curly hair matched her golden eyes of mischief. I’d never seen golden eyes before I met Kennedy. They had splashes of brown in them, too. Not that I was looking at her eyes too closely, because whenever I looked at Kennedy for too long, she’d look back and smile at me in a way that made my stomach turn upside down.
She made me sick, but the kind of sick that felt a little good…kind of. I hadn’t known feeling sick to your stomach could feel good until I met Kennedy.
Kennedy stood and held her hands out wide as she looked up at the rain clouds. Didn’t she know lightning could strike and kill her? I’d once seen a documentary with Mom about how many people died in lightning storms, and sure, maybe it wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to keep me from ever wanting to stand outside in the rain with bolts of fire flashing throughout the sky. She was oddly close to a tree, too—a tree she’d no doubt hugged earlier in the day.
Kennedy Lost—the tree-hugging, mud-castle-building oddball at camp.
“Is that Kennedy out there?” Miss Jessie exclaimed as she looked out the window at the girl who was now dancing in the rain beside her messy castle like a wild thing.
Where do the wild things grow, you ask? Wherever Kennedy Lost was found.
Miss Jessie shot outside toward the weirdo, and all of us rushed over to the window to watch as Kennedy got yelled at and dragged off to her cabin to get cleaned up.
“What a freak,” someone muttered.
A lot of people called her mean names, and I knew Kennedy heard them sometimes, but she didn’t seem to care. I wished I were like that. I wished I couldn’t have cared less about what people thought of me, especially my dad, but for some reason, I cared what he thought about me more than anyone else in the world.
As Miss Jessie walked Kennedy back to her cabin, the weird girl danced the whole way there.
For the most part, I hated camp. I hated the sports, and the games, and the group activities. I hated being away from home—well, kind of. I missed Mom bec
ause I figured she missed me, too. I didn’t miss Dad because it seemed as if I was never good enough for him even though I tried my hardest. Dad loved my older brother, Derek, a lot more than he loved me. Derek wasn’t even his biological son, but still, he got Dad’s love the most. They liked all the same kind of stuff—football, hunting, action movies. I wasn’t a good son like Derek, and Dad made me feel bad about it all the time, too.
He sent me to camp hoping I’d get better at certain things and man up. Mom sent me to camp in hopes I’d make friends.
I wasn’t good at manning up or making friends, even though that was all I’d ever wanted.
People called me weird—kind of like how I called Kennedy weird, I supposed, but I didn’t dance in the rain and build castles out of mud. I was actually the complete opposite of Kennedy Lost. She was loud, and I was reserved. She dressed in all the colors of the rainbow while my clothes were black, white, or gray. She always yapped on and on about made-up stories while I stayed mute. She even wore her curly hair wild with the tips dyed purple while mine stayed brown, tamed, and in place.
It was odd how two weird people could be complete opposites.
* * *
“Let me go!” I shouted as my camp bunkmates dragged me out of the room in the middle of the night. James, Ryan, and the leader of their pack, Lars freaking Parker, wouldn’t let me go. Lars was from my hometown, and he bullied me during the whole school year. I shouldn’t have been surprised when he kept bullying me at camp.
It was pouring rain, and the three guys were pissed at me for making them lose at flag football earlier that day. I hadn’t even wanted to play, and my team hadn’t wanted me to either, but the camp had a stupid ‘nobody left behind’ rule that made me a bully’s prime target.
My dad would’ve liked them all because they were good at that guy stuff.
“Shut up, cry baby!” Lars hollered, wrapping his hands around my wrists as Ryan and James each grabbed one of my ankles.
I hadn’t even wanted to play flag football. I hadn’t even wanted to go to summer camp!
I hated it! I hated it so much I could have cried.
“Let me go, let me go, let me go!” I shouted.
“Oh, we’ll let you go—right after we throw you into the trash bin like the garbage you are,” Lars said. It was clear he was the ringleader of the circus of jerks. Ryan and James pretty much did anything he said. I wondered how people got powerful like that, how they could just get anyone to follow anything they said.
“You’re not throwing anyone anywhere,” a voice said. I looked over my shoulder to see Kennedy standing there in the pouring rain with a bow and arrow in her grip. She held the arrow pointed straight at Lars’s face and ohmygosh weird Kennedy Lost was a freaking psychopath. “Drop Jax and no one gets hurt.”
“Oh look, Jax’s freaky girlfriend came to save the day!” Ryan mocked.
“Oh look, Ryan is so basic he couldn’t think of a better comment to make. Really, Ryan, work on your insults. They lack authenticity, much like your whole persona—or should I call you Lars number two?” Kennedy mocked them right back before I could express that she wasn’t my girlfriend.
That was another difference between her and me—she wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself.
“Will you just go away, Kennedy? This has nothing to do with you,” James said.
“Sorry, Lars number three, I can’t let you do this. Just put him down, and no one will get hurt.” She shot an arrow that landed right between James’ feet.
“Are you insane?” he barked, jumping in the air and dropping my foot to the ground.
Kennedy didn’t reply. She simply reached into the backpack she was wearing, pulled out another arrow, and shot it straight between Ry—er, Lars number two’s feet.
He jumped and dropped his hold on my other foot.
Two legs free, two arms to go.
Lars cocked an eyebrow at Kennedy as his two sidekicks scurried behind their ringleader. He held me in front of him and gave her a cocky smirk. “You can’t shoot with Jax in front of me, Kennedy. So you might as well—”
She shot her next arrow straight past me, and it grazed Lars’s ear.
Holy crap! She’d almost given him an ear piercing! I’d have bet if she’d really wanted to, she could’ve put a hole straight through said ear.
“I can do anything,” Kennedy barked, and funnily enough, I was starting to believe her. “Now, let him go because next time, I won’t miss.”
I knew Lars wasn’t showing it, but I felt his trembles as he released his hold on me.
Kennedy reached back in her bag for another arrow but froze when she realized that there were none left.
Lars smirked. “Looks like the freak is out of weapons. Now I’m going to kick both of your butts.”
I began shaking as I ran beside Kennedy. She turned my way. “It’s okay, Jax, just bark.”
“What?” I asked, nervous.
“Bark at them! People get freaked out if you start barking at them and then they’ll leave you alone. Watch.” She turned back toward Lars and his friends and began barking like a dog. “Woof! Woof! Woof!” she howled, leaving me stunned and a little scared.
What a weird, weird girl.
But it seemed to be working. The guys began backing up, so I started doing it, too. “Woof! Woof!” I said, probably sounding more like a poodle compared to Kennedy’s rottweiler, but I kept going until the guys backed off. “Woooooof!”
Lars shook his head while stepping away from us. “Whatever, losers. Come on, guys. Let’s go back to the bunk. If you’re smart, Jax, you won’t come back tonight unless you want to get your butt kicked.”
The three dashed off, and I stood there a bit stunned as Kennedy placed her bow into her backpack and then began dancing in the rain. “See? Whenever someone is bothering you, bark at them. It always works.”
“Always?”
“Yeah, like fifty percent of the time.”
“That’s not always.”
“Oh, then not always, I guess.”
“What were you even doing out here?” I asked, soaking wet, dazed, and confused.
Kennedy looked back at me, and her lips curved up into a crooked smile.
Who knew crooked smiles could look…cute?
Whatever. It wasn’t that I was noticing that Kennedy’s smile was cute. Because it wasn’t. I mean, it was, but I wasn’t noticing it because I didn’t notice those kinds of things about Kennedy Lost.
She raised her eyebrow. “Oh, I was shooting archery.”
“In the pouring rain?”
She nodded. “Yes. It makes you a better shooter if you work against the elements of nature. The rain adds an obstacle that forces me to think outside the box and do something different.” She pulled out her bow and held it out toward me. “Do you want to try?”
I shook my head. “No. I want to go get dry.”
“Okay. I can walk you to your bunk and you can grab some of your clothes. Then you can sleep in my bed with me so the guys don’t bother you.”
“I don’t need some girl watching after me,” I spat out, feeling embarrassed.
“Yes, you do,” she replied, not in a mean way, just as a fact. “Now come on, I’ll keep my arrows pointed at them as you get your stuff.”
Even though I wanted to argue with her, I knew better than to fight with an unstable girl holding a bow and arrow.
We went to my cabin, and I gathered some clothes for the night as Kennedy protected me from the guys.
They didn’t say a word.
When I got to her cabin, her roommates were already sleeping. Thank God. The last thing I needed was for people to think I was in love with a girl like Kennedy Lost.
I changed in the bathroom, and Kennedy changed after me—putting on yet another brightly colored pajama set. Only Kennedy would have neon green pajamas.
She crawled into her bed, and I reluctantly crawled in beside her. The last time I’d been in bed with a girl was—oh, that�
��s right.
Never.
I’d never been in bed with a girl.
She turned to face me and gave me that stupid cute crooked smile that made my stomach sick. “Why didn’t you dance in the rain out there, Jax?”
“I don’t dance in the rain.”
“Then when do you dance?”
“Never.”
She frowned, and holy crap, that was cute, too. She flipped over and turned her back to me. “You should dance in the rain. It will make you happy.”
“I am happy.”
“You’ll be even happier if you dance in the rain.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing.
“You don’t talk a lot, do you?” she asked.
“No.”
“That’s okay. I talk a lot. I go on and on and on and on and”—she took a deep breath—“on with words even though they don’t really lead me anywhere.”
I couldn’t disagree with that.
I shifted around on her bed that I wasn’t supposed to be in. “I have to be out of here before anyone wakes up. People can’t see us in the same bed.”
She yawned. “Don’t worry, I always wake up before everyone to go talk to the birds that sing to me in the morning.”
I yawned because she yawned, and now we were yawning together. “You’re a very weird girl, Kennedy.”
In my head, I could see her cute crooked smile that made me sick as she replied, “Thank you, Jax.”
9
Kennedy
Present day
It rained for three days straight, and I was exhausted.
I hated storms. I was never able to sleep through them, and when I was alone, I couldn’t shut off my brain. My anxiety was through the roof. I missed Penn. Well, not him as much as having someone lying beside me in bed during the storms. The comfort of having another warm human beside me when I was in the midst of my lowest points always made them seem that much easier.
Southern Storms Page 7
