The Years Between Us
Stephanie Vercier
The Years Between Us
Copyright © 2017 by Stephanie Vercier
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For my beautiful Mother
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Epilogue
Other Books by Stephanie Vercier
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
CLAUDIA
Two Years Ago
“You realize how badly he wants to screw you, right?”
Jocelyn nudged me, pulling me out of my last minute cramming for our chemistry test. I lifted my head from my book and first turned to the girl sitting next to me on the bench, just big enough for two, across the courtyard from our school cafeteria.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked of my friend who should have been studying just like I was but has always been more prone to people watch on sunny fall days like this one.
She tilted her head toward the other side of the courtyard, her shiny, fire-engine red hair moving like a silky curtain. “Over there. Mr. Banks. He so wants to fuck you, Claudia.”
“Mr. Banks?” I got red-faced all at once, feeling the burn over my cheeks and neck. “He’s like thirty-five,” I said, horrified, frozen and unable to turn to our history teacher, the man Jocelyn thought I was the object of affection for.
“So what? He’s fucking hot for an older guy. I’d do him in a second if he’d let me.”
“Don’t you have other guys you can do?” I asked, nastier than I meant to, but desperate to take the focus away from me.
She laughed, a wicked look in her eyes. “Sure I do, but those are just boys.” After a long sigh, she added, “And I could really use a man. It’d be refreshing, to sleep with someone that knows what they’re actually doing.”
I sighed too. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Exactly,” she said, bumping me with her shoulder. “That’s why you should get your cherry popped by someone with experience. And I’m sure Mr. Banks has it.”
I shook my head. At seventeen, I was tired of being the one remaining virgin in my small circle of friends, tired of hearing how amazing it was or feeling like I was the only girl who’d come to school on Monday without a story of how spectacular my weekend had been. With the burn of my cheeks beginning to cool, I turned my head ever so slightly and took a tentative look across the courtyard.
Mr. Banks, in khakis and a dress shirt, sat on the bench just outside the cafeteria door, arms crossed over his chest. He looked like he was trying to soak up as much sun as he could before fall became winter, which in Seattle meant months of gray skies and rain. My eyes moved from his arms up to his face, to his eyes that I could plainly see, even under the lenses of his glasses.
And damn if he wasn’t looking right at me.
“Shit,” I mumbled under my breath, just loud enough for Jocelyn to hear and then laugh as I instantly directed my eyes to the ground.
“See,” she said with a know-it-all attitude. “He’s undressing you with his eyes.”
“That’s just… gross.” I refused to look up again, even though I was tempted, even though Mr. Banks was cute in a nerdy kind of way and being in his mid-thirties actually was attractive. “And he’d totally get fired if we did that.”
She laughed again. “And that’s what you’re worried about? That he’d get fired? So you’d do it—you’d actually fuck him?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head, knowing I’d never get back to studying for my test. Jocelyn had flustered me.
“I would never,” I told her, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t curious, that maybe I’d like to.
“You sure about that?” One of her eyebrows lifted in questioning when I looked back up to her.
Sometimes I’d think that Jocelyn knew me better than I knew myself. But she couldn’t know what it was like to live with my parents or to be conditioned to do pretty much everything they demanded of me. They’d probably have turned a blind eye to me having sex, as long as it was with the right boy. But even at a prestigious, expensive private school in Seattle where pretty much all of us came from money, where most of us would be heading to college, a good chunk of us to Ivy League schools—Harvard and Yale being the only two my parents found acceptable—the number of boys my parents actually approved of was practically infinitesimal.
And of those boys, there wasn’t one that I truly liked.
I’d dated most of them—the ones on the acceptable list—jocks and mathletes, future lawyers and doctors and businessmen. Some of them would tell me they loved me, but they didn’t really—they just wanted sex and expected it, and I knew that they’d show their true colors if I didn’t give it to them. Either I’d break up with them or they’d dump me when they got too touchy-feely, too pushy or too eager, when no was no longer an acceptable answer.
And show their true colors, they did.
Some of them would call me a tease or make up lies that I’d slept with them anyway, given them blowjobs or taken it up the ass. I didn’t refute those lies—unless it was to my parents—because I didn’t see the point. The more I’d try to deny it, the more people would believe it—that’s just the way it was here. But maybe Mr. Banks had heard them. Maybe that’s why he was looking at me in the school courtyard, that I’d do something with him in secret, that nobody except he and I would ever have to know about it.
“It’s not worth it,” I finally said, daring to take another look at Mr. Banks who would be just the same as the boys—he’d only want sex if he was actually willing to risk his position here. “I don’t want to lose it to someone who doesn’t care. I want them to love me.”
That had become my standard. If I couldn’t date a guy outside of the ones pushed at me by my parents, then I at least wouldn’t settle for one that didn’t love me. It didn’t matter how curious I was about sex or how much I wanted to have the same experiences my friends did—by now, I’d gotten used to th
e denial, and giving in would feel like failure.
“Awe… that’s kind of sweet,” she said, less mockingly than I would have expected.
“Or just pathetic?” I asked, wondering if true love even existed in this world or if people were just out to get what they could from each other. Maybe all of my waiting wouldn’t give me what I wanted either.
“No… it really is sweet. And it’s kind of incestuous here, so I don’t blame you for not wanting to hook up and have things get all weird, weirder than they already are. Besides, you were a fucking model. You’re too good for this place.”
“When I was fourteen,” I snapped back. “And I’m not too good… it’s not that.”
I hated modeling, hated it more than the hardest chemistry test I’d ever taken. I only did it because one of my mother’s friends who was an agent insisted, said it would be a waste for me not to. But it had been a waste, a waste of my summer and part of the school year when I’d flown to New York and looked like a giraffe walking down runways before being herded into the back with a sea of half naked girls. Some of them were in their early twenties and felt like their careers were almost over, and they hated me because they knew I was there because of connections, because I was an interloper, because I was young enough that I could eventually replace them.
I’d had to act aloof and bitchy for it not to get to me, and it had rubbed off when I’d started back up at school. Any of the boys who were actually worth anything at the Denny G. Pike Day Academy and would pass muster with my parents were probably turned off by it, thought that I’d shoot them down before they could even get close to me. The die was cast, or so they say.
“Such a tough life,” Jocelyn said lightly, but with just enough edge in her voice for me to know she didn’t think so.
“Whatever,” I said. “Just promise no more jokes about me being a virgin?”
“Oh, no… there will definitely be jokes, but they won’t be mean spirited. They’ll be told with love.”
“Good to know,” I said, relaxing some, but still not enough to get back to studying.
Mr. Banks took one last look at me, then got up from the bench and went back inside, and I was glad for it. My first time most definitely wouldn’t be with him or any of the guys here at school—that’s something I just knew, as much as I knew I’d be going to Yale or Harvard or die trying.
But the who and the when of it was a mystery. And for today at least, I didn’t mind keeping it that way.
Chapter One
CLAUDIA
Present Day
“All of us are leaving for Florida as soon as you get in, dear,” Mom tells me over the phone as I’m packing up my dorm room at Washington State University.
“Florida?” I ask, horrified at the prospect of leaving the relative coolness of the Pacific Northwest for the swampy, humid summer heat of South Florida and the uninviting beach house my parents bought a few years ago. “For how long?”
“Two months,” she says like it’s nothing.
“Two months?”
Danielle, my dorm-mate and the girl who has become my best friend during our first year at college raises her brows at me as she stuffs clothes into her suitcase.
“Yes, two months, Claudia. Your father and I think it’s important we all reconnect as a family, and being cloistered at the beach house is the best way we know how to do that.”
Leave it to my mother to use a word like cloistered.
“Mom… you know I was looking forward to my summer job.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind as a way to get out of this, a way to remind her that I’d already secured a job in Seattle and that it would be irresponsible to blow it off. And hadn’t my parents always harped on responsibility?
From nearly three hundred miles away, Mom just laughs haughtily. “At a smoothie bar, Claudia? I don’t think they’ll have any trouble finding someone to replace you, and if you really want a job, you can get something at a souvenir shop in Florida.”
I sigh and plop down on my small bed.
Shit.
I hadn’t even wanted to leave the comfort and security I’d found here at WSU, a school I’d fought hard to convince my parents to let me attend. I loved the friend I’d made in Danielle, and I adored Pullman and its small town atmosphere. Coming here had been a fresh start as well as a way to get away from the drama and suffocating rules that had been a constant part of my family life back home. But I’d at least considered that I’d be mostly independent over my summer in Seattle, that I’d work the job Mom thinks so little of just to get out of the house, to be social and help pass the days until I’d come back for another year at WSU. Spending two months at my family’s beach house in Florida hadn’t even been on my radar.
“What’s going on?” Danielle mouths from her bed.
I just squash my lips together and shake my head. I might be nineteen now, an adult by most standards, but this is not something my parents seem to grasp. It means I’ll need a far better excuse than just my planned summer job if I want to get off the hook.
“It wouldn’t be a terrible idea if I stayed at the house by myself though,” I tell her, knowing it’s a stretch. “I think it would do me good… you know, to give me some added responsibility?” Even I hear it coming out as a question and not a statement, making an already weak argument even weaker.
Another swell of laughter. “I’m not leaving you in a four-thousand-square-foot house by yourself for two months. I might not be mother of the year, but I won’t abandon my child.”
“I’m not a child—I’m nineteen years old.” And yet I might as well just be nine for the way my parents treat me, trying to keep me boxed up into the version of me they’d worked so hard on crafting over the years.
“Nineteen and you think you know everything, don’t you, Claudia?” She is condescending in every one of those words.
I try to withhold the anger that is starting to swell within me. No, I might not even be legal drinking age, but I know for a fact that I can carry myself better than either of my parents. The best excuse I could use for not going to Florida would be that it would preserve my mental health. My parents aren’t horrible, awful people—generally—but they are gluttons for drama, fighting and snapping at one another every chance they get, the alcohol they consume like water only amplifying their arguments that often spill over into extended family functions. I cannot, for the life of me, remember one holiday in the last five years where someone hasn’t left in a huff and sworn they’d never speak to [fill in the blank] again.
“I don’t think that,” I finally say, “but if you never let me truly be on my own, then—”
“It’s a no, Claudia. No to the job and no to staying on your own.” Her voice is firm and immovable. “Imagine my horror if we returned from our trip to find you raped and murdered? What kind of mother would people think I was if that happened? It’s bad enough you’re going to that school.”
I roll my eyes, like really roll them, enough so that Danielle has to hold back from laughing. More accurately, what kind of mother imagines rape and murder being the only outcome of letting me stay at home alone? The way she’s treating me is making me even more desperate now, unable to imagine trailing her and Dad around Florida like a shamed puppy.
“Then I can stay with a friend maybe?” I blurt out, barreling past the brick wall she’s put up out of sheer desperation to avoid two months of misery.
There is silence, and I’m expecting her to bark out another no or to put my father on the line so that he can talk some sense into me.
“Why is it you don’t want to come with us?” she asks instead. “You’re starting to hurt your mother’s feelings.”
“It’s not that,” I begin, working on gathering up the best possible defense. “I just think it’s important that I… well, that I do some things on my own and figure some things out for myself.”
And all of that is true. Even away at school, I’ve felt like a child, having to check in with both Mom and Da
d every single day, separately, in case one of them is too blitzed and won’t remember or the other is working late and doesn’t want to bother talking to the other. And I’m not even sure this is so much about being worried about me, just more about controlling me.
“Kyle and Cory will be heartbroken,” she tells me, knowing just how to tug on my heartstrings.
A few years ago, bringing up my younger twin brothers would have put the nail in my coffin. For all the fights they have with one another—taking after my parents in that respect—I still love and adore them. But at fifteen, they’ll be focused on playing video games all summer and hanging out at the beach the rest of the time. They aren’t going to miss their older sister.
“They’ll be fine. They have each other.”
Mom lets out a loud, annoyed sigh. “I should remind you that neither your father nor myself are actually obligated to pay for your college, especially when it’s at a second rate school. That’s something you might remember when trying to squeeze out of familial obligations.”
My heart quickens in sudden fear. Of course she would use this particular leverage as one of the last tools in her arsenal, and I’m frantically attempting to weigh two months in Florida versus having to scramble to find another way to pay for school or being told that an East Coast college will be my only option next year. “Mom, I—”
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