by Jay McLean
Sammy—maybe four—pursed his lips and crossed his arms over his chest as he made his way over to us. He climbed onto the seat, crawled into her lap, and put his arm around her neck. Then he just looked at me—more like scowled.
I put my hand out for him to shake. I didn’t know if that was a thing that kids his age understood, but I didn’t know what else to do. “I’m Blake,” I told him. “And what’s your name?”
He shut his eyes tight and counted to six, missing the five. Then he opened them. A smile quickly spread across his face. “I’m Sammy.” He looked down at my hand and slapped it. Giggling, he turned to Abby. “Is he your friend?”
She smiled, but it was sad. “I guess.”
“I didn’t know you had friends,” Sammy told her.
She sighed then. “You better get inside before Mary realizes you’re gone.”
He hopped off the swing seat awkwardly, causing it to glide backwards. And then he was gone, running up the steps to the front door, just as it swung open.
He froze.
“Inside!” A middle-aged woman whisper-yelled. I assumed that must be Mary.
He ran in, ducking under her arm while her eyes searched the front yard. When she saw Abby and me, a different expression replaced the scowl on her face.
Sadness. Sympathy. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” Abby replied quietly.
Mary studied me quickly, before speaking to Abby, “When you’re done out here, come inside and get some clothes on.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Then she, too, was gone.
Abby self-consciously tugged her skirt lower.
“Abby . . .” I said cautiously. “What’s going on? Why did you want to lose yourself tonight?”
“It’s the anniversary of my mom’s death.” She glanced up at me now. “I was having a really bad day, Blake. The kind of day where all I want to do is forget.” Her voice broke. A tear fell. She went to wipe it away, but I beat her to it. I didn’t remove my hand from her cheek. Not even when her eyes widened in surprise as I leaned in closer. She searched my face, begging for an explanation.
“Do you think that’s what she’d want?”
She sniffed. “What?”
“Do you think that your mom would want you to try to forget her existence? Even just for one day? I don’t really know you, but from where I’m sitting, you turned out pretty well . . . and if she had anything to do with that, then maybe you should try celebrating her life, rather than trying to forget it.”
She let it out now—the sob that had been brewing inside her. “I’m sorry,” I said in an effort to soothe her, but my words just made her cry harder. “I’m so sorry,” I repeated.
She pulled back. Her hair caught in the wetness of her tears. “Where did you come from?” It wasn’t a question, though. More like a thought that needed to be voiced. Then she rubbed her nose against mine.
And then it happened.
The kiss.
My eyes drifted shut. I could taste the saltiness from her tears. But the moment was over way too quickly. I was still frozen when she pulled away. Her breath brushed against my lips. Then the cold morning air replaced it. “Thank you, Blake.” My eyes snapped open. She was already on the steps, walking up to the door.
I rushed over and took her hand. “What are you doing? Where are you going?”
She turned to me and placed one hand on my cheek, rose up on her toes, and kissed the other. “It’s just one night, Blake.” There she went, using that tone with my name again. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
I blinked, confused, as she ran up the steps and into her house, closing the door behind her.
What the hell had just happened?
I sat in my car for a good ten minutes before finally starting the engine. I’d never felt anything like that before—that anxiety at the thought of never seeing her again. I took one last look at the house. The attic light was on. She was there, one hand raised, waving good-bye.
CHAPTER FOUR
I lifted my head and reached for the phone on the nightstand. I had no idea how long I’d been asleep, but the ringing made my head pound. I knew it was Will, because he’d put some stupid rap song as his ringtone on my phone. It drove me crazy—which was why he’d done it. “What?” I said, sitting up and letting the covers bunch at my waist.
I tried to focus my vision as I pulled the phone away to check the time. It was early afternoon, but I felt like I’d only just fallen asleep.
“Find a new toy last night? Hannah was pissed you just left.”
I’d never been with anyone but Hannah, and I didn’t know what made him think differently. “That’s why you’re calling?”
His chuckle made me squirm. “No, dick. We’re all meeting at the tattoo shop. Remember?”
I rolled my eyes. We had just won the state championship the week before, and the team wanted to get matching tattoos. It was stupid. They were stupid.
“Yeah, man. I’ll meet you there,” I lied and faked the edginess in my tone as I said, “I gotta go. Hannah’s calling.” I hung up and threw the phone on the bed. Not five seconds later, it rang again. Hannah this time. I picked it up and rejected the call.
Resting on the edge of the bed, I let my feet drop to the floor with a thud. And then I did something pathetic. I got on my phone, pulled up Facebook, and typed in the name Abby. Of course I had been too dumbstruck to call my phone from hers and get her number last night, but I was sure we had to know some of the same people—and Facebook was the place to find anyone.
Only it wasn’t.
I searched through four pages of Abbys. Nothing.
With the basketball season over and my “friends” being idiots, I didn’t have shit to do. I tried to get some homework done, but I couldn’t focus.
After lacing my sneakers and going to my wardrobe, I moved a few boxes aside on the top shelf until I felt the hard leather of the basketball. This one was new, my fifth one in just as many months. I’d tried to find different places to hide them, but my strategy didn’t seem to be working. Dad had never told me, and I’d never asked, but I knew he was taking them . . . probably deflating and discarding them, just like he’d done with my ego and my dreams of playing ball.
The one thing he couldn’t take away, though, was the mental escape I got from playing the game. And right now, I needed the escape. I needed to get Abby out of my head.
An hour dribbling a ball up and down the driveway killed me. I hunched over and attempted to catch my breath.
“You’re dehydrated.”
I lifted my eyes. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d heard her voice. I nodded in greeting. “Mother.”
She leaned against the doorway of the guesthouse and took a sip of whatever her current choice of alcoholic beverage was. “Have you had anything to eat or drink today?” she asked.
Sighing, I straightened up, dropped the ball on the ground, and settled my foot on it. Then I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for her to continue with the facade of being a caring mother.
She glared at me. It was her go-to move. “What?” She raised her chin, attempting to look defiant. It would’ve worked if she wasn’t drunk off her ass. She’d changed in the last few years since she’d started drinking. She had once been vibrant, the perfect soccer mom, according to everyone. Now she looked like ass. Her clothes were several sizes too big for her, most likely because of all the weight she’d lost recently. Her hair was a mess, and her eyes had lost the fight to fake it. She looked at least a decade older than her forty-five years.
“Just surprised you remember who I am is all.”
She sighed, dropping her shoulders, and stared at the ground. “I was at your game,” she said, as though it was going to make up for years of neglect.
“I didn’t see you.”
“I went in dis
guise.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course you did.”
She pushed off the door frame and looked like she wanted to come to me. Maybe say something more than the few words we occasionally exchanged. “I tried” is all she said, before walking backwards into the guesthouse and shutting the door.
Guesthouse—I should probably stop calling it that, considering she’d been living there for the past five years.
“She tried,” a deep voice boomed from behind me. Great.
I turned toward the voice, arms still crossed. “Colonel.”
He eyed me up and down and raised his eyebrows. My body went rigid. I balled my hands into fists behind my crossed arms. I knew what his expression meant. It meant that my crossed arms and casual posture were no way to greet a colonel, regardless of whether he was my dad or not.
“You didn’t come home last night.”
No hello. No how are you, son? Nothing.
I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off. He always did. “Midnight curfew,” he said. Then he paused for a beat, his jaw clenched. “I don’t know why you’re still messing around with that shit. Shooting a ball through a hoop won’t help you when the enemy’s pulling the trigger on an AK aimed at your damn head.”
He spun on his heels and walked away.
“Fuck you,” I said under my breath but then quickly raised my eyes. His back was still turned. He hadn’t heard. Thank God. I didn’t feel like an ass beating today.
After such amazingly heartwarming conversations with both my parents, I decided I needed to get out of the house. So I did what I always did. I ran.
Somehow, I ended up in the bushes where we’d found Abby’s things the night before. I wanted to make sure that she hadn’t left anything behind. It wasn’t like I went out of my way. I was there to run anyway. And it wasn’t like I was hoping to find something just so it gave me a reason to go to her house and give it to her. I was just . . . fuck it. Who was I kidding? I wanted to see her.
Unfortunately for me, there was nothing around. But that didn’t stop me from stalking her, waiting for a glimpse of her outside her house. There were a bunch of kids playing in the front yard. Mary was there, too, sitting in the same spot that Abby and I had occupied only hours earlier.
Forty-five minutes, I waited.
I never saw her.
I drove out to the half-court I’d been going to since I was a kid and shot baskets until the sun went down. I picked up food on the way home and ate in my room, where I stayed. I didn’t see either of my parents for the rest of the night.
I went to bed early, hoping to get a full night’s sleep so I could actually focus the next day, but thoughts of Abby infiltrated my mind. I tossed and turned all night until my alarm finally went off. School was the last thing I wanted to deal with.
You know what the problem with high school is? There is way too much of it. I figured everything I needed to learn could have been compressed into two hours a day. I’d have enjoyed it a lot more if I had to devote only a couple of hours of my life each day to educating myself on the subjects I actually gave a shit about. Two hours. That was all it would take.
There was absolutely no need for lunch breaks and cafeterias, which were nothing more than a source of social awkwardness and opportunities for people like Hannah to develop and show off her hard-earned social status.
I started to pick up the apple off my tray, but she took my arm and wrapped it around her shoulders. She was speaking to Sophie, her best friend. Something about a sale on bags. Tuning her out, I decided that leaving the apple would be better than having to deal with the future conversation of how it was important that we show a level of togetherness in public settings. Hannah—on the outside—was every guy’s wet dream. Perfectly straight brown hair, perfect blue eyes, perfect legs, perfect skin, perfect cheerleader body. She may have even been the perfect girlfriend, she just wasn’t perfect for me.
I looked around the cafeteria and settled my gaze on a girl sitting alone at a table in the corner of the room. Our eyes locked, and I smiled at her.
She blushed and looked away.
This was my life. Everyone either had me on a pedestal or was afraid of me. Why? My hot girlfriend and the ability to shoot a ball through a metal hoop? Granted, I worked hard for the second one. The first, not so much.
The loner girl stood up and made her way to the exit. As I watched her leave, my gaze caught on a figure through the windows, sitting underneath a tree. I squinted, trying to get a better look.
It couldn’t be.
She sat cross-legged, with her hair up. Her head was lowered, and it appeared that she was looking down at something in her hand. A scraping sound snapped me out of my daze. I didn’t realize it was my chair being pushed back until I was almost standing.
“So you’ll come with us tonight, right?” Hannah’s voice sounded far away.
My eyes focused on the blonde girl sitting outside. Her head started bopping up and down. She must’ve been listening to music. I found myself smiling as I watched her.
“Babe!” Hannah tried to get my attention.
I blinked, trying to switch focus. Turning to her, I asked, “What?” It came out harsher than I’d intended.
Her eyes widened, and I knew I was going to pay for that later. “Will you drive us to the mall after school?”
I squared my shoulders and took a step back. The chair behind me fell and hit the floor with a loud clank. “What, Hannah? No. I’m working!”
“Babe,” she pleaded. All eyes were on us. I must’ve been louder than I thought.
“Hannah, I can’t.”
I chanced a glimpse out the window. She was standing now, lifting her backpack onto her shoulders. Her head was still lowered.
I needed to see if it was her.
A hand on my wrist pulled me back to my surroundings.
“Babe,” Hannah said again.
I looked out the window. She was leaving.
I shook my hand out of Hannah’s grasp and gathered my shit. “Fuck.”
And then I walked out of the room and chased after her.
Abby.
By the time I got out to the tree, she was nowhere to be seen. I searched the parking lot, the hallways, and the library. Nothing.
The moment I’d left the cafeteria, my phone had started blowing up with texts from Hannah. I didn’t even bother to read them. I already knew what they’d say. The worst part was that I didn’t even know if it was Abby. It could have been any number of blonde girls who walked these halls on a daily basis. Maybe I just wanted so badly to see her that I’d imagined it. I shook my head back and forth in disbelief. What the hell was it with this girl that had made me so crazy?
I texted Hannah right after I’d given up looking for Abby and apologized. I told her I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before and that I’d call her after work. I probably needed to blow off some steam, and if there was one thing Hannah was perfect for, that was it.
She was at my locker, waiting for me before the end-of-lunch bell rang.
“Just so you know, I forgive you, but you should get some more sleep.” She pouted, pressing my body against the lockers with hers and moving my hand to her hip. Licking her lips and searching my face, she added, “I worry about you.” She said it loud enough so that the random people walking by in the hallway could hear.
This was Hannah. All show. Then she leaned in closer, squashing her large breasts against my chest. I looked down at the tight tank that barely covered them. And then I mentally compared her tits to Abby’s. I started to get hard. “Fuck,” I groaned. I shouldn’t be having these thoughts while my girlfriend was trying to seduce me.
Hannah must’ve taken my reaction the wrong way, because by the time I managed to pull my mind away from Abby’s breasts, her mouth was on my neck. My fingers instinctively curled around h
er tiny waist, drawing her closer. I waited for the moment her lips brushed mine before moving in and tasting her.
“Come over tonight?” Her voice was husky and laced with desire.
Will walked up behind Hannah, just as I pushed her away, along with any lustful thoughts. “I’m working.”
“After?” She ran her finger down my shirt and into the band of my shorts.
“I’ll call you.”
Her lips curled. “I’ll see you later.” She took a step back and winked. “Run over to my place. We can shower together.”
With a smirk on his face, Will watched her walk away. “Run over so we can shower together,” he mimicked, pretending to brush hair over his shoulder. The guy was an ass, but he was funny enough and he made the long-ass school days more bearable. I turned to my locker and ignored him. “By the way,” he said, his voice back to normal. “Good job on the whole flaking to get-a-tattoo thing. We waited over an hour for you.” I kept ignoring him. Then I felt his hands rub harshly on my shoulders. “So who was she?” he asked, chuckling suggestively. This kid would not let up.
Slamming my locker shut, I turned to him. “Your mom.”
He shook his head with a chuckle. “Hope she was a good time.”
“That’s gross.”
“You’re gross.”
“And you’re four.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re being a dick.”
I was. “Sorry, man. Bad night’s sleep.”
“With my mom?”
We both laughed.
That was as deep as any of our conversations ever went, and that was how I liked it.
The rest of the day seemed to drag on forever. So much so that when the final bell rang, I hauled ass out of there. On the way to my car, I checked the weather on my phone, trying to plan my next run. When I raised my eyes, all the air left my lungs.
She was a few feet ahead of me, and this time, I was certain it was Abby. I would recognize her walk anywhere. She wore an oversize T-shirt and jeans cut off just above her knees. Her outfit hid the curves that had been so obviously on display when I had seen her last. Her hair was tied up in a messy knot on top of her head, like it had been earlier when she was sitting under that tree. “Abby!” I called out, shoving my phone in my pocket and picking up my pace. She didn’t turn around. “Abby!” I called again. Still nothing. I hesitated for a second before grabbing her arm.
