by K. S. Thomas
forget
me
not
by
K.S. Thomas
Copyright © 2016 - by Karina Gioertz (AKA KS Thomas)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the consent of the author, except where permitted by law.
Memories Made & Forget Me Not are both works of fiction. All characters and subject matter are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
For Rachel Wells | (Who doesn’t drink coffee, but I still love her)
BEFORE | Memories Made | Cooper
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
AFTER | forget | me | not
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Further Reading: One More Chapter
Also By K.S. Thomas
About the Author
For Rachel Wells
(Who doesn’t drink coffee, but I still love her)
BEFORE
Memories Made
Cooper
CHAPTER ONE
I can feel someone else in the room before I even open my eyes. It’s him. Bastian. The only biological child among five in my newest foster family. It’s not shocking to anyone that he’s their golden boy. The thing I do find more than a little disconcerting, is just how inept he is at living up to said title. He’s arrogant, not unusual for a jock, I suppose, but for someone who spends a great deal of time functioning in a team environment, Bastian is one of the most self-involved people I’ve ever encountered. He goes for seconds before some have had a chance for firsts at nearly every meal. He spends hours grooming himself in the one bathroom all five of us share, and in the three weeks I’ve been here, I have yet to enjoy the privilege of a hot shower.
But even his arrogance and intense levels of self-infatuation pale in comparison to his creep factor. He leers at the girls his parents insist on referring to as his sisters, myself included. I can’t count the number of times I’ve found myself half naked just to look up and see him standing in the room, acting as though he has every right to be there. I’ve complained repeatedly about the lock on my door being broken, but no one seems particularly bothered by it other than me. As a result, I’ve started dressing in layers just so I can switch outfits without ever having to be completely undressed. The bathroom is no better. Bastian has a tendency to leave his phone behind, in strange and hidden places, and twice I’ve stumbled on it only to find the camera running on record. I hate it here, but every attempt I’ve made to express my concerns have fallen on deaf ears. As usual.
His newest stalking hobby is yet another step closer on his ever-shortening ladder toward total sexual assault and I have no intention of sticking around to see how long it takes for him to climb that final rung.
“Get out of my room, Bastian,” I hiss, without moving a muscle or conveying just how awake and alert I am. I’m desperately hoping for this aspect of surprise to work to my advantage.
“I’m not in your room, I’m in your dreams. Just go with it.” Apparently not.
“More like a fucking nightmare.” I still don’t make any efforts to sit or act too bothered. Instead, I carefully glide my hand along the mattress and reach between it and the box spring. “I should warn you, I tend to wake up screaming from those.” My hand curls around the handle of a wooden spoon I swiped from the kitchen last week in anticipation of this very moment. Not my first foster family nightmare. “Loudly.”
In mere seconds, he’s hovering over me like a hawk on his prey. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll be quiet.”
I move the handle toward the edge of the bed, ready to yank it out and attack. “How exactly is that in my best interest?” These encounters often go nicely with blackmail. If he has some angle in that game, I prefer to know ahead of time.
“If you don’t, I’ll tell my parents I caught you sneaking out again. And when I tried to stop you, you screamed.” Even in the pitch-black I can see his shoulders move up and down in a casual shrug. “I know you meet up with your little boyfriend when you leave here, I hear he’s got quite the bad rap already. Doubt it would be hard to pin a little more bad news on him.”
“You leave him out of this. You don’t know anything,” I snap, fear and frustration coming to a head. “But I do. Maybe I’ll tell a little story of my own. How would you like that? Huh?”
He laughs. “Right, because when given the choice between their only son and the troubled foster kid they were gracious enough to take in, my parents will totally believe you.” He leans down until his mouth his right beside my ear. His breath is hot and it reeks. “Oh wait. They wouldn’t. Because they never do.”
Well, that confirms my concerns regarding whether or not he’s graduated predator high yet.
And I’m done playing.
Bastian’s hand is making a bold move for the back of my thigh just as my own comes flying out, swinging the wooden spoon straight for the side of his head.
He calls out in pain, falling backwards off my bed. I don’t hesitate to scramble out of my covers and for the window. I’m struggling to unlatch it when his fat meaty fingers clasp my wrist, squeezing hard. I refuse to succumb to the pain, if I do, more will follow. So, I fight through it and kick back aiming for his groin and throwing my heel at it as hard as I possibly can.
I can hear him howling in pain even as I’m crawling over the shingles toward the rain gutters. Within a matter of seconds, I’m running down the driveway and disappearing into the safety of night. Three weeks. It’s not the shortest stay I’ve ever had.
I run and I don’t stop. Not when my side hurts. Not when my bare feet hit rocky, pointy gravel. Not even when my lungs feel like they’re on fire and I can no longer catch my breath. I run through it, my only focus is on my destination. Whaler’s Home for Troubled Boys. I briefly consider changing course and taking off without aim, just running away and hoping for the best. But then I think better of it. Guys like Bastian will always weigh out the desire to bust over the need to avoid unwanted attention. As long as no one woke up from our altercation tonight, he won’t say anything. I’ll get dinged for taking off, but the altercation won’t make my record. No need to buck the system today.
Besides, if I ever took off without Gunnar, he’d hunt me down and kill me. All out of love, of course. I’d do the same to him.
The house is dead silent when I reach it. The only light still shining bright is the one on the front porch, same as always. There’s another light on the side of the house activated by sensor, I learned that the hard way and nearly got caught my first visit. Now I know to slink along the wall and avoid it.
It takes a few practiced moves and I’m around the main structure and climbing up the orange tree reaching perfectly around the corner of the house. It’s not strong enough to hold the guys, so no one has bothered to trim the easy access limbs, but I’m still small enough to make my way across the longest branch and straight up to Gun’s window.
As quietly as I can, I slide my finger into the small crack he leaves open just for this reason, and grip the edge to pull it up. When I have just enough space to crawl through, I slide inside, thinking for the hundredth time or so that black jammies would go a long way in my life, but accepting that the bright pink tank top and lime green bootie shorts definitely aided in keeping me from becoming roadkill alongside the highway tonight.
I take a moment to just stand still. To breathe. To listen. It takes a good long minute before I can hear anything outside of my own heart beating a mad bass rhythm in my ears. Though thankfully, I don’t hear much. Everyone is sleeping, including Ed, Gun’s new roommate.
Now that I’m standing here, nothing left to run from, the events leading up to this moment start to catch up with me. My feet hurt. I’ve got cuts and blisters that will likely make shoes impossible for several days and I’m envisioning a disgusting and disturbing trail of bloody footprints marking every step of my path. I squeeze my eyes shut, shake the visual from my head and thank God for Florida’s year-round flip flop weather.
What little material my clothes consist of is soaked, I’m drenched to the bone in sweat. Repugnant, fear induced sweat. Running somewhere in the ballpark of eight or nine miles to get here, probably contributed somewhat as well. I need a shower. I feel filthy. But I felt that way before I left the house tonight.
Bastian.
Fuck him. Fuck every Bastian I’ve ever had to deal with. He’s lucky I love Gunnar more than I hate him or he’d be a dead man.
Gun.
He likes it here. I can tell because he never wakes up when I sneak in and there’s a lot to be said for feeling safe enough to sleep so soundly. On the rare occasions that he does pass out beyond waking, it’s like I get to peek back at the boy he was before I knew him, the kid who lived in a car with his mom. Who was alone and forgotten most of the time, and who knew it was best to keep quiet, to stay small and out of the way. It was safest to just sleep.
Gun’s not little anymore. He towers over me by a long shot, towers over most. But, when he falls into a deep sleep like this, he still curls up into a tiny ball, knees pulled up to his chest, arms hugged tight around them and his face, the one that’s worn and wise so far beyond his years, is sweet and almost at peace, tucked close to his arm, chin nearly meeting with his knee caps.
I watch him like this for a long time. Even after I’m too tired to stand upright and wind up slowly crumbling to the floor. Eventually I curl up into a Coop sized ball myself and finally get some rest. The last thing I remember, is watching his chest rise and fall with the silent rhythm of his breath, and wondering what sort of things he dreams about and if in those dreams, he’s the sweet boy he sleeps as or the guy I know who wakes.
CHAPTER TWO
I can feel Gun watching me out of the corner of his eye as we walk but I ignore him, instead focusing all my efforts on devouring this breakfast sandwich consisting of all of my favorite foods – pancakes, bacon, eggs and a healthy drizzle of syrup to make it all stick together. It’s not so much that I’m more devoted to this meal than I am to my best friend, as it is that I know there’s stuff brewing behind his heavy stare and I’m not ready to find out what it is. Mornings that come with a hot breakfast are few and far between, and just for the moment I’d prefer to pretend they were a common occurrence and that my life is no different than any other seventeen-year-old’s walking to school this morning. I can’t do that if I pay attention to Gun and his stare.
“So.” His elbow lands in my side, forcing my attention away from my food and onto him. As soon as I look up, he smiles broadly, a clear indication something is up. He never smiles. Not like that. “Where are we headed?”
I shrug and take another bite in hopes it will sway him from pursuing this conversation. “School?” I mumble the obvious.
Apparently not so obvious to Gun. “Nah. I’ve got a total bitch for first period. Not feeling it. I say we take off. Fuck all of ‘em.”
I freeze up mid-step, an empty set of pancake rims now permanently abandoned and dangling listlessly at my side. So much for enjoying breakfast. “We can’t just take off, Gunnar. You finally have a decent place.”
“It’s a fucking group home, Coop. Not the Brady Bunch.”
My eyes roll up into their sockets. He drives me crazy. Mr. B and his wife may not be parents, but the way they run the house they may as well be. “They make you pancakes for breakfast.”
“So does IHOP.”
“Gun.”
I can hear him release a long, ragged breath as he tries to calm his screaming demons. He won’t yell. Not at me anyway. But he doesn’t exactly have to. He gets his point across just fine without ever raising his voice at me. Like via that noisy-ass exhale.
“No. I’m not sticking around to eat paaancakes,” he elongates the word, doing an exceptional job today of trying to make me out to be the irrational one, “while you’re stuck in a house you don’t feel safe in.”
I can’t argue with him when he’s like this, there’s no point. And I knew he would be like this. He can’t stand it when something good happens to him but not to me. Annoyingly, he never seems to have this issue when the situation is reversed.
I drag my flip flops across the sidewalk and start moving again, tossing my leftovers as I shuffle along listlessly. I’ve lost my appetite completely, but maybe there are some birds or squirrels around who will enjoy the treat.
“It’s not that bad,” I mutter, making a last-ditch effort to sway him. “I’ll deal with it. I won’t come running to you again.”
He’s back at my side in a flash. “You know damn well that’s the last thing I want. Just tell me what’s happening and I’ll take care of it.”
“No.” I bite down and make every muscle in my face go stiff. The last thing I need is for him to see me get upset. I don’t even know which is harder to swallow, my own freaking life or the fact Gun’s about to blow up his own just to try and save mine.
“Cooper.”
“You can’t, Gun. There’s nothing you can do, okay?” I shout, the helplessness of it all driving me over the edge. “It’s their son. I caught him standing over my bed last week while I was sleeping. I screamed when I saw him and his mom came rushing in. He told her some bullshit story about how I was having a nightmare and he came to check on me and that was the end of it. Didn’t matter how much I insisted that wasn’t what happened, no one believed me.” I force myself to gulp down the rest of the story. I already told him too much.
I watch in slow motion as the anger spreads from his inside to the out. His body changes, tenses and fury flares in his face, though he still doesn’t say a word.
“You can flash your eyes at me all you want, Gun. I’m not going to let you screw up your good thing just because I’ve hit another little snag on the road through foster hell. It’s senior year. We’ll both be eighteen before summer. We almost made it through. Let’s just stay on track and get there.” I point ahead at the hypothetical path we’ve been put on. We could make it. I could make it. It’s not that much longer.
“Look, Coop. You’ve got two choices. Either we head for the train station and get the hell out, or I’m walking you to school and I’m tracking down the piece of shit who left a mark on you – yeah, I saw your wrists – and I kill him. It’s as simple as that.”
“Don’t be stupid.” I kick at a rock on the sidewalk. Not the smartest thing I’ve done today given the shape my sad, swollen feet are in. Not the dumbest either. “You’re not going to kill anyone.” I’m reminding him. Mildly, casually begging him.
“The only thing I’m not going to do, is sit on my as
s and eat pancakes while someone is threatening you.” He takes a step into my path and stops. “See this?” A few hundred dollars in twenties are dancing around in my face. “It’s enough money to get us by for at least a week. Maybe longer if we’re smart about it. By then, we could be on the other side of the country. Why the hell wait for eighteen? Let’s just go now.”
“Where did you get that money?” I ask, pissed and panicked competing for top spot now.
“I stole it, what do you think?!” He makes a face and returns the stash of bills back to his pocket. “Before you freak, it was cash Mr. B took out to pay some dude to replace the downstairs carpets. It wasn’t their money.”
“Fantastic.” I slam my hands into him and shove him out of my way, stomping off before I blow up at him. “So now it doesn’t matter what I say or do, you already fucked up your chances of ever going back there.”
“I really think you’re putting way too much importance on some fucking pancakes, Coop.”
I stop, succumbing to a full-on tantrum. Why can’t I ever win these fights with him?!
I turn back to face him, fully prepared to give him a last, angry piece of my mind, when he does the thing he so rarely does, and grins, rendering me completely useless.
He juts his jaw out playfully, like the last ten minutes never even happened. “How do you feel about Arizona? I’m thinking we need to stay south. Let’s be real. You’re not cut out for any sort of winter.”
“I hate that you did this,” I grumble. I’m giving in but I’m not happy about it. “I hate that you’re always ruining your life for me.”
“Don’t hate that I’m doing it. Hate that there are shitty people out there who don’t give me a choice but to do it.”
I shuffle back to where he’s standing and curl my arm around his. He tugs me closer. As soon as I feel the strength of his body against mine, I remember how exhausted I am. He steadies me, as my muscles slack and I lean into him, resting my head on his shoulder as we slowly begin to meander down our new path.
