Whisper (Novella)

by Crystal Green

  “I didn’t know that your stepdad was such an ass to you. If I had known, I would’ve done something about it.”

  “And lose your job?”

  “You don’t have the only yard in Aidan Falls.”

  I shook my head, my throat still itching with emotion. “I’ll handle my stepdad. It’s time I did.”

  “You know I’m there to back you up with anything, Carley. You just let me know.”

  I looked up at him, so tall, so solid. How could I not have seen that before?

  In this town, where I thought there’d be nothing for me, I’d found something I hadn’t even been looking for, hadn’t I? Found someone. And all I had to do was reach out and take him, feel him, make him more than an image I could swish past with a stroke of my thumb.

  So I took a step out of the shadows and gripped the front of his canvas jacket, standing on my toes, our gazes connecting as I slowly pulled him down to me, more confident about this than anything I’d ever come up against.

  When our lips met, it was with a soft touch that didn’t have anything to do with pent-up, mysterious passion. It was with all the yearning I’d read about in my secret admirer’s TellTales.

  A head-spinning, gentle kiss that I felt soul-deep.

  Bret tenderly wrapped his arms around me like I was a fragile thing, like a dream had come true for him tonight. He kissed me back, long and easy, like a whisper that rushed through me and settled into a fulfilled sigh.

  I’d never been anyone’s dream before. Before Bret, I hadn’t allowed my dreams to see any light, and as we embraced out there that night, I lost myself in him, the music from the club thumping on, pacing my heartbeat.

  Echoing a suddenly brighter future with my not-so-secret admirer on my side.

  If you enjoyed this story, please consider leaving a review at Goodreads or any reader site or blog you frequent.

  You can read about hellraiser rebel Micah Wyatt in Honeytrap, available February 2015 from InterMix—keep reading for a preview!

  And look for Carley and Bret to be characters in Sugarbaby, a future Aidan Falls book!

  When the group on the dock finally saw us lying out on the lake’s shore, the attacks began, just like I told Evie they would.

  “She came back to town? Unbelievable!” one of them yelled.

  “Small town, small world! Too bad it isn’t big enough to make that bitch disappear!”

  From the towel next to me, Evie put her hand on my arm. In her unflappable voice she said, “Ignore them, Shelby. They’re just being dicks.”

  It didn’t really matter that the loud comments were coming from two girls I’d gone to high school with more than a year ago. In Evie’s world, being a dick was equal opportunity.

  I didn’t have to remind her that I’d gotten used to being raked over the coals like this the past couple of months, so I didn’t respond except to pat Evie’s hand in thanks. Then I tried to relax while I reclined on my back, dressed in my bikini, letting all the shouted comments evaporate like the May humidity.

  But my fan club wasn’t done.

  “Let’s see how fast she hightails it outta here when Rex comes!” This time, it was a guy’s voice.

  I bit my lip at the sound of Rex’s name, hurt tightening my throat. Rex, my first love . . . my first in a lot of things. The anguish trickled downward, into my chest, strangling my heart.

  Evie slowly sat up and, with smooth deliberation, flew the double bird to the small pack on the dock about a hundred feet away. They laughed and flipped her off right back.

  “You’d think,” she said, all collected and cool, sliding onto her stomach, her long red braid smacking her shoulder, “that they’d grow up after some college experience, just like the rest of us.”

  I kept trying to act like what they were saying didn’t bother me. And like my stomach wasn’t tumbling about Rex coming here. The end of our relationship had been ugly—devastatingly ugly. I was the first to admit that I should’ve handled the breakup with Rex in a better way, but the kids here in Aidan Falls, Texas, loved their former star quarterback, and no one humiliated him—especially if that “no one” was a nobody ex who should’ve considered herself lucky to go out with a stud like T-Rex Alvarez in the first place, even if he’d . . .

  The memory crushed me. Even if he’d cheated with a girl named Lana Peyton.

  As I peered from the corner of my eye, I saw that the dock kids had already gotten bored with hurling insults at me. They were unpacking a cooler, the gleam of beer bottles sparkling in the sun, the splatter of a hip hop song breaking the air as someone turned on a playlist and a couple ex-cheerleaders started dancing around.

  “Let’s leave,” I said to Evie.

  “Hell no.” She stretched out like a cat in a sleek black bathing suit while the tiny hoop piercing in her lip caught the light. “And don’t you dare start bellyaching about how I forced you to come to the lake. You’ve been back for two days already and you hadn’t stepped foot out of your house.”

  “They don’t want me here.”

  “Jeez, Shel! You’re allowed to go anywhere you want in this town. Are you going to let them control you all summer? Besides, you’ve always had a way of making the others get bored with teasing you every day, all the way back to grade school, when they’d snark at you for not having a dad around.”

  True. Kids did get bored after a while if you didn’t react. But this kind of teasing was different because they were defending their idol, and they were even meaner. Could I go a whole season laying low? And would a season turn into even longer than that, making me an eternal social pariah in the town I’d grown up in?

  I settled back into my sun worshipping, even though I was still aware of every move and sound the others made. “I said yes to coming here because I thought the lake would be deserted this time of day. Isn’t it too early to party?”

  Just like they’d heard me, their music blasted even louder. They “whoo”ed, and I could’ve sworn it was aimed at me. I even heard one of the ex-cheerdevils from high school—someone an average Josette like me would never hang out with—yell, “Here’s to you, loser!”

  “Dicks,” Evie muttered.

  A laugh cut out of me, like that would somehow ease the tension. But the thudding beats from the music kept digging into me.

  Evie stirred on her towel, and I opened my eyes, squinting against the sun. She’d perched her head in her hand, lying on her side, inspecting me.

  “So,” she said. “You ever gonna explain what exactly happened at school to get them so riled up?”

  That rock in my throat wouldn’t go away. “I told you on the phone months ago. All the gory details.”

  “Right. But you never really went into . . . Well, you know. Why you handled things the way you did with Rex . . .”

  Crap. “You mean why I was so insecure that I ended up overreacting with him about Lana Peyton? Why I was such a cruel bitch to him in the end, just like all his friends are calling me?”

  “There’s a lot more to talk about than that, Shel, and you know it.”

  Yeah, there was more, like why my feelings for a guy who’d disrespected me were still so messed up. Anyone with some dignity wouldn’t have a shred of emotion left for Rex, but here I was, shriveling into an emotional vacuum just because of his name.

  Fucked up. Screwed up. I didn’t want to be that way, but I couldn’t stop myself. Love hurt and it hoped and it sucked.

  Luckily, Evie seemed like one of the only people in this town who hadn’t judged me for being so hard on Rex—a guy who represented the future most people here would never have. He was a homeboy made good, a rising star at college, and I was the asshole who’d gone over the top during our breakup and publicly humiliated their golden boy. In a place like Aidan Falls, people took their idols seriously, and it didn’t help that half my graduating class had also gone to Texas-
U so they’d been around for every painful minute of the breakup. To them, I was the psycho ex-girlfriend, the ingrate weirdo who’d never belonged with him in the first place.

  I hadn’t been that way in high school. Evie and I were fringe rebel-nerds—she was artsy, and I liked keeping to myself, organizing plans for future businesses, designing what my office would look like, pretending I had money to invest in stocks and fake playing the market. Yup. N-E-R-D. But then graduation had come and, during last summer, I’d grown into a different, taller, curvier non-nerd body.

  Rex had noticed.

  But those kids were right about one thing when it came to me. I could’ve—should’ve—done things differently. When I’d believed Rex was cheating, emotion had taken me over, and that had never happened to a so-called nice girl like me before.

  Evie gave up on trying to squeeze any deep talk out of me, and she rested her arms on the blanket, cradling her chin on them. Streaks from the layers of sunscreen I’d rubbed onto her back gave off a clean summer scent.

  “Just know I’m on your side,” she said. “No matter what, okay? Even when I go back to school halfway across the country, I’m always there, Shel. I’ll wait the whole summer for you to talk if that’s what it takes.”

  “Thanks. I’d rather not talk about it right now, though.” Or maybe not ever, if I could avoid it.

  “Got it. But if I have to kick the butt of every single cheerdevil over on that dock to shut them up, I’ll do that, too.”

  “Like you need a reason.”

  “What can I say? I’ve always wanted to paint their smug faces with the wrong end of one of my brushes.”

  Evie and her artsy side. “Thanks for that most of all.”

  “It’s only fair that you have a fraction of the support system Rex has. And, damn, does he need it more than ever or what?”

  I squinted at her again.

  She cocked one perfectly plucked eyebrow at me. “Oh my God. You don’t know the latest, do you?”

  That tumbly feeling was going on in my stomach again—half from fear of what Evie was about to tell me and half twirling heat from hearing Rex’s name one more time. Nice.

  Evie gave a low whistle. “Wow, you’re totally in the dark. Has your head been stuck in a hole the entire time you’ve been here?”

  “Pretty much.” I’d been working in the back of my mom’s restaurant for the past couple days, scrubbing until everything shined, until Evie had pulled me out of there when she’d gotten home from UC San Diego.

  “Jadyn Dandritch,” Evie said, like that was all she needed to tell me.

  The name knocked at me with bladed force. Jadyn, Rex’s rebound girlfriend? The townie who’d comforted him when he’d returned home for spring break after my relationship with him had imploded? The girl he’d dated from afar for the rest of the school year?

  “What about Jadyn?” I asked tightly.

  “Let’s say you’re not the only one in the doghouse with Rex’s friends. She and him broke up, too, and it also wasn’t pretty . . .”

  As she trailed off, I flushed so hard that I thought my face might stay red forever.

  Evie widened her brown eyes, knowing it’d be best to move on. “Anyway, about two weeks ago, Jadyn ‘accidentally’ messed up real bad, and it was with that new guy everyone’s talking about.”

  I sat up slowly. “What?”

  “She banged him,” Evie said.

  “That’s what I thought you meant.” But why had my stomach spiraled again? Was it happy because Rex was available now?

  But I hadn’t come back to Aidan Falls this summer so I could see if it was possible to win Rex back or something. I was here because my mom needed more help running the café and she couldn’t accommodate any more staff. I’d thought that I could work scrub jobs for her while I figured out what to do with the rest of my life. Wherever I was going next, it sure wouldn’t be back to school on the scholarship I’d pretty much blown because I’d fallen down on my studies so hard after the breakup in March.

  “Are you sure Jadyn cheated on Rex?” I asked, still unable to grasp the news.

  “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? But this new guy she did it with . . . Word is that he comes on strong, and Jadyn had a little too much to drink at a party and gave in to him.” Evie frowned. “But that’s only the start of it.”

  Oh, God. I didn’t like how this sounded.

  She made a sorry-to-tell-you face. “There’s this crazy rumor. Some jerks are saying that you persuaded this guy to go in and seduce Jadyn so she and Rex would break up.”

  I didn’t move a muscle, couldn’t say a word.

  Evie held up a hand. “I know—stupid. So stupid.” She paused, looking at me long and hard to see how I was handling the news, and then went on. “But there’s even a second rumor, and it has to do with Rex and his whole paranoia about a girl cheating on him. You know how he acted with you when you started dating? All jealous and checking up on you every night?”

  She was talking fast, like she just wanted to get through all this, and the only reason she was putting me through the rumor mill was because I needed to know. And I did. Forewarned is forearmed.

  I calmed down my stomping pulse. “I thought his possessiveness meant that he really did love me. I didn’t know any better.” I’d never really dated much before Rex. But now I was wiser.

  “Right. So I heard that Rex was still hurting from your breakup, and we know that underneath the jock suit he’s a hypocrite who was always afraid you would leave him. And some people are wondering if, somehow, Rex let Jadyn have an extra-long leash at parties and such, and he was testing her faithfulness that way.”

  Was she saying that Rex had asked this new guy to seduce her? Yeah, that really was a weird rumor. Truthfully, it was stranger than the one about me and the new guy.

  I turned my face away from Evie. It was just that, every time she said “Rex”—and every time a memory spiked me—I got sicker and sicker.

  Reading me, Evie switched focus. “All right, forget all that. What I’m really getting around to is that this new guy is supposedly making his way through half the female population in Aidan Falls, and he’s only been here since the beginning of the year. Jadyn’s just another notch in his huge pistol slinger belt, if you know what I mean.”

  Thank God, moving on. “I can’t believe Jadyn would do that to Rex. She’s had a crush on him since junior year.”

  “Didn’t just about everyone? Except me.”

  I turned to her. “You’re positive she did this.”

  “Basically. Not that this is proof, but my sister saw Jadyn sulking around Kroger a week ago. She was stocking shelves, looking like she just wanted to go off somewhere and cry.”

  I knew the feeling. But maybe I was supposed to hate Jadyn, seeing as Rex had fallen into her arms so quickly after our breakup. It’d been hard to dislike her, though, since she’d always seemed sweet in high school. Very decent to everyone. Who could hate that?

  Evie continued. “I keep hearing how hot this Micah Wyatt guy is, so I’m wondering just how easy he makes it to go gaga over him.”

  Time to give Evie another what? look. This was a girl who’d told me that, in a college psychology class, she’d discovered she was “asexual,” which pretty much explained why she could care less about having steady, committed boyfriends. But clearly she could still think a guy was hot.

  “No lie,” Evie said.

  I hugged my knees to my chest and exhaled. No matter what I’d been through with Rex, I didn’t want him to hurt. And I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the idea of someone being more desirable than he was.

  He wasn’t just beautiful, with his tall, honed athlete’s body, toasty-tan skin that brought out the light brown of his eyes, and thick brown hair that flopped over his forehead. I missed his laugh and his lust for
life.

  How could any other guy compare to him?

  Evie didn’t say anything for a minute. There were only the chopping beats of music coming from the dock, the laughter, the feel of eyes on me, even from a distance.

  But she didn’t stay quiet for long. “I hope you aren’t thinking what I think you’re thinking.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Rex. Now that he’s single again, you aren’t going to . . . ?”

  “No.” My heart cracked around the edges.

  The seconds ticked by as I kept taking in Evie’s news, and when a cheer went up from the dock, I glanced over to see a sight that suspended my pulse.

  Rex was sauntering toward his open-armed friends. He was in his swimming trunks, his skin warmed and worked with gym-honed muscles. It was like I’d conjured him just by picturing him in my mind.

  Something in my chest twisted again, like it was being drilled. And when one of the cheerdevils called out, “Guess who else is here, Rex?” I wanted to die.

  “Can we go?” I whispered to Evie, wishing we’d taken off ten minutes ago. Forget taking a stand against the others.

  From the dock, a chant started: “Lo-ser! Lo-ser! Lo-ser!”

  And they weren’t talking about Rex, their gridiron god.

  “Come on,” Evie said softly, standing and turning her back on the jerks. “Pretend they don’t exist.”

  I wished. But I managed to piece together all the dignity I could as I pulled on my cut-off jeans shorts and a halter top, then stuffed my towel in my oversized hand-me-down bag. My legs shook as I walked side-by-side with Evie, who was obviously taking great pains to block everyone’s view of me.

  But I couldn’t stop myself from peering around her to get a glimpse of Rex.

  He was telling his friends to be quiet, and as their jeers petered out, his gaze caught mine. Even with the tense distance between us, the connection rocked me and, for a suspended moment, we were back in the first week of college, on the lawn in front of the brick dorms. I was reading a book when I felt a shadow cover me.