Everything to Me

by Teresa Hill

  Everything To Me (Book 1)

  Teresa Hill

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Dear Readers,

  Excerpt: The Edge of Heaven

  Excerpt: Bed of Lies

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Don’t we all love the bad boys?

  I grew up on stories about my father and what a bad boy he was, back in the day.

  He’d tell us that he “grew up rough,” lost his mother when he was really young, was pushed aside by his father’s next wife and was mothered by an older sister more than anyone else.

  He left home at sixteen to take care of his younger brother, who’d been kicked out of their unhappy, dysfunctional home by their stepmother.

  Daddy found them a room above a pool hall for a dollar a day, and he went to work. Somehow, they made it.

  He liked to fight a little too much and said it was a miracle he ever made it to adulthood.

  My mother says he still had that air of a bad boy when they met, while he was playing his guitar at the church she attended. Her parents did not approve, but she couldn’t resist.

  She married the bad boy and went to work on taming him. She must have done a good job, because they were married for more than fifty years before we lost him last spring.

  Until writing this dedication, even I didn’t realize how much of him I had in mind when I wrote about Dana’s bad boy, Peter.

  I love you, Daddy. This one’s for you.

  * * *

  1

  Peter

  I always thought if I blew up my life, it would be because of her.

  Dana. My sister’s husband’s niece.

  She’s perfect, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, my biggest weakness, my greatest regret, at one time my best friend, my strongest temptation, the subject of every sexual fantasy I’ve ever had.

  Still, I’ve been handling even that, despite the temptation she poses just by existing, by breathing, by smiling and saying my name. But it wasn’t her who tripped me up.

  Shit, I’m not trying to be funny, but the people who started me down the path to chaos were a girl I barely know and an arrogant little rich boy named Tripp.

  Walking into that party, I just wanted to hang out with my best friend, Kev, on his birthday.

  I’m not big into the party scene. I can’t afford to be. Too many risks involved in getting shit-faced. It’s way too unpredictable. I spent too many years living with drunks not to know that, or for alcohol to have any real appeal to me.

  Besides, my life is all about control.

  Self-control, because I finally figured out that the only person I can control is me. Not my screwed-up parents. Not the parole board who I know will let my mom out of jail again. Not the people who give me shit. I can’t control what people think of me, or whether I get to keep the life I have now — not completely.

  I didn’t understand that when I was a kid, when I was living with my parents and caught up in all their craziness. It tried to suck me in, chew me up and spit me back out as a stupid kid as mad and reckless as they were.

  I learned the hard way, but I got here, finally. I know my life is about me and what I make it.

  Especially three weeks from now.

  I turn eighteen, and that’s a very big deal for me.

  Not in the way most kids think, the ones with easy lives and parents who’ve always given them whatever they want. The kids who have these bullshit fantasies about being an adult, which to them means they can do what they want and answer to nobody, but Mom and Dad will still provide the house, the car, the food, all that stuff.

  Turning eighteen is real for me. My parents will no longer have any legal authority over me. That’s huge for somebody with parents as fucked up as mine. No court will ever be able to make me go back to them.

  I’ve been waiting for this day forever. At times, I thought I’d never make it this far. Some days, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.

  Not that Mom and Dad have been around much for the past four years. They’ve been in prison, Dad not as long as Mom, and even when he got out, he didn’t come back here. Mom … well, she did, then got bounced right back to prison on a parole violation. But she’ll be back again. I have to be prepared for that.

  For three more weeks, I have a legal guardian, my sister, Julie. She’s okay. More than okay. She ran away at eighteen, and I didn’t think she’d ever come back — especially to this town she hated, where people saw her as the poor little girl with the fucked-up parents. But when Mom and Dad got arrested for embezzling, Julie came back to keep me out of foster care. I’ll always be grateful to her for that, and for bringing Dana into my life.

  Julie married Dana’s Uncle Zach a year after she came back, and they’ve been good to me, better than I deserved. But nobody wants to start a marriage with a screwed-up fourteen-year-old. Those two need their privacy. Trust me, I’ve walked in on them often enough to know. Hell, they’re entitled to have some time to themselves. I don’t want to be an obligation to anyone.

  I don’t think Zach and Julie will throw me out the minute I turn eighteen, but I need to know I can take care of myself no matter what, so I’ve been working and saving some money. If Mom comes here and stirs up shit, I can leave. Once I’m eighteen, no one can stop me.

  It’s a kind of freedom I can’t begin to describe, and it’s so close I can taste it now. I can’t wait.

  As long as I can take care of myself – stay out of trouble and make enough money to support myself — I can make my own decisions, do what I want. The only thing that can bring me down is if I fuck up badly enough to wreck my own life, and I’m determined not to do that.

  Tonight, I plan to let go a little and enjoy the party.

  It’s Kev’s birthday and it’s a really nice night, clear skies, not too hot despite being late July, a huge, full moon hanging low in the sky. The guy throwing the party lives about four miles out of town with no close neighbors to complain about the noise, and his parents are away.

  As I park my truck and climb out, music blares from the backyard. The heavy thrum of the base mixes with laughter and a buzz of conversation. I come around the right side of the house and notice, off in the shadows in the trees, two people making out.

  No big surprise. Lots of people will be doing that.

  But as I take two more steps, I think I hear whimpering.

  Not the good kind a girl might make when she’s happy and really turned on.

  The scared kind.

  Maybe.

  I’m not sure.

  I glance back to the right and think, If the girl needs help, she’ll yell, right? I hear the whimper again. It’s dark in that part of the yard, so I’m still not sure, but I think the guy might have his hand over her mouth.

  Which still could just be to keep her from making too much noise while they … have sex? Right there? Maybe. Drunk kids will do just about any damned thing.

  I take a few steps closer, and they shift enough to move into a patch of light. He definitely has his hand over her mouth, and … yeah, she is trying to get away. She’s trying to knee him in the balls. She must be scared.

  “Hey!” I yell as I rush toward them and finally see the guy.

  Tripp Fucking Buchanan, and he looks pissed. “Back off!” he says. “This is none of your business.”

  He’s on the football team with me, strong as hell, and
she’s tiny. Andie, that’s her name. We had European History together one year. I think I remember hearing about her and Tripp hanging out with each other over the summer.

  I keep walking toward them, thinking I’m going to knock the shit out of Tripp for this and enjoy it, because I know what it’s like to have someone bigger and stronger than I am grab me like that and refuse to let go. There’s no way I’m letting any guy do that to a girl.

  But me coming toward them is enough to distract Tripp for a few seconds. Andie uses that to twist around and break his grip on her forearms. She comes running into my arms, trembling and sobbing, dark streaks of what’s probably mascara running down her cheeks.

  I put my arms around her, to show Tripp I’m going to protect her. He glares at me like he’s going to start something, but in the end says, “Fine. Take her. She’s more trouble than she’s worth, stupid little bitch.”

  Deciding it’s more important to take care of Andie right now, I let him go. I can find Tripp anytime I want.

  She finally stops crying and mostly stops shaking. I ease back a step so I can see her better. Her shirt is pulled to the side, off one shoulder. I think she’s going to have bruises on her arms from his hands tomorrow, but I don’t see any other injuries.

  “Hey?” I ask. “You okay?”

  She nods a little, sniffles, then whispers, “Thank you.”

  “Did he … What did he do?”

  “Nothing, really. I … made him mad. That’s all, and then—”

  “—He tried to rape you?”

  “No. It’s not … We’ve had sex. He likes it rough, you know? And when he gets drunk, or I make him mad—”

  “He’s done this before, and you still go out with him?” That makes no fucking sense, and it makes me mad, which must have come through in what I said to her and how I said it, because she eases back like she’s a little afraid of me now. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t like him very much before I saw what he did to you, and now I like him even less.”

  “He’s okay most of the time. And he can be really nice. Just … like I said … when he drinks … ”

  “Yeah, I know.” God, did I know.

  “He really scared me tonight. My arm and my shoulder hurt, and my mouth. He smashed his mouth against mine.” She touches trembling fingers to her bruised lips. I can see the puffiness in them.

  “He doesn’t get to hurt you,” I say. “Being drunk is no excuse.”

  “I know. I do.” She leans into me, hugs me quickly and as she’s pulling away, gives me a kiss on my cheek. She’s a sweet girl, too mousy and poor to be popular, but sweet, even if she does have lousy taste in guys. “Thank you. I don’t know what he might have done if you hadn’t come along.”

  “Did you come here with him, Andie?” I ask. “Do you want me to take you home?”

  She tells me she came with her cousin Mia, and we run into her at the edge of the crowd in the backyard.

  Tripp’s there, surrounded by his friends, glaring at us. He yells across the space between us, “Hey, plenty of other girls here, all happy to be with me.”

  Andie leans into my side, trembling again, and I put my arm around her and tell her, “It’s okay. I won’t let him hurt you.”

  Mia offers to take Andie home, and I walk them to the car. In the light spilling out of the open car door, I see Andie, with her right hand, holding her left arm against her waist, like if she moves it too much, it’ll hurt even more, and her lip is puffy.

  That little prick. I’m furious.

  “Andie, you can’t let him do this again. You can’t stay with him.”

  Her face looks like I hurt her just by saying that. “I know,” she whispers.

  I get her in the car, and tell her if he bothers her again, to tell me, that I’ll take care of it. And I will. Before I turn to leave, she says, “Peter? Could I … Please don’t tell anyone about this, okay?”

  “That he hurt you? That he scared you? That he’s a mean drunk?” I’m not sure what she’s asking.

  She nods. I guess she means all of it, and she looks scared again. Is that what she’s not telling me? That she’s scared of what he’ll do if he finds out she told anyone what he did to her tonight?

  Fucker.

  To scare her like this? A girl he probably outweighs by seventy pounds? He’s right there in the backyard, so drunk he’s slurring his words. Who knows what he might do to some other girl. I want him to pay for what he already did. I want him to know what it feels like to get beaten up.

  Unlike me, he has a classic football player’s body, all big, bulky muscles, and he’s probably got twenty pounds or so on me. But I bet I know a lot more about fighting than he does. I bet I can take him.

  And I want to, even if it isn’t smart.

  * * *

  Dana

  I drag Becca to the party with me, because I know he’ll be there. It’s one of the last big blasts of summer, but more importantly, his best friend’s birthday. Peter will show up.

  Not that I don’t see him around. I do. Casual, everyday family things, where we pretend to be nothing but casual, everyday friends.

  It makes me furious and more than a bit crazy that he treats me this way now.

  Sometimes I think I imagined it all. Everything that happened between us. Or didn’t happen. The look in his eyes when he watched me. The way it felt when he touched me in the smallest of ways. The times when I felt like he wanted so much more for the two of us, like I did, except we were both too scared of messing up what we had to do anything about it.

  He was my best friend. I know that. That was real, and I miss him so much.

  But did I imagine that little blast of heat in his eyes when he used to look at me? Did I imagine that look meant he wanted me? That he once took any chance he got to touch me, even if it was in a thousand insignificant ways — that felt completely significant to me? Did I really feel that little hit of need between us, like hundreds of little threads pulling us toward each other? Did I completely misread that feeling that all he could think about was kissing me? Touching me? That at any moment he might grab me and haul me up against him and never let me go?

  I grew up thinking I could figure out anything, could handle anything. I’ve always been smart. My whole life, people have said so. At school, I’m almost always the smartest kid in the room.

  But I’m unbelievably bad at the whole boy-girl thing.

  It’s like I’m trying to swim, and in theory I know all the strokes, but when I get in the water and try it, I sink. It’s like we’re in a movie, and everybody got a copy of the script except me. They know exactly where they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to say. I don’t know what my cues are, what my lines are. Everything I do seems awkward and wrong. I get more tense about it all the time, which makes it all worse, this thing that seems to come so naturally to everyone else.

  I can’t believe I’m this bad at anything, that I can’t figure it out.

  Normally, I’ll study, I’ll read, I’ll make outlines and write note cards, I’ll research like you wouldn’t believe to figure things out.

  Not this.

  Not him.

  I want to go up to him and beg him to tell me what happened five months ago, what I did wrong, what changed. For a while after, I did that. I couldn’t help myself. He could always see it coming. I’d try to bring it up, and he’d shut down completely, get that blank look on his face that I hate. He’d claim nothing happened, nothing’s wrong. Like I’m the one who’s crazy. Like I made it all up in my head, and he never felt anything special for me beyond friendship.

  I want to scream at him, beg him, cry all over him, corner him and not let him go anywhere or do anything until he tells me. I’m afraid I have begged. I know I’ve cried. I haven’t quite screamed, but I did corner him at least once, and his story never changed.

  You didn’t do anything, he’d say. Nothing’s changed.

  But I know everything has.

  I hate it. I keep going o
ver and over it in my mind. What did I do? I can’t figure it out. I’d give anything if I could just figure it out, because I can’t fix what I don’t understand. I can’t begin to apologize when I don’t know what’s wrong.

  And I can’t imagine why he’d do this to me. Why he’s treating me this way. He liked me. I swear, he did. And he wanted me.

  But he doesn’t anymore.

  “Okay, so what’s my deal here?” asks my best friend, Becca. “Am I supposed to keep you from talking to him? From standing in the corner staring at him? From making a fool of yourself over him?”

  “Definitely the last one,” I say. “Other than that, I’m not sure.”

  Becca sighs. “Okay. But will you try to have fun, at least?”

  I shoot her a look. She knows parties like this aren’t my thing — wasted high school students, music so loud it pounds inside my head, people in dark corners making out and disappearing to have sex. I’m too cautious for that. Maybe I’m too uptight for that. Is this really what we’re supposed to be doing? Drinking until we throw up or pass out and taking our clothes off for guys we barely know?

  I’ve had a drink, a couple of times. It’s not that I have some moral or religious objection to it. I just have no desire to throw up or pass out and feel like crap the next day, and — okay, I have a thing about making plans, thinking, strategizing before I do anything. It’s a little anal, I know, but that’s the way I am. I’m not into forgetting what I’ve done. Being so drunk I can’t think clearly? That sounds as smart as diving off a cliff when it’s cloudy or foggy and I can’t see what’s below me.

  And the whole sex thing? I want to be in love. At the very least, I’d have to really trust a guy to take my clothes off in front of him. When did that become an unreasonable position? I feel like people my age think it is, that I live like a nun and I’m the most boring sixteen-year-old on earth. A little of it might be that I’m younger than everybody in my class. I skipped third grade, and I won’t be seventeen until January. But mostly, I think, it’s just me.