by Melissa West
I smiled a little. “Macca’s?”
“Er, yeah. McDonald’s?”
My grin spread. “Ah. Yeah, let’s go there. Thank you. How many times am I going to say that today?”
He peered over at me. “You were amazing back there. Truly. Not just anyone could stay cool in a situation like that. It was—you are—amazing.”
I smiled again. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
Colt gave my order, and then far too quickly, we were outside my apartment. “So this is you. Let me walk you inside.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, but my voice gave me away. I didn’t want him to leave.
We walked up the steps to Olivia and my apartment, and he tucked his hands in his pockets as I unlocked the door. I turned back around and eyed the ground before returning my attention to him. My heartbeat began to pick up, my mind swarming with a thousand different things I wanted to say, but didn’t know how. I opened my mouth and then swallowed hard, trying again. “I don’t know what we are or where this is going or even if it is a thing at all, but what I do know is that I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
Colt took a step toward me, his body heat radiating off him. His eyes dropped down to mine, fixing me to the spot. “Kara . . . are you asking me to stay?”
“No,” I said, all the walls around me crumbling down. “I’m begging you.”
And then, before I could say another word, his lips were on mine and his hands were around me, pulling me to him. The kiss was nothing like the one at the beach. The beach was fast and sweet. A taste of what was to come.
This . . . this kiss was powerful and intense and full of deep, dark emotions that we’d yet to explore. His tongue slipped across the seam of my mouth and then inside, raking over my tongue in a delicious swirl that had me panting for more. I clung to him, like he was my lifeline, overwhelmed by everything he’d shown me today. His care for Maggie, a stranger. His refusal to leave me. And I knew I couldn’t deny how much I wanted him any longer. Colt was in me, in my mind, in my heart, and I didn’t want him to leave.
I wanted him to stay. I needed him to stay.
I reached behind me for the doorknob, my eyes on his, and then I was pushing through the threshold and waiting for him to follow, all my hesitation remaining outside.
I eyed the family room, curious if Preston and Olivia were there, but the apartment was empty, dark. I flipped on the light switch in the kitchen and leaned against the counter, comforted that he was there with me. I scooted onto a barstool and spread out my cheeseburger and French fries, careful to keep them from touching, then began my routine of squeezing ketchup onto the cheeseburger wrapper, again careful to keep it from touching the burger or fries.
“You’re a little on the crazy side, aren’t you?” Colt said, edging closer.
I peered down at my makeshift plate and grinned. “I get it from my mom. She used to say that food tasted better when tasted alone, and somehow the sentiment stuck. She always accuses me of being obsessive. Little does she realize that she’s the one who made me that way.”
“I think it’s cute.” Another step. “So are you going to tell me what happened back there?”
I kept my eyes on my fries. “What do you mean?” I knew exactly what he meant, but I didn’t want to go there. Not yet. We were finally moving toward something here and I didn’t want to mess it up.
“I think you know.”
I chewed extra slowly, and then took a drink from my Coke and placed it back on the counter. “She’s a regular at the center. I just wanted to make sure she was okay.”
Colt slipped onto the barstool beside me, his legs out wide so I was sitting between them, making it even harder for me to concentrate on hiding my emotions from him. Somehow Colt brought out the real me. “And . . .”
“And what?” I asked.
“You weren’t treating her like a regular at the center. You were treating her like she was your sister. Like family.”
“Well, you heard her piece-of-shit dad. She lost her mom, and her dad checked out. I had to step in. I had to.”
“So that was it? You were being kind, nothing more?”
“What the hell do you want me to say?” I asked, growing angry. What did he want from me? We’d already discussed my fear of growing too attached. He knew that was exactly what had happened, so why was he forcing me to say it out loud? Or was this about something else? Again, I wondered if Ethan had told him my secret.
He released a breath. “I want you to trust me enough to tell me the truth.”
My eyes dropped back down, my moment of anger suddenly replaced with sadness. “Maybe I want to trust you, too.”
“Have I ever told you how my mum died?”
I looked up, surprised at the change in conversation. “No, you haven’t.”
“She developed breast cancer years ago and had gone through chemo, but then the cancer came back. There was another round of chemo, and then more cancer, and more chemo, and then finally, she refused to be treated. She had lost all her hair and was sick almost always and she had no one there to give her the strength to keep going. I was an angry kid and Dad was long gone. And then suddenly . . . so was she.” His voice had dropped to almost a whisper, and the intense emotion in his eyes, coupled with the pain in his voice, was too much for me. I stood up between his legs and wrapped my arms around him. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” he said into my hair. “I’m not trying to push you. I just want you to know that I know pain, too. I know sadness. I know how it can cling to you, unwilling to let up. You don’t have to walk through that alone. Whatever Maggie is to you, whatever memory she conjures, you don’t have to face it alone. I want to be here.”
I pulled away to look at him. This was it, the moment when I either took the step toward a trusting, healthy relationship . . . or I shut down, giving up on us before we’d officially even started. I didn’t want to back down, not with Colt. He deserved to have the whole me, the good and the bad. I swallowed hard to give me the strength I needed and then said, “I had an abortion in high school. I was Maggie’s age, so I guess I feel like she made the decision I wasn’t brave enough to make.” My bottom lip shook, so I bit down on it, hoping to steady it.
“Then what happened?”
I looked at him. I always assumed when I told him he would fixate on the abortion itself, but I had underestimated him. I’d underestimated him in a lot of ways. “Next?” My mind drifted back to Mom’s face when I told her. It was the single hardest thing I’d ever said in my life. I couldn’t get the words out, and she became furious, screaming for me to spill it already. She rushed me because she had to get to the office, because she had a patient waiting—she always had a patient waiting. I finally found the words, and as soon as they were out, I saw that I had said the one thing my mother had dreaded the most. The one thing that disappointed her the most.
I reached for my wrist, feeling the pressure of her nails even now, impressions that would stay in arced slices across my wrist for the rest of the day. I couldn’t stop crying. There was no stop to that type of crying. I was petrified, maybe more of my mom than of the pregnancy itself. And then she told me we would be aborting it. We. I had felt sad and relieved in equal parts. My life could continue without missing a beat. Nothing would change. Preston would be fine with it. He would feel only relief. I was sure of it.
But then I told him, and suddenly I knew there was something far worse than the fear I’d felt when I told my mom. Because Preston was more than my boyfriend. He was my best friend and had been my entire life. And because I made that decision without him, he hated me. I could see it in his eyes. His face had changed from concern to complete and utter hate faster than I could finish telling him the truth. Suddenly the real truth—that I was forced into it—no longer mattered. I knew what he would say. That I was in control of the situation. I could have
said no. I could have fought for our child . . . but I didn’t.
“You don’t have to tell me, Kara.”
“I want to.” I drew a long breath, and then began to tell him my story. The story only a few people knew.
I talked for an hour, standing there between his legs, his face unchanging, until I mentioned Preston, and then his eyes snapped into focus. “Preston? You mean . . . ?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that Preston.”
I could tell by his expression that of everything I’d told him, that fact was the hardest to digest, but he said nothing.
“We aren’t anything now,” I added, though he hadn’t asked.
“All right.”
“Really?”
“Kara, we all have a past. Some more involved than others, but we all do. Preston is part of yours. That’s all right.”
My eyebrows drew together. “How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Push aside the stuff that should bother you. Does anything bother you?”
He laughed. “Plenty of things bother me. But after my mum died, I decided not to live my life by those rules. I decide what rattles me. No one else. I have no idea if I have fifty years left or fifty days or fifty minutes. I refuse to live my life angry.”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to test his life-without-anger sentiment, but surely he saw the irony in his words. “But, Colt . . . what about your dad?”
He instantly tensed, and I wondered if I touched on the one exception to his life-of-happiness rule. “My dad had affair after affair when I was little. My mum would forgive him, they would seek counseling, and then he’d do it all over again. Finally he left her, and I spent years resenting her for staying for so long, for belittling herself. It wasn’t until after she died that I realized she’d stayed for me. She wanted me to have what she had—a loving set of parents who worked together to create a family unit. Instead, she carried the weight alone. It isn’t that I’m angry with my dad. It’s that he’s nothing to me. Less than nothing.”
I nodded slowly, though I didn’t believe him. I could see the anger in his face. “Do you think he’s a better person now?”
Colt shrugged. “I doubt it, but I wouldn’t really know. I only see him when I must, which is practically never.” He hesitated, then glanced up at me. “Anyway, when are you going to tell Preston that your mum forced you to have the abortion? I think that’d change his opinion on things.”
“I don’t think it matters now. We’ve moved past it.”
“Are you sure? I don’t know the bloke that well, but it isn’t something I could move past. Even if I said I had. I think he’d like to know the whole story. I’d want to know.”
I tried to stifle a yawn and failed, exhaustion catching up with me.
Colt’s eyes fixed on mine, and then moved to a strand of my hair that had fallen loose from my ponytail. He reached out and gripped it loosely between his fingertips, then delicately tucked it behind my ear, his gaze returning to mine. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through.”
“I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” I whispered back.
He stood up, his body flush against mine. “We’re the same, you know. Broken, but strong. Misunderstood, but hopeful. You . . . you make me want things I haven’t wanted in a long time.”
I drew a shaky breath, my heart picking up speed. “What sort of things?”
He leaned down until his lips touched mine. “This.” And then his mouth moved to my neck and he trailed his breath and lips up to my ear before reaching the soft spot just behind my earlobe, sending a surge of goose bumps across my flesh. “And this.” He pressed his lips against my skin, and I thought my body would ignite in flames. We were connected, through our pain, through our desire, through some cosmic pull that made me want to be wherever he was.
I reached for his hand and started for my room, when he stopped me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I want to sleep with you. I want to hold you in my arms and hear your breathing slow, feel your body relax against mine. But I don’t want to have sex with you.”
Instantly my body became torn between relief and sadness, a familiar feeling that made my insides recoil. “Why?”
He stepped closer. “You’re not ready for us to go there.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he placed his fingertips over my lips. “I know what you’re going to say. And I agree with you. You’re strong. You can do whatever the hell you want. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”
My eyes fell and my cheeks began to burn. I felt like a fool, leading him into my bed, ready to do whatever it was I did, but the truth was that person wasn’t me and he deserved better. I swallowed hard and then reached for his hand again, which I had dropped away in my shock.
“So, sleep?”
A smile lit his face. “Sleep sounds perfect.”
Chapter Fifteen
I pushed through the doors to the new cafe Sarah had begged us to meet at for lunch and peered around for the others. It was the first time in what felt like forever that it was just us, the girls, without bottles of testosterone walking around in guy form, voicing their opinions on all things irrelevant to a girl.
Colt and I had woken up that morning, wrapped in each other’s arms, every single part of my body and soul happy in a way I had never experienced. He made me want to be me, the real me. It was like he saw something in me that no one else had ever seen, and I wanted everyone else to see me just as clearly as he did. We reluctantly said our goodbyes, and though I missed him, I was happy knowing that we would be together again later that night.
“Kar!”
I spun around and immediately saw Olivia standing at a table in the back, her hands waving frantically. I smiled. “Hey!”
I slid into the free seat across from Alyssa and grabbed the small paper menu from the center of the table.
“What’s good?”
It took me exactly five seconds to realize that none of them were looking at their menus. They were all looking at me. “What?”
“What do you mean ‘what?’ You know what. Or rather who.”
I sighed, faking aggravation, but I couldn’t help smiling at their excitement. “Okay, fine! What do you want to know?”
Sarah grabbed a slice of bread from the basket our waitress had brought over and leaned in. “Tell me about the accent. Is it hot in bed? Does he talk dirty to you with his Aussie slang?”
I pushed back, giggling. “No! We . . .” I lowered my voice and peered around. “We haven’t actually . . . yet.”
“Are you serious?” Alyssa half screamed, making my cheeks flame. “He looks like that and you haven’t done anything yet?”
Olivia waved Alyssa away. “Hey, let off. It doesn’t have to be rushed. And it’s none of our freaking business anyway. She’ll do whatever whenever it’s right.” She shot me a grin, and I mouthed thanks. No one was as understanding about privacy as Olivia.
“But you like him?” Sarah asked as she nibbled on another slice of bread. She was the romantic of the group, always preferring romantic comedies to action flicks. Always talking about celebrity weddings and TV show hookups.
I smiled. “I do. So much.”
Our waitress came by and took our orders, before disappearing back behind the counter.
“What about you?” I asked Sarah pointedly. She and Taylor had been dancing around their feelings all summer, and if she could ask questions, then so could I.
“What about me?” she said as she toyed with her straw, avoiding eye contact.
“Um, Taylor.”
Her eyes flashed up and around to each of us. She opened her mouth to spit out an obvious argument and then shut it back with a shrug. “It’s nothing really. We’ve hung out a few times. We’re friends.”
“Do you want to be
more than friends, though?” Olivia asked.
Sarah looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. It’s complicated. He’s just very . . . closed off. I don’t know what he’s thinking most of the time.”
Huh. That was not at all the Taylor I thought I knew. The Taylor we saw was very easygoing and quick-witted. I had a hard time picturing him being closed off.
Sarah sighed heavily as she reached for a third piece of bread. “Boys.” I eyed her, wondering when she’d given up her crazy-obsessive calorie-counting, but feeling relieved that she was going easier on herself.
Our waitress brought over our lunch, and we delved into complete boy talk, then school talk, then future career talk, and before long nearly two hours had passed and we had stuffed our faces with sandwiches and pasta salad and chocolate cake for dessert. I leaned back in my chair, regretting eating the final bite of cake, when Sarah said, “I’m going to hit the bathroom. Be right back.”
The rest of the table barely paid attention to her, but I waited until she had disappeared into the restroom and then followed her, stopping just outside the closed door. Sarah was always careful with what she ate, but today, she gorged herself. Like she was starving and was finally getting a bite to eat. Now, she was rushing off to the bathroom? Nothing about it felt right.
I leaned against the wall outside the bathroom door, and for a moment, I heard nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief, telling myself that my concerns were just in my head, but then came the distinct sound of coughing following by retching. I slumped against the wall, my heart pounding. Sarah had lost so much weight over the last few months, and I knew it wasn’t just because of stress over grades. I had noticed the way she either ate practically nothing when we’d all get together or disappeared to the bathroom shortly after a meal. She knew better than to hurt herself like that . . . didn’t she?
I contemplated going back to the table and ignoring my suspicions for now. I could be wrong. I didn’t want to push her away by accusing her of something like this, but if she was really bulimic, she needed help. I’d seen a few bulimic girls at the center, and they always felt as though they weren’t doing anything wrong. One had even ended up in the hospital. I didn’t want that to happen to Sarah. She was my friend, and friends should look out for one another. Right?
