by Anne Hansen
And when she turned her interest to me, it was like having the sun shine down on my face after living in a cave for years.
I couldn’t resist her.
The more time we spent talking, the harder it was to stop myself from thinking about other things…
Every time she smiled, I wanted to kiss those lips. Every time she brushed my hand with her fingertips, I imagined what it would feel like to have her hands all over my body. Every time she gasped over a perfect sunset or a beautiful overlook when we went walking, I would have this crazy desire to hear her gasp when I touched her in a way I knew would drive her crazy.
I’ve never been good at resisting temptation.
It didn’t help that Keira started it all.
We were just about to round the corner to the girls’ dorms after we’d snuck to the lake to swim one night, about a week after we started talking. Her dark hair was pushed back, and I could see the freckles under her tan in the light of the moon, full that night. She put a hand on my arm to stop me and stood on her tiptoes.
Every time I think about that—how she stood on her toes—it makes me smile. So damn adorable.
She said, “Vin? I’ve wanted to do this for a while.”
And then she kissed me, and it was as sweet as I expected, but with a wild edge I never saw coming.
That one kiss erased all the barriers I’d put up. Once I knew she wanted me, I couldn’t stop myself from giving her what she asked for. Even though I knew it might wind up hurting her.
The day we said our goodbyes was the most bittersweet day of my life, but I vowed to myself that I’d come for her in one year, a changed man, ready to start our life together, and I never meant anything more.
It’s only four weeks later, and I’m not sure how exactly I’m going to do that. I haven’t made a run yet, but my uncle Gio’s been in Naples visiting my grandparents. When he gets back, I know he’ll have assignments for me, and I’m not sure I’ll have any choice other than to say ‘yes.’
“You’re going to be late,” my mother nags, heaping fried eggs on top of the toast on my plate. “Not a good way to start the school year.”
I grunt and she scowls. “Dominic and Nicola graduated high school. You’re graduating.”
“I could be working,” I protest, but she smacks me with the hot spatula. “Ow, Ma! What the hell?”
She smacks me again, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that one left a mark. She shakes the utensil in my face. “Your father and I work our fingers to the bone to provide for you kids because we were too stupid to go get an education. You wanna end up like that, Vinnie?”
“Dad has a good thing going with Uncle Gio. They’re close to paying their debt down, and then he and Dom can open their own garage. I know it’s tough now, but things will be better,” I say, watching as my mother stomps to the sink and starts scrubbing the frying pan so hard, she’s going to put a hole in the steel.
“Uncle Gio,” my mother bites out, then looks up at me, her green eyes soft and sad. My ma can be a little overwhelming, but I hate seeing her upset. “I know what he’s doing against your father’s wishes. I know what he’s asking you to do. He’s playing with fire. And I’m afraid you’re the one who’ll end up burned.”
“Nah.” I stand up, throw my jacket on, and kiss her cheek. “I don’t mean to make things hard, Ma. I just know I could help more, money-wise, if I was working longer hours with Uncle Gio.”
She cups my face in her hands the way she always did when I was a kid and pulls my head down to kiss my forehead. “You just focus on school. That’s what will make me and your father happy. Okay?”
I nod obediently. No point in arguing with a feisty Italian woman anyway. I know from experience that I’ll always be wrong, no matter what. I head instead to my Mustang, a shiny white shark of a car that I wish I could have taken cruising with Keira this summer.
A little of my happiness at seeing my car in the driveway is sapped away knowing Keira never got to sit in the passenger seat. The truck Uncle Gio loaned me for my time at Silver Poplars got the job done, but it wasn’t quite my style.
I check my phone and there’s already a text from Keira telling me that she loves me, and that she hopes I have a great day. I feel a sharp stab of regret. We haven’t talked much this past week. I’m already late, but I punch in her number.
“Vin,” she breathes. “I’m about to head to school. I’m so glad you called. I was afraid to wake you.”
I love that she sounds out of breath. It makes me think of the times we were together in the bed of the truck. “You never need to worry about waking my lazy ass up, Keira. You can call me anytime, day or night. You hear me?”
Her laugh makes me feel so damn good. “Yes, sir.”
“That’s more like it.” I rub the picture of her tucked into my visor. I took it at the annual Silver Poplars Employee End of Summer Dance. There was no way I would have been caught dead at it if she hadn’t asked me to take her.
When she came out to meet me in this tiny red dress that fit her like a glove, I was definitely glad she talked me into going. And I definitely tried to convince her to skip the dance so we could go somewhere private and celebrate on our own. But Keira loves dancing, and, that night, I did too.
She did that to me. Made me rethink the ‘nevers’ I had spent so long being so firm about. Keira was a game changer in a lot of ways for me.
“So, did you get your district crap all sorted out?” I ask, trying not to think about how much I miss seeing her smile first thing in the morning.
She gives a little groan of frustration. “Dad’s first rental actually fell through. We had to scramble to find a place, get our stuff hauled there...it was a freaking mess! And my school stuff is insane. I found out yesterday where I’m going, so I’ll have to do all my paperwork when I get there this morning. But, you know, it’s all good. I’m just happy we’re getting settled.”
I grit my teeth. Since Keira’s mother died two years back, her father relies on her to manage more than he should, in my opinion. “I told you I’d help any way I could. Why didn’t you call me?”
“Thank you for offering. But, seriously, it was nothing,” she says, and I can picture her waving her hand like moving away from everything she knew and loved was no big deal. “Plus, I knew you were trying to get some work in before the school year started.”
“It’s not ‘nothing,’ Keira. You lost your childhood home and had to leave your school senior year. That’s not ‘nothing.’ And I don’t have anything going on that’s more important to me than you are. Are you at least in an okay area?” I ask, my grip tightening on the steering wheel.
Keira’s dad unexpectedly lost his cushy job at a computer programming firm. She found out after we got back from Silver Poplars that he was in way more trouble financially than she’d ever realized. He’d exhausted all their savings, maxed their credit, and had tapped into his 401K. There was no way he could afford their huge house in their upscale zip code or her private school tuition, and it’d been a rush to find someplace permanent before the new school year started. Last I heard, they were moving just on the outskirts of her old neighborhood. Still a nice place, which I like.
I want the best for Keira. It makes me crazy that she didn’t tell me more about all the changes. But she prides herself in taking care of things, and I respect that.
“It seems nice. I’m just trying to get my bearings,” she says. “Lots of older people. The surrounding area is a little, um, rundown.” She lets out a shaky laugh. “It’s way closer to the city than I expected. They actually gave me a wrong school assignment the first time, because apparently I’m right on the edge of two sending districts.”
I vaguely remember her telling me she was going to Roosevelt. Which is a good school. If she’s on the edge, that means she’ll go to Edison. Another pretty nice place. The craphole is Eastside, where I go. It’s a little weird that Keira and I grew up no more than thirty minutes away from each other, but we m
ight as well have come from two different planets.
“I worry about you,” I tell her.
“You don’t need to, babe. I’m fine, seriously. This is hard, but my dad and I will adjust. And a move isn’t such a big thing. His old company paid to have movers box our stuff as part of his severance package, and his new company is giving us a stipend for transferring. It’s more chaos than I wanted, but it’s okay. And I think I might be closer to you than I was before. What town are you in exactly?” I hear the edge of hope in her voice.
The thing is, I don’t want Keira knowing exactly where I live.
She’s got a good heart and wouldn’t think twice about stopping by to surprise me at some point. Much as I would love if for that to be a possibility, it’s not. I don’t want her coming around to visit or showing up unexpectedly on my side of the tracks. This is a rough neighborhood if you don’t know it, and Keira has this naive sense that she can go anywhere, do anything. So, for her own good, I always did my best to skirt around the question of my address whenever it came up.
“I’m around Passaic,” I say, which is mostly true. “Keira, you need to text me your address. It makes me insane to think about you doing all that moving in on your own when I could be there helping you.”
“Give me your address, and I’ll give you mine,” she singsongs, then gasps. “Crap! I just noticed the time. Sorry, babe, but I have to run. It was so good hearing your voice. I...I miss you so much.”
It rips my heart out the way the confidence in her voice stalls. I can hear how worried she is. “Today’s gonna be amazing, Keira. All you have to do is make it through the week, and I’ll come see you this weekend. I love you so much.”
“I love you,” she says, her voice catching. “I can’t wait to see you.”
Hanging up with her sucks, and I realize things are only going to get harder as the year goes on. But nothing worth anything comes without sacrifice.
She’s worth it.
I pull up at the pothole-filled parking lot of Eastside. The summer school delinquents scrubbed the walls clean of graffiti and pulled the weeds from the lot. I was one of those delinquents freshman year, and I remember those hours of hard labor in the sun all too well. Eastside’s still a dump on a crappy patch of dirt and scattered grass, but this is the best it’ll look for the rest of the year, so I take a second to soak it in.
“Vin, my man, how the hell are you?” My best friend, Leo Neglio, comes to stand by my side. “Miss this place?”
“Hell no. I was just thinking it’s lucky this is the last year we’re stuck in this shithole, ‘cause there’s no way I could do more than that.”
He snorts. “You better suck up to Delani then. She’d throw a fucking party if you flunked out, and I hear she’s the only senior English teacher this year. You’re so screwed, man.”
English class is the last damn thing on my mind. I have bigger problems to worry about...like how to get my act together and make shit right so I can be with Keira.
“Vin!” A female voice calls my name, and I don’t hide my grimace.
Faline DeLuzia totters over, trying not to fall on her ass because she’s wearing fancy high heels. When she gets to my side, she grabs onto my arm and flashes me her fake smile, the same smile she gave me every morning last year when were were a couple and met daily for breakfast.
The same smile I imagine she also flashed Peter Azula, who she was screwing behind my back.
I pull my arm away. “Get lost, Faline.”
She pouts. I guess it used to get to me, I thought all her drama was cute or something. I used to think Faline was gorgeous. Now when I look at her face, all I see is cheating scum.
“How was your summer?” she asks, her smile cracking a little. She rifles in her tiny purse, which costs as much as I bring in in a month. I know that for a fact because I worked a full month of overtime to buy the damn thing for her last Valentine’s Day. I wish she’d stop carrying it, but since I gave it to her as a gift when things were good between us, I can’t exactly tell her not to carry it around now. “I wish I could have a smoke.”
“Why don’t you take a long hike behind the bleachers. You can smoke a cig and suck Peter Azula off back there while you’re at it,” Leo says in a flat voice.
Faline’s big brown eyes narrow and she bares her teeth, still a little yellow from all that nicotine no matter how obsessively she whitens them. “Why don’t you mind your own freaking business, Leo?”
“Why don’t you stay the hell away from Vin?” Leo asks with a shrug. “He threw you out when he realized you were garbage last year. You keep hanging around, though. It’s desperate. And sad. Go the hell away, Faline.”
She looks down and blinks hard, her blond hair falling in her face. If she hadn’t taken my heart and put it directly in the blender last year, I might feel bad for her.
But I don’t take getting screwed over lightly. I value loyalty, and Faline almost ruined my faith in it. Until I met Keira, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to trust a girl again.
“I screwed up big time, Vin. I know that now. I just…I hoped we could talk. I miss that. Talking to you. I just wanted to ask how your summer was,” she says, her voice like a little girl’s.
“Fine. I met someone,” I say and watch her face crumple.
Leo’s jaw swings open. “What? You met someone? What the hell, man? You never said anything—”
“Is it serious?” Faline asks, running her fingers over a strand of hair and chewing on her bottom lip.
I wait until she looks up at me, so she can see plain on my face just how serious I am. “I love this girl. And I’d sure as hell never risk betraying her trust by associating with you. Have a nice life, Faline.”
Leo and I leave my ex standing in the parking lot, and he punches me in the shoulder. “You holding back on me?” he asks as we head to our lockers, right in the main drag. “Is it someone I know?”
I shake my head. “Nah. I met her at the job I got assigned this summer.”
His eyes go wide. “At that bigass resort? Is she loaded?”
“See, this is why I don’t tell you anything. You run your mouth too much,” I growl, feeling weirdly protective of Keira even around Leo, who’s totally harmless. “She’s not rich, not anymore anyway. Her old man lost his job. And she’s too good for me, no doubt about that.”
“You gonna bring her around sometime? Let us meet this mystery woman?” Leo gives me a shit-eating grin.
“Leo, you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of meeting this girl.” I open my locker and put my jacket in. It’s otherwise empty, the same way it’s been my last three years at Eastside. I realize I’ll probably need to change my ways and hit the books a little harder if I plan on getting out of this hellhole, especially with that hag Delani out to see me fail.
“Now I’m damn curious,” he says, leaning against his locker and crossing his arms. “What’s she look like? Tall? Short? Curvy? Blond? Throw me a bone here, Vin.”
I slam my locker shut and head to homeroom, which I might actually get to on time for once. “Forget it. She’s off limits. There’s no way I’d bring her to our shitty neighborhood. She’s too—”
“Vin?” A familiar voice calls my name down the hallway, which is getting more crowded every second.
It’s a voice that doesn’t belong here.
Leo lets out a long wolf whistle. “Who is that fox?”
I feel my throat go dry and shake my head because I have to be hallucinating. There’s no way it’s…
“Keira.” She’s next to me now, her smile so wide and bright, it’s electric. “What are you doing here?”
I take her arm and lead her away from Leo, whose eyes are bugged out of his head. I weave in and out of the traffic in the halls and duck into an empty stairwell with her.
A thousand thoughts are racing through my brain. I want to stay in this stairwell all day with Keira in my arms. As much as I want that, there’s something I want even more: I want to mar
ch her to my car, push her into the passenger seat, and drive her away from here immediately.
I want to drop her off at the private all girls school she’d been going to since she was in elementary school. The one where she was elected class president, the one with huge leafy trees all over the sprawling campus, the one where the teachers aren’t just state-paid zombies sludging through another too-long workday.
What kind of fucked-up world is it that would let Keira grow to love a place like that only to have it ripped away from her right before her senior year? It pisses me off.
I pin her against the wall, my hands on either side of her head, my lips brushing hers even though I’m supposed to be getting her the hell out of here. I just want a few seconds before she leaves for good.
She stands on her toes to kiss me, and I wrap my arms around her waist, yanking her up against my body. My hands run up into her silky hair, and I breathe the sweet smell of her deep into my lungs.
“How did you figure out I went here?” I ask, rubbing my hands up and down her delicate back. “I’m glad to see you, I swear I am, but you gotta get out of here, Keira.”
“I didn’t figure anything out,” she says, her smile so wide it must make her cheeks ache. It’s hands down the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life. “This was where I got reassigned. My father’s company moved him to Ridgedale.”
“Ridgedale goes to Edison,” I insist, like saying it will change things. Maybe I can change things. She’s on my turf now, and I might actually have some pull. I wonder if anyone in my family has ties to anyone in Edison.
“The north end of Ridgedale does,” she says, her smile falling. “Our new apartment is in the south end, just at the edge of the border.” She pulls back from me and furrows her eyebrows together. “When I saw you in the hall, I felt like I finally had some good luck after weeks of being stressed. But it’s like you’re not even happy.”
“I’m not,” I snap, hating the way her shoulders sag. I take it down a few notches. “I mean, I’m happy to see you. Of course, I’m always happy to see you, Keira. But not here. We need to go to the office and see if we can get your district reassigned.” I run a hand through my hair, trying to think of a way out of this, and the answer flashes through like a lightning bolt. My relief is instantaneous. I snap my fingers. “I have an aunt who lives in Brooklawn. That’s an Edison sending district. Use her address. She’ll vouch for you. We can have it figured out by the end of today, and you’ll only have missed a few classes.”
