Never Let Go: Top Shelf Romance Collection 6

by Steiner, Kandi

  It was an unfamiliar, warm ache that spread through my chest as I used my hand to shield the sun streaming in behind his silhouette, just how you’d expect the first sip of whiskey to feel. He was bent over, hand outstretched, saying something that wasn’t registering because I had somehow managed to slip my hand into his and just that one touch had set my skin on fire.

  Handsome wasn’t the right word to describe him, but it was all I kept thinking as I traced his features. His hair was a sort of mocha color, damp at the roots, falling onto his forehead just slightly. His eyes were wide — almost too round — and a mixture of gold, green, and the deepest brown. I didn’t coin the nickname Whiskey until much later, but it was that moment that I saw it for the first time — those were whiskey eyes. The kind of eyes you get lost in. The kind that drink you in. He had the longest lashes and a firm, square jaw. It was so hard, the edges so clean that I would have sworn he was angry with me if it weren’t for the smile on his face. He was still talking as my eyes fell over his broad chest before snapping back up to his sideways grin.

  “Oh my God, are you fucking blind?!” Jenna’s voice snapped me from my haze as she shoved Whiskey out of the way and latched onto my hand, ripping me back to standing position. I’d barely caught my balance before she whipped around to continue her scolding. “How about you brush that long ass hair out of your eyes and watch where you’re going, huh champ?”

  Oh no.

  I didn’t even have time to call dibs, I couldn’t even think the word, let alone say it, before it was too late. I watched it, in slow motion, as Whiskey fell for my best friend before I even had the chance to say a single word to him.

  Jenna was standing tall, arms crossed, one hip popped in her usual fashion as she waited for him to defend himself. This was her standard operating procedure — it was one of the reasons we got along. We were both what you’d call “spitfires”, but Jenna had the distinct advantage of being cripplingly gorgeous on top of having an attitude. She flipped her long, wavy blonde ponytail behind her and cocked a brow.

  And then he did, too.

  His smile grew wider as he met her eyes, and it was the same look I’d watched fall over guy after countless guy. Jenna was a unicorn, and men were enamored by her. As they should have been — she had platinum blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, legs for days, and a personality to boot. Now, before you go thinking that I was the insecure best friend — I had it going on, too. I worked hard, I was talented — just not at the things traditional high school boys valued.

  But we’ll get to that.

  “Hi,” Whiskey finally said, extending his hand to Jenna this time. His eyes were warm, smile inviting — if I had to pick the right word for him, just one, I’d say charming. He just oozed charm. “I’m Jamie.”

  “Well, Jamie, maybe you should make an appointment with the eye doctor before you run over another innocent jogger. And you owe Brecks an apology.” She nodded to me then and I cringed at my name, wondering why she felt the need to spill it at all. She always called me B — everyone did — so why did she choose the moment I was face to face with the first boy to ever make my heart accelerate to use my full name?

  Jamie was still grinning, eying Jenna, trying to figure her out, but he turned to me after a moment with that same crooked smile. “I’m sorry, I should have been watching where I was going.” He said the words with conviction, but lifted his brows on that last line because he and I both knew who wasn’t paying attention to the trail, and he wasn’t the guilty party.

  “It’s fine,” I murmured, because for some reason I was still having a difficult time finding my voice. Jamie tilted his head just a fraction, his eyes hard on me this time, and I felt naked beneath his gaze. I’d never had anyone look at me that way — completely zeroed in. It was unnerving and exhilarating, too.

  But before I could latch onto the feeling, he turned back to Jenna, their eyes meeting as slow smiles spread on both of their faces. I’d seen it a million times, but this was the first time I felt sick watching it happen.

  I saw him first, but it didn’t matter.

  Because he saw her.

  It was just over a week later that Jenna and Jamie put a title on the flirting relationship they’d been having for a solid eight days. That’s how it was when we were in high school — there were no games, no “let’s just hook up and see where this goes.” You were either with someone or you weren’t, and they were very together.

  I had the privilege of watching them make out between classes, and as much as I wanted to hate them together, I just didn’t. In fact, I’d pretty much forgotten that I’d seen Jamie first because they were disgustingly cute together. Jenna was taller than me, but she was just short enough to fit perfectly under Jamie’s arm. She was a cheerleader, he was a basketball player — different seasons, but popular and respected nonetheless. His dark features complimented her light ones, and they had a similar sense of humor. They even sounded good together — Jenna and Jamie. I mean honestly, how could I be mad at that?

  So I dropped it, dropped the idea of him, moved easily into the third wheel position I was used to with Jenna and her long list of boyfriends. Jamie was the first of them who seemed to enjoy me there. He was always talking to me, making jokes, bridging the gap between awkward and easy friendship. It was nice, and I was sincerely happy for them.

  Still, I had opted out of tricycling that particular afternoon after school. Instead, I swung my Jansport onto my bed and immediately started ruffling through the clothes in my top drawer for my bathing suit, desperate to get some time on the water before the sun set. Daylight Savings hadn’t set in yet, but the days were slowly getting shorter, reminding me that summer was far away.

  “Hey sweetie,” my mom said, knuckles rapping softly on the panel of my door frame. “You hungry? I was thinking we could go out for dinner tonight, maybe to that sushi bar you love so much?”

  “I’m not really hungry yet. Going to go check out the surf,” I replied, my smile tight. I didn’t even look up from my drawer, just pulled out my favorite white, strappy top and avoided her eyes. It wasn’t that I was a dramatic teen who hated her mom, I wasn’t — I loved her, but things were different between us than they had been just two short years before.

  Okay, this is the part where I warn you — I had daddy issues. I guess in a way, mommy issues, too.

  But let me explain.

  Everything in my life was perfect, at least in my eyes, until the summer before my sophomore year of high school. That was the summer I opened my pretty gray eyes and looked around at my life, realizing it wasn’t at all what it seemed.

  I thought I had it all. My parents weren’t married or even together, but then again they never had been. I was used to that. It was our normal. Mom never dated anyone, Dad dated but never remarried, and somehow we still always ended up together — just the three of us — every Christmas. I’d always lived in my mom’s house, but I’d spent equal time at my dad’s. My parents never fought, but they never really laughed, either. I assumed they made it work for me, and I was thankful for that.

  We were unconventional, me bouncing between houses and them tolerating each other for my sake, but we worked. Dad’s skin was white, pale as they come, freckled and tinged pink while Mom’s was the smoothest, most delicate shade of black. Ebony and ivory, with me the perfectly imperfect mixture of the two.

  They may not have made enough at their respective jobs to shower me with birthday gifts or buy me a shiny new car on my sixteenth birthday, but they worked hard, they paid the bills, and they instilled that mindset in me, too. The Kennedy’s may not have been rich in dollars, but we were rich in character.

  Still, not everything is as it seems.

  I never understood that saying — not really — not until that summer before tenth grade when everything I thought I knew about my life got erased in a violent come-to-Jesus talk. My mom had drank too much one night, as she often did, and I’d humored her by holding her hair back as she told me
how proud she was of me between emptying her stomach into our off-white toilet.

  “You are so much more than I ever could have wished for,” she kept repeating, over and over. But then the literal vomit turned to word vomit, and she revealed a truth I wasn’t prepared for.

  You see, the story I’d been told my entire life was that mom and dad were best friends growing up. They were inseparable, and after years of everyone around them making jokes about them dating, they finally conceded, and it turned out they were perfect together. They had a happy relationship for several years, a bouncing baby girl who they both loved very much, but it just didn’t work out, so they went back to being friends. The end. Sounds sweet, right?

  Except it was a lie.

  The truth was much uglier, as it so often is, and so they hid it from me. But mom was tequila drunk that night and apparently had forgotten why she cared so much about lying to me. So, she spilled the truth.

  They had been best friends, that much was true, but they had never dated. Instead, my dad had turned jealous, chasing every guy who dared to talk to my mom out of her life. But he didn’t stop there. One night, when she was crying over the most recent guy who’d dumped her, my dad had come on to her. And he didn’t take no for an answer.

  Not the first time she said it.

  Not the eleventh.

  She counted, by the way.

  Mom was seventeen at the time, and I was the product of that night — a baby not meant to be born from a horror not meant to be lived.

  I guess this is the part where I tell you I immediately hated my dad, and in a way I did, but in another way I still loved him. He was still my dad, the guy who’d called me baby girl and fixed me root beer floats when I’d had a bad day. I wondered how the soft-spoken, caring man I’d grown up around could have committed such an act.

  For a while, I lived in a broken sort of limbo between those two feelings — love and hate — but when I finally had the nerve to ask him about it, to tell him that I knew what happened, he had nothing to say. He didn’t apologize, he didn’t try to defend himself, and he didn’t seem to hold any emotion other than anger that my mother had told me at all. After that, I slipped farther toward hate, and I stopped talking to him a short five months after the night my mom told me the truth.

  And though I shouldn’t have resented my mom for not telling me sooner, I did. She didn’t deserve me to blame her for letting me think my father was a good person, but I did. And so, my life was never the same.

  Like I said, it wasn’t that I hated my mom, because I didn’t. But there was a raw wedge between us after that night, an unmovable force, and I felt the jagged splinters of it scrape my chest every time I looked at her.

  So, more often than not, I chose not to.

  “Okay,” she replied, defeated. “Well, I hope you have fun.” I was still rummaging, searching for my bottoms, and she turned to leave but paused long enough to call back over her shoulder. “I love you.”

  I froze, closed my eyes, and let out one long breath. “I love you too, Mom.”

  I would never not say those words. I loved her fiercely, even if our relationship had changed.

  By the time I found my suit, dressed, strapped my board to the top of my beat-up SUV and made it to the beach, the weight of the day was threatening to suffocate me. But as soon as I set my board in the water and slid on, my arms finding their rhythm in the familiar burn that came with paddling out, I began to breathe easier.

  The surf in South Florida was far from glorious, but it worked for my purposes. It was one of my favorite ways to waste a day, connected with the water, with myself. It was my alone time, time to think, time to process. I used surfing like most people used fitness or food — to cope, to heal, to work through my issues or ignore them, depending on my mood. It was my solace.

  Which is why I nearly fell off my board when Jamie paddled out beside me.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” he mused, voice low and throaty. He chuckled at my lost balance and I narrowed my eyes, but smiled nonetheless. Everything I thought I knew about his body was erased in that moment and I swallowed, following the cut lines along his arms that led me straight to his abdomen. There was a scar there, just above his right hip, and I stared at it just a second too long before clearing my throat and turning back toward the water.

  “Thought you had plans with Jenna.”

  He shrugged. “I did. But there was a cheerleading crisis, apparently.”

  We met eyes then, both stifling laughs before letting them tumble out.

  “I’ll never understand organized sports,” I said, shaking my head.

  Jamie squinted against the sun as we rode over a small wave, our legs dangling on either side of our boards. “What? You’ll never understand having a team who works toward the same goal?”

  I scoffed. “Don’t be annoying. You know what I meant.”

  “Oh, so you hate fun?”

  “No, but I hate organized fun.” I glanced sideways at him then, offering a small smirk, and I grinned a little wider when the right side of his mouth quirked up in return. “I didn’t know you surfed.”

  “Yeah,” he answered easily. “Believe it or not, us organized-fun people enjoy solo sports, too.”

  “You’re really not going to let this go, are you?”

  He laughed, and I relaxed a bit. So what Jamie was impossibly gorgeous and had the abs of the young Brad Pitt? I could do this, be friends, ignore the little zing in my stomach when he smiled at me. It was nice to have a friend other than Jenna. Where she made friends easily, I tended to push people away — whether by choice or accident. Maybe the Jamie-B-Jenna tricycle wouldn’t be so bad, after all.

  But when I truly thought about that possibility, of having a guy as a friend, my stomach dropped for a completely different reason. A flash of Mom bent over our toilet hit me quickly, her eyes blood-shot and her truthful words like ice picks in my throat. I swallowed, closing my eyes just a moment before checking the waterproof watch on my wrist.

  “We should try to catch this next wave.”

  I didn’t wait for him to answer before I paddled out.

  We surfed what we could, but the waves were sad that day, barely offering enough to push our boards back to shore. So eventually, we ended up right back where we started, legs swinging in the salt water beneath us as we stared out at the water. The sun was slowly sinking behind us, setting on the West coast and casting the beach in a hazy yellow glow.

  “Where do you go when you do that?”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “You have this look, this faraway stare sometimes. It’s like you’re here, but not really.”

  He was watching me then, the same way he had the first day we met. I smoothed my thumb over one of the black designs on my board and shrugged.

  “Just thinking, I guess.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  He grinned, and I felt my cheeks heat, though no one would know but me. My skin didn’t reveal a blush the way Jenna’s did. “Probably is. You should steer clear.”

  Jamie chewed the inside of his lip, still staring at me, and opened his mouth to say something else, but didn’t. He turned, staring in the same direction as me for a few moments before speaking again.

  “So what are you thinking right now?”

  I let out a long, slow breath. “Thinking I can’t wait to get out of here, move to California, and finally surf a real wave.”

  “You’re moving?”

  “Not yet. But hopefully for college.”

  “Ah,” he mused. “I take it you have no interest in going to Palm South University, then?”

  I shook my head. “Nah, too much drama. I want a laid-back west coast school. Somewhere with waves that don’t suck.”

  Jamie dipped his hand into the water and lifted it again, letting the water drip from his fingertips to the hot skin on his shoulders. “Me too, Brecks. Me too.”

  I cringed at the use of my name. “It’s just B.”

&nbs
p; “Just B, huh?”

  I nodded. “You want to go to school in California, too?”

  “That’s the plan. I have an uncle out there who has some connections at a few schools. You have a specific one in mind yet?”

  “Not yet. Just somewhere far from here.”

  He nodded once, thankfully not pushing me to expand on that little dramatic statement. We sat in silence a while longer before paddling back in and hiking our boards up under our arms as we made the trek back to the cars. The sand was a bit course under our feet, but I loved the way it felt. I loved everything about the beach, especially surfing, and I glanced over at Jamie, more thankful than I thought I would have been running into him.

  He helped me load up after we rinsed off, strapping my old lime green board to the top of Old Not-So Faithful. And just like the reliable Betty that she was, the 1998 Kia Sportage failed to turn over when I tried to start her up.

  “Great,” I murmured, my head hitting the top of the steering wheel. Jamie had just finished loading his own board a few cars away, and he made his way back over.

  “Not starting?”

  “Seems to be my lucky day.”

  He smiled, tugging the handle on my door to pull it open. “Come on, I’ll drive you home.”

  I didn’t know it then, but that one small gesture, those six small words, they would be what changed everything between me and Jamie Shaw.

  Chapter 2

  Buzzin’

  As much as I loved the beach, I hated what it did to my hair.

  I was a product of my parents, taking equal features from each. I had my father’s eyes, my mother’s hair, a smooth mixture of their skin tones. With my dad being white and my mom being black, I fell right in-between them with a creamy mocha latte. I was short like my mom and stubborn like my dad, and somehow I inherited the fiercest combination of their work ethic. My mom was petite, with virtually no curves to speak of and I mirrored her in that respect. I loved my athletic build, even if it didn’t grab the attention of boys the way Jenna’s hips did.