Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 98048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 490(@200wpm)___ 392(@250wpm)___ 327(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 490(@200wpm)___ 392(@250wpm)___ 327(@300wpm)
“You better keep your head down, girl,” he warns, growling at me with a wet, phlegmy voice full of impotent anger. He’s getting off on the power trip. “None of that partying bullshit. I catch you with drugs, you’re gonna find yourself in the back of this car. So much as sniff trouble around you, you’re going to jail. Hear me?”
He’s aching for a reason, the slightest provocation to nail me. Too bad for him, I left that Genevieve behind a long time ago. From the corner of my eye, I spot Heidi and the girls standing at the entrance to the bar, waiting for me.
“We done here?” I ask, keeping my chin up. I’d walk into traffic before giving Randall the satisfaction of knowing his threats affect me. “Good.”
I walk off. When the girls ask, I just tell them to watch their backs. Wherever we are this summer, whatever we do, it’s a sure thing he’ll be watching. Biding his time.
I’m not about to play his game.
Later, at home, I lie in bed still rigid with anger. There’s tension tugging at the muscles in my neck. A throbbing pressure pushing against my eyeballs. I can’t be still. So that’s how, at nearly midnight, I find myself sitting on the floor at my closet, surrounded by boxes, yearbooks, and photo albums, taking a walk down memory lane. An ill-advised walk, because the first picture in the first album I open? One of me and Evan. We’re eighteen, maybe nineteen, standing on the beach at sunset. Evan has both arms wrapped around me from behind, one hand holding a bottle of beer. I’m in a red bikini, resting my head against his broad, shirtless chest. We’re both smiling happily.
I bite my lip, trying hard to fend off the memories attempting to bat their way into my brain. But they barrel through my mental defenses. I remember that day on the beach. We watched the sunset with our friends, then took off alone, walking in the warm sand toward Evan’s house where we locked ourselves in his bedroom and didn’t come out till the next afternoon.
Another picture, this one at some party at Steph’s house, and this time we’re sixteen years old. I know it’s sixteen because those awful blonde highlights in my hair had been a birthday present from Heidi. I look ridiculous. But you wouldn’t know it from the way Evan is staring at me. I don’t know who took the photo, but they managed to capture in his expression what I can only describe as adoration. I look equally smitten.
I find myself smiling at our young, besotted selves. It wasn’t long after that party that he told me he loved me for the first time. We were hanging out in my backyard floating on our backs in the pool, engaged in a pretty serious conversation about how much we wished our mothers gave a shit about us, when he suddenly cut me off mid-sentence and said, “Hey, Genevieve? I love you.”
And I’d been so startled to hear him utter my full name and not Fred, the dumb nickname whose origins I don’t even remember, that I sank like a stone. I didn’t even register the second part of that statement until I came up to the surface, eyes stinging, coughing up water.
His indignant expression had greeted me. “Seriously? I tell you I love you and you try to drown yourself? What the hell?”
Which made me laugh so hard I peed myself a little and then stupidly confessed to peeing a little, at which point he swam to the ladder and heaved his wet body out of the pool. He’d thrown his hands up in exasperation and growled, “Forget I said anything!”
Laughter tickles my throat. I’m half a second away from texting him to ask if he remembers that day when I realize I’m supposed to be keeping my distance.
My phone buzzes beside me.
A glance at it triggers an anguished groan. How does he do it? How does he always know when I’m thinking about him?
Evan: I’m sorry about the other night.
Evan: I was an idiot.
I sit there staring at the texts until I realize all the tension I’d been feeling over my run-in with Randall, all the anger and shame, has dissipated. My shoulders are limp, the ten-ton boulder on my chest finally removed. Even my headache has subsided. I hate that he can still do that too.
Me: Yes you were.
Evan: I think I’ve still got sand in my eye, if that makes you feel better.
Me: A little.
There’s a long delay, nearly a full minute before I see him typing again. The little gray bubbles appear, then disappear, then reappear.
Evan: Missed you.
Already I feel the tug, those old ties pulling me back to a place I swore I wouldn’t go again. Backsliding would be so easy. Making a promise to myself and actually keeping it this time is much harder.