Page 14 of Dotted Lines (Runaway 5)

“You suck. I was worried.” Then she disappeared, probably sulking on her bed.

“Oops.” Guilt hit hard. Aria was my number one. I should have remembered a note. “I’m a bad sister.”

“No, you’re not.” Karson put his hand on my shoulder. “Better go apologize.”

“Yeah.” I took a step away but stopped and turned back. “Thank you.”

“You already said that.”

“I know.” My cheeks blushed as he stared at me so intently, as if waiting on my every word. If only that were the case. “Sweet dreams, Karson.”

“Then I’ll have to dream of you.”

I rolled my eyes, covering up the fact that a cheesy line sent a swarm of butterflies fluttering in my belly. “Flirt.”

He winked. “With you? Always.”

Chapter Three

Clara

“Forty-seven,” Aria said as she wrote it on the wall.

That should have been cause for celebration. We were only forty-seven days from freedom. Why the freaking hell wasn’t I more excited? I mean . . . there was a little bit of anticipation. A lot of nerves. And mostly dread that seemed to grow faster than Aria’s plants as the number ticked lower.

Because in forty-seven days, Karson would be a memory.

He didn’t think we’d ever see the girls again, and what scared me the most was that he didn’t seem to mind never seeing three people that we’d lived and survived alongside. When Aria and I left, would he feel the same?

He’d stayed here for us. He clearly cared, right? Maybe we were different. Maybe . . .

“I was thinking of asking Karson to go with us.” I blurted the thought that had been in the back of my mind for two weeks. “Wherever we go. If you don’t care. I just don’t want him to be alone.”

“That’s cool. I don’t think he will, but I don’t care if you ask.” Aria put the marker away and scooped her hair into a ponytail.

Even though my sister and I were fraternal twins, we had similar features. Our mouths. Our noses. Our brown eyes. And our hair.

Or . . . we used to have the same hair.

Aria had come home with a dye box from the grocery store yesterday. Every week we kept five dollars out of our pay to use on whatever our hearts desired. Mine was normally spent on books or a tabloid magazine—another attempt to be like normal girls my age and fawn over the latest Hollywood heartthrob. Aria had spent hers this week to become a brunette.

“It’s going to take me a while to get used to seeing you with brown hair.”

She smiled and stroked her chocolate strands. “Me too. But I love it.”

If I ever dyed my hair, I was going lighter. Like Londyn. I wanted hair like sunshine.

“Okay.” She sighed, letting her shoulders sag. “We’d better go.”

I stood from my bedroll and followed her out of the truck. We were both working today and even though my shift started an hour after hers did, we were walking into town together. Then she would come to the diner and hang out until I was finished so we could walk home.

The two of us had just started down the path toward the gate when the creak of hinges echoed across the junkyard from Lou’s shack.

Aria and I both looked over as he shuffled out, heading for the fence with a ring of keys in one hand.

We slowed, waiting and watching, as Lou unlocked the padlock on the chain wrapped around the fence’s posts. He hadn’t noticed us yet. Or maybe he had but was just ignoring us. When it came to Lou, I wasn’t sure how much attention he paid to his teenage squatters.

Lou was wearing a white T-shirt, the cotton thin and dingy. Like everything around here, dirt had become a part of its fibers. Aria and I didn’t own a light color, not anymore. Anything we’d brought with us that had been white or a pale shade had been ruined early on. Even with a weekly trip to the laundromat, it was simply too hard to keep whites bright.