AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER ONE
I couldn’t fucking believe I was doing this.
I stayed in some kind of not-quite-reality daze as I handed my soaked-through hoodie to Caleb and pulled my clothes back on. Emptied my dresser out into a duffel bag that reeked like four years of football camp but was the only luggage I had. If I was leaving, it wasn’t with my shit in a trash bag. I’d watched way too many neighbors go out like that.
Took about five minutes to look around at the absolute lack of everything I had worth taking and realize I was done. In so many ways.
Caleb wasn’t right when he said I was desensitized to everything. But he wasn’t wrong either. I had shadow feelings, I guess, like emotions I kept in jars and let myself look at sometimes, disconnected until I lost my shit and smashed them, and they all smothered me at once. Right now I was trying my hardest to hold everything at a distance because there were already cracks in me that hadn’t been there this morning, and whatever I was holding back was probably going to be ugly.
I kept tripping up on the idea that this couldn’t actually be real. That there wasn’t anyone in the world who wanted me so much they’d actually take me. See me at my worst, my most messed up and unlovable, and grab me and not let go, no matter how much I begged.
Except I wasn’t begging.
Except Iwantedto go with him. I wanted to hold on to whatever dream this was with both hands for as long as possible.
I’d fantasized forever about growing up and moving away, taking one last look at this house and walking out. It was always dramatic, always some big scrapbook, sunset moment where I was proving something. This wasn’t that.
Turned out it didn’t matter as much as I thought. Just leaving was enough.
* * *
Millstone Apartments by the high schoolweren’t really so far away. It took me twenty minutes to walk to school most mornings— I could do it in my sleep, sometimes I felt like I did. But the route looked hella different sitting in his passenger’s seat.
It hurt my head something crazy to stare out the window and see all the hours I’d wasted walking back and forth get eaten up in seconds, all the sidewalk cracks and angry dogs and pissy drunks out on their stoops disappear in a blink and not even matter instead of making my jaw clench every time I walked past. It was so fucked up how easy it was for things to look completely different, how fast I could totally forget which side of the glass I belonged on.
The streets classed up as we got closer to the center of town, and I watched the houses get bigger and the paint get fresher and the grass get greener. Cliche or not, it was true, money got you a better yard. All those summers landscaping, I knew that was right.
We sat idling at the stop sign with theSnakebitesticker slapped on it, and I stared at the shitty band logo until my eyes started to cross and my vision started to blur and nothing felt real. And then Caleb reached over and put his hand on my thigh. It was huge and warm, and I liked the way it felt, just resting there, a little squeeze of his long fingers. Casual. Possessive. Maybe a little dangerous. Maybe a lot dangerous.
It broke through the fog a little, sprinkled a little reality on me and woke me up, and I glanced down at his hand and then over at him. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but he looked like he did. He always looked like he did, and somehow that used to bug the shit out of me, and now I fucking lived for it. This huge, bossy son of a bitch that walked through the door and started knocking out my problems one by one. There wasn’t anyone I’d rather have sitting next to me right now, and that was the truth. Crazy as fuck, but no lie.
His car was so fucking quiet you couldn’t even hear it running— even the wipers were silent, shoving the rain off the windshield, and the heat was just a tiny hum as it blasted through the vents. I felt like we were sitting there too long, but there were no other cars around— the gloomy, wet streets were ours.
“You realize I’m not kidnapping you, right?” he finally asked me.
I looked down at the duffel at my feet, the backpack in my lap, knowing this wasn’t my idea. Blame would have been easier, but I’d packed them myself. Wasn’t my idea, but I’d said yes.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“If you want to go back… Well, I don’t actually think I can let you go back,” he finished, like he’d changed his mind halfway through the sentence.
My lips curled up a little, chasing a trickle of nausea away. “That kind of sounds like kidnapping.”
“Okay, maybe a little,” he agreed, squeezing my thigh again. “But it’s for your own good.”
Those words fell deeper into me, rattled around like loose change, starting to fill me up somewhere I was so empty. For my own good. Not even I knew what that meant. But I thought he might.
“I don’t want to go back,” I admitted. It was an obvious truth, but it still felt strange and wrong and scary to say it out loud. “Nobody wants me there. And I don’t…”
“I want you,” Caleb said when I ran out of words. “Fuck everyone else.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Millstone was one of those placesthat had been around a long time and looked fancy because it was old. There was lots of iron— iron gates and iron door knockers and building numbers and hanging lamps, deeply vintage shit you couldn’t buy at Home Depot that made the place seem like it had been there a hundred years.
Caleb walked slow, giving me plenty of time to look around at the apartment buildings crowded a little too close together. The stone paths connecting them all, looking like the kind of shit I busted my back laying out at Greene Gardens. There were a lot of plants, and everything was a little crowded and overgrown, but not in a bad way. It felt cozy and quiet instead of like a mess, like somewhere I could hide. It felt safe.
He wanted to touch me, I could tell— maybe grab my bag or hold my hand, or who knows what as he led me from the parking lot up to the building markedEast. He didn’t, but hewantedto, and that feeling was almost better than actually being touched, since I wasn’t sure if I would have liked that.
