Eight
Winter of 2007
18 years old
“L eah.”
Gasping, I whipped my eyes open in the dark and shuffled away from the hand shaking my arm, hoping to God it wasn’t him again. But as the seconds passed, I blinked away my exhaustion and stared at Carter’s comforting face. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in his leather jacket that was drenched in the rain I could hear blasting through the opened window.
For a second, I was terrified of the noise level. I jerked my face in the direction of the door, half-expecting Russell or somebody else to come bursting through it. My heart lurched at the thought and my stomach swam with nausea.
“You can’t be here,” I whispered hysterically. “You have to get out of here, Carter, before anyone sees you.”
“He’s asleep, Leah,” he immediately reassured me, leaning over the bed to rest a hand on my shaken body. “Your aunt’s stopped for the night. They’re both passed out from all that booze. Calm down, I made sure he wasn’t awake.”
I slumped my shoulders. I’d been living in hell for the last two months. Russell and Cheryl had hit a massive bump in their relationship. She’d completely gone off the reservoir, deciding she wasn’t going to whore herself half as much as she had all these years. She claimed her body couldn’t handle any more of it, which was fair enough in my opinion. They fought a lot about it, and Russell had threatened to stop her drug supply, but she was eerily calm about it. Even after he knocked her around a few times, leaving her bruised and suffering from withdrawal, she stuck to her guns and refused to do as she was told. As a result, their income was suffering.
Russell copped a lot of bad flack for this. Men lined themselves up for a go at Cheryl, and some waited inside. I had to keep myself shut inside my room. Even when I was desperate to pee, I wouldn’t dare step foot out there. But that didn’t seem to make me as invisible as I longed to be. One man in particular was snoopier than the rest, and when I woke up to a large figure hovering over my bed, I nearly peed right then and there. If it hadn’t been for Russell catching him at the nick of time, I dread to think what he would have done.
The argument that ensued after that was branded inside my memories forever. As soon as the scary man told the rest there was another girl—“one of age”—in the room, they started hounding Russell for a go at me.
I thought Cheryl would protect me. She hated doing what she did. Surely she didn’t want to witness her niece subjected to the same thing. She had told me herself to never become her. Which is why I hated her more than anything when she didn’t say a word. Not that she’d ever given two shits about me, but I thought there was some kind of goddamn comradery there, especially considering what a complete dick Russell was and how disgusting the idea was to use me—that she wouldn’t put me through the hell she had gone through all these years.
But no.
Such courtesy was not extended to me. I wasn’t fortunate enough to be a passing thought in that coke whore’s head, and I was absolutely livid by it all. All these years living quietly in the far back of the trailer—hoping to be avoided like a plague and forgotten—had come undone. Now I had a target on my back, one that Russell had made clear to me just the other day.
“You’ve just turned eighteen, Leah,” he’d said to me. “And it’s best you realize at this point I’m not going to be taking care of you all your life. You gotta work to have a roof over that head of yours. You gotta contribute like the rest of us, or maybe I’m gonna have to show you the door. Being on your own is a scary thing, and I’d hate for you to be on the streets doing something you could have just done here under my protection. Think on that.”
Oh, I did.
Obviously.
Did the asshole think I wouldn’t or something? I thought about that every minute after he opened his mouth and said those words. I suppose I always knew it was coming. I just preferred to have my head stuck in the sand and keep living in denial. I think in some na?ve part of my mind I thought I always had more time.
I didn’t, though, and reality had become a tragic thing.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Carter. I wrapped the covers around myself as the icy wind tore into the room. “And shut the window, will you?” Winter in the Pacific Northwest was a bitch filled with buckets of cold rain and heavy winds.
“I’m not shutting shit,” he retorted, getting off the bed. “I’ve come to get you, and we gotta go now .”
My brows pinched together. “What are you talking about?”
“Ron kicked me out,” he simply said. He picked up my backpack off my dresser and emptied it on the floor. All my textbooks and homework assignments fell out in a heap.
“That’s my winter break’s homework,” I hissed. “Put that back inside.”
“Where are you going to put your clothes then?”
I was so confused. My head was spinning. “Why do I need clothes?”
He sighed and shook his head at me like I was being dumb. “What did I just say? Ron kicked me out, and you’re coming with me.”
I paused. “Your father’s kicked you out ten million times before, Carter.”
He kneeled to my level, and my eyes widened when I saw his lip was busted up.
“This time it was different,” he told me flatly.
My hand reached out to him, and my finger lightly brushed his lip. He was stoic about it, like my touch did nothing to him. Of course, I was used to this.
“He hit you,” I whispered in shock.
“I hit him back,” Carter replied evenly. He pulled away from me and resumed what he was doing, which was opening drawers and shoving whatever clothes inside. I cringed when he grabbed a handful of my underwear, and I leaped out of bed to stop him, taking my blanket that was wrapped around my body with me.
“Enough!” I went at him. “Put that back, Carter! You’re being ridiculous! We have nowhere to go!”
“I’d rather we have nowhere to go than be here in this shithole!” he fired back, pushing me back so he could resume.
I was panicking at this point. He couldn’t just decide this for the both of us. I stepped away and watched him fill my backpack to the brim with clothes. I was a little disturbed by how well he’d sorted through them, knowing which ones I wore and which ones I didn’t. Carter was a lot more mindful than I’d given him credit for.
“Carter,” I said quietly, my back resting against the door. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“No, I’m not. It’s crazy! Where are we going to go?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I can’t jump into something this deluded. Are you hearing yourself right now? You need to stop and just think, alright?”
He exhaled and shook his head like I was annoying him. Zipping up my backpack, he tossed it to the ground beside the window and turned to me. I had to crane my head up now to look at him. Carter was nineteen then and he was broad and big. One of the very few guys around his age that actually looked manly, and I knew it was genetics at play because Ron was a huge guy.
“I have stopped and thought about it,” he told me calmly, coming even closer now. “I realized that I would rather be scared shitless out there on the streets and be in control of my life than to be stuck here inside a prison under the illusion of safety.”
He stopped in front of me, his body barely touching mine. I didn’t respond for a moment. I shut my eyes and looked away from him. I didn’t want to be under his affect again. Christ, he always made me drunk on him when he got close to me like this, and I know even then he was doing it on purpose to get his way. By fucking with my body I would forget about the logic my brain was spewing.
“Then go and do it on your own,” I muttered out weakly. “I’m not going anywhere, though.”
He exhaled and shuffled even closer. He smelled of earth, and I noticed a sheet of dirt on his body, as if he’d rolled around the ground.
Goddamn him and his superpowers.
My heart started thumping harder, especially when his hand touched my face. He pulled aside my hair and took my chin in his grip. He forced it up to him, and in the dark I could see the fire in his eyes. That mask he wore was down, and he was looking at me lovingly. Like he cared for me, and I wanted to believe it so badly.
“Be with me,” he whispered desperately, bringing his face down to mine. “Ignore everything your head is telling you. Be with me, Leah, and let me take you away from this place. Away from Russell and the sick men he has around. He’s going to destroy you if you stay, and I’m going to make everything better if you come. Be with me .”
He drew me in with those words. He stroked an already burning fire inside of me, making me heated and intent on his every word. I was lost to him like the fool that I was. He was pleading for me to be with him and, fuck, I wanted to be with him since I was ten years old.
“Carter,” I whispered indecisively. “I don’t know—”
He cut me off with a kiss.
His whole body pressed against the length of mine. He took my mouth into his like it was everything to him. My hands immediately gripped his jacket and I kissed him back. Dear God, I burned for this guy. I opened every part of myself up to him. I surrendered my soul and I let him take every inch of it.
The blanket fell to the ground, and I would have been chilled to the bone if he hadn’t been covering me the way he was. One of his hands was in my hair, tilting me up as he kissed me even deeper. The other hand was somewhere against my back. Honestly, I wasn’t really paying attention to it or to anything else but the feel of our mouths locked together. This was better than my first kiss with him. This one was all tongue and passion, and I needed it like my next breath.
He pulled away abruptly, his forehead rested against my own. His eyes were shut, and he was breathing just as heavily as me.
“Come with me,” he urged. “We’ll get out of this together.”
Completely high off his kiss, I stared at his lips and felt myself nod. “Okay.”
He tore away from me instantly. Grabbing my hand, he led me to the window. He picked up the hoodie he’d given me a while back from off the floor and threw it over my head. I hastily slipped my arms into the sleeves.
“Put your boots on,” he demanded.
I grabbed them from under my bed and sat down to pull them on. He had already flung my backpack over his shoulder, and I suddenly wondered where all the rest of his clothes were. Had he even packed? What was the damn plan? Was I being an idiot doing this?
My gaze fell despairingly on my bookshelf. Would I have time to grab a few paperbacks? I didn’t know what I’d grab under such pressure.
“Fuck the books,” I heard him say. “I’ll replace them for you, Leah. I promise.”
I nodded once more and started to tie the strings on my boots. “Do you need to grab some of your things?”
“I’ve got my backpack just outside the window.”
I stood up and went to him. I couldn’t believe I was doing this. He stared down at me for a few solid seconds, a strange look on his face that made me wonder what the hell had happened to him tonight.
“I’m all ready,” I said to him shakily.
“You’re never coming back here,” he then told me sternly. “ Never . You got it?”
Terrified, I managed a nod. “Okay.”