I remembered it. Luke’s fresh uniform, his unlined face. The butterflies smashing at the bottom of my stomach. Laurie’s gentle romantic hope. Cade’s harsh and inescapable reality.
My inescapable reality.
I surfaced from my memories with an audible gasp, clutching at the sides of the dirty sink in my bathroom. My head sank onto my chest that was rapidly rising and falling as if I’d run a marathon. And I had, of sorts. A marathon through the years, visiting my past failures.
My chocolate hair fell around me like a waterfall. I pushed it away and yanked my head up, regarding the stranger in the mirror. She blinked her long lashes at me, cheeks flushed and eyes somehow empty and full at the same time. Without makeup, she looked younger, almost like that girl in high school. But her features were sharper, face almost gaunt due to the unintentional diet she’d been on. It was hard to enjoy crappy food when corpses routinely filled your vision as you chewed.
Corpses she’d created.
She blinked again, that time a lone tear trickling down her face.
I wiped at my cheek furiously, both me and the girl in the mirror glaring at each other, accusing each other of that fatal weakness.
“Get your shit together,” I ordered her.
I stared hard. The mop of hair was the last of what remained of who I had been before. A mess of chocolate curls, sprinkled with honey highlights. Why was I clinging to it?
He looked at me, then lifted his arm to push away some errant hair that was masking my face, as it tended to do at this length.
I held my breath as he did so.
He tucked it behind my ear, pausing at the contact between our skin, eyes locked on mine. Seemingly reluctantly, his hand went back down to his side.
“Like your hair long,” he murmured.
Once again, I yanked myself out of the shark-filled waters known as my memories much the way a lifeguard would snatch a drowning woman from the unyielding ocean.
He liked it long.
My gaze landed on a pair of scissors discarded on the sink.
I didn’t hesitate. I snatched them and began hacking at my locks.
Chapter Four
Rosie
Age Seventeen
I couldn’t put my finger on when things changed for Luke and me. Like really changed. Morphed from a handful of almosts. Almost glances, almost declarations. All the almosts added up to nothing.
Because almost didn’t mean shit.
Almost dying? You’re still living.
Almost living? You’re still dead.
Almost pregnant? You’re not pregnant, go have a cocktail.
I grew into a woman. He noticed. I knew he noticed because I grew into a woman, and a woman knew when a man noticed her.
Once—a time I’d never told someone about, not even Lucy—he caught me and some guy making out in his car on the outskirts of Amber. We’d met at a party, and he didn’t know my family, which meant I had a real chance at finally giving up my V-card. My brother’s promise to kill anyone who touched me seemed to stick with any fuckable guy in town. I took what I could get.
Things were getting to almost sex when a blinding light illuminated the cheap and cliché act. When the door opened and the half-naked guy was wrenched out of the car with a violence I was all too familiar with, I was sure it was my brother. I scrambled out of the back seat, forgetting I was just in a bra and unbuttoned cutoffs.
“Hey! Do you have to—”
But it wasn’t a leather cut and a bike. It was a uniform and a cruiser.
And Luke, beating the shit out of my would-be deflowerer.
The cop, Luke, beating up a minor.
“You”—thump—“little”—thump—“piece”—thump—“of shit,” he grunted, punches enunciating his words.
“Luke.” My voice was soft, though it punctured his violence as if I’d screamed it.
In the headlights of his cruiser, I saw him drop the half-naked teenager to the ground, looking from him to his hands, dazed, as if he was wondering what they’d done when Luke had left the building.
Andy scrambled up, bleeding from the nose. “She was consenting, I swear,” he babbled through the blood. He pointed at me. “Babe, tell him you wanted—”
“Get the fuck in your car and drive off,” Luke growled.
He scrambled to do exactly that.
I was gaping at Luke, all traces of the night’s shots wearing off to see him in stark reality. Though being sober didn’t provide any more sense of logic to the situation.
His eyes moved from his fists to me—more accurately, my exposed chest. “Get your shirt on and get in the car,” he ordered, voice so rough it was barely recognizable.
I blinked. “Luke—”
“Now!” he yelled.
I jumped, as if I wasn’t used to people shouting at me, as if they didn’t do it on an almost daily basis. They did. Luke? Never.
I snatched my shirt, yanking it over my head, most likely ruining whatever was left of my hair and makeup. Andy had already started the car and was regarding me with panic, as if he was considering driving away even though the door was open and half of me was still in the car.