Chapter Eight
She has no distinct features that I can remember. No birthmarks. The fact that I saw a girl with brown hair and brown eyes and felt she was the same brown-haired, brown-eyed girl from thirteen years ago is quite possibly borderline obsessive.
Am I obsessed? Do I somehow feel as though I won’t be able to move past Les’s death if I don’t rectify at least one of the things I’ve f*cked up in my life?
I’m being ridiculous. I’ve got to let it go. I’ve got to let go of the fact that I’ll never have Les back and I’ll never find Hope.
I have these same thoughts for the entire two miles of my run. The weight in my chest lightens little by little with each step I take. I remind myself with each step that Sky is Sky and Hope is Hope and Les is dead and I’m the only one left and I’ve got to get my shit together.
The run begins to help ease some of the tension built up from the incident at the grocery store. I’ve convinced myself that Sky isn’t Hope, but for some reason even though I’m almost positive she’s not Hope, I still find myself thinking about Sky. I can’t get the thought of her out of my head and I wonder if that’s Grayson’s fault. If I hadn’t heard him talking about her at the party the other night, I probably would have moved on from the grocery store incident fairly quickly and I wouldn’t be thinking about her at all.
But I can’t stop this growing urge to protect her. I know how Grayson is and somehow, just seeing this girl for even a few minutes, I know she doesn’t deserve what he’s likely going to put her through. There isn’t a single girl in this world who deserves the type of guy Grayson is.
Sky said she had a boyfriend at the store and the possibility that she might consider Grayson her boyfriend gets under my skin. I don’t know why, but it does. Just thinking she was Hope for even a few minutes already has me feeling extremely territorial about her.
Especially now as I round the corner and see her standing in front of my house.
She’s here. Why the hell is she here?
I stop running and drop my hands to my knees, keeping my eyes trained on her back while I catch my breath. Why the hell is she standing in front of my house?
She’s at the edge of my driveway, propped up against my mailbox. She’s drained the last of her water bottle and she’s shaking it above her mouth, attempting to get more water out of it, but it’s completely empty. When she realizes this, her shoulders slump and she tilts her face toward the sky.
It’s obvious she’s a runner with those legs.
Holy shit, I can’t breathe.
I try to recall everything on her driver’s license and what all Grayson said about her Saturday night because I suddenly want to know everything there is to know about her. And not because I thought she was Hope, but because whoever she is . . . she’s f*cking beautiful. I don’t know that I even noticed how attractive she was at the store, because my mind wasn’t going there. But right now, seeing her in front of me? My mind is all over that.
She takes a deep breath, then begins walking. I immediately kick into gear and ease up behind her.
“Hey, you.”
She pauses at the sound of my voice and her shoulders immediately tense. She turns around slowly and I can’t help but smile at the wary expression strewn across her face.
“Hey,” she says back, shocked to see me standing in front of her. She actually seems more at ease this time. Not as terrified of me as she was in the parking lot, which is good. Her eyes slowly drop down to my chest, then to my shorts. She looks back up at me momentarily, then diverts her gaze to her feet.
I casually lean against the mailbox and pretend to ignore the fact that she totally just checked me out. I’ll ignore it to save her embarrassment, but I’m definitely not going to forget it. In fact, I’ll probably be thinking about the way her eyes scrolled down my body for the rest of the damn day.
“You run?” I ask. It’s probably the most obvious question in the world right now, but I’m completely out of material.
She nods, still breathing heavily from the effect of her workout. “Usually in the mornings,” she confirms. “I forgot how hot it is in the afternoons.” She lifts her hand to her eyes to shield them from the sun while she looks at me. Her skin is flush and her lips are dry. I hold out my water bottle and she flinches again. I try not to laugh, but I feel pretty damn pathetic that I freaked her out so much at the store that she’s afraid I might actually do something to harm her.
“Drink this.” I nudge my water bottle toward her. “You look exhausted.”
She grabs the water without hesitation and presses her lips to the rim, downing several gulps. “Thanks,” she says, handing it back to me. She wipes the water off her top lip with the back of her hand and glances behind her. “Well, I’ve got another mile and a half return, so I better get started.”
“Closer to two and a half,” I say. I’m trying not to stare, but it’s so hard when she’s wearing next to nothing and every single curve of her mouth and neck and shoulders and chest and stomach seems like it was made just for me. If I could preorder the perfect girl, I wouldn’t even come close to the version standing in front of me right now.
I press the bottle of water to my mouth, knowing it’s more than likely the closest I’ll ever get to her lips. I can’t even take my eyes off her long enough to take a drink.
“Huh?” she says, shaking her head. She seems flustered. God, please let her be flustered.
“I said it’s more like two and a half. You live over on Conroe, that’s over two miles away. That’s almost a five-mile run round trip.” I don’t know many girls who run, let alone a five-mile stretch. Impressive.
Her eyes narrow and she pulls her arms up, folding them across her stomach. “You know what street I live on?”
“Yeah.”
Her gaze remains tepid and focused on mine and she’s quiet. Her eyes eventually narrow slightly and it looks like she’s growing annoyed with my continued silence.
“Linden Sky Davis, born September 29; 1455 Conroe Street. Five feet three inches. Donor.”
As soon as the word “donor” leaves my mouth, she immediately steps back, her look of annoyance turning into a mixture of shock and horror. “Your ID,” I say quickly, explaining why I know so much about her. “You showed me your ID earlier. At the store.”
“You looked at it for two seconds,” she says defensively.
I shrug. “I have a good memory.”
“You stalk.”
I laugh. “I stalk? You’re the one standing in front of my house.” I point to my house behind me, then tap my fingers against the mailbox to show her that she’s the one encroaching. Not me.
Her eyes grow wide in embarrassment as she takes in the house behind me. Her face grows redder with the realization of how it must look for her to be randomly hanging out in front of my house. “Well, thanks for the water,” she says quickly. She waves at me and turns around, breaking into a stride.
“Wait a sec,” I yell after her. I run past her and turn around, trying to think up an excuse for her not to leave just yet. “Let me refill your water.” I reach down and grab her water bottle. “I’ll be right back.” I take off toward the house, hoping to buy myself some more time with her. I’ve obviously got a lot to make up for in the first-impressions department.
“Who’s the girl?” my mother asks once I reach the kitchen. I run Sky’s bottle of water under the tap until it’s full, then I turn around to face her. “Her name is Sky,” I say, smiling. “Met her at the grocery store earlier.”
My mother glances out the window at her, then looks back at me and cocks her head. “And you already brought her to our house? Moving a little quickly, don’t you think?”
I hold up the water bottle. “She just happened to be running by and now she’s out of water.” I walk toward the door and turn back to my mother and wink. “Lucky for me, we just happen to have water.”
She laughs. The smile on my mother’s face is nice because they’ve been so few and far between. “Well, good luck, Casanova,” she calls after me.
I run the water back out to Sky and she immediately takes another drink. I attempt to find a way to rectify her first impression of me.
“So . . . earlier?” I say hesitantly. “At the store? If I made you uneasy, I’m sorry.”
She looks me straight in the eyes. “You didn’t make me uneasy.”
She’s lying. I absolutely made her uneasy. Terrified her, even. But she’s looking at me now with such confidence.
She’s confusing. Really confusing.
I watch her for a minute, trying my best to read her, but I have no clue. If I was to hit on her right now, I don’t know if she’d punch me or kiss me. At this point, I’m pretty sure I’d be more than okay with either.
“I wasn’t trying to hit on you, either,” I say, wanting to get some sort of reaction from her. “I just thought you were someone else.”
“It’s fine,” she says softly. Her smile is tight-lipped and the disappointment in her voice is clear. It makes me smile, knowing that disappointed her a little bit.
“Not that I wouldn’t hit on you,” I clarify. “I just wasn’t doing it at that particular moment.”
She smiles. It’s the first time I actually get a genuine smile from her and it feels like I just won a triathlon.
“Want me to run with you?” I ask, pointing toward her path home.
“No, it’s fine.”
I nod, but don’t like her answer. “Well, I was going that way anyway. I run twice a day and I’ve still got a couple . . .”
I take a step closer to her when I notice the fresh, prominent bruise under her eye. I grab her chin and tilt her head back to get a better look at it. My previous thoughts are sidetracked and I’m suddenly overwhelmed with a need to kick the ass of whoever touched her.
“Who did this to you? Your eye wasn’t like this earlier.”
She backs away from my grasp. “It was an accident. Never interrupt a teenage girl’s nap.” She tries to laugh it off, but I know better. I’ve seen enough unexplained bruises on Les in the past to know that girls can hide this kind of shit better than anyone wants to admit.
I run my thumb over her bruise, calming the anger coursing through me. “You would tell someone, right? If someone did this to you?”
She just stares up at me. No response. No, “Yes, of course I would tell.” Not even a, “Maybe.” Her lack of acknowledgment takes me right back to these situations with Les. She never admitted to Grayson physically hurting her, but the bruises I saw on her arm the week before I made him break up with her almost ended in murder. If I find out he’s the one who did this to Sky, he’ll no longer have a hand left to lay on her.
“I’m running with you,” I say. I place my hands firmly on her shoulders and turn her around without giving her the opportunity to object.
She doesn’t even try to object, though. She begins running, so I fall into a steady stride with her. I’m fuming the entire run back to the house. Pissed that I never got to the bottom of what happened with Les and pissed that Sky might be dealing with the same shit.
We don’t speak the entire run back to her house until she turns and waves good-bye at the edge of her driveway. “I guess I’ll see you later?” she says, walking backward toward her house.
“Absolutely,” I say, knowing full well I’ll be seeing her again. Especially now that I know where she lives.
She smiles and turns toward her house and it isn’t until she’s halfway up her driveway that I realize I don’t even have a way to contact her. She doesn’t have a Facebook, so I can’t contact her that way. I don’t know her phone number. I can’t really just show up at her house unannounced.
I don’t want her to walk away until I know for sure I’ll talk to her again.
I immediately twist the lid off my water bottle and pour the contents of it onto the grass. I put the lid back on it.
“Sky, wait,” I yell. She pauses and turns back around. “Do me a favor?”
“Yeah?”
I toss her the conveniently empty bottle of water. She catches it, then nods and runs inside to refill it. I pull my cell phone from my pocket and immediately text Daniel.
Sky Davis. Girl Grayson was talking about Saturday night? Does she have a boyfriend?
Sky opens her front door and begins to make her way back outside when he responds.
She has several from what I hear.
I’m still staring at the text when she reaches me with the water. I take it from her and down a drink, not sure why it’s hard for me to find truth in Daniel’s text. As much as she’s still an enigma to me, I can tell by the way she’s so guarded that she doesn’t let people in that easily. Based on my interaction with her, she just doesn’t fit the description that’s being painted of her by everyone else.
I put the lid back on the water bottle and do my best to keep my eyes focused on hers, but dammit if that sports bra isn’t a magnet right now. “Do you run track?” I ask her, attempting to stay focused.
She covers her stomach with her arms and her movement makes me want to punch myself for being so obvious about checking her out. The last thing I want to do is make her uncomfortable.
“No,” she says. “I’m thinking about trying out, though.”
“You should. You’re barely out of breath and you just ran close to five miles. Are you a senior?”
She smiles. That’s twice she’s smiled at me like that, and it’s really beginning to mess with my head.
“Shouldn’t you already know if I’m a senior?” she says, still grinning. “You’re slacking on your stalking skills.”
I laugh. “Well, you make it sort of difficult to stalk you. I couldn’t even find you on Facebook.”
She smiles again. I hate that I’m keeping count. Three.
“I’m not on Facebook,” she says. “I don’t have internet access.”
I can’t tell if she’s lying to let me off easily, or if she’s actually being honest about not having internet access. I don’t know which one is harder to believe. “What about your phone? You can’t get internet on your phone?”
She lifts her arms to tighten her ponytail and I feel like I’m the one out of breath right now. “No phone. My mother isn’t a fan of modern technology. No TV, either.”
I wait for her to laugh, but it’s obvious in just a few short seconds that she’s completely serious. This isn’t good. How the hell am I supposed to get in touch with her? Not that I need to. I just have a pretty good feeling I’ll want to. “Shit.” I laugh. “You’re serious? What do you do for fun?”
She shrugs. “I run.”
Yes, she certainly does. And if I have anything to do with it, she won’t be running alone, anymore.
“Well in that case,” I say, leaning toward her, “you wouldn’t happen to know what time a certain someone gets up for her morning runs, would you?”
She sucks in a quick breath, then attempts to control it with a smile. Three and a half.
“I don’t know if you’d want to get up that early,” she says.
If she only knew I would go so far as to never sleep again if she would just agree to run with me. I lean in a little closer and lower my voice. “You have no idea how bad I want to get up that early.”
As soon as her fourth smile appears, she disappears. It happens so fast, I don’t even have time to react. The sound she makes when she smacks the pavement makes me wince. I immediately kneel down and roll her over.
“Sky?” I say, shaking her. She’s out cold. I look toward her house, then scoop her up and rush her to the door. I don’t bother knocking, since I have no extra hands. I lift my foot and kick at the front door, hoping someone is home to let me in.
Within seconds, the front door swings open and a woman appears. She looks at me in utter confusion until she recognizes Sky in my arms.
“Oh, my God!” She immediately opens the door to let me in.
“She passed out in the driveway,” I say. “I think she’s dehydrated.”
The woman immediately runs to the kitchen while I lower Sky onto the living room sofa. As soon as her head meets the arm of the couch, she moans and her eyelids flutter open. I breathe a sigh of relief, then step aside when her mother reappears.
“Sky, drink some water,” she says. She helps her take a sip, then she sets the glass of water down. “I’ll get you a cold rag,” she says, walking toward the hallway.
Sky looks up at me and winces. I kneel next to her, feeling awful that I just let her fall like that. It happened so fast, though. One second she was standing in front of me; the next second she wasn’t. “You sure you’re okay?” I ask after her mother has left the room. “That was a pretty nasty fall.”
There’s gravel and dirt stuck to her cheek, so I wipe most of it away. She squeezes her eyes shut and throws her arm over her face.
“Oh, God,” she groans. “I’m so sorry. This is so embarrassing.”
I take her wrist and pull it away from her face. The last thing I want her to feel is embarrassed. I’m just thankful she’s okay. And even more thankful it gave me an excuse to carry her inside. Now I’m inside her house with an excuse to come back and check on her this week. Things couldn’t have worked out better for me.
“Shh,” I whisper. “I’m sort of enjoying it.”
Her mouth curls up into a smile. Five.
“Here’s you a rag, sweetie. Do you want something for the pain? Are you nauseous?” Her mother hands me the rag and walks to the kitchen. “I might have some calendula or burdock root.”
Sky rolls her eyes. “I’m fine, Mom. Nothing hurts.”
I wipe the rest of the dirt off her cheek with the rag. “You might not be sore now, but you will be,” I say quietly. She didn’t see how hard she hit the ground. She’ll definitely feel it tomorrow. “You should take something, just in case.”
She nods and attempts to sit up, so I assist her. Her mother walks back into the room with a small glass of juice and hands it to Sky.
“I’m sorry,” she says, extending her hand out to me. “I’m Karen Davis.”
I stand up and return the handshake. “Dean Holder,” I say, taking a quick glance at Sky. “My friends call me Holder.”
Karen smiles. “How do you and Sky know each other?”
“We don’t, actually,” I say. “Just in the right place at the right time, I guess.”
“Well, thank you for helping her. I don’t know why she fainted. She’s never fainted.” She turns her attention to Sky. “Did you eat anything today?”
“A bite of chicken for lunch,” Sky says. “Cafeteria food sucks ass.”
Cafeteria food. So she goes to public school. I might just be rethinking my educational decision after all.
Karen rolls her eyes and throws her hands up in the air. “Why were you running without eating first?”
“I forgot,” Sky says defensively. “I don’t usually run in the evenings.”
Karen walks back to the kitchen with the glass and sighs heavily. “I don’t want you running anymore, Sky. What would have happened if you had been by yourself? You run too much, anyway.”
The look on Sky’s face is priceless. Apparently running is as vital to her as breathing.
“Listen,” I say, finding an opportunity to appease all parties involved, especially myself. “I live right over on Ricker and I run by here every day on my afternoon runs. If you’d feel more comfortable, I’d be happy to run with her for the next week or so in the mornings. I usually run the track at school, but it’s not a big deal. You know, just to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Karen returns to the living room and eyes both of us. “I’m okay with that,” she says. She turns her attention to Sky. “If Sky thinks it’s a good idea.”
Please think it’s a good idea.
“It’s fine,” Sky says with a shrug.
I was hoping for a “Hell yes,” but “fine” will suffice.
She attempts to stand up again, but she sways to the left. I immediately reach out and grab her arm to ease her back down onto the sofa.
“Easy,” I say to her. I look at Karen. “Do you have any crackers she can eat? That might help.”
Karen walks away to the kitchen and I give Sky my full attention again. “You sure you’re okay?” I run my thumb over her cheek for no reason at all other than the simple fact that I wanted to touch her cheek again. As soon as my fingers graze her skin, chills rush down her arms. She tightens her arms over her chest and rubs the chills away. I can’t help but grin, knowing it was my hand on her skin that did that to her. Best. Feeling. Ever.
I glance at Karen to make sure she’s not making her way back into the living room, then I lean in toward Sky. “What time should I come stalk you tomorrow?”
“Six-thirty?” She says breathlessly.
“Six-thirty sounds good.” Six-thirty is my new favorite time of day.
“Holder, you don’t have to do this.” She looks me directly in the eyes as if she wants to give me the opportunity to back out. Why the hell would I want to back out?
“I know I don’t have to do this, Sky. I do what I want.” I lean even closer, hoping to see the chills run down her arms again. “And I want to run with you.”
I pull away just as Karen is walking back into the living room. Sky keeps her eyes focused hard on mine and it makes me wish more than anything that it was tomorrow morning already.
“Eat,” Karen says, placing crackers in Sky’s hand.
I stand up and tell Karen good-bye. “Take care of yourself,” I say to Sky as I back my way toward the front door. “I’ll see you in the morning?”
She nods and it’s all the confirmation I need. I pull the door shut behind me as I leave, pleased that I somehow managed to redeem myself. As soon as I’m out of her driveway and back on the sidewalk, I pull my phone from my pocket and call Daniel.
“Hey, Hopeless,” he says when he answers.
“I said stop calling me that, Jackass.”
“Shoulda thought about that before you got the tattoo,” he quips back. “What’s up?”
“Sky Davis,” I say quickly. “Who is she, where’s she from, does she go to school here and is she dating Grayson?”
Daniel laughs. “Whoa, buddy. Slow down. First of all, I’ve never met her. Second of all, if that’s the same Sky that I claimed to have deflowered in front of Val at that party the other night, there’s no way I’m asking around about her. I’m still trying to convince Val I never really slept with the chick. Asking people about her will only make it worse for me, man.”
I groan. “Daniel, please. I need to know and you’re better with this shit than I am.”
There’s a long pause on his end. “Fine,” he says. “But on one condition.”
I knew there’d be a condition. There’s always a condition when it comes to Daniel. “What condition?”
“You come to school tomorrow. Just one day. Enroll tomorrow and try it for one day and if you absolutely hate it you can officially drop out with my blessing.”
“Deal,” I say immediately. I can do one day. Especially if Sky will be there.