The Outskirts (The Outskirts Duet #1)

“I’m not a big fan of the past,” I commented. When I stole a glance back I noticed him staring blankly at the shore. “I know where I’ve been, enough to know I’m never going back there.”

When I turned back around, Finn’s eyes were again on me until something on the shore caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. “What’s that?” I asked, grateful for the distraction.

“It’s a gator slide,” Finn said. “During the hotter months, they’ll make these nest-mounds at the edge of the water to lay their eggs. You see those reeds up ahead? The green ones with the lily-pad looking thing at the end?”

“Uh huh,” I followed to where he was pointing off the front of the boat.

“There isn’t much that can crush those over just from wading through, so if you see any of those bent all in one direction it’s usually a good sign that you got gators nearby. There’s also one other telltale sign they’re close. The most important one to remember.”

“What?”

“It’s the fucking swamp,” Finn said. “Of course there are gators nearby.”

“So he does know how to joke,” I said sarcastically.

When we passed the back of a huge white house I screamed. “Stop!” I shouted and Finn slowed the boat down. “That’s it!” I exclaimed as we floated past it. “This is the house I first saw when I came into town. Isn’t it amazing? It’s like a much bigger version of the park model in the junkyard. Do you know who lives there?” I asked.

“Nobody worth mentioning,” Finn grumbled.

I ignored him. “It’s almost pretty in a really messed up way. Almost like she doesn’t know how beautiful she is,” I lamented, looking around in wonderment at my surroundings before turning back to Finn. The heat of his gaze firmly fixed on mine. I bit my lip and my heart began to race as his eyes trailed from my eyes to my neck down to my t-shirt and my nipples tingled when they raked over the front of my t-shirt.

“No, I don’t think she does,” Finn said. His lips turned upward into a smile that made my pelvis clench and my skin heat.

A shadow crossed over the boat and Finn’s half smile fell. His gaze shifted over my head. Finn slowed the boat to a crawl as we approached the abandoned water park.

“Wow,” I mouthed as we passed under three huge intertwining slides. “You really can get everywhere by water.”

Back on the land there were tall palm trees artfully arranged around empty pools. Crumbled landscape curbing surrounded downed palm fronds and weeds covered the ground beneath them covering at least a few feet of the trunks themselves. A few small pavilions and some downed lockers came into view. The sign was missing letters but I’m pretty sure S K SH C once read SNACK SHACK.

The place was the water park equivalent of a ghost town. Like when the wind whistled through the tunnel of the slide it was like I could almost hear the echoes of laughter from kids who never got the chance to slip down the twisting slides and the cries of the toddler who dropped their ice cream cone the second his mom handed it to him at the Snack Shack.

“It looks sad. Like it was meant to bring happiness and now it’s just a reminder of what it’s never going to be,” I thought out loud.

Finn remained quiet.

“So, I take it you don’t like Sterling?” I asked in an attempt to get him to use words again.

Finn’s expression remained unreadable. His lips in a straight line. His shoulders squared.

“I mean, was he a friend of yours? Like Miller and Josh were?”

“Fuck no,” he snapped.

My frustration was growing. I’d just shared so much with him and in the course of a few seconds he’d completely shut down on me. Which was why I asked a question I knew I shouldn’t have, and pushed a button I knew I shouldn’t have pushed. “Finn, why aren’t you friends with Josh and Miller anymore?”

“Drop it,” Finn grated through his teeth, speeding up the boat. The motor buzzed loudly, effectively ending any further conversation. When we got to Critter’s, Finn didn’t bother tying off the boat. He hoisted me up onto the shore.

“You told me to trust you, but I can’t trust you if you don’t tell me anything,” I said, trying one last time to get him to open up.

“So then don’t,” he growled; before he pushed off the dock, he added “I’ll leave the door unlocked.” He zipped back under a curtain of moss. The high-pitched zinging of the small engine was all that remained of Finn’s presence.

“Don’t,” I whispered, rubbing the skin on my arms up and down as if a sudden chill had blown through the thick humid air.

When my dad wasn’t drunk, he still wasn’t the happiest person in the world. Liquor for him was that added fuel to an already burning fire. It helped turn his irritation into full blown anger which then caused him to lash out. It was the reason why I’d come to see him as a monster instead of a father.

But with my father, it was like a predictable kind of insanity.

Finn’s anger, on the other hand, didn’t come with the courtesy of a warning in the form of a bottle. He didn’t need alcohol to help flip the switch on his demons. Even though I had a feeling it was Finn’s demons that were somehow flipping the switch on him.

Whatever he had gone through, he was STILL going through it and it was worse than I’d imagined.

I needed to keep my distance. To not allow myself to be fooled by his kiss or convinced that he was a good person to have in my life because I liked how it felt in his arms.

I knew better.

The only thing more dangerous than a predictable monster…

Was an unpredictable one.





Chapter Twenty-Seven





Sawyer





“Where exactly are we going?” I asked Sterling who was leading me in the opposite direction of Josh’s apartment building. He grabbed something from a big black newer looking shiny truck parked on the side of the road and clicked the alarm button, making the headlights flash as the chirp indicated it was all locked up. “And if you have a truck then why are we walking?”

“I told you. I have a surprise for you,” Sterling said mysteriously.

“What is it?”

“You do know how surprises work don’t you?” he teased. “Hasn’t anyone surprised you before?”

“No,” I admitted. “Not very often.”

And not in any sort of good way.

“Well, I’m your first then. Just how I like it,” Sterling said suggestively, wagging his eyebrows at me. “Sorry. I was just teasing,” he reassured me when he noticed how uncomfortable his comment had made me.

I shifted my book from one arm to the other. Sterling quickly changed the subject and plucked the book from my hand. “What are you reading?” he asked, holding the book up so he could read the title in the moonlight. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn? It’s not my favorite, but back in school, we had to read it almost every year for different lit classes. I must have read it a thousand times.” he handed it back to me. “You?”

“This will be my first.”

“So, what’s going on with you and Finn?” Sterling asked. “He seemed a little…protective of you at the junk yard.”

“He was my neighbor before the storm wrecked my camper. He’s the one who pulled me from it,” I explained.