The Outskirts (The Outskirts Duet #1)

“Fuck, you!” he roared after me. “Don’t you dare come back here. You will rot in the depths of hell for this!”

“Don’t worry, I won’t ever be coming back,” I called in a calm tone that surprised even myself. I risked a glance back and watched as he tried to get up, only to fall again when his leg didn’t cooperate.

Father might’ve actually meant what he said, although it wasn’t true. He might have thought he had no intention of coming for me, but again, I knew better. I patted my pocket, the one that held the deed.

Too bad he was never going to find me.

I lifted my long skirt and started to climb over the tall fence. At the top, I paused.

When Father spotted me looking back at him writhing around on the grass, he went silent. For a moment, we were locked in a war of unspoken words. There had been a time for words. There had been a time when I’d have felt sympathy for him. A time when I would’ve rushed to his side without question.

Those times were long gone.

“Help me,” Father begged.

I tore my eyes from his and dropped down to the other side of the fence.

“Saaaawyer!” his screams echoed through the alley over and over again. The anger he had momentarily shoved aside to beg for my help was back in full force.

It always was.

The door to Rusty squealed when I opened it and leapt inside, tossing my bag to the passenger seat. Getting him and Blue into the alley was nothing short of a miracle. Now there I was, starting the engine. The loud noise thankfully drowning out my father’s cries.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew I would still hear him. No engine would ever be loud enough to mask him completely. No amount of distance between us would ever truly silence him.

But I was going to try anyway.

I blew out a long-held breath. Twenty-one years long-held, and shifted the truck into drive. I took off into the night. Before I turned down the road that led to the highway I glanced in the rearview mirror and whispered the last words I’d ever speak to the man who had become a monster.

“Goodbye, Father.”





Chapter Four





Finn





“I can’t believe it’s been two years,” I said, feeling the effects of the whiskey as it heated my skin and dulled my senses.

Perfect.

“Two years without you,” I continued. “Two years of thinking about you every single day.”

I chuckled. “Two years of sitting up here talking to myself and pretending like you’re still here.”

“Oh, sorry, Jackie,” I noticed the slur in my own words. I was well past the point of giving a shit that I’d drank too much.

Two years past the point, to be exact.

“I haven’t offered you any,” I continued. “You remember this?” I pointed to the label. “This stuff here is the gross shit we used to drink after a game. You remember? It’s the cheapest crap Donna sells at the Go-Mart but she would sell it to us for three times the price because we were underage. What a scam.” I laughed, remembering how Jackie was an expert at getting people to do her bidding for her. It may have come at a price but she always got the job done one way or another.

I tipped the bottle over and poured a generous amount of the cheap booze down the slide watching it twirl around and around the graffiti covered plastic until I heard it leak onto the concrete of the empty pool below.

“Drink up.” I saluted the air with the bottle and swallowed down the last of the contents in several large gulps.

My eyes watered and my throat burned. I coughed and whiskey dripped down my chin. I wiped it with the back of my hand.

“I guess whiskey was never meant to be chugged,” I said with a chuckle. “It never stopped us though, did it?”

I tossed the empty bottle into the air and watched it spin around and around and around until I was rotating the upper half of my body to spin with it. The sound of shattering glass echoed all around me when it crashed to the ground five stories below.

“You know. I kind of fucking hate you,” I said, sniffling hard. The weather must have shifted because the air was growing thicker and more humid than when I’d first arrived. “We were supposed to do…we were supposed to do a lot more than we got to fucking do is all.”

I lit a joint. “Josh told me a while back that I haven’t properly grieved you.” I scratched my forehead with my thumb. “She’s wrong, you know. All I feel is grief. The only thing I’ve done wrong in this whole process is recover. Get over you. Can’t seem to wrap my head around that concept. Josh may have a dude’s name, but she’s all woman and wrath and things I’m not going to get within ten feet of.”

I pounded my closed fist roughly against my chest, growling out my frustrations.

“You know, it fucking hurts,” my voice grew scratchy. I cleared my throat.

“It still hurts just as bad as it did two years ago. If you were here right now I’d…” I could feel the pang in my chest at the sound of my words. “Doesn’t matter,” I muttered. “Because you’re not here.”

My heart sputtered out a few irregular beats and I coughed. After it calmed down to a regular pace I took a long hit from the joint and blew the smoke out into the empty space next to me. It was Jackie’s spot. It’s where she should’ve still been sitting.

If it weren’t for me, she might still be.

I held up my joint. “It’s not the shit I used to get from Miller, but it does the job.” I sighed.

“You know, I haven’t seen him in a while. Or Josh. After you died, I couldn’t face them. They gave me the space I wanted and now it’s become this big crater between the three of us. I can see them on the other side, but in order to get to them I’d have to jump in and see what’s sitting there at the bottom of it all.” I shook my head. “I’m not ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be. They just remind me of how things will never be the same again. It was too fucking much to lose you. I just can’t have even more reminders that you’re not here,” I explained.

My eyes watered. I must have been blowing the smoke too close to my face. “Every building in this damned town. Every back road. Every drip of moss and every single song reminds me that you’re not here.”

“It should have been me.” I pushed up to my feet and hung onto the railing for support. “It ain’t fucking fair.” The railing gave way and suddenly I was gazing straight down five stories at the ground below, falling forward.

At the bottom, I saw Jackie smiling up at me. Perfect blonde hair and matching smile. She was waving up at me.

Waiting for me.

Jackie disappeared when I was yanked back onto the platform with such force I landed on top of the person who’d done the yanking.

“Jackie?” I asked in my confused, drunken, high, and somewhat delirious state.

I was pushed over and then lifted off the ground. My arm was hoisted across a set of broad shoulders that assisted me down the rickety metal steps while a deep voice muttered every swear word in existence.