Carter (6 page)

“I never asked you to do that!” I cut in angrily, facing him.

His face fell. “What the hell? Are you angry I helped you?”

“You didn’t help me!”

“Like hell I didn’t! He was threatening your life –”

“I’ve been threatened with a lot worse than my life, Carter, and I’ve managed just fine!”

His nose flared, and his mouth twisted as he retorted, “Stop dealing with these pricks on your own! You’re a fucking
girl
, and these are guys trying to bring you down!”

“Then let them try. I’m tough. I can handle it on my own, and I had without you bursting into the scene and getting suspended for it! Now I look even weaker! Like I need help over my own issues –”

“There’s nothing wrong with needing help,” he cut in, stepping closer to me. I could feel the anger rolling off of him. “You stood up for yourself, I get it. You brought him to his knees after you grabbed at his balls, and I admire that. Really, I do, Leah, but fuck, you can’t expect that to have scared them away. They would have come at you harder later on! I’ve seen it happen. It fucking
kills
me when they treat you like that.” His voice broke at the end, and he looked at me with his walls down, letting me see his pain.

I blinked hard, feeling moisture in my eyes. What the hell was wrong with me? Was I seriously on the verge of tears? No, no, that couldn’t be right. Yet the lump in my throat, hard and round and impossible to swallow away, told me that I really was fighting back tears.

“I just don’t want to burden you with my crap,” I whispered, because talking louder would have given away my emotion.

“You expect me to just watch?” he whispered back in shock. “Fuck no, Leah. I’m not going to be like fucking Rome, sitting there because I was told to shut up. No way. I’m not going to watch someone I care about get bullied like that. You’ll never convince me otherwise, so you’re just going to have to deal with it.”

I stared at him for a long moment, taking in that look of conviction.

“You don’t
have
to do that,” I said, feeling a tear fall. “You really don’t, Carter.”

He moved closer to me then and wiped the tear with his thumb. His blue eyes shined with emotion as he quietly replied, “Yeah, I do.”

I took the hand he used to wipe my tear and held it tight. Whatever connection we had at that point only grew stronger. He pulled me in for a hug and I shut my eyes, face against his chest, breathing all of him in.

“It’ll be alright,” he reassured me. “I won’t let anything happen to you. They’ll all die before they set a finger on you again.”

When he pulled away, we both sat down on the bench and watched the cars go. He kept me by his side, his arm around me, comforting me.

“What happened to your cheek?” he suddenly asked.

“Nothing,” I answered, turning my face away from him so he couldn’t see the light bruise there. Under the sun, it was inescapable, I knew. I hadn’t even thought of a good enough lie for how I got it if someone had asked.

His finger wrapped around my chin, and he forced me to him. I couldn’t meet his eye, but I knew he was staring at it hard.

“Did Russell do this to you?” he demanded.

“I back-chatted him,” I grumbled.

He clenched his jaw and let go of my face. He fisted his hands together and looked away from me. “He tell you not to see me?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you going to listen to him?”

“No. I’ll just need to be more careful.”

He exhaled and shook his head. “I wanna hurt him.”

“It’s fine,” I told him, grabbing hold of his arm. “It was the first time he ever touched me. I’ll be good and he won’t do it again. Don’t do anything stupid, Carter. If you do, you’ll make it worse for me.”

He didn’t reply, but he managed a stiff nod.

When the bus did finally come our way, I skipped class and spent the day with him.

*

During his two weeks of suspension, Carter would intercept me on my way to school and plead for me to skip class. I did whatever he wanted because he was my fucking hero and I loved him like crazy.

We usually stopped by the gas station on the way to the bus stop and buy some ice cream and energy drinks. Then we’d catch a couple buses to Castle Fun Park, an amusement park that was usually packed with kids over the weekend. The arcade was mostly dead during the schooldays, and so he bought fifteen dollar cards and we played the cheap 60 cent  retro games until we ran out of money.

Those days always stood out to me the most in our early years. I was sure he was giving me all this attention because he wanted me to be strong and not think about what James had said. My image was tarnished, would always be, and he was keeping me sane by treating me like a friend and not a whore’s niece.

“You figure out what you’re gonna be yet?” he asked me once on our walk back home after a very busy day being a truant student.

He was asking only because I’d been wracking my brain over my future lately. Teachers kept talking about Colleges and making sure we had considered what path we wanted to take. It usually did my head in with stress. It might not have looked like it since I was skipping that many days of class for him, but I was a very serious student, and I worked very hard to get great marks.

“No,” I answered, kicking a rock. “As long as I’m out of Russell’s place, I don’t think I’ll care.”

“Yeah, me too,” he muttered. “My dad’s a piece of shit. I’ll give him a good punch across the face when I walk out of there.”

I smiled. “You have some serious aggression issues, Carter. But on that note, you’re going to be a famous singer. I know it.”

He just chuckled. “Yeah, the day I become a famous singer will be the day I crawl on my hands and knees and kiss your feet. That shit doesn’t happen in the real world.”

“It will with you.”

He looked at me, his blue eyes soft and mesmerizing. Softly, he remarked, “I don’t think anyone’s ever had the confidence in me like you do.”

“That’s why I’m your best friend,” I reminded him, nudging him with my shoulder.

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” he replied, wrapping an arm around me.

“Sing to me at the creek?”

“Sure.”

I sighed internally, closing my eyes for a short second to inhale his scent and drown in the warmth of him. Would I forever pine for this guy? Time had proved it wouldn’t lessen. It never would.

This was why I kept my distance at times.

When you have feelings for your best friend who does not share those same feelings back, you learn to endure. Eventually, I did have eyes for other guys, and dates did happen every now and again. I learned to be outgoing, and sometimes, I did listen to Rome when he wanted to drag me to a party. Forcing that distance from Carter, I learned to have fun without him.

But there were still those times… Times where he’d be wrapped up in a girl physically, but he’d be staring at me from across the room. His attention would solely be focused on me, and I’d see something brimming in his magnificent eyes that was far from friendly.

He would never act on it, though. Our friendship was important to him in a way he would never divulge with me.

I was simply a boundary he would not trespass.

I did my best to forget my first kiss with him, did my best to move on from him, and when it got hard some nights, I drowned in a sea of literature to dull the ache.

Carter

If I kept her at arm’s length, I would never hurt her.

Winter of 2007

18 years old

“Leah.”

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 in regards to 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 naïve 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 down 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 at 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 for bit.

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 in 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. He stared down at me for a solid few 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?”

I managed a nod. “Okay.”