Impossible (22 page)

Ashton sighed. “I feel bad that you have to lie to your momma for me. I know how much you hated it when you were lying to your friends about us. Which didn’t even work, by the way. Eddie figured out everything.”

Her words surprised me. How had Eddie known? I’d never let anything slip to him. Even when he and Riley had confronted me about all this Ash business, I’d denied everything. “Who told you that?”

“Eddie did. This afternoon I ran into him in your driveway. He said he’d known all along that we were faking the whole thing, but didn’t say anything because it wasn’t his business.” Ashton paused, and when she spoke next, she sounded incredibly sad. “I spent years making fun of you guys and thinking I was so much better than all of you. In the end, Eddie was the one who reassured me about you and talked to me like I was a human being, which is more than I can say for my own behavior towards him. In the end, Oliver was the one who attacked me and you were the one who saved me.”

Her voice broke and I reached out and took her hand in mine. “Shh, you don’t need to talk about this right now. It’s too soon.”

“I want to talk about it now,” she insisted. “I’ve been so horrible, Luca. I deserved what happened to me tonight. It was karma for all the bad things I’ve done to other people.” She broke down in a fit of tears and I squeezed her hand.

“Don’t ever say that again. You didn’t deserve what happened to you. This isn’t your fault, Ashton. It’s that douchebag’s fault. He had no right to put his hands on you. I should’ve broken them off.” Once again, anger rushed through me. Anger at what Oliver had done. Anger at myself for not stopping it sooner. “If I’d left the bonfire earlier I could’ve stopped him from hurting you.”

My voice was laced with guilt that Ashton immediately picked up on. She moved closer to me and put her arm around me. Being this close to her made my heart race. She smelled so goddamn amazing. “This isn’t your fault, Luca. You’re the one who saved me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She took a ragged breath. “I tried to be someone else for years, but I know that right now I’m exactly where I should be.”

Her words filled me with glee and I let them hang in the silence, savoring them. I thought she’d gone to sleep until she spoke again.

“I didn’t even think of this before, but you and Yuki…I don’t want to create problems between you.”

The uncertainty in her voice made me smile. “Don’t worry about that right now. You’re not going to create any problems with Yuki, because there’s nothing going on.”

“But I saw you two dancing together.” The uncertainty was quickly replaced with disbelief.

“That’s all we were doing, Ash. Dancing. I came there to see you, but when you and douchebag disappeared, I decided to leave. I mean, you got everything you wanted so what was the point in sticking around?”

“So…you were leaving the bonfire when you heard me scream?” she asked quietly.

“Uh huh.”

Ashton hesitated before she continued in a quiet voice. “When he kicked you down, I’d never been so scared in my life. I thought…I thought you were dead. I didn’t know what I was going to do without you. I kept thinking back to that day when we were in your kitchen, and how I ignored you all week after that. And my last words to you…I was such a major bitch.”

“Hey, don’t think about that. I’m fine.  Nothing happened to me.”

“Yes, but what if it had? The last thing I said to you was some snarky comment about you and Yuki. I’m so stupid. I’ve been stupid about everything. Yet, you’ve always been there for me. You’re still taking care of me even though I gave up on you.”

I wanted to kiss her. Badly. But she’d been through enough today. Instead, I settled on putting my arms around and pulling her closer to me so that her head was resting on my chest. “It’s okay. You’re safe now. I’ll never let anyone hurt you again. I promise.”

Ashton

I snuck out of Luca’s house at six the next morning while he slept. His momma hadn’t gotten up yet, so I thought it was the best time to make my escape. My mom wouldn’t be up for another hour or so, and I definitely didn’t want her to see me like this. I wanted to get cleaned up and see how bad I really looked.

When I’d woken up, our bodies had been entangled with one another. My dress was hiked up as my leg rested on his thigh, and Luca had me cinched against his chest with his arm wrapped around me. The sunlight filtering through the blinds had lit up his tanned skin, making it look golden, and I’d stared at his peaceful face for a while before reluctantly leaving him.

Once I was inside my house, I immediately went upstairs to the bathroom and locked myself in. My head was swimming with thoughts of Luca and how innocent he’d looked sleeping. I couldn’t bring myself to wake him up, so I’d scrawled a quick note thanking him for last night and letting him know that I’d gone home.

I headed over to the sink and turned on the tap, splashing my face with water. Then I stood there, staring down at the sink, until I finally gathered the courage to look into the mirror.

I did not look good, but I could’ve looked a lot worse. My eyes were red and puffy and the skin around them was swollen. Not only that, but the left side of my face where Oliver had slapped me was a bit swollen too. There was also a nasty bruise on the left side of my face along with a scratch that had dried out overnight.

How the heck was I going to explain this to Mom?

I gingerly touched the swollen side of my face and winced every time I felt a twinge of pain. Thank God it was Saturday and I still had the rest of the weekend to heal, but there wasn’t going to be any avoiding Mom. I looked bad enough for Mom to question me about it.

When my phone rang, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Luca’s name flashed across the screen and I immediately answered it.

“Where are you? Are you okay?” Luca asked, before I could even say hello.

His concern made the corners of my mouth turn upwards in a half-smile. “I’m at home. I left you a note on your bedside table. Didn’t you see it?”

“Hold on.” The bed creaked and there was a rustling sound—probably from Luca picking up the paper. “Yeah, I see it now. When I woke up, the only thing I noticed was that you were gone, nothing else.”

“Oh.” His words made my cheeks flame up, and I wished I hadn’t left him. There was nothing that made me feel safer than being curled up beside him. “I have a problem, Luca. My face is as fat as a blowfish.”

Luca chuckled on the other end. “Come to your window.”

“Okay, hold on.” With a disappointed glance at my reflection, I opened the bathroom door as quietly as I could and tiptoed down the hall to my bedroom.

  I shut the door and locked it before walking over to the window. Even from this distance I could see the dark bruises on Luca’s face. He’d kicked Oliver’s ass, but Oliver had managed to throw in a few punches before going down. Immediately, I felt bad that Luca had injured himself because of me.

My eyes wandered and I couldn’t help admiring Luca in all his shirtless glory. Not for the last time, I wondered how he’d managed to get his body like that.

Now I really regretted leaving him. I’d felt most of his bare upper half last night, but seeing it in the daylight was a completely different matter.

“I’d say you could look worse, but then I’d be lying.” The voice in my ear startled me and I dropped the phone.

Darn it! I’d forgotten that Luca was still on the line. I quickly picked up the phone and pressed it against my ear. “S-sorry! What did you say?”

“Nothing. Just a bad joke.” He paused. “The swelling will go down in the next couple of days and your bruises will fade by the end of the week. Don’t you girls have some sort of magic make up to cover that shit up?”

“You’re awfully optimistic about this.”

“Okay, fine. I have a hidden agenda. I wanna take you out today.” He cocked his head as he waited for my response.

Immediately, my hand shot to my face and I turned my back to the window so he couldn’t see the devastation that had crept onto my face. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I didn’t want eyes on me. I didn’t want people talking about me. I just wanted to crawl under my covers and never come out.

“Ashy, what’s wrong?” The concern in his tone was unmistakable. He really did care about me and it wasn’t his fault that I was having a hard time letting go of what had happened last night. I knew he was just trying to get my mind off everything.

“I don’t want anyone to see me like this. I’m going to have a hard enough time explaining it to Mom. I don’t want half the town gossiping about it either.” And I knew they would gossip. It was the only thing this ghost town was good at.

“Trust me, where we’re going there ain’t gonna be a soul.”

***

Somehow, I let Luca talk me into meeting him out the front of his house in an hour. Mom would definitely be up by then and I’d have some serious explaining to do about my injuries. So, I took Luca’s advice.

Sitting down in front of my dresser mirror, I placed all the cover up and foundation in one pile and spent the next thirty minutes applying layer upon layer onto my face.

The scratch and bruises were easy enough to hide, but it was the swelling on my face that I couldn’t disguise. With a sigh, I finally gave up and decided I’d take my chances and see what Mom’s reaction was.

When I pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and studied myself in the mirror, I decided that I didn’t look as bad as I had that morning. The whites of my eyes weren’t bloodshot anymore, so I looked somewhat normal. That’s what I thought anyway, or maybe I was just desperate to convince myself that.

As I headed downstairs, I could hear movement in the kitchen. Great. Mom was up. There was no way I’d be able to sneak past her, so I put on a fake smile and hoped that Mom believed the lie that I was about to feed her.

Mom glanced up at the sound of my footsteps and then her eyes went wide over the brim of the cup she was taking a sip from. She slammed the cup down—dark liquid sloshed all over the table and floor—and jumped up from her seat. I’d barely taken two steps before she was running a hand over my hair and giving me this look like I was about to drop dead any second.

“Ashton! What in the world happened to you? You look absolutely awful!” She said this like I didn’t already know that my face was the size of a helium balloon.

“Jeez, Mom. You really know how to make me feel better,” I said with a roll of my eyes as I tried to escape her clutches.

She stepped back and surveyed me with stern blue eyes. “Ashton Blake Summers, tell me who did this to you.”

I forced a laugh and waved her off. “Oh, Mom, you overreact too much. No one did this to me. I fell over on the way to the bonfire.”

Mom stared at me in disbelief and raised an eyebrow. “You look like this because…you fell over?”

“That’s what I said.” I sighed and walked over to the fridge so she couldn’t see my face. I grabbed a pitcher of orange juice and poured myself a glass. “My face wasn’t even swollen until I woke up this morning. That’s why I came home so early this morning. So I could make myself look half decent before I went out.”

“You’re going out? Where? You should really stay home and get some rest.”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I said with a shrug. “I’m going out with Luca.”

Mom’s mouth dropped open and she gaped at me as though I’d told her I was pregnant. “You’re going out with Luca? For someone who allegedly hates him, you’ve been spending a lot of time over at his house.”

Taking a long drink of the orange juice, I rolled my eyes. “Mom, you are so overdramatic. We’re not “going out” going out. We’re just hanging out, but he didn’t say where.”

The look on Mom’s face clearly said that she thought something more was going on between Luca and me. Ugh. My mom was so stuck in her “writing world” that she didn’t realize that real people didn’t work the way the characters in her books did. There was no epic love story when it came to Luca and me. There was only confusion. A lot of it.

“Well, make sure you come home if you’re not feeling well, alright?”

“You worry too much.” Her concern made me want to tell her the truth. I wanted to curl up in her arms, and tell her everything that had been going on over the last few weeks. I wanted her to hold me as I cried, but I couldn’t do it. I just wanted to move on and forget about it. I didn’t want to have to repeat the same story over and over again, because I knew Mom would make me go to the police and that wasn’t something I wanted to deal with.

“It’s in my job description,” Mom said, kissing me on the top of my head. Whenever she did that, it made me feel like a little kid again.

“Bye, Mom. Tell Blaze I love him.”

I was so glad to be out of the house and away from Mom. She loved me to death, but she had this amazing talent for getting information out of me. Last night was definitely something I didn’t want to spill to her, even if it was eating me up inside. There were no secrets between us, and I was keeping something major from her. If she ever found out, I knew she’d be devastated for me.

The dry leaves crunched under my sandals as I walked down my driveway and rounded the fence onto the Byron’s property. Luca’s station wagon was parked in the driveway with the trunk open. Luca had his back to me as he put something in the trunk and quickly shut the door.