Promise Me (3 page)

I let out a sigh of relief when I heard his truck start a few seconds later. He didn’t know where Johnny was. He was leaving. Hopefully he’d go sleep it off somewhere and give Johnny’s mother some peace for the rest of the night. I could hear her moving around their trailer, most likely cleaning up things that had been knocked over, but I was glad to hear she was alright – or as alright as she could be given the circumstances.

“Not if I kill you first,” Johnny muttered, a surge of confidence having fallen over him as his father had driven off.

I looked over at him in horror, hoping I hadn’t heard him right.

“Johnny, no,” I told him, pleading with him to rethink what he’d just said. I knew where his mind had gone, and I hated the thought. He had to know he had better options.

“It’s the only way,” he insisted with a steely calmness in his eyes.

“No, it’s not,” I said, sitting up straighter so I could look at him head on. “It’s not the only way. You can tell someone what’s happening. They’ll make sure your dad never hurts you or your mom again. He can’t keep doing this. You know what he would have done tonight if you’d been home, right?”

“Yeah, I do,” he said tightly, his hands clenching into fists.

“I couldn’t stand to see him hurt you, Johnny,” I said, my eyes welling up with tears.

When he saw how upset I was, he reached over and hugged me, comforting me when he was the one whose life was in tatters. I was just being emotional over things I couldn’t control, and I hated that I couldn’t keep it together for him.

“It’s okay, Kate. I won’t let him hurt me.”

“He’s a monster,” I sobbed. “He’s insane, and he’s huge.”

He pulled back and smiled at me, smoothing my blond hair back from my forehead. “I’m fast. I can outrun him,” he said, trying to appease me. “Then I can take him by surprise and finally end things.”

I couldn’t believe he was saying that – especially because it was delusional. We both knew what would happen if he ran. His father would eventually find him, and Johnny might be able to fight back at first, but he wouldn’t be able to do it for long. His father’s size alone would put him at a disadvantage. What he was saying wasn’t a solution, and we both knew it.

But he was looking at me like he wanted me to agree with him, to tell him I thought it was a good plan, and that I supported him. And any other night I might have given in to the forced smile on his face and tried to fake one of my own. I would have pacified him with a response he’d accept, just so he wouldn’t have to worry about me being upset and we could start to forget about everything that had happened. But I couldn’t do that after everything I’d just heard. It was too much, and I’d finally hit my breaking point.

I shook my head. “No, you can’t. That’s not the answer, Johnny. We have to tell someone. This has to stop.”

The smile slipped from Johnny’s face. “So what will happen if I do that, huh? The police get involved, and they arrest my dad? My mom will never let that happen.”

“Why not?” I demanded, confused by what he was saying.

“Because she loves him.”

“What?” I asked, even more confused by that statement.

Johnny sighed. “Even though he hits her, and he’s always mean to her, she still loves him. She’d never send him away.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve been trying to talk her into reporting him for the past year, and she won’t do it. She always talks about how he was before the war, how it changed him, and how she knows he doesn’t mean the things he says and does. She still sees the good in him after all this time and after all the shit he’s done to her – and to me.” He shook his head. “It’s sick, but she won’t listen to reason.”

“So you think killing him is the answer?” I demanded.

Johnny sighed. “I don’t know what else to do.”

I just stared at him, not sure when he’d changed from the scared little boy who’d come to me in tears to a boy filled with rage and fire in his eyes. It made me so sad, and I just wanted all the madness to stop. He was a kid. The last thing he should have been doing was contemplating ways to murder his father.

“Johnny, I’m so worried about you,” I finally told him, feeling my eyes fill with fresh tears. “I lay awake every night worried that something’s going to happen to you. I’m so scared. And when you say things like that, when you threaten to go after your dad, it makes me sick to my stomach. I think about him hurting you – or worse – and I can’t handle it. I don’t even want to think it, but I can’t help it. It’s there, in the back of my mind, all the time, and it makes me so afraid. I’m so terrified of losing you.”

I could see in Johnny’s eyes that he was surprised to hear me say that. For a year I’d been his rock, the person he’d come to, who’d tell him that everything would be okay. I hadn’t cried in front of him before, and I hadn’t told him how freaking scared I was all the time, but I couldn’t hold it back any longer – not when he was contemplating murder.

But instead of telling me all the reasons why I was wrong, that he could handle his dad, and that he was stronger than he looked, he pulled me back into his arms, comforting me for the things
he
should have been upset about, not me. It wasn’t my life. I wasn’t the one living in danger. Johnny lived in a volatile world that could be turned upside down at a moment’s notice, and after hearing his father threaten him just moments earlier, I was afraid it was going to happen sooner rather than later.

“Shh,” he said softly, his arms so solid as they held me close. “Don’t be afraid. I’m fine. I’m okay. My father has never hurt me before – not really, and he won’t do it now. He’s just angry. He’ll get over it.”

“Do you really believe that?” I asked him, pulling back to look at him through my tears.

He offered me a small smile. “I have to believe it. I don’t have another choice.”

The tears spilled from my eyes once more, and I felt the pull of Johnny’s arms.

“It’s okay, Kate,” he said, softly. “Listen.”

I paused to do what he said, and I didn’t hear anything.

“Silence,” he said, as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world. And in that moment, it was. “He’s gone. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“But what if he comes back? What about tomorrow when he remembers you weren’t home tonight?”

Johnny pulled back to look at me, shook his head and smiled. “He won’t. He’s so drunk that he probably won’t remember half of what happened tonight.” Then his smile slipped a notch. “That’s why my mother won’t do anything. She knows he’s never in his right mind when he lashes out at her.”

“It still doesn’t make it right.”

“I know it doesn’t.”

“Johnny, I don’t want him to hurt you. I seriously couldn’t stand it if he did that.”

He smiled. “Well, it’s a good thing you don’t have to worry about that.”

I let out a shaky sigh. “I hope not.”

“I’ll never let him,” he promised.

When I didn’t say anything, he tilted my chin up so I was looking at him.

“You don’t believe me,” he said softly.

I shook my head.

“Have I ever made you a promise I couldn’t keep?”

I shook my head again.

“I’m not making one I can’t keep now. I promise I won’t let him hurt me.”

“Okay,” I said, the word sounding thick in my throat.

Johnny reached up to cup my cheek with his hand. He gave me a soft smile. “You look really pretty when you cry, Kate. Do you know that?”

“What?” I asked, caught off-guard. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. When had our conversation taken a left turn?

“You look really pretty when you cry,” he repeated. “Of course, I think you look really pretty all the time, but some girls look like a hot mess when they cry. Not you.”

“You think I’m pretty?” I questioned, wondering what had just happened.

This was Johnny, my best friend who I built forts with, ran around the park with, and dug for worms with. Why was he looking at me like that? Why was he telling me I was pretty? Did he really think I was pretty?

“Have you ever kissed anyone before?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “No. You know that.”

He grinned. “I know. I just wanted to make sure. I’ve never kissed anyone either.”

“Oh, okay,” I said, my heart suddenly jumping into my throat.

What was happening? One minute we were talking about horrible things, and then next he was pulling me so far away from reality that I didn’t know where I was.

“Johnny, what are you doing?” I asked quickly when I realized he was moving his mouth toward mine, closing the distance between us.

He was going to kiss me.

He smiled as his eyes darted from my lips up to meet my gaze. “Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Can I?”

Even though I had the very real urge to push him away, because this was Johnny, my best friend, there was another urge that had been foreign to me until that moment that felt a lot stronger. He was going to kiss me – and I think I wanted him to. I realized the last thing I wanted was to push him away.

I nodded. “Yes.”

His smile got even wider before his tongue darted out to wet his lips, and my heart rate kicked up a few notches. The seconds leading up to that kiss might have been the most terrifying, exhilarating moments of my life, and when his lips met mine, they were soft and warm. I’d expected my first kiss to be awkward, but this was the furthest thing from it. Johnny was home to me, and with his lips pressed against mine, I felt things I’d never experienced before. The whole moment was better than I’d ever imagined it could be.

After what felt like both an eternity and no time at all, Johnny pulled back and smiled at me. In his eyes, I saw the sweet boy I’d befriended years earlier, but I also saw someone different – someone older, someone new, and someone I was excited to get to know. I realized everything had changed between us in an instant, but with his warm smile, I wasn’t afraid of what was to come. This was Johnny, my best friend, and I was so glad he was the first boy I’d kissed.

But for as nice as it had been, everything that had transpired that night still weighed heavy on my heart as we lay side-by-side in my twin-sized bed. The new and exciting feelings he’d elicited from deep within me couldn’t overshadow the fears that still gripped me.

“Johnny?” I said softly.

“Yeah?”

“Are you really sure everything is going to be okay?”

“Yeah, I am,” he said, although it was still hard for me to believe him.

I turned to look at him, and he met my gaze. “You promise?”

He offered me a small smile that I could make out in the moonlight filtering in through my blinds. “I promise you, Kate. Everything will be okay.”

Johnny and I fell asleep soon afterward, his hand in mine, his words running through my mind, and the memory of his kiss on my lips. I had no idea what it meant, or if it even meant anything, but I was happy.

I trusted that, like he’d said, he wouldn’t make a promise he couldn’t keep. He’d never lied to me before, and he’d never promised anything he couldn’t deliver on. And even though fear had gripped me for most of the night, I was no longer afraid. For the first time in a long while, the excitement of a new day followed me into my dreams.

If only I’d known that was the last night I’d ever see Johnny, I might have held on tighter, stayed awake longer, and made him talk to me until dawn. But I didn’t know I was going to lose him the very next day. I had no idea that when I said goodbye to him before homeroom that it would be for the last time. I didn’t know he was going to break a promise to me for the first time since I’d known him.

Chapter One

Kate

Present Day

“Where should I put this?” I heard a male voice ask in a southern drawl, shouting a little over the Fifth Harmony song blaring from Sara’s iPod that she’d set up on the counter.

I set down the mug I’d been putting in the cabinet above where I planned to put our coffeemaker and spun around to see a guy with a mop of blond hair holding a box, standing in the doorway of my new apartment, looking around like he belonged there. I reached over and turned down the music.

“Um, who are you?” I asked him, probably sounding harsher than was necessary, but I had no idea who he was.

“This is Micah,” my sister said, scooting around him with a smile on her face and a small box in her arms. “He lives across the hall. He said he’d help us move in.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yup,” Sara said as she grinned flirtatiously at Micah.

He grinned right back at her, so I fixed him with a cautious glare. My sister flirted with anything that moved, and this guy looked like he saw a prime opportunity to get in good graces with the new girl across the hall.

“I think we can handle things on our own, Micah,” I told him.

“No, we can’t,” Sara admonished. “We have an entire truck of heavy stuff that I can’t lift. The only reason we got it all in the truck in the first place was because Dan and Chris helped.”

I sighed, wondering when my sister had become so dependent on other people. “We’ll figure it out,” I promised her, because I’d been figuring things out my whole life. It was just what I did.

Sure, our stepfather, Dan, and our step-brother, Chris, had helped us load our dressers and beds and the couch into the truck, but I’d driven it all the way from Indiana. Sara and I could handle unloading a few heavy things.

“Coming through,” I heard then, and I looked up to see Micah step out of the way to allow another guy with almost jet black hair to back into our apartment with one end of our couch in his arms.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.

“What she asked us to do,” he huffed out in a deep southern accent, gesturing to Sara as he walked past her, and another guy came into view, holding the other end of the couch.

“I’m assuming you want this over here,” the second guy said, nodding toward the living room with his head. I noticed he’d didn’t have any trace of an accent. “It’s where ours is in our apartment, and we have the same layout – with one more bedroom – but the common areas are the same.”

“Sounds good to me,” Sara said cheerfully as I watched her lean over to admire the backside of the second guy.

“Sara!” I hissed at her.

She looked up sheepishly at me. Then she winked as the guys set the couch down.

“Um, I’m not sure we want it there,” I told them, and they both looked up at me.

“Trust me, you do,” the guy with no accent said. “We’ve lived in our apartment for a year, and we tried the couch a few ways before we settled on this angle.”

“He’s right,” the dark-haired guy said, his thick accent wrapping around his words. “I don’t live with them, but I’ve spent many nights on that very couch. If you mount your TV on the wall, it gives you an optimal view.”

“We have a TV stand,” I told him haughtily, knowing I was being difficult on purpose.

I wasn’t keen on these guys barging into our apartment like they owned the place. And I knew it was all because my sister had batted her long lashes at them. 

The guy with no accent grinned at me, apparently not missing a beat. “It’ll work the same way with a TV stand.”

“Great,” I said sourly, as I tried to ignore the fact that he had really pretty green eyes that were offset by the light caramel color of his skin. It didn’t matter if he was cute or not. What he was doing was irritating.

“I’ll just put this down in here,” Micah said, setting his box near the bar.

“Thanks, I guess,” I muttered while Sara flashed him another smile.

When he headed back downstairs with his friends, presumably for another load, Sara put her hands on her hips and chastised me. “Try to be a little nicer, Kate. They offered to help us.”

“Oh yeah, and what did you offer them in return?”

“Nothing. They’re just gentleman. We are in Texas after all, and kindness is a way of life down here.”

I barked out a laugh at her optimism. “I highly doubt that.”

“It is. Trust me. You’ll see.”

“Fine. Whatever. Just go downstairs, and make sure they don’t run off with our stuff,” I told her, not in the mood to argue.

I’d just driven for two days, since Sara said she couldn’t handle the U-Haul truck we’d rented. So she’d driven her car, and I’d driven the truck that was towing my car the whole way. I was tired, my back ached, and I desperately wanted to sink into a hot bubble bath. The sooner we got unpacked, the sooner I could do that, and if a few ‘kind’ strangers wanted to help, I figured that was okay – as long as they didn’t try to weasel anything out of us in return. Or steal our things. Where we came from, you didn’t trust strangers with your prized belongings.

But I figured they might be legit when my bed came through the door a few minutes later. The guy with the pretty eyes asked me where I wanted it, so I directed him to the last bedroom down the hall. He smiled and nodded.

When he and his friend came back through, he stopped to introduce himself. “I’m Cullen,” he said, sticking his hand out for me to shake.

“Kate,” I told him curtly.

He smiled. “It’s nice to meet you, Kate. Where are you from?”

“Indiana.”

He nodded. “Indiana. Nice.”

“Yeah, it’s really not.”

He laughed. “I guess I’ll take your word for it. I’ve never been there.”

“Oh yeah? Are you from around these parts?” I asked, figuring that was a thing people said in Texas – at least they did in old Western movies.

His laugh deepened, and the sound rumbled through our mostly empty apartment. “Not even close. I grew up in Maryland, but I’ve been here for two years, and I kind of love it. I figure I’ll stick around after I graduate.”

“It’s that great?” I questioned, having coming to Austin because it was where Sara had decided to go to school, and they’d offered me a partial scholarship.

And UT was a pretty good school, so there was that. But I hadn’t been in love with the idea of moving to Texas. It had just worked out that we’d ended up there.

“It’s pretty great,” Cullen confirmed. “And what your roommate said is right. Hospitality is kind of a thing down here. The football is also sort of legendary, and the music scene in Austin is like nothing else. It’s kind of the perfect place to live.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for it,” I said, still skeptical.

“I think you’ll like it here,” he told me cheerfully. “And if you girls need anything, we’re just across the hall.”

“So the three of you live together?” I questioned, because I thought one of the guys had said he didn’t live there. He just used their couch a lot.

Cullen shook his head. “Nah, just Micah and me live there – with our roommate Jack, but he’s not around much. Drew hangs out at our place a lot because he’s a mooch and hates to grocery shop, but he doesn’t pay rent.”

“Hey!” Drew said as he came back into the apartment with two boxes stacked on top of each other in his arms. “I’m no mooch.”

“Yes, you are, you punk,” Cullen told him.

“Where do you want these?” Drew asked me, ignoring his friend.

“You can set those down in the living room,” I told him, having no idea what was in the boxes he was holding.

I figured I’d go through everything later. Mom and Dan had gone on a spree to get us everything they thought we’d need for our adventure at college, and we probably had way more than we could ever use. I wasn’t even sure what was packed with what, since packing had been a team effort at our house the week before. I guess I should have been grateful, because Sara and I hadn’t had much to start with.

I’d been living at home while attending community college for the past two years, so things like toasters, dishes, and silverware had always been available. I was glad to not have to go out and buy everything to outfit our apartment. It was nicer to just have it there.

I’d have to thank Dan again the next time I talked to him. He’d only been in our lives for a few years, but he’d treated Sara and me like family since the day he’d met us. And he made my mom smile, which hadn’t happened for a long time before he came along. But he’d rescued her. Back when her drug addiction had been at its worst, she’d finally decided to do something about it. In rehab, she met Dan. He was a recovering addict, and he spent time counseling other addicts who were trying to get clean.

He was a great guy, and I was glad they’d found each other. My mom had been sober for three years, and I knew he was a big part of the reason she’d decided to stay clean. They’d gotten married a few months after I graduated high school, and we moved into Dan’s house soon after.

It had been surreal at first, because the place felt like a palace compared to the trailer we’d lived in my whole life, but even more than that was how Dan treated Sara and me. He’d always been kind to us, but it went beyond that. He treated us like his daughters, and he welcomed us into his home and his family with open arms. His son, Chris, who was a few years older than me, had done the same.

I wasn’t used to that from the men my mother had dated in the past, but Dan wasn’t like those other guys. He was compassionate, supportive, and he was a genuinely nice guy. I felt lucky to have him as a stepfather, especially since he was a big part of how Sara and I had been able to get to UT in the first place.

I had a feeling Dan would be grateful that a few of our neighbors had decided to pitch in and help us move our things into the apartment. He’d been concerned about what we’d do when we got to Texas as he and Chris has been loading the truck. He’d even offered to drive down with us, but I told him we’d be able to handle it. I figured he’d already done more than enough when he’d helped us buy everything we needed. That meant I hadn’t had to dip into my savings, which was always a plus.

“Thank you for your help,” I called after Drew as he left the apartment for another load, figuring I could at least try to be appreciative.

“No sweat,” he called back. “Pizza’s on you when we’re done, right?”

I smiled. “Yeah, sure. Pizza. You got it,” I told him as I looked up at Cullen who was still standing in front of me. “Do you know of a good pizza place?”

He grinned, and I noticed how great his smile was. “I’m a college guy. Of course, I do.”

“Alright then, pizza’s on me. It’s actually really nice that you guys are helping us. Thank you.”

He tipped his burnt orange UT baseball cap at me. “It’s our pleasure, ma’am,” he said in an affected southern accent.

I shook my head as he backed out of my apartment grinning.

“He is so cute!” Sara hissed as she came into the apartment as Cullen was leaving and dropped a garbage bag of throw pillows onto the floor in the living room.

“He’s really nice.”

She smirked at me. “You think he’s cute too!” she accused as she pulled her long dark hair down from its ponytail and fluffed it a little.

I was still getting used to her darker locks, since she’d only just dyed her hair at the beginning of the summer. For years we’d looked a lot alike, with similar coloring and highlighted blond hair. But one day in June, Sara had come home with dark brown hair, and I’d done a double-take. I barely recognized her, and with more intense make-up, we no longer looked alike. In fact, if you didn’t know we were sisters, you’d probably never guess, which I had a feeling was intentional.

Sara had basically lived in my shadow for years, and I had a feeling since we were starting over in a new place, she’d wanted to create some separation between who we’d always been – the Pierce sisters.

And I couldn’t really blame her. Our name alone carried a stigma in our hometown. We both had the chance for a fresh start in Texas, a place where no one knew that just a few years earlier we’d lived in a trailer park and had been poor as dirt, because our mother had a penchant for spending all her money on things she could snort or shoot. It was a reality that had hung over our heads even after our mom got sober, and I had a feeling Sara wanted to shed as much of her old identity as she could.

A part of me sort of felt the same way. I doubted I’d be regaling anyone I met at school with tales of eating only peanut butter sandwiches for a week straight, combing the thrift store for new clothes, or huddling together with my sister when our heat went out in the middle of winter, because we couldn’t afford to pay the gas bill. I wanted to leave that life behind as much as she did.

“I do not think he’s cute,” I told Sara, who was smiling a little too widely for my liking.

I could tell she was dying for me to agree that Cullen was cute, because if I thought he was cute, there was the chance that I’d want to date him. Sara liked to play matchmaker with me a little too much.