Lost Perfect Kiss: A Crown Creek Novel Read online

  I paid for both of them, then handed hers over. “Thank you,” she said, holding it away from her body like she was afraid of it.”

  I set mine down at one of the wobbly tables and took off the lid. “Do you take milk and sugar?” I asked.

  Her face fell. All at once she sat down in the chair like someone had swiped her legs out from under her.

  My nursing instincts kicked into high gear. “Are you faint?” I demanded. “Have you eaten?”

  She looked up at me. “I’m okay,” she said. I widened my eyes when I heard how different her voice sounded. Gone was the breathy deference, and in its place was a kind of steely confidence that made me wonder what this girl had gone through—and wonder about those she’d left in her wake. “I was just realizing that I have no idea how I like my coffee.”

  The way she said it, it sounded like a huge confession, but I couldn’t figure out why it was a revelation. “I think it’s better with a little bit of cream and one teaspoon of sugar,” I said.

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  Confused, I went over to the creamers, carefully prepared hers exactly the way I prepared mine, and brought it back. “Here you go,” I said.

  She took a deep breath before taking a sip, then she licked her lips. She looked up at me. “This is the first time I’ve ever tasted coffee,” she said in that new, confident voice.

  I blinked. “First time?”

  She set the cup down and closed her eyes, then opened them like she was making a decision to trust me. “My religion forbade it,” she said.

  “Your religion? Are you Mormon?”

  She shook her head and looked down.

  The realization hit me in slow-motion waves, lapping at the shore again and again until I was able to say it. “You’re one of God’s Chosen?” I asked. I’d never seen them working out in the community before. I’ve never seen their women wearing pants before, either. I’d also never been spoken to by any of them as they moved like shadows through our community, ghosts we all saw but never spoke of.

  Rachel wasn’t a ghost, that much was clear.

  She lifted her gaze to me and her eyes were direct and clear and more than a little fierce. “Not anymore,” she said firmly.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Gabe

  I stomped around the quiet house, boredom nipping at my heels. Everly had class all day and then clinical hours at the hospital, and the knowledge that it would be at least twenty-four hours until I could be with her again had me pacing like a jungle cat at the zoo.

  I was mostly healed now. As long as I moved carefully and took frequent breaks, I was able to move normally again.

  Normally for regular people, anyway. For me it was almost worse than before, to have command of my body again but not be able to do what I wanted with it.

  My family could see that the cabin fever was getting to me. Yesterday, my mother had come home with an armful of thick, heavy books, plonking them down on my bedside table with a wordless smile. She’d brought me a bunch of true-adventure stuff, memoirs of risk-takers doing incredible things.

  She meant well, and I tried to appreciate it. But I’d read exactly ten pages of one of them before I needed to stand. Sitting there reading about other people’s lives being lived to the fullest while I sat there in the quiet bedroom made my skin itchy.

  I stalked around in the house, my mind a perfect blank, until I ended up in Beau’s room.

  If you’d asked me right then what my plan was, I would have sworn that I had none. I hadn’t come in here with any purpose in mind.

  Then I saw it.

  My tablet.

  I knew why I was there.

  He hadn’t even attempted to hide it. Probably thought I was well enough to be trusted, now. A promise was a promise, so I wasn’t about to start watching the video of my fall again.

  I grabbed it and sat down, stretching my legs way out. I hesitated, then tapped a few keys, calling up YouTube. Then I tapped a few more keys and settled back. There it was—that same illicit thrill I felt when I watched my fall. In a way, this was the same as watching my old self die.

  A few chiming notes sounded, and then an overblown “ah ah ah” choral that made me grimace. Hands fluttered across the screen, then turned into a dove.

  Then—

  Noelle.

  I inhaled sharply when my ex’s face filled the screen. I stared as she sang, that sweet voice that used to raise goosebumps on my skin.

  She had torn out my soul as well as my heart, but there was still that ache in my chest that she’d left behind. As I watched, I slowly realized that ache was a part of my old self that had belonged only to her.

  I wasn’t that guy anymore. That old self had died, and I was here now. I watched her, waiting for the feelings to resurrect themselves, like ghosts in my cells. But the more I watched, the more I felt…

  Nothing.

  She was just another pretty blonde girl. Bubbly and sweet-voiced, nothing more and nothing less. I didn’t feel angry anymore, only a strange kind of nostalgia. She was a part of my life that had passed. It was over, and I’d moved on to something better.

  I pressed stop, freezing Noelle in place. I lifted the tablet and stared into those wide blue eyes. “I’m done,” I told her.

  Then I closed the browser and carefully set the tablet back onto my brother’s desk.

  When I walked away, I didn’t even limp.

  I got exactly as far as Beau’s doorway, only to come face to face with my younger brother as he came up the stairs.

  He’d caught me red-handed snooping in his room. If it had been Finn, I’d be getting a beat-down even now. But since this was Beau, he gave me one of his level looks. “You need something?”

  I let out a long breath. “Yeah. A dirt bike and a hundred-foot jump.”

  He grinned. “Yeah…you’re not gonna find that in my room, though,” he pointed out. Then he widened his eyes a little. “But what you will find is this.”

  He shoved past me and went right over to his guitar stand. “Here,” he said.

  I swallowed and stared at the instrument. My brother held it out to me in some mix of encouragement and accusation.

  I hadn’t played since the band broke up. Without my brothers around me, the idea of making music didn’t seem the same.

  I took it from him anyway. Call it reflex. Call it curiosity. I slung the strap around my neck with careless confidence. I moved my fingers to the strings.

  Then I stopped. “I don’t think I remember how,” I said slowly. I pressed down on the frets and winced. “My callouses are all gone.”

  My brother gave me an encouraging nod. “You’ll pick it up again. It’s like riding a bike.”

  I tested out a few hesitant chords. “Are you still playing?” I asked him. I hadn’t heard any strumming come from his room.

  He shook his head. “Guitar was never really my thing.”

  I nodded. Beau was a competent enough guitar player, but he only did it when he had to. “Are you playing your big-ass piano still?” I asked.

  Beau’s eyes got a little foggy looking. “Not here as much. I found an even nicer one at the high school. It’s got the kind of tone I always wanted, but those little keyboards were so synthetic. Big and round and full.”

  “You know you look like a total weirdo when you play,” I reminded him.

  “I have passion,” he said primly.

  Why did that make me feel defensive? “I have plenty of passion.”

  “Your passion is getting your shit fucked up,” Beau said, his mild tone taking the sting out of his words. “We always knew you didn’t have music in you.”

  Now I was really feeling attacked “I have music in me,” I protested.

  “It’s okay, man. You are a good technical player. You have a good enough ear to fake it.” Beau lifted his chin a little and grinned. “It was enough for our purposes, right?”

  The way he smiled, I could tell he meant nothing by it, but it still stung. �
�Fuck you, then,” I grumbled, clutching the guitar close and stalking back to my room.

  I spent the rest of the night starting from scratch. I got out all my old instruction books, and even played along with a few of our old songs, humming my harmonies along with my brothers’ recorded voices. I was up so late that sleep overtook me. I woke up right next to the guitar and started practicing again.

  It was only after I’d retuned it and picked my way through all the major and minor scales that I realized Beau had outwitted me. He knew I’d rather play music again than admit he was right.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Everly

  “Coffee is magic,” Rachel grinned.

  We’d been meeting before my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday classes for three weeks now, and in that span of time she’d developed a wicked caffeine addiction. “I can see why they forbade us drinking it,” she went on, cupping it in both hands before taking another sip. “I feel like I could take down a house. Or run a marathon.”

  Her pupils were dilated the size of dinner plates. “Okay, champ,” I said, reaching over and gently prying the cup from her hands. “Let’s go easy on it, okay? You’ve got years of addiction to make up for before you can keep up with me.”

  She laughed. We sat in the Student Union on a drizzly April afternoon. On the wall next to our table was the message board where clubs and groups posted their flyers. “They need to take down that one for the Blood Drive,” I commented as I glanced over it. “That already happened.”

  “So take it down,” Rachel said.

  I gave her a look. “If I get up from this table are you going to suck down the rest of this coffee in one gulp?”

  “Yes I am,” she said with such prim dignity that I had to give in. “Fine,” I said, sliding my chair back. “That flyer’s been driving me nuts.”

  I went over and yanked it down, exposing the post that had been hidden underneath. A house for rent—a small, two-bedroom cabin on Ridge Point Road. I knew that area. It used to be blocks of summer cabins situated on a low spit of land formed where the creek divided south of town, forking into two branches before coming together again a half mile downstream.

  Without really knowing what I was doing, I yanked that flyer down too. Rachel watched me as I thoughtfully tucked it into my bag, but she didn’t ask me about it. She was good at keeping her thoughts to herself. I appreciated that about her. It was something that friends did.

  I had a friend.

  I sat back down and took the coffee cup from her hands with a shake of my head. My friend smiled with that little twist of her head, looking down as she did. It was this little tic she had, like she was afraid to let you see her smile. “What are you doing after class?” she asked.

  I blinked. “I honestly have no idea,” I sighed. “I’ve been working my ass off, running this insane schedule for so long that now that I have a moment to myself I don’t know how to relax.”

  “I get that feeling,” she agreed. “The rest of the janitors all complain about being exhausted, but I used to clean the whole house and care for all my little sisters and brothers.” That small twist of her head again. I could tell it hurt to mention them. “And after that, I’d still have to work with the rest of the women to get the meals done. Only having to look out for myself is so easy, I’m kind of bored.”

  I grinned at her. “Well, as your official ambassador into the world of secular hedonism, I can’t have you bored. I was going to go visit Gabe—”

  “Is that what you secular hedonists call it? Visiting?”

  I did a double take. “Oh, oh! You’re catching on fast!” I laughed. Something in my chest unclenched, the tight fist that had held my breath in its grasp loosening. Rachel was smiling too, a smug little grin as she reached over and swiped the coffee cup back from me. “I feel like I’m corrupting a little baby lamb.”

  She shook her head. “My older sister told me things. And you learn a lot growing up on a farm,” she said.

  “Come on over with me,” I said. “If you really want to be like a normal girl, then you need to know who the King Brothers are.”

  “They’re a musical group, right?”

  “They were the obsession of every girl our age the whole time we were growing up,” I corrected.

  “Including you?”

  I felt the hair on my scalp raise a little. “I had a crush on one of them, yeah.”

  “Gabe?”

  “Jonah.”

  Rachel clapped her hands together in glee. “Oh my gracious, does Gabe know?”

  “No!” I said, clapping my hand over her mouth. “And you can’t tell him, either. He absolutely hates being overshadowed by his brother. It would drive him nuts.”

  “I solemnly swear to never breathe a word,” Rachel said.

  I glowered at her. “I feel like I should get you a Bible to swear on or something.”

  She shook her head. “It would have to be the Prophet’s Missives,” she said, and the way she said it told me that those two words were capitalized in her brain. “The Bible is corrupted by Man’s touch.”

  “Wow,” I whistled. “Don’t let my mom hear you say that.”

  Rachel looked stricken for a moment, then let out a sigh of laughter. “Oh my word, I love caffeine!” she crowed, gulping down the last dregs from her cup.

  I grinned at her. “Wait ’til you try alcohol.”

  Her eyes widened, scandalized. “Devil’s water.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I nodded eagerly. “You think you feel good now? Just you wait.”

  Rachel looked eager, so I did some quick calculations. I couldn’t very well ask Gabe to come out to the bar with us, so it would have to be later in the night. Meaning I wouldn’t be home for 9:30 curfew. I’d been sneaking out so often to run over to Gabe’s, but going to the bar would require me taking the car. There was no way I’d be able to pull in again without waking my parents.

  I pressed my lips together. “Hang on. I need to send my mother a text and tell her I’ll be out. She’s not going to like it, so I’m going to have to stay out until after she leaves. That’s not until two, which is when the bar closes anyway. You think you’ll be able to hang with me until then?”

  “Gee,” Rachel said. “You have to account for your whereabouts more than I ever did.”

  I looked up from my phone and stared at her. She smiled in her sweet way. “I guess I’m not the only one who grew up with controlling parents.”

  “No, I mean, it’s not like that…” I started to say, but she raised her eyebrow in a way that silenced me.

  Rachel had grown up under an oppressive, autocratic authority figure who made her feel shame every time she dared deviate from their rigid expectations.

  Hadn’t I done the same thing?

  “You’re right,” I said, completely awestruck. I reached down and brushed my hand over the flyer I had taken from the bulletin board without truly understanding why. “Hey,” I asked her. “You want to take a drive with me real quick?”

  We pulled on to Ridge Point Road exactly eight minutes later, and I noted with satisfaction how close it was to school. The low-slung gray house hugged the banks of the creek like a lover. I got out of the car and pulled my hood up against the rain and grinned at Rachel, who looked shyly hopeful for me. “Look at that! If it ever stops raining, I could open the window at night and hear the creek,” I said, already relishing the idea of deep quiet. “It’d be like having a white nose machine.”

  Rachel gave me that smile—the one that said she had no idea what I was talking about but didn’t want me to spend the time to explain it.

  I stared at the little place, already dreaming of being on my own. I glanced down at the flyer again as cold reality smacked me in the face. “But I can’t afford the rent,” I sighed. “I’d need a housemate.”

  Rachel was quiet. I looked over at her. Her eyes were cast downward.

  That’s why she had looked so hopeful. “Rachel? Where are you living these days?”

&
nbsp; “Hi-Lo Hotel,” she said softly. I hated when the confidence dripped out of her voice like that. “Everything for rent requires a security deposit and I haven’t been able to—”

  “Rachel?” I asked my first real friend. “Would you like to live here with me?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Gabe

  When Everly called to tell me she was moving out of her parents’ house, I jumped up and down for the very first time since my accident.

  Then I came over to help her start packing.

  She met me at the back door with a grin and a finger to her lips. “My parents are sleeping,” she whispered.

  I furrowed my eyebrows. “It’s the middle of the day.”

  “I know,” she hissed. “That’s why I need to move out.”

  I stepped in and closed the door quietly behind me, then kissed her hello. “How’d they take the news?” I asked.

  She lifted her mouth into a wry smile. “I think my mother wanted to ground me, then realized that wouldn’t exactly work. Then the two of them called my sister to try to get her on their side.”

  “How did that go?” I wondered. Everly’s sister was still a mystery to me.

  Her smile widened. “Abby cheered for me and then told them living in this house was like being a plant with no sunlight. They started fighting and I went upstairs and got a bunch of packing done in the meantime.”

  I kissed her. “You’re spectacular.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Stop being so spectacular and I’ll stop.”

  She grinned and gestured for me to head up to her room. This was the first time I’d ever been in the Fosters’ house, even after all these years of being neighbors. It was big enough, but there was an air of closeness that hung in each room, like the walls were pressing me down with invisible hands on my shoulders. I had the strangest urge to sit.

  Instead, I bounded up the stairs.

  “Stop,” Everly ordered when we got to the top.