A Boy Like You (Like Us Book 1)(8)

"So, you, TK and Levi … you're … brothers?" My heart pounds a little harder  in my chest. I'm not good with new people. I usually either avoid them  or dominate them from the beginning, figuring they'll either bow to my  aggressive style or steer clear of me. But Wes intimidates me more than  most. I don't like that.

Wes doesn't respond verbally, instead looking at me to make sure my eyes are on him when he nods.

"Cool," I say, immediately feeling stupid for having asked the question.  The quiet takes over quickly on our side of the glass, while the two  boys in the back with Taryn are laughing loudly, talking  happily-smiling. Nothing but serious tolerance going on in here.

"Which one of you … " I start, but stop, my mouth not sure of the right  way to form the words dashing around my head. I don't know why I'm  compelled to talk to him-I don't know why I really even care, other than  the fact that I now know I'm going to see him at school, probably more,  given his skill and my father's love of pitchers just like him.

He'll be my dad's new favorite.

I pull the lighter from my shirt pocket and run my finger over the  switch a few times, a nervous habit I've picked up. Sometimes I crave  having something to hold and touch more than the actual drag of a  cigarette. "Who's adopted? Just TK? Or … you?" The three of them look  nothing alike-TK's skin a deep brown, Levi's pale and freckled and Wes's  somewhere in between.

The truck stops slowly at the edge of the dirt road, and Wes leans  forward, looking both ways and squinting into the setting sun. The light  plays off the ends of the hair sticking out of the back and sides of  his hat, turning the strands gold.

"We all are," he says, his answer short. A semi passes in front of us  and Wes turns left onto the highway. I open my mouth to start giving him  directions, but he interrupts me, glancing down to my lap where my  finger is still nervously clicking the lighter. "You smoke?" he asks.

He knows I do. This feels like a trick.

"Sometimes," I answer, not wanting to give him any more or any less, but  inside, my voice keeps going. Sometimes I do a lot of things, and  nobody has given a shit for years, so don't pretend you do.

Part of me is tempted to light a cigarette now, just to see how he'd  react. I don't, though. Instead, I slide the lighter back into my front  pocket and push my hands back under my thighs, turning my attention to  the rows of houses streaming by outside my window.         

     



 

"I lived with a foster family when I was young-the mom smoked a lot. She  died of a heart attack at, like … forty," he says, his lips parting to  say more. A breath escapes, the kind that someone takes before they  speak-a courage kind of breath. But his lips close just as quickly, and  he glances over his opposite shoulder, switching lanes.

"Yeah, well … like I said. I only smoke sometimes," I say. He didn't tell  me to stop. He didn't say it was bad for me. He just smacked me with a  small dose of guilt.

Asshole.

We reach the light for our neighborhood street, and I sit up, readying  myself to tell him where to turn, but he pushes the blinker and moves  into the left lane on his own, so I stop myself. How the hell does he  know where I live?

The laughter in the back of the truck kicks in again, and I let the  sound fill the small void as he turns at the arrow and maneuvers through  the narrow street and cars all parked along the curbs.

"So you're all … Stokes?" I ask, my eyes keeping a suspicious hold on him  as he glances up in the rearview mirror. The small dimple comes again  before he speaks, and the sight of it makes my heart beat harder for  that second.

"Yeah. Three mix-and-match triplets," he says, making the slight turn toward my house.

I lower my eyes and twist my head forward to peer out the front window  before looking back to him. Taryn's voice is faint through the glass  behind me, and I hear the two guys laugh along with her again. Maybe she  gave him our address while I was busy untangling my hands from the  seatbelt.

"I'm the third one on the left," I say, my eyes not leaving his face. His jaw twitches, but he nods slowly at my direction.

Shit. Maybe he's a creeper. He's a hot creeper, but totally a creeper.

I move my hand to my seat buckle, and the second he pulls up to my  house, I unfasten my belt, and flip open my door. Wes doesn't leave the  driver's seat. Taryn and I say goodbye to Levi and TK and wait at the  edge of my dirt front yard while they climb into the cab with Wes.

"Did you give him directions too?" I ask Taryn, for some reason not  wanting to admit I didn't tell him where to go. I don't want my best  friend freaking out over this. It's probably nothing. But then, it also  feels like something-at least something I should pay attention to.

"No, you know I suck at that. I figured you had it handled. Why, did he  get lost?" she asks, glancing at me, but only for a second before  smiling and waving to TK.

"A little," I lie, pinning my lower lip in my teeth and holding my  breath. My thoughts race in search of any reason Wes Stokes should know  where I live, and just before he pulls away, he looks at me through his  window, his blue eyes locking on mine, and there's a flash of a much  younger face behind them for the briefest moment when he blinks.

The familiar feeling is gone quickly, but it leaves a trace of something  behind. A memory. Wes Stokes has been here before. My chest constricts  as I glance to the place in my front lawn a few yards behind me, the  place where a boy once saved my life, and I live in that memory for a  few long seconds before shelving it again-burying it back under  everything I've promised myself to forget.





Two





Christopher.

It's funny how that name has become such a part of my life. His face.  His eyes. The way his rapid breath was synchronizing with my heartbeat  pounding in my ear the day I should have died. Sometimes, I wake up from  nightmares hearing that sound. Not that it's a bad sound. It's the  opposite, really. The hum of his chest as he's breathing hard, fighting  to protect me, is the sound that wakes me-saves me from whatever bad  thing is about to happen in my head.

When I was younger, I would fall asleep imagining him holding me,  tugging my blanket tightly around my body to feel safe-the way I felt in  his arms, in the only real hug I'd ever had. I haven't done that in  years … until last night. The blanket didn't have the same effect as it  did when I was a child. I know better now-I understand pretend and  fantasy.

As much as I know I can't conjure up that feeling from that moment in  time, I still indulge in imagining his face. That is something I've done  nightly since the day he disappeared. Sometimes the boy I'm looking at  in my head is the one from that day-like I'm trying to hold on to his  memory, not forget his details. Other times, though, I lie awake and  imagine what he looks like now. The one happy constant in my crap life  is my thoughts of him.

It's a secret I keep for so many reasons. I asked about him before I was  shipped off to Fresno for the summer. I had heard he got hurt saving  me, that my dad's car hit him just as he grabbed me. The neighborhood  kids were talking about it. There was blood, but when people tried to  help him, he just waved them away, instead tightening his hold on me.  They all called him a freak. But he didn't seem so freaky to me anymore.  That happens when someone saves you, I suppose.         

     



 

After my mom left us, my dad wrecked his car a few more times-driving  drunk, and by the time I got back from Fresno, that's all the  neighborhood kids were talking about-my fucked up family and how my dad  was going to lose custody of me if he kept acting like this. That wasn't  the threat that got him to stop drinking, though. It was baseball-the  risk of losing his position. When that hung in the balance, my dad  learned to keep his drinking to the bar down the road, the one within  walking distance, and he saved his drunken rants and outbursts for our  home.

For me.

In the midst of it all, Christopher became an afterthought, and when I  brought him up, I got the "Oh, him … yeah … " response with foggy looks and  disinterested shrugs. Subjects changed quickly, and his name was lost to  everyone but me. He had disappeared. The rumor that he was in the  hospital for injuries proved to be a lie, and when I made Taryn ride her  bike all the way to the Woodmansees' house four miles away, all Mrs.  Woodmansee could tell us was that Christopher went back into the system,  that he wasn't working out at their house. That's also the day Taryn  told me it seemed like I had a thing for Christopher Woodmansee. I told  her she was being stupid, and I never brought him up to her again.

Taryn didn't understand. Nobody would. It wasn't a crush or some  obsession or whatever. It was a boy who saved my life, and I felt like I  needed to at least tell him thank you. I needed to know he was okay,  even if everything else was not.