Being the considerate person I am, I gave him three seconds to recuperate before I kicked him in the kidneys. He flew back, but got his feet beneath him and charged before he’d barely landed.
He slammed me into a tree, and the breath rushed out of my lungs. I came up with a knee to his chest. He countered with an elbow to my face.
I was just about to kick him off me when a shot of cold water blasted both of us.
Anna stood ten feet away with the hose in her hands. “You guys never know when to call it quits. You keep going and you’ll kill each other!”
Sam stalked toward her. “We just started. No one got hurt.”
“Blood is running down your face,” she pointed out. “And Nick’s nose is bleeding. And your lip is split and—”
While Sam distracted her, I charged toward her, grabbed the hose, and yanked the sprayer out of her hand.
“Nick!” she screamed, and then I soaked her.
Sam threw his head back and let out a chest-deep laugh. Anna wasn’t so amused. She stood there, soaking wet, glaring at me.
“I hate you both!” she screamed, and turned for the house, but Sam caught her, his arms around her waist, before she could escape. He kissed her neck, murmured something through her hair that made her blush.
“That’s my cue to leave,” I said.
Cas was leaning against the sink in the kitchen when I came inside, a hunk of steak in his hands.
I grabbed a towel out of the laundry room. “You look like a fucking barbarian.”
“And you look like a dumbass.”
I took the stairs up two at a time, and claimed the bathroom before anyone else could. After running seven miles, sparring with Sam, and then getting doused with bitingly cold water, the hot water felt good. I stayed beneath the showerhead longer than I should have—the hot water would run out before Sam got in here—but I didn’t give a shit.
When I came up for a breath and swiped the water out of my eyes, a pulse started in the base of my neck and rocketed up my skull.
I slammed my eyelids shut.
I knew what that feeling meant. It was the precursor to a flashback.
Images flickered in the darkness beyond my closed eyes. Like the past was a movie slowly coming back in fits and starts.
There was the girl again—the one I’d seen in the forest—but she was somewhere else now. In a white room, with a white floor, dark hair wild around her face. She looked at me, through that wild hair, and said my name.
But it wasn’t Nick she used.
It was Gabriel.
5
ELIZABETH
AS I WALKED IN THE SIDE DOOR OF Merv’s Bar & Grill, I nearly ran into my best friend, Chloe.
“Heeeeeyyyy,” she called, sliding her order pad into the apron tied around her waist. “I nearly knocked your face off.”
“Sorry,” I said, and made my way to the break room, Chloe trailing behind.
“What do you work tonight?” she asked, and hopped onto the table, swinging her legs.
“Umm… I think I work till eleven.”
“Oh?”
Though my back was to her, I could hear the devious smile spreading across her face.
“Why?” I asked, turning.
“Evan works tonight,” she sang, and waggled her eyebrows.
“I thought he had today off?”
“Well.” She grabbed a pen from the table and twirled it between her fingers. “I may or may not have told John, who was supposed to work tonight, that we overscheduled, and then I may or may not have told Evan that we were shorthanded. Ergo…”
“Chloe!”
“What?” She shrugged. “Now you get an entire shift with Evan. Though”—she checked the clock—“he’s, like, two minutes away from being late. Go figure.”
I hung my bag in my locker and pulled out my apron, trying to pretend like I didn’t care that Evan was working the same shift I did, like I wasn’t thankful that Chloe had pulled all these strings to put us on the same shift.
I liked Evan. A lot. But I was also A-level dysfunctional, and having a real relationship seemed the least likely thing to ever happen to me. It didn’t help that the entire town knew about the horrible things that had happened to me six years ago. The kidnapping. The trauma thereafter.
Three months after I’d been rescued, I’d had a meltdown in a grocery store that nearly made the local news. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t. Everyone had heard about it within a day anyway.
I’d started screaming in the toilet paper aisle, and then burrowed into the stacked packages shaking and sobbing. That was the first time I’d switched foster homes, and it wasn’t the last.
“You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble,” I said. “I mean, it’s Evan. And it’s me.”