I looked at him, really looked at him, and found him staring right back at me, his hazel eyes focused on mine.
“Everyone changes, Kale. Nothing stays the same forever,” I murmured.
He frowned. “Have you changed?”
He looked, and sounded, like it pained him to ask that question.
I reluctantly nodded. “I’m not the same Lane you once knew, pup.”
Surprisingly, my answer brought a glorious smile to his face. It was the kind of smile that caused butterflies to flutter in my stomach, my heart to beat fast and my breath to catch.
It was a true thing of beauty.
“My Lane is still in there somewhere,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Only she would call me ‘pup’.”
I always called him that because he had the biggest puppy-dog eyes I had ever seen, and that was one thing about him that would never change. The glint in them had, but not the size.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I gave him a small smile and bid him goodnight. When I got into my bedroom, I closed the door behind me, pressed my back against the wood, then sank down to the ground and stared into the darkness.
He called me his. Kale said I was his Lane.
I shook my head at that because I wasn’t his. You could never belong to someone without owning a piece of him or her in return, and I’d learned the hard way that I didn’t own any part of Kale. I had a memory of what owning him was like, but that was it. And that memory was fading. Fast.
CHAPTER TEN
Seventeen years old (nine years ago)
My brothers were going to bloody kill me.
Layton might be reasoned with, but not Lochlan, who would run through me like a murderous bull. Even Kale would tear me a new one when he understood how I’d lied to my parents and snuck out to a party instead of staying over at my friend’s house like I’d told them I was going to.
The plan was unassailable – that was until my brothers, Kale and their friends walked into said party.
“I’m so dead,” I whispered to myself as I sat on the lid of the toilet of the upstairs bathroom.
I was in this massive house on the edge of town, where a huge party happened a few times a year. I had heard about them over the last two years from older girls at school, and they were always ragers. The man and woman who owned the house were always away on business, so their son had parties to keep from being bored.
I regretted ever agreeing to come, even though I was having fun before my brothers and Kale showed up. No amount of fun was worth dealing with the three of them when they were mad at me, though.
“Lane?” a familiar voice whispered through the bathroom door; then three hard knocks rapped against the wood.
It was Lavender.
Lavender Grey – that was her real name – was my friend. She’d moved down the road from me nearly two years ago, and we instantly became friends. She showed up in my life shortly after everything went to hell with Anna and Ally. I was so happy when she didn’t take to either of them or any of the other mean girls in our year at school; she saw them and their true colours without me having to tell her they could be nasty.
We hung out every single day and became best friends rapidly. She was unlike any other person I had ever met. She was straight-up honest and took no bullshit. The first day I’d met her, I was annoyed with Kale for ditching plans we had made at the last minute, and I literally bumped into her in the supermarket where Kale and I were supposed to meet. I mumbled an apology, and she said if I was going to say sorry, then I had to mean it. At first I thought she was a bit of a bitch, but I quickly found that she was up front and said what she thought, and I liked that. I liked how different she was from me. She didn’t keep things bottled up like I did; she was an open book.
She didn’t just distract me from Kale’s absence in my life, but helped me become more independent with her I-don’t-need-a-man-to-be-happy attitude. It rubbed off on me a little – not a lot because I was still obsessed with Kale, but enough to keep me from thinking about him every second of every day.
At that point in my life, Kale and my brothers only came home on weekends from their university in London, and sometimes they missed a weekend here and there. I was still close to them, but it wasn’t the same with Kale. After our shopping day out, things changed between us. I felt like I was losing him. He was currently broken up with Drew and was off doing God knows what with God knows who in London, while I was stuck in York with my parents, uncle and nanny for company. If it wasn’t for Lavender coming into my life, I may have just up and died of loneliness and boredom.
“Lane,” Lavender’s voice hissed. “Let me in.”