Instinct kicked in, and I stepped back. Looked away.

I had to get out of that room. I had to turn around and walk right out of this place. Away from her. Away from what she needed.

Beth. And she needed help.

I wasn’t that guy anymore, the kid trying to take care of everyone and fucking it up. I didn’t have the strength for that. The will.

I wasn’t that kid, and I couldn’t save anyone. I’d barely saved myself.

Least of all Beth.

I tried that already.

Fuck you, Bates, I thought.

I took another step back. Another. I’d go down for the cop-killing crime. Fine. I’d been resigned to jail a long time ago.

“Who are you?” she said. And I knew without looking that she was talking to me. The rough rasp of her voice forced my feet to a stop on the thick carpet. I remembered that voice. I didn’t want to, but I did.

Because it still sounded like my life. Gritty and raw. Rough and dark.

It sounded like the happiest three months of my life.

Beth.

I closed my eyes.

I was a shit hero; I knew that. But somehow I could never stop myself from trying.

When I opened my eyes and looked at her it was an act of will not to see her as the girl in pigtails I’d loved so hard. I had to actively not remember her. Not pull out all those memories and attach them to her, like ornaments off a Christmas tree.

Her eyes when she looked at me had no recognition. I was a stranger to her. It wasn’t a surprise considering the state she was in, and our past wasn’t something that needed to be talked about here. But I found myself wanting to answer her.

I’m Tommy. Remember? When we were kids? I was your friend. Or maybe you were mine. Or maybe I imagined all that. But we knew each other. We did.

And that’s what Bates was counting on. That was the trap he’d laid for me. Why he knew I’d make good on my promise.

Because I’d loved this girl once. And failing her was my great regret.

“The driver,” I said in a quiet voice. She kept looking at me, and I crouched down so she could see me better. The freckles were still there, those beautiful constellations, that one-of-a-kind artwork. My fingers twitched with the urge to touch them, connect them across her chin and neck. The one at the top of her lip.

That one had been my favorite. I studied it. Tasted it.

Her amber gaze made tracks all over my face, and I waited, my breath half held for her to recognize me. To see in the man I’d become, the boy I’d been.

“Do I know you?” she asked, stoned and confused.

“No,” I lied. Or maybe it was the truth. I couldn’t say.

“Did you call a driver, Jada?” the “doctor” asked.

Her face creased. “I don’t know. Did I?”

“Jada,” the doctor said. “I’m having this man arrested—”

Beth, the assistant, came back in the door, looking defiant and terrified all at once. “I’ve called the police. I gave them your name and told them you were here operating with a fake license.”

“Shit,” the doctor muttered and started packing up his things, his bluff called. All his concern for Jada was clearly secondary to his fear of the police.

“What a piece of shit you are,” I said to him.

“Fuck you,” he said. “Like you know anything. Jada, honey. I’ll be in touch.”

And like that the doctor was gone, Beth, at the door, all but hissing at him as he left. A better junkyard cat than dog.

“Get lost,” I said to the couple on the bed, who’d been watching everything with wide eyes.

Without another word they snorted up the last of the coke, got up and stumbled out after the doctor.

“I’m going to go let security know police are coming,” Beth said. “Don’t… don’t leave her.”

“I won’t.”

Beth vanished, and I turned back to Jada, who sat there, a little slumped, watching me. Her eyes were startling.

So familiar and so different at the same time.

Her hair slipped over her shoulders, down across her eyes, and my fingers twitched to push it back, to stroke it off her shoulders with my palms, to hold it in my fist at the nape of her neck.

I’d never seen her hair down. Except for that one time. That horrible time.

When we were kids, her hair had been red. And I’d never seen a girl with that many freckles before, and she told me it was a mutation in the MC1R gene. How I remembered that, I couldn’t say. Except that I remembered everything she told me. Like those three months with her were crystallized. Solid moments I’d taken out over the years and watched like movies. Until I forced myself to stop. To give them up.

Because what was the point? Up until this moment, she’d been gone. So gone it was like I’d dreamed her. Made her up.

I could see freckles on her chest, the inside of her arm. Hidden away. Secret.

They made me breathless.

She smiled at me, dazed. “I know you.”

“You don’t,” I said. Because I couldn’t do this if she did. If we had to remember who we’d been to each other.

She wrinkled her nose, and my heart squeezed so hard I saw stars.

When she stood, she was a breath away, her hand on my wrist.

“You’re…really good-looking.”

I felt myself smile. She could always do that—make me smile when I’d rather not.

“Oh,” she breathed and touched the dimple in my cheek. “Will you look at that? A dimple. Did you know you had a dimple?”

“I’m aware.” Now I couldn’t stop smiling.

“I’d like to kiss you.” She’d said that same thing to me a million years ago. Announced it, because she’d been that kind of person—full of intention and courage. Bold. She’d been bold.

And I wanted to fucking roll in that boldness. Soak it into my dried-out skin.

“You should be kissed,” she said. “You got a mouth that wants it. Do you want to be kissed?”

God, I did. I wanted her to put her lips on me and her tongue in my mouth and I wanted to taste her, to see if she still tasted like Skittles. If the grown-up woman liked what the teenage girl had loved so much.

Fuck, I wanted everything we never did. Everything I’d dreamed of. Everything I didn’t even know to dream about.

But she was fucked-up and in some kind of trouble and I was in my own and the whole world was a little upside down.

I stepped back, and she bent forward, off-balance without me there to hold her up with my dimple.

She grabbed my elbow, blew out a breath. Seemed to crumple before me.

“Jada?” Not Beth. This whole thing would be easier if she wasn’t Beth and I wasn’t Tommy and we were strangers to each other.

“I want to leave,” she said.

I heaved a sigh of relief, blinked with surprise. “Are you sure?”

She nodded. “I can’t do this anymore.”

It was such a loaded statement. Such a sad sentence. Her knees buckled and she collapsed toward me and I caught her in my arms. “Jada?” I whispered, trying not to feel the skin of her arms. The lace of her hair. “Are you okay?”

“Get me out of here.” Her voice was sleepy and slurred. Whatever that shot was that she’d been given was kicking in.

Chaos broke out in the other part of the house, and I scooped Jada up in my arms. She was barely conscious and featherlight. So light it made my heart ache. So light it left bruises in places I thought too hard and calloused for such things. Her chest rose and fell with her breathing, and I could see the pulse working in her neck. A steady beat.

She was warm against me. Alive and flush—and I ignored all of it. I shrank back in my body so I didn’t feel a goddamned thing.

I wasn’t thinking. This thing I was doing was long past thinking. This was some instinct shit happening inside of me. This felt nearly outside of my control.

And it also felt really familiar.

I should call Simon, I thought, let him talk some reason into me.

But I didn’t.

There were sliding glass doors on the other side of the bedroom. The deck outside was dark and unoccupied. With one hand I opened the doors and stepped out into the cool night air. I walked along the side of the house, away from the party, until I got to the driveway and my car, sitting there with my dog in it.

Through the glass of the passenger window I watched Pest freaking out at the sight of me.

In the distance I heard the beginning wail of a police siren.

The front doors opened, and people were flooding out.

I fished the key out of my pocket and hit the button opening the doors and laid Jada, carefully on her side in the backseat. And then I ran around to the driver’s seat and I drove away from that party and the cops as fast as I could. Pest climbed from the front seat into the back, to lie curled up on the floorboards beside Jada.

“Good girl,” I said to Pest, wiping away the cold sweat pouring down my face.

I avoided the coastal highway, zigzagging through the mountains and then the desert on smaller roads, feeling every minute like I was about to get pulled over. But behind me was only empty highway, not a cop in sight.

The envelope with all my ID and the scrap of paper was on the passenger seat, crinkled slightly from Pest lying on it. One eye on the road, I fished out my phone from my pocket and called the cell phone number written there.

It didn’t ring. It went right to a robot voice saying, “Leave a message.”

“Carissa,” I sighed, my voice low so I didn’t wake up Jada in the backseat. “This is Tommy. What… I have…” Her name stuck in my throat. “Beth…I mean, Jada. Am I supposed to have her? Is she the thing I’m supposed to be dropping off? What the fuck have you set me up for?”

I mean, what were the chances that I was supposed to actually kidnap a pop star.

Low. The chances were really fucking low that was what I was supposed to do. So not only did I have to worry about cops, but I had to worry about Bates on my goddamned tail because I’d screwed this up.

“Call me back.”

I hung up and tossed the phone in the passenger seat. In the rearview mirror I had a good look at Jada, making sure she was still breathing. She was, her chest rising and falling under the paper-thin white T-shirt.

Fuck. What was I doing?

My phone buzzed with an incoming text, and I grabbed it.

All is according to plan, read the text from the phone number I just dialed. Continue to drop-off.

So the plan was taking Jada? I’d acted on some kind of instinct, needing to get her out of that shitty environment where everyone was taking advantage of her and the only person that seemed to care had just been fired.

But that had been the plan all along? The highway in front of me was empty, the moon a big white slice out of a dark purple sky.

What about cops? I texted.

Avoid them, was texted back.

“Fuck,” I breathed.

Yeah. Avoid the cops, because the biggest pop sensation in the world right now was in my backseat.

And I just kidnapped her.