CHAPTER TWO
Skye
Six Years Earlier…
I pumped my legs harder, making the bike wheels whir with speed. Heat simmered off the top of the hill, the asphalt a makeshift oven. It was only May, but it was the hottest spring I could remember. I didn’t care though. I loved it. An early summer meant early pool and beach days. There could be no better way to kick off the end of my high school career.
I crested the hill and stopped pedaling. As my bike skimmed down the street with increasing speed I sucked in a fresh breath. The wind tossed my hair around my face and cooled the sweat on my neck and temples. No matter how old I got, I would never tire of that feeling, the one that came when I coasted down a hill after killing myself biking up it.
My bike glided toward a fork in the road, and I took a right, still using the momentum from the hill to slice my way along the street. As I biked, the houses became bigger and farther apart. The hedges grew taller, and the iron fences seemed more menacing. Behind the bars, though, I knew there were mini paradises. Houses with elevators and basement movie theaters that seated twenty. Backyard pools with waterfalls. Tennis courts that were rarely even used but existed just to one-up the neighbors.
I’d lived my entire life in Weston, and though I still lived in a pretty standard three-bedroom house with my mom and dad, I’d spent my entire childhood with the rich kids who lived along this street. There were two sides to Weston, the uber-rich side and the middle-class slash lower-class side, but since there was only one high school, we pretty much intermingled with no regard.
I gently hit my brakes as I arrived at the house at the very end of the street. Blindingly white, the towering mansion was the most beautiful one on the block. Whether the climbing ivy on the front of the house had been intentionally cultivated or not, it was still gorgeous, creating a glorious background for the fountain in the middle of the circular driveway. I’d spent more days than I could count in this house, and it had become my second home years ago.
Leaving my bike in the grass, I trotted for the front door.
“Skye!”
I turned toward the garage. Trey waved at me from the doorway, the bright sun glinting off his blond hair.
I shielded my eyes against the light and walked over to him. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Jake got a Maserati.”
“Oh.” I didn’t add, shit.
Trey grinned in pleasure. “Yeah, it’s pretty tight. Come on.”
He turned and started walking for a doorway on the left side of the garage. With enough room to house probably twenty vehicles, the garage was divided into several compartments. Trey and I left the one that was used for storage and went into the main area.
There, between the yellow Jeep and brand new Mustang sat a white convertible, its top down. The paint was so fresh it seemed to sparkle even in the garage’s dim lighting.
“Isn’t it awesome?” Trey asked, the excitement in his voice making me smile.
I forced the smile away before he could see it and shrugged. “Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
I bit my tongue before asking the question that was on my mind. Did Jake really need another car?
“Where is Jake?” I questioned instead.
“Right here,” a voice said at the same moment two hands tickled my waist from behind. I yelped and jumped. Jake stepped in front of me, a mischievous smirk on his lips. At the sight of him, my stomach flipped over.
“Don’t scare me like that,” I chastised, smacking his hand.
He just smiled wider. “I think you like it.”
Something about the way he looked at me was seductive. Or maybe I was imagining it.
“No,” I clipped. “I don’t.”
Jake’s nose wrinkled. “Yeah, right.”
Quick as a flash, I reached out and slid a finger against his neck, hissing like I’d sicced him with my pet snake, Monty Python. He jerked away. “Hey! No fair.”
“All’s fair in love and war,” I singsonged. As soon as I said the words, I regretted them. Just mentioning love around Jake was a dangerous thing to do. Not because it would give him ideas, but because it would remind me of what I wanted but could never have.
Looking away, I cleared my dry throat. “I think I’m dehydrated. It’s hot as balls out there.”
“Catch.” Trey extracted a Gatorade from the garage’s mini fridge and tossed it to me.
“Thanks.” I turned back to Jake. “Hey, why did you get a new car? Didn’t you just get that Mustang?”
Jake and Trey turned to look at each other, knowing and identical smiles plastered on their faces. “Two is better than one,” Jake replied. “Especially when it comes to extracurriculars.”
“Right.” I took a drink of Gatorade and turned away so the boys wouldn’t see me rolling my eyes. I’d never understood their need for drag racing. I got the part about the adrenaline rush, yeah. I myself had a thing for speed and danger.
But not for getting caught. And drag racing in Weston, New York seemed like it was the number one way to ensure arrest. I loved action and excitement. If I hadn’t, the two wild guys standing next to me wouldn’t be my best friends. But getting hauled into jail? No, thank you. I took my thrills with a small side of caution. My parents’ wrath was legend, and I avoided it at all costs.
Ever since Jake received his full inheritance, he’d been going crazy spending it. As laid out in his parents’ will, he’d received an allowance each year of his childhood and teenage years. When he turned eighteen ten months ago, nearly a billion was funneled into his bank account, with more to come over the next twenty years.
Most people would say they couldn’t imagine having that kind of money. Being Jake’s friend since the fifth grade, though, meant I could. Just being in his uncle’s multimillion-dollar house gave me a taste of what that kind of lifestyle was like. I’d hoped that once Jake received his money, he’d start thinking smarter when it came to writing checks. So far, it didn’t look like that was happening.
At all.
“Let’s take this for a ride,” Jake whooped and jumped behind the Maserati’s steering wheel. Trey quickly claimed shotgun, leaving me to clamber into the back. I knew how to drive and had a license, even though I didn’t have a car. Jake had offered me one of his but my parents said no, that I could drive Mom’s mini-van if I needed to go anywhere. Needless to say, I rode my bike as much as possible.
Jake didn’t waste any time putting the convertible into reverse, peeling out of the garage, and roaring up the driveway. The wind whipped through my hair, the rush of riding my bike earlier now a distant memory. Jake left the neighborhood and screamed around a few turns, taking us on a side road leading toward the country. As the car sped up, excitement built in my veins. For a brief moment, I wished that I could be stupid enough to take part in the drag races Jake and Trey loved.
Needing to feel free, I unbuckled my seat belt and stood up, throwing my hands over my head. An unchecked and primal cry flew from my throat. The wind picked it up and carried it away behind us, but I kept on yelling, sending my war cry into the countryside.
Jake and Trey joined me with their own hoots and hollers. Breathless, I collapsed back into my seat. My face felt stretched thin from the force of the wind against it, and I knew my hair was a wild mess.
“Crazy woman,” Trey yelled, though he couldn’t hide his smile as he looked back at me.
“I’m only half as crazy as you,” I countered, having to shout above the rushing air. “Where are we going?”
“The quarry,” Jake yelled over his shoulder.
Fifteen minutes later, we were in a parking lot at the edge of the woods. A wide dirt trail led down into the shady foliage, but we ignored it. Instead, the three of us languidly sat in the car, under the shade of a big tree, and passed a beer around.
“What does your uncle think about this car?” I asked Jake.
A look of disgust washed over his chiseled features. Even when he was frowning, Jake was undeniably hot. With his dark brown waves, matching eyes, deep-cut dimples, and toned arms, he drove every single girl at our school wild.
Except me, I reminded myself.
“Who cares?” he asked. “He’s gone anyway.”
“Just till Thursday,” Trey added.
Jake shrugged and looked away as if to say, so what?
He’d never hidden how he felt about his uncle. In Jake’s mind, the guy was stricter than a nun. Trey and I didn’t see it that way. All of our parents gave us curfews and punished us when we got caught screwing up. At least Jake’s uncle spent every other week traveling for work. That meant that Jake got to do whatever he wanted half of the time.
Maybe losing his parents at ten meant it was different for him. I didn’t know. For only the millionth time, I wondered what was going on in Jake’s head. He seemed to carry around a secret burden. I’d never gotten a peek at it, and as far as I knew, neither had Trey.
“Hey,” Jake said, his back becoming straighter. “Is that Coleen and Serenity?”
I followed his gaze to where two girls our age had emerged from the woods. They looked like every other high school girl in hot weather in their short shorts and crop tops, but they were different because we went to school with them, and I’d seen the mean — and slutty — side of their nature too many times.
“Yeah,” Trey agreed. “It is.” He waved and called out the girls’ names. Jake joined in with an ear-piercing whistle.
I slumped back in my seat, a new feeling coming over me. It was like a little rat was in my chest, gnawing away at my heart. I didn’t know Coleen or Serenity that well, so couldn’t really say if they were nice or not. But I did know that Jake was excited to see them. Jumping from the car, he strode over and met them halfway across the parking lot.
“Is that your car?” Serenity asked.
“Yeah,” Jake grinned. “I just got it yesterday.”
“So nice,” Coleen cooed in a voice that made it sound like she was trying to emulate a talking baby doll.
They turned away from us and started talking in lower voices. It was like Trey and I weren’t even there. Jake said something and Coleen and Serenity both burst into laughter. I folded my hands on the back of the driver’s seat and looked at Trey. He gave me a smile back.
The best thing about Trey was that he was always smiling. The guy could find the bright side of anything. To him, even an empty glass was half full. “That’s Jake,” he simply said with a lift of his shoulder.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “It is.”
Jake turned around and jogged back to the car. “Hey, I’m going to hike with Serenity and Coleen.”
“We’re not invited?” I instantly asked, feeling a wave of unacceptance and something else… I refused to call it envy.
Jake’s eyes dropped to my lips and my breath got stifled in my lungs. He whipped them away and ran a hand through his hair, turning his attention to his best friend.
Before he could answer, Trey butted in. “All right, man.” The two of them did that stupid self-congratulatory bro handshake-slap-knuckle-bump thing.
“I’d give them a ride in the Maserati, but then you guys wouldn’t be able to get back,” Jake said, still looking in the girls’ direction, his back nearly turned completely to me.
“How kind of you,” I answered scathingly.
Either Jake didn’t hear my sarcasm or he didn’t care. “See you guys later?” He pulled the keys from his pocket and dropped them in Trey’s waiting hand.
“Later, man.” Trey hopped into the driver’s seat and cracked his knuckles. I watched Jake disappear into the woods with Serenity and Coleen, both of the girls flipping their hair over their shoulders while giggling like cackling hens.
“He always does this.”
“What?” Trey turned to look at me.
“Bails on us. As soon as a pretty girl pops up...” It took everything inside me not to stomp my foot.
Trey lifted a shoulder and gave me a strange look, as if he was trying to look inside me. “That’s how he is. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
I bit my tongue and climbed into the front seat. I was getting dangerously close to revealing too much. In our small circle, we shared almost everything, but there were some things the three of us never talked about. Ever. And that was the love triangle going on between the three of us.
Correction… the unrequited love triangle going on between the three of us.
Technically, I wasn’t sure that either one of them knew how I felt about Jake. But I did know Trey’d had a crush on me since elementary school. I only merely suspected that he knew I had feelings for Jake. Or maybe he didn’t and I was just paranoid.
Gah.
Not that any of that mattered. Trey and I were just friends. And Jake and I? We had to be just that. I couldn’t allow anything to happen with him, not even if he might have been the slightest bit interested in me in return. Even one night of fun would ruin our friendship, and Jake wasn’t the kind of guy who did more than short flings.
And I wasn’t the kind of girl who wanted them. At least I didn’t think I did.
I turned my face away from the trail but kept it hidden from Trey as we slowly rode out of the parking lot.
“Want to order pizza and watch a movie?” he asked.
“I’m feeling kind of tired,” I lied. “Plus, I have my grandma’s birthday party tomorrow. I need to finish making her card.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Trey probably saw right through my pathetic excuses — it was just a matter of how much of the truth he saw. Did he know I was in a bad mood because Jake had shrugged us off so he could go hang out with some girls?
It wasn’t the first time this had happened, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. But it was the first time Jake’s leaving felt like a knife in my heart.
I’d spent the last several years battling a major crush on Jake. I’d done everything I could to try and get over him. I’d dated other guys. I’d thrown myself into school, work, and track. I’d done everything except the one thing that would have probably worked. I hadn’t ended our friendship.
And I never would.
Jake, Trey, and I understood each other in ways no one else could. When Jake moved to Weston, a newly orphaned ten-year-old, Trey and I were the only kids in our class to take him in. I couldn’t even explain what pulled us together. On that first day of school, we knew nothing about each other. Didn’t even know if we had anything in common. But none of that mattered. It was like some force was pulling us together. We were meant to be friends.
And nothing would ever screw that up. Especially not a stupid school girl crush. I had to constantly keep reminding myself of that, because if I didn’t, there was a chance I would do something I’d regret. And it would never be worth it.
Because I could never lose him.
If I did, I knew I’d never get over it.