First Impressions
PROLOGUE
The girl standing in front of me took off her shirt.
I couldn't help staring as the buttons unclasped one by one to reveal the pale white cleavage. It was thrust into an improbably-small piece of underwear and it drew my focus. The girl was beautiful in an explicit, made-up way and I felt my loins stiffen. I watched the pale body under her shirt appear inch by inch.
“Wanna kiss, big boy?” she whispered.
I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away, forcing myself to do so before the sight and sound and scent of her got overwhelming and I couldn't refuse anything.
“No,” I said.
That took all my effort. Feeling drained, I stood and walked to the door. I was shaking when I stood there, drawing in gulps of air. Behind me the music carried on, and with it the scent of cheap cigarettes and the sound of loud laughter and loud, rhythmic music.
“Jerry!” One of my friends called out – Pete. His voice came across the loudness and the music and got into my head. I turned to stare across at him. He was holding a glass of beer. He was already red in the face and smiling.
“Where you going, Jerry?” he called out, repeating the nickname my friends had given me. It grated on me. It was part of my former life.
I sighed. “Pete, I can't.”
I stayed where I was at the door of the Reef Club – really an overstated name for a seedy bar in the worst part of LA.
“Can't what?” Pete asked. His face creased with concern – evidently he wasn't too drunk to notice my desperate frustration.
“I can't do this anymore.”
Pete sighed. “What's wrong, Jared?” he asked. “I mean, really wrong?”
I shook my head, trying to swallow the lump that had unwittingly appeared in his throat. I had drunk quite a lot, and I knew the sudden urgent intensity of my feelings was at least partly to do with that. But it was more than that. The news about Callum had cut me hard. I still couldn't think anything about it without feeling that strange, cold numbness right inside me.
Callum was dead. He would have been twenty. Shot in a gang-related incident on the street. I knew Callum had been involved with the heroin dealers. It was probably why he'd been hanging out with the Marlow Gang in the first place. That didn't matter – no-one deserves to die for having gotten involved with stuff like that. Everyone deserves a second chance. Now he was dead.
He was a good friend. A good man. His life should never have ended that way.
I dragged fresh air into my lungs, wishing something would exculpate the terrible rancid smell of smoke and cheap alcohol and sweat from my mind and nostrils. I hated this place now. Why was I even here? Callum had died living the kind of life I'd been living. It was time.
“I don't want to live like this anymore.”
I focused on Pete's face as he said it. I looked into my friend's wide, bloodshot blue eyes. He swallowed, and nodded.
“Jared, I...I understand,” he began. “We...”
The name of Callum was like a lead weight in the air between us. We didn't have to speak it for both of us to know what we meant.
“I need to get out of this, Pete,” I said. “Callum would have agreed too.”
That was what he'd said to me the last time I saw him. Which was why it hit me so hard, as such a horrible irony, that he'd died. He wasn't meant to die just when he'd decided we were both going to live a better life.
Pete nodded slowly. The rest of the group – Jake and Bill – they hadn't been as close to Callum as I had. Callum had been restless and different and spoken more to me than he had to the rest of them.
“You're right,” Pete agreed. “He would want that. Good for you. We understand.”
I swallowed. The words meant a great deal to me. I had been afraid to walk away – afraid of losing the social circle I had. Of being on the edge of things the way Callum was. Now I knew: they wouldn't reject me just because I wanted to better myself, and that meant I had to try.
I wanted more than getting drunk and having sex with girls who I didn't know and who didn't know me. I wanted to remember my weekends clearly and make real love. Hell, from a childhood on the streets to an early adulthood of dissolution, I wasn't sure I knew if love even existed.
It was time to find out.
I let out a long sigh. That was it.
I wanted more than that. Callum had wanted more than that. And he'd died trying to find it. But I wasn't planning on dying before I took that brave step out of the life I'd known and into the life I had no idea about but knew sounded good. I wanted it.
I was ready for it.