Keep From Falling (Markson Grove Series Book 1) (34 page)

“It’s been a while.”

“Not because I didn’t want to,” he replies, squeezing my hand gently.

“I know.”

When we step off the elevator and reach the door, I invite him inside to join me. I’m still drunk, it’s very obvious, even to me, but Parker doesn’t let on that he notices. He accepts my invitation inside.

I fumble over to the couch and plop myself down as he quietly slips off his boots, helps himself to a glass in the cupboard, and fills it with water. He walks over to the couch and hands me the glass before sitting down next to me.

“I don’t know how much you drank, but I have a feeling you’re going to need a few more glasses of water so that you aren’t completely sick tomorrow,” he says with a grin.

“Aw, thank you,” I say, taking the glass from him and gulping down half the liquid before setting it on the coffee table in front of me.

“So you and Bree are done, huh?” He says it like a statement, not a question, draping his arm over my shoulder and hugging me to him. He smirks. “I wasn’t sure when you asked me to take you to my room tonight if I was going to be your secret, or if you two were officially over. But considering we spoke about it this afternoon and you told me you wouldn’t leave her, I was leaning toward
secret
.”

I laugh, because I’m still drunk and the tone of his voice is relaxed and light, but the topic is still painful. It hurts that I was so wrong about her. “You’ll never be my secret again, I promise,” I tell him.

“So she’s out of the picture then? This wasn’t just a fight?” he asks hopefully. He’s keeping his composure, but even through my drunkenness I can see that he’s scared to hear my reply.

“We’re not together anymore and I don’t plan on going back to her,” I tell him truthfully.

He exhales loudly. “Do you think I should be worried about her trying to beat me up?” he asks with a straight face, and I immediately burst out laughing. I think he might be making a joke.

“She might try,” I reply once my laughter settles, “But something tells me that you’ll be fine. Speaking of which,
Mr. Misfit Phoenix
, when were you going to tell me that you’re a fighter?”

He shrugs. “It’s not something I’m exactly proud of.”

“Well, just for the record, even though you have a promise to uphold and all, seeing you like that makes me want to fuck you so bad,” I say with a wink and he grins.

I’m too drunk. What the hell has gotten into me?

“Well seeing you dressed like that makes me want to do the same to you,” he confesses, the grin on his face growing even wider.

“But you won’t?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Nope. Not till you’re sober.”

“Well, dammit, man! Get me some coffee then!” I exclaim, and he laughs some more. He’s getting a real kick out of me tonight, I can tell.

He leans down and kisses the top of my head softly. “There’s no rush, Sky. I’m not going anywhere.”

I look up into his eyes. “You’re a perfect gentleman, you know that?” I say and his eyes instantly cloud over. The fact that he reserves these moments just for me makes me feel so sad. No one gets to see just how good he is because he won’t let them.

I cuddle up really close to his warm body and lay my head down on his chest. “Why don’t you let people see the good in you?” I ask quietly.

“Because there isn’t very much good in me, you know that,” he returns sullenly.

I shake my head. “That’s not true,” I say. “Everything about you is good. What you did that night, on the beach, that doesn’t make you a bad person. You did what you had to do.”

“And you hated me for it.”

“I was
scared
of you for it, there’s a difference. I could never hate you for that. Never.”

By July, in the summer before the eleventh grade, Parker and I had officially known each other for six months. We were intimately close friends, but nothing more, at least that was the case for me. But I knew what he was waiting for from me; I knew how much he wanted us as a unit. But I couldn’t because I was scared. I had never met a guy like him before who respected my body and myself so perfectly. I honestly didn’t know how to move forward with that.

But Parker was persistent, and one day he stopped playing along with my little game of not noticing what was happening between us and he kissed me. Passionately. He took my face into both of his hands and kissed me so strongly that I actually went weak in the knees just like in the movies.

We had an argument only a few days before that first kiss. He wanted me to stop my Misfit ways for him. He begged me to stop with my persona, but I didn’t give in, not until that kiss a few days later. After that kiss, he had me forever. I was his, and he knew it.

Summer faded into fall and the two of us, now a very talked about unit at the mansion, were officially exclusive. But we didn’t have sex.

It’s not that I wasn’t ready, I just didn’t want our first time to be at the mansion where I’d done it with so many others under the influence of so many kinds of drugs. He was important to me, I was falling in love with him, and because of that, it needed to be different.

After he had asked me out on an official date outside the mansion, I turned into a different Skylar. Everything became hearts, rainbows, and sunshine. It’s ridiculous how a guy feeling like this toward me could change the way I would feel about myself, but that’s honestly how it felt. I was worthy of him and that felt empowering. For the first time in my life, I felt needed by someone as much as I needed him. He was broken like I was broken, and together we could fix each other.

He picked me up at Bree’s house that night. He knew that I spent more time living at Bree’s than at my own place with Cecelia. He knew every last thing about me at that point and so it wasn’t a surprise that when seven o’clock rolled around, he showed up below Bree’s bedroom window instead of at the front door. This thoughtful action made me giddy. Everything I’ve ever told him never seemed to slip his mind. He remembered that I prefer to climb in and out of Bree’s windows instead of using her front door. I was in awe of this guy.

“I think I’m in love,” I said to Bree as I climbed out of the window and began down the trellis. Her eyes grew wide, but she didn’t say anything about the confession. She likely thought it was just a joke since I had led her to believe that I’d only just met him. Instead, she smiled and told me to have fun.

As I finished descending the trellis, Parker reached up to hold onto me with a hand on either side of my hips, and as soon as my feet touched the ground he spun me around and kissed me.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said looking me up and down, taking in my non-Misfit attire.

I smiled inwardly.

“Thank you,” I replied, trying to keep my exuberance in check. I didn’t want him to know just how much this date meant to me.

When he parked by the shoreline of my favorite spot on the beach, the spot where Keegan used to bring me when our home life was spinning out of control, I was so touched that it rendered me utterly speechless.

It was October, my favorite month. The leaves were changing, the night air was cool and crisp, and the beach was a private location for just the two of us. He left no stone unturned when it came to my hopes and dreams. He wanted me to feel everything I love in this first date. He wanted me to know how much he cared.

I took his hand in mine and kissed it softly as a single tear slid down my cheek. I was in heaven. It couldn’t get any better than this, he was exactly what I needed in my life.

And then, in an instant, everything changed forever.

We couldn’t have been down there for any longer than thirty minutes when we noticed two men approaching us from the west end of the beach. I didn’t like the look of them, they weren’t dressed for a stroll on the beach, they were dressed for business, and I had an unsettling feeling that the business might be Parker.

I glanced at him uneasily, hoping it was just paranoia I was feeling, and that he’d be able to alleviate it with a comforting smile of some sort. His rigid demeanor and the panic in his eyes, however, made any ounce of comfort I was hoping to get from him disappear.

They were here for him.

Parker immediately urged me toward the car and told me that he would join me in a minute. I didn’t want to leave, I told him I wouldn’t and shook my head stubbornly. But the second his pleading eyes pierced into mine, I gave in and reluctantly made my way toward his car.

I had only managed to walk about ten steps before Parker’s voice screamed out to me, “Skylar run!”

I whipped around and froze in place the minute I saw one of the men holding Parker’s arms behind his back as the other man pushed the barrel of a gun to Parker’s temple. My knees buckled and, for some unknown reason, I couldn’t move. I just stood there, staring at these two men in the middle of an assault on my boyfriend. I knew I was next, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, budge at all.

I looked at him, my wide and terrified eyes staring into his, and all I could think was that I never saw this coming.

Suddenly, another man who I hadn’t even noticed until it was too late, tackled me to the ground and the air in my lungs ceased to exist. I desperately gasped for breath as he dropped his entire weight on top of me and attempted to pin my hands above my head.

“Get off of her!” Parker bellowed in uncontrollable panic, kicking and lashing out at his attackers. I looked up at him helplessly from where I was pinned to the ground only a few feet away. “This isn’t about her. Please,” he begged.

He tried to pull free from the man who was holding his arms behind his back but wasn’t able to. All he managed to do instead was kick some sand up into the eyes of the man holding the gun.

“Watch it, you little shit!” the gunman growled, pushing the gun harder into Parker’s skull.

I whimpered. Anxiety coursed through my veins and bile climbed into my throat as it became very clear to me that we weren’t going to survive this. And so, feeling like I had no reason not to, I kicked my legs over and over and wiggled my body from the man’s hands as much as I could in order to break free from his grasp. Somehow it worked, and I managed to find a place to crawl out from under him. The instant I realized I was free, I unconsciously let out a bloodcurdling scream and scrambled away from his grasp.

I thought I was going to get away. I couldn’t feel the man’s weight on me anymore and somehow managed to get up to my feet and begin to run. But a moment later his hand was on my ankle and I was face-first in the sand once again.

I sputtered the sand out of my mouth as he hauled me toward him. The coarse sand scratched and ripped the bare skin on my face and legs. I screamed, kicking him in the knee and then again in the shin.

I could hear Parker pleading with the gunman in a far off voice as I struggled to break away. “Please. She has nothing to do with this. You have me! Just let her go. I’ll go with you. I’ll do anything…anything. Just please let her go.” His desperate pleas morphed into a sputter of tears and if I wouldn’t have been so petrified, my heart would have broken at the sound of it.

The gunman smiled a crooked toothy grin at Parker, as he motioned for the guy who was holding me on the ground to bring me to them.

“Fuck you!” Parker growled, trying to kick himself away from the guy who held him in place. He spit in the gunman’s face. The gunman instantly lashed back, pistol-whipping him across the face with the barrel of the gun so hard that a cut broke open on his cheek and began to gush blood to the sand below.

I screamed hysterically the instant the gun hit Parker’s face. The man who I had kicked only a few moments earlier picked me up by a handful of my hair and tossed me toward Parker and the gunman. I landed right at Parker’s feet and curled myself up into a tiny ball, holding onto his leg for dear life as the blood from his cheek dripped onto my shoulder in a rhythmic flow.

“They want me Sky, this isn’t about you,” he said, trying to make me feel some sense of ease but it didn’t work. I was too petrified to even allow the words to register in my mind.

“Where are the drugs and the money, boy?” The gunman demanded, taking the gun off of Parker and pushing it to my temple instead.

A devastated moan escaped my lips as my body broke down and stopped working the way that it should. I felt piss seeping out through my panties and around my legs at the very same moment that my eyes began flooding with an uncontrollable gush of tears. And yet, I couldn’t seem to get even one word out of my mouth in order to beg for my life.

“Oh God,” Parker groaned. Tears of fear and rage soaked his face. “I’ll get you the drugs and all the money. Just take the fucking gun off of her. Please!” he begged.

The gunman took the gun away from my head and Parker exhaled, momentarily relieved. But the relief was short-lived because a moment later the gunman told my original captor to take me away. “She’s distracting,” he said. “Get rid of her.”