Текст книги "Paper Thin"

Автор книги: Jennifer Snyder

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

“HERE’S THE LAST BOX.” Dawson hoisted the final cardboard box from my house into the back of the U-Haul. “Everything fit. Imagine that,” he teased.

I hadn’t been sure we would be able to cram the entire house in the back of one U-Haul, but Dawson had been set that we could. Apparently, he was a better judge of spaces than I was. “You were right.”

He grinned as he pulled the door down, and latched it. “I’m enjoying those words coming out of your mouth.”

“I bet.” I laughed.

My cell chimed with a new text. I knew it was Sadie. She had already sent me eighty this morning.

“Sadie again?” Dawson asked.

I pulled my cell from in my back pocket, and glanced at the screen. “Yup.”

About twenty minutes from you. Stopped for gas and wanted to ask if you packed extra sunblock? You know it’s going to be hotter than Hades there.

“What does she want this time?” There was humor in his words.

“To know if I packed extra sunblock.”

I tapped out a reply to her.

Got it, Mom. Thanks. ~ Charlotte

I joked.

“And your response was?” I flashed him the screen to my phone. “Typical Charlotte.”

“Thanks.”

“So, she’s the type to text while she drives, huh?” There was an odd tone to his words; it was almost as though he was worried about me getting in the car with her.

“No. She’s getting gas. She should be here in about twenty minutes.” I couldn’t believe that was all the time I had left until Sadie picked me up to take me to the hotel I’d rented a room at next to the airport.

This was it. I was leaving. Not only Parish Cove, but the United Sates. Before long, I would be walking around a tiny town somewhere in Africa. It was surreal.

I slipped my cell back into my pocket, and started toward the house. It was strange to know this would be the last time I walked through the front door for a while. Three months at least.

After some phone calls, I had made arrangements for a storage unit in town that was fairly cheap. My plan was to empty out the house, toss all the stuff in storage, and let the place sit until I could decide what to do with it. I wasn’t sure how long that might be, but I knew it wouldn’t be any time soon. Dawson had given me the names of a few lawn care places, and mentioned Mrs. Nelson and her granddaughter had agreed to swing by once a month to clean the cobwebs up and make sure things were okay for me.

Everything was set for me to leave, but I couldn’t help feel guilty. I could think about finding myself and healing while I help do something positive for others, but the guilt was still there in the back of my mind.

I was running again. I knew I was.

Once I stepped through the front door, I stood in the empty living room and glanced around. The space looked bigger without furniture. My eyes drifted to the green nail polish blob near where our couch used to be. When I was thirteen, I’d knocked over a bottle and the entire thing spilled before I noticed it. Emma had offered to help me clean it up before Mom saw it, but all she’d done was manage to smear it across the hardwood floor, making it impossible for any of Mom’s tricks to work when she tried to get it off.

I would miss this place, but I couldn’t be here anymore. There were too many memories, and I needed time away to heal before I could let myself feel them all.

“Three months in Africa, chaperoning teens as you all help to build a school,” Dawson said from behind me. I glanced at him. He was shaking his head. “I never thought that would be something you’d enjoy.”

“Me neither.” I shrugged. “But, I fly out in the morning.”

“Is there cell service at least?”

“Will said it will be sketchy, but I’m sure I’ll be able to make a few calls while I’m there.” Did he want me to call him? I would, because if I didn’t, I would worry about him. I worried about him even now. “Have you decided where you’re going yet?”

He’d put his dad’s house up for sale. It was only on the market for three days before the guy across the street gave him an offer. Dawson took it. He didn’t care to be stagnant in Parish Cove either. Just like me, the town held an even larger suffocating feeling than it had when we were teenagers.

“Wherever I feel like stopping, I guess.” His gaze drifted to the green blob of fingernail polish.

“Want me to call you every now and then?” My throat grew dry as I realized this was our goodbye, maybe even our final one.

Dawson was finally going to leave Parish Cove behind for good. There was no tether to pull him back this time. I was glad, even though I did hope our paths crossed again one day. This town wasn’t good for either of us, especially not now.

“Absolutely.” Dawson flashed me the same sexy smirk I’d always loved as he pulled me in for a hug. I closed my eyes and buried my face in his shoulder.

With his scent surrounding me, I locked the moment in my mind, knowing it would be one I would never forget.

“Promise me something,” he whispered against my hair.

I kept my eyes closed, enjoying the moment a little longer. “What?”

“You’ll call me when you’re ready to let her ashes go.”

His words hit me hard. I didn’t know if I would ever be ready. Emma’s request floated through my mind.

When the time is right, please let me go. Don’t hold onto me forever. Spread my ashes in the ocean waters so I can be free in every sense of the word.

Tears fled from my eyes. “I will.”

“Thank you.” Dawson pressed a kiss to my temple. “I’m hoping I’ll be ready to let her go by then too.”

The sound of a car pulling into the driveway had us pulling apart. I was positive it was Sadie. My time with this house, with Dawson, was up. I wiped beneath my eyes, erasing the tears that had fallen.

“Have a safe trip, Charlotte. Call me when you can.” He smiled, but it was halfhearted.

“Thanks, and I will.” I chewed my bottom lip, and crammed my hands into my back pockets. If I didn’t, I feared I would reach for him again. “Don’t stay lost for too long, okay?”

His jaw twitched before he lifted his blue eyes to meet with mine. “You either.”

“I won’t.”

“I know.” He nodded and his smile shifted into something real, before he disappeared through the door, heading outside.

I stood in the living room for a few heartbeats longer, saying goodbye to the only house I had ever called my home. One day I would come back. I knew this. There was no way I would forever let this house remain empty. It deserved to be filled with life and love again after witnessing so much sorrow. I closed the door behind me and locked it. My eyes shifted to Dawson and Sadie as I made my way down the stairs of the porch.

“Ready to get this show on the road?” Sadie asked. We still had a good three-and-a-half-hour drive before we made it to the place I had booked for the night.

I was glad Sadie had talked me into getting a room for us so we could have dinner and spend some time together before my flight in the morning.

Happy new memories before I left sounded good.

“I am.” I smiled.

It was the truth. This was my new beginning. My fresh start. My time to heal. I couldn’t be any more ready for it than I was right then.

“Bye, Dawson.” I walked around Sadie’s car toward the passenger seat. “I’ll see you around.”

“You know it.” He winked. “Take care, Sadie.”

“Always,” I heard her reply as I slipped into the passenger seat.

I buckled up as she reversed out of my driveway, while watching as Dawson walked to the U-Haul.

“So, he’s unloading all that into the storage unit by himself?” Sadie asked.

“No. The guys who helped us load all the big stuff are meeting him there.”

“Cool.” She put her car in drive, and I watched as my childhood home grew smaller in the side mirror with each passing second.

My heart thumped hard as I wondered for the millionth time if I was making the right decision. I wondered if I should stay and be with Mom while I could. She didn’t know who I was, but she was still family. The only family I had left.

Three months. I would come back in three short months and spend time with her then. I wouldn’t be gone forever, but that didn’t mean I would ever stay in this town again for more than a few days.

“Everything will be okay,” Sadie said. She reached over, and clasp my hand. “I think this trip will be good for you. You need a little distance.”

“I know.” I took in a deep breath.

“I mean it,” she insisted. “I heard someone say once that you can’t start the next chapter of your life, if you keep rereading the last one. It’s true, don’t you think?”

It was. On so many levels. “Yeah. I do.”

I was setting out to write a new chapter in my life. That didn’t mean I was erasing the previous ones. I was only adding to my story.

Emma would be proud of me, which was something I could live with. I would be okay. Dawson would be okay. Maybe not today, but someday. The promise of it warmed my heart.

Death is unavoidable. It’s part of life, but people are right when they say time is what you need to heal.

I let the guilt consuming me, the worry about whether I was making the right decision to leave, go.

Emma would have wanted me to.

She wanted me to live, and I couldn’t do that staying in Parish Cove.

I never could.

She knew this about me.

Thank you for reading PAPER THIN, I hope you enjoyed it! Please consider leaving an honest review at your point of purchase. Reviews help me in so many ways!

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If you enjoyed reading Paper Thin you may also enjoy Jennifer Snyder’s New Adult Contemporary Romance Coldcreek Companion novel series. All four novels in the series are available now!

Continue reading for a preview of book one in the series, Break You, which is currently free.

Prologue

There’s only one question that plagues our fragile minds when we are forced to face the unthinkable, one question that never allows for any answers to suffice or even an ounce of comfort to be felt in some situations. It’s the question we tend to ask ourselves most when we can’t seem to wrap our heads around the circumstances that have been tossed our way unexpectedly.

And that crippling question is: Why?

That one, three-lettered word holds more power over our minds than any person could guess. When asked in the right context and combined with a precise situation, that simple question can hold disastrous consequences that could end a person in the worst of ways.

The question itself is essentially unavoidable. It will pass through your ears countless times in a year. It will flow from your lips in multiple tones for various reasons in a lifetime. And then there are those moments in life in which that tiny question will hold within it all the power to break you.

This story comes from one of those moments…a moment when that all-consuming question becomes the only feasible thought possible.

Chapter One

BLAIRE

“You’re not sick,” Paige grumbled from where she stood at the doorway to my room. “You just need to come out of this sterile place you call a bedroom and have some damn fun.”

The urge to chuck my pillow at her as hard as I could raged through me in a nearly overpowering rush. What didn’t she understand about the word no?

“I have to study and I feel like shit,” I said. The pillow I’d been holding over my head for the last few minutes was removed, but not by my hand. Somehow Paige managed to make it across the room and to the side of my bed without me noticing. Maybe it was due to the fact that my nose was still so stuffed up the muffle of my breathing was all I could hear. “Seriously, Paige! I feel like dog shit right now. Dog shit that was ran over. Twice.”

A chuckle escaped her and she moved to sit at the edge of my bed, unfazed by my outburst of melodrama at the situation.

“Then a night out is exactly what you need,” she insisted. “A chance to give your pretty little mind a freaking break. What good is all of this studying? You’re burning yourself out before finals. You’re just going to be exhausted and sleep deprived from it all.”

I scrunched my eyes up and glared at her. Her face was serious, but she obviously wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying. “Are you kidding me right now? You’re not even making any sense.”

She cocked her head to the side. “Yes I am.”

A smile twitched at the corners of my mouth, because she was clearly repeating what she’d just said to me in her mind, struggling to figure out if it made sense.

“No, it didn’t. You’re trying to persuade me into going to that stupid party with you instead of studying, because you think I’m cramming too heavily for finals and need a break. Won’t partying all night with you cause me to be more sleep deprived than studying would?”

She flipped her dark hair over her shoulder. “Nope.”

I laughed at her simplistic answer, which sent her into even more of a fit.

“All three of us are going out tonight, all right? Even if I have to drug your ass up with some Nyquil and you sleep right though all the fun, you’re still getting out of this damn bedroom and away from these papers and books.” She ruffled up my notebook papers and flipped my textbook over, making me lose my place.

“I can’t breathe through my nose and I’m pretty sure my voice sounds like I’ve been a chain smoker my entire life, because of my sore throat.” I attempted to fix the papers she’d messed up and flipped my book back over. “I’m not going out with you and Lauren tonight.”

“Please,” she pouted. I knew if I glanced her way there would be big brown puppy eyes pleading with me and a fat bottom lip poking out. “Pretty please, Blaire, just this once. You know I just broke up with Karl and could really use a girls’ night.”

She was pathetic when she pulled the puppy-dog look—pathetic, but undeniable, and she knew it. After all, like she’d said, she had just broken up with Karl. In spite of her being the one to do the dumping, I still felt bad for her. Karl had been sleeping with someone behind her back. Which would have been bad enough all on its own, but add in the fact Paige had caught him red-handed, and it made a bad situation that much worse.

“Oh my God, fine.” I slammed my book closed and tossed it to the side. “I’ll go out with you guys, but I’m not staying out past twelve or getting sloshed. Understood?”

Paige’s face lit up. “Understood. Now take a shower and some Sudafed and meet me in the living room in an hour. I’ll text Lauren.” She scrambled out of my room, her silky, dark hair bouncing across her shoulders as she went.

Paige Jacobs and I had known each other since our freshman year of high school. For whatever reason, we’d never hung out before then, even though we’d attended the same schools throughout our childhood. It wasn’t until we were crammed in Spanish class together that we realized we had two things in common. One, we both had only taken Spanish because we’d been forced to. Every student had to take at least one year of a foreign language. And two, we both had the hots for Ben Howard, a senior who didn’t know we existed.

“Lauren will be here in about forty. She said she’d be D.D. tonight. You know what that means?” Paige shouted in a singsong voice from somewhere in the apartment we shared.

Lauren Myers was the one who topped off our Three Musketeers trio. Paige and I met Lauren on the first day of our freshman year at Norhurst University. The three of us had been standing in the cafeteria, staring at the lasagna as though we were waiting for it to move. Lauren had made some hilarious statement about how she’d always dreamed of two things when she thought about what college would be like—one, that the boys would be hotter and in more ample supply; two, that the cafeteria food wouldn’t give her the shits. Then she added something about how getting one out of two wasn’t horrible. Paige and I had died laughing and a lifelong friendship had been born.

“No, what?” I asked, unsure if I really wanted to know.

“You have no excuse to not drink with me!”

I rolled my eyes. “Already said I wasn’t getting sloshed tonight,”

Paige peeked her head into my room. “I didn’t say sloshed…I said to drink with me. What, has it been so long since you’ve been out drinking that you’ve become a little lightweight again?” she teased.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it has. I’ve been working my ass off lately between Cross Meadows and school, unlike some…” I raised an eyebrow at her, insinuating my point further.

An exaggerated expression of hurt stretched across her face. “Blaire, you know just as well as I do that I work as hard as you. I might not work as much, but I do work just as hard.”

I placed a hand on my hip and glared at her. “Really? That’s what you’re going with?”

“You have to admit I’m right.” She laughed.

I pursed my lips together. Paige hadn’t held a steady job for as long as I’d known her. Most would question why I’d decided to share an apartment with someone who was so irresponsible and careless when it came to things such as bills. My answer: Paige was my best friend and she had never let me down once in the length of our friendship. She always came through regardless.

Friendship was reason number one. Money was reason number two. Paige’s parents were loaded. All she had to do was make a phone call home to Daddy and the money was in her account the next day. Problem solved.

If you asked me, it was a lazy way to parent. It seemed to me that parents should raise their children to stand on their own two feet…which didn’t include bailing them out with their own money every time their child was in a jam. Then again, maybe that was just my non-loaded, poor parents upraising.

Reaching for a tissue from my nightstand, I blew my nose and then tossed it at her.

“Eww!” she shrieked.

I chuckled. “Go get ready, you always take longer than I do.”

* * *

In thirty-five minutes I was showered and standing in front of the mirror in my bathroom, straightening my hair. One piece continued to flip in the wrong direction no matter how many times I ran my scorching-hot straightener over it. Giving up, I secured the piece in place with a bobby pin and called it good. My nose was sore and raw, and my eyes had massive dark circles underneath, but after a few coats of concealer any trace of those telltale sick signs disappeared and I sent a silent thank you up to the makeup gods. If I was being forced into a girls’ night out feeling like crap, then I at least didn’t want to look like I felt.

A knock sounded at the front door. Neither Paige nor I rushed to answer it, because we knew it was just Lauren and she’d let herself in anyway.

“You guys?” Lauren shouted down the hall.

“Back here,” I answered her. Paige must have been too occupied primping to speak.

“Hey,” Lauren said. She wore a short, multicolored dress with a thick black belt cutting it in half and a pair of cute purple heels. The entire outfit would look horrendous on me, but she managed to pull it off effortlessly. As always. “I’m surprised you agreed to come out with us.”

I reapplied another layer of black eyeliner and frowned at her. “You guys act like I never do anything fun.”

“Well, since you took that CNA job at Cross Meadows you kind of don’t,” she insisted.

Had it come from anyone else I would have been offended, but since it came from Lauren, and I knew she wasn’t saying it out of hate but merely sincerity, I let it slide. Sighing at my refection, I shifted my eyes in the mirror to her.

“I know.” I pursed my lips together for a moment. “I haven’t been doing much of anything besides working and studying lately.”

Unwrapping another throat lozenge, I popped it in my mouth and attempted to think back to the last time I went out with the girls. Paige’s birthday, nearly two months ago, was the only time that came to mind. I’d really let myself become a hermit. Paige walked into my room. The ends of her hair had been curled into little ringlets, and she only had one eye made up.

“I thought I heard you,” Paige said to Lauren. She pointed at her with her mascara wand. “I need your help choosing which dress matches the shoes I want to wear tonight.” She led Lauren back to her room.

“And you couldn’t have asked me?” I shouted after them.

“You’d tell me to pick a different pair of shoes, because you’d think they were uglier than sin,” Paige yelled in reply.

My nose scrunched up. What? Why would she think I’d say something like that? I started down the hall after them to check these shoes out for myself. I paused at the door to Paige’s room. Dear Lord, she really needed to clean. I tried not to be anal when it came to housework, but Jesus, my little niece kept her room cleaner than this and she was three!

The black-and-white, zebra-striped comforter and bright pink sheets were crumpled up at the foot of her bed in a heap. There were clothes of every color slung all over her bed, making it look like her closet threw up. Soda cans, lotions, and perfume bottles lined the top of her dresser. Nail polishes and hair ties littered her nightstand. Magazines along with dirty laundry covered the hardwood floor.

Paige and Lauren stood in the center of the mess. In nothing besides her bra, panties, and a pair of the ugliest shoes I’d ever seen, Paige held up one dress to herself after another as Lauren scrunched her face in disapproval at them all.

“Those are the shoes you’re wearing?” I asked, taking them in once more. They were some kind of crazy print with tones of seafoam green, purple, and gold. She was right. I thought they were hideous.

“You don’t like them. I can tell by looking at your face,” Paige laughed. “I knew you wouldn’t, that’s why I didn’t bother asking you which dress would go with them.”

Switching the lozenge from my right cheek to my left, I glanced down at them again. “You actually paid money for those things?”

“Yeah, I did,” Paige scoffed.

“You could have saved yourself a crapload of money by buying a white pair and giving Tinley some finger paints.”

Lauren burst into laughter. “I don’t know which is funnier to me right now—the thought of little Tinley decorating a pair of shoes for you, Paige, or the look on your face.”

Paige planted her hands on her hips and glared at us both, which made me think she looked even more ridiculous.

“Whatever.” She stalked off into her closet with a dress the same shade of seafoam green as on her shoes.