The Problem with Forever (3 page)

Chapter 3

Mouse
.

No one but him called me that, and I hadn’t heard that nickname in so long, I never really thought I’d hear it again.

And I never in a million years dared to hope that I’d see
him
again. But here he was, and I couldn’t stop staring. None of the thirteen-year-old boy he’d been remained in the guy in front of me, but it was
him
. It was those warm brown eyes with golden flecks and the same sunbaked skin, a trait from his father who’d possibly been half white, half Hispanic. He didn’t know where his mother or any of her family had come from. One of our...our caseworkers had thought that his mother might have been a mix of white and South American, maybe Brazilian, but he would most likely never know.

Suddenly I saw him—the
him
from before, from when we were little and he’d been the only stable thing in a world of chaos. At age nine—bigger than me, but still so small—he’d stood between Mr. Henry and me in the kitchen, like he’d done too many times before, as I’d clutched the redheaded doll—
Velvet
—he’d just retrieved for me. I’d held her close, trembling, and he’d puffed out his chest, legs spreading wide.
“Leave her alone,”
he’d growled, hands curling into fists
. “You’d better stay away from her.”

I pulled myself out of the memory, but there were so many of him coming to my rescue for some reason or another until he couldn’t, until the promise of forever had been shattered, and everything...everything had fallen apart.

His chest rose deeply, and when he spoke, his voice was low and rough. “Is that really you, Mouse?”

Vaguely aware of the girl on his other side watching us, I saw her eyes go as wide as mine felt. My tongue was useless, which for once was strange, because he...he had been the one person I’d never had any problem talking to, but that had been a different world, a different lifetime.

That had been forever ago.

“Mallory?” he whispered. Turned completely toward me, I thought for a second he might climb out of his chair. And that would so be him, because he wasn’t scared of doing
anything
. Never had been. As close as we were, I saw the faint scar above his right eyebrow, a shade or two lighter than his skin. I remembered how he’d gotten it and my chest ached anew, because that scar symbolized a stale cookie and a shattered ashtray.

A guy in front of us had twisted around on his stool. “Yo.” He snapped his fingers when he didn’t get a response. “Hey, man? Hello?”

He ignored the guy, still staring at me like a ghost had appeared right in front of him.

“Whatever,” the kid muttered, twisting toward the girl, but she, too, ignored him. She was focused on us. The tardy bell rang, and I knew the teacher had entered, because the conversation in the room was quieting.

“Do you recognize me?” His voice was still barely above a whisper.

His eyes continued to hold mine, and I spoke what turned out to be the easiest word I’d ever said in my life. “Yes.”

He rocked back in his chair, straightening as his shoulders tensed. His eyes closed. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, rubbing his palm against his sternum.

I jumped in my seat as the teacher smacked his hand on the stack of texts piled on the corner desk, forcing my gaze forward. My heart was still acting as if an out-of-control jackhammer had gone off in my chest.

“All right, all of you should know who I am since you’re in my class, but just in case some of you are lost, I’m Mr. Santos.” He leaned against the desk, crossing his arms. “And this is speech class. If you’re not supposed to be here, you probably should be somewhere else.”

Mr. Santos continued to speak, but the blood rushing through me drowned out his words, and my thoughts were too caught up in the fact that
he
was sitting next to me. He was here; after all these years, he was right beside me like he’d been since we were three years old, but he hadn’t seemed happy about seeing me. I didn’t even know what to think. A mixture of hope and desperation swirled inside me, mixing with bitter and sweet memories I’d both clung to and longed to forget.

He was... I squeezed my eyes shut and swallowed against the lump lodged in my throat.

Textbooks were handed out, followed by a syllabus. Both sat on my desk untouched. Mr. Santos went over the type of speeches we’d be writing and delivering throughout the year, everything from an informative speech to one that would be based on interviewing a fellow classmate. While I’d been seconds away from full freak-out mode when I’d walked into the class, the prospect of having to give multiple speeches in front of thirty people was now the furthest thing from my thoughts.

I stared straight ahead, realizing that Keira was also in this class, sitting in front of the guy who’d tried to get
his
attention at the beginning. I wasn’t sure she’d noticed me when I entered the class. Then again, maybe she did and didn’t care. Why would she have? Just because she spoke to me in one class didn’t mean she was lining up to be my BFF.

My lunch fail seemed like it happened years ago. Each breath I took I was aware of. Unable to stop myself, I tucked my hair back as I glanced to my left.

My gaze collided with his, and I sucked in an unsteady breath. When we were younger, I could always read his expression. But now? His face was completely impassive. Was he happy? Angry? Sad? Or as confused as me? I didn’t know, but he didn’t try to hide the fact that he was staring.

Heat infused my cheeks as I averted my gaze, and somehow I ended up looking at the girl beside him. She was staring straight ahead, lips pressed in a thin, firm line. My gaze dropped to where her hands were balled into fists, resting on top of the desk. I looked away again.

Maybe five minutes passed before I caved and peeked at him again. He wasn’t looking in my direction, but his jaw was working, causing a muscle to thrum in his cheek. All I could do was gawk at him like a total idiot, incapable of much more.

When he was younger, anyone could tell he’d grow into someone with heart-stopping looks. He had the framework for it—big eyes, expressive lips, and defined bone structure. Sometimes that had been a...a really bad thing for him. He had received all kinds of attention. It seemed like Mr. Henry had wanted to break him like he was fine china. Then there were the men that roamed in and out of the house. Some of them had... They had been too interested in him.

Mouth dry, I shut those thoughts off. I shouldn’t be so shocked by how attractive he’d turned out, but as Ainsley would say, he was stupid-hot.

While Mr. Santos was passing out index cards for some reason I’d missed, the guy in front of us turned around again, his sea-moss-colored gaze direct. “You good for after school?”

I couldn’t help it. My gaze flickered to
him
. Lips taut and arms folded across his chest, he nodded curtly.

The guy raised dark brows before he glanced in Mr. Santos’s direction. “We need to talk to Jayden.”

Jayden? I thought about the boy I’d almost plowed over in the hall.

The girl looked over, head cocked to the side.

“Got it, Hector,”
he
replied, voice clipped, and I was struck by how deep his voice was now. A moment passed as his chin tilted toward me.

Flushing, I looked away, but not before I caught Hector’s curious green gaze flicker to me. The rest of the class was an exercise in stealing glances at
him
, as if I needed to see him to remind myself that he was seriously sitting there. I wasn’t really good at being furtive, because I was pretty sure the girl on the other side of him, the girl that had been touching him quite familiarly on the way into the class, caught me about half a dozen times.

As the minutes ticked by, my stomach began to churn around the ever-increasing knots that were forming. Anxiety circled like a viper waiting to attack with its crippling venom.

Pressure closed my throat, a steel vise squeezing until it eked every last breath out of me. An icy burn crawled up the back of my neck and then splashed across the base of my skull. My next breath hitched, and I felt
it
—the flash-flood feeling of losing all control.

Breathe
.

I needed to breathe.

Curling my fingers into my palms, I forced my chest to rise and fall evenly and willed my heart to slow down. When I had been in therapy, Dr. Taft had drilled into me the fact that I wasn’t losing control of my body when this happened. It was basically all in my head, sometimes triggered by a certain loud sound or a scent that would throw me back in time. Sometimes, I wasn’t even sure what was triggering it.

Today I knew.

The trigger was sitting right beside me. This panic was real, because he was real, and the past he symbolized wasn’t a product of my brain.

What would I say to him when the bell rang and school was over? Four years had gone by since that night. Would he even want to talk to me? Or what if he didn’t want to talk to me?

Oh, God.

What if my being back here wasn’t something he’d hoped for or even thought about? He had... He had taken a lot of crap for me, because of me. While there were good moments over the course of our ten years together, there had been a lot of bad. A lot.

And it would... Yeah, it would suck if he got up and walked out of class without saying another word, but that would be better in a way. At least now I knew he was alive and appeared to be physically unscathed, and he seemed to be familiar with the girl on his other side. Maybe she was his girlfriend. That meant he was happy, right? Happy and whole. Knowing he was okay meant I could officially close that chapter of my life.

Except I’d thought I’d already closed the chapter. Now it was reopened, flipping all the way to the beginning.

When the bell rang, protection mode kicked in, like it had oh so many times in the past. I wasn’t even aware of what I was doing. An old instinct reared its head like a sleeping dragon, an instinct that I’d spent four years beating into submission, but had already caved to once today.

Standing, I scooped up my book and grabbed my bag off the floor. My heart slammed against my ribs as I darted around our seats, and I didn’t look back, didn’t give him a chance to walk away first. My sandals smacked off the floor as I hurried down the hall, easing past slower-walking students as I shoved the textbook into my bag. I probably looked like an idiot. Well, I felt like an idiot.

I burst outside and into the hot sun. Chin down, I followed the path to the parking lot, hands trembling as I opened and closed them, because it felt like the blood had stopped at my wrists. The tips of my fingers tingled.

The silver Honda gleamed up ahead, and I drew in a ragged breath. I would go home and I would—

“Mallory.”

My pulse spiked at the sound of my name, and my steps faltered. I was feet from my car, from escape, but I turned around slowly.

He stood beside a red truck that hadn’t been there when I parked this morning and that I hadn’t even noticed on my mad dash to my car. In the sunlight his hair was more brown than black, and his skin deeper, his features sharper. There were so many questions I suddenly wished I could ask. What had he been doing for four years? Did someone finally adopt him? Or was he moving from one foster home to the next?

Most important, was he safe now?

Not all group homes were bad. Not all foster parents were horrible. Look at Carl and Rosa. They put the
awe
in awesome. They’d adopted me, but before them, this boy standing before me and I had not been lucky. We’d been fostered by the worst kind of people who somehow managed to pass inspection. Caseworkers were underfunded and understaffed, and most did the best they could, but there were a lot of cracks to slip through, and we’d fallen right through one in the worst way.

Most foster kids didn’t stay in the system or one house longer than two years. Most kids were reunited with parents or adopted. No one besides Mr. Henry and Miss Becky had wanted us, and I still couldn’t figure out why they wanted us and yet treated us so badly. Our caseworkers came and went with the frequency of the seasons. Teachers in school had to have seen what we’d been going through at home but none risked their jobs to step in. The bitterness of being overlooked and stepped on for so long in an overburdened and broken-down system still clung to me like a second skin that I wondered if I’d ever shed.

But there was good and bad in everything. Had he finally found some good?

“Really?” he said, his fingers tightening around the old notebook he held. “After everything, after four years of not knowing what the hell happened to you, you just show up in fucking speech class and then run away? From me?”

I inhaled sharply as I lowered my arms. My bag slipped off my shoulder, hitting the hot asphalt. Shock flowed through me, but in the back of my mind, I wasn’t surprised that he’d caught up to me. He never ran. He never hid from anything. That had always been me. We had been yin and yang. My cowardice to his bravery. His strength to my weakness.

But that wasn’t me anymore.

I wasn’t Mouse.

I wasn’t a coward.

I wasn’t weak.

He took a step forward and then stopped, shaking his head as his chest rose and fell unsteadily. “Say something.”

I struggled to get the word out. “What?”

“My name.”

I wasn’t sure why he wanted me to say that, and I didn’t know how it would feel to say it again after all this time, but I drew in a deep breath. “Rider.” Another breath shuddered through me. “Rider Stark.”

His throat worked and, for a heartbeat, neither of us moved as a steamy breeze tossed strands of hair across my face. Then he dropped his notebook to the pavement. I was surprised it didn’t burst into dust. His long-legged pace ate up the distance. One second there was several feet between us, and in the next breath he was right there in front of me. He was so much taller now. I barely reached his shoulders.

And then his arms were around me.

My heart exploded as those strong arms pulled me against his chest. There was a moment where I froze, and then my arms swept around his neck. I held on, squeezing my eyes shut as I inhaled the clean scent and the lingering trace of aftershave. This was
him
. His hugs were different now, stronger and tighter. He lifted me clear off my feet, one arm around my waist, the other hand buried deep in my hair, and my breasts were mushed against his surprisingly hard chest.