Forever Right Now

Prologue

Sawyer

August 15, 10 months ago

I barely heard the doorbell under the pounding music and the laughing conversations of a hundred of my closest friends. Jackson Smith jerked his head at me from across the room, a shit-eating grin on his face. He was dressed as Idris Elba’s Roland the Gunslinger, to my Man in Black. Across the crowd of costumed guests—each dressed as a villain from movies or comics—he mouthed the words, Your turn.

I widened my eyes and inclined my head at the beautiful redhead in the Poison Ivy costume beside me. She was a second year at Hastings, asking me for advice about which professors were the hardest in Year Three, my year, but I don’t think she was listening. Her gaze kept drifting down to my mouth.

Jackson shook his head and made eyes at the pretty Nurse Ratchet beside him, then held up his hands in an exaggerated shrug.

I sighed at my best friend, and scratched my eye with my middle finger.

“I gotta get that,” I told Poison Ivy. I think she said her name was Carly or Marly. Not that it mattered. Her name wasn’t what I wanted from her. I flashed her what my friends called my trademark panty-dropping smile. “Save my spot?”

Carly-or-Marly nodded and tilted her own approving smile back. “Not going anywhere.”

“Good,” I said, and the way our eyes met and held was like a pact being sealed.

I’m going to get laid tonight.

I shot Jackson a triumphant smile, which he answered with a two-finger-gun salute. I laughed and wound my way through our place.

Jackson, myself and two other guys lived in a rented Victorian in the Upper Haight neighborhood. There were no frats at UC Hastings College of the Law, so our three-story house had become the next best thing. Our parties were infamous, and I was happy to see this one was no exception. Guests swayed to “Sex and Candy” playing on Jackson’s state-of-the-art sound system. They smiled at me, thumped me on the back, or leaned in to shout drunkenly above the music that this Evil-Doer party was “The Best Party Ever.” I just smiled back and nodded.

Every party of ours was “The Best Party Ever.”

I opened the door; a charming smile and an excuse on my lips should it be one of my neighbors complaining about the noise. My smile dropped off my face like a mask and I stared.

A young woman with dark hair tied in a messy ponytail, strands falling loose to frame her narrow face, stared back at me. Her eyes were shadowed and bloodshot. She wore faded jeans, a stained shirt, and she struggled under the weight of an enormous bag on her shoulder. Old alcohol oozed out of her pores—the stench of someone who’d got plastered the night before.

The vision before me warred with a hazy memory of this same girl, wild and laughing next to me at a bar; tossing down drinks like they were water; kissing me in a cab. The taste of vodka and cranberry came to my lips, and then her name.

“Molly...Abbott?”

“Hi, Sawyer,” she said, and shifted a baby in her arms.

A baby.

My stomach tightened and my balls tried to crawl back into my guts. The hazy memory became stark and vibrant, with brutal clarity.

A little more than a year ago. A summer trip to Vegas. A kiss in the cab had led to a drunken night of lustful tumbling on Molly’s bed in her tiny apartment and a half-heard assurance that she was on the pill. And then I was inside her without a fucking care in the world.

The words fell out of my mouth. “Oh shit.”

Molly barked a nervous laugh and shifted the huge, overstuffed nylon bag on her other arm. “Yeah, well, here we are,” she said, and stood on tiptoe to peek over my shoulder. “Having

a party? Looks epic. Sorry to just show up like this but…”