“Kara,” I said in a serious tone.
She let out a happy puff of air. “Tell me about your childhood. Just a little. Give me a happy memory.”
I was quiet for a moment. She laced our hands together, fitting my fingers with hers. She traced from the tip of my finger to my knuckle slowly and continued with the same treatment on all of them. Her soft touch evoked a response from me.
“Happy memory,” I said.
I felt her nod. “Anything.”
“Coming home from school in the afternoons,” I said after a moment.
“Can’t wait to play your video games, huh? Freedom.”
“No, it’s not that,” I answered.
“Freedom. How can anything be better than that?”
I smiled against her hair. She would think so.
“What could be better than that?” she pressed.
“My mom waiting for me in the kitchen,” I said. “Cooking something for me.”
She stilled, then squeezed my hand after a beat. “And then? Describe it for me. What did she make?”
“Anything. Spaghetti, maybe? With meatballs. Huge ones. The size of a baseball and a lot of them.”
“Your mom must be a good cook.”
“She can’t cook worth shit. It’s not a memory. I conjured it up,” I told her. “I don’t remember any happy childhood memory except for my time in the maze. And I don’t want to talk about that right now.”
“Understood.”
“Tell me about yours,” I said, sensing her sadness.
I shouldn’t have said anything.
“A happy one. About your dad and Dylan.”
“We used to go to the beach during the weekend when my dad wasn’t busy with work. We’d make sandcastles or Dylan and I would hold him down on the sand, and he’d pretend we were so heavy he couldn’t get up, then we’d cover his body with all that wet sand. I’d make this mermaid tail for him and he’d say it was the most wonderful thing.”
She told me another one after that, and another. I lost track of time. She made me laugh, and I had never laughed as much in a year as I did with her that night. She made me…happy. And I could only hope I made her just as happy.
“Kara,” I said softly. “Let’s go to sleep.”
“All right.” She pulled my arm around her and wiggled her butt against me again in an effort to be closer. “We’ll make good and happy memories,” she whispered. “Promise.”
As I drifted asleep, I realized for the first time in my life, I actually believed the best was yet to come. With my spitfire.
Read on for an excerpt from
Caleb
The dance floor glowed as red and green laser beams shot out from the rotating lights in the ceiling. It was Friday night, and the club was packed with people dancing and jumping to the DJ’s throbbing music. The floor pulsed beneath my feet, and the heat radiating from the mass was inescapable. My eyes roved over the tightly packed crowd. They reminded me of penguins huddled in the cold—on crack.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Cameron yelled in my ear, giving me a friendly punch to the arm. His ice-blue eyes glittered in the dim light. “That was the fourth chick you turned down tonight, and we just got here.”
I shrugged. Saying that I was bored with the meaningless sex and monotonous flirting seemed pretty pathetic. All right, the sex I didn’t mind, but I was feeling restless, looking for something else lately. A challenge, maybe. The thrill of the chase.