You Make Me (Blurred Lines #1)(5)
Author: Erin McCarthy

It had been a good long break from one of those, at least three weeks, and I wasn’t looking to have my solitude interrupted.

My parents collected foster kids for the government checks. It was my mother’s full time employment and the only thing she was capable of doing since she had let the psych ward electroshock her in her twenties, when I was a baby. She couldn’t remember things, like how to use the stove or where the bedroom was. Every day she spent wandering around confused, muttering to herself.

My dad was a lobster fisherman until he lost his hand in the ropes pulling up a trap. After that he did odd jobs and collected disability and the foster kid checks. I think he kind of liked the chaos of random people in and out of our house. Otherwise, he’d have to stop and think about my mom, and he wasn’t good at facing facts. He liked to pretend everything was okay, even when it wasn’t.

The social worker climbed the porch steps. But I ignored her, because her passenger had gotten out of the car and was walking towards me with a confident, but defensive stride. He was about six feet tall, lean but muscular, and his hair was dark, shaggy, in his eyes. There was stubble on his chin, and his jeans were worn, dirty, but fit his body in a way that made me very aware of my own. My mouth went hot. My cheeks burned. My br**sts tingled in a way that shocked the hell out of me, and I squirmed, aware that I was only wearing a tank top and little bitty denim shorts. I was sure he could see my ni**les since I didn’t have a bra on. But he wasn’t even looking at me.

His gaze was straight ahead, focused on the door, and it seemed he was purposefully not acknowledging me. I sat up straighter, pulled my shoulders back. I bit my lip in an instinctive flirtation. I’d never been particularly into boys, but this one… he looked sexy and mature and dangerous. I understood all at once why girls at school fell all over themselves to talk to guys, and lacquered their lips with seventeen layers of lip gloss. I’d always been a tomboy, and it hadn’t interested me, the primping and the effort.

Suddenly it did, and I was aware of my dirty feet, my unshaven legs. I wanted to say something to him, but nothing came out of my mouth. He just moved up the stairs past me and into the house after the social worker.

I felt like he had just done the same thing to me all over again, five years later.

Only this time I wasn’t going to scramble to follow.

I tried to regroup. I did. I danced and laughed and drank entirely too much of Ethan’s flask, desperate to recapture the excitement and pleasure I had felt when I’d walked up to the house an hour earlier. But I couldn’t shake the anxiety, or the need to glance over my shoulder and see if he was there, anywhere. The longer I thought about it, the more none of it made sense. We were well over an hour away from Rockland, the ferry stop for Vinalhaven, where I’d grown up. Where had Heath been? Was he enrolled for classes at UMaine? If he was, why hadn’t I seen him before? It was a decent-sized school and the campus had some sprawl, but it seemed like we might have crossed paths at one point.

All my thoughts raced around and around, and I played with the engagement ring on my finger, sitting on Ethan’s lap in distraction. He was nuzzling my neck and I barely felt it. Especially when I saw Heath again.

Only this time he was just passing through the hallway. Holding a girl’s hand. She was blonde, and petite, and had muscular shoulders and biceps in her strapless dress. She looked like a gymnast. It hit me like a roundhouse kick to the gut, shocking me at the ferocity of the unexpected pain. This was worse than the shock of seeing Heath again so suddenly. This was proof that he had moved on. Without me.

Of course I had known that, but seeing it was brutal. Wherever he had been for the last four years, he hadn’t been pining for me.

For the first time in an hour, I leaned closer to Ethan, wanting the comfort, the security he offered. He had never hurt me. I kissed him, and his touch was solid, familiar.

But I couldn’t stop myself from glancing over to gauge if Heath had seen me.

The second I did it, I was furious with myself. Heath totally saw me. He was watching me as he led Blondie on by, and he gave me a smirk and a nod.

I wobbled on Ethan’s lap, tongue thick from the whiskey. The room seemed loud and hot and I wasn’t sure if that was the alcohol or my nerves. I wanted to leap up, rush over, and shake Heath repeatedly. I wanted to scream at him.

But I couldn’t. I didn’t. I just met his stare boldly while he kept walking until our eye contact broke.

Aubrey came up to us. “Dude, I’m stealing her,” she told her brother.

“What? I don’t think so.” Ethan’s grip on me tightened.

“What’s up?” I asked Aubrey, grateful for a distraction. I was already attempting to stand up. Not because I wanted to follow Heath. Because I didn’t.

Not much anyway. If I happened to go in the same direction he did, that wasn’t following, was it?

Ethan made an exasperated sound, but it didn’t have any bite to it. He released my waist. “Don’t be gone too long. I need you.”

It was a weird thing to say. Very un-Ethan like. I paused to look down at him but he was just smiling, looking handsome and confident the way he always did. “Need me for what?”

He just shrugged and gave me a charming grin. “I can’t dance without you.”

I tried to laugh, but it sounded a little brittle. My hands trembled when I bent over and touched his shoulders to give him a kiss. “Back in a sec.”

Aubrey pulled me through the crowded kitchen, people and alcohol scattered all over the room. “Where are we going?”

“The garage.”

There was an attached garage added at some point in the seventies from the looks of the style, slapped right on to the back of the colonial. It was probably supposed to store a lawnmower and garbage cans but the guys had turned it into a very cold lounge, with a pool table, dart board, and a whole lot of pot smoking. The house rule was you could smoke out there, but you couldn’t leave your butts or your bowl lying around.

“Holy shit,” I said as we walked into a cannabis cloud. “I’m going to get high just standing here.”

“It’s better than being outside.”

“Being in the house is even better,” I told her pointedly. “We could stay there.”

About a half dozen guys were lounging around on a couch and a bench in the far corner, a couple of girls with them. There was some giggling, but for the most part it was chill.

“But I can’t hear anything in there.” She stopped and crossed her arms across the front of her dress. “So who the hell was that guy?”