The Girl in the Love Song (Lost Boys #1)(17)

Her brave tone couldn’t mask the fear in her eyes. The agonizing bottom line was that she needed me to be her friend. In the last few years, her family had been on shaky ground, forcing Violet to grab on to any steady thing she could.

Like our friendship. Even if it tears my heart to shreds.

I swallowed hard. Swallowed down everything I’d come to say and sing to her. I even managed a weak-ass smile. For her.

“Yeah, of course we’re okay. I told you. It’s no big deal.” I shouldered my backpack. “I gotta go.”

Violet didn’t protest and that was almost worse.

Her own smile widened tentatively, hopefully. She wiped the tears from her eyes. “See you at school tomorrow. First day of senior year. I think it’ll be our best yet.”

“Yep,” I said, taking up my guitar case and moving toward the window. “See you, Vi.”

“Miller?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

God, she was so beautiful in her pajama shorts and t-shirt, her eyes shining and full of gratitude. Athletic from soccer but rounded with curves, intelligence in her eyes, and a smile that could tear down a guy’s defenses in a heartbeat and leave him naked and raw and wanting…

I smiled with knives in my chest. “Always.”

The bus ride back to my neighborhood felt darker. The bus was emptier, and the streets outside the window were black and deserted. My guitar case sat on my lap, full and heavy. A thousand unheard notes bursting to get out.

She doesn’t love you like that. Get over it.

I mustered every broken piece of my pride, sealed up the cracks in my heart. Lesson learned: loving someone wasn’t enough to keep them. Didn’t work for my dad. Or with Violet.

I didn’t know why I kept expecting anything else.





Chapter Two





I got off the bus a few blocks from home—near the cliffs overlooking the ocean—and nearly tripped coming down the steps. The ground tilted beneath me, and my hands trembled as I clutched my guitar case. The bus hissed and rumbled off into the night, just as my watch sounded the alarm. I peered down at the number. 69 and sinking.

“Shit.”

I sat down hard on the curb and fished around in my backpack for the glucose gummies my doctor had prescribed. Orange juice worked faster, but I wasn’t going to make it the two blocks to my apartment for that, and I’d stupidly forgotten to bring a bottle.

I chewed three gummies and waited for my watch to give me a better number. A few minutes later, it registered a 74 and my limbs felt stronger and less watery. I hauled myself up and trudged along the darkened streets.

Shitty apartment complexes, much like the shitty apartment complex Mom and I lived in, rose up around me: peeling paint, concrete stairs, and rusted metal railings. They all had names like Ocean Front, Beachside, and The Coves, as if they were luxury condos with the ocean for a backyard, instead of rundown housing where the nearest “beach” was a rocky, unforgiving shoreline.

It was after eleven when I climbed up an exterior set of cement steps to 2C at the Lighthouse Apartments. Our new home, after my escapade with Violet’s garden hose. It was a small, two-bedroom, one-bathroom, with a heater that worked only when it felt like it and a shower that had shitty water pressure. Roaches scuttled in and out of cabinets and across counter tops when the light came on.

But it had a shower. A toilet. A sink. It had rooms. It had a stove and even a tiny little patio off the shoebox living area. I had a bed and so did Mom. She cried when we moved in.

I wanted to cry too but reminded myself of the truth: nothing good lasted and everything could be taken away at any second.

Or it could turn to shit at the drop of a hat.

I turned the key into our place and found my mother sitting on the couch when she wasn’t due to be home from her second job at the diner until midnight. Instead of her yellow uniform shirt, she was in sweats, and her dark hair was tied up in a loose ponytail. Her house uniform. I suspected she hadn’t gone to work at all. The yellow light of our shabby floor lamp cast a warm, homey glow over the beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays, and fast food wrappers on the coffee table.

A middle-aged guy I’d never seen before sat next to her. Warily, I shut the door, set my guitar case down.

“Hey,” I said flatly. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“Jesus, Miller,” Mom said with a tired laugh. She was only forty-one—she and Dad had me young—but she looked a decade older and was always tired. “This is Chet Hyland. Chet, this is my son, Miller.”

Chet stared me down from across the small room, a meaty hand holding a beer, resting on the belly of his mostly white wife-beater. I’d stopped thinking of the tank as a “wife-beater” but it fit Chet. Unshaven, dark hair unwashed, and jeans stained with grease or dirt, he watched me with beady eyes. He set off every internal alarm I had; the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

Then a friendly smile burst over his face. “Good to meet you, Miller. Beer?”

“No, thanks.”

My hands were shaking again, and my watch was showing a 70. Still too low. I went to the kitchen, my skin breaking out in a cold sweat.

“You’re home late,” Mom called from the couch.

“I went to Vi’s after work.”

“Miller works at the Boardwalk,” Mom said, and I heard the flick of a lighter and an inhale off a cigarette.