Dare You To (Pushing the Limits #2)(60)

I take a deep breath and close the door. I want the bird to find freedom, but I’m not ready to go back to Scott’s. Thanks to my impaired state, I half walk, half trip back to my bed of straw. Damn bird. Why can’t something be easy? “Noah’s girlfriend.”

“That’s a screwed-up name,” he says.

I giggle. “She’s a screwed-up girl.” I stop giggling and remember how Noah looked at her: as if she was the only person on the planet, the only person that mattered. “But Noah loves her.”

That must be love: when everything else in the world could implode and you wouldn’t care as long as you had that one person standing beside you. Isaiah has it all wrong. For many reasons. He doesn’t love me. He can’t. For starters, he doesn’t look at me like Noah does Echo. Besides, I’m not worthy of that type of love.

The bird hides its head under its wing. I understand that feeling of wishing the world would go away. If I had wings, I’d hide underneath them too.

“It’s just a bird, Beth. It’ll find its way out eventually.”

Something deep and dark and heavy inside me tells me it won’t. The poor bird will die in this damn barn and will never see blue sky again.

Straw rustles and Ryan drops beside me, stirring dust into the air. He clumsily rolls onto his side to face me. His warm body touches mine and his eyes have a strange intensity.

“Don’t do that.”

My heart trips over itself. Ryan kept his hat off and I like it more than I should. His hair kicks out crazily in the back and it gives a boyish charm to a face that belongs to a man.

“Do what?” I ask, ashamed that my voice comes out a little breathless.

His eyebrows inch closer together and he moves his hand near my face. He stops and so does my breathing. Ryan stares at my lips and then caresses my cheek.

“You do that a lot.” His finger slides steadily to the tip of my mouth. My skin tingles under his touch. “Look sad. I hate it. Your mouth turns down. Your cheeks lose all color. You lose everything about you that makes you…you.”

I lick my lips and I swear he watches. His finger pauses before tracing another teasing path across my cheek. My pulse quickens and heat spreads through my body. His touch—oh God—feels good. And I want good.

So much.

But I don’t want him. At least, I don’t think so. “Are you stalking me?”

His lips burst into a bright smile and he withdraws his hand. “Welcome back.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Ryan does it again—his smile. The one that makes my stomach flip.

“I like you,” he says.

I raise an eyebrow. He must have snorted some crack earlier, or maybe he’s doing that steroid crap. What do they call it? Juicing.

Yeah. The kid is definitely juicing. And drunk.

“You like me?”

He shakes his head and it’s a strange clumsy mix of yes and no at the same time. Ryan is sloshed. “I don’t know. The way you talk. The way you act. I know what I’m going to get from you, but then I don’t. I mean, you’re unpredictable, yet I know whatever reaction you’re going to give me is real, you know?”

Officially cutting him off, I slide the few remaining beers from him and conceal them in the hay while trying to keep his eyes on me.

His declaration of “like” has placed him in the category of beyond intoxicated and there’s no way I can lug him home. “You mean you like knowing that our conversations will end with me telling you to go f**k yourself?”

He laughs. “Exactly.”

“You’re weird.”

“So are you.”

He has me there.

“Is there anything you don’t pierce?” Ryan stares at my belly button. My shirt must have ridden up, exposing the red jewel dangling on my stomach. On my sixteenth birthday, Isaiah paid for my belly button piercing. At seventeen he paid for the tattoo. Both times he came up with the “consent.” Isaiah is crafty like that.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Ryan’s eyes flash to mine and I see he understands the innuendo. I laugh when his cheeks turn red. “What are you, Ryan?”

“Did you just ask what I am?”

I nod. “Why would a jock be holed up with me in a barn, drinking beer, when he could be screwing half the female population at school? You aren’t fitting the profile.”

His eyes search my face and he ignores my question. “What’s your tattoo mean?”

“It’s a reminder.” It means freedom.

Something I’ll never have. My destiny was built for me before I sucked in my first breath.

“You’re doing it again,” says Ryan. And he touches me again. This time on my stomach, yet his eyes hold mine. His finger lightly explores the edges of the jeweled ring. Tickling me. Entrancing me. Taking my haze higher.

And that’s exactly where I want to go—higher.

“What would you say, Ryan, if I said I didn’t want to be alone?”

His fingers slip to my side and his warm palm clings to the curve of my waist, inching me and my body slowly toward heaven. “I’d say I don’t want to be alone either.”

Ryan

THE LANTERN LIGHT FLICKERS, creating shadows over Beth’s face. There’s no mistaking the suggestion in her smoky-blue eyes or the invitation of her fingertips as they trace the curve of my biceps. With her black hair sprawled out against the golden hay, she reminds me of a modern-day version of Snow White—lips as red as roses, skin as white as snow.