Come to Me Quietly(95)

It wasn’t as if Aly really thought badly of them. Most of them were her friends. She just didn’t understand the shift, the distraction from one boy to the next in the matter of seconds, the fleeting attraction that never lasted. Because the only boy she’d ever wanted had been one and the same. She forced out a ragged breath from her lungs and tried to blink away the pounding in her head.

Aly froze when Jared suddenly lifted his face and caught her eye as she stared at him openmouthed through the sliver in the door.

He kicked Christopher on the sole of his shoe to get his attention. “Shh… ,” he hissed in warning. He announced her presence to Christopher with a gesture of his chin. “Your little sister is right there.”



She stepped back, shaking, hating that she’d managed to make herself the fool.

“Aly?” her mom called from the living room.

She hurried to the end of the hall before she allowed herself to speak. “I’m right here.”



Her mom both smiled and frowned. “I thought you were running to your room to get the picture? Helene is dying to see your first-place winner.”



Jared’s mom, Helene, twisted around her seat, smiling at Aly from across the room. “I knew you’d do it, Aly, baby.” Her blue eyes shone with warm affection, her long natural blond hair pulled to one side and flowing down her slender shoulder. “I’ve never seen anyone who can draw like you… ever since you were just a tiny thing… always drawing.” She smiled knowingly at Aly’s mom.

“Let’s see it, sweetheart,” her mom said.

“I couldn’t find it,” Aly lied, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She’d been too busy spying on Christopher and Jared. “Let me look a little more.”



Aly rushed to her room, slammed the door shut behind her, and rested her back against it as she fought against the tears.

Jared’d had sex with some girl and she’d never so much as held a boy’s hand.

She’d been waiting for him.

Anger pulled at the knots in her stomach, knitting them tighter. She stomped across her room, knew she was acting like a baby, like one of those stupid girls at school with a stupid crush and even stupider tears, but she couldn’t stop them. They flooded down her face. She just wanted to curl up in her bed and die.

Instead she jerked up the hem of her shirt and used it to harshly dry her eyes.

He’d promised her he’d never leave her behind.

But he did.

“Stop it. Just stop it,” she scolded herself below her breath, drawing air into her tight lungs. “Stop being dumb, Aly. He’s almost sixteen.”



What did she expect? That he would actually want her?

She had to pull it together, forget about this, shove it aside.

She dropped to her knees and dragged the portfolio from under her bed, retrieving the large charcoal drawing that had been awarded first prize. She’d felt proud when they gave her the ribbon, proud when they gave her the check to put into her savings account for college.

It was a landscape, the mountains stretching up to kiss the horizon as the sun sagged behind the mountain, distorted, as if the two were melting into each other.

But this art wasn’t her treasure.

Her treasures were the faces she kept safe, bound up in sketch pads that she’d never show another person.

Now she knew why. She’d been right.

Jared would have laughed.

She swallowed down the humiliation and rushed back down the hall. At the brink of the living room, she slowed, her movements guarded as she made her way to Helene. Jared’s mom was so beautiful… as beautiful as her own… but different, the woman somehow both exotic and plain. Aly wasn’t exactly sure how that could be, but she’d drawn her face so many times she knew it was the truth.