One Day Soon (One Day Soon, #1)(23)

But Yoss was always there.

Fourteen days. That’s how long it took to decide he was what I wanted. The only thing I needed.

I had dated guys before. I had kissed. I had groped. I had once let a guy put his hands down my pants. I had lusted. I had desired.

But I had never felt this out of control thing that now resided in the center of my chest.

Sure, part of it was because Yossarian Frazier was beautiful. When he smiled, my heart galloped at full speed and when he touched me I tingled everywhere.

The attraction I felt for him was intense. Overwhelming. But it was more than that.

It was something else. Something deeper. Something I had never known or felt.

I couldn’t be positive he felt the same way. Sometimes I thought he did. I would catch him looking at me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. He would roll onto his side after the sun had set and I felt his eyes on me, heavy and protective.

But he never pushed for anything from me. His touches were casual. Warm but not necessarily romantic.

Even though I was runaway with no real place to call home, I still obsessed about normal teenage girl things.

And whether the object of my affection felt the same way was pretty high on the list of things to fixate about.

When I wasn’t thinking about Yoss and whether he liked me as I liked him, I was doing whatever I could to endure in a world that at times felt like it would drown me. Yoss, however, seemed comfortable navigating the scary waters of life on the streets. Because of him, I was safe.

I was surviving.

We spent our days under the bridge or down at The Pavilion, which was a fancy name for a falling down barn by the river and was a popular swimming spot for the local kids. We found food in dumpsters; we scavenged for change in phone booths. I watched Yoss, Shane, and Di skateboard on makeshift ramps at the abandoned car lot outside The Pit.

At night, Yoss made sure I was warm and dry and as comfortable as possible in his tiny hideaway. He let me read his books and listen to CDs on his old stereo that he had found at the landfill. I’d fall asleep to the sound of him humming song after song in the dark.

He kept me fed.

He found me an old pair of jeans to replace the less than practical short shorts I had left the house in.

He took me to the local library where I used the bathroom to wash up as best as I could with stolen toothpaste and toothbrush Yoss had swiped from a drug store.

He brought me deodorant and brightly colored socks. “So your feet don’t get cold,” he had explained when I had asked what I needed with red and yellow striped socks.

We learned a hundred tiny, insignificant details about each other. We discovered that we shared a mutual love for old 50s and 60s family films. Freaky Friday—the Jodi Foster version of course—and Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang being particular favorites. We both had dreams of living at the beach, neither of us having ever been to the ocean.

Was it any wonder I started to fall so hard and so fast?

His personality was infectious. People flocked to him in droves. Within the homeless teen community that banded together underneath the bridge, he was the unquestionable leader. The other kids deferred to him in all things. He seemed to always have the answers. He knew the best places to get leftover food. He was always finding random stuff to give away to his friends. Blankets. Clothes. A battery operated radio, an old pair of sneakers.

But for as much I was learning about my protector, my friend, I quickly figured out that there was a lot that I still didn’t know. Things he kept from me.

And one night, two weeks after starting my new life, I found out how horrible Yoss’s secrets were.

It had been a great day. We had spent the afternoon at The Pavilion and afterwards when we had returned to The Pit, Yoss gave me a fuzzy, purple heart-shaped pillow. It smelled like the bottom of a trashcan, but I didn’t care. Because Yoss had found it, just for me.

I hugged it to my chest. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. It’s not much, but I saw it and thought of you,” Yoss said a little shyly.

“How do you know where to get all this stuff?” I asked him as we changed into spare clothes and laid our wet ones out to dry.

“When you’ve been around as long as I have, you know all the secrets.” He smirked.

Something about his statement bothered me. I ran my hand over the soft material of the pillow and watched him as he rearranged the stuff in our corner of The Pit. He had recently added an old bowling trophy and a watch with a cracked face to the clutter. He hoarded things he found, piling them up on the floor beside our makeshift bed. He never got rid of anything. He held onto broken things. Junk. It didn’t matter to him. They were his. And that’s what was important.

“How long have you been homeless, Yoss?” I asked him softly.

I expected him to get defensive, to tense up. But he did neither. Instead he shrugged and tossed me a bag of unopened Hershey’s kisses. “Since I was twelve,” he answered and my hand went to my mouth in shock.

“You’ve been living out here for six years? Oh my god, Yoss, that’s awful!” I knew how much he hated sympathy, but I couldn’t help it. I tried to picture a little boy with Yoss’s dark hair and green eyes, curling up in this dark, dirty corner, scared and alone.

Yoss came and sat down beside me and nudged my foot with his. “Hey, don’t you dare do that,” he warned.