Rival (The Fall Away Series Book 3)

“Was that your first kiss?” he asks, pulling his head back to look at me. I keep my gaze down and clutch the kitchen counter behind me. This feels wrong. He’s pressing my back into the countertop, and I can’t move. It hurts.

Just look at him, I will myself. Look up, you idiot! Tell him to back off. He doesn’t see you. He’s a user. He makes you feel dirty.

“Come here.” He grabs for my face, and I cringe. “Let me show you how to use that tongue.”

This feels wrong.

“Fallon?” The soft, feathery voice broke through my dream. “Fallon, are you up?”

I heard a knock.

“I’m coming in,” she announced.

I opened my eyes, blinking away the fog of sleep from my brain. I couldn’t move. My head felt separated from my body, and my arms and legs were molded to the bed, as if a ten-ton weight sat on my back. My brain was active, but my body was still sound asleep.

“Fallon,” a voice sang out to me. “I made you poached eggs. Your favorite.”

I smiled, curling my toes and clenching my fists to wake them up. “With toast to dip?” I called from underneath my pillow.

“White toast, because multigrain is for pussies,” Addie deadpanned, and I remembered I’d told her those very same words about four years ago when my mom married Jason Caruthers and we came to live here.

I kicked the covers off my legs and sat up, laughing. “I missed you, girlfriend. You’re one of the only people in the world I don’t want to cut.”

Addie, the housekeeper and someone who’d acted more like a mother to me than my own, was also one of the only people that I didn’t have hang-ups about.

She walked into the room, carefully maneuvering a tray full of all the things I hadn’t eaten in years: poached eggs, croissants, freshly squeezed orange juice, a fruit salad with strawberries, blueberries and yogurt. And real butter!

Okay—so I hadn’t tasted it yet. But if I knew Addie, it was real.

As she set the tray over my legs, I tucked my hair behind my ears and grabbed my glasses off the bedside table.

“I thought you said you were too cool for hipster glasses,” she reminded me.

I dipped a wedge of toast in egg yolk. “Turns out I had a lot of opinions back then. Shit changes, Addie.” I smirked at her happily as I took a bite, salivating more as the warm saltiness of the yolk and butter hit my tongue. “But apparently not your cooking! Damn, girl. I missed this.”

Addie is far from a girl in looks but more so than anyone I know in personality. She’s not only a valuable housekeeper, but she proved to be the lady of the manor that Mr. Caruthers needed. She took care of things the way my mother didn’t. Of course, Addie and Mr. Caruthers weren’t sleeping together. She was a good twenty years older than him. But . . . she took care of everything. The house, the grounds, his social calendar outside of work. She anticipated his needs, and she was the only person he’d never fire. Seriously. She could call him a fuck-up, and he’d just roll his eyes. She made herself invaluable, and because of it, she called the shots in this house.

She also took care of Madoc. That’s why I needed her.

“And I missed you,” she replied, picking up my clothes from the floor.

I cut a piece of egg and put it on my toast. “Come on. Don’t do that. I’m a woman now. I can clean up after myself.”

I hadn’t been paying my own bills, but for all intents and purposes, I’d been taking care of myself completely for two years. My mother had deposited me at boarding school, and my dad didn’t micromanage. When I got sick, I dragged my ass to the doctor. When I needed clothes, I shopped. When it was laundry day, I studied next to the washing machines. No one told me which movies to see, how often to eat vegetables, or when to get my hair trimmed. I took care of it.

“You are a woman. A very beautiful one at that.” She smiled, and I felt a warm hum in my chest. “A few more tattoos, but you took the piercings out, I see. I liked the ones through your septum and lip.”

“Yeah, the school I went to didn’t. You gotta know when to fold ’em and know when to hold ’em.”

I wouldn’t exactly say I was going through a phase the last time Addie had seen me, but I’d definitely loaded up on multiple forms of self-expression. I had had a piercing through my septum—a small ring—and another through the side of my lip and a stud in my tongue. I hadn’t kept any of them, though. St. Joseph’s, my boarding school, didn’t allow “unorthodox” piercings, and they limited you to two in each ear. I also had five in my left ear—my industrial was one piercing, but it took two holes—and I had six in my right ear, counting my tragus, two in my lobe, and three going up the inside ridge of my ear. The school had ordered me to take those out, too.

But when Mom didn’t answer her phone to deal with their complaints, I finally told them to “fuck off.” When they called my dad, he gave them a hefty donation . . . and then told them to fuck off.

“You and Madoc have both grown up so . . .” She trailed off, and I stopped chewing. “I’m sorry,” she finished, looking away from me.

If someone had tried to take my heart right then, they would have needed both hands to hold it. I swallowed the heavy lump of food in my mouth, and took a deep breath.

“Why are you sorry?” I shrugged.

I knew why.

She knew why.

Madoc and I hadn’t been alone in this house after all. Everyone knew what had happened.

“You don’t have to worry,” she assured me, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Like I told you last night. He’s not here, and he won’t be back until your visit is over.”

No.

“You think I have a problem with Madoc, Addie?” I snickered. “Madoc and I are fine. I’m fine. We took our idiotic rivalry too far, but we were kids. I want to move on.” I kept my tone light, and my shoulders relaxed. Nothing in my body language was going to give me away.

“Well, Jason thinks it’s unsafe. He says you’re welcome to stay for as long as you like, though. Madoc won’t be here.”

This was why I needed Addie. I could talk her into getting Madoc home. I just couldn’t be too obvious about it.

“I’ll only be here for a week or so.” I took a sip of my juice and set it back down. “I’m going to Northwestern in the fall, but I’ll be staying with my dad in the city for the rest of the summer until school starts. Just wanted to visit before I start the next phase.”

She looked at me the way moms on TV looked at their daughters. The kind of look that makes you feel like you’ve got a thing or two to learn, because honey, you’re just a kid, and I’m smarter.

“You wanted to face him.” She nodded, her blue eyes locked with mine. “To resolve things.”

Resolve things? No. Face him? Yes.

“It’s cool.” I pushed the tray down the bed and climbed off. “I’m going for a run. Do they still keep that trail trimmed around the quarry?”

“As far as I know.”

I walked across the newly decorated room to the walk-in closet where I’d thrown my duffel bag yesterday when I got here.

“Fallon? Do you usually sleep in your underwear and a T-shirt too short to cover your ass?” Addie asked with a laugh in her voice.

“Yeah, why?”

I heard nothing for a few seconds as I bent over to get my bag. “Good thing Madoc’s not here after all then,” she mumbled in an amused tone and left me alone.

I got dressed, looking around my bedroom in the light of day. My old room with new décor.

When I’d gotten in yesterday, Addie had walked me up to my room, but the interior was very different than the way I’d left it. My skating posters were gone, my furniture had been replaced, and my red walls were now a cream color.

Cream? Yeah, gag.

I’d had a whole wall lined with bumper stickers. It now featured some impersonal mass-produced photographs of the Eiffel Tower and French cobblestone streets.

My bedding was a light pink, and my dressers and bed were now white.

My graphing table with my drawings, my shelves with my Lego robots, and my DVDs and CDs were gone. I can’t say I thought about any of that shit over the last two years, but I felt like I wanted to cry as soon as I entered the room yesterday. Maybe it was that I’d assumed they’d still be here, or maybe I was thrown off that my entire life could be thrown away so easily.

“Your mom redecorated shortly after you left,” Addie had explained.

Of course she did.

I allowed myself about two seconds to lament all of the hours I’d spent skating on boards that were now in a trash dump and building with precious Legos that were now rotting in the dirt somewhere.

And then I swallowed the ache in my throat and moved on. Screw it.

My room now was mature and even a little sexy. I still liked boys’ clothes and wild forms of expression, but my mom didn’t suck at decorating. There were no floral motifs anywhere, and the room was designed for a grown-up. The soft pink tones of the bedding and draperies, the innocence of the romantic furniture, and the black-and-white photographs in vivid frames made me feel like a woman.

I kind of liked it.

And I still kind of wanted to kill her for throwing away all of my stuff, too.

•   •   •

The best part about my mom marrying Jason Caruthers was that his house sat in the Seven Hills Valley, a huge gated community—if you considered it a “community” when your nearest neighbor was a half mile down the road in either direction.

Rich shits liked their country houses, their space, and their trophy wives. Even if they used none of them. When I thought of my stepfather, Richard Gere in Pretty Woman always came to mind. You know the dude who reserves the penthouse suite but can’t stand heights, so why the fuck did he reserve the penthouse suite?

Anyway, that was Jason Caruthers. He bought houses he didn’t live in, cars he didn’t use, and he married women he didn’t live with. Why?

I asked myself that all the time. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he was looking for something that he never seemed to find.

Or maybe he was just a rich shit.

To be fair, my mom was the same. Patricia Fallon married my father, Ciaran Pierce, eighteen years ago. Two days later, I was born. Four years later, they divorced, and my mother took me—her meal ticket—on all of her gold-digging adventures. She married an entrepreneur who lost his business and a police captain whose work turned out not to be glamorous enough for my mother.

But through him, she met her present husband and in him my mother found exactly what she was looking for: money and prestige.

Sure, my father had it, too. In certain circles. I had never truly wanted for anything. But my father lived outside of the law—far outside of the law—and to protect his family, he kept us hidden and quiet. Not really the glamorous life my mother was looking for.

But despite her selfish decisions, I liked where she ended up. I liked it here. I always had.

The estates all sat tucked away beyond large driveways and dense little neighborhoods of trees. I had loved running—or even walking—along the quiet, secluded roads, but what I anticipated more now was the way the community connected into the Mines of Spain recreational area that featured narrow woodsy trails and deep quarries. The sandstone all around, the greenery, and the perfect blue sky overhead made this the ideal place to get lost.

Sweat poured down my neck as I pounded the shit out of the dirt under my feet. Tool’s “Schism” played through my earbuds while I zoned out on the trail, and I had to remind myself to keep my eyes up. My father hated that I ran alone. He hated that I ran in quiet, unpopulated areas. I could hear his voice in my head: Keep your head up and protection on you!

He had ordered a crap-load of running shorts with gun holsters attached to the back, but I refused to wear them. If he wanted me to attract less attention, that was the wrong way to go about it.

If you run in your underwear, someone will get the wrong idea, he’d said. And then I have to hurt people. You know I like to do that as little as possible.

I didn’t run in my underwear. But some spandex running shorts and a sports bra? Fuck it, it was hot.

So we had compromised. He had a bracelet designed that featured a small pocket knife and some pepper spray. It looked like some sick, twisted charm bracelet, but it made him feel better to know I wore it whenever I went out running.

Scanning the trail ahead of me—because I listen to my daddy—I noticed a young woman, about my age, standing between the trail and the pond, looking out over the water. I saw her lips were turned down, and she sniffled. That’s when I noticed the shake to her chin. Slowing to a walk, I took a quick inventory. She was dressed like me, running shorts and sports bra, and from what I could see, she wasn’t hurt. There were no other runners or hikers. She just stood there, eyes narrowed, watching the soft ripple on the water.

“Nice tunes,” I yelled over the noise from the iPod strapped to her arm.

She jerked her head toward me and immediately wiped the corner of her eye. “What?” She pulled out her ear buds.

“I said ‘nice tunes,’” I repeated, hearing Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City” spitting out of her ear buds.

She choked out a laugh, her flushed face brightening a little. “I love the oldies.” She reached out her hand. “Hi, I’m Tate.”

“Fallon.” I reached out and shook her hand.

She nodded and looked away, trying to covertly wipe away the rest of the tears.

Tate. Wait . . . blond hair, long legs, big boobs . . .

“You’re Tatum Brandt,” I remembered. “Shelburne High?”

“Yeah.” She draped the cord to her ear buds around her neck. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I remember you.”

“It’s okay. I left at the end of sophomore year.”

“Oh, where’d you go?” She looked me straight in the eye as we spoke.

“Boarding school out east.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Boarding school? How was that?”

“Catholic. Very Catholic.”

She shook her head and smiled as if she couldn’t believe what I’d told her. Or maybe she thought it was ludicrous. Didn’t people ship their unwanted kids off in her world? No? Weird.

The wind blew through the trail, causing the leaves to rustle, and the breeze was a welcome comfort to my hot and wet skin.

“So are you just back for the summer before college or for good?” she asked, sitting down on the ground and looking up at me. I took that as an invitation and sat down, too.

“Just a week or so. I’m heading to Chicago for school. You?”

She looked down, losing her smile. “I was supposed to go to Columbia. Not now, though.”

“Why?”

Columbia was a great school. I would’ve applied, but my father didn’t want me so close to Boston. The farther away from him the safer, he’d said.

“My dad is having some . . . issues.” I could see her damp lashes as she leaned back on her hands and continued to study the pond in front of us. “For a long time, apparently. I think it’s best to stick close to home.”

“It must be hard to give up Columbia,” I offered.

She stuck her bottom lip out and shook her head. “Nope. I didn’t think twice about it, actually. When someone you love needs you, you suck it up. I’m just upset that he didn’t tell me. He’s had two heart attacks, and I only found out through hospital bills I wasn’t supposed to see.”

She acted like it wasn’t even a choice. Like it was so easy. My dad is sick. I stay. I was jealous of her resolve.

“Wow, I’m sorry.” She smiled and sat up, dusting off her hands. “I bet you’re glad you stopped to say hi.”

“It’s okay. Where do you think you’ll go to school now?” I looked over at her and saw that she had a little tattoo on the back of her neck. Down at the curve where it met her shoulder. It wasn’t that big, but I could make out flames bursting out of a black lantern.

“Well, I got into Northwestern,” she offered. “It’s a good option for my degree, and it’s only about an hour from here. The more I think about it, the more excited I get.”

I nodded. “Well, that’s where I’m going.”

She raised her eyebrows, surprised. “Well, well . . . you like old-school GNR, you’re going to Northwestern, you’ve got some nice ink”—she motioned to the Out of Order tattoo I had written behind my ear at my hairline—“and you jog. Tell me you’re into science, and I may have found my hetero soul mate.”

“I’m majoring in Mechanical Engineering,” I singsonged, hoping that was close enough.

She put her fist out to bump me and smiled. “Close enough.”

Her smiles were a lot more frequent than the last time I’d seen her. She must’ve either gotten Thing 1 and Thing 2 to leave her alone, or she’d put them in their place.

“So,” she started, standing up and brushing off her butt. “My friend is having a party tomorrow night. You should come. He has no problem with pretty girls crashing. You may have to forfeit your underwear at the door, but I’ll protect you.”

I stood up, too. “He sounds like a hell-raiser.”

“He tries.” She shrugged, but I could see the proud little smile underneath the gesture. She grabbed my phone out of my hand and punched in some numbers. “Okay, I just called myself. Now you have my number, so text if you’re interested. I’ll shoot you the address and time.”

“Whose party is it?” I asked, taking my phone back.

“It’s at Madoc Caruthers’s house.”

I closed my mouth and swallowed at the mention of his name.

She continued. “He requires that you wear a bikini, but if you kick him in the balls, he’ll shut up.” She hooded her eyes in an apology. “He’s one of my best friends. It just takes some time getting used to him,” she explained.

Best friends? Huh?

My breathing turned shallow. Madoc was supposed to be having a party tomorrow night?

She backed away, getting ready to leave. “See you tomorrow, I hope!”

And then she was gone, while I stood there, shifting my gaze left to right, searching for I-don’t-know-what. Madoc was friends with Tatum Brandt?

How the hell did that happen?

•   •   •

“I like that metal in your mouth. I heard a tongue piercing can be all kinds of fun for things other than kissing.” He grips my hair, breathing into my mouth. “So are you really a bad girl or just playing at one? Show me.”

I’m not sure what woke me up first. The nausea rolling like thunder through my stomach or the high that was flooding my nerves with excitement.

Nausea and excitement. Sickness and thrill. Why did I feel both at the same time?

I knew the queasiness was from the dream.

But the excitement? The thrill?

And that’s when I noticed what had woken me up. The flow of air in the room had changed. It was now filtering out into the hall. My heart beat faster, and my belly tingled with butterflies. I tensed my muscles in response, because the elation flowing through them was too much.

My bedroom door was open!

I snapped my eyes open and bolted upright in bed, my heart lodging in my throat as I tried to take a breath.

A dark figure, much bigger than I remembered, stood in the doorway. I almost screamed, but I clamped my mouth shut and swallowed.

I knew who it was, and I definitely wasn’t scared of him.

“Madoc,” I fumed. “Get out.”