Because of Him

by Jessica Roe

  * * * *

  Because of Him

  Copyright © 2014 Jessica Roe

  Cover Art by Mayhem Cover Creations

  Formatting by JT Formatting

  Smashwords Edition

  ISBN:

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

  .

  For the readers,

  Because every one of you is awesome.

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Because of Him Track List

  Acknowledgements

  Come Find Me

  Undone

  THERE'S NOTHING QUITE like the open road. With the car roof down, the sun shining, the wind whipping through my hair and Neon Trees blasting out over the speakers, life should be seriously awesome right about now. Perfect even. And it is, right now. But soon I'll reach my destination and the thought of what's waiting there for me is constantly at the back of my mind, like a sour aftertaste that won't go away.

  But whatever, life is life, right? Because if you sit around thinking about all the bad crap then the world is sure as hell gonna pass you right on by.

  Up ahead I spot a sign for a roadside diner boasting the best pie in town. Obviously I slow down; I'm a girl who loves me some pie. I pull into the surprisingly packed parking lot. This can only mean one thing—they really must have good pie.

  There are no free spaces and I find myself driving around in circles for at least five minutes, feeling pretty stupid, but now even more determined to get that pie. I'm nothing if not stubborn as hell.

  Finally a space opens up ahead but another car, a white Jeep, is already lining up to take it, though they're taking their own sweet time. I know it's in the unwritten rules of polite drivers everywhere that you don't poach a parking space right out from another car, but they really are taking too damn long and I want pie. Also, I've never been all that polite. So I hit it and snatch the space up, narrowly avoiding scraping the edge of my baby against the Jeep.

  Once parked I switch off the engine and turn in my seat. Like I'd expected, the owner of the Jeep—a guy, probably cute underneath the dark shades, though not cute enough to make me feel bad—is still there, glaring at me out of his open window.

  With my tongue between my teeth, I grin and salute.

  He shakes his head at me, pissed, but clearly deciding to be the bigger person here because without saying anything, not even a throwaway curse like most people would, he drives away. Good for him, I guess. Being the bigger person is great and all, but you miss out on a lot of stuff...like parking spaces.

  I hop out of Nancy and pat her on her gorgeous, shiny red hood. I got the old Chevy way, way cheaper than I should have, but she was a total rust bucket when I bought her and the dirty old perv selling had been fixated on my legs the entire time we were doing the exchange. I don't think he even realized what a gem he had and I wasn't about to clue him in. So I, with the help of some guys I met back when I lived in Chicago for a while, fixed Nancy up, and now she's as beautiful as she ever was.

  My muscles burn when I stretch. Aside from the occasional stop to pee I've been on the road from Chicago to Washington County, New York, for over thirteen hours after starting out late last night.

  Inside the diner I pull off my sunglasses. The air is cool in here, a welcome relief from the sweltering August heat outside.

  A young waitress, maybe a couple of years older than me, appears the moment I sit my butt down on a stool by the counter. Her brown hair is braided and her eye shadow is bright blue.

  “Hi there!” she chirps. “My name's Keeley Perkins and I'll be your waitress today! What can I get for you, sweet thing?” Keeley Perkins' name seems super ideal because I'm pretty sure I've never met anyone perkier in my entire seventeen years of life.

  “Two slices of cherry pie...please.” Despite my slip up outside, I really am working on being a nicer person. Sort of.

  “Comin' right up, sugar!” Keeley Perkins the Perky Waitress bounces away and I watch her go with a raised brow. People never give me pet names—not cutesy ones like sugar, anyway. All they see when they look my way is my dark eye liner and my beloved chunky biker boots and the five multi coloured stripes in my long, dark brown hair. I look like trouble and that's exactly what they think of me. I guess it's my own fault for never going out of my way to prove them wrong.

  My order doesn't take long to arrive and I dig right in. The sign was right, the pie really is good here.

  I'm half way through my slice when White Jeep Guy, who must have eventually found a space, strolls in and sits down on the stool next to mine. I don't need to look over at him to know he's watching me, scowling at me.

  “You know you're kind of a jerk, right?” he says finally. He has a nice voice—low, but not too low, and more refined than the guys I usually hang with.

  Without a word I slide the second piece of pie over in his direction with one finger and continue to eat my own. From the corner of my eye I can see him staring down at it.

  “What is this?” he demands, sounding suspicious.

  I look over at him properly for the first time. “It's pie.”

  There's a long pause, and then, “Is it supposed to be an apology?”

  “It's just pie.”

  “Apology pie?”

  “Just eat your damn pie or go away.”

  “I'm not eating it,” he declares, folding his arms and narrowing his eyes at the pie like it's about to sprout sharp teeth and gnaw on his nose. “You've probably done something to it.”

  “Like what?” He's interrupting pie time and it's pissing me off. Usually when I talk to guys they don't argue this much with me. The ones I hang with are either too high to care about anything I'm saying or too horny to want to piss me off. This argumentative guy who distrusts pie is annoying, but...I also kind of like it, I like being challenged. Maybe that's why I keep talking to him.

  “You could've spat in it...or poisoned it!”

  I can tell he doesn't really believe that, th
at he's arguing just for the sake of it, something I often do, but I huff anyway and lean over and scoop out a forkful. I make a big production of chewing and swallowing and then I stick out my clean tongue. “Happy?”

  “Nope.” He picks up his fork. “But I'll eat it anyway. You're still a jerk, even if you did buy me apology pie.”

  “It's just pie,” I reiterate, but I don't think he's even listening any more. He's already away in pie heaven—the best kind of heaven there is.

  I really like pie.

  Unable to help it, I find myself watching him as he eats. He's older than I am, maybe twenty one or twenty two. His dark brown hair curls around his ears and it's cute, very cute. He's cute, but I've never gone for cute guys before. Even cute guys with an adorable smattering of freckles across their nose.

  “Black coffee please?” he requests when Keeley Perkins the Perky Waitress comes by to check on us, snapping me out of my daze.

  “No,” I tell him, frowning. “You can't order coffee.”

  Both he and Keeley look confused. “Why the heck not?”

  “'Cause I want milkshake but I can't decide which flavour to get. So you need to get one and I need to get one so I can try both,” I explain, like he should already understand my logic.

  He rolls his eyes and looks down his perfectly straight nose at me. “You're crazy, you know that right? I'm not ordering for you.”

  “YOU CAN ARGUE all you want, my peanut butter shake was clearly superior,” I declare, flipping my hair over my shoulder defiantly.

  “Wrong,” White Jeep Guy protests. “So wrong. The banana was way better.”

  “The banana sucked!”

  “Well, the peanut butter was lame.”

  “You're lame.” I sound so pre-school, I know, but this guy is bringing it out in me. I've always been the kind of girl who likes to argue, and arguing with him is particularly fun.

  “You are the most annoying girl I've ever met,” he says, shaking his head.

  I grin and waggle my eyebrows up and down. “You still want to kiss me though.”

  He blinks in surprise. “What...I mean...Why would you even...How do...What?”

  “Don't think I haven't seen you staring at my lips.”

  The back of his neck reddens. “You're infuriating, argumentative, bitchy and bossy, but you've still got the most kissable lips I've ever seen,” he admits, sounding exasperated, as if I forced the confession out of him.

  I watch him for a moment, a small smile upon my face. “I got you all figured out, ya know,” I point at him with my straw and a small, stray blob of shake flicks off the end and hits him on his neck and for a moment I'm so, so tempted to lean forward and lick it off. I bet his neck smells really good. But I refrain and he wipes it off with his thumb and playfully smears it onto my bare knee. I slap his hand away with a laugh.

  “I doubt it.”

  “You've got that whole hot, nerdy vibe going on,” I say, ignoring his smug grin when I call him hot. “You're a nice guy, a real good guy. I bet you read poetry for fun and even wear hip little spectacles while you're doing it. You work out a bit, I can tell.” I eye the way his t-shirt clings to his flat chest and his strong looking arms. “But not too much. And you work in an office, wearing restricting suits and ties and you're all repressed and just dying to break out and go wild.”

  He bites on his bottom lip to try and hold in a smile, like he really doesn't want to find me funny but he just can't help it. “You're so wrong.”

  “Sure I am.”

  He swivels in his stool so we're face to face. Over the past thirty minutes we've been slowly inching towards each other, creeping in and pretending like we're not even noticing it's happening, that we're not aware. But I am aware, I'm very aware of him. And now we're so close that our knees, bare because we're both in shorts, are touching. I don't move mine away and neither does he. I like it, I like it a lot.

  “You're not exactly hard to read either,” he says, smirking. I raise an eyebrow as an invitation for him to continue. Unlike the others, I'm actually interested in this guy's opinion of me, though I know none of it will come as a surprise. I know what it is people see when they look at me. “You're sexy and you know it,” he starts, looking right at me with sparkling eyes. “You've got those tiny shorts and all that gorgeous skin showing and that silky, wild hair just begging for someone to run their fingers through it.” His hands clench, as if he's holding himself back from doing just that. “I mean, look at those big eyes, they're gorgeous. You've probably got guys falling at your feet to get your attention. And...what else? You're a bad ass, a punk. I bet you don't take crap from anybody. I can see trouble written all over you.”

  Ah, there's a word I'm familiar with...trouble. Because if you dye your hair unconventionally and wear t-shirts with happy skulls printed on then you must be trouble, right?

  “So...did I get it?” he asks, and I shrug, trying super hard and failing to stop a smile from sneaking through. “Yeah,” he says. “I got it.”

  “You're kind of smug when you think you're right.”

  He laughs at my bitchiness. “You got a lot of fire in you for such a little thing.”

  “I'm not little!” I protest, though I know it's a futile effort.

  “Are you kidding? You're a tiny little midget! What are you, five foot?”

  “Actually I'm five one.” Way to prove him wrong, Blair.

  “Is that why you're so bitchy? 'Cause you've got short man syndrome?”

  I flick his arm and he catches my hand and just grins at me. Just grins.

  SOMEHOW WE END up leaving together—though it's not really a coincidence on either of our parts. Despite annoying the hell out of each other, neither of us is willing to say goodbye just yet.

  I walk him to the Jeep, which is only parked a few spaces down from Nancy, and lean against the door. He stands right in front of me, not a foot away, and I have to crane my neck to look up at him through my sunglasses—not that he's too tall, maybe five nine or ten. His eyes are hidden behind dark shades once more, but his smiling pink lips and his clean shaven jaw are perfectly visible and I like them. Way too much.

  He's watching me again, shaking his head and probably wondering why the hell he's still stood here with me when I've done nothing but piss him off. I can't quite figure it out either, why I'm flirting, why I'm practically begging him for attention like a little kid pulling pigtails on the playground. I don't flirt with good guys, not like him. I spend my time with losers, guys who don't give a crap about life, guys covered in piercings and tats. Not wholesome, squeaky clean looking guys like him. Maybe I hung with those guys because they all lived in the same grotty, run down areas that I did, or maybe I'm just more like my mom than I ever hoped I'd be. But this guy, this argumentative, grumpy, preppy guy in his plain but expensive grey t-shirt and his tan cargo shorts...yeah, this guy is out of my league. Or perhaps I'm out of his. Either way, we're in two entirely different leagues.

  Yet I can't bring myself to walk away.

  Maybe I'm just lonely. Yeah, that's probably it.

  He reaches out and fingers the five multi coloured stripes of hair on the left side of my head—Sapphire Blue, Peacock Green, Bubblegum Pink, Love Heart Red and Sunshine Yellow, according to the labels on the dye bottles, anyway. “They're pretty.”

  I bite my bottom lip at his touch and I can tell, even though his eyes are covered, that he's watching me closely. “You can kiss me if you want,” I tease.

  He snorts and takes a big step back, but I'm not offended. “You do realize you sound insane?”

  “Really? I was trying for charmingly ignorant.”

  “You're crazy. We don't even know each other's names.”

  “We don't need to know.” I push off the car and step right up to him, reaching onto my tiptoes and lowering my voice. “We can just have the hottest, most hate filled, passionate make out of our lives and go our separate ways. Then you'll have something super fun to think about when you're all alone i
n bed at night being repressed and bookish.”

  “Okay, there is no way I'm kissing somebody I don't even like, and I definitely don't like you.”

  I watch him a moment longer, and then shrug one shoulder casually. “'Kay. See you ar-”

  He snags my arm as I go to walk away and pulls me back, walking with me until I hit the side of the Jeep. Before I can even suck in a breath his body is pressed against mine, totally and completely, from chest to knees. Tantalizingly, he slides his fingers up my arms, over my shoulders, and threads them through the hair at the back of my neck. When he kisses me it's slow, thorough. His lips are soft and hard at the same time, and the moan he makes in the back of his throat as I run my nails down his back is sexy as hell. He deepens the kiss and I let him take the lead.

  All those other guys I've been kissing, the punks, the stoners, the troubled musicians...yeah, I've been going after the wrong kind of guy all this time because I had no idea nice guys could kiss like this.

  He pulls back suddenly. “I don't usually do things like this,” he tells me, breathing heavy. “Kiss girls I've only just met, I mean.” Unlike most guys who might feed me something like that as a line, I actually believe him. He seems like the wholesome kind of family man who's never even had a one night stand, who's only ever slept with girls he's been going steady with, who's never made out with a girl he just met in a diner with crazy hair and a bad attitude.

  I reach up and push his shades on top of his head, suddenly desperate to see him. His eyes, sea green and blue, are sparkling with excitement, lust, and a lot of confusion, like he really can't figure out what he's doing. He copies my movements and pushes my own shades up, and then grasps my cheeks and kisses me again, harder, more passionately, as if he's losing control. His tongue slips into my mouth and it tastes like cherry and bananas; it's delicious...he's delicious.

  He fumbles behind me for the car door handle and we laugh into each other's mouths as we move forward so he can open it. His hands grip my waist and he lifts me up. I lie back on the bench seat and wait for him, not giving a crap that we're in the middle of a super busy parking lot and that anybody at all could walk by and see us. He has me in a lusty haze where nothing in the whole world matters except him and his lips.