Fall Into Forever

by Beth Hyland

  She shrugs. “I wish you did some kind of social media, Ivy—then maybe I’d know if I was being paranoid or not. Over the break, I stalked him online and…”

  Stalked?

  I’m suddenly boiling hot with this scarf around my neck. I tug on it to make it looser. “What? So I can…stalk…him, too?”

  “I want to know what you think. Maybe I’m being paranoid. I mean, he can be friends with an old girlfriend without wanting to hook up with her again, right? Maybe that’s all it is.”

  “I suppose it’s possible…”

  “But not probable,” she finishes for me. Her shoulders sag.

  I don’t want to go all negative on her and agree, but I think she’s right. Why else would Will not want to talk to her during the break? Before I can reply, a string of obscenities erupts from inside the house, followed by a few loud grunts. Sounds like an argument has just gotten physical.

  The two people at the sign-in table jump up in unison. “What the hell?” the guy says, stomping toward the door. “If it’s one of those high school kids, I’m going to be so fucking pissed.”

  “They’re letting in local high school kids, but they make us wait outside? That is sooo lame.”

  “Maybe it’s someone’s little brother and his friends,” Cassidy says. “Ryan visited me my freshman year and got so sick at a party that he puked on my neighbor’s bed and passed out in the men’s bathroom. The RA found him in the shower at six in the morning, wearing leopard-print underwear and nothing else.”

  I laugh. “Poor Ryan. What kind of a big sister are you?”

  “He was supposed to be staying in my friend Steve’s room, but he wandered off.”

  The music stops. Now we can really hear the fight. I’m envisioning someone getting slammed up against the wall and furniture being knocked over.

  We press our faces up to the glass next to the front door. It’s frosted and all we can see are a bunch of shapes. But the shapes are—

  Cassidy and I jump out of the way just as two guys come crashing through the door and fall at our feet. Instantly, people from inside and outside the house crowd around us.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” The guy on the bottom is trying to wriggle free. He’s the smaller of the two. Wiry, with long arms and legs, he flails against his opponent, but the guy on top is much stronger.

  From this angle, I can’t see the stronger guy’s face, just his broad back and shoulders. His black T-shirt stretches tightly over tattoo-covered biceps. I wouldn’t be surprised if the shirt had a graphic on the front for an MMA gym, because this guy is definitely tough. None of the smaller guy’s punches seem to be having much of an effect on him.

  Grabbing fistfuls of the skinny guy’s shirt, the stronger guy hauls him to his feet. Dark hair hangs over his forehead, obscuring his face. He reminds me of a wild animal, ready to rip out this guy’s throat. I seriously wouldn’t be surprised if he let out a growl right now.

  “Oh my God,” a girl behind me whispers. “That’s Jon Priestly.”

  “Which one?” her friend asks. “I’ve never actually seen him in person before.”

  “The hot one, silly. The one beating up that other guy.”

  Jon Priestly? I take a closer look. He’s obviously someone well known at PSU, but I’ve never seen or heard of him. Maybe he’s one of the football players. He definitely looks like one. Unlike the tiny college I transferred from, which was basically an extension of high school, playing at a Division One school like PSU is a big deal. Many of the players go on to play professionally.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” the guy named Jon is saying.

  “But it’s not my fault. Brick said—”

  “I don’t want to hear your lame-ass excuse, Chris. You’re done.” He points toward the road. “Out.”

  I have no idea what this Chris guy did, but since he’s the weaker of the two, I can’t help but feel sorry for him. I’ve seen anger like this before and believe me, it’s not fun being on the receiving end. In fact, it’s terrifying. I clasp my hands together to keep them from trembling. I’m so close to what’s going on it’s like I’m a part of the action with the anger directed at me.

  My head throbs as bits and pieces of another fight flash in my head.

  No. Don’t go there. You can’t.

  I rub my temple, aware that I need to shut it down quickly, otherwise I’ll end up with a debilitating migraine—one that could last for days. Not good at the beginning of the new quarter. The medication I take does help, but I only have one or two pills left.

  “Ivy, are you okay?” Cassidy whispers, her eyes wide. She’s looking at me like I’m the one who just got beaten up. My face must be ash white.

  “I’m fine,” I mutter. With the crowd pressing in around us, it’s not like I can easily turn around and leave, anyway. I continue watching, even though I don’t want to. When you mix alcohol and male egos together, the resulting cocktail is often a bloody and violent fight.

  Chris adjusts his baseball cap, angling it backward. “God, you are so fucking uptight, Priestly. I said I’d get it.”

  “You’re too late. Your promises don’t mean shit anymore.” Jon’s tone is knife-edge sharp. I wouldn’t want to cross him.

  “That’s not true,” Chris is saying. “I—”

  Jon jabs a finger at him like a weapon. Chris jumps backward, just out of reach. Scratch what I said about him looking weak. The guy is small, but he’s wiry and quick. The fight isn’t as one-sided as I thought.

  “You owe a bunch of money,” Jon says. “And the fact that you didn’t pay when you said you would has caused a lot of problems. Problems that someone like you couldn’t begin to understand.”

  “Seriously? You need to relax. It’s not like you can go to the Bahamas on three hundred bucks. Besides, I never said I wasn’t going to pay. I said I was good for it and I am. But it’s going to have to wait till next week, when my dad puts money into my—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Jon holds up his hands. “You’re using your daddy’s money to buy weed? Does he know he’s funding your extra-curricular activities?” He’s looking at Chris like I look at someone who’s hawked up a loogie on the sidewalk.

  Cassidy and I exchange glances. So this fight is about weed. Jon sells it and Chris buys it. Neither of us smokes weed, but we’ve both tried it—a fact I learned about her on the second day we met, along with a bunch of other details that usually take weeks for strangers to share with each other. Like the number of guys she’s slept with (five). She’s lactose intolerant and gets diarrhea if she eats dairy. Also, her mother made her get one of those under-the-skin birth control implants right before she left for college because, in her mom’s words, “College is one big sex-fest.” We had a good laugh about that.

  “Who cares where I get the cash? Am I right?” With a cocky expression, Chris looks around at everyone, flapping his arms like a football player trying to incite the crowd for the next play. I can’t tell if anyone is agreeing with him or not. He turns back to Jon. “I said I’d pay and I will. Money is money.”

  Jon shakes his head, his eyes flashing with anger. His whole body is tense and flexed, his hands balled into fists. A few black leather bracelets are stacked around one wrist. Either that, or it’s one long cord that he’s wrapped around and around. I tear my gaze away. I have a thing for guys who wear man-jewelry, but I definitely don’t want to be jonesing for this one.

  “You’re even more pathetic than I thought,” Jon says through clenched teeth.

  “You need to chill. What’s one more week? The bitch is loaded.”

  Jon’s punch is lightning fast. It hits the guy in the face and knocks him into the porch column next to me. I try to jump away, but the sea of people is as solid as a brick wall. Blood splatters, making a fan pattern on my cute white jacket. A few people in the crowd scream, including me.

  Jon glances up, and for a split second, his gaze locks on mine. Suddenly, I can’t breathe. I couldn’t speak if I wanted to
. All the oxygen has evaporated from the surrounding air as well as from inside my lungs. It’s like I’m the one who’s had the wind knocked out of me, not his opponent.

  I’ve never seen eyes like his before. So vibrant. So stunning. You’d expect someone with hair as dark as his to have the dark eyes to match, but his are a pale, crystal blue. Like cut glass lit from within. And right now, they’re icy shards, freezing me in place.

  It takes me a moment to catch my breath, for the blood to flow into my fingers and toes again. By that time, his attention is back on the guy he just hit.

  Chris touches his mouth and nose. His hand comes away covered in blood. “What the fuck, Priestly? You broke my nose.”

  “Actions have consequences,” Jon says. “That’s one of them.”

  “I can’t believe you actually broke my nose.”

  The way he says it makes me wonder if they hang out or might have been friends at one time. Guys are weird. They can be best friends one minute, then beat the crap out of each other the next.

  Gingerly touching his nose, Chris mumbles under his breath, “You’re such a fucking loser.”

  Jon lunges forward again and grabs him. The crowd parts as he drags him down the steps like a rag doll. Away from me. I can finally breathe again.

  Once they’re out on the lawn, he gives the guy a hard shove. “You promised to pay, dickwad. Or didn’t your daddy teach you that? Stella’s not running a charity. Now, get the fuck out of here before I break something else.”

  A low murmur runs through the crowd. “Stella?”

  “Who’s Stella?”

  “Is that his girlfriend?”

  “I don’t think he has a girlfriend.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “No, he dumped her.”

  Chris lobs a few more parting insults, but when Jon starts after him again, he storms across the lawn with as much swagger as he can muster. He jumps into a shiny black Beemer parked halfway down the driveway and floors it. Gravel sprays in a wide arc, hitting a few nearby cars. I’m glad I parked around the block. Even though I have a POS car, I’d have been pissed if it got pelted with rocks.

  Jon rubs his bloody knuckles as he turns back to the house. “Party on,” he says, and everyone laughs.

  The music returns, and people are laughing as they line up again to get inside. It’s like the fight we witnessed was just a blip—a rock breaking the surface of the water, making a momentary ripple. I wonder if stuff like this happens all the time at the White House. No wonder the place has a reputation.

  Jon stops to talk to a group of girls standing at the foot of the porch steps, their faces turned up to him like he’s some sort of rock star. Yeah, he must be on the football team.

  “Are you okay, Ives?” Cassidy repeats her earlier question. “And your jacket. Ugh.”

  I plaster on a smile and try to sound lighthearted. “Well, that was interesting. Does that happen often?” I take off my blood-splattered jacket and hold it by the loop in the collar. “I’m fine. But I don’t think this is.”

  “Yeah, that sucks,” the girl behind her says. “I hope it comes out.”

  Cassidy agrees. “Maybe we can dab it with water once we get inside.”

  It’s a two-hundred-dollar North Face jacket that I bought at Nordstrom Rack for seventy-five bucks of my own money. It’s really cute. Slim, like a shell, not bulky but very warm. I’ll be pissed if it’s ruined. “That’s what I get for wearing white, I guess.”

  It pains me to say that. Growing up, my mom never let me wear anything white, saying it stained too easily and that I was too messy. Even in high school, she bitched about me buying anything completely white. Seriously, white shorts are the cutest, but no, I didn’t have a pair. So when I first went to college, I went on a white shopping binge. Skirts, shorts, jeans, tops.

  I’ll probably need to call her for stain removal advice. I’ll tell her I got a bloody nose or something, which wouldn’t be that much of a stretch. After the accident, I was getting them once a week or so. Then again, I don’t want her worrying about me. That would be worse.

  Jon’s coming up the steps now, all five girls in tow, one hanging off each arm. They’re each wearing matching pink T-shirts that say something about…church? Okay, that’s weird. Must be a sorority joke. Moving aside to let his entourage pass, I lean back against the porch pillar as Cassidy talks animatedly to that girl. As soon as she’s done, I’m going to tell her I want to go. I can feel the beginning of a headache starting to form at the base of my skull already.

  Cassidy stops in midsentence and stares just over my shoulder. Something strong closes around my upper arm and pulls me around. However, instead of swiveling, the heel of my shoe slips on the wet porch floorboards. As if in slow motion, I’m falling headlong into a hard male body, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I hit that muscular chest with an umph and slide cheek-first down the black T-shirt, stopping literally inches from his belt.

  And the bulge below it.

  Oh my God. I am so freaking embarrassed right now.

  “Whoa there, sweetheart.” Long-fingered hands cup my elbows and set me back on my feet. “You okay?” Jon’s voice is soft and tinged with amusement, but not cruel. Totally different from when he was talking to Chris.

  “I’m…uh…fine.”

  A clean scent, faintly spicy, fills my nostrils and lungs, invading my body, and courses through my veins like an illegal substance. He doesn’t loosen his grip or step away, and although my teal top has long sleeves, my skin burns where his hands are touching me. He steals away my breath, my energy, my very essence.

  Without blinking, he holds me at arm’s length and lets his gaze travel slowly over my body. Every inch of me tingles. And I mean every inch. My toes. The backs of my knees. Between my legs. My belly. My ears. My scalp. All my senses are on complete overload and for a split second I feel myself teetering. If he wasn’t holding onto me, I’d have to place a hand on the pillar to steady myself to keep from falling again.

  He’s a good six or seven inches taller than I am, which is impressive, since I’m five foot eight. I’m used to looking guys straight on, or at least almost straight in the eye, so it’s a weird sensation for me to crank my head up like this. He’s got black gauges in his earlobes the size of a medium-tipped Sharpie. A bruise is starting to form under his left eye. Guess he took a few blows after all.

  I should say something to fill the awkward silence between us, but nothing that’s not completely stupid comes to mind. Nice right hook or Good fight don’t seem appropriate.

  His expression darkens, and I’m filled with a sense of unease again. It takes me a minute to realize he’s looking at the bloody jacket I’m holding and not me.

  His female entourage has had enough of this interruption and tries to pull him away, but he shrugs them off. “Go inside,” he tells them without turning around. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  One of them protests, “But—”

  “Go.”

  None of them look too happy, but they do as they’re told. I’m struck by the fact that I was a lot like them just a short time ago—doing what a guy wanted me to do even if it wasn’t what I wanted. This break in focus snaps me out of la-la land and I regain some of my lost composure.

  They file past us into the house, and each of them gives me the once-over. I want to tell them, “He’s all yours, ladies. Don’t know him. Don’t want to know him.” Instead, I straighten my spine and try to ignore my body’s insane physical reactions to this complete stranger. I can’t let a guy like him affect me this way. Not only does Jon Priestly sell drugs, he’s also got a violent temper. If I were in the market for a boyfriend right now, which I’m not, I’d pick a smart, sweet, law-abiding guy any day of the week.

  “Your coat,” he says, frowning.

  I shrug, pretending it’s no big deal. Part of me is afraid of him, but the rest of me is utterly fascinated. Who is this guy? He’s wild, almost primitive. And I’m too weak to resist
. If he pushed me up against this pillar and kissed me right now, I might—just might—be stupid enough to kiss him back.

  Geez, Ivy, you’re better than this. You’re not that stupid. Not anymore.

  My inner voice is right. Why am I attracted to boys who aren’t good for me? I’m so disappointed in myself, I can hardly stand it. You’d think that after what I’ve been through, I’d be smarter than this. Obviously not. If I could slap my face right now, I totally would. No more guys with tempers. No more guys with cocky attitudes who think they’re the shit.

  “Come inside. You can clean up there.” He makes a move toward the front door, assuming I’m going to follow him inside like an eager puppy.

  Well, you know what? He’s wrong. I’m not interested in how he’s going to help me. I may be a fool, but I’m not stupid. Any hesitation on my part, any little opening, and bam, a guy like him will force his way in. And I don’t need that.

  “No. That’s okay. I’ll wash it when I get home.”

  Some girls may find a guy like Jon exciting and charming. Some are even naive enough to want to date them. But guys like him can harbor dark, dangerous secrets. Secrets you don’t want to know or be involved in. How do you think they got this way in the first place? It’s best to follow your head and stay as far away from them as possible.

  Trust me when I say this: Guys like Jon Priestly are nothing but trouble.

  chapter two

  There was a dawn I remember when my soul heard something from your soul.

  ~ Rumi

  Jon

  I’m sitting on the edge of the bed when Tina comes out of my bathroom, wearing only her bra and underwear. A few minutes ago, she cornered me on the stairs as I was heading up to my room to chill out, and, well, I’m not a saint. The party is still rocking, but I’ve got to be at work in about an hour, so it’s not like I can hang around and drink, anyway. I don’t know about you, but being the only sober guy in a house full of drunk-ass college students isn’t my idea of fun.

  Tina tosses her things on my desk chair. “I’m so glad I ran into you. It’s been waay too long since we hooked up. I need my JP fix.”