Promise Me Forever (Top Shelf Romance)

by Kate Stewart

  I’ll never forget Jade’s indrawn breath. He’d told me to stay against the wall, to face the wall, but when I heard her gasp, I looked at them. I wasn’t a rule breaker, but I knew this one time, I should break the rule. I should step in when I saw his hand working under her dress, when I saw one tear slide down her face. He had a gun. He was a cop. I didn’t know what to do. Jade just shook her head at me, thinking the same thoughts and holding the same fears. It was only a few moments, but that was all it took to turn the whole world upside down.

  “I don’t know why we never talked about it,” I say to Bristol. “And we never told anyone. Jade didn’t want to. She was ashamed, I think. I know I was.”

  “You were kids and he was in authority.” There’s a world of emotion in Bristol’s eyes when they bore into mine. “That’s awful.”

  I blink away the tears filling my eyes as that day suffocates me again.

  “And some days, I look in the mirror, like just brushing my teeth or whatever, and I’ll say it out loud. I’ll say ‘Don’t touch her.’ Just like that. Just that, and maybe he would have stopped.”

  But there’s no rewind button. There are no do-overs. There’s no delete key that undoes the damage or the guilt or the shame. I’m sorry, but I can’t make it un-happen, and that’s why it’s called regret.

  “Things just kind of changed after that, between me and Jade, I mean,” I say. “I mean we still talk, but …”

  I shrug, giving up on words to articulate my complex relationship with the cousin I still love so much.

  “We all make mistakes and do things we wish we could do differently,” Bristol says softly, drawing my attention to her pretty face in the carnival light. “That’s part of life. You and Jade should talk about it someday. Tell her you’re sorry it happened, and that given the chance, you would have done things differently. We only get one life, but it’s filled with second chances. That’s why I came here to try again with Rhyson.”

  I don’t reply, but we smile, and I want to tell her that I’ve never spoken about this before. I want to tell her how good it felt and that I could talk to her all day. That this wheel could be stuck up in the sky for hours, and I wouldn’t get tired of hearing her talk or watching her listen.

  I look over the side of the car again, wishing I could hurl this shame and hurt down to the ground but knowing I’ll live with it forever. Even though it has faded through the years, it isn’t gone. It won’t ever go away completely, but at least today, for the first time, I shared this load.

  And it feels lighter.

  Chapter Twelve

  Bristol

  I SHOULDN’T HAVE asked that question.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I whisper it, but Grip hears. He’s looking over the side, maybe composing himself. There were tears in his eyes when he talked about his cousin Jade, and that dark, dirty day. When he looks back to me, his eyes are clear of tears but they are still shaded with emotion.

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For asking you …” I lift one shoulder, hoping it conveys things I can’t put into words. “I’m nosy. It gets me in trouble. I ask too many questions, and then I—”

  “I like it.” He cuts in softly.

  My breath swirls around in my chest and furiously circles my heart like a cyclone.

  “You … you like what?” I ask.

  “That you’re curious and ask questions that make me think. That challenge me. People don’t always do that.”

  There’s a disparaging twist to my lips.

  “Because it’s called casual conversation,” I say with a husky laugh. “And I seem to have trouble keeping things casual.”

  With you.

  I don’t say the words aloud, but our eyes exchange them nonetheless.

  “It just means I get to ask a tough question that will gut you.” He delivers the words lightly, but the curiosity in his eyes is real. This will be a gutter.

  “Okay.” I release a longsuffering sigh. “I guess it’s only fair. Hit me with your best shot.”

  “Toughest day of your life.” He twists so his back is against the car and he has a clear view of me.

  “Wow. Just go for it, huh?”

  “Like you didn’t?” He cocks one brow and props his chin in his hand, as if he has all the time in the world to wait.

  “Right.” I laugh nervously. “This is the last question. No more after this.”

  “And I was honest with you, so repay the favor.” He says it easily, but the remnants of emotion on his face remind me it’s true.

  “Toughest day of my life.” I twist a little to face him, too, which is probably good because, if I look over the side, I might start hyperventilating again. “Um, the day Rhyson left.”

  It’s quiet for a moment, and I give him my face to search, not looking down or away. So he’ll know it’s true.

  “Grady had been visiting us for the holidays.” I look down at the anxious tangle of my fingers on the safety bar. “And he took Rhyson with him when he left.”

  Rhyson wasn’t home much, but when he was, I could always find him in one of two places: his rehearsal room or the tree house in our backyard. I ran from room to room. I climbed that tree looking for him, but he was nowhere to be found, and no one had even bothered to tell me.

  “What I remember most is the silence.” I hush my voice like it’s a secret, and maybe it is, because I’ve never told anyone this before. “Rhyson rehearsed constantly when he was home.”

  I laugh, but it costs me a pain in my chest right above my heart.

  “I was such a goofball I would sit out in the hall and listen to him play for hours while I did my homework, painted my nails, or even talked on the phone with my friends.”

  I rest my elbows on the safety bar and prop my chin on the heel of my hand.

  “That was when I felt closest to him. I know that sounds crazy since we weren’t even in the same room when he was playing, but his music was the realest thing about him. And not in a concert hall or in front of an audience. It was most honest, most raw, when he was alone. It was just for him.”

  A sigh trembles across my lips and is absorbed by the cooling night air.

  “And I would pretend it was just for me, too. So when Grady took him away …” I hear my mother’s influence, her anger even in how I phrase that, so I amend. “When Rhyson left, the house was dead. No music, no life. He left without even saying goodbye.”

  Hot tears leak from the corners of my eyes.

  “To me, I mean.” My breath stutters as I struggle to get the words out. “I am his twin, Grip. Somehow I, this unremarkable in every way girl who couldn’t even play a clarinet ‘adequately’, shared a womb, shared the beginning of my life with this genius person, and I feel it so deeply. It’s like I feel his music, I feel him the way twins feel each other.”

  I bite my bottom lip to control its trembling.

  “But he doesn’t feel me.”

  “He does, Bristol.” Grip reaches over to grab my hands, his one hand, which is so much bigger, darker, and rougher than mine, is a comfort. “I know he loves you. He’s just … like you said, a genius. Musicians, sometimes the art takes so much from us and we don’t know how to save enough for the people around us. We pour so much into it, it’s isolating, especially for Rhyson. He was a kid. Dealing with more shit than most adults ever have to. The kind of pressure that had him popping pills just to survive it.”

  I know truth when I hear it, and what Grip says is true. I just stare back at him, giving him permission to go on.

  “Rhyson’s addiction was a destructive path, and your parents weren’t helping. They may not have realized it, but they were only making it worse.” Grip dips his head to catch my eyes as he says the next part. “You said Grady took him, but he saved Rhyson. You know that, right?”

  I do know that. For the first time, I allow the worst-case scenario to play out in my head. If Rhyson hadn’t left, hadn’t gone to rehab, or hadn’t gotten the help he needed, wh
at would have happened? God, I’ve made this all about me. All about how I felt when Rhyson left, not how desperate he must have been to go. All these years, I thought my heart was broken, but only for myself. For the first time, maybe ever, my heart breaks for the gifted, lonely boy who had nothing but his piano.

  I mop my hands over my cheeks, gathering the wetness on my palms. So many tears. I’ve never told anyone how I felt that day. My mother tried to make me go to therapy for that, too, but by then I was sixteen with a strong will of my own and refused. I was tired of talking to strangers, and I wanted to keep this pain locked away, private.

  Until now. Until Grip. His eyes rest on my face. I feel his compassion, and it weighs so much I want out from under it. I turn my head to escape the honesty between us for a few seconds. Just for a reprieve. As soon as I look over the side, I realize my mistake.

  “Oh, God. We’re so high.”

  Breath charges up my throat, panic pushing out the last few minutes of peace. My heart jackhammers. Blood rushes to my head, and the world spins. I grip my head to make it stop.

  “Hey, hey.” Grip scoots closer, eliminating the distance between us. “Put your head down as far as you can.”

  The safety bar keeps me from putting my head between my knees, but I don’t think it would help anyway. Nothing helps. It’s irrational. I know I’m safe, but fear mocks me and makes me its bitch. I hate it, but I can’t stop it.

  “My mom used to tell me to recite things,” Grip says from above me. “Like to distract myself when I was scared. To give me something else to focus on.”

  It only makes me more anxious that I have nothing I can recite. Fear jumbles all my thoughts together, so discombobulated that I can’t even assemble the digits of my phone number.

  “I can’t think of anything.”

  “Okay. Hold up.” He rubs my back in soothing strokes that don’t soothe. “I’ll do it. Just listen to my voice. Focus on what I’m saying.”

  I can’t focus. I can’t stop the encroaching darkness, blurring my edges and knotting my interior. It’s never been this bad, and it would happen right in front of Grip.

  “I’ll recite “Poetry” by Pablo Neruda. My favorite actually.” Grip’s voice is warm but disembodied as I press my eyes closed. “It feels like he was writing my life story. Like he knew there would be this kid who needed something bigger than himself, and he wrote this to guide that kid to a different path. This has always felt like more than a poem. It’s personal. It feels like my prophecy.”

  The emotion, the honesty in his voice compels me to hazard a glance at him. In the faint light of the moon and the bright lights of the carnival, I see his face. Beautiful and bronzed, a sculpture of bold bones and full lips. His eyes are intent, never looking away from mine as he begins.

  His deep voice caresses Neruda’s sentiments of how poetry called him from the street and away from violence. Of how writing saved him from a certain fate and opened up a world he’d never imagined. And Grip’s right. The poem could have been written for him … could have foretold the story of a boy called, not from the streets of a Chilean city, but from the streets of Compton.

  Passion weaves between his words and conviction laces every line. He means these words. He loves these words. Amazingly, as he’s reciting a poem I’ve never heard before, someone else’s words illuminate Grip to me. I see him clearly. A man deeply committed to his craft and who views his gift as a miracle of circumstance. As cocky as he is, I see him humbled by the means to escape a path so many others never leave. And if the poem tells his story, his eyes are a confession, never straying from mine, holding mine in the moonlight, his voice liquid poured over something sweet. As he approaches the end, my fears are forgotten, but I’m still stuck on a Ferris wheel under a darkened sky, and nothing has ever been more fitting than the final words, in which the poet says he wheeled with the stars and his heart broke loose on the wind.

  There are too few perfect moments in this life. Far too few of us get them, but I am privileged to have this one with this man. When he empties his chest of his heart and empties his body of his soul for me under a starry sky on a Ferris wheel. And I know. In this moment, I know that I’m lost to him. It has been a matter of days. It has been a string of moments. It has not been long enough to tell him, but in my heart, I know I am lost.

  “Did that help?” he asks.

  He searches through the dim light for my fear or my panic, but they aren’t there anymore. He leans closer, so close his breath whispers over my face. I don’t know when he realizes that fear has gone and that something else has come, but I see the change in his eyes.

  I think he might be lost in me, too.

  The inches between our lips disappear. At the first brush of his mouth on mine, I know this kiss will never end. It will live on in my memory for the rest of my life. His lips beg entry, a tentative touch that blazes through my defenses and hastens the rhythm of my heart. I clutch his arm, skin and muscle, satin over steel. A thousand textures collide. The hot silk of his mouth. The sharp, straight edge of his teeth. The firm curve of his lips. The taste of him. God, the taste of him makes me moan. He cups my face, fingers spearing into my hair. I press so close the heat of his body burns through the thin fabric of our shirts.

  “Bris.” He says it against my lips before trailing kisses down my chin. His mouth opens over my neck, hot and wet, and I arch into him, the pleasure like a train in my veins. Rushing. Vaulting. Exploding.

  “Oh, God.” I’m a panting mess. My hands venture under his shirt, desperate, nails scraping at his back. “Keep kissing me.”

  He’s back at my lips, devouring, our tongues dueling, dancing. This kiss has a cadence, his head moving to the left and then right, on beat, a syncopation, a simultaneity of lips and tongues. His mouth slants over mine, hot and zealous, and I link my fingers behind his head, clinging, afraid this will end. Afraid to lose the enormity of this moment. At the top of the world, so close we could almost touch the sky and with only the stars watching, I found out what a kiss should be.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Grip

  I’M SO SCREWED.

  I kissed Bristol last night, and nothing’s the same. Our kiss ended once the wheel started turning, but nothing stopped. There’s a momentum to this thing between Bristol and me that I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. We held hands through the Ferris wheel’s slow, rolling descent to the ground. By silent agreement, we let go when we saw the others. I don’t want this examined, mocked, made light, and for now, we want to keep it to ourselves.

  The rest of the night, we stayed with the group, but a quiet, untraceable intimacy linked us. We played silly games and won stupid prizes. She won me a black plastic watch. I won her a whistle. We got lost together in the fun house, and I pressed her against a wavy mirror. Even distorted, our shapes were perfect together.

  I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what she wants or what I am to her. Is she slumming? Am I some exotic fruit or a novelty she sampled on vacation? Or does this feel to her like it feels to me? Like the beginning of something. Mr. Chocolate Charm himself can’t get up the nerve to ask a girl if she really likes him.

  I watch her and Jimmi running on the shore, laughing as the tide chases them. Jimmi’s uncle has a small beach house in Malibu, and we’re spending Bristol’s last day here. Rhyson spent the day with us but got called into the studio for one more tweak. It’s been a perfect day, except I’ve had no time with Bristol alone to ask her what she’s thinking or feeling. She leaves tomorrow, and I don’t know if we’ll forget this ever happened, or if we’ll make it something more.

  “Whew.” Jimmi collapses onto the beach blanket. “This day has been amazing.”

  “It’s gorgeous here,” Bristol smiles and sits beside Jimmi. “Thank you for bringing me.”

  Our eyes collide over the small fire we used to roast marshmallows and s’mores. She looks quickly away and lies down to close her eyes.

  “We need to be heading back,
” Luke says, his arm around Mandi’s shoulders. “One last swim before we go? Not too far out because it’s already dark.”

  “Let’s make it count,” Jimmi says, a reckless glint in her eye. “Skinny dipping.”

  Luke and I are already shaking our heads. No way am I going bare nuts into that freezing water.

  “I’m not going naked into the ocean,” Mandi says. “There’s seaweed and fish and it’s cold. No, thanks.”

  “What about you?” Jimmi nudges Bristol, who still lies back, eyes closed. “You chicken?”

  “Those mind games don’t work on me.” Bristol sits up, a defiant smile curling the edges of her full lips. “Do you honestly think I’d let you goad me into such a stupid dare?”

  They look at each other, exchanging wicked grins and then scrambling to their feet, a blur of long legs and flying bikini tops. My jaw unhinges. I can’t believe she did that. It looks like she kept the bottom on, but I can clearly see her top, which is nothing more than two tiny triangles of fabric, on the beach with Jimmi’s. Their squeals echo in the night.

  “You wanna?” Mandi asks Luke, sporting a reckless grin of her own now.

  For a moment, Luke looks like he’ll resist, but his eyes wander to the bikini tops on the sand and then to Mandi’s considerable rack.

  “Hey, why not?” He shrugs, standing to his feet and shucking off his trunks. I look away, not needing to see his tan line or his junk. I deliberately avert my eyes when Mandi tosses her top and runs to the ocean’s edge.

  I look to the shore, making out their bodies, shadows in the fresh moonlight, frolicking and screaming and laughing. A smile settles on my lips, and I’m on my feet walking toward the water. Not naked, though. It’s too cold for that shit.

  I’ve waded in just a few feet, still adjusting to the temperature of the water, when an arm slips around my waist from behind. Warm, water-slick breasts press into my back.