Those days always stood out to me the most in our early years. I was sure he was giving me all this attention because he wanted me to be strong and not think about what James had said. My image was tarnished, would always be, and he was keeping me sane by treating me like a friend and not a whore’s niece.

“You figure out what you’re gonna be yet?” he asked me once on our walk back home after a very busy day being a truant student.

He was asking only because I’d been wracking my brain over my future lately. Teachers kept talking about Colleges and making sure we had considered what path we wanted to take. It usually did my head in with stress. It might not have looked like it since I was skipping that many days of class for him, but I was a very serious student, and I worked very hard to get great marks.

“No,” I answered, kicking a rock. “As long as I’m out of Russell’s place, I don’t think I’ll care.”

“Yeah, me too,” he muttered. “My dad’s a piece of shit. I’ll give him a good punch across the face when I walk out of there.”

I smiled. “You have some serious aggression issues, Carter. But on that note, you’re going to be a famous singer. I know it.”

He just chuckled. “Yeah, the day I become a famous singer will be the day I crawl on my hands and knees and kiss your feet. That shit doesn’t happen in the real world.”

“It will with you.”

He looked at me, his blue eyes soft and mesmerizing. Softly, he remarked, “I don’t think anyone’s ever had the confidence in me like you do.”

“That’s why I’m your best friend,” I reminded him, nudging him with my shoulder.

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” he replied, wrapping an arm around me.

“Sing to me at the creek?”

“Sure.”

I sighed internally, closing my eyes for a short second to inhale his scent and drown in the warmth of him. Would I forever pine for this guy? Time had proved it wouldn’t lessen. It never would.

This was why I kept my distance at times.

When you have feelings for your best friend who does not share those same feelings back, you learn to endure. Eventually, I did have eyes for other guys, and dates did happen every now and again. I learned to be outgoing, and sometimes, I did listen to Rome when he wanted to drag me to a party. Forcing that distance from Carter, I learned to have fun without him.

But there were still those times… Times where he’d be wrapped up in a girl physically, but he’d be staring at me from across the room. His attention would solely be focused on me, and I’d see something brimming in his magnificent eyes that was far from friendly.

He would never act on it, though. Our friendship was important to him in a way he would never divulge with me.

I was simply a boundary he would not trespass.

I did my best to forget my first kiss with him, did my best to move on from him, and when it got hard some nights, I drowned in a sea of literature to dull the ache.

Carter

If I kept her at arm’s length, I would never hurt her.

Seven

Winter of 2007

18 years old

“Leah.”

Gasping, I whipped my eyes open in the dark and shuffled away from the hand shaking my arm, hoping to God it wasn’t him again. But as the seconds passed, I blinked away my exhaustion and stared at Carter’s comforting face. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in his leather jacket that was drenched in the rain I could hear blasting through the opened window.

For a second, I was terrified of the noise level. I jerked my face in the direction of the door, half-expecting Russell or somebody else to come bursting through it. My heart lurched at the thought and my stomach swam with nausea.

“You can’t be here,” I whispered hysterically. “You have to get out of here, Carter, before anyone sees you.”

“He’s asleep, Leah,” he immediately reassured me, leaning over the bed to rest a hand on my shaken body. “Your Aunt’s stopped for the night. They’re both passed out from all that booze. Calm down, I made sure he wasn’t awake.”

I slumped my shoulders. I’d been living in hell for the last two months. Russell and Cheryl had hit a massive bump in their relationship. She’d completely gone off the reservoir, deciding she wasn’t going to whore herself half as much as she had all these years. She claimed her body couldn’t handle any more of it, which was fair enough in my opinion. They fought a lot about it, and Russell had threatened to stop her drug supply, but she was eerily calm about it. Even after he knocked her around a few times, leaving her bruised and suffering from withdrawal, she stuck to her guns and refused to do as she was told. As a result, their income was suffering.

Russell copped a lot of bad flack for this. Men lined themselves up for a go at Cheryl, and some waited inside. I had to keep myself shut inside my room. Even when I was desperate to pee, I wouldn’t dare step foot out there. But that didn’t seem to make me as invisible as I longed to be. One man in particular was snoopier than the rest, and when I woke up to a large figure hovering over my bed, I nearly peed right then and there. If it hadn’t been for Russell catching him at the nick of time, I dread to think what he would have done.

The argument that ensued after that was branded inside my memories forever. As soon as the scary man told the rest there was another girl – “one of age” – in the room, they started hounding Russell for a go at me.

I thought Cheryl would protect me. She hated doing what she did. Surely she didn’t want to witness her niece subjected to the same thing. She had told me herself to never become her. Which is why I hated her more than anything when she didn’t say a word. Not that she’d ever given two shits about me, but I thought there was some kind of goddamn comradery there, especially in regards to what a complete dick Russell was and how disgusting the idea was to use me – that she wouldn’t put me through the hell she had gone through all these years.

But no. Such courtesy was not extended to me. I wasn’t fortunate enough to be a passing thought in that coke whore’s head, and I was absolutely livid by it all. All these years living quietly in the far back of the trailer – hoping to be avoided like a plague and forgotten – had come undone. Now I had a target on my back, one that Russell had made clear to me just the other day.

“You’ve just turned eighteen, Leah,” he’d said to me. “And it’s best you realize at this point I’m not going to be taking care of you all your life. You gotta work to have a roof over that head of yours. You gotta contribute like the rest of us, or maybe I’m gonna have to show you the door. Being on your own is a scary thing, and I’d hate for you to be on the streets doing something you could have just done here under my protection. Think on that.”