Cross the Line (Boston Love Story #2)
Read Cross the Line (Boston Love Story #2) Online
Authors: Julie Johnson
CROSS THE
line
a novel
Julie Johnson
Copyright © 2015 Julie Johnson
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations included in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, product names, or named features are only used for reference, and are assumed to be property of their respective owners.
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Works by Julie Johnson
Like Gravity
Say the Word
Erasing Faith
Not You It’s Me
Cross the Line
This one’s for the girls who laugh a little too loud and fall a bit too fast.
The ones who believe in soul mates and second chances.
Who break their own rules and chase their own destinies.
Never stop
.
“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
I wasn’t looking for trouble.
He found me anyway.
Phoebe West, reflecting on her love life.
The first time I ever met Nathaniel Knox, I was crying my eyes out.
(In retrospect, I see this as a fitting prelude to our relationship.)
Sitting on the grass in the back yard of our estate on Nantucket, I was too focused on the dead bird lying under our maple tree to even notice the new boy next door hopping over our fence from his yard to ours. It wasn’t until he’d settled in the grass beside me and asked why I was crying that I lifted teary eyes to the most stunning face I’d ever seen in my five years on planet earth.
He was older, that was certain — at least eight, maybe nine. Tall, like my brother Parker, but there was something sad about his dark eyes. I was too distraught by my gruesome discovery — and, even back then, too captivated by a single glance at him — to work up any sense of stranger-danger.
“The bird,” I’d hiccupped, turning back to the tree and pointing with a shaking finger. “It’s… it’s….”
“Dead.” The boy nodded and leaned closer, eyes flashing with annoyance as he took in my tears. “So? It’s just a stupid pigeon.”
“It’s n-n-n-not a pigeon,” I managed to squeak out between hiccups. “It’s a t-t-t-turtle d-d-dove.”
“Sorry,” he said, voice a bit softer. He rubbed the back of his neck, looking nervous and uncomfortable. “I didn’t mean to upset you, or whatever.”
I took a deep breath and stared at him, tears still dripping down my cheeks.
“Tell me about the pigeon.” He sighed. “Sorry. The
turtle dove
.”
“That’s the boy husband bird.” I pointed at the dead dove. “The girl wife bird is up there in the tree.” My finger lifted straight up to the branches overhead. “They lived in a nest together. They sang every morning and every night. I could hear them from my window, right there.” I swung my arm around to point at my bedroom window, halfway up the lawn. His gaze followed my finger, then returned to my face. I hiccupped again. “They were m-m-married. But now the husband bird is dead.”
“Are you stupid?” His face contorted into a scowl. “Birds don’t get married.”
“My m-m-mom says turtle doves mate for life.” I wiped my running nose on my sleeve. “She says they’re just like humans. And now…” My eyes watered again.
“Now what?” he asked, curious despite his best efforts to act otherwise.
“Now there won’t be any singing.”
“You
are
stupid,” he said decidedly. “There’s still one dove left. That one will sing.”
I shook my head. “The wife bird won’t sing anymore. Because her heart is broken. Mom says she might even d-d-die.”
Something strange moved at the back of his eyes. It looked almost like fear.
“You can’t die from a broken heart, can you?” I asked, wiping my nose again.
“Well…” His scowl reappeared. “I don’t know for sure. My parents definitely aren’t in love anymore, but they haven’t died or anything.
Yet
.”
“How do you know they aren’t in love?” I asked.
His scowl deepened. “They fight all the time. That’s why we moved here. My mom said she wanted a divorce if my dad didn’t buy her a bigger house and stop sleeping with something called Cheyenne.” His eyes narrowed in thought. “I don’t know what a Cheyenne is, but my mom was real upset about it.”
“What’s a divorce?”
He sighed. “How old are you?”
“Five. How old are you?”
His chest puffed out a little. “Nine.”
“My brother Parker’s nine. He’s at soccer right now, though.” I tilted my head to get a better look at him. “What’s your name?”
“Nathaniel Xavier Knox. You can call me Nate.”
“I’m Phoebe,” I said, ducking my head. “You can call me Phoebe.”
“Have you lived here a long time?”
“Only, like, my whole entire life.”
“I think I’m gonna like it.” He stared at the water. “It’s near the beach.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “Sometimes there are jelly fish and seals and stuff. It’s cool.”
We were silent for a while.
“We should bury him,” I said, staring at the dove again. “The husband bird deserves a funeral. Maybe it’ll cheer the wife bird up.”
“How do you even know that one’s the boy and the other one’s the girl?”
My bottom lip started trembling again. When he spotted it, he sighed.
“All right, don’t be a cry baby. Let me go get a shovel.”
And so, the strange dark-eyed boy-next-door went back over the fence and returned ten minutes later with a gardening shovel. Together, we dug a hole — well, mostly I watched
him
dig a hole while I stared forlornly at the dove — and then he used a stick to push the bird into the tiny grave. It took barely any time to cover his soft, winged body over with a mound of dirt.
“We should say something.” I stared from the mound at the base of the maple tree to the boy with dirt under his fingernails sitting beside me. “They always say stuff at funerals.”
“It’s a bird funeral,” he pointed out. “You can’t say normal human stuff. That’s stupid.”
My lip trembled again.
“You’re not gonna cry, are you?”
“No,” I said in a choked voice.
He paused. “I’ll say something.”
My eyes were wide on his face as he cleared his throat, closed his eyes, and grabbed my hand. I stared at his fingers — large, grimy, and tangled with mine — and felt comforted for the first time since I discovered the bird an hour before.
His voice was steady and serious as he started speaking.
“I believe I can fly,” he intoned somberly. “I believe I can touch the sky.”
My eyes locked on his face.
Whoa
. He was like a real priest.
“I think about it every night and day,” he continued in that even voice. “Spread my wings and fly away.”
He was like… a
poet
.
He cleared his throat again. “I believe I can fly.”
“I believe I can fly,” I echoed, in awe of his originality.
(Looking back I can’t believe, even at five, I didn’t recognize R. Kelly lyrics when I heard them.)
His eyes opened and met mine. We both looked up at the same time when, a second later, a bird chirped in the tree overhead. Not a song — just a single, solitary chirp.
“Think that was the wife bird?” I asked hopefully.
He shrugged.
“Maybe the funeral cheered her up,” I said, brightening. “She chirped. Maybe that means a broken heart can’t kill you.”
“Maybe,” he muttered. “But, just in case, you’ll never catch
me
falling in love.” He looked horrified by the mere idea.
“Me neither,” I agreed immediately.
He scrambled to his feet, brushed off his hands on his jeans, and stared down at me.
“See you around, little bird.”
His lips twisted in a smile as he grabbed his shovel, crossed the lawn, and hopped back over the fence… landing firmly in the flesh of my heart as soon as his sneakers hit the grass.
Some people brag about one night stands.
Whatever. I’ve got two night stands.
Either side of my bed.
Phoebe West, upon hearing her best
friend lost her v-card after prom.
My name is Phoebe West and I’ve been kidnapped.
I think. Maybe.
It’s kind of a long story.
See, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
For the record, it
never
would’ve happened this way if my life were a movie. (Preferably a rom-com of some sort with a kickass soundtrack and a happy ending, starring a fabulously-styled version of myself opposite Michiel Huisman. Or Liam Hemsworth. Or Henry Cavill. I could go on, but I won’t.)
Point is, I had a plan. A pretty good one — or so I thought until yesterday, before it all went to hell faster than you can say
Phoebe-you’re-a-nutcase
in Pig-Latin.
Sigh.
This calamity began, as they usually do, because of a boy.
No, not a boy.
A
man
.
A smoking hot, sexy as sin,
older
man who just so happens to be my big brother Parker’s best friend — and has been since they were, like, ten and still thought girls were weird and covered in cooties.
Oh, how I wish
that
phase had lasted.
It would’ve saved me the torture of watching my undying preteen crush work his way through half the girls at the private prep school he and my brother attended. He would’ve worked his way through the other half, too, but he and Parker had a strict rule against going after each other’s girls. (Part of their man-code or whatever.) For that, at least, I could be grateful.
Or, so I thought.
Because a few years later — by which point my binder-doodling, call-and-hang-up, harmless little crush had blossomed into full-on love (or
lust
depending on the day) — I realized that same man-code which forbade boys from ever stealing each other’s girlfriends also extended to other things.
Specifically, to little sisters.
More specifically, to
me
.
There I was —
BAM!
— smack dab in the fine print of their bro bible:
RULE #1:
No dating ex-girlfriends, current girlfriends, or potential future girlfriends.
RULE #2:
Absolutely no touching, fucking, or corrupting little sisters.
RULE #3:
Pizza without meat on it doesn’t count as a meal.
I probably should’ve been flattered that I ranked above pizza when it came to male priorities, but all I could feel was heartbreak that I, Phoebe West, would never be able to call Nathaniel “Nate” Knox my own.
Never feel the weight of his eyes moving over my face with heart-stopping heat.
Never know the touch of his hands, big and rough, gliding across my skin, as I’d envisioned since I was barely old enough to understand my desire for such things.
The closest I’d ever get was a brotherly pat on the back and that same cool, narrow-eyed stare he used on everyone. The cocky, condescending, infuriatingly attractive one that made a tiny crease appear in the space between his eyes and clearly said,
Yes, I’m measuring your worth
and
No, you don’t live up.
Even his blatant indifference wasn’t enough to deter me. Because, well, here’s the thing.
I love him.
I always have.
Falling for Nate wasn’t something I was ever really conscious of doing. It was just something I
knew,
in the pit of my stomach, in the marrow of my bones, in every dark, secret corner at the back of my mind. Ingrained so deep I wouldn’t know how to begin to overcome it — like my hatred of chocolate in breakfast foods and my love of Old-Fashioneds with top-shelf bourbon.
It’s set in stone.
Unchangeable, no matter how hard I wish I could let him go.
I can’t help it. From that very first day I met him, it was like my body had been programmed to fall head over heels… and my mind had absolutely no say in the matter.
So, you can imagine how frustrating it was when, after years of patiently waiting — for my boobs to come in, for my wardrobe to sort itself out after that weird retro-Punk phase I went through, and, most especially, for Nate to come home from his first semester of college and notice that I’d grown up — he didn’t even blink an eye at my high school freshman field hockey skirt and newly minted set of knockers.
In fact, if anything, he pulled away more, until I’d been demoted from
honorary little sister
to
invisible girl who lives with Parker
. That first winter break, he barely spoke to me at all unless it was to say something banal like “excuse me” as his body brushed past mine with new carefulness on the way to the fridge, or “is Parker home” when I’d hear the doorbell chime and race downstairs as fast as my legs could carry me, determined to be the one to greet him.
At first, I hated how much those tiny, bland niceties meant to me — how one thoughtless word from him could make or break my entire day. Each “hey Phoebe” and “tell Parker I called” was a bone thrown to a desperate dog, who’d live on any scrap of attention that came her way so long as it came from
his
hand. It made me feel weak. Pathetic. Invisible.
But afterwards, when Nate dropped out of Harvard — and, for all intents and purposes, out of my life — I missed his strained small talk, his tossed scraps. Oh, how I wished he’d come back from wherever he’d gone and look through me while saying “pass the pepper” at dinner. Because, as sad as it was to admit, having Asshole Nate around was better than no Nate at all.
His father, an influential Boston defense attorney with big plans for his only son, was pissed beyond belief when his sole heir joined the special forces and disappeared without so much as a discussion.
Parker, his best friend since elementary school, wasn’t thrilled to lose his partner in crime, but he vowed to be supportive if it meant making Nate happy.
And me? Well, there’ve been several stages of my post-Knox life…. starting with pure, undiluted misery.
The slightly melodramatic
wherefore-hast-thou-forsaken-me-o-beloved-one
phase was essentially an eighteen-month period during which I consumed a lot of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and listened to Damien Rice songs on repeat until my eye sockets physically refused to produce any more tears.
Then, when I turned sixteen and was finally done feeling sorry for myself, the numbing sorrow of missing him wore off and I realized how freaking pissed I was at him for abandoning me.
This may’ve been because my pride was a bit wounded that Nate hadn’t even bothered to come back and
notice
my months of moping, which was pretty inconsiderate, since it was all over him. Even later, when I learned he was halfway around the world training for a tactical team so lethal they didn’t even have a name, the firestorm of rage-fueled, unrequited love continued to scorch my insides.
My angry phase lasted longer.
Approximately six years, to be exact, until both high school and college were fading in my rearview and I was a twenty-two year old woman with a pitiful amount of experience with the male sex, all because my stupid, stubborn heart refused to relinquish hope that someday, my soulmate would wake up and smell the freaking pheromones.
But eventually, as I moved to the city and settled into new patterns in my Back Bay brownstone, as my “real life” started and — alarmingly — began to slip by without anyone to share it with…. I was forced to accept the fact that my reckless, hopeless (and occasionally dirty) dreams of Nate would never be fulfilled.
With that realization, I transitioned from anger into the indifferent phase, where I’ve been dwelling unhappily for nearly a year, now.
The main rules of indifference are:
Don’t think about Nate.
Don’t talk about Nate.
And never, ever, talk
to
Nate at the few family gatherings where our paths cross.
It’s kind of like my own personal Fight Club, except less violent and way more pathetic since I’m the only member.
Before you judge me for giving up on the man I’ve loved for almost my entire lifetime, you have to understand something — a girl can only handle so much rejection. And, over the years, I’ve had more than my fair share of it.
First, there was the time in fourth grade when I stole Nate’s cellphone and spent an entire afternoon — practically an eternity, at age nine — locked in my walk-in closet, scrolling through his text inbox and sending eloquent “Dnt txt me! I h8 U!” messages to every girl in his contact list. (I know, I know. Not my proudest — or smartest — moment. But, in my defense, no one told me he’d be able to see them in his SENT folder as soon as he miraculously found his missing phone on the kitchen counter later that night.
Oops
.)
And I can’t forget the incident in sixth grade — well before my boobs came in, mind you — when Parker threw a huge pool party for his sweet sixteen and, jealous of the
totally
mature tenth-grade girls wandering around with what, at the time, seemed like Victoria’s Secret model bodies in comparison to my mosquito bites, I went into the bathroom and stuffed the cups of my bikini with enough tissues to keep Kleenex in business for at least the next decade.
A mistake — the repercussions of which I didn’t even fully realize until one of Parker’s bitchy girlfriends pushed me into the pool, the impact dislodging my stuffing like confetti from a canon. The two minutes I spent floating in the water, makeshift boobies drifting around me like white, translucent jellyfish as I listened to the older girls giggle, were bad enough; the fact that it was
Nate
who reached in, pulled me out, and wrapped a towel around my shaking shoulders was worse. Mainly because, as soon as my feet hit dry land, the tissue began fusing to my limbs, clumping on my skin like some grade-school paper maché project gone terribly awry.
Somehow, when I’d imagined Nate seeing my boobs for the first time, I hadn’t reeked of chlorine and they hadn’t been made of paper.
Oh well. You win some, you lose some.
(I seem to lose most, actually.)
And yet, even the pool party wasn’t as abominable as the time in eighth grade, when I asked him to be my date to the Sadie Hawkins dance. He didn’t even bother letting me down easy. He just grinned, ruffled my hair like I was an adorable-but-idiotic golden retriever, and walked away, laughing as though the suggestion was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. His rejection stung, don’t get me wrong, but it was the aftermath that really kicked me in the shins. Without Nate as a date, I had no option other than to ask my friend Lila’s older brother, Duncan, to go with me. He was cute in a clean-cut, average kind of way — not dark or dangerous-looking, like other boys-who-shall-not-be-named, but handsome enough to get my fourteen-year-old heart pumping.
Duncan was a charmer when he picked me up in his father’s Porsche, smiling as he slipped a corsage on my wrist, driving with one arm thrown across the back of my seat. Just when I was beginning to think things might not turn out so bad… he downed six shots of whiskey in the school parking lot, which left him so incapacitated he couldn’t even slow-dance with me
once
during the hour I spent leaning against the wall of the Starry-Night-themed reception hall, watching him gyrate questionably against several unsuspecting girls in taffeta.
When I called Parker to come get me, he — somewhat grudgingly — showed up… with Nate in tow, because apparently the universe thought I hadn’t suffered enough humiliation for one night. Crammed in the backseat next to a moaning Duncan, I listened to Parker and Nate talk about the “hot chicks” they’d had to bail on to pick me up, and prayed to disappear. When Duncan puked in my purse halfway home, I knew my perfect night at the middle-school dance was finally complete.
Ah, memories.
I could go on, but I’m sure you get the picture. When it comes to Nate, my life has been one long string of humiliation and horrifyingly bad luck. Before he disappeared, taking my heart with him, I tried
everything
to get his attention.
Okay, not
everything
. I stopped short of stripping to my skin and climbing into his bed naked because
hello
, I still have some pride left. (Not much, but enough to know that ambushing him in my birthday suit and demanding that he finally remove my pesky virginity — only to be rejected and dismissed with the same detachment he’d use to send an overcooked steak back to the kitchen — is a blow from which my self-esteem would never recover.)