Sheltered

Ellora’s Cave Publishing

www.ellorascave.com

Sheltered

ISBN 9781419938146

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Sheltered Copyright © 2012 Charlotte Stein

Edited by Grace Bradley

Cover design by Syneca

Photography by Peter D/shutterstock.com and Syneca

Models: Shannon and Manuel

Electronic book publication March 2012

The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

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She could see him over the fence with the Ryerson kid. He came fairly frequently, and always acted the same way. As if he hadn’t come to do anything at all, and after the Ryerson kid gave him some small square of something, and he’d handed over the money, he usually slid away into the shadows as though nothing had happened.

Sometimes she pretended nothing did. She hadn’t seen them. And then the second time, when she purposefully set out to watch—she hadn’t seen them then, either. If she hadn’t seen them, she didn’t have to think about drug deals or other things illegal, going on right here in this safe little island of suburbia.

She didn’t have to think about the punk, who didn’t come from anywhere around here and always looked very tall and mean-mouthed, in the shadows cast by the Ryersons’ porch light. Like a Gollum, she thought, or something else similarly nightmarish and exotic.

Even the word itself—
punk
—suggested all kinds of things she wasn’t familiar with. Like the music she wasn’t allowed to listen to and the places she wasn’t allowed to go and the people she wasn’t allowed to see. It reminded her of that boy back at St Mary’s, the one who’d cut his hair too short at the back and got himself expelled. The one who looked as though he’d dyed it.

The punk looked as though he dyed it. She could see how black it was, even from all the way over here, when she pressed against the fence with just her eyes peeking over the top. And he’d shaved it all a certain way too, so it looked short at the back but longer at the front, all kind of sticking forward like a rude raised finger.

At first she’d paid attention to the Ryerson kid, mostly, because the Ryerson kid was the one she knew and he was the one doing something wrong, really. The punk had probably gotten himself addicted to something terrible, like…brainathol, and even if he hadn’t the Ryerson kid was snotty and mean and everyone said he’d hurt Michaela Tonbeck on one of the dates they’d gone on.

But he never tried to hurt the punk. What sort of person would? The Ryerson kid was big, but the punk was bigger. In fact, he was bigger than any man she’d ever seen in real life—six foot four, she guessed, but it could feasibly be more. And he was always so silent too. The Ryerson kid jabbered on in his cocky, stupid way, but the punk never said anything.

He just took his drugs and then she’d hear the slow purr of a motorbike behind the houses somewhere, cycling up as it got farther away as though he knew the neighbors would ask questions if he was too loud.

He was smart, this punk. So smart that he pretended not to see her today, even though she knew he’d looked.

Of course she ducked down. Because she was not smart, apparently. It took her a good long moment to process the fact that ducking down would only make her look guilty. It would make it look as though she’d been watching him for nefarious purposes, to catch him in the act, maybe, then report him to the police.

And though there was something about him that seemed very far from violent—the centered stillness, the way he never spoke—it didn’t mean he couldn’t be. In fact, the quietness probably suggested something worse, about how violent he
could
be. He was likely one of those types, the ones who lunged suddenly, right when you least expected it. He was a coiled snake, ready to strike.

He was going to
get
her in the middle of the night.

Or maybe he was just going to get her right now.

“I know you’re there, little spy.”

He knocked against the wooden gate between them first, before speaking. As though he had to ask permission to interact with her, he had to be invited. It wasn’t comforting, however. His voice sounded like molten metal. As if he had something thick at the back of his throat and it was making him sound deeper and richer than he actually was.

It made her clasp her hands into fists.

“Mainly because I can see you,” he continued and she jerked a glance up. It was always possible he was lying. Maybe he couldn’t see her at all and he just wanted to scare her.

But no. When she tilted her head back there he was, clearing the gate by a good foot. He’d even laid a forearm across the wood, and from here she could make out a tattoo on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. An actual
tattoo
, in such a tender place.

Oh, he was undoubtedly a maniac.

“You’re not afraid of me, are you?” he asked, but he said it in such an incredulous tone she didn’t know what to think. Did incredulity mean something good? Like maybe her being afraid of him was so ludicrous, so impossible, he could barely comprehend it? “Just because I’m here making a little…transaction, doesn’t mean I’m gonna hurt anybody.”

She wondered where the Ryerson kid had gone. Maybe the punk had knifed him and pushed him into the pool.

“It’s Evie, right?”

Maybe he was going to knife her and push her into the pool.

She stood and put her shoulders back. Folded her arms across her chest and moved in the direction of her house, toward safety and calls to the police and screaming for parents who weren’t actually in there.

Not that they’d come, if they had been.

“I know what you were doing, okay? It’s not just a transaction so don’t call it that.”

She had absolutely no idea where she’d gotten the gall from, but there it was anyway. Right over the top of her churning stomach and all the sudden thoughts of the flick knife he probably had in his back pocket. Like maybe he’d suddenly become a greaser from the 1950s and this was some special on the dangers of interacting with boys.

He glanced away, back at the now empty Ryerson porch. The actual earrings all over his left ear glittered and winked—solid silver loops, she thought, and many more than one.

“I wasn’t buying anything weird. Just a bit of pot.”

“So it being a bit of pot makes it okay?”

In truth, she had no idea. Her parents called pot a gateway drug and her father had said if he ever caught her with anything like that he’d give her such a belting. But then he gave her such a belting for a lot of things. Coming in after curfew, watching something she shouldn’t be watching, breathing in a way she shouldn’t be breathing.

“I didn’t say that,” he said, and for a second he looked…hurt? It had seemed as though he’d flinched when she’d leveled the accusation, but she couldn’t be sure. “But come on. Everyone likes to unwind after a hard day of almost flunking out of college.”

It felt weird that her first urge was to ask him what he was studying. Her first urge should have been to tell him to go and never come back, unless he wanted the police after him.

But then he kind of half laughed, ruefully, and said, “Jesus—I don’t even know why I’m justifying this to you. Guess there’s just something about your face.”

And after that she didn’t know what to think about any of it. What did he mean,
something about your face
? Did she look particularly pious or something?

“I don’t care what you do. You don’t have to justify anything to me.”

He held up a hand then, and this time she could see he had a tattoo on the inside of his wrist too. A thick line of something, like lettering.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said, and she wondered what sign of offense she’d given. Did she seem wounded, suddenly? “You just seem so…”

She watched his eyes flit over her features and felt suddenly conscious of all of them. The way her nose dominated her face. How broad her cheekbones were, how nonexistent her upper lip was. The only boy who’d ever gotten anywhere near to her had said she looked like a silent movie star, which hadn’t seemed to be a compliment.

And it certainly didn’t feel like one now, with this strange, punkish creature studying her with his big, intense eyes. They looked black, in the low light, and they probably seemed more so because of the thick rim of eyelashes all around. Like shadows around his eyes. Like maybe he wore makeup, even though she didn’t think he did.

“You live here with your parents, right?” he asked, and for some unaccountable reason her face heated. Of course it had already started warming up back when he’d first run his eyes all over her, but this was stronger. More obvious.

She was a nineteen-year-old woman still living with her parents, still obeying their crazy rules and doing the crazy things they wanted her to do, like biking every day to
Bible
college. And now the cool punk with his earrings and his tattoos and his dyed hair knew it.

For the first time in her life, she was truly sensible of how humiliating her situation was. How not like normal people. This guy—this weird-ass guy—was more normal than her.

“I’m not getting at you, honey,” he said, and strangely enough she believed him. The
honey
should have sounded patronizing, but somehow it didn’t. It sounded gentle instead. Far more gentle than his bizarre exterior suggested.

“It’s okay,” she said, but it was only after the words were out that she realized every connotation of them. She’d somehow shared some part of herself with this punk, this
drug addict
. She’d told him it was okay as though
she
was okay, as though she could live like this and be all right, and she didn’t know how or when it had happened.