Tomorrow's Lies (Promises #1) (13 page)

Cody is far from reassured. He wants to go back. “I like playing close to house better,” he tells me.

I tousle his hair. “No problem, kiddo.”

With the decision made to abandon our game in the woods, Mandy gestures for Cody and Callie to follow her back to the trail that leads down to the open fields. Just as I’m about to fall in line behind them I feel a tug at the back of my T-shirt.

When I turn around, Jaynie takes a step back. “What’s up?” I ask.

Hesitantly, she says, “Would it be all right if you and I stayed in the woods a while longer? It’s just so pretty up here. And…” She glances around at all the flora around us, everything thick and green. “I really like this place.”

I raise a brow. “Even with snakes lurking all about?”

“Pfft…” She waves her hand dismissively. “Snakes are the least of my worries, Flynn.”

Her eyes—green as the foliage around us, but troubled—tell me Jaynie has had to worry about far worse things than little snakes.

“No problem,” I tell her. “We can stay. Just wait here a sec.”

I run ahead to catch up with the others. Once I have Mandy’s attention I tell her Jaynie and I are going to stay in the woods a while longer.

Mandy narrows her eyes and gives me an
I know what you’re up to
look. She’s protective of Jaynie, but she needn’t worry. I am, too.

“It’s nothing like that,” I assure her, rolling my eyes.

“Not yet,” she says in a sing-song-y voice. “But I can see it coming.”

I push her shoulder. “God, get out of here. Now, I’m not sure if you’ll kick my ass if something happens…or if something doesn’t.”

“I like to keep you on your toes, Flynn,” she says as she starts to jog away to catch up with the twins, who’ve run way ahead on the trail.

“Having you around is as bad as having a real sister,” I call out.

Yelling over her shoulder, Mandy gets in the last word. “I have every intention of remaining like a real sister, Flynn. For as long as I’m here. And I guarantee you’re going to miss all this sisterly concern when I’m gone.”

Shit, that part is probably true. Mandy leaving is definitely going to suck. Apart from missing her friendship, it will be up to me and Jaynie to take care of the kids. That won’t be easy since the twins rely so much on Mandy.

When I return to Jaynie, she watches me curiously as I rake my hand through my hair.

“What’s bothering you, Flynn?” she asks.

We begin to walk, and I think about how I usually deflect questions of that nature. Today, though, I feel like I could use someone to talk to.

“I was just thinking how hard it’s going to be when Mandy leaves.”

“Yeah, it’ll suck. The twins are going to be a mess.”

“That’s an understatement,” I scoff.

Jaynie stops. She reaches out to touch my arm, but then it’s like she realizes what she’s doing.

“Oh.” Her arm drops back to her side. “Anyway, we’ll still be here for the twins.”

“Yeah, we will.”

We start walking again, heading deeper into the woods. The trail narrows for a while and we have no choice but to walk single file. When it widens, we walk side-by-side.

“Hey, Flynn,” Jaynie says with a sigh. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“What is Mandy’s story? How’d she end up in the system?”

I motion to a huge old oak. “Here, let’s sit for a minute.”

We use the thick roots protruding from the ground as seats, and after we’re settled, I say, “Mandy never had a real home, like ever.”

Jaynie looks over at me, brow furrowing. “What do you mean?”

“She’s been in the system since birth.”

“Oh, Flynn.” Jaynie appears absolutely stricken. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah, but it is what it is. Mandy’s mother was a foster kid who got pregnant at fifteen. She was in a group home at the time.”

“Mandy was born in a group home?”

I nod. “She was. And she was taken away immediately because her mom had psych problems.”

“Wow. Where’d they place Mandy?”

“She was sent to live with a family who wanted to foster an infant.”

Jaynie picks up a stick and starts tracing the grooves in the tree roots. I can tell the story unsettles her. Hell, what foster story is soothing?

“Did those people adopt Mandy?” Jaynie asks.

“They were in the process, supposedly. But, uh, something bad happened.”

Jaynie stops tracing and looks over at me. “What happened?”

I blow out a breath. “They were killed in a boating accident, and Mandy was thrown back in the system.”

“Damn, Flynn. That’s…I don’t know. Just…talk about bad luck.”

“I know, Jaynie, I know.”

Things are turning too dour. I want this day of freedom to stay positive, since we have so few.

“Hey,” I say, tone upbeat. “Enough of all this sad talk, okay?”

Jaynie tosses her tracing stick off to the side and stands up. “Sounds good to me. Let’s keep walking.”

“Yeah.” I jump up and point to where the trail continues. “You up for seeing a place up here that’s really cool? It’s actually my favorite spot to go when shit down at the house gets to be too much.”

Nodding enthusiastically, Jaynie says, “I’d love to see it, Flynn.”

We wind our way through the forest, diverging away from the trail. Jaynie doesn’t know it yet, but we are close to the edge of the mountaintop, the only part of the property that’s not fenced off.

Finally, we arrive at the spot that’s my sanctuary—a thick copse of pines growing in a perfect circle. The trees soar high into the air, seemingly to the heavens. Their long limbs provide a heavy canopy of green that stretches all the way to the edge of the cliff. The cliff itself juts out over a swiftly flowing river.

“I can’t wait to share this with you,” I say to Jaynie, wishing I could take her hand. I nod to a break in the pines that lead into the circle, but Jaynie walks instead over to the edge of the cliff.

“Mind I see the view from the edge, first?” she looks back and asks.

I shrug. “Sure.” She seems pretty focused, so whatever.

At the cliff’s edge Jaynie is peering across the forested valley. She then looks down to the water, flowing hundreds of feet below. “Where does the river go, Flynn?” she wants to know.

I walk over so I can stand beside her. “Downstream,” I say. “There’s a little town named Lawrence not far from here. After that, I’m sure the water keeps going. I guess this river eventually dumps out into an even bigger river.”

“Oh.”

Jaynie sounds distant and lost in thought, so it’s with care I inquire, “What are you thinking about?”

Jaynie turns to me, eyes sparkling and bright. She looks so alive and happy right now, and I almost tell her how I think her eye color is a perfect match to the boughs of the pines above us. I ultimately decide to save that observation for another day.

“I was thinking that I wish I were a bird,” she replies, at last.

Her answer catches me off-guard. “Why in the hell would you want to be a bird?”

She faces the water again and throws her head back. Spreading her arms, like wings, she says, “Because then I could fly away.”

I step closer to her, until her hand is near my face. I expect her to curl her fingers away. But she doesn’t. She leans toward me, allowing her fingertips to brush over my cheek. “Flynn,” she sighs.

We stay like that for a while, her barely touching me, but touching me nonetheless. I want to hold this moment for as long as we can, so I don’t move an inch. My heart sure races, though.

Quietly, just loud enough to be heard over the rushing rapids, I say, “If someday you fly away, Jaynie-bird, can I go with you?”

She opens her eyes and peers over at me. When she lowers her arms, I can’t help but sigh at the loss of feeling her touch.

With her attention returning to the water, she asks, “Would you go with me? Like, for real? If we could leave this place, Flynn, would you go?”

Answering that question is easy. “Yes.”

Jaynie

“W
e could really go,” Flynn tells me. “If things ever get to be…you know, too much.”

“What?” I gesture to the river, so far below us. “You really think we could jump into the water from up
here
?”

He sounds like Mandy. What do they know that I don’t? It’s not that horrible here…yet.

“Yeah,” he says, dead serious. “You can swim, can’t you?”

“Well, yeah.” I peer down at the dark rapids, trying to calculate the distance and just how dangerous a jump like that would be. And, crap…

“Wouldn’t the fall kill us?”

Flynn chuckles. “No, we’d be fine. The water is deep in this part of the river, and there are no rocks down there to hit your head on. The fast-moving current keeps debris from settling.”

“So, how would it work?”

“Simple. We’d jump, land in the water, float to the surface within a few seconds, and then let the current do its work to help us swim away.”

I eye him curiously, this guy who keeps more secrets than I, apparently. “Hmm, sounds like you’ve put a lot of thought into this, Flynn.”

“I have,” he murmurs.

His expression, so serious, makes him look far wiser than a seventeen-year-old guy. But then again Flynn is well-acquainted with sorrow. He knows life is not all sunshine and rainbows.

Softly, he says, “You should always have a plan, Jaynie. You never know when things may go to hell. You need to be ready to roll if that happens.”

He’s right, of course, like someone else I know. “You sound like Mandy,” I say with a small smile.

Flynn levels me with a curious stare as his hair falls over one eye. “Oh, yeah? What’d she say?”

“She told me not to get too settled, especially here at Mrs. Lowry’s house. She said I should always have an out.”

He nods approvingly. “She’s right.”

“Does she know about this place?” I nod to the river. “Is this her out, too?”

Flynn chuckles. “Yeah, Mandy knows about this place, but she’s not going anywhere. She’s playing it cool till July. She’s got less than three months now, and she’s not about to jeopardize anything.”

Flynn knows about her plans to foster and eventually adopt the twins, and I assume that’s what he means by her not jeopardizing anything.

Back to his plan, I ask, “So, what would we do if we jumped? Swim to the next town? What did you say it was called? Lawrence? How far away is that? Like, miles and miles?”

When I look over Flynn is staring at me like he can’t believe I may actually be onboard with his idea. But I am. Quite solidly, in fact. If I’d had an escape plan at my last home I wouldn’t have ended up a victim.

One thing for sure,
that
will never happen again.

Flynn watches my face changing, surely expressing all the emotions conjured by the memories that still haunt me. And I know then that he knows. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happened to me.

Quietly, he says, “Swimming wouldn’t be hard. Like I said, we’d have the current helping us. And Lawrence isn’t that far away.”

“Well, then.” I turn to him, rubbing my palms on the hem of my tee and down the sides of my long shorts. “We should make a pact.”

Flynn steps closer. “Okay, it’s a deal. If things ever get too bad, this”—his eyes move to the cliff’s edge—“is our way out.”

“Deal.”

Flynn extends his hand, same as he did the first day we met. He wants to seal our pact with a handshake, and I do, too. But when I make an attempt, I end up jerking my hand back.

“Come on,” Flynn urges. “You can do this, Jaynie. It’s no different than before.”

But it is. Him brushing hair from my face, and me barely touching his cheek with my fingertips, those were fleeting encounters. A handshake requires grasping, squeezing, prolonged contact. “I don’t know, Flynn.”

“You can do it,” he encourages.

Tentatively, I extend my hand to meet his. And…I do it. We seal our pact with a quick shake.

“See, not so bad,” he teases when I quickly slide my hand from his.

“Not bad at all,” I agree, rubbing my hand. “I think I’m getting used to us touching each other.”

We both turn red at the unintended innuendo in my remark. When I start stammering, trying to explain, Flynn smoothly diffuses the tension.

“Hey, come on.” He motions for me to follow. “Let me show you the best spot up here.”

I follow him to the thick clumping of tall pines, the same trees I bolted past to rush to the cliff’s edge. “So, this is your favorite place up here, yeah?”

“It sure is,” he says as he holds up a branch. We slip under and into the circle of pines.

Sunlight is filtering through the tops of the trees, creating a crisscross pattern of light and dark on a thick bed of pine needles covering the ground.

“Are they soft?” I ask, gesturing to the needles.

“Very,” Flynn replies. “Here, follow me.”

I trail behind him to the middle of the circle. Flynn flops down on the ground, smack dab on an especially thick mound of pine needles. I suppose to prove his point that they are indeed soft.

“Comfy?” I ask.

“Quite.” He raises a brow. “You should come down here and join me. See for yourself.”

I dig one sneakered toe into a nearby mound of needles. “Maybe. I’ll think about it.”