Coast (Kick Push Book 2) (The Road 3) (2 page)

I kissed him that day, his lips warm and soft across my mouth. The taste of his kiss forever scarred on my lips, lips that have longed for him.

His mouth moves, and I know he’s speaking, but the thumping in my eardrums has turned the world silent. My dad’s touch is gentle, urging me forward, and I force the chaos out of my mind. Josh raises his eyebrows waiting for my response, but I don’t have one. Dad, however, clears his throat and steps forward, half blocking me from Josh’s view—something Josh senses right away because he straightens to full height, his chest rising with his intake of breath.

“We’re here to see Josh Warden,” Dad says, even though he knows he’s speaking
to
Josh Warden.

Josh Warden,
Josh Warden
,
Josh Warden
. His name replays in my mind, over and over, while his shoulders slump, his gaze switching to me quickly before going back to my dad, taking in all 6’4” of him. “That’s me, sir,” Josh murmurs, the confidence he exuded only minutes ago no longer visible.

I step away from behind my dad’s protection and lift the tag from the lanyard hanging around my neck. I tap it twice and then look up, waiting for his response.

His eyebrows bunch and he reaches for the tag, his fingers brushing mine.

His touch is like fire. Sweet, torturous flames setting off too many emotions. I struggle, and I fight, and I fight some more, to not move away, to not fear his touch.

But I
fail
.

Because I’m Becca Owens—a broken girl.

And he’s Josh Warden—the boy who broke me.

—Joshua—

I
can hear
them following behind me as I lead them to my bus, their footsteps crunching on the gravel now the soundtrack to my fear.

Every day I thought about her, missed her,
craved her
, and now she’s here, and her presence has me struggling for air.

Chris’s eyes widen when I open the door, and Becca comes into view, his mouth opening, closing, opening again. He pushes off the table he’s leaning on and taps away at his phone. After a while, he looks up, first at me, then at her, and then her dad behind her. “Becca Owens,” Chris says into the thick, tension-filled air. “You’re doing the interview for
Student Life
?”

Becca nods, her gaze everywhere but on me.

“Right.” Chris returns her nod before looking over at me, his demeanor changing from being my agent to being my friend. “You good?”

I hesitate to answer because I don’t know if I am. That’s a lie. I
know
I’m not good.

“Why don’t you guys set up?” Chris says, pointing to the couch. “We just need a minute.”

He’s trying to save me, and I appreciate it. But all the minutes in the world couldn’t save me right now. I wipe my sweaty palms on my shorts and swallow hard. “I’m good, man,” I tell Chris, then to Becca, “Do you need anything? Water or…”

Her head shakes as she points to the table behind Chris.

I move out of her way so she can get past. Her dad follows, and I wonder for a moment if he goes to all her interviews or if he’s just here because it’s
me
. Because I’m the reason she is the way she is, the reason she can no longer speak. Becca sets up on one side of the table, her dad standing next to her, his arms crossed over his massive frame, doing everything he can to elicit the fear inside me. But it’s not him that has my heart hammering, making it impossible to breathe.

It’s
Her
.

It’s
always
been Her.

I take a step forward and offer her dad my hand. “I’m Josh Warden, sir. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

He takes it, shaking it harder than necessary. “Martin,” he grunts, and it’s that moment I know he
knows.
About as much as I know that there’s not a damn thing I can do about it now, so I suck it up and take the seat opposite his daughter. I wait, watching her set up her phone, iPad, and computer on the table. Then she sits back, her hands on her lap, and she looks right at me, her eyes searing mine. After a moment, her lips curve into a smile, and I die. A thousand deaths. Over and over. Because while on the outside, I’m living the life, living my dream, it had never felt real and I had never felt worthy. And for that split second when her eyes were on mine, and her smile was directed at me, she gave value to my existence.

Her smile fades when she leans forward, her fingers frantic as they press down on key after key of her computer. She hits one, then pauses and looks up at me, waiting for the mechanical voice to sound.
“I should probably start by introducing myself. I’m Becca Owens, and I’m a student at Washington University here in St. Louis. I’ll be interviewing you for Student Life newspaper. The interview will run a little different than what you’re probably used to because I’m speech impaired. I’ll be communicating via my trusted old friend Cordy. If this is going to be a problem, please let me know now.”

I stare, unblinking, feeling my worth, my value, being sucked into a black hole along with the rest of me.

“I’ll be using my computer to speak with you. My iPad is for recording, and my phone has my notes. Again, if this is a problem, please let me know.”

Wiping my palms on my shorts again, I glance up at her dad before leaning forward, my forearms on the table. “It’s no problem, Becs. Whatever you need.”

Her dad sighs, and Becca’s gaze drops.

“Sir?” Chris says, his voice loud as he shoves his phone in his pocket. “What size feet you got?”

“Excuse me?” Martin asks.

Chris points behind him. “I got a bunch of shoes out back. The sponsor likes it when we hand ’em out. You interested?”

For the first time since I saw him, Martin seems to relax. “I got big feet…”

Chris smiles. “I got plenty of sizes. Plenty of styles.” He motions to where we keep the shoes. “Take your pick.”

Martin places his hand on Becca’s shoulder. She doesn’t flinch, unafraid of his touch. “You good, kid?” he asks her.

She smiles up at him and nods once, then shoos him away with a wave of her hand.

We both wait until they’re in the back part of the bus, the door closed behind them, before she types and I speak. “You look good, Becs,” I say, the same time “Cordy” says,
“Sorry about my dad.”

I laugh.

She frowns.

Then her fingers are moving again.
“I haven’t been following your success, so I had to have someone else on the newspaper write up the questions. He was supposed to be here, but he had a family emergency come up, so you’re stuck with me.”

I clear my throat and push aside my disappointment.

“Ready?”

“Not really,” I mumble.

Her frown deepens, her fingers tapping.
“You took quite the hiatus for a few years there, and you’ve made it known in previous interviews the reason you did—your son Tommy—but you’ve never been clear on why you came back. Feel like giving a small time college newspaper an exclusive?”

Her chest rises and falls as she keeps her head lowered, waiting for my response. “You want an exclusive?” I ask.

She chews on her lips, her gaze dropping. She hesitates a beat before her fingers move again.
“I’m sorry. He’d e-mailed the questions to me a few minutes before I arrived and I didn’t get a chance to read them. I’m not looking for an exclusive, I swear. I don’t want you to feel like I expect more because of our history or whatever.”

Her eyes are on mine now, wide and filled with fear. And my memories, my visions, my dreams of her do not do her justice because she’s so much more.

I’m about to speak, but a knock on the door cuts me off. A moment later, Chris is back, Martin—holding three shoe boxes—following behind him. “I got it,” Chris says, the door already half open. Justin’s on the other side, his hands in his pockets. “Oh, I’m sorry.” He eyes Becca before switching to me. “I didn’t know you were still working.”

“It’s cool, man. What’s up?”

“We’re trying to get Tommy to head to the hotel, but he won’t go without—”

“I got it,” I cut in, not wanting Becca to hear. I get up and move to Tommy’s room in the bus and grab what Justin needs. “Here you go,” I tell him, back at the door. He pulls his gaze away from Becca and looks down at the skateboard, the camera, and the framed drawing of Tommy’s “family.” He focuses on the drawing, and then up at Becca, then back down, again and again, while my heart thumps in my chest and my eyes drift shut because I know he
knows
. His thumb swipes over the glass of the frame, over the bright green crayon eyes and he gasps, his mouth dropping, his eyes wide as he looks back up at Becca. “You’re—”

“Is that it?” I ask, cutting him off. But I’m too late because Becca’s already seen his reaction and now she’s on her feet, moving closer and closer to me. She takes the frame from Justin’s hands, her eyes as wide as his were while her thumb skims from the green crayon eyes to the bandage on her stick figure chest.

“Because you had a boo-boo,” I whisper. Then clear my throat. “Becca, this is Justin, Nat’s fiancé. Justin, Becca.”

The fear in Becca’s eyes is replaced with something else, and she hands back the frame before turning quickly and sitting back at the table, her hands on her lap and her focus on her computer.

“Thanks for this,” Justin says, and I nod and shut the door.

“Interview done?” Martin asks.

Becca shakes her head, glaring at her screen like it’s somehow going to give her answers to the thousands of questions a year apart has created.

Sitting back down, I watch the sadness take over, watch the tears fill her eyes. “Becs…” I start to reach over, but her eyes narrow, her lips pressed tight when she slams a finger down on a key.

“You took quite the hiatus for a few years there, and you’ve made it known in previous interviews the reason you did—your son Tommy—but you’ve never been clear on why you came back. Feel like giving a small time college newspaper an exclusive?”

I suck in a breath and keep it there while I hold her gaze. The seconds tick by, one after the other until my mind begins to spin, and my heart begins to race, and I know, deep down, that the only thing I can offer her is the pain that comes with the truth. “I met a girl with raven dark hair and eyes the color of emeralds…”

—Becca—

“I
met a
girl with raven dark hair and eyes the color of emeralds. I came into her life with an insecure past, and she came into mine with a tortured one. My future was set, and hers was uncertain, but at the time, it didn’t matter. We filled our days with porch-step kisses, filled our ears with three-year-old laughter, and filled our hearts with love. Deep, soul-aching, desperate love. She believed in me in ways only my father ever had, and I wanted to prove that I was worthy of that. So I agreed to SK8F8. For her. But then one day my future became as uncertain as hers, and I crumbled. I was so afraid of the destruction she’d cause when her life would no longer be filled with those things—kisses, laughter, and love—and so my fear pushed me to destroy the things I loved. Physically. Metaphorically. Every way possible. And when the dust of my demolition settled, she re-appeared, like sunshine between two buildings, and she gave me a chance to validate her belief in me. So I did. With her by my side or her following behind me, I skated my heart out. And as I stood on that pipe on the day of my so-called ‘come back,’ my heart hanging in the balance, just like my board on the edge of the coping, I looked down at the girl, a girl I knew I had lost, a girl whose emerald eyes were blocked by her camera, and I felt the same thing I felt the moment I fell in love with skating. The moment I fell in love with her. She made me feel weightless, feel free, feel airborne. So I kicked, and I pushed, and for the past year, that’s all I’ve been doing because it didn’t feel the same and I knew in my heart that without her, I’d never be able to coast.”

I dipped in his words.

Bathed in his declarations.

Submerged myself in the tale of his love.

His one true love.

It was perfect.

Too perfect.

Every sentence.

Every word.

Every damn syllable.

Perfect.

Until the last word was spoken.

And I drowned in his lies.

And I realized…

That the world was full of perfect things.

And broken, faulty people.

~ ~

I pull the
earphones out of my ear and turn to my door where Dad is standing, calling my name. I spent the rest of last night thinking about Josh, and when I awoke, I thought about him some more. So I listened to his interview, over and over until I had his words memorized, and then I became angry. Unjustifiably angry. And when the anger faded, I became sad. Miserable, even. And I had no idea why. So I wrote down my feelings in the stupid journal and stared at my words until they, too, were memorized. Seared into my brain for all of eternity as a reminder that no matter how good he looked, how good he smelled, how good I
felt
when his eyes were on mine—that I could never go back there.
We
could never go back there. Because as much as he told me he loved me, that I was everything to him, my mother had said the same things. And I’d spent the past year, three days a week, in some form of therapy trying to force myself to believe that it was
not
love. It couldn’t be.

“How you doing, sweetheart?” Dad asks.

I nod and smile.

“You working on that article?”

Another nod. Another smile.

“Listen,” he says, stepping forward, his hands in the pockets of his sweats. His eyes—green just like mine—drop to the floor, and I know he’s nervous. It’s the exact way he’d approached me the first few months I’d moved in with him. “That Warden boy is at the door.”

I stand quickly, knowing—
praying
—he’s wrong, and rush to the door because there’s absolutely no way in hell that Josh is standing outside
my
house on the morning of a day when he should be competing. Yet here he is, looking as disheveled as I feel. My mouth forms an
O
as I stop in front of him, half hiding behind the door when he looks up at me. I feel the same way I did when he looked at me last night,
exposed
, as if he could see all my secrets and hear all my thoughts and sense all my fears.