Page 25 of Carter

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

I frowned. “Is your father okay?”

He shrugged. “He’ll be in one piece, I guess.”

What the hell did that mean?

I raised my brow in question, but he didn’t open those beautiful lips to explain some more. It would have been the courteous route letting his best friend know the exact details of what pushed him out the door until we were here, sleeping inside a vehicle he’d sort of broken into.

But no such luck with Carter. He decided to take the mysterious route and leave me hanging.

“I think you should take me back,” I whispered to him.

His grip around me only tightened at that, and I felt like a balloon on the verge of popping if he squeezed a little more.

“No,” he responded solemnly. “We discussed this.”

“We’re homeless now. Are you aware?”

“Perfectly aware.”

I swallowed, feeling my body tighten in fear. “I can’t do this, Carter. This is freaking me out. I’m absolutely terrified.”

“I know you are, but we’ll figure it out.”

I shook my head. “We’ll figure it out? That’s your response? I want to know the plan. I want to know what you expect is going to happen from here on out. Where are we going to sleep? What do we eat? Where will we shower? What about my school? Some of us haven’t graduated high school, you know.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he repeated calmly.

The last thing I felt was calm though. I was already thinking of the future. I didn’t want to be those window wipers on the side of the road, begging for some loose change. Or have to wear a sign that read “Homeless and hungry” in the hopes someone would pity me enough to give me a hot meal. Or have people judge me as some druggie in the streets because of an addiction I didn’t have. I didn’t want to pee in alleyways or shoplift at stores. I wasn’t strong like them, and now I wished I’d hugged every freaking homeless person I’d come across because this shitsucked. I wanted my life back, even if it meant living with an evil man and a whore in a dingy area. It was safer than this, and I was opting for the lesser of two evils.

“You’re letting your fear get to you,” Carter said, pulling me away from my thoughts. “I’ve got some money stashed inside my pocket from my previous job, enough to see us through for the next while. You don’t need to fear anything, Angel. I know deep inside you’d rather be here with me than at that shithole. You say I didn’t have to take you, but how could you think I could just walk away? I wouldn’t be able to live with myself knowing you were under that roof with all those men coming and going, especially when one of the sick pricks went into your room.”

I softened a little by his concern. It was nice to know I wasn’t the only one fearing them.

I mulled his words over, and he was right, I suppose. I was letting my fear get to me. I guess it was the unknown that frightened me. I liked to be in control of what tomorrow brought with it. I wanted some predictability because it meant stability too. But was I prepared to continue that lifestyle among criminals? Because that’s essentially what Russell and Cheryl were at the end of the day. If I had a choice whether to live neglected and unloved with the certainty of a roof over my head, or live in the unknown with a man that I reserved a special place in my heart, the answer came without thought.

Carter.

He would always come first.

This would never have gone any other way.

I sighed and told myself to be calm. I trusted him. That was all that mattered at the end of the day. He seemed to feel my mood shift and he relaxed further in the seat.

Relaxing too, I brushed my fingertip over his bruised lip. “Does this hurt?”

He shook his head. “Not so much.”

“Even when we…?” Heat rushed to my cheeks as I thought about the kiss he gave me in my bedroom—well, myoldbedroom now if we were going to be technical.

He just stared at me for a moment, his eyes roaming over my face while his lips flinched upwards. “No,” he whispered.

I swallowed hard and managed a nod. I tried to say the wordgoodbut I couldn’t seem to find my voice. I just looked at him and his mouth, my need already so evident in the way I gazed at him. He could see it, couldn’t he? Surely he could see the love pouring out of me for him, it was as real as the rain pounding the roof of this zebra print interior car.

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