Page 1 of The Same Backward as Forward
Chapter 1
There was an art to being invisible. In this town, with my last name, it took effort to be nobody, to make people look right through me. I was quiet. I never wore makeup. I kept my hair just long enough to pull back into a nondescript ponytail. When I wore it down, its sole purpose was falling into my face. But the real key to being the right kind of invisible, the thing that mattered far more than making myself quiet and nondescript, was keeping the world at arm’s length.
I was a master at being alone—but not lonely. Loneliness would have been a vulnerability, and I was Rooney enough to know how that would end. Weakness of any kind was nothing but blood for the sharks. At twenty, I’d survived by keeping my head down and my eyes open. I’d made it out of the house—and out of the family in every way that mattered.
Except for one.
“Kaylie.” I didn’t raise my voice as I called out to my sister, who was currently dancing rather enthusiastically on top of a pool table. She shouldn’t have even been able to hear me over the dull roar of small-town drunks on a mission to get drunker, but Kaylie and I had always had a sixth sense for each other.
“Hannah!” My sister kept right on dancing, as delighted tosee me as she’d been when she was three and I was six and I’d been her favorite person in the world. “Dance with me, you beautiful bitch.”
Kaylie was an optimist. For example, she thought there was a chance in hell that I was joining her on top of that pool table. My sister’s knack for misplaced optimism was half the reason she had a rap sheet. The other half was that, no matter how good I was at fading into the background, I’d never been able to shield her, too. Kaylie had been born dancing on tables and shouting her joy to the moon—and sometimes her fury, too. Her fearlessness suited our mother.
Some of the time.
“I’ll have to take a rain check,” I told my still-dancing sister.
“Your loss, you glorious thing, you.” Kaylie twirled in a circle, adeptly avoiding the half-dozen balls scattered over the table’s surface. The trio of guys holding pool cues, whose game she had presumably interrupted, didn’t seem to mind.
Collared shirts. Expensive shoes. Prep-school looks.Those three weren’t locals. In this bar, that spelled trouble.
“I’ll race you home.” I tried to tempt Kaylie off the table. She had a competitive streak.
“Last I checked, it’s not your home anymore, O Serious One.” Kaylie walked along the edge of the pool table, her arms held to the sides, her long hair streaming down her back. When she reached the end, she bent at the waist to place a hand on the shoulder of one of the pool-cue-holding boys.
“My sister,” Kaylie confided in him in a stage whisper, “is faster than she looks.”
Faster. Stronger. Smarter.I was a lot of things that Kaylie didn’t need to be advertising. Luckily, the guy on the receiving end of her attention, who didn’t look older than eighteen or nineteenhimself, couldn’t have glanced away from her leather-clad torso if he’d tried. As for his friends, one of them was relishing the view of Kaylie from behind, and the other one…
The other one shifted his gaze languidly toward me.
His hair was a dark, almost reddish brown and long enough to hang over his eyes, which did absolutely nothing to mask the way they roved over my body. I could feel him taking in my faded blue scrubs, my dishwater blonde hair, the exact set of my mouth.
“I have to ask,” he said with the air of a person to whom everything was a very dark joke, “exactly how fast are you, Hannah?”
My instincts, honed from years of watching and trying not to be seen, told me two things: first, that he was drunk or high or both, and second, that, even inebriated, he missed nothing.
I gave him no visible response. My quiet was the kind of quiet that didn’t blink. Didn’t flinch.
Dark green eyes, shining with the light of bad ideas and worse ones, locked on to mine. “It’s nice to meet you, too,” he said dryly.
We hadn’tmet, and we weren’t going to. “You’re not from around here,” I commented. That was a warning. He didn’t heed it.
Instead, he picked up a piece of pool chalk and spun it through his fingers, one after another. “What gave me away?” he asked mockingly.
That was a rhetorical question, but my brain generated an automatic response.Your tan is too even. Your hands aren’t calloused. You’re wearing a button-up shirt.The top three buttons were undone, his collar more rumpled than popped. Smirking, he leaned against the pool table, as casual as a demigod who found some amusement in sizing up little mortals. There was a canny looseness to the way he moved, not even a hint of tension visible anywhere in his body. It was all too easy for me to imagine him as an ancient royal sprawled across a litter, being carried around by servants.
Or soldiers, I thought. Something in me whispered that he was spoiling for a fight. And in this bar, as an outsider, he was likely enough to find one.
Not my problem.
“Kaylie,” I called. To everyone else in the bar, my voice probably sounded exactly the same as it had before, but my sister heard the difference. The two of us had been forged in a different kind of heat. She hopped off the pool table and sauntered around to my side, slowing as she passed the guy who’d zeroed in on me.
“Maybe I’ll see you around.” Kaylie’s smile was trouble.
“You won’t.” I directed those words at the outsider.
“Will I not?” Eyes on me, he set his whiskey glass on the edge of the pool table, partially overhanging the edge, just daring gravity to make itself known.
