Page 1 of The Return
CHAPTER1
COREY
Angela Marquardtand her BFFs occupied a table in the corner of my coffee-shop-slash-diner. Like they were in high school, the girls—now ladies—were boisterous and animated. Normally I could ignore them, and was doing a pretty good job of it until Angie gasped and announced, “Can you believe he’d come back here?”
My ears perked up, unbidden. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but my skin prickled when they said someone had returned, and I was desperate to know who it was.
“I know! After what happened with Adam? Why the hell would he come back here? I thought he’d run far and fast.”
And just like that, I knew. My skin grew clammy, and I couldn’t hold the cloth I was using the clean the tables.
“Corey Mills, are you listening to me?”
I jerked my head in the direction of the voice.
“I asked if you were okay,” Deirdre Dawson—DD to her friends—whispered to me.
I nodded sharply, and she gave me a dubious look but went back to her work. I had to think. Was I okay? There was a time I worshipped the ground that Jonas Brodie trod upon. From the moment I met him after we moved here, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Jonas was a geek, just like I had been. A bit taller than my five six, with sandy hair and caramel macchiato eyes. We were inseparable. My mom used to say she thought we might be conjoined, because where one of us was, the other wasn’t far behind.
All that changed in a moment.
I wasn’t there, so I didn’t see what happened. I had been sent to the nurse—and later the ER—to get stitched up after Adam Taylor and his buddies roughed me up and dumped me in a garbage bin. It probably would have been the same as always, but I had to stand up and tell them what fucking clichés they were and how they’d watched too much television, probablyGlee.
That enraged Adam. He cocked his fist back and drove it into my face. He’d smashed my cheek and split my lip in two places. I slipped in the slime on the bottom of the Dumpster and cracked my skull open on the way down.
Suffice it to say, it was not one of my finer moments.
The repercussions? None to speak of. Adam was popular—I was not. His buddies backed up his story of finding me like that and all insisted I had to be confused, because they’d never laid a hand on me. I was out for a few days, and Jonas came to my house and sat with me, holding my hand, every morning, not leaving until late in the evening. His touch actually helped more than the Tylenol I’d been given. When he asked me what happened, I told him. We had no secrets from each other. When I finished, my throat hoarse, a growl erupted from Jonas, unlike anything I’d ever heard in my life. He got up and stormed from my room, despite my calling him to come back.
That was the last time I saw him.
When I returned to school, the buzz was that Adam had gone to the principal and admitted what he’d done. The rumor mill was rampant with how awful Adam had looked. His right arm was broken in two places, his jaw fractured, and his left leg had been dislocated. His eyes were black and swollen shut. Someone had done quite the number on him.
Then someone said it had been Jonas who’d done it. But that wasn’t possible. Adam was a linebacker. He weighed 225 pounds, and stood six two. Jonas, on the other hand, was skinnier than me. He might have been, maybe, 120 pounds. There was no way Jonas Brodie could have hurt Adam that way. It was impossible.
When I called his house, his father answered and told me in a gruff voice that Jonas was gone. That was it. When I pressed, asking where he’d gone, he snarled at me to not look for Jonas, and then he’d hung up. Two days later, the family home was posted for sale, and they, like Jonas, were gone. Letters I sent came back undelivered, phones were disconnected. None of their neighbors knew where they’d gone.
The whole family simply vanished and took my broken heart with them.
The next six years were hard. Memories of Jonas flooded my brain. His smile, that wicked sense of humor. His utter inability to beat me when we played games. All of it was gone, and wasn’t coming back.
Only apparently, now it had.
I had the urge to kick everyone out and go looking for Jonas. I wanted—needed—to know what happened. Oh, who was I kidding? I wanted to see him, to wrap my arms around him and confess the secret I’d kept hidden from him for the longest time. I had been in love with him since we were eight years old. I’d gone to my mom and told her that when I was with Jonas, I got a fluttery feeling in my stomach, and how much I liked looking at him and being with him. She’d given me a soft smile, ruffled my hair, and told me to go out and play.
When I came out at seventeen, no one in my family was surprised. Apparently my love of Jonas had never abated, and I kept talking about it, until my mom took me aside and told me I would find love again. Jonas was my first, but wouldn’t be the last person I’d have in my life.
Only he would, and I knew it. My one chance at love had packed up and left.
“Has anyone seen him?” I asked, a nervous flutter in my stomach.
Angela turned to face me. “He was at the bank yesterday.” She shrugged. “He’s changed. A lot.”
What did that mean?“Changed how?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. And then did it again. “I’m not sure I can explain it.” Her cheeks pinked. “Let’s just say puberty was damn good to the boy.”
Before I could ask anything else, the women all rose as one. They carried their trash to the wastebasket, making sure to separate the recyclables, then gave me a wave and headed out the door, leaving me with so many unanswered questions.
