Trusting You

  Trusting You

  Ketley Allison

  Copyright © Ketley Allison LLC, 2018

  Visit Ketley Allison’s official website at www.ketleyallison.com for the latest news, book details, and other information

  Cover Design by Sarah Hansen, Copyright 2018 Okay Creations.

  Editing by Mitzi Carroll, Mitzi Carroll Editing Services

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. Carter

  2. Locke

  3. Carter

  4. Locke

  5. Carter

  6. Locke

  7. Carter

  8. Locke

  9. Carter

  10. Locke

  11. Carter

  12. Locke

  13. Carter

  14. Locke

  15. Carter

  16. Locke

  17. Carter

  18. Locke

  19. Carter

  20. Locke

  21. Carter

  22. Locke

  23. Carter

  24. Locke

  25. Carter

  26. Locke

  27. Carter

  28. Locke

  29. Carter

  30. Carter

  31. Locke

  32. Carter

  33. Locke

  34. Carter

  35. Carter

  36. Locke

  37. Carter

  38. Locke

  39. Carter

  40. Locke

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Ketley Allison

  1

  Carter

  The night my best friend died, I’d been thinking about Skittles.

  She holds my hand, the pale of hers almost translucent compared to my tan, her blue veins swelling in ways they hadn’t nine months before.

  Before.

  That’s the classification I’m cursed with. Before, when Paige was healthy. After, when she is dying.

  “Do you remember?” she asks now, a weak smile on her lips.

  Her voice is hoarse as if a breathing tube were inserted and removed, although that hasn’t happened, thankfully. And never will.

  “Remember what?” I ask, leaning forward so I can hear better. The beeps and blips of the hospital machines echo her every breath.

  “At the end of freshman year, how we met by fighting each other for green Skittles?”

  It’s such a rare moment of clarity. Paige’s grass-green eyes are usually glazed over in a chemical-induced fugue. She’d stopped eating days ago. Stopped drinking the day before yesterday.

  I bark out a laugh at the memory.

  “God,” I say, squeezing her hand. “I can’t believe that’s what you’re thinking about.”

  “You took the last one,” she says, then chuckles hoarsely.

  “As I said then and will now, you took the last one and blamed me.”

  “Who likes only the green ones anyway?” She smiles. It’s a brief glimpse of visceral health until the muscles fall and she goes back to ghostly sick. “Everyone knows the red ones are the best.”

  “Not according to us.” I make my voice stronger than the utter cave-in my insides are suffering through, the crumbling and cavernous twists that began their avalanche ten minutes ago.

  I’d been getting coffee from a beaten-up vending machine down the hall when a nurse gently tapped me on the shoulder.

  “It’s getting close to time,” she’d said, somehow managing to be grim, but kind. She held my stare, understanding the process it took to go from looking for the cream button to saying good-bye to your best friend forever.

  The walk back to Paige’s room was like taking the Green Mile; the execution of my heart, of Paige’s soul, imminent. Yet I lift my feet, for her. I’m by her side, for her. Nobody wants to watch the person they love most die before their eyes. It takes a certain form of bravery to wait for death, to hold it in your hands and watch it pass through the body of your soul mate, a wonderful woman, who did not deserve to be the next one chosen. And whom, if you could, beg whatever force was taking her to take you instead.

  It was a nightmare to go to bed each night, thinking Paige might not be breathing the next day. Yet, the lead-up was somehow worse than the actual moment. Beside her now, I feel a strange sort of calm, an ability to help her through these last hours, maybe because the last thing I want her to see is me hysterical beside her, my twisted, devastated expression her last image on this earth.

  “It’s time for me to go, isn’t it?” she asks me now. Somehow, despite her pain and opioids, she can read me as well as ever.

  “You’ve been out of it a few days.” I clear my throat of the rest of the clogs. Her last sounds can’t be of me keening and howling beside her.

  “So, that’s a yes.”

  I stroke her hair, once a cascading blonde, from her face. It’s short now, growing in uneven, frizzy chunks, since they’d stopped her chemo a few months ago in favor of hormone therapy, managing to extend her life a little bit more. That’s what it comes down to—a few more options for a few more months. Then a few days. Until they can only extend hours. Until it becomes minutes.

  “Lily?” she asks.

  “She’s fine.” I top off the reassurance by kissing Paige’s cold, damp forehead. “She’s at the daycare downstairs. I’m picking her up after…” My voice catches.

  This time, Paige squeezes my hand. “I don’t think I’m gonna go by the time daycare closes at five.”

  I tremble out a surprised laugh. “Then our neighbor will come get her. I’m not leaving you, Paige.”

  “And her? Lily?” Paige is blinking slowly but becomes wildly alert. “You’ll never…”

  “Not for a second,” I say, and mean it. “She will be taken care of. Adored. Will know everything there is to know about you. Including your love for green Skittles.”

  Paige smiles, but it’s not even half the glimmer she used to give off. “I should tell you…”

  “Save your strength,” I say, then try for a joke. “All this chitchat is exhausting me.”

  “What am I saving my strength for? Dying?”

  I pause with my mouth open. She has me there.

  “I need to tell you…” She exhales, then her chest rises with a big breath. “I want Lily to know her father.”

  I swallow, buying myself time in a moment where there are so few seconds left. “We’ve never talked about that.”

  “I know. But it’s time. When Lily grows up, when she understands she doesn’t have a mother… I’m not leaving her as an orphan.”

  “I’ll be here,” I say to her firmly. “Lily will never understand what it’s like not to have parents.”

  “I know, honey, but…” Paige’s breathing slows, labors. Her eyes drift to a spot on the other side of her hospital gurney, filming over as the morphine pump blips its administration. “I know she has you. And I know it’s enough. But Lily needs more. She’d want more.”

  “Yes, I…” I rub my lips together. “You’re right. It’s just, you said he was a one-night stand. I don’t know if showing up at his door with a baby would…”

  “Because this is the last thing he’d want, I know, but without me, without a mother…” Paige c
hokes up, and I brace myself forward, holding her hands tight.

  “She will know you. Okay?” My attempt at being strong fails miserably. “She will know her mother.”

  Paige nods, her shaking lips parting. And she murmurs his name.

  “Oh,” I say, thoughts shifting to a little over a year ago, where we were, where he was. Who he is. My brows furrow.

  “I know it’s hard to understand,” she says. “But promise me. Promise me you’ll tell him.”

  As my lips waver, they feel wet. I taste salt. I don’t like this, not at all, but I can’t dismiss a dying wish. “On all the green Skittles on this Earth, I swear to you.”

  Paige gives me a long look. She says quietly, “If I had the energy, I’d cry with you.”

  I break under her soft, wise gaze. “Don’t go. Please. Don’t go.”

  Paige shakes her head, a gentle side-to-side. “Not my choice anymore.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Carter. So much.”

  My head bows, and, when the weight becomes too much, rests on her stomach. Her arms come around, stroking kindly, weakly. We stay that way for a while, mostly because I can’t summon the energy to rise, to look up and see my friend’s slow seeping of spirit. I’d rather feel her warmth and movement through her breath and strokes. It means she’s here for the moment. She’s staying.

  The slow up-and-down of her chest, the candor of the machines around her, almost forcibly lull both of us to sleep.

  And when I wake up, she doesn’t.

  Paige remains alive—physically—for another twelve hours, her body ever so slowly succumbing to the end. It’s an education I wish I’d never received: what a death rattle sounds like, how the body reacts to the deprivation of food and water. But this is what Paige chose—do not resuscitate. And I’d go through it again. Whether or not Paige is aware of my presence, when she went into the unknown, she isn’t alone.

  I hold vigil, look upon her face, until the official proclamation that she is gone. The nurse has to quietly but firmly remove my hand from Paige’s, whispering kind assurances with an all-too-knowing calm. And while reality is a brutal, terrible beast, my last words to Paige are about us. About Lily. Letting her know that her daughter will be okay.

  But as I take these steps out of Paige’s hospital room, I have something important to hold me down. An essential person who continues to tie Paige to this lifetime. A whole-hearted presence bearing Paige’s namesake and sweetness. Lily James Tobias.

  While she doesn’t understand it yet, Lily lost her mother today.

  And now I must find her a father.

  2

  Locke

  The morning after is so fuckin’ awkward.

  It’s why I don’t have any. Until an accidental now.

  I’m pretty sure I got so hammered last night I forgot to chivalrously escort a lady to a car.

  I risk a glance to my right.

  Fuck. Definitely sure.

  Couldn’t she be nudged out by text? Something like Nice to take shots with you, even better to fuck you, but can you get out of my bed?

  Actually, not so bad an idea. If only I could… No.

  Way too much chance of waking her up.

  Instead, I’m stuck beside a woman whose hair is tangled in my pillow, not to mention my face, those red-brown strands that were so sexy a few hours ago sticking to my stubble like we’d used honey instead of lube last night.

  Only one set of sheets lives in this apartment. And I only know to say “set” because my sister drilled it into me when she threw the plastic package at my chest after storming out the other day. Something tells me I’ll be picking curly hairs out of this set long after I send it out to be washed.

  And I hate sending my stuff out to be washed. Takes days. Usually, I sleep ass-up on the mattress, but after the sex and now the shedding, not to mention my sister’s annoying, You need to grow the hell up, Locke—

  “Mmf.”

  The woman whose name is… Candace? Candy? Tara? …rolls over, taking her hair with her, but making my nose itch like the red in those highlights contain fire ants.

  “God…fuck.” I rub at my nose with my palm, sitting up and flicking the rest of her tangles off me. I take it as my opening.

  I stumble out of bed, the groan of the floorboards making me pause half in, half out, waiting for those doe-blue eyes to open and face my ass crack, but relief comes instead when I notice she’s still out cold.

  Tiptoeing is not something a twenty-four-year-old man should be doing, especially one with a bum knee, but here I am, doing a creep-limp out of my own bedroom and exerting mental gymnastics to figure out where my phone is. That way, I can text her good-bye and good luck after fleeing my apartment in search of some bacon, the best hangover cure there was.

  I give my pits a sniff while heading to my bathroom. Definite shower needed first. Risky, but hell, I brought her all the way over here, maybe I deserve to look her in the eye when I request she leave without so much as a prompting of her name.

  I pause, scoff at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. Nah.

  Locking the door behind me, I croon as I duck under the spray. “Ah, sweet, sweet lady goddess of warm water…”

  I scrub at my skull and give my chin a good scratch, phantom strands still tickling. Eyes closed, I take my time, loving a good clean, giving my jewels a good tug and some soap.

  Hmm. I glance down at my half chub. Maybe Candy-Tara didn’t have to be dismissed outright. She could be up for another go around…

  Pounding at my door halts any further fantasy.

  “In a minute!” I call.

  “No, right now!” Candy-Tara yells back.

  Water gets in my eyes when I freeze mid wash. She doesn’t sound tired. Or hungover. Or confused. She’s…

  Pissed.

  “Gimme a sec.” Squeaking off the tap, I step out of the bathtub, giving my hair a good shake, like a dog coming out of a pool, and use a towel to do the rest before tying it around my waist. The pounding hasn’t stopped.

  “All right.” I turn the knob, and the door unlocks with a click. “What’s the—”

  “You could have told me, you fucker.”

  Angry, red-rimmed blue eyes glare at me. Candy-Tara’s hair is a nest around pale skin. A slight layering of freckles adds to her pissed-off charm.

  Damn. She’s even hotter when she’s flushed. My dick gives a little tug in agreement.

  “Told you what, babe?” I offer her my best smile. “I was just thinking about you and how lonely I was in that shower.”

  “Not gonna work on me this time, Locke,” she spits. Then levels that spit by smacking me in the shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a girlfriend?”

  “A…what?” I cock my head, but not in the usual sense that gets women biting their lower lip. “Believe me, sweetheart, I do not have one of those.”

  I lay my hand on her shoulders, brush down her arms and give an encouraging grin upon feeling her goose bumps. “Come on, I’ve been picturing your ass naked and wet all morning.”

  “Locke,” she fumes.

  I add further inducement by dropping my towel and showing her just how much I want her again.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  I frown. I hear a woman’s voice, except Candy-Tara’s lips aren’t moving. In fact, her arms are crossed, and she’s completely immune to my slick, scented, muscular body, standing at attention for her in exactly the way she’d moaned for it to do last night.

  Candy-Tara inclines her head and gives a cat-like purr. “That not-girlfriend you were talking about? I just let her in.”

  “Wha…” Slowly, my gaze travels from her plump lip fillers—which never really turned me on until I saw them around my cock—to another girl, standing in my small space, arms also crossed, but appearing mighty more enraged.

  The new girl doesn’t even ask me a question. She just says, “Nope. I am not doing this. No fucking way.”
>
  And spins once on her heels and goes for the door without looking back.

  I almost gape at her departure. Never have I been dismissed so entirely.

  “Wait, who are you?” I ask her retreating back.

  Candy-Tara cuts in to say, “I’m not an idiot, so stop playing dumb.”

  “I don’t know who that girl is!” I say to her while grabbing my towel. I fumble it closed while I chase after the other girl—the one who’s actually nameless—before she disappears from my life forever.

  Because if Candy-Tara is hot, the angry girl is downright sexy.

  Her fury is like a magnet, sizzling with electricity. It scores her cheeks and narrows her eyes in a way that if her tongue darted out, I’d be over there in two strides, pulling her hair back with one hand and tonguing the sensitive corner of her neck until she moans. Add to that thick, brunette waves almost reaching her elbows, the widest caramel eyes I’ve ever seen, tits that are at least a C cup, and an ass I’d kill any man to get to.

  Holy shit, I want those cheeks in my hands.

  “Where are you going?” I call as I sprint out of my apartment into the hallway, hoping this isn’t a hallucination, that a girl this gorgeous actually exists.

  I find the top of her head on the stairs, heading down.

  “Wait!” I say again, chasing after her barefoot. I curse when I hit an exposed nail on the staircase.