Chapter One
Natasha
Staring at the screen of the cash machine, I contemplated withdrawing all the money. My finger itched at the thought of just doing it and running. Would he even miss me if I disappeared? Would he notice or care? I couldn’t imagine that he would. Not after all this time. And even if he did, it would be just so he could drag me back here.
Closing my eyes for a minute, I let my finger hover over the withdraw button. I could do it. I could take it all and use it to get away. Maybe this time I really would be able to disappear. Maybe this time it would be different.
The man standing behind me in the queue coughed impatiently, his foot tapping against the brickwork sidewalk. Opening my eyes I typed in the number fifty and waited for the machine to spit the cash out at me.
Coward.
The little voice whispered inside my head. I tried to blot it out, now wasn’t the time to be reckless. I had to just graduate from this place and then I was free. I had job interviews lined up and once I had something decent then I could tell him to go to hell. No one understood my need to cut my father from my life. No one understood that having to use the money he sent me every month was like having my finger nails ripped out. It made me sound spoilt. Like a child throwing a temper tantrum. But it wasn’t like that at all…
Nobody knew what he had done. No one knew that he had forced me to rely on him. I’d never thought my father was a powerful man. He didn’t look like a man who had power and yet here I was… Apparently a few well placed phone calls made me un-hireable. An undesirable. I couldn’t even so much as get a job cleaning toilets. Nobody wanted me. The second they heard my name.
Of course I’d tried to work around that one too. I’d attempted to change my name, pretend I wasn’t Natasha Masterton. But he’d seen that one coming. Supplied all the local businesses with an up to date photograph of me. How’d he’d gotten an up to date photograph was beyond me, considering I hadn’t seen him in three years. Not since the day he’d dropped me off outside the college after I’d run for the first time.
I wanted to be angry, but I was more tired than angry. There was, after all, only so much time I could remain angry without it draining me completely. I couldn’t count on him for anything in my life except putting the money in my account every month like clockwork. It was the only reason I knew he was still alive.
It hit me then. What would happen if he was dead? Who would notify me? Would anyone even have a way of contacting me? After mom died, he had cut ties with everyone we knew. Pulled me out of school, away from my friends, away from a normal life. When he’d sent me to boarding school it had been the last straw. Talking to him wasn’t an option, he didn’t want to listen and it only ever ended in an argument…
A guilty pang settled in my gut. Here I was imagining what would happen if he simply ceased to be. Part of me still wanted to believe that he loved me, that he still looked at me as being his daughter. But if I was honest with myself I knew the truth. He didn’t love me, he blamed me for her death. I was here and she wasn’t and he couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t understand all of his motives and I didn’t understand the blame. But at least I had a reason.
“Natasha!” Rachel’s voice pulled me out of my morbid thought spiral. I dragged my gaze away from the fifty I held in my hand as I proceeded to stuff it into my wallet along with my card.
She jogged towards me, her dark hair swinging from side to side in the ponytail she had dragged it up into. It wasn’t something I could do. I wasn’t the type of person who could just roll out of bed and look effortlessly stunning. And Rachel was stunning. I wasn’t jealous of her, she was my best friend and Rachel seemed to have the strange knack for not knowing just how pretty she was. It didn’t seem to matter how many guys crushed on her, or flirted with her. It didn’t seem to matter how many girls tried to be mean to her. She was nice to everyone and I loved her for her need to only see the good in everyone around her. It was something I wished I could do.
“Where are you off to?” Her expression seemed to be one of genuine puzzlement.
“Home. I’m just wrecked…”
The look she gave me was one of complete sympathy. Under normal circumstances, and if it was coming from anyone other than her, I would have hated it. But I knew there was nothing malicious behind the soft look in her eyes.
She wrapped her arms around me, dragging me into a tight hug. “One of these days it’ll all become clear. I can’t believe that he doesn’t love you. If he didn’t then why keep sending you the money?”
“Because it’s a way of punishing me and he knows it…” My voice was half muffled by the fabric of her sweater. When she finally released me I could still taste some lingering fluff against my mouth. I brushed it away with the back of my hand and plastered a smile across my face.
“You don’t need to worry about me, I’m fine. Really.” I emphasised my last word in the hopes that she would simply let me off the hook. But the look of determination in her eyes let me know instantly that she had no intention of doing so.
“I know what would make you even more fine…” She tilted her head to one side, her ponytail of dark chocolate brown hair falling across her shoulder.
“No way! I know that look and I know what happened the last time I agreed to it… Never again.”
She pouted at me, her full bottom lip sticking out making me laugh. She looked ridiculous, and she knew it too.
“Please, I promise this time you’ll have fun…”
“You said that the last time and it wasn’t fun at all…”
“But your favourite band is playing this time. Please, for me?”
There had to be a reason why she was so desperate for me to go… And normally when she begged this fervently it had something to do with the male of the species…
“Who is he?”
“What?” The look of surprise on her face caused a small laugh to escape me. I couldn’t help it.
“Who is he?” I felt like enunciating each word but I didn’t. It would only make her angry and then it would be harder to get any real information out of her.
“How do you do that?” She asked as she linked her arm through me and began to tow me back towards the main coffee shop. I hesitated for a second, not wanting to go back in there. It was the place they liked to hang out. The popular kids… The ones that made me feel as though we were back in high-school again and I was the nerd. The outcast. The one who didn’t go home for holidays… The one who didn’t get post from family, or phone calls, or visits… The weird outsider.
Even though I was older now, nothing seemed to have really changed. They still looked at me the same way. Different people, different place, the same opinion.
“Natasha?” Rachel’s voice cut into my thoughts again pulling me back to the moment at hand. She was staring at me, the look in her eyes filled with concern.
“Sorry, I was miles away. What did you say?”
“I wanted to know how you did that? How you always seemed to know what I was really up to? Am I really that shallow?”
I grinned at her and grabbed her arm again dragging her in the door of the large coffee shop. The scent of chocolate, coffee and sticky pastries instantly invaded my nose, making my mouth water.
“You’re not shallow, I just happen to know you as well as you know me… And well in this instance it has to be a guy. Nothing else would give you such a twinkle in your eye.”
She grinned at me, immediately launching into a full description of the guy she had her heart set on.
“He’s just so dreamy… Big brown eyes that a girl could drown in and his hair is blonde but sort of spiky. He’s in the band that’s playing before ‘Backward Sliding Domino’.”
I shot her a look of disbelief as we stood in line and I eyed up the last piece of fudge brownie.
“And how do you expect to get anywhere near him?”
“He invited me. I met him earlier and he gave me two tickets. He was only going to give me one but I begged him to let you come to and… Voila.” She pulled the two cards from her purse and flashed them in front of me.
The telltale black and white domino was emblazoned across the front with the 8 ‘o’ clock start time written in red. I struggled not to snap them out of her hand. She wasn’t wrong when she said ‘Backward Sliding Domino’ were my favourite band. There was something about their music that drew me in. It was as though when I listened to them play they understood me. And I knew how cheesy that sounded but it was true. Every single one of their songs could have been written about my life.
The guy in the line ahead of us pointed to the fudge brownie and the girl serving him quickly whipped it out from behind the counter. Disappointed, I let out a sigh. Rachel clearly thought it was something she had done because she immediately jumped on it.
“I thought you’d be excited. You love them.”
“Yeah, I am excited, you know how I feel about them.”
She nodded thoughtfully as she chewed the inside of her lip and we reached the top of the line. The bored expression on the face of the girl serving us made me smile. I watched carefully as she shot furtive glances over my shoulder to someone behind us. The curiosity was too much and I turned.
The guy who had stolen my brownie was sitting at a table in the far corner. The cake sat on a small plate in front of him completely untouched. But it wasn’t the brownie that she was staring at, and it certainly wasn’t the brownie that kept me staring at him. He was cute, although cute was probably the wrong word to use to describe him. He was hot. His hair was dark and messy, as though he spent way too much time running his fingers through it. His shoulders were broad and I could make out the ripple of muscle beneath his t-shirt as he reached out and grabbed his cup of coffee and took a sip from it.
He chose that exact moment to glance up and his eyes caught mine. There was something odd about them, something I couldn’t exactly put my finger on at this distance. I wanted to get a closer look, to just walk across the coffee shop and stare into his eyes. Something pulled me to him.
Rachel nudged me in the ribs and I spun around to face her, my face flushing an unbecoming shade of red.
“Who is he?” She asked in a loud mock whisper.
I pulled a face at her and glanced back over my shoulder as I handed my money over the counter to the girl. The guy was still sitting in the corner, a small smirk playing around his lips.
Shit. I muttered to myself. I really needed to work on my making a complete ass out of myself. It was a problem I had and one that needed to be fixed.
“I have no idea. Why?” I answered Rachel, my voice not betraying the butterflies I had in my tummy.
“Because you’re staring at him like he’s someone special.” She grinned as she handed over her own money.
I struggled to think up something to say, anything that would get me off the hook. She was right in a way, I had been staring at him like he was someone special. I wasn’t sure why, but something inside told me he was. That maybe just maybe he was meant to be more than just a stranger in a coffee shop.
I laughed then, the sound erupting from me abruptly making Rachel jump and the girl serving us stared at me as though I had just lost my mind. I grabbed my iced drink and practically ran to a small table at the opposite side of the room from him. Was I losing my mind? Maybe after everything that had happened in my past it was finally all catching up to me. Would I be one of those tragic cases? I could see the headlines now on the college paper, “After Family Trauma Girl Finally Cracks - Loses it in local coffee shop.”
Rachel sat down across from me and shot me another look of concern as she sipped on her coffee. I didn’t say anything as she set the cup down slowly. I knew what was coming. It would be some sort of lecture. Probably something about how I needed to stop taking everything in life so seriously. That I needed to chill and just be young… Whatever that really meant.
“What was that all about?” Her voice was low, calm as though she was speaking to a small child that might, at any moment throw a tantrum.
“He took the last brownie and…” I paused realising how ridiculous it sounded. “I thought he was cute and then I thought of something else and it made me laugh… That’s all.” I shrugged, as though by pretending to be utterly nonchalant I could convince her.
“You really thought he was cute?” She sounded almost surprised and I tried not to laugh at her reaction.
Was I really that bad, that even my best friend had to question my interest in cute guys? Maybe I was. I certainly wasn’t that girl that showed that much interest in the opposite sex. It wasn’t that I didn’t find guys attractive, because I did. It was just easier to pretend not to see them. I’d gotten so good at the pretence that I wasn’t sure anymore if it was really a pretence.
“Yes, I really thought he was cute. Didn’t you?”
“Well yeah, but…” She hesitated, her eyes dropping to the cup in front of her. “You’ve never really shown an interest in anyone, not since, Daniel.”
I swallowed hard, the lump that had instantly formed in my throat tried to cut off my air supply. I wouldn’t allow even the mention of his name to put me back in that place again. I couldn’t. He wasn’t worth it. He didn’t deserve my tears… Or at least that was what I told myself.
“Well I guess I’m just over it now. I don’t think of him and that guy was cute…”
She nodded and smiled at me, as though instantly recognising that I needed to change the subject. Rachel was one the person who saw through me. She knew everything about me and she knew when I was lying. But at least she had the good grace not to pull me up on it.
She glanced over her shoulder to the guy in the corner, her gaze taking in very inch of him. When she looked back at me the twinkle was back in her eye.
“You should go talk to him.” She half whispered at me.
“No, I shouldn’t. It’d be a bad idea.”
A grin spread across her face, a look that made me nervous. As though at any moment she might spring up from her chair and march over there to him, force me to talk to him. I shook my head in the hopes that the combination of the expression on my face and the gesture would be enough to stop her.
“But why?”
“Because he’s leaving.” I watched him stand and drop a couple of bills on the table. He scooped up the notepad he had with him before making his way to the door. Part of me hoped he would look back at me. Maybe he would. But that was something that happened only in the romance novels I liked to read. It didn’t work that way in real life. Daniel had taught me that…
He pushed the door open and disappeared out into the afternoon sunshine without so much as a backwards glance. A bubble of disappointment popped inside me and my shoulders slumped. It was stupid. I knew it was stupid, but I couldn’t help it. Perhaps I was regaining my optimism. And if that was the case then it sucked. Feelings and emotions like that only lead to more disappointment.
It was amazing how easy it became for people to let you down if you allowed yourself to hope. Hope was a luxury reserved only for those who had stability in their lives… I’d had plenty of it once and now that it was gone I missed it.
“Awh…” Rachel’s shoulders slumped and she slurped her coffee loudly from the white mug she cradled in her hands. “Maybe you’ll see him again? Maybe he goes here…”
I smiled at her sadly and shook my head, dropping my gaze to the table we sat around. Someone had spilled sugar across the surface and I had the overwhelming urge to draw patterns in it. But I didn’t. That was something my mother used to do. I wasn’t her. I would never be like her… Could never be like her…
“Well how do you know? He might be at the gig tonight?” She brightened visibly as she mentioned the gig. And even I had to admit that when I thought about going to see my favourite band play a quiver of excitement raced through me…
I swallowed down the last of my drink and stood. There was no point in hanging around the campus, not when I had to get ready. Rachel stood with me and we made our way to the door. I could practically feel the excitement rolling off her and it made me smile.
“I’ll meet you outside the club at eight?” She gripped my arm tightly and turned me to face her as she spoke. “Promise me you’ll come? That you will be there?”
I grinned at her and gestured to her pocket where I knew she had shoved the tickets. “You know I have a weakness where my band is concerned. There is no way I could resist… And who knows, maybe I’ll actually get to meet the band?”
Rachel squealed as she spun away from me and started to jog in the opposite direction. All I could do was shake my head and smile. She had a way of making life better. Of making tough times so much easier and for that I was eternally grateful to have her in my life.
Turning I began to walk back towards my own apartment. Only one thought occupied my mind, who the hell had that guy been? And would I ever see him again?
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