Page 71 of Striking Range

“Yeah.” My voice is a whisper; a shameful secret is being passed between us. “He’s not very nice.”

Skylar watches me for a moment, his fingers never letting up, forever caressing me. “That’s why you never asked me to come over… Fuck, Evie. I-I don’t know what to say. Why? What’s his problem?”

“This time it’s because I don’t want a girlfriend,” I explain. “Other times, well, it depends on the situation. He’s a hit-first, talk-later kind of man.”

A storm cloud passes over his features, and it doesn’t leave; it makes itself a home there in those blue eyes, over those pillowy lips.

“He beat you because you don’t want a girlfriend? That’s so stupid,” he sneers.

“I know.”

His fingers drag over my chin, my jaw, the shell of my ear. My eyes threaten to close under the warmth of it, the intimacy, and what giving him this truth might mean.

Though my body is heating up, my skin reacting to him the way it has failed to for anyone else since the moment we touched in that bathroom, my mind is somewhere else, far away.

I’m scared. Will he think less of me now?

“Is he… Is he why you said being with a guy is wrong?” Skylar asks, each word slow and concise.

I think he’s scared of the answer.

Allowing my eyes to close once more, I ready myself for this conversation. I don’t know how he will react; I don’t know if he’ll accept my cowardice.

But I have to try. I have to.

“Yes. He’s… He’s made his expectations of me very clear. And I cannot fail; I can’t lose my family.”

“Oh, Evie.” His voice is dripping with pity, so fucking doused in devastation that as he lays himself over me and wraps me in his arms, I can feel his sympathy as if it’s a third person here in the bed with us. “That’s wrong. You know that, right? That that is wrong.”

I nod my head. “But knowing it and feeling it are two different things.”

It’s Skylar’s turn to nod as he holds me, his breath caressing my neck in a way that makes me shiver against him.

I want his hands all over me; I want my lips on his skin, even now. Even in the midst of all this anguish I carry, I want to touch.

But there is a fragile spell cast over the bedroom, and I’m so afraid of breaking it and him running from me that I don’t move; I let him control our situation and anything that might come from it.

“I understand. I hear you,” he assures me, leaning back enough to look into my eyes, his lips far too close to mine. “Everett, you need to get away from him. If it has always been like this, then that’s never been your family—not really.”

The tears come before I can stop them. They well up and pour over, unstoppable, an overwhelming force that shakes my body as they make their way down my neck and into the back of my shirt.

“So then what, I’ve never had a family? That’s so… so lonely.” My voice is a choked sob, my body tensing and untensing in an attempt to keep from sobbing completely

Skylar pulls me up to sit, cupping my face with his palms. “Hey, so what am I then? Am I not your family? Or what about Kelly and Henry?”

I tug at my bottom lip with my teeth, watching his worried eyes search mine, then drop to follow the motion. He has a hard time dragging his eyes away from my mouth, but once he does, I respond.

“I… I don’t want you to be my family.”

A flash of hurt flickers through his eyes, a moment of hesitation where he stares at me in what could be read as pain or betrayal. “W-what?”

“Sky… What I want from you is so much more. Much more… intimate.”

Like light breaking through the darkest of storm clouds, all of those conflicting feelings are replaced with a desperate heat. One I have been craving to see for so long—that I’ve reimagined alone in my room, night after night with my hands on my body, imagining them as someone else’s. As his.

He breathes out heavy and hot, straight onto me, into me, inside of me. “But I can still be your family.”

It’s a whispery, shy thing as it leaves him, his eyes darting around the room and a beautiful red flushing his cheeks.