Page 3 of Bad Decisions & Back Roads

The guilt wasn’t a memory.It was a living thing, clawing up my throat, dragging me under every time I tried to breathe.

I hit the fence and shoved through the barbed wire, pain tearing across my jacket, metal biting skin.I barely felt it.Didn’t care.Because there was only one place left to go.One person left who could make any of this feel survivable.

Gia.

She stood beneath the massive oak across the line on McClary land.Branches thrashed above her, wind whipping her reddish-brown hair loose from two small braids and across her face.Her glasses were shoved into her hair, forgotten.The worn jacket absorbed water rather than repelled.Her rubber boots were planted like she was bracing against the world while waiting for me.

She was the only thing I could see through the wreckage of everything I’d destroyed.

“You’re late,” she said, like we both weren’t fighting a storm.

Rain streaked down her face, catching on her lashes, dripping from her chin.She didn’t wipe the water away.

“Sorry.”The word scraped out of me.I didn’t apologize to anyone.Not to teachers.Not to the principal who’d suspended me twice already this year, my senior year.Not to the coaches who benched me for bad behavior or the cops who dragged me home last week.I’d built a reputation on not bending and never breaking.

But Gia?She got the version of me I didn’t let anyone else see.

To everyone else, I figured if I pushed hard enough—if I acted out, screwed up, made myself a problem—my father might finally look at me and decide I wasn’t worth handing the farm down to.That I wasn’t worth trapping here into a life I didn’t want.

Vision, North Carolina was a town that felt like it had been holding its breath for a hundred years and forgot how to exhale.Here, people sized you up by which church claimed your soul—Methodist or Baptist—and how many generations your blood had soaked into the same stubborn land.

“I’m sorry we have to be out here in this miserable weather, but you promised.I need you to take him today.”She waved at a damp cardboard box with a towel over it next to her that I already knew contained a puppy.She’d told me last week the small heeler was struggling.Her father was going to shoot it, but she’d been hiding it in the barn.She had a class field trip tomorrow and needed the puppy gone.

“I got it.”

“Thank you.Now about you…” She crossed her arms.The movement tugged her sleeve back.“We talked about your brother last week.It wasn’t your fault.I feel awful I couldn’t be at the funeral.You know…Dad.”She paused to frown.“What are you looking at?”

There it was on her wrist.A bloom of bruises worked their way up her pale skin—dark, mottled, half-hidden like something ashamed to exist.

“I noticed at school…” My voice snagged on the truth she kept sanding down into something harmless.I stared at the damaged skin.

She tugged her sleeve down to cover it.She always brushed the bruises off fast, saying they weren’t that bad, that her father just got mad sometimes.The lies never fooled me.

Since we started meeting to fish, I had noticed the things she couldn’t hide as easily.The way her smiles never quite reached her eyes.The quick flashes of hurt that crossed her face before she buried them.The way she flinched at slammed lockers, then immediately mouthed off or picked a fight so nobody would notice she’d startled or that she was angry.I recognized that trick.Straight out of my own playbook.Only, my family was the polar opposite of hers—too loving, too protective, and parents who hovered so closely it felt smothering.

I reached for her wrist.She tried to pull back, but I was faster, pushing her sleeve up just enough.Finger-shaped bruises bloomed against her freckled skin.Something ugly and violent clawed up my throat.

I pulled her into me and held her tight, wishing I could keep the world from touching her again.

She went rigid for a breath.Then she melted.Her forehead dropped to my chest.Her arms wrapped me, holding me as much as I was her.

She said, “I need you to remember something.No matter what happens.”

I didn’t like her tone.“What do you think is going to happen?You’re going on a school trip tomorrow.”

“Promise not to lose yourself in the ugliness of everything.”Her hands curled into my back as if trying to squeeze out my promise.“Please, promise me.”

“Okay.”I bent my head, my mouth near her hair.“This can’t keep happening.Let me kill him,” I whispered.“Just say the word.”Please.Let me be able to savesomeonein my life.

She shook her head against me.No.

I forced myself to let her go, even though every instinct screamed not to.I tipped her chin up until she had to look at me.

“I need to get you out of that house,” I said.“I can’t—” My voice cracked.“I can’t watch this happen to you anymore without doing something.”

“I am getting out,” she said quietly.“I’m doing it my way, Rye.”

Rye.