Page 68 of Before Now

“We won hide-and-seek.”

“Reigning champs,” she replies.

When I peel back the bunk’s curtain, she’s sprawled on my bed with a kick at the corner of her mouth. I look down at her. Her face flushed, hair covering my pillow, meadowy eyes more sated than sad. I keep looking but can’t see a difference between her and my Remi. I can’t feel the difference either.

It’s been overwhelming, to say the least, ripping between needing more of what I’ve missed and despising reminders of how I lost it. But staying on one side is somehow worse.

And it fucks with me. It really fucks with me.

I swallow, blinking out of a goddamn trance. “I need to go before anyone else traps us in here.”

Remi sits up, swinging her legs out of the bunk as I grab a clean shirt. Hers landed at the end of the bed earlier, and she reaches for it.

“You’re good?” I ask, pulling mine on.

A close-lipped smile flashes at me. “Yeah.”

The expression drops fast, and her eyes even faster. A tension takes over the space, both of us waiting for the switch to flip between us. But instead I shock us both and bend down, catching the side of her face. I set my forehead on hers.

“I’ll make sure no one hangs around the bus, so you can escape.”

She nods against me. “Thank you.”

A memory trickles in, the emotions that go with it close behind. Too close.

My thumb strokes her jaw before I straighten. Then I walk through the curtain. Off the bus. Into the sun.

And she still feels like my Remi—my perfect girl who looked like heartache and dissolved into a dream. Not callous and cold or capable of not caring about the pain she leaves behind. She feels like I want to believe her about us being real. The possibility bears down on me. Maybe I’ve been wrong this entire time.

I head back inside, security barricades lining the short path and two security guards flanking the venue’s exit. Already set up for the concert. Colt’s in the hallway, posted against a wall. He pushes off with his foot when I walk in.

“Sorry if they woke you up. I didn’t know they were out there until they came back in.”

“I wasn’t sleeping,” I tell him.

I hook my head, passing him, and he follows as the heavy door bangs shut behind us. It sounds like something cracks, but I ignore it. Probably just that armor I’m fucked without.

19

FOSTER

Before…

Walkingthrough the flat’s door, I toss the single key on a dinky ring on the kitchen counter. I pause, noticing the other single key on a matching dinky ring, and try to determine if it’s moved since last night. When I left this morning, I barely paid attention. Now I’m overanalyzing, searching for something that isn’t there.

There’s a simple way to find the answer. I just need to ask the keeper of the key. Except Chase has barely spoken to me since Halloween. A grunt here and there. An irritated whatever.

Four fucking days.

We talked more when I lived halfway across the country than we are sharing the same thousand square feet.

At first, after I stopped being pissed at him, I over-cheered the shit out of everything to be a dick. He’d scowl. I’d grin. He ignored me asking if he wanted to grab food. I praised him on his commitment to finishing the entirety of the trash show he was watching in a single binge session.

Then he switched to avoiding me, and I decided fuck it and stopped trying to break him out of his tantrum.

I still have no idea what it’s even about. The Remi hate came out of nowhere. The day before our fight, he ran around the couch, pumping his fist and chanting #TeamFomi. I’m the one who told him to chill—it’s not that serious. Chase responded with, “You’re so cute when you’re full of shit. Like a baby kitten.” He scratched the air, using his hands as claws. Ten minutes later, he was blaring audio of an entire litter meowing.

Since the sun’s down and it’s peak avoidance time, I expected him to be out for the night already.

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