Page 7 of Wild Eyes
“Skylar, what’s wrong?”
“Skylar, did something happen with you and Andrew?”
Something.
I scoff again in the quiet car. It was something all right.
Something I can’t confess out loud.
I’ve always prided myself on being an honest person, but what if everything about me is fake? The world thinks they know me, but they’ve been spoon-fed a lie.
I’vebeen spoon-fed a lie.
My life has been turned upside down, and I don’t have a single soul to talk to about it. The truth is just too humiliating to acknowledge.
I definitely can’t go public with it. Not yet anyway. The press would eat me alive. The fans would either pity me or mock me—neither of which I want.
It’s funny how I can be surrounded by so many people who profess to love me and still feel so utterly alone.
So my new move is staring into a camera blankly, feeling like my lungs are full of concrete and my throat is swollen shut. The only thing more difficult than finding the right words to say is catching my breath.
Yes, a girl who has performed in front of millions of people, who sings and dances and says all the right things, now shuts down in front of cameras.
My jaw clenches as I physically brace to endure the mental beating I’m about to give myself, but the pickup carrying the man with the nice hands signals, prompting me to do the same. He turns at a weather-stained wooden gate that opens onto a freshly paved driveway, and I follow his lead.
A thick frame of emerald pine trees entirely blocks the property beyond, and without even thinking about it, I press the button to roll down my window, letting the fresh country air into my car—into my system.
“Too slow!” Cherry squawks from her cage on the backseat. This bird loves car rides.
“It’s a driveway, Cherry. I have to go slow, you rebel.”
“Too slow!”
I chuckle and crane my neck to see where we’re headed, pushing away the anxiety cropping up. Where would Cherry have ended up if a grizzly had eaten me on the side of a backroad? Another humane society? A zoo? One of my parents, who would have marched her out before the press like a commemorative spectacle?
All the options are truly too awful to contemplate, though I already know they’ll keep me up when I’m lying in bed tonight. As sad as it sounds, Cherry, the sassy African grey parrot with a penchant for swearing, might be my only friend in the whole damn world.
The driveway weaves and turns, and there’s something cozy about the press of trees and the scent of soil and crushed pine needles wafting through the window. I suck in a deep breath and feel incrementally better.
So I keep doing it.
Three seconds in.
Three seconds out.
An image—clear as day—of Weston’s sky-blue eyes boring into mine as we breathed together on the asphalt flashes throughmy head. I wanted to clamp my eyes shut and hide until that moment of terror was over, but I couldn’t look away.
He’d trapped me. But being trapped in his gaze soothed me in a completely unfamiliar way.
“Too slow!” Cherry bitches some more, drawing me out of my head just as the trees dissipate.
I gasp as the landscape filters in before me.
Ford’s emails prepared me for a picturesque setting, but this is surreal.
The property is set on a gentle slope. Straight ahead is the main building with its wraparound deck and freestanding copper mailbox that matches the copper roof. Although the siding looks like old barn wood that’s been preserved, there’s something grand about the place. It’s rugged but elevated.
Above that, it’s trees, rocks, and deadly cliffs, all topped off by the bluest sky. No haze, no pollution—just pure, unfiltered blue. Like Weston’s eyes.
