Broken Promises (Broken Series) - By Dawn Pendleton Page 0,52

me.

“What?” I asked.

“We saw you hitting on Carrie,” Gabby pouted. Were they insane? Carrie came on to me. And I pushed her away. I wasn’t about to get involved with anyone else. At least, not right now.

“Where’s Mallory?” I asked. It all suddenly clicked in my head.

“She took off,” Rainey said. “She said she was going to walk home.” Walk? It was after eleven at night and she lived several miles from the bar. I sighed.

I was never going to understand women.

NINETEEN

Mallory

My brain wasn’t functioning properly. It couldn’t be. At least, that’s what I told myself to reason why I had left a crowded bar and gone out into the night alone. It was a stupid, childish thing to do, but now that I’d done it, I sure as hell wasn’t turning around to watch Luke maneuver some other woman. Especially Carrie. It was bad enough I had been jealous enough, and drunk enough the first time she was brought to my attention to try to break them up.

Now that I had slept with Luke again, I didn’t even want to think about the dumb things I would do if I knew they were back together. It tore my heart to pieces. As I walked the sidewalk through town, I thought about the past I shared with Luke.

It was my sixteenth birthday. Long after the surprise party Dad and Luke threw for me, I lay on my bed exhausted while Luke thumbed through my loot.

“Do you know how much money you got? There has to be at least five hundred dollars here,” he said with a sigh. While money had never been a problem for Dad, we weren’t exactly rich, either. I had my own savings account with two grand in it that no one, not even Luke knew about. I planned on using the money when I moved to Boston.

My plan, for as long as I could remember, had been to escape the lame small town life in order to get a better education, better job, and ultimately, better life than Casper could offer me. I included Luke in my plan to move, since he insisted on putting off college until I graduated high school so we could go together. I hadn’t asked him to do that—he simply wanted to be with me.

“Yeah, people are generous,” I brushed off his obsession with money. That was part of the reason I didn’t tell him about my stash. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him; he would just want to use it for something local, like buying a car or investing in our future. And while those weren’t bad ideas, my money was my escape fund. It was my way out.

“Generous? Hell, I wish I knew so many generous people,” he muttered. Luke had grown up on the poorer side of life. His deadbeat father had done little to support him and his mother, and then when she passed away, Luke had been more or less on his own. He had worked nearly full-time all through high school while maintaining a decent enough grade point average to be considered for several colleges. But he’d pushed college off. For me.

“Luke, we should talk about college,” I said from my spot on my bed. I sat up and crossed my legs indian-style. He turned to look at me and sat in the ratty old chair at my desk.

“What’s up?” He asked.

“I want to go to college in Boston,” I explained. He didn’t even blink.

“Then that’s where we’ll go,” he answered. He moved over to the bed and took my hands in his. “I want to be where you are, Mallory. Always.”

I fought the memory as it flooded my mind. I had been so sure we could survive anything at that point. We were so in love. But his mind had changed. He had chosen to stay while I had gone. If I had known then about my father’s cancer, I would have stayed, though. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself. But Luke had known and chosen not to tell me. He’d let me go instead of keeping his promise to always be where I was.

“Mallory! Wait up,” a deep voice called from somewhere behind me. I half-turned toward the voice, but I knew it was Luke before I saw him. I stared at him for a moment before I decided to cross the street. I was leaving in the morning. The more distance between us, both physically and emotionally, the better.