heel, and storms away. And this time, I know he’s gone for good.
5
Eli
I make a beeline for the garage and the secret entrance. Not-Mackenzie runs after me, crashing into the walls and knocking over weird statues as she tries to pull her clothes on. She grabs my shoulder, but I shrug her off. She reeks of Noah. She cries my name, and her voice stirs this desperate need inside me that makes me seethe with hatred.
I hate her.
I hate Noah.
I hate myself.
I jog through the cars and hit the spiral staircase leading down into the tunnel. As my hand closes around the balustrade, something hooks around my foot. An arm flings across my chest and my foot is knocked out from beneath me. I go down in a tangle of limbs. My knee hits the metal railing. My tailbone crunches against the concrete.
Not-Mackenzie is on top of me, straddling me, pinning my arms. The ends of her hair tickle my skin. Everywhere she touches me burns. “Eli, listen to me. You can’t leave.”
“Get the fuck off me.” I rock my hips and roll her over. She tries to pin me between her thighs, wrapping her legs around my back and pulling me closer. She’s stronger than I expect, but then, I shouldn’t be surprised. I never knew her at all.
My body doesn’t know what to do with itself. I’ve spent every night since she returned to school dreaming about being this close to her. My dick’s hard and my eyes swell with tears. In my dreams, she didn’t have Noah’s cum dribbling down her legs.
She was mine.
My Mackenzie.
I shove her off and run for the stairs. She’s behind me, but she doesn’t run track. In the tunnel, I quickly gain a lead on her. I slam through the outer door and run through the woods toward my car.
I fumble in my pocket for the key fob. Not-Mackenzie’s hands slam against the window. “Eli, wait.” Her fists pummel the glass. “I know you’re pissed at me, but you’re putting your life in danger. Don’t go home yet. Just stay and we’ll—”
I slam my foot down and roar away. I don’t look back. If I see her face – familiar and completely alien to me – I won’t be able to control what I do next.
I don’t go home. I head out of the city to the place I’d been hiding for the last few nights, ever since I saw Mackenzie with Gabriel. I spent the last three days wishing what I saw hadn’t been real.
Be careful what you wish for.
Nothing is real.
Mackenzie’s playlist blasts out my speakers. Kurt Cobain sings of claustrophobia and suffocation. The lyrics have never punched me in the gut the way they do today. Emerald Beach feels too small, too shallow to hold all the rage I need to scream into the sky.
Only when I pull into the gates of the Everlasting Hart Ranch does my jaw unclench. Only then do I open my mouth and let the screams out.
I howl and curse and rage as I careen up the uneven drive and jerk to a stop in front of the homestead. This place was Dad’s vanity project. Back in Tennessee he always dreamed of owning a ranch. Dad had a lot of dreams everyone called stupid, but he made them all come true – he moved our family to Emerald Beach. He grew the humble funeral home he inherited from his father into a multi-million-dollar death empire, he got on TV, he bought a football team. Dad used the proceeds from the reality show to buy this land – two hundred acres of rolling hills and crumbling outbuildings an hour outside of Emerald Beach. He commissioned an architect to redesign the homestead as luxury accommodation. He’d even been in discussions with the TV executives about a new series following his attempts to do up the ranch and offer overpriced cowboy experiences to Emerald Beach’s ultra-rich.
Since he’s been in prison, the place has gone to ruin. The construction crew left, the network ghosted him, the ranch-hands he hired moved on. The two racehorses he purchased have either died in a paddock somewhere or run off to literal greener pastures. Mom doesn’t care about the ranch, and the land has devalued so much she can’t sell it. The homestead at the top of the driveway is over a hundred years old and slowly returning to the land – roof tiles blown off during the last storm litter the