Stay With Me (She's With Me #2) - Jessica Cunsolo Page 0,100

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Still with Me

EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT

1

When I was in elementary school, I thought being normal was probably the worst thing I could grow up to be. I must have been six or seven, and we had to pick what we wanted to be when we were older from a list of preapproved careers to do a project on. They didn’t have the option I wanted, so I picked doctor and went home to complain.

My dad was thoroughly confused when I explained that I didn’t want to be a doctor or lawyer or teacher, but I wanted to be a hairdresser exclusively for gorillas, who also juggled part time in a traveling ukulele band.

He tried throwing logical facts at me, but I was undeterred by the fact that gorillas probably don’t need hairdressers, or that I didn’t know how to juggle or play ukulele, and that no one even wanted to see a juggling ukulele band in the first place.

Then he hit me with the that’s not a normal career path speech. I replied, in my cutesy, little kid way, that being normal sounded boring, and I’d much rather have interesting things happen to me, even if they made my life harder. Now, looking back, I would do anything to slap six- or seven-year-old me silly, and eat my words out of existence.

My dad wanted me to have a normal, boring life without any hardships. I scoffed at the idea. It’s funny how in the end, he was the one who set into motion a chain of events that ensured my life would never be completely normal again.

There have been multiple attempts to end my life made by two different men, all within the last year. There’s Tony, the man who’s quite possibly a real psychopath, and the reason I’ve had to move three times and change my identity each time in order to keep myself safe.

Then there’s Aiden’s biological dad, Andrew Kessler, who’s ruthless and clearly has no problem getting someone to murder a teenage girl in order to send a message to his estranged son, who threatened to blow the whistle on his true, shitty past.

My mother is having an affair with the father of one of my best friends, and I have no idea if or how I should tell Mason. Plus, there’s the whole Mason’s most likely in love with me thing that I really don’t even want to think about addressing right now.

Annalisa’s half brother, Luke, is going to stand trial for murdering Aiden’s stepfather, which he claims he doesn’t remember doing because he wasn’t sober at the time, and Annalisa is just now realizing that she can’t bear to not have Luke in her life.

Noah and Chase are in a weird, we’re friends but not really stage because Chase walked in on Noah in bed with the love of his life, Charlotte, who really doesn’t know if she even likes either of them as more than friends.

My middle (and favorite) finger is dislocated from punching Ryan, Aiden’s now ex-stepbrother, in the face, my nose is swollen and bruised from walking into Mason’s elbow, and there are a bunch of cuts and bruises on my body from Aiden’s dad’s attempt to murder me.

And to make all of that worse, I’m being relocated as soon as the agents assigned to my case finalize our new location and identities. King City is the one place that feels like home, where I have friends I love and a boy I love. But Aiden already knows all about me, and I decided to break some small rules so that I don’t have to completely give him up, namely the no contacting anyone from your old life rule. But what my mom and the agents don’t know won’t hurt them, and I’ll be supercareful. When the time comes to leave, I won’t feel like my heart is being ripped out; I’ll still have Aiden.

But in the meantime, while I’m still here in King City, not only do I have Kaitlyn and Ryan trying to make my life miserable, but my best friends are all in the middle of their own drama, and I have two grown men trying to kill me.

Nice.

Honestly, Julian’s the only one in this group who has his shit together and is living a relatively normal life, except for the fact that he hangs out with all of us.

After the accident, Aiden and Mason give the cops a pretty convincing story about what had happened, mostly sticking to the truth