When You Come Back to Me (Lost Boys, #2)

by Emma Scott

“Sure, I’m fucked up. We’re all fucked up. Who isn’t fucked up? But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to be okay. You can be okay and completely fucked up at the same time. I’m living proof.”

“Parents are people who care for their children. Not sociopaths who torture their only son because he happens to be gay.”

He reminded me of the vampire, Lestat, from the Ann Rice books I’d stolen from my mom’s bookshelf and secretly read as a kid. Lestat moved across centuries, always elegant, always making the era conform to him. Holden doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about him.

And what kind of name is Holden?” “It’s from Catcher in the Rye,” I said instead of something I’d regret. Or beating his ass. “Huh?” “It’s a book about an outcast. A guy who feels like the entire world is drowning him in bullshit.”

“I was thirteen when Dad gave me the sex talk. Mostly warning me that if I got a girl pregnant, it would derail our plans. But he never asked me if I was interested in girls in the first place. It never occurred to him, so I didn’t know it could occur to me.” I hunched over the beer bottle, peeling. “It’s like everyone assumes we’re all built the same way—as if we have a default setting. If you’re different, you start to believe something’s wrong with you.”

“I said, shut up,” Holden snapped. “You’re worried about what I deserve? As if you have the monopoly on being fucked up. I have trust issues. I don’t set healthy boundaries. I close down emotionally before people get too close, and I sabotage relationships because I want to be the one who leaves first.”

“River Whitmore,” he murmured to the ceiling. “There was nothing fucking casual about that.”

“It is possible,” I said to no one, “to be completely sick of one’s own shit.”

“I want to do both. Kiss you and talk to you.” “Under a glittering meteor shower, no less,” Holden said and our lips brushed. “You’re a softy. A pillow. A grilled cheese sandwich.”

The heat of River’s body and his love for me burn away the cold that I thought was permanently imbedded into the marrow of my bones. And I know that one day, there will be nothing left.