Southbound Surrender Read online

  Southbound Surrender

  By Raen Smith

  Copyright © 2013 Raen Smith

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover design by Stephanie White of Steph’s Cover Design

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  About the Author

  Links to other Books

  Acknowledgements

  Sneak Peek: Southpaw

  Chapter 1

  End of Summer 2008

  I first laid eyes on the love of my life at the tender age of seventeen. Most people will tell you that teenagers can’t really fall in love and, by any stretch of human imagination, can’t possibly fathom the intricacies of what might be considered one of the most pure and basic needs in life. Or they’ll say it’s impossible to fall in love at first sight. I’m here to tell you they’re wrong.

  I knew the moment I saw Piper Sullivan that I never wanted to exist in a world without her. I never wanted to live a day without seeing those glistening peach lips that parted slightly as if she held a secret waiting to be unfolded in your ear. Or those luscious blonde locks that fell to the middle of her back, wavy and loose in a recklessness I desperately wanted to weave myself into. Or the emerald green eyes that softened at the edges when she laughed – a sound so contagious and breathtaking I never wanted to hear anything else. It also didn’t hurt that Piper Sullivan had a rack at the age of seventeen that grown women would die for. I chalked up that obsession to my adolescence and to my lack of sexual adventures with girls. Hell, I was seventeen, and I was in love.

  And I knew that day after day¸ Piper Sullivan would continue to shatter my heart until that moment when there’d be nothing left but a mere dust where my heart used to be. Her peach lips would one day blow that away, too. Piper Sullivan, my friends, was an impossibility in an impossible universe.

  It’s hard to say how I knew this other than to tell you that I’ve just come to know things over the years. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a carnie fortune teller with a crystal ball and red turban who can close his eyes and see the exact date you’ll plummet to your death off a sixty-foot cliff or channel the innermost thoughts of your deceased loved ones or pick the winning numbers of a $27.8 million dollar Powerball jackpot. If you’re reading this and are psychic, please tell the rest of us why you don’t pick the winning numbers.

  Back to me and this feeling I get when I know how something is going to turn out – good, bad, or otherwise. I’ve had this intuition for the better half of my utterly normal, well-adjusted life. “Secret power” is how Ms. Mares, the middle school counselor, referred to it. She even used little bunny ears, that gesture everyone else knows as air quotes, to describe it to me. It was my “secret power” up until about a year ago when my dad started referring to my knowledge as my “spirit guide.” While I typically don’t get into all his spiritual enlightenment bullshit, it gave me permission to forget about Ms. Mares’ annoying little bunny ears every time I had the feeling. Hasta la vista, little bunnies. Plus, I like saying my spirit guide’s name any chance I get. I now call it my Luella Intuition.

  So here I am peeking through a hole in the backyard fence of Piper Sullivan’s McMansion like a stalker, soaking in the girl and all her bikini glory when I feel the Luella Intuition spark through my body. That’s how I feel it; it’s always a spark that ignites somewhere in my chest, usually close to my right nipple. Sounds weird, I know, but I’ve felt it now well over a dozen times, and I hold my breath waiting for the next phase in anticipation. I want nothing more than to feel the spark soar, igniting the rest of my body through a five second sensation of elation and ecstasy. Wrap up all the kisses, rainbows, and goddamn puppy dogs in the world, and you’ll know the feeling. Even though I usually close my eyes at this point, I keep them open because I can’t miss any movement this gorgeous creature will make. My heart hammers against my chest – thump, thump, thump – and then it happens. The darkness seeps in and the spark fizzles until my body is chilled and clammy like I’ve got a tag wrapped around my big toe. No puppy dogs and rainbows. No five second ecstasy. I’m motionless and tagged like a body on a cart in a fluorescent-lit morgue.

  Damn, Luella Intuition.

  I press my hands against the fence, rest my forehead against the wood, and start to negotiate with myself while I watch Piper stand up from her lounge chair. God, they shouldn’t even be allowed to manufacture bikinis so small and perfect like that. The pink fabric hugs her body, showcasing her every curve. As she flips her blonde waves over her shoulder, I realize I don’t like puppies anyway, and I sure the hell don’t give a rat’s ass about rainbows. And kisses? I haven’t kissed a girl like that, yet. I’ve kissed a handful of girls. Okay, make that two. Judy Baker with her black-rimmed glasses that crashed into my brow, and Jill Havens with her tight, bird lips that pecked at me, but I hardly count those as kisses, or at least I don’t want to. Those girls and those so-called kisses aren’t worth remembering. They were nothing like Piper Sullivan, anyway. I can only imagine what those peach lips taste like – sweet, juicy, and soft, so incredibly soft. So I say to hell with my Luella Intuition (sorry Luella) and decide to take my chances with Piper Sullivan.

  Call me a sucker for true love or call me a raging hormonal teenager. I guess either one is accurate.

  She stretches at first, throwing her book on the lounge chair, and I know that I’m never turning back now. I don’t care what kind of book she’s reading – one with a half-naked man, one with a bloody knife, or even better, Gray’s Anatomy (not the show, the medical reference guide). All that matters is that it’s a book. I haven’t seen a girl this hot with a book since, well ever, really. She looks across the glittering water of the Olympic-sized swimming pool occupying at least a quarter of the yard. A bead of sweat drips down the side of my face, and I contemplate what it would be like to be her pool boy. I would clean the hell out of that pool just to be next to her.

  I know what you’re thinking, so I’ll stop you right there. I’m not some pathetic stalker who obsesses about every single girl I see. Believe me, I’ve never done this before. It’s just that she literally takes my breath away. Watching Piper Sullivan is addictive, and I don’t want anything or anyone to take away this feeling – this moment of pure, state of streaming consciousness that I’m experiencing. I’m dazed. I’m confused. All without drugs.

  Suddenly, her head snaps toward me, and I fling my back against the fence away from the hole. There goes my heart again – thump, thump, thump. My breath is erratic. And I wonder how the hell this is happening. How some blonde girl who I don’t even know makes me feel this way; she’s turning my insides out. The only reason I know her name is because I saw it, along with her address, on the Xavier High School roster for our senior class. I start my last year of high school in exactly one-hundred-sixteen hours. Praise Jesus Almighty Hudson would say. I’ll get to my best friend and that dirty roster in a little bit.

  The pull to this girl is irresistible so I press my hands against the fence and flip my body back around until I can look through the hole again. I�
�m in a neighborhood called Apple Hills. If you could call anything swanky in Appleton, it would be this neighborhood where all the doctors, CEOs, and secret drug dealers live. Piper’s house is easily a million-dollar home, according to Hudson. He’s been in a few of these McMansions with his carpenter dad, who managed to land a handful of upscale clients in the last year.

  I, Cash Rowland, live on the opposite side of town where all the lower and middle class families live in their single-blue-collar-income earned ranches that are twenty to thirty years old. We have shutters that could stand repainting and roofs that could definitely be replaced, but I don’t live in a bad neighborhood with crack and meth addicts lying in the gutters. I’m not sure those houses exactly exist in Appleton and if they do, I’ve never seen them. I like my house and all that crap, but it’s nothing like this with its white picket fence and in-ground pool and coordinating pool house and the girl. The girl. The house itself is a stone fortress that looks like it could be imported from Italy and for all I know probably is. Maybe the girl is, too.

  But right now, I don’t care that I’m on the wrong side of town or worry that someone might see me peeping through a fence. All I think about is how spot-on this hole is for me. It’s like someone made this hole exactly for this moment. I’m standing flat-footed with the hole right at my eye – right in line to see Piper Sullivan bending down to grab a bottle of sunscreen.

  Praise Jesus Almighty.

  She stands up and begins to rub sunscreen across her arms first, then her shoulders. She squeezes more liquid heaven out of the bottle and then bends over to rub her long, lean legs. She definitely works out unless she was blessed with a body of a goddess from a remarkably generous gene pool. And suddenly, I find myself wondering what her mom looks like. I shake my head out of the fog and hope like hell that Piper Sullivan goes for the gold next. She squirts another dab of sunscreen in her palm and stops. She pulls her head up and stares right at the hole again. Right at me and my unblinking eye.

  But this time, I don’t move. I swear I’m panting now and that steam is blowing out my ears. I know for a fact my heart is about to crawl out of my throat, but I don’t care if she sees me. This is too good to miss.

  Those emerald eyes glare back at me, and I think she’s about to storm over here and tear me a new one – I can tell she’s that kind of a girl - but she doesn’t. Instead, she lets out a low whistle, a melodic tune that sounds like a nightingale’s call to a lost love, and turns her palm toward her chest. She begins rubbing her fingers along her chest in slow massaging movements.

  It’s beyond glorious. I’m almost positive that I’m going to pass out.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  The sudden voice and hand on my shoulder makes my balls curl up toward my body. The gorilla hand spins me around, and I’m face-to-face with a shaved head, thick jawline, and steel eyes. A silver cross dangles against his White Stripes t-shirt, sparkling in the mid-afternoon rays. There’s only one guy that can pull off a necklace like that: Hudson Hawley.

  “Hudson!” I choke out as I shove him back on the sidewalk. He stumbles back only a step. Hudson’s built like a brick house, and he’s looked like a twenty-five-year-old since we were both fourteen. I, on the other hand, still look like I’m fourteen, maybe fifteen on a good day. He started shaving when he was thirteen. I shaved my first whiskers two weeks ago, and I haven’t seen one since. Shaved head. Moppy brown hair. One-hundred-ninety pounds. One-hundred-forty pounds soaking wet. I’ll give you one last perspective: his forearms are the size of my calves.

  Hudson Hawley is a man child and my best friend of ten years. He threw a football in my face during a flag football game I had no business being at when we were seven and almost broke my nose. Like I said, naturally best friends.

  That’s not to say I’m unfortunate-looking because I’m not. I rock my boyish good looks, but I’m no Hudson Hawley. I hope this preternatural youth thing I’ve got going on serves me well when I’m thirty. The tables will turn on Hudson. Just give me another decade.

  Hudson raises his hands in the air and laughs, “Whoa! Relax, Cash.”

  “You scared the hell out of me,” I say to Hudson who’s now standing on the edge of the sidewalk with his hands still up in the air. “Put your hands down already. You’re making me feel like I did something wrong.”

  “It looks like you are to me,” Hudson replies, nodding to the fence. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Not much.” I shove my hands in my shorts.

  Since we’re all getting to know each other here, there’s one more thing you should know about me – I never lie. I never have, never could even if I wanted to. It’s like I swallowed a truth serum when I came barreling out the birth canal. I then gulped my first breath of air and the honest – and incredibly dashing I might add – Cash Rowland was born. Believe me, I’ve tried to lie, but it doesn’t work. My lips are incapable of forming deception. I’ve self-diagnosed it as Tourette Syndrome of my conscience.

  My response isn’t a lie when you think about it. Watching a girl through a fence isn’t much really or it really shouldn’t be anyway.

  “Whose house is this?”

  “Someone’s.” The insult feels dirty in my mouth. Piper Sullivan isn’t someone. She is the girl, but I’m not lying to Hudson. Technically, this is someone’s house. “How did you know I was here?”

  He points to my beauty standing in the grass. “Who else drives a 1995 blue Yamaha dirt bike with red flames that’s been street legalized?”

  “Point taken.” I exhale, wishing that Hudson hadn’t showed up. But you know what they say about wishing. You can wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one gets filled first. Getting Hudson out of here is going to be impossible, just like Piper Sullivan.

  Screw Hudson.

  I spin back around and press my eye back against the fence to the usual spot. It’s getting quite comfortable, but I can feel and smell Hudson behind me now. The scent of fresh cut pine and lemon oil permeates from his hands. I can pick out that smell anywhere. His whole house smells like it. I blink my eyes, trying to shake the scent – and Hudson – out of my head. This moment is just for Piper. I press my palms against the fence and scan the backyard, looking for any sign of that pink bikini in the burn of the late August sun. The sunscreen. That blonde hair. Those peach lips. The emerald eyes. Any glimpse of her. My heart drops.

  She’s gone.

  “You asshole.” I shove Hudson until we’re both on the sidewalk. Child versus man.

  “What’d I do?” Hudson asks with a laugh before he scrambles past me to the fence. He presses his own face against it. “What am I looking for?”

  “You’re too late. She’s gone,” I reply. This is where the down-on-his-luck boy kicks a stone with his shoe except there is no stone to kick so I shove my hands back into my pockets.

  “What’s her name?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “It’s that new girl you’ve been blabbing about for the last week, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” I can’t lie even though I want to. Hudson knows I won’t lie and that if he keeps asking I’ll eventually cave and tell him everything he wants to know. We both know it doesn’t take much. I’m a bowl of Jell-O, without the fruit.

  “How’d you get her address?”

  I’m silent.

  “How’d you get her address, you dirty dog? What’s her name again?”

  “Piper Sullivan.”

  “Address,” Hudson demands.

  “Roster at school when I was helping my dad.” I cave like the sucker I am. There’s no sense in holding out any longer. Hudson’s going to get it from me eventually. When I saw Piper Sullivan’s name as a new student on the senior roster a week ago, I couldn’t get her name or the note attached to her name out of my head. I never met a Piper before and the sound of her name rolled off my tongue. But in the end, it wasn’t her name that did me over. It was the flawless 2400 SAT score that made me drive to the north s
ide of town, literally across the highway, to check out Piper Sullivan’s house. It’s the only score in the school higher than mine.

  “Big Dave let you in the administrative offices? You know what you could do in that office?” Hudson jerks his head away from the fence to look at me with his steely eyes. He calls them his panty-dropping eyes, even though neither of us has been dropping any sort of panties. Hell, we haven’t even been close to even seeing any panties.

  I’ll let you in on another little secret: We’re both wannabe badasses, but we’re not even remotely close. We’ve maybe got a pinky toe in the badass arena, if we’re lucky, on one of those good days when I look fifteen. There’s a silent agreement between us not to share our major shortcomings in this endeavor. At least Hudson looks tough. I’ve got nothing, except my dirt bike, which could go either way. Lame or badass. I’m not really sure.

  “We could hack into the computer system and mess with the grades. Turn Fs into As,” Hudson adds.

  “I’ve never gotten an F and neither have you.”

  “For other people,” he replies.

  I shake my head. Definitely not badasses.

  “Are you sure you saw a girl in there? Are you delusional? The heat index is high today. Maybe the sun’s getting to you. Maybe you should sit down,” Hudson says as he turns back to the fence. I want to peel him away from the fence so he can’t witness the beautiful sight that I just experienced.

  I want Piper Sullivan all to myself.

  “No, she definitely was there,” I whisper like I’m trying to convince myself that she actually was there. She had to be.

  “Did she see you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You sure about that?”

  All I can see are those emerald eyes and all I can hear is that low whistle she released between those glistening lips.

  “Pretty sure…”

  “Does that vision you had include a fifty-something-year-old man in khaki pants and a tie?” Hudson asks. “Who happens to be walking toward me and looking pretty pissed like he’s going to pound someone’s face in?”