Page 38 of I Would Stay Forever (Parkhurst Prep #2)

twenty-four

My breakfast sat untouched in front of me as I stared at Imogen. More accurately, at Imogen’s cast. Turns out, she broke her wrist when she fell—but what stood out more to me was the reason that she was even out biking in the first place.

She was going to Dad’s new flat.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that Dad might still live close by.

It made sense, of course, since his job was here, but in my mind he was in some far off land.

Some invisible town for deadbeat dads who blew up their families and disappeared.

I hadn’t thought about what it would feel like to see him.

To go about my days knowing he was within the same city limits as me.

Even when Imogen asked me about him in the car last week—and why hadn’t I realized she meant she was planning on acting on that so soon?

—I didn’t think it would mean running into him.

And yet there he was yesterday, in the fluorescent lights of Urgent Care, hands shoved into the pockets of his coat and looking like a stranger I’d seen too many times before.

“Drivers really need to watch where they’re going,” Mum tutted, dumping eggs onto Imogen’s plate. Imogen—who had been eating toast for breakfast and never asked for eggs in the first place—just smiled weakly at her.

“I can’t believe he didn’t even stop to see if you were okay.”

“It’s really not that bad,” Imogen said, voice light, polite, distant. It was the same brave face she’d put on for Dad yesterday. She’d smiled up at him, reassuring him in a way he didn’t deserve after abandoning her for six weeks.

My grip on my spoon tightened as I forced my gaze away from her cast and looked down at the food in front of me.

My bowl sat untouched, the cereal having gone soggy in the milk.

It wasn’t the look of it that turned my stomach though.

It was the memory of Imogen smiling at Dad last night, looking at him like he’d hung the moon and stars.

Something in my chest splintered, cracking open beneath my ribs and making it hard to breathe.

My heart sped up. My lungs burned. The kitchen closed in around me—too many walls, too much air, not enough space.

I need to get out of here .

I jumped to my feet, the chair scraping along the floor as I did. Everyone turned to look at me but I was already moving, telling them something about how I forgot about a group project meeting. It probably wasn’t believable, but if they asked about it, I didn’t hear them.

I bolted out the front door and practically leaped across the steps of the porch. The moment the soles of my trainers hit the sidewalk, I was sprinting.

I didn’t think about where. I never did. Just forward, faster, away.

The wind stung my cheeks as I picked up speed, lungs working overtime, legs burning, eyes blurring slightly from the sharp morning light.

I was wearing the worst possible running outfit—my school uniform—but I didn’t let that slow me down.

Houses blurred past. Lawns. Mailboxes. Sidewalk cracks.

I ran until I couldn’t hear anything but my heartbeat pounding in my head.

I ran until I thought I might collapse and then I pushed myself even longer.

It was only as my steps slowed and the stitch in my side became bad enough for me for me to think about stopping that I heard the footfalls behind me.

It wouldn’t have been weird, except that I wasn’t on a residential street anymore.

I was on the outskirts of my neighborhood where the houses gave way to a ravine and park.

AKA pretty much the best place to get murdered.

I spun around, almost twisting my ankle in the process, ready to scream at the top of my lungs, but whatever scream I had died in my throat as I came face to face with Dean Graham.

And because I apparently had no brain-to-mouth filter, I said, “You’re following me?

” As if there was no other reason he could be in the park.

He didn’t seem offended, though. Between deep breaths, he said, “Not in a creepy way. Just in a friendly-concern way.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that, so I decided not to acknowledge it at all.

I pushed past him and started walking back up the trail in the direction of the road.

I had no idea what time it was right now, but I did know we needed to be getting back if I didn’t want to be late yet again.

I was just glad we’d gotten up early for breakfast this morning so we could spend a rare morning home with Mum, who was often either working or sleeping in because she’d worked late.

Dean fell into step beside me and neither of us spoke as we made our way back onto the sidewalk.

I was glad that this was one of the times where I actually had a sense of where I was and how to get home, because there had been a few mornings of the summer where I’d been stuck walking in circles without my phone to act as a GPS.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Dean asked after we’d walked a block away from the park. I spared a glance at him, but the concern in his eyes made me turn forward again. I didn’t want to talk about it, or at least I thought I didn’t, but the words came tumbling out before I could stop them.

“Imogen broke her wrist,” I said. “She asked me to come get her at Urgent Care.”

Dean hummed but didn’t say anything. I wondered if he was waiting for the rest of the story. It had been a few days since I told him about the panic runs. Was it because I told him about them that he decided to follow me?

“She was on her way to see Dad,” I said and I felt a perverse sense of satisfaction when I heard his sharp inhale of breath at the words.

Like somehow the whole situation was bettered by someone else being just as shocked about it as I was.

“Apparently she tried to call him first when she got hurt but he missed the call, so then she called me. But then he got her voicemail saying what happened and…”

I couldn’t even get the words out. It felt like such a pathetically small thing— I saw my Dad —but it felt like I was being strangled as I tried to force myself to say it.

With that came the all-consuming hatred that had washed over me many times across the past few weeks.

Mum told me once about the five stages of grief, and sometimes I wondered if I was going through them with him.

If I was, I seemed to be stuck on anger .

I hated him for what he did, but even more, I hated myself for even giving him the power to hurt me like this.

I hated this stupid town for being small enough that Imogen could go visit him at all.

“He looked so normal,” I said. “Like nothing had even happened.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“No.” I pressed my tongue into the side of my cheek as I replayed last night’s events in my mind. “He tried to talk to me but I ran.”

Dean laughed under his breath. “Glad I’m not the only one who gets that treatment.”

I flushed as I remembered the day we were assigned our group project and I’d pretended to get sick so I could run off. Definitely not the most mature way for me to have handled the situation, and I was sure it was a bit of a bruise to his ego, but I’d panicked. Much like I panicked last night.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said sheepishly. “But I guess when it comes to fight or flight, I’m firmly in the camp of flight .”

I half-expected him to make a crack about me running this morning, but he stayed silent. But I thought about it all the same—all the running I was doing in my life. Running from Dean, from my dad, from my feelings at home, and soon from this town altogether.

“Maybe that’s why I’m interested in going to B.C. for university,” I said, my brain-to-mouth filter letting me down again. “Because I want to run from here and that’s as far as I can get. Somewhere where the memory of him can’t reach me.”

I regretted speaking the words aloud pretty much as soon as I said them.

They made me sound like I was worse off than I was and Dean might tell me to see a counselor or something.

But it felt so right to confide in him. Not only was he the only person who knew exactly what happened that night, but he was the only one who had been trying to check in with me since it happened.

Maybe I was being stupid by thinking he actually cared, but I couldn’t help but want to share every small piece of myself with him.

“I think about leaving too,” Dean said, breaking through my anxious thoughts.

I blinked in surprise, sure that I heard him wrong, and turned to look at him.

He wasn’t looking at me anymore, just staring off into the distance.

We were close to home now and I strangely already found myself missing this.

Missing him, before he was even away from my side.

The feeling was so strange that I immediately tried to push it out of my mind.

“It’s because of my parents too but not the same as you,” Dean continued. “Sometimes, I feel like the only way I can find out who I really am is if I’m somewhere they can’t scrutinize my every move.”

I thought of what he’d told me in the library on Monday, about how his parents were obsessed with the image of perfection. I couldn’t imagine how stifling it must be to make every decision based on how your parents thought the rest of the world might perceive it.

“It’s not just them, either,” he added. “It’s the whole town, you know? Everyone here thinks they know you. What you should want. Who you are. I feel like if I stayed, I’d end up folding into whatever version of myself they’ve already decided on.”

“Don’t,” I said without thinking. He glanced at me in confusion. “Don’t fold, I mean.”

I shrugged, trying to act nonchalant when I was feeling anything but. My heart was still pounding even though we’d finished running ages ago and just the act of his eyes locking on mine made my stomach turn into butterflies again.

“I kinda like you as you are,” I said.

His mouth pulled up in a grin. “Well, that’s pretty convenient because I kinda like you as you are too.”

I was pretty sure my face flushed, but I tried to ignore it.

We’d both come to a stop in our walking, just around the corner from my house.

I wondered if he realized we’d stopped just far enough away that Sebastian wouldn’t be able to see us from the house.

Was it intentional on his part or just a coincidence?

I wondered if I asked now if he would stick to his story of not telling Sebastian we were spending any time together because of how Sebastian got when I hung out with his friends, or if it was becoming something deeper.

It was starting to feel like more to me—but was it to him too?

“Promise me something,” Dean said softly, looking straight into my eyes. I blinked a couple times, a little nervous about the command but nodded slightly anyway. “Don’t leave before it’s time.”

I frowned, both surprised by the words and not totally understanding what he meant. I guess because my thoughts had been spinning around Sebastian and how Dean and I weren’t supposed to be friends that I thought the promise would be about that. Not… whatever this was.

“And how will I know when it’s time?” I asked.

He stepped forward, coming fully into my space, much like he had at the party last week.

I’d been replaying that moment in my head over and over as I tried to fall asleep the past few nights, letting it play out as it would have if Zoey hadn’t showed up—Dean closing the gap between us and kissing me.

I wasn’t sure how soft his lips would be or what they would taste like, so I’d imagined it differently each time.

All I knew was that I wished I could have found out that night.

His hand brushed mine. At first, I thought it was an accident, but then he threaded his fingers between mine and gave my hand a light squeeze.

My eyes dropped to it, needing to see it in order to believe that it was actually happening.

Dean Graham was holding my hand. My heart squeezed with the same feeling I got whenever I saw a cute dog or we won an impossible volleyball game—filled with such overwhelming happiness that it was actually painful.

“You’ll know it’s time,” he said softly, “when you have something you’re running to.”

He loosened his grip on my hand, and even though I knew we couldn’t stay like that forever, a small wave of disappointment washed over me. That was, until he intertwined just his pinky with mine and held them up between us.

“Promise?” he asked.

I gulped then stared at him. I was scared of reading too much into this, of thinking he might care about me more than he really did, but something about this promise almost felt like a love confession.

Something deep inside me was hoping, praying, that he wasn’t just asking this of me because he thought it would be for the best, but rather because it was for him. That he needed me here, in North Glen.

It wasn’t like he was holding me back from it entirely or asking me to settle and deal with the pain—but just to wait. I’d spent the last month and a half running away. Maybe a change of perspective was what I needed. Something to run toward.

“Promise,” I said. Then I pulled our hands close and kissed them softly to seal the deal.