Never Loved Read online

  Never Loved is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Loveswept eBook Original

  Copyright © 2015 by Charlotte Stein

  Excerpt from Zack by Sawyer Bennett copyright © 2015 by Sawyer Bennett

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Zack by Sawyer Bennett. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eBook ISBN 9781101882771

  Cover design: Derek Walls

  Cover illustration: Claudio Marinesco

  www.readloveswept.com

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Charlotte Stein

  About the Author

  The Editor’s Corner

  Excerpt from Zack

  Chapter 1

  I know they are the ones I have to speak to. I recognize the guy with the tattoo of a hammer on his biceps, and some of the others look familiar from that bar on Maple Street. I’m pretty sure that’s the guy who pointed Tommy out to me, yet still I hesitate. Of course I hesitate.

  They look like such an insane rabble. As I watch through the windscreen of my car, three of them start fighting. One of them pushes another one; the third guy grabs the first by his dirty tank top. Harsh words are exchanged, so fierce and forceful I can almost make out the spittle flying.

  Then suddenly there’s a knife. I see its edge gleam in the bright sunlight, about a second before something red appears across the chest of the guy who started it. Blood, I think dizzily. That’s blood. He’s bleeding all over his own T-shirt, and though it isn’t anywhere close to a mortal wound, it doesn’t encourage me to get out of the car.

  Nor does the way the fight ends. The one with the knife goes to slash at the other guy again, and I’m just about to cover my eyes with my hand when this enormous man comes out of nowhere. He lashes out with a hand like a shovel, and somehow the knife is on the ground. The brawling men are scattering, as though they were never there at all.

  And I understand why.

  The big one is pretty terrifying. And obviously everyone else thinks so, too, because they part like butter under a knife before him. He goes back to his bike without anyone so much as brushing his arms, and once there he sits down in a way that gets my attention in a fucking chokehold. I mean, he had it before, but watching the machine balk beneath his weight is something else. It actually seems to sag. I can almost hear its sound of protest.

  God knows how he rides the thing. God knows about anything going on here. I try to make a list in my head of all the shenanigans that might be ensuing, but all I can come up with is drug ring. And I’ve got to be honest—I don’t think drug ring is a real thing. It sounds like something my father would have ranted about whenever I asked if I could go anywhere, or do anything, or be out past five in the afternoon.

  The drug ring will get you, I think, which would probably be funny if I couldn’t feel his ghost pressing down on my shoulders at the same time. Or if I understood any of this on any level whatsoever. I mean, even if they’re not dealing meth to kids, or about to snatch me and put me in a van, a ton of this stuff is disturbing.

  For a start:

  Why are they all congregating outside an abandoned convenience store? It’s not even a nice one, with those signs people like to collect and stick up on their walls, or some remnant of civilization still hanging around. It’s an ugly rotten tooth of a place, striped all over with rust streaks and half sagging in the middle.

  Yet here they are, milling around in this big odd jumble. Some of them have bikes; some of them have battered cars. Some are dressed in leather and denim; others wander around in mismatched tracksuits. In a couple of cases I spy business-wear, as though the wearers came straight here from an early-morning meeting. This is secretly the abandoned-convenience-store branch of GE, and in a second they’re all going to start funneling funds through accounts in the Caymans.

  Or maybe I just hope that’s the case, because now I have to get out of the car.

  I have to if I want to find my brother, yet somehow I’m still not doing it. Instead I take out my phone and call the only person who might be able to help me, even if I suspect she won’t be able to help me at all. When I left our dorm room, she was trying to decide if scarves are in or out now, which seems pretty far from this.

  I’m not even sure if I should say. But I do anyway.

  “Do you know anything about gangs that hang around outside convenience stores?” I ask, bracing myself for all kinds of answers. One time I tried to tell her about my brother and his problems, and she suggested I change my name so I won’t be bothered anymore.

  Of course, I couldn’t explain to her why that was ridiculous. Whenever I try, I start doing something silly, like crying uncontrollably. I get this urge to start spilling all my secrets, and most of them barely make any sense. Sometimes I look back on them, and it almost seems as if they happened to another person—one who never had to hide a magazine with a man’s naked chest on it under her mattress, or push every clock in the house back by two minutes so Tommy would be home on time, or fear enclosed spaces in case the next time we never get let out at all.

  Those things were just a dream.

  This is the reality, where I am a cool and very normal—if slightly older than most freshman—college girl.

  Or at least, I will be one soon. All I have to do is get through this latest disaster, and onward to the other side. On the other side is the possibility of being a proper person, a person who is successful at doing the things that everyone else does. I could be more interested in parties and hairstyles and dating, to the point where Sam might actually approve and maybe even remember me.

  At the moment, that isn’t happening.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me. It’s your roommate. Your buddy, Beatrix.”

  “Beatrix wouldn’t call me and ask me something like that. I know this is you, Jason.”

  In all honesty, I kind of wish I was Jason.

  Then maybe I wouldn’t be sitting here, trying to convince my only friend in the world that I’m me. Plus, Jason sounds as if he’d know what to do about scary convenience-store guys. He could just crank call them into oblivion, if they put up any trouble.

  “Honestly, it’s me, Beatrix. That’s why I have a British accent. And sound like a girl.”

  That seems to click with her, at least. Not by much, but enough.

  “Oh, yeah. Okay. What was the question again?”

  “Abandoned-convenience-store gangs.”

  “Ew, that sounds gross. Are you doing something gross? You know, I keep saying I’ll set you up with Steven Walker. He only has one tiny eyebrow. The other is completely normal-size, so it’s really not a big deal. Plus, he has—”

  I have to cut her off before sh
e finishes her sentence. I’m almost ninety-nine percent certain she’s going to tell me he has a massive one, and I’m just not prepared for that right now. I will never be prepared for that. My father pretty much told me penises are a myth, and I need easing in to the idea that they are not.

  I need small ones to start.

  Really, really small ones.

  Or maybe none at all.

  “Sam, Sam, Sam—I’m not trying to date anyone here. I’m trying to find Tommy. The guy at Banana Blitz said he’d be here but he isn’t, so now I’ve got to go amongst this rabble and find out for sure,” I say, and almost add what I’ve been dying to since I called her.

  Please just tell me something supportive and calming.

  But I’m starting to suspect why I don’t.

  “Hey, which guy do you know from Banana Blitz? If you speak to the one with the beard, tell him that you know Sam. He will totally give you free drinks,” she says, at which point I know for certain. I didn’t really call Sam because I thought she might help. I called her because I wanted to put this off for a few more precious minutes.

  And now it’s time to face the facts.

  “I gotta go, Sam. Make sure to tell someone if I don’t turn up alive after forty-eight hours,” I say, and to her credit she says, “Hey, wait.” She says, “Be careful, okay?” But I can’t stick around and reassure her. Instead I slide my phone back into my pocket and breathe deep, one, two, three. I straighten my hair in the rearview mirror—for what little good it does, considering the shaggy, mousy mess it always is—and try to force my dark eyes down a size.

  At the moment, they’re as big as dinner plates.

  But I get them under control. I gather my strength, and then somehow I’m opening the car door. The idea of Tommy dead in a ditch flashes across the front of my mind, and that gets me across the parking lot. My heart is pounding in my temples and in my teeth, and my legs are running water, yet I make it to the guy with the hammer on his biceps. And once I’m standing in front of him—arms folded so tight over my chest I can feel my own pulse—he turns his head. He turns it lazily, as if the muscles in his neck have melted.

  But it’s a start. I have his attention, which is the main thing. He even seems to recognize me on some vague level, light flickering over his dull gaze as he takes in my glasses, my cardigan, my silly corduroy trousers. Of course I immediately wish I’d worn something else, like seventeen suits of armor and maybe a really macho hat.

  Though if I’m being honest, what would it have mattered if I had?

  I’d have looked out of place either way.

  I’m just too nervous for this crowd, too obviously soft and weak. My eyes won’t stay still in my head—they want to dart back and forth, searching for sudden threats. The urge to bite my nails is so strong I can actually feel one arm straining against the fold of the other, desperate to be free and in the vicinity of my mouth. Only the thought of how much worse that would look stops me, and even then it’s a close thing.

  I’m not cut out for this. I wasn’t cut out for it back in the bar, but at least there I’d been in the company of other women. Here there’s just a lot of muscle and manliness. I’ve no positive experiences with any kind of manliness—or muscles, for that matter. My own fled my body about three years ago, and show no signs of returning.

  It’s probably why they’re all sort of starting to laugh. They’re glancing at my arms and wondering why they look like limp noodles—or maybe it’s my gigantic ass that’s got them smirking. I can’t quite tell because I don’t really dare look at any of them directly, and after a moment, it doesn’t really matter anyway. They all turn back to whatever they were doing, once they realize I’m not worth their time.

  All apart from one.

  “What you doing here, girl?”

  I don’t want to glance in the direction of the speaker. The question is scary enough, but with that voice, too? I can hardly stand to hear and know and see what is in front of me. The guy sounds as if he has gravel caught in his throat, and each word has to rumble up through the mess.

  Plus, I already sort of suspect who’s asking. There aren’t many men who would suit a voice that deep and that rough.

  But the big guy does. In truth, I could have described what he sounds like before he says a word. It’s just so obvious, the way it’s obvious that a girl in patched corduroy doesn’t belong among all of these sweaty, filthy, angry men. They know it, I know it, and now the big guy does, too, though I’d rather he’d stayed out of it.

  I could have just talked to hammer tattoo. I can’t talk to someone like the big guy. He’s far too much, and not just in terms of his size. When I finally dare to glance in his direction—one hand shielding my eyes against the glare—I come pretty close to swallowing my own tongue.

  He has a neck tattoo. And not just any neck tattoo, either. This one goes all the way around, as though he hadn’t been satisfied with something small. He hadn’t been satisfied with a few minutes of absolute agony. No, he needed a rope around his throat two inches thick, so rough and coarse I’m tempted to offer him lotion.

  If I peel the image away, there will be welts underneath, I’m sure of it. And even if there aren’t, even if that’s insane, the fact still remains:

  It looks as if he’s tried to hang himself.

  I suspect, in fact, that this was the aim.

  Though really, the tattoo is the smallest part of the problem. He’s also wearing this weird overall thing of the kind you usually see on men who work in sewers—though I don’t think the outfit has anything to do with his profession. I’m fairly sure you’re not allowed to tromp around underground with both sleeves hacked off your uniform and all the buttons undone right down to the waist, and if you are, someone should make it illegal right now.

  It has to be some kind of health hazard. It’s certainly having a hazardous effect on me, despite the intense effort I’m putting into not staring. I focus on some point just to the left of his head, but that hint of enormous chest keeps calling and calling me back. How could it be otherwise when the better part of my life was spent in knee-high socks with a copy of Men’s Health under my mattress? I thought it was the filthiest thing in the world until I got to this school and saw cocks careening all over everybody’s computers.

  It’s a miracle that I manage to control myself at all.

  And no surprise when I don’t. I just about get the urge to ogle his chest under control, and then I accidentally glance a little to the right and oh, I shouldn’t have done that.

  His general face area is even crazier than the rest of him. He has this strip of hair right down the middle of his shaved head, black and slick and flat, and just in case that’s not wild enough, there are these lines carved through the stubble, like racing stripes, just above his ears. He has actual racing stripes, so strange and bold it’s impossible to look at anything else.

  Though God knows I try. I really do. He’s looking at me now in this steely, half-amused sort of way, as if he just knows I can’t resist. In a second he’ll probably crack a joke at my expense, so acting indifferent is very important. Answering him is very important.

  And yet I can’t seem to say a word. If I do, I will say all the wrong ones. He will hear my dad in them, blaming him for all the world’s ills and accusing him of turning his daughter into a whore. Or maybe my accent will leak out due to nerves and get me the uncomfortable attention it always does.

  Hey, Mary Poppins, he’ll tease, while I try not to die a thousand deaths.

  “You mute, girl?” he says, and some of the guys around him snigger. One of them—an oddly preppy-looking kid in a T-shirt that looks as though it came from somewhere like Hollister—reaches out and touches the big guy’s bike in an awed sort of way, and he breaks off from this non-conversation to bark at him.

  “Hey,” he snarls, and then even more startling: He lashes out one hand whip-quick and slaps the kid right across the face. He doesn’t punch, or kick, or kill that preppy little idiot
with one massive fist—the way everyone here knows he could. Instead he chooses to bat him away, then simply goes back to his business as though nothing happened.

  And by God, I wish I could say the same. My mouth is actually hanging open a little, though I do my best to keep it closed. I keep glancing back and forth between him and the kid, and when he speaks again I struggle to respond to him.

  Of course I do. Now my head is stuck on some god-awful violent moment from my childhood, instead of right here and right now.

  “Maybe you don’t want to talk to someone like me, huh?” he says, and a dozen possible answers flit through my fevered mind. All of them are completely impractical, however. They start with Is that a trick question? and end with You just slapped someone in a really humiliating fashion, none of which are appropriate to aim at someone like him.

  He’ll probably kill me if I try.

  He’s probably going to kill me anyway.

  So I put on the most neutral accent I can, and go with:

  “I just don’t think you can help me.”

  “No? So I seem unhelpful, then?”

  “That’s not what I meant at all.”

  “Then what did you mean?”

  He doesn’t say it angrily, or as if he’s trying to trap me. In fact, his words are so casual and curious-sounding I’m almost tempted to go with the truth. I meant that I’m scared out of my wits and not sure how to explain without enraging you, I think, but at the last second I chicken out. He probably is angry, beneath this layer of quiet calm. It’s probably like the slap: not hard or brutal, but still shockingly there.

  And I don’t want to be shocked.

  I had enough of being shocked with my father.

  “I’m looking for people who might know where my brother is, and I don’t think you do. I’ve never seen you around him.”

  “You sure?”

  “I think I’d remember,” I say, and though I don’t intend it, I can hear a wry slant to my words. It’s as though my sarcasm doesn’t know how to help itself, and I can’t really blame it. After all, who wouldn’t remember this guy? Even his eyes are distinctive, amid that strange maze of black hair and black brows and those racing stripes. They’re the color of a winter sky, pale but with the faintest hint of blue.