Untouched (Bay Falls High, #1)
Jaxson Kidman
He didn’t say a word to me.
He brought the cigarette to his mouth again and took another drag.
Putting his head back, he parted his lips and let the smoke slowly lift from his mouth. His throat… mygod… it was fucking hot in the worst way possible.
When he lowered his gaze to me again, he extended his right hand and offered me the cigarette.
Written by Jaxson Kidman
UNTouched
I’m just the dirty, poor girl …
… with a junkie for a mother.
Now I’m the new girl.
My mother’s in rehab and the last person I expect to see takes me in so I don’t end up on the street.
Except… BAY FALLS HIGH is like nothing I know.
Rich. Power hungry. A$$holes around every corner. Liars. Cheaters.
And if that wasn’t enough…
I have three of the hottest and baddest guys in school after me.
I didn’t mean to see what I saw to get their attention.
And I swear to them I won’t say a word.
But they don’t believe me.
I’m not a prize.
I’m a toy.
I know once I’m broken they’ll leave me alone…
… but maybe for the first time in my life I’m done with being broken.
Plus, when I find out what they really want from me, I realize that maybe I can be the bitch calling the shots.
prologue
(all your fault…)
the crunch of metal the sound of breaking glass this is everything you’ve ever wanted boys so now you can kiss my ass
I wrote that in my head.
Knowing damn well what was going to happen if I didn’t slow down. This wasn’t like I was still the new girl around here. I mean, technically, I was, but I knew enough to know enough. The push and the pull was like that of the ocean. Something you’d see from afar and think… beauty.
Right?
I mean, who doesn’t do that?
It’s the way life goes.
Like the one year I lived on the east coast.
For the entire winter all everyone did was complain about the cold and the snow. They talked about the beach. They talked about summer. They talked about the sun, the sand, the surf.
Guess what?
It happened.
Summer came.
School was out.
And even I fell for the bullshit tricks.
Getting excited about the beach.
Packing up my little broken bucket and faded purple shovel. Thinking I was going to build a giant sand castle. Or catch a crab and name him Herman.
Guess what happened?
Everyone complained about the beach. About the heat. Wishing it was cooler.
And for me, the water was cold, tasted bad, the sand got everywhere, and my sand castle sucked. I never saw a crab.
That was the push and pull of the ocean.
And what the fuck does it have to do with me sitting behind the wheel of a stolen car that’s just been wrapped around a tree?
Simple.
It’s the push and pull of BFH.
Bay fuckin’ Falls High.
You think you know what you see, but you don’t.
And it was amazing thoughts still worked in my head after getting punched in the face by the airbag. Or the searing pain of the car losing the fight with the tree, leaving me as a junked toy to get thrown around the car.
There was only pain.
But I was used to it.
And there was only the Rulz.
But I was used to that too.
Their names floated through my head and I groaned.
I hadn’t hit the tree hard enough.
Because… well… between you and me…
I crashed the car on purpose.
one
One time when I walked home from school with Ruby, her mother was asleep on the couch. With a bottle of cheap wine on the table, a glass tipped over, blood red wine dripping to a black carpet. Ruby rolled her eyes and didn’t care. Which I understood. I mean, her neighbor was selling drugs from the front porch that they shared as Ruby lived smack dab in the middle of a row home. And that was the nice part of the neighborhood.
But I remembered going up to her room to listen to music and not do our homework only to hear her father come home from work and go crazy. He screamed and yelled and woke Ruby’s mother up to argue with her.
Ruby just opened her bedroom window and smoked a couple of stolen cigarettes from Garcia who lived across the street from her. They had a little boy across the street thing going on but Ruby was terrified of having a baby so she never did that. Which I always laughed at because there were ways to make sure you didn’t have a baby.
To her, she’d rather remain a virgin until she was thirty-two if it meant getting the hell out of her house and out of this town.
Which I totally understood.
Her father screamed so loud the house shook.
He called her mother lazy. A lazy drunk. A lazy whore drunk. A lazy whore bitch drunk.