EPIC (Book 1 of the Soundcrush series)

Chapter 44: Rock Stars Make Miracles

This chapter is dedicated to another Soundcrush Fan DestinyBenton3  cause she can't decide if she wants Kat to keep with Trace or lose him. DestinyBenton3 I hope Trace convinces you  he could be a miracle worker....

Kat

I don't like to schlep around in the rain, especially when it involves being trailed by a security guy who also has to schlep with me, but I spend my whole day avoiding my house anyway. No way am I spending my day pacing the front porch, wondering if today is the day Trace might show up, practicing my furious speech which I half imagine he will promptly dismiss with a passionate kiss while the heavens pour upon us, soaking us to the bone and washing away the hurt between us.

Yeah, fuck that. This is not a Nicholas Sparks novel.

But-wait—it could be. Doesn't someone usually end up dead at the end of one of those?

It's late afternoon now, and I'm having trouble finding more excuses to avoid home. I've been to the gym with Colin, to lunch with Laurel, then Maddie met us for a little shopping. I needed to pick up a few additions to my wardrobe to take on my internship, but there's only so much retail therapy my dwindling bank account will allow. I went to the art supply store, just to browse, and now I'm at the book store. I pick up a romance novel and Twelve Things Every Young Adult Should Do. Better to have a to-do list than a don't-do list, right? My don't-do list is filling up quite nicely without the guidance of a self-help book.

Don't run away with rock stars.

Don't drink Mollycocks.

Don't date your brother-in-law.

Don't throw away the most real thing you've ever felt.

Shit. No. Scratch that last item. That's the kind of thinking that's going to put me in the summer rain with Trace laying one of his epic, reality-bending kisses on me. And I can't let him do that, because it's not that simple.

He lied. He hurt me more than I thought it was possible to hurt. And it wasn't even the first time. I knew about hurt already—because he hurt me before. It wasn't a summer rain that time, though. Standing in the middle of the book store, I can almost feel the cold January sleet...

We stood on my porch that day, too. He'd just brought me home from visiting Ashlynn at the hospital. His Jeep was already packed for LA, loaded with several suitcases, a box of random stuff, two amps, three guitars, foot-pedals, coils of cables.

He held my hand as he walked me to my front door. We'd probably held hands a thousand times, running through sprinklers, playing Red Rover, hauling each other up from stumbles, diving together in my pool. But it was the first time he ever laced his fingers through mine, pulling me against him, his heavy arm keeping me close. The first time I ever felt the weight of his possession. He thinks, in his old-fashioned way, that "taking" my virginity would be the thing to cement us, but the truth is, he claimed me that January day, on my porch, with the sleet dancing on the roof. The New Year's kiss had been epic, and the way he had been there for me during the Ashlynn crisis, constantly by my side in the hospital, was beyond comfort, but that January moment on the porch, with his fingers warming mine—the expression on his face as he brought my wrist to his lips and pressed so sweet, so slow, like he meant for it to last forever—it wrote his name on my heart, indelibly.

I was permanently marked by Trace Gallant.

Then he let go.

That was my first warning of the pain coming.