Read Love Me If You Dare (Safe Haven) for Free Online Page B

week.
    Maddy,
always a bit more reserved, unfolded her legs and stretched them out in front
of her before leaning back on her hands.
    “What
are you doing here?” I felt like a total bitch, and though I wanted to throw
myself into a big group hug, to collapse now that my friends were here, I knew
that I needed to erect a barrier. An impenetrable one. “You shouldn’t have
wasted your money.”
    To
someone who didn’t have a tragedy in their past like I did, my need to keep my
school and home lives separate might have seemed silly. But in just the few
hours that I had been back in Fish Lake I could feel the insecurities and
problems that I had worked so hard to work past pulling at me, sucking me in.
    If
they touched the part of me that I had compartmentalized for school, I might
not be strong enough to hold back the resultant flood.
    “You
weren’t happy about coming home. We wanted to make sure that you were okay.”
Serena pulled back from the hug and studied my face, her pale blue eyes
probing. I did my best to avoid her concerned gaze.
    Serena
was the only person I’d come close to sharing my secrets with, and I’d only
been tempted because she had ghosts that haunted her as well.
    But
even though she would understand better than most, I couldn’t cross that line.
Couldn’t stand to see the shock and disgust in the faces of the friends who
thought of me the way I wanted them to—Kaylee, the good time girl.
    “And
we got the urge for a road trip. Took turns driving, ate a lot of granola bars,
so it just cost us the gas.” Maddy grinned up at me.
    My
heart sank. How could I be a bitch when they gone to so much trouble?
    “Um.
How did you guys get in?” I avoided Serena’s implied question. Between the mom
who couldn’t take care of herself, the dad who hadn’t bothered to make an
appearance yet, and the ghost of my dead sister, I was anything but okay.
    Not
to mention Dylan. Dylan was in a class of stress all by himself.
    “Your
mom let us in.” Maddy stood and stretched, tousling her raven dark hair with
one hand. “She’s pretty.”
    I
blanched inwardly. My mom was pretty, sure, but she’d been even prettier before
alcohol had begun to ravage her.
    “Was
she... ah... coherent?” I couldn’t think of a better way to ask.
    Serena
furrowed her brow at me, seeming to sense that something was off about me, in
that way that best friends do.
    “Yes,”
she finally answered. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
    “She’s
not a morning person.” I told myself it wasn’t a lie as the words slid slickly
off my tongue. I just wasn’t about to share the reason why my mom wasn’t
at her best in the mornings.
    It
was easy to see that I wasn’t fooling Serena. But though she raised an eyebrow
at my glib response, she didn’t press further.
    “Is
it okay for us to be here?” Maddy asked carefully. I must have been giving off
super bitch vibes, for her to ask. “I guess we should have told you we were
coming. We can go rent a motel room, or something.”
    I
knew why they hadn’t told me they were coming—they thought I needed some
company, and they knew that if they’d told me, I would have found some excuse
for them to stay back in Connecticut.
    No
way could I make them stay in a motel, even if it meant that on a hotel room
they would be shielded from the shittiness that was my home. Serena was on
scholarship, and Maddy waitressed during the summer, so neither of them was
exactly rolling in it.
    “No
way.” I said firmly, bending and shouldering a bag that had a neon green yoga
mat strapped onto it. “Let’s get your stuff upstairs. You can crash with me.”
    We
had an extra room, complete with its own bathroom, the setup identical to that
in my own—our parents had renovated the rooms for a fourteenth birthday present
for Ella and I.
    I
hadn’t been able to bring myself to peer inside Ella’s old bedroom in the last
couple of days, but I was certain that it would be just how I remembered it,
with