The Girl of Tokens and Tears

Book 2

The Half Shell Series

Susan Ward

Copyright © 2015 Susan Ward

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1497494893

ISBN-13: 978-1497494893

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

For my beautiful daughter Shelby, a.k.a. Shell-bell, who believes in love, the impossible, enchantment, and magic the way all young college girls still should. I’m so proud of you. I should say it more. I love you, baby girl!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PREVIEW: THE GIRL OF DIAMONDS AND RUST

PREVIEW: BROKEN CROWN

SNEAK PEEKS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

New York City, Spring Break 1989…

You can’t hold the minutes back, no matter how hard you try to. The minutes go only faster when you do not want to let them go. I want to stay here in this perfect quiet with Alan, but Sunday morning is here and I can’t do a damn thing about it.

I roll over in Alan’s arms. I look at the clock. 9 a.m. Jack and I settled on 10 a.m. after heated negations for the ritual of packing up Lena’s things and finally saying goodbye to Mom. I have a little time. Not much. I really should get moving. I can shower after the packing. It will save me a little time now, but not enough. No amount of time will ever be enough, and I still don’t know what I’m going to do after saying goodbye to Lena.

I turn my face into my pillow to hide my tears. I’m going to lose him. Alan won’t want to be with me if I go back to Santa Barbara. Oh, he’ll try. He’ll do all those be-kind-type of things. There will be the phone calls and maybe a letter or a present. But that won’t last long because the real world exists whether we want it to or not, and the real world made us over from the start.

The bed shifts under his weight as Alan turns me slowly in his arms so I can face him. My head is nestled on his arm. His eyes are black and searching.

I gaze at his beautiful face. It is emotionless, compassionately so, and I hate that he can give nothing away if he wants to. His eyes stare into mine, hardly blinking, calm and smiling, merely because he wants them to. Reaching up, I caress his cheek and run the tip of my fingers across the perfect structure of his jaw. I want to remember each line on his face exactly how he looks at this moment.

Time moves in, hovers and slips away. I can’t stop it.

I rummage on the floor for Alan’s shirt and pull it over my head. I climb from the bed. “I’ve got to go, Alan.”

I start to gather my clothes, and carelessly I shove them into my duffel, carefully avoiding Alan’s eyes. I can feel him watching and I wish he’d just say something, because the faster I get through this the sooner the pain will go away.

“Do you want me to go with you?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No. I’m meeting Jack at the apartment. We’re packing up my mother’s things today.”

Alan sits up. A torturous and heavy pause in the room hits me like a punch. “And then?”

“I catch a plane and go home to Santa Barbara.”

More heavy silence. The lump in my throat is strangling and I can’t look at him because if I do I don’t know what I will do.

“You can’t be serious, Chrissie. You’re not leaving.”

The room is filled with Alan’s panic and his need. It moves across my flesh like a chilled nightwalker.

“I have to go, Alan. I’m not ready to be everything you want me to be.”

“I don’t want you to be anything other than you are,” he whispers, his voice raw. He crosses the room and stops my hands in their frantic efforts of packing.  “You’re not leaving, Chrissie.” His thumb traces my lower lip. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I whisper, almost unable to push the words out of me. “But I have to go home.”

I step away from him and gather my clothes to wear. I lift his shirt to my face and breathe it in deeply. “Can I keep this shirt?”

“Why?”

“I love the smell of you. I want to smell you until I can’t anymore. In a perfect movie lovers would never end they would slowly fade away. I want to smell you until I can’t smell you anymore.”

He closes his eyes.  Oh shit, that was a really shitty thing to say, but I didn’t mean it and I wish I didn’t said it.

“You can keep the fucking shirt, Chrissie.”

My scalp prickles as every nerve in my body is suddenly blasted by a chill. The earth falls away beneath me. Oh no, this is not how I want this to go between us. What have I done? I don’t want us to part angry.

Alan pulls on his jeans and crosses the room to light a cigarette. Finally, he runs a hand through his hair and doesn’t look at me. “I’m sorry. You may have the shirt, Chrissie. My reaction to the shirt thing has nothing to do with you.  It is an enormous irritant. The shirt thing. But I shouldn’t be rude to you. Sorry.”

My eyes open to their roundest and it takes everything I have not to cry. That was unkind, Alan. Why do you have to be such a shit at times? A shit who lets me know that girls taking souvenirs after climbing from your bed is a frequent event; a shit who on purpose reduces me to meaningless, when my words were only an accident; a shit because…

“You can stay, Chrissie. You can stay with me in New York.  We can get married. Whatever you want. I’ll quit now before the tour starts. I don’t want you to leave.”

I have to get out of the room quickly. Anymore and I’m going to crumble and stay. “I can’t stay, Alan. And you don’t really want to marry me.”

That spikes his anger. “Don’t tell me what I want.”

Oh jeez, another stupid blunder. I’m going to ruin us if I don’t get out of here quickly. I sink my teeth into my lower lip and continue to dress. The words clog in my throat and they are too painful to speak. I hear them in my head: Oh Alan, I’ve got my own shit to fix!

“I can’t stay,” I repeat.

“If you leave we are over.”

Oh god, I see it and I don’t want to. Alan loves me, but right now Alan loving me is more a thing about him than me. He doesn’t want me to leave because he’s afraid to be alone. That’s the fear and desperation I see in his eyes and it is the wrong reason to stay.

We both have so much messed up shit we need to work through. It would be wrong for us both if I stayed. But I don’t remember me before Alan and I don’t know if I really want to.