Read Online Running From Mercy by Terra Little - Free Book Online

he say something was up?” she asked suspiciously, ready to take Nate’s head off for lying.
    â€œHe didn’t say nothing. I’m asking you.” He reached up and pressed the pad of his finger into the flesh of her bottom lip, watched it sink and then rise again. She swatted his hand away irritably and he grinned.
    â€œStop it.” She came away from the wall and pushed at his chest with both hands. “Get off me.”
    Instead of heeding her words, Chad dipped his head and stole a kiss. He drew back and looked into her shocked face and then stole another one. And another one after that. When her lips went slack, he slipped his tongue in her mouth. Pam had never kissed a boy before, and the experience shook her.
    â€œStop,” she pleaded against his lips.
    â€œYou ever kiss before?”
    She shook her head. “Not like this, not with tongue. I don’t know how to do what you’re doing.”
    â€œOpen your mouth wider and put your tongue in my mouth,” Chad told her. “Move your head this way.”
    She did as he said and let him slip his arms around her waist as they kissed. “Your tongue is in the way,” she said after they pulled apart for air.
    â€œThat’s part of the fun, Pam. You have to make room in my mouth for your tongue.”
    â€œOh.”
    Chad grinned at the silly memory and stepped back from the window in Paris’s bedroom. He had been standing there long enough to see Pam get out of a car with a strange man and then he’d heard her and Nikki talking downstairs. They spoke in low tones for several minutes and then the sound of the door closing floated up the stairs to him. Nikki hadn’t told him Pam was coming to the house, nor had she told him she was leaving with Pam. He figured it out when he saw the two of them climb into a shiny new rental car, with yet another strange man, and drive off.
    Worrying about Nikki’s safety was the last thing on his mind. What he did worry about was Nikki becoming too attached to Pam and being let down when Pam disappeared again. No one knew better than he did the pain Pam could cause when she pulled one of her famous disappearing acts.

    May 21st
    Â 
    Dear Diary,
    Â 
    Nikki went back to school today. She told me that Chad was going back to work, and since he was, he was making her go back, too. How would it look if the principal suspended other kids for skipping school and let his own daughter get away with it? she said he’d asked. I made sure to make a lot of sympathetic noises when she told me about it, but secretly I agree with him. Sunday will be two weeks since Paris died, and I know she wouldn’t want Nikki to start slipping in school. Paris was all about education, and Nikki knows it.
    I have spent time with her every day since the funeral, and I’ve decided that she is the most amazing young woman I’ve ever known. Talking with her feels different in person than when I called from California to see what she was up to. She tells me her secrets and her dreams and I soak them in like a sponge, thinking that I never thought I’d know these things about her. Paris was the one she confided in, and I was the one who went looking for the latest Prada bag and sent it to her right away. When she and Paris came to visit, I thought I was being the best aunt I could be by introducing her to famous people, bringing her to the studio with me to watch me record tracks, and letting her shop endlessly. But there’s more growing between us now, and I don’t know if I should be afraid of what’s happening or not. We both know I’m not the most emotionally available person on the planet. Even scarier is the thought that I don’t know how to be.
    Oh, and she looks so much like Chad it kills me to look at her sometimes. She laughs and I catch myself staring at her mouth, at the way her dimples sink into her cheeks like wells, just like Chad’s used to do.