Cameron Casey and Annabeth Taylor are about to find out just how deep a burn can hurt you. Together, they're being trained to take over the family business. Neither of them want the lives their fathers have planned out and they realize that sometim...
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Cameron. 16 years old.
My days went like this: wake up in the Martinez's spare room, eat breakfast, leave the house when Hannah went to school, walk to the gym and work out, visit the bus station in case Annabeth and Alex showed up, go to the hospital, eat lunch with Hannah's dad in near silence while he went over work notes and made sure I finished my plate, wait in the parking lot in case Annabeth and Alex showed up there, watch Hannah pull her car into the closest parking spot, have fun for the first time in my life.
Staying with the Martinez family made me feel safe. It felt like I could go to sleep and not worry about the house getting shot up in the night or someone attacking me when my eyes were closed. It was new and new things usually scared me because of the uncertainty of it all but not this. The Martinez family went out of their way to make sure I was eating and sleeping. Mr. Martinez promised my dad wouldn't hear about the hospital bill even the three extra times I asked him. And that ease was something I never knew I didn't have.
As soon as Hannah finished any homework she had, we jumped from place to place until we had to sleep and every moment seemed like a new adventure. I tried to remember every second of it because I wasn't sure when it would happen again. I still planned to leave with Alex, Annabeth, and Finn so it was unlikely that life on the run from my gang family would be fun in the beginning. I wanted to bottle up these memories for a rainy day.
One time, we went to a movie theater and got popcorn. Hannah paid. They had a self service station where you could put butter and seasoning on it. I used every single thing they had available. Hannah told me it was going to taste horrible but she was wrong. It was the best popcorn I'd ever had. It took the length of one movie preview to get me to convince Hannah to get the popcorn. She immediately spit it back out into her hand and tried to clean it up with a napkin.
"That's disgusting." Hannah cringed and looked at her hand.
"You should wash it," I offered before I grabbed another handful of the popcorn.
"I meant what you're eating. It's pure salt at this point." She made a sound of displeasure. "I'll be right back."
She came back with clean hands and a new bag of popcorn that she kept all to herself.
