Free Aussie: A Bad Boy Second Chance Romance by Kate Dawes, Ava Catori Page A

been referring to. I was blown away, just after Halloween, her and some friends snagged some weed. I was like, Dawn? Good girl, smoking weed? I would never have guessed she’d even go there. Hell, I only knew because it dropped out of her glove box when I was with her one time. We’d just parked at school, and there right in front of us was a rent-a-cop, watching over the parking lot.
    When the guard saw it, we froze. I reached for it and put it in my coat pocket. No way would I let her get in trouble. I knew the guy saw me. I’d hoped he would.
    The security guy told me to get out of the car. When I did, Dawn protested, saying it wasn’t mine. I looked at the guard and said, “She’s trying to save me from getting in more trouble.”
    She looked at me incredulously.
    I shook my head and glanced back at her. “Not going to work, this time.”
     
    She tried again to insist that it was hers, but the guard knew me—who at school didn’t?—and there was no way he was going to believe it was hers.
    It was my first suspension. I’d had plenty of detentions, so many in fact that anything I did next would result in suspension. A bag of weed, no matter how small it was, triggered it.
    “I’m sorry you got into trouble for me. I still can’t believe you did that,” she said, her head resting on my chest.
    “No big deal,” I said, and it wasn’t. I’d take the fall for her any day. I’d protect her at all costs.
    “It was a huge deal, and you know it.” She looked away from me, right at the wall, at nothing, and I could tell she was contemplating something. Without looking back at me, she said, “I used to blame myself.”
    “For what?”
    “Everything that happened to you after that day.” I could hear it in her voice, the sorrow and self-blame.
    I pulled her closer. “Look at me.”
    She had trouble making eye contact with me, and kept looking away.
    I placed my hand under her chin, tipping her head up, and met her gaze. “Nothing I did was your fault. Do you hear me? Nothing. I’m the one who made bad choices in life, not you. I’m responsible for my behavior. Nobody else.”
    “Sometimes I wonder if things would have turned out differently if you didn’t take the fall for me that day.”
    I got what she was saying, but she wasn’t looking at the big picture. I shook my head. “Of course things would have been different. But the outcome would have been the same. I would have skipped school. I still would’ve pulled the fire alarm during the athletic award assembly, or whatever that shit was called. You didn’t do anything to cause me to do the tuna fish thing.”
    She sat up quickly. “Oh my God, I almost forgot about that.”
    One day the school cafeteria had served this awful tuna casserole, which was really nothing more than canned tuna with some noodles and some kind of disgusting cream sauce. I put mine in a plastic bag and, between classes, took off the side of the math teacher’s desktop and placed the casserole inside. That afternoon, the heat and the fan produced a stench that had the entire wing of the school shut down. They eventually found the bag, but never solved the mystery. Only Dawn knew I’d done it.
    “Stupid pranks,” I said. “The shrink told me I was acting out for attention. She was wrong. I knew why I did all of those things. Same reason I was doing drugs. It was the only thing that made me feel alive. It was like the thrill of doing something dangerous made me feel human. Honestly, I’d been dead to everything for so long after the accident, you know? I was numb. Couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t know how to change it, but when I’d do something stupid like that, suddenly I was alive again. Breathing.”
    She put her chin back on my chest, but didn’t say anything.
    “The same was true of sex. That’s why I was with different girls and never stayed with just one,” I admitted.
    She sighed heavily, her breath warm on my chest. “I don’t want to talk about