Skater Boy (Patchwork House Book 1) Read online

  Skater Boy

  Mary Catherine Gebhard

  Unglued Books

  Copyright © 2019 by Mary Catherine Gebhard

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Line editing by Nancy Smay

  Content Editing by Edits in Blue

  Proof Reading by My Brother’s Editor and C. Marie

  Cover by Hang Le

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the above copyright owner of this book.

  Skater Boy (Patchwork House #1)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7338510-0-8

  An Unglued Books Publication

  www.MaryGebhard.com

  Contents

  Freebie alert

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Patchwork House #2

  Let’s Hang

  Also by Mary Catherine Gebhard

  Acknowledgments

  Freebie alert

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  For Rachel and Collin, because your nickname inspired this book. Both this Tweetie, and the one on the page, thank you!

  Prologue

  The first thing you learn is how to fall. You learn to brace for impact, so you don’t break a wrist or arm or collarbone, because you’ll be falling a lot—at least that’s what he told me, the boy who taught me when no one else would.

  Then he ruffled my hair and pushed me off my skateboard to prove his point.

  It was the very first thing he taught me; it was also the last thing I remembered when we met again, because I didn’t just fall for him,

  I slammed.

  One

  Slam: A hard fall.

  TWEETIE

  1989, present

  Tweetie is 19

  “Well, this is Patchwork House. Good luck. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Right,” I said, readjusting my duffle in one hand and my skateboard in the other. I reached for what little cash I had left to pay my cabbie, and while he got change, I took in my destination.

  Patchwork House was the most notorious house in our small nowhere town of Heaven Falls. An old, three-story Victorian nestled on the corner of a forgotten street, home to all runaways, rebels, and anyone else who couldn’t fit our town’s very rigid definition of normal.

  You knew it was Patchwork by the eponymous patchwork graffiti covering every inch of its exterior.

  “Here’s my card.” He reached through the half-open car window. “Call me when you’ve had your fun. If you’re hoping for a place to stay…” He eyed my bag. “Well, they’ll chew up and spit out an innocent thing like you. It’s a boys’ club up there—mean boys.”

  Then he peeled out so fast his tires screeched.

  It was just me and Patchwork, a house that infamously only opened its doors to the boys of our town—the mean boys.

  But once upon a time, they’d allowed one girl to stay.

  This is your life now, Tweetie.

  I knew I should go up the brightly painted steps, through the door painted with even more colorful words—no one ever knocked—but for the umpteenth time, I wondered if I’d made the right choice coming back. Nervous energy buzzed through me, an ungrounded wire in my blood. I felt like a thief just about to be discovered.

  In front of the house I’d lived in, been raised in.

  So I walked around back, postponing the inevitable. The air was crisp and brittle like the leaves falling to the ground. When I reached the yard, I stopped short, my breath leaving me. A ramshackle wooden skateboarding ramp shone in the autumn sun, climbing above the trees.

  That was new.

  I dropped my duffle and grabbed my board. What a perfect distraction.

  There was only one skate park left in our state, and it was two hours away. People didn’t want us around, didn’t want drugs and crime in their neighborhoods, and they said we brought them. That was bullshit. Either way, taking away the parks didn’t stop skating.

  I took a deep breath and climbed up the ramp, trying to clear my head, not think about the life I’d just willingly walked back into. Patchwork House and I had a history as beautiful and sordid as the boys who’d founded it, but as a boy who’d once changed my life told me, there was only now.

  My board.

  The lip of the bowl.

  And the mahogany valley below.

  I dove.

  Speed blew my hair back, wheels grinding against the wood. This was my peace. No matter the storm, skating always calmed the rain. I always knew I was going to be a skater. It’s in my blood. Just because I want it, though, doesn’t mean the world will let me have it.

  That was a lesson learned when I was just nine.

  Back then, equipped with a too-big board and no training whatsoever, I went to my first park. I remember Dad telling me they were going to try and push me out, but to tell them I had every right to be there. Just because I was little and a girl didn’t mean they could push me around.

  Dad was good like that.

  I kept falling over.

  But I wouldn’t give up, even when the older boys laughed at me.

  So when one boy approached me, maybe fourteen or fifteen, hat pushing down a dark, wavy shag and shadowing darker eyes, I braced myself. Before he could even get a word out, I scrunched up my face, trying to imitate Dad when he was talking with the phone company.

  “You can’t make me leave,” I said, folding my arms. “I have every right to be here.”

  He grinned and flicked a joint over my shoulder. “Yeah, you do.”

  He spent the rest of the day teaching me how to ride. His friends called him names they probably shouldn’t have said around me, words I didn’t learn the meaning of until I was much older. They whooshed past us, getting so close to him the tail of his shirt lifted up and exposed his hard, muscled skin. But he ignored them.

  Then he
snatched my chin and said, “Block everything else out.”

  So I did.

  “Block it all out,” I whispered to myself now, attempting a trick I’d never tried before. A reckless move that made my veins pulse. A move that felt a little like the reason I’d gotten into skating.

  In the end, I became indebted to that boy in more ways than one.

  I sailed down the bowl and up into the air, spinning around before coming back down.

  I knew the moment I landed I was going to slam. You can tell immediately if it’s going to be a good land or bad. My foot gave out, the board flying up as I flew with it. I braced myself for the inevitable crash landing with the hard wood, but it never came. Instead I landed on something hard yet malleable—someone.

  “Oof.”

  I blinked open my eyes, into the gaze of another.

  They were dark yet warm, like fresh chocolate caramel, and there was something eerily familiar about them. My gut rang with a song I knew but couldn’t remember.

  I tilted my head. “Have we met?”

  “I think I would remember you,” he said dryly, just as my board finished its descent onto my back. My chin connected with his chest as reality came back.

  I quickly scrambled off.

  Pain zinged through my neck, bright and burning, but embarrassment superseded everything.

  Flip. The Flip—that’s why he was so familiar. He’d been the most famous skater in the world. I fought the urge to turn into a puddle in my sneakers.

  “Uh…” I rubbed my skull. “Sorry.” I tilted my head, really seeing him. He gave me an appraising look back, like someone buying a car.

  But that was fine.

  He was twenty-four and uber-famous. I was nineteen and people often mistook me for a boy. He had that skater boy look I went absolutely insane for, though. Thin, with muscles etching every inch of him. Tattoos climbed up one arm and disappeared into places I couldn’t see. Dark, devil-may-care eyes shadowed under wavy hair and a cap. A constant, cocksure grin hooked one side of his cheek, as if a cop could put him in handcuffs and he’d say thanks with a wink.

  I probably should have been immune to boys like him growing up in Patchwork, but everyone tried so hard to keep me out of the life, and it had the reverse effect. I was drawn to it. Drawn to any sign of a fuck authority attitude.

  And Flip had it in spades.

  I had no problem admitting he’d starred in many of my fantasies. Something flickered beneath his espresso brows and he dragged his index finger along his lower lip in an unnervingly slow pace. It felt like he was going to stay quiet forever, watching me.

  But then he said, “Bad slam.”

  I shrugged, rubbing my arms, trying to ward off that odd look I’d sworn I’d seen.

  Like he knew me.

  “Yeah—” I started, when I was cut off by a new but very familiar voice.

  “What the fuck are you doing here—Tweetie?” I couldn’t turn to see him, though memories had perfectly preserved him in my mind. His voice changed when he said my name, going from anger to shock. I froze, forgetting everything.

  Forgetting the famous boy whose poster had hung over my bed was only inches away from me.

  Forgetting the words I rehearsed for this very moment.

  “Tweetie, is that you?”

  I turned, bracing myself.

  King.

  With his tatted body and just-slept-in hair. My best friend, my almost-brother, my Corrupt father figure. The only thing missing was the cigarette at his lip.

  “I live here.” It came out as a whisper.

  King's lips parted. No words came out.

  “What’s with the ramp?” I asked, needing to say something to break the tension.

  “You always needed a place to train.” He stared at me like I was a ghost.

  I chewed my lip, trying to keep the emotions from bleeding onto my face. I hadn’t been here for two years, but they were still thinking of me. People like the cabbie thought Patchwork was some den of iniquity, home of the Corrupt of Heaven Falls, and if I stayed they would swallow me whole like mythical demons.

  They didn’t know the real Patchwork, didn’t know my Rebel Gods—didn’t care to.

  I tugged my soft shirt. “Where’d you get the wood?”

  “Donated,” King said like I’d asked him the weather.

  “Donated?” The skepticism in my tone was palpable. Then Flip spoke, and I was reminded we weren’t alone in a rush of noise, emotion, feeling, hitting me like a freight.

  “Sure. They donated it. Maybe they just don’t know they donated it yet.” And just like that King’s face closed off, the hurt and anguish gone.

  An arm landed on my shoulder—King’s—like it had thousands of times before. Years had passed, but it still fit like a glove. He shoved me behind his back. I was so startled I didn’t think to react.

  “Who’s the am?” Flip asked. Am, AKA amateur AKA me. He and King shared some inscrutable look and I couldn’t help but think they were having another conversation beneath the surface.

  My eyes darted between them, trying to play catch-up.

  Now that my nerves had settled slightly, a more pressing question bubbled to the surface: why was Flip at Patchwork? I’d only been gone a few years; what could have happened in that time to put the most famous skateboarder in the world in its backyard?

  “Somebody talk,” I said.

  “Go inside,” King said. At first, I thought he was talking to Flip, but then he gripped my bicep, body still facing Flip, glare still hard, and gently pushed me toward the back door.

  Years passed, yet nothing had changed.

  I yanked him off. “What’s going on? Do you know each other?” Flip tilted his head, catching me over King's shoulder and giving me another look, this one coated in an arrogance I couldn’t understand. It was almost like he knew things about me, things I didn’t give him permission to know.

  It scared me. Instinctively I grabbed King's hand like I always had.

  Flip’s eyes shot to the movement and whatever I’d seen vanished. He laughed close-mouthed, as if in on some joke. I squeezed King's hand.

  Flip’s gaze slowly drifted from our interlocked hands to my eyes. “I was just thinking of moving back in.”

  Back in? “You used to live here?” I blurted.

  Something passed.

  Something unsaid but known.

  The Rebel Gods had an unspoken language, one I’d never been able to crack, even after years, but here King was speaking it with Flip. Warning bells rang loud and vibrating.

  “I think we’re all full up now,” King said. “Sure you’re not here to pick up the last of your shit?”

  The last of his shit?

  I tried to remember any time King had mentioned knowing Flip.

  Nothing. Nada. Blank. All the years we’d spent together, that I’d lived with King, and he’d forgot to mention knowing the most famous skateboarder in history.

  “Pretty sure.” Flip’s stare hadn’t relented. “Anyway, Patchwork can always fit another wayward soul, right?”

  A stiff tension passed, slow and crackling, like someone accidentally stepping on uneasy ice.

  King stepped to Flip, and Flip met him halfway, their noses separated by the thinnest strip of air.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?” King’s voice was granite.

  Flip’s gaze flicked to me. Maybe I should have looked away, but it wasn’t my style. I met him, eye for eye.

  His stare ignited. The little oxygen I had left disappeared in a rush down my lungs.

  Without moving from King, without taking his eyes off me, Flip said, “I’ll grab my bags.”

  FLIP

  Present

  Flip is 24

  Tweetie held her board across her lap. With wild, bright yellow curls and even brighter blue eyes, it was almost like the very first day we met—but the little girl from the park wasn’t so little anymore.

  I leaned on a tree edging the sidewalk
and street, the lawn the only barrier from the graffitied walls I swore I wouldn’t return to. With a shuddery breath, I tangled my hands through my hair. I didn’t have shit to grab, I just needed to get out of there.

  She’d still gone right for King's hand, so shit hadn’t changed much over the years.

  But then, I wasn’t surprised she didn’t recognize me.

  I wrote the story of our lives so I was always her shadow.

  “Are you really coming back?”

  I broke from Tweetie, finding a familiar denim jacket with gray hoodie, hood up. It hid his faded sides, only the dreads he kept well maintained above them falling across his forehead to eclipse striking hazel eyes.

  He was someone you might overlook at first, unlike the rest of us with our tattoos and obvious bad attitudes, but anyone who was anyone knew not to look past him. Daniel was the Demon of Heaven Falls for a reason.

  Daniel offered me a cigarette and I shook my hand, declining the offer. My stare locked back on Tweetie.

  “Has she eaten yet?” I asked.

  Daniel paused, flame flickering in his palms. “What?”

  I rummaged around in my jean pocket for cash. “She needs some fucking dinner.”

  “King’s on it,” Daniel said just as King dropped a bag of burgers in her lap.

  I stopped digging. She hated burgers.