Beneath Her Skin by Gregg Olsen (ebook reader for manga txt) 📗

Her spiritual side, he thought. What a joke!

Not Katelyn. She was spiritual. Like a lot of people who’d suffered great hurt, she never forgot how that felt. She could understand the pain of others because she’d been there herself. She was a fighter, and everything she had was because she was able to dig herself out of it. Starla thought she was on the rise, but Teagan was sure that it was Katelyn who was the true star.

And he was in her bedroom. Her wonderful, freaking awesome, amazing bedroom.

He could hear the water running in the bathroom, and he followed the sound. Each step closer, closer. He wasn’t sure that he was ready to see her naked, but he was positive that must have been something she had wanted.

Why else would she have let him come over?

The faucet stopped and the sound of her in the water beckoned.

Before opening the half-closed door, he drew in a breath. Katelyn smelled of jasmine bath salts and scented candles. It was the scent of a young woman. Not like his sister. Not like his mother.

A sweet, young woman. A woman who wanted him there. Invited him there.

He pushed the door open. And just like that, the fantasy was over.

“Teagan!” a stunned-beyond-measure Katelyn called out. “What are you doing here?”

She moved her arms to hide her breasts and sank lower into the water, trying desperately to cover herself. Her long dark hair, which had been clipped up out of the water, became unfurled and soaked as she swiveled around.

Teagan started to shake. “You asked me to come over,” he said. “That last message was from me.”

Katelyn was angry and embarrassed—and the punk kid next door was frozen in fear.

“No, I didn’t! Teagan, get out of my bathroom! You little creep!”

What? Teagan couldn’t quite grasp what Katelyn was saying. It was at odds with how he felt about her—and how he was sure she felt about him.

“I brought you Starla’s pregnancy test. She thought Cameron knocked her up. We can report her to the school or something.”

He held out the test wand to prove what he was saying.

But Katelyn didn’t seem to care.

“Do you want me to scream?” she asked. “Get out of my bathroom!”

Teagan became frantic. This wasn’t how he thought it would be.

“I love you, Katelyn,” he said.

She turned in the tub, sending some water to the floor.

“You are seriously f-ed up, Teagan. You need help. I get that. But get the hell out of here!”

Teagan was embarrassed, confused, ashamed. All of his emotions were in a Magic Bullet and were spinning around and around. He moved forward, closer to the tub. He’d wanted to tell her he was sorry. He wasn’t going to touch her.

“Get out!” This time she was loud. Not loud enough to wake up the neighborhood, but loud enough to get him into trouble.

He was going to be in trouble. His sister was going to make fun of him. He was going to get yelled at by his mom. Jake was going to hit him again.

And yet he stood frozen, unable to move.

* * *

“It happened so fast,” Teagan said to Chief Garnett. “It was so, so fast, but at the time, it happened in slow motion. Really.”

The chief’s office was pin-drop quiet.

Annie looked over at Mindee and Starla, their grim faces easily betraying their own shame and guilt over what had occurred. A lot of what the boy said was true. In fact, all of it. But what he had to tell them next was the most important part of the story—the part that would keep him out of juvenile detention in Port Orchard… or wouldn’t.

Teagan had started to tear up some more, which Annie considered a good sign. Whatever happened in that bathroom in the house next door, it had not occurred without a heaping measure of regret and hurt. Teagan might have been a bit desperate and a pervert-in-training to climb up that trellis to Katelyn’s bedroom, but he likely wasn’t as bad as the kid who sets fire to the family dog or the one who trolled the neighborhood for an open window to get a peek at a girl undressing.

“Okay,” the boy said. “I just stood there a second, not really knowing what to do. I thought she wanted me there. I really did. She was so mad at me.”

* * *

Katelyn was completely pissed off. “Get out of here, Teagan!”

“But, I thought…” Teagan tried to find the words that would turn all of that moment into something better. Something he’d imagined.

“You thought wrong!”

Seeing that he wasn’t going, Katelyn fumbled for the towel on the vanity adjacent to the bathtub. Once she got a hold of it, she jerked it toward herself. In that terrible moment, the towel caught the electrical cord on the espresso machine. In a second, but again, seemingly in slow motion, the machine cartwheeled into the bathtub.

Although she saw it coming, Katelyn didn’t have time to scream.

In those hideous split seconds, the water hissed and Katelyn jerked in the bath like a fish on a line fighting that brief battle for its life. And then the lights went out.

“Katie?” Teagan called out.

No answer.

“Katie?” he tried again.

He bent down, embarrassed to get so close to the naked girl next door but needing to know what he could do to help her. Her eyes were open, staring at him in the ultimate staring game, one that he knew for sure he couldn’t win.

* * *

“She had soap on her face and in her eyes. I turned on the water and tried to rinse it off, thinking… I don’t know… thinking that maybe she’d be all right. But I kind of knew that she wouldn’t be.”

“Then what did you do?” Annie asked.

Teagan looked over at his mother and sister, then back at the police chief. He was shaking then, no longer a grown-up wannabe, but a