Keep From Falling (Markson Grove Series Book 1) by Amy Vanessa Miller

blood begins to pool in the cuts as I wipe the razor off with a piece of toilet paper and shove it back into the plastic case. I look again at the cuts that are now bleeding down my side, toward the waist of my jeans and instead of wiping up the blood, I watch it slowly flow down my skin. My breathing begins to calm and I realize that my heart isn’t aching like it had been just moments before. I smile inwardly.
    But when I look at the blood again, all I can hear is his panicked voice inside my head telling me to stop, and I cringe at the uninvited memory creeping into my mind. Why won’t he get out of my head already?
     

     
    “Stop it! You’re mutilating yourself,” Parker exclaimed when he walked in on me cutting myself one night at The Misfit Mansion. Nearly six months had passed since our introduction to one another and since then, we had spent almost every weekend together in each other’s arms just talking and smoking pot.
    I looked at him with my mouth hanging open in shock. What he had just done was in violation of the Misfit rules and he knew it. We were never to voice an opinion openly about someone’s actions unless the action was directly harming someone else without his or her consent. I covered the cuts I had just made on my inner thigh with my hand and attempted to hide my embarrassment. An embarrassment I shouldn’t have even been feeling. He was very much out of line, and he knew it.
    “I could have you kicked out for that,” I said with narrowed eyes.
    “I don’t care. I can’t watch you do that to yourself anymore and not say anything.”
    “Then don’t watch,” I returned angrily. “I didn’t invite you in.”
    “Skylar—” he began, but I cut him off quickly.
    “No,” I hissed. I got up from the bed and shut the door before continuing. “You don’t have the right to call me by my name in here and make me feel like my persona isn’t ok. This is me. This is who I am and you’ve always known that.”
    “You’re destroying your body.”
    “We are all destroying our bodies in some form here, Parker!”
    He dropped down on the bed and let out an angry sigh.
    I stood in front of him in only my black panties and tank top. The cuts I had made on my inner thigh continued to bleed and roll down my leg.
    Without hesitation, he placed his hand on top of the wound to stop the bleeding and looked up at me sadly.
    I put my hand over his gently. “I’m not your responsibility,” I said to him as I removed his hand from the cut.
    “You are.” He reached for a box of tissue on the bedside table and grabbed a few sheets to hand to me. “Please.”
    I took the tissue and pressed it against the wounds as I took a seat on the bed beside him. “Why do you come here?” I asked with a sigh. “You aren’t even a Misfit, not really, not anymore. You smoke weed with me and that’s pretty much it.”
    He smirked slightly despite the seriousness of our conversation. “Did you ever think that maybe how you know me in here is the complete opposite of how I am out there? Or even how I used to be in here for that matter?”
    “I know about your misfitting days before me, you told me all about the sex rooms with your friends,” I reminded him.
    He shook his head in distaste, not wanting to remember those drug-filled nights. “Yeah well, maybe I’m an angry drug dealer out there who beats up people for fun, did you ever think of that? Maybe me taking care of you now and smoking a little bit of pot is my persona.”
    Was that a possibility? Could the guy I had spent every weekend with for the past six months really be so different out there in the real world? I suddenly realized that I don’t actually know much about Parker’s life at all.
    I turned to look him in the eye. “Is it?” I challenged.
    He shrugged. “What would you say if it is?” He lay down on the bed and placed his hands behind his head as he attempted to look indifferent, but I knew better.
    I thought the question over for