Ramblings From This Chick: RFTC Back to School Event with Nazarea Andrews

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

RFTC Back to School Event with Nazarea Andrews

Nazarea Andrews is an avid reader and tends to write the stories she wants to read. She loves chocolate and coffee almost as much as she loves books, but not quite as much as she loves her kids. She lives in south Georgia with her husband, daughters, and overgrown dog.

School Year Goals:

The campus is different. Maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m different.

Knowing that you aren’t insane is enough to make a person different, isn’t it?

Peter sits behind me, his hands spanning my waist, slipping around to secure me to him and tug me back so I was flush against his body. He’s been more and more possessive since we returned from The Island.

It bothered me until I realized that it wasn’t the kind of controlling possessive that irritated me last year. This is the kind of desperate clinging that comes from losing everything he’s ever known.

I squeeze his hands, resting low on my waist, and lean my head back to kiss him. We’re perched on the steps of AGZ house, and he’s warm and comforting against me.

“Do you think this year will be as insane as last?” he murmurs against my ear and I cock my head. Take a deep breath and focus on the question rather than his lips on my neck.

What do I want? The year is stretching in front of me, and I know. It’s what I’ve wanted for almost as I’ve wanted the Boy.

“I want to make my brother proud,” I murmur. Behind me, Peter goes still and I twist to look at him.

“Why would Micah be anything but proud of you?” he murmurs.

I smile. “Because I’ve been a fucking headcase for the better part of a decade. But I’m not. I wasn’t. And Grayson says we should set goals, and reach for them. We’re starting a new school year. We should have goals.”

“Mine is to get drunk every night this semester.”

I grin over my shoulder at James and Orchid. She looks slightly disgusted and he looks—as ever—just a little too rakish, a little too handsome, a little more than a little drunk.

“I don’t have goals,” Peter says, and not for the first time, he sounds lost. Impossibly young and so fucking lost. My heart squeezes and I lean into him, “Don’t worry, Pan. One day at a time.”

As he clings to me and the school comes awake around us, I add another goal for the year.

One day at a time. For both of us, we need time. And each other. One day at a time, putting the pieces of a broken girl and a lost boy back together.

Northern was supposed to be a fresh start—a place where people didn’t know who I was or how I had spent years in and out of mental institutes. People didn't know about my parents death or the island no one heard of. But when Peter sits next to me in lit class, I can’t stop the memories, and I don’t want to. He looks too much like the boy from the island, and despite my best intentions, coaxes my secrets from me.

He’s gorgeous, irresistible, a little mad, and completely lost—we are a pair of broken cogs in a world neither of us truly fits into. He is somehow gentle and fierce, heartbreaking in his devotion and savage in his defense.

When Belle, his best friend, shows up, pale and lovely and sick, Peter pulls away from me, a startling withdrawal. It’s a relationship that scares and confuses me. She is at times warm and friendly, and other times is violent and unpredictable.

Peter says that he wants me, but refuses to let himself get close. And there are secrets, surrounding both of us, that border on nightmares. As the memories close in, as Belle gets sicker and more violent, I’m torn between what is true and what I believe, and what this magical boy knows about my mysterious past.

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Losing Gwen was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to survive. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love her.

But finding her was never about that. And now that I have found her–now that she knows the truth about me and the Island, I have to trust her to believe. Because her leaving me didn’t just destroy me–its killing Neverland.

I need her to love me. But we all need her to believe again.

Peter Pan has grown up and found the girl who left–but the stakes are higher than ever in this romantic conclusion to the story begun in Girl Lost.

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