The Forbidden Heart Read online

  He looked at it as if taking it would doom him.

  “No diseases,” I said.

  He took it, holding it very gently, almost too gently for a man who looked as fit as he did. “Steve Carson. You liked my look?”

  “Sorta,” I said, and he did that smile and shaking of his head again.

  He looked around—to see if anyone was noticing us, I guess. Then he turned back to me. “I guess you live in New York?”

  “Right. East Side. You?”

  “I’m going to Columbia. Junior. Born and raised in Rochester, New York.”

  “Raised? What are you, corn?” I asked, and he laughed.

  “You’re funny, all right. You go to school or what?”

  “Mostly ‘or what,’ but I’m still enrolled in school. At least today.”

  “College or . . .”

  “High school,” I said. “A senior, but don’t hold it against me.”

  He nodded. Then he looked at his watch.

  “Heavy date at the dorm?” I asked.

  “No. I don’t live at the dorm. I took a studio apartment on Jerome Avenue.”

  “Oh, a loner?”

  “I’m just not into the college rah-rah stuff. Can’t afford to fail anything. Besides, I like being on my own.”

  “Makes two of us.”

  “So you’re a senior in high school?”

  “I’m old enough. Don’t worry about that. I was left back three times,” I added, half in jest. He looked as if he believed it and smiled a little more warmly now. I could see he was very attracted to me, not that most boys weren’t.

  I think that was a big part of what confused my parents and my teachers. I was, in all modesty, quite beautiful, with a terrific figure, but as Billy Barton, a boy in my class, was fond of saying, I was “hell on wheels.” The contradiction probably kept me from suffering more severe punishments. Whenever I had been brought before a judge, I could see the confusion in his face. Why would someone who looked like me be so bad? Who was I, the daughter of Bonnie and Clyde? I knew how to be sweet and remorseful, too. Each time, I was sent off with warnings. Most men, especially some of my teachers, were easy to manipulate. But not my father, never mon père.

  “So what do you want to do afterward?” he asked.

  “After what?”

  “High school,” he said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s too far away to plan.”

  He nodded. I had the feeling I was beginning to scare him now.

  “No, I don’t know. I might go into fashion modeling.”

  “You could.”

  “Thank you.”

  He glanced at his watch again and then surprised me. “How about some lunch?”

  “Lunch?”

  “That’s the least I could do for a girl who risked her reputation and her uncertain future for me.”

  I shrugged. “Why not? Only, I didn’t risk my future. I reinforced it.”

  He laughed. “You’re very funny.”

  “I’m better when I’m really trying to be. So where’s this lunch?”

  “I know this great sandwich shop on Fifty-Seventh.”

  “Lead the way,” I said, and we started out together.

  I suppose a relationship that began with a theft didn’t have a good prognosis, but I was never one to care about long relationships, anyway. Maybe my mother’s relationship with my father turned me off the idea. My guidance counselor, Miss Laura Gene, was an amateur therapist, and she often accused me of always looking for ways to blame my parents for anything and everything.

  “One of these days, you’ll have to take sole responsibility for things you do, Roxy,” she told me. “That’s when you’ll know you have become an adult.”

  “Oh, I thought that was when I had my first period,” I replied, and she turned a shade of purplish red.

  She would definitely categorize Steve as an adult. He was obviously a very responsible person and serious about his schoolwork. He was not my idea of an ideal guy, anyway. I liked guys who weren’t uptight about their futures. When he told me he was very interested in international politics, I thought he was going to start talking about current events like my father and be boring, but he had a passion for what he liked, and I was attracted to that for a while. It didn’t take me long to figure out that he was not terribly experienced when it came to romance, despite his good looks. He was an only child, born to parents who had him late in their lives. Cursing, sex, drugs, and drinking were so alien to him that I thought at first he was from another planet. But he didn’t prove too difficult to corrupt.

  After lunch, we went for a walk in Central Park. He was going to go on to his apartment to work on a research paper. I asked him if he wanted company later.

  “Later? When later?”

  “I don’t care. You tell me,” I said.

  “It’s Sunday. Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

  “I never let something like that interfere with my happiness,” I said.

  He smiled, now far more relaxed. I could see he was intrigued with me, and for now, that was enough for me.

  “I’m not much of a cook, but I’m good at putting out a ready-to-eat chicken with some vegetables.”

  “I’m always ready to eat,” I said. “And other things.”

  “Other things?”

  “You’ll figure it out. You seem smart.”

  He smiled and gave me his address. “Six-thirty?”

  “Fine,” I said, and gave him a quick kiss on the lips, then hurried away. When I looked back, he was still standing there looking after me, glancing at the book I had swiped for him and then back at me as if he couldn’t believe that what had just happened was real.

  That was one of those nights when my father nearly took off my head, but I endured the pain and continued seeing Steve on and off during the next two weeks. As it turned out, he didn’t just have limited romantic experiences. He was a virgin. That ended fast. I was able to spend that night later at his place because one of the girls at my school covered for me in exchange for an iPod I had lifted. She really wasn’t much of a friend, not that any of them were. Mon père was on a short business trip, so I was able to pull it off.

  I did begin to really like being with Steve, but I still couldn’t see a long relationship with him. To his credit, he never got too emotional, never said “I love you” or even something like “I really like you, Roxy.” Maybe he realized how little that mattered to me. We just had a thing. In fact, I told him he made love like someone brushing his teeth.

  “What’s that mean?” he asked.

  “You do it like it’s simply something that has to be done. You’re afraid of cavities.”

  He thought a moment, missed the point, and shrugged. By now, he had decided not to take anything I did or said seriously, anyway. It was as if he went in and out of a dream when we were together. I really questioned whether he thought about me the day after or pushed me aside for fear he might miss an important point in political science class.

  However, the night my father threw me out, I went directly to Steve’s apartment. After I had packed, I stopped to look in on Emmie for a long moment. There was a good chance I wouldn’t see her again for some time, maybe ever. I wondered how she would react to that. We weren’t very close. There were just too many years between us, and my father did his best to keep me from doing too much with her without either my mother or him around. I could count on my fingers how many times I had taken her somewhere in the city without one of them. I wasn’t to be trusted.

  She didn’t stir. She looked like a little doll some other girl had tucked into her bed. I thought her teddy bear was looking at me suspiciously. I touched her hair softly so as not to wake her, whispered good-bye, and then descended the stairs. Mama came to the
door of the living room. She looked out at me standing there with my suitcase and shook her head. She seemed unable to speak. It was hard for me, too, but I managed.

  “Have a good life,” I told her, and walked out.

  It was overcast and dreary, but even if it weren’t, the street never looked as dark or as empty to me, even though there were people walking on both sides and the traffic was heavy. I did feel a little dazed, but I wasn’t hesitant. I walked with determination to the corner and hailed a taxi to take me to Steve’s apartment building. When he opened the door and saw me standing there with a suitcase, he looked about as amazed as anyone possibly could.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m here.”

  “With a suitcase? For how long?”

  “As long as you’ll let me stay,” I said.

  His amazement changed quickly to a look of worry. “Er . . . I could get into trouble if you were here more than a night. You are underage, Roxy. You’re not quite eighteen. You know I know the truth.” He shook his head and put up his hands. “Look, I’m not ready or able to do something like this,” he said. “What did you do, run away from home?”

  “Sorta,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Go home, Roxy. This is a mistake that you’ll regret.”

  “I guess it is,” I said. “Too bad,” I told him, and left him standing there in his doorway looking quite relieved.

  I took the elevator down, walked through the small lobby, and stepped back into the street.

  And that’s how it all began.

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  Following the death of Virginia Andrews, the Andrews family worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Virginia Andrews’s stories and to create additional novels, of which this is one, inspired by her storytelling genius.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Designed by Leydiana Rodríguez-Ovalles

  Cover design by Anna Dorfman

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  ISBN 978-1-4767-5585-4 (ebook)