Losing Johnny

  LOSING JOHNNY

  A NEW-ADULT NOVEL

  JOHNNY - BOOK II

  BY RACHEL DUNNING

  Genres

  Coming of Age

  New Adult Romance

  Mature Young Adult Romance

  Copyright © 2014 Rachel Dunning.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Book Cover Design, Copyright 2014 Rachel Dunning

  First Edition.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Rachel Dunning:

  Finding North, #1 Naïve Mistakes Series

  East Rising, #2 Naïve Mistakes Series

  West-End Boys, #3 Naïve Mistakes Series

  Deep South, #4 Naïve Mistakes Series

  Johnny, #1 Johnny Series

  Red-Hot Blues, Standalone Novel

  Like You, #1 Perfectly Flawed Series

  Know Me, #1 Truthful Lies

  Find Me, #2 Truthful Lies

  Need Me, #3 Truthful Lies

  Christmas Comfort, #1 Hot Holidays Series

  Easter Sundae, #2 Hot Holidays Series

  Girl-Nerds Like it Harder, #1 Girl-Nerd Series

  Girl Nerds Like it Faster, #2 Girl-Nerd Series

  Girl-Nerds Like it Deeper, #3 Girl-Nerd Series

  Girl-Nerds Like it Longer, #4 Girl-Nerd Series

  For news of upcoming releases, visit:

  http://racheldunningauthor.blogspot.com

  Or connect with me on Facebook:

  http://bit.ly/RachelDunning

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  PROLOGUE

  -1-

  -2-

  CHAPTER ONE

  ~ The Beginning ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  CHAPTER TWO

  ~ The Roadtrip ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  CHAPTER THREE

  ~ Johnny ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ~ Nicole ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ~ The Bikers ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  CHAPTER SIX

  ~ Tiago ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ~ A Daughter ~

  -1-

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ~ Tiago and Catherine ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  CHAPTER NINE

  ~ That Girl ~

  -1-

  -2-

  CHAPTER TEN

  ~ The Promenade ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ~ You wanna dance? Let’s dance. ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ~ Touch ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ~ True Love ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ~ Sexual Favors ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ~ The Birthday ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ~ Betrayal ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ~ The Seed ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ~ I love you ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  -8-

  -9-

  -10-

  -11-

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ~ Spark ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ~ Disaster ~

  -1-

  -2-

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ~ Curveball ~

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  BOOK THREE

  -1-

  -2-

  BOOK ONE

  If you haven’t read Book One yet, you should probably do that now.

  Very little effort has been made to make this book stand on its own.

  Book one, called Johnny, is a FULL-LENGTH NOVEL, and is available from the kindle store here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQRN44C

  PROLOGUE

  -1-

  You can't stop loving someone. You just can't. No matter how hard you try, who you meet, how many new lovers you get.

  You just can't.

  You move on. You forget. But you never stop loving him.

  Ever.

  -2-

  It’s not that I didn’t love Tiago Espada. I did. I loved him deeply. He was my first “adult” lover, you might say.

  We were also compatible sexually. No, we were explosive sexually. Tiago knew what he was doing, knew it all too well. I’m sure he was actually sexually compatible with anyone female. Anyone.

  That should have warned me.

  But love blinds...

  CHAPTER ONE

  ~ The Beginning ~

  -1-

  I met Tiago Espada when I was nineteen, just shy of a year after Johnny and I had split up.

  Johnny and I didn’t talk at all that first summer after we broke up, the one where he went to Portugal and met the love of his life.

  OK, fine, she wasn’t the love of his life.

  And I, technically, was the one who broke up with him.

  We texted a few times in the beginning, but I needed to let the wound heal. Our relationship had become confused by sex, to the point where that was finally all we had.

  I’ve known Johnny since I was six, and was in love with him (in the romantic sense) since I was fifteen. I knew Johnny even before his tanned body had transformed into the perfect sculpture it is today. But his eyes had always remained the same, a haunting green that a person could get lost in.

  How close were Johnny and I? We took each other’s virginity, and he got his arm inked up, shoulder to elbow, in remembrance of it.

  That close.

  After my father had died and I’d hit rock bottom, the love I’d had for Johnny became buried in a need for me to find myself. Back then I was lost, drowning, gasping for air. And the pain didn’t go away, mo
nth after month, no matter what I tried. Johnny, my lover, the only boy I had ever been with, became suddenly no more than a mirage.

  I was swimming.

  After five months of being stuck in that funk, even Johnny agreed we needed to part ways—if only to save our friendship.

  So while mom and I and Nicole were hitting the road and driving through deserts and Vegas and looking at the most jaw-dropping tongue-on-the-ground views of breathtaking canyons across the USA, I did my best to keep distracted and not text Johnny.

  Mom and Nicole and I had lots of adventures on the road. Plenty of adventures. Hundreds.

  But these are other stories, maybe for other books.

  But not this one.

  Because this one is about me and Johnny.

  And me and Tiago.

  And how the two came to clash.

  -2-

  For those of you who haven’t met me before, here’s a quick run-through.

  My name’s Catherine Ramsey. Johnny always used to call me Cat. The way he called me that sent shivers over my legs and into my privatest or privates.

  I have light blue eyes and dirty blond hair, shoulder length. My hair’s not my friend. It’s a love-hate thing.

  Looks-wise, I take after my mom, Alice Ramsey. She’s cool. No, scrap that: She’s the best damn mom in the universe.

  My best friend is Nicole Fermann, who also used to be my worst enemy growing up. Literally, worst enemy. I downright hated the bitch. And I had every right to. She was, well, a bitch.

  But she apologized (a lot), and now we’re tight. We’re super tight.

  In addition to that sex-goddess look of hers which has guys turning heads everywhere we go (long red hair, deep auburn eyes that look almost red themselves, milky skin with hot freckles on it; and boobs, boobs, lots of boob), she also has one helluva right boot. I learned that at a honky-tonk down south after some guy with a mustache up to his ears came up to me at the jukebox (yup, this place actually had one of those) and started getting frisky. Next thing I knew, dude was on the floor holding his nuts and screaming for momma. Nicole loomed over him like Superwoman after having kicked him. I thought she was actually gonna spit on the dude. But she didn’t.

  As to “The Second Leg of The Life and Times (or The Loves and Losses) of Catherine Ramsey,” I guess it really all started when mom and I got back to our suburban home in Long Island after having thrown fears to the wind and problems to the water for eight months.

  Seeing our house again...was heavy.

  It was so heavy that we ended up renting a spot in Brooklyn Heights and putting the house up for sale.

  We just couldn’t go back there anymore. I guess it was a sign that we had changed after all that traveling. We didn’t want to go back to the losses and the sadness. A lot of shit went down in that home.

  And we were done with it.

  Dad would have wanted us to move on.

  -3-

  It’s in Brooklyn that I’d meet Tiago.

  I’d more than meet him. He’d be the second boy in my life to capture my heart. He’d make the room spin, my legs drop, and the earth crack.

  He’d rock my world.

  I’m not unaware that a large part of Tiago’s initial appeal was his uncanny resemblance to Johnny. He had the same dark skin, the Latino face. He was leaner than Johnny, much leaner, but taller by about a forehead. Black-as-night hair, curls.

  Only the eyes were different. No one had eyes like Johnny. A girl could drown in Johnny’s eyes.

  And I had. Drowned. Swam. Lost for air.

  In Tiago’s eyes you wouldn’t drown.

  You’d burn.

  And I did that too.

  -4-

  We need to go back a bit, and as you approach the end, you’ll understand why. Because the future is determined by the past. And the more painful the future, the more mistakes were made in the past. What’s that saying? If I had a dime for every...

  If I had a dime for every mistake I made, I’d be the goddamn Queen of Persia.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ~ The Roadtrip ~

  -1-

  Brooklyn Heights is about as close as you can get to living in midtown Manhattan without actually living in midtown Manhattan.

  For those unfamiliar with the layout, midtown Manhattan is a synonym for “We have a gajillion dollars in the bank.”

  And Brooklyn Heights is a synonym for “We have a great view of Manhattan—without the helicopters. Or ice-cream trucks.”

  It’s the snobby part of Brooklyn.

  We didn’t have a gajillion dollars in the bank.

  We rented. Mom wanted to wait for the house to be sold before committing to a new mortgage. The place we got is only two blocks away from The Promenade, with the most stunning views available of Manhattan. You’ve probably seen it in movies. We got a place with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, family room, and an all-purpose room. Nicole would be staying with us, and the rent on a decent two bedroom wasn’t too much different from this one. Plus, with Nicole covering her share (which her careless godparents were more than happy to provide so as to have her out of the house), it worked out to about the same in cost.

  I tried to help with the rent myself, but mom wouldn’t have it. A lot had changed in our eight month roadtrip, and I had the beginnings of my own business now. Mom wanted me to invest every dime I made into that business because she believed it had a future.

  And how did I start my business at nineteen, on the road, and have it bring in money by the time the trip was finished? Well, to understand that, you need to know a little about Alice Ramsey, a.k.a. financial expert extraordinaire. She’s modest about it, but the woman is a genius.

  You also need to know a little about our roadtrip.

  And the bikers we met that would change everything.

  -2-

  Mom had stayed on a light salary with Pat’s shipping company by receiving work from him via email and doing it on the road. He’d wanted to keep her on her usual salary (which was quite a generous one), but she’d refused. “It just wouldn’t be right,” she said to me. “And if you do things that aren’t right with money, you’ll cop it sometime in the future.”

  Mom’s real new-agey.

  Dad had left us some money behind, quite a bit of money. But you’d be amazed how expensive it can be to live out of a suitcase for eight months. Besides, both of us felt that spending all of dad’s bequeathal would be disrespectful to him, even though he would have wanted us to have the time of our lives in his memory.

  She worked out the most cost-effective plan.

  You must understand, you can’t only stay on the road for eight months of the year. You just can’t. As big as the USA is, you’d run out of road, you’d run out of gas, you’d run out of money, and you’d run out of patience.

  Part of mom’s plan was not only financial, but logical. Even if our trip had only lasted the originally planned three months, we would have gotten bored, not to mention broke.

  I won’t bore you with the accounting details (or the smartphone ledgers my mom kept), but it sums up to a very few things: Home Exchange, Extended Stay Hotels, Vacation Rentals, AirBNB, the occasional RV rental. And, on the apps side (which Nicole took care of): apps such as Trail Wallet, Priceline for motels, Gas Buddy, and Urbanspoon.

  The total cost of the trip might have been similar if we’d purchased a second-hand RV, thereby saving on accommodation, but the vote was three-to-zero that none of us wanted to worry about sewage dumps each week.

  We did camp, twice. It wasn’t a hit.

  Following mom’s plan, we got to actually stay in a place for a while and get to know it.

  It was during one of these layovers that we’d meet Thunder.

  -3-

  There are certain “on the road” staples every vacation and roadtrip has. This isn’t hard to guess: I took photos—hundreds of photos. Not only that, with some of the photos I’d write a poem. Poetry’s my thing. It always has been.

 
I started putting some of these online, just on FB at first. I had few actual “friends” back home but I was sure at least Viv and Lee would like to keep up with what I was doing, and to know that I wasn’t dead after all the crap that had happened during my last year of school.

  The posts became popular. I started getting actual demands for more poetry, more photos. And not only from Viv, either. I started getting these from all sorts of people. The posts were shared and re-shared. One girl messaged me telling me she wept for an hour after one I wrote entitled “Long Gone.” I didn’t think it was that great actually. The photo that went with it was of a derelict shack in an Old West ghost town called Virginia City up in Montana which, today, is basically...Long Gone. (But the poem was a love poem.)

  People knew I’d lost my dad. And I guess word had also spread to my few friends that Johnny and I were no more. Maybe that’s why the poems had meaning to them, and the photos, because people probably knew they came from the heart.

  But Nicole said it wasn’t that. Nicole said the poems were good. “Damn good,” to use her words.

  I took photos of my mom, elegant photos that evoked both feelings of sadness and beauty. Black and whites, backlit shots, shots with the sun behind her and her head in her hands. I didn’t publish any of these. But I think it was these very photos which first struck up mom’s interest.

  We were on Montana Highway 200, dodging a storm to rival Dorothy’s, and a cracked blacktop. Mom looked like a blond Louise in the driver’s seat. She said, “You could probably make money off those things.” Mom, ever the accountant.

  I parked the thought.

  Before long, I scored a pretty awesome Nikon with a full set of lenses for less than twenty bucks off craigslist. We drove a hundred miles to pick it up (“I ain’t shippin nuthin foh twenty dollahs, miss.”) I spent hours on shots, putting them together. I Googled lighting, depth of field, framing. I got an e-book, read in the car while mom drove. I started a travel blog on Nicole’s advice. (Nicole knows all this internet stuff. I was always a little lost about it.) I landed an older generation iPad by chance in a town we stopped at. I bought some professional photo editing software for it which Nicole found. It set me back all of three bucks. I also got a laptop off eBay. Slow, but it did the job. I signed up for Shutterstock and other photo-selling sites. Nicole became my model. I took some, how shall I phrase this, evocative photos of her and they sold well. She wasn’t nude, but those are the sexiest kind, the ones where the skirt is just a little too high on the thigh and if it only went a little higher...