When You Come Back to Me
©2020 Emma Scott Books, LLC
Cover Art: Lori Jackson Designs
Cover Photographer: Cory Stierley
Cover Model: Dylan Brooks
Photograph Licensed by: The Cover Lab, LLC
Proofing and Formatting by: R. Anderson
No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, events or incidents, businesses or places (such as Santa Cruz Central High School, Soquel Saints, Campbell Coyotes, Gold Line Records) are fictitious or have been used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
Books by Emma Scott
Playlist
Content Warning
Dedication
Prologue
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part II
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part III
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part IV
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Part V
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Sneak Peek
About the Author
Books by Emma Scott
(All books but the Beautiful Hearts Duet are available for FREE through Kindle Unlimited)
Duets
Full Tilt
All In
Bring Down the Stars (Beautiful Hearts #1)
Long Live the Beautiful Hearts (Beautiful Hearts #2)
Series
How to Save a Life (Dreamcatcher #1)
Sugar & Gold (Dreamcatcher #2)
The Girl in the Love Song (Lost Boys #1)
When You Come Back to Me (Lost Boys #2)
The Last Piece of His Heart (Lost Boys #3) coming soon
RUSH (RUSH #1)
Endless Possibility (RUSH #1.5)
Standalones
Love Beyond Words
Unbreakable
The Butterfly Project
Forever Right Now
In Harmony
A Five-Minute Life
Someday, Someday
MM Romance
Someday, Someday
When You Come Back to Me (Lost Boys #2)
Novellas
One Good Man
Love Game
Playlist
Walkabout // Augustines (opening credits)
Señorita // Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello
Night Running // Cage the Elephant (feat. Beck)
When Doves Cry // Prince
Fix You // Coldplay
I Will Possess Your Heart // Death Cab for Cutie
Fine Line // Harry Styles
Wish You Were Here // Pink Floyd
Not Over You // Gavin DeGraw
Superposition // Young the Giant (closing credits)
Content Warning
Please note that this book contains content that may be triggering for some sensitive readers such as the death of a family member, depression, mental health struggles, repercussions of conversion therapy, and sexual exploitation (off the page). It is my sincerest hope I have treated these issues with the care they deserve. Intended for readers 18 and up.
Dedication
For Bill, with all my love. Thank you for being the calm to my storm.
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Prologue
Sanitarium du lac Léman
Geneva, Switzerland
“Can I tell you a secret?”
The lump in the twin bed on the other side of the room answered with a petulant sniff.
I tried again. “I’m not kidding, Milo. It’s a very important, life-changing secret. Trust me.”
My roommate hunched deeper in his blanket. “Leave me alone.”
Milo resembled a snow-covered mound in our whitewashed room. White sheets, white walls, white linoleum floor. Like the inside of an igloo. If I dwelled too long on all that white, I’d start to shiver under my own thin blanket.
Not because I was cold. Switzerland in August was quite pleasant, actually. But my parents had sent me to a brutal conversion therapy camp in Alaska for six months, which necessitated this vacation at the Sanitarium du lac Léman. A year later, and my brain was still turning my waking hours into a remembered nightmare.
My room’s walls and ceiling would morph into the vast white plains of Alaska. The green forests surrounding the sanitarium grounds awoke memories of endless night marches through bitter cold. The indoor pool’s warm water became the icy depths of Copper Lake where I’d been plunged, naked and freezing…
I don’t swim in pools anymore.
Dr. Lange would say I was projecting my past trauma onto the sanitarium, that was actually warm and inviting. But PTSD doesn’t give a rat’s frilly pink ass what a thing was supposed to be. Its computations are mindless. White = snow = Alaska = torture.
And warm and inviting wasn’t how I’d describe the room I shared with Milo anyway. Sanitarium du lac Léman was a mental hospital trying to disguise itself as a bed and breakfast. The moonlight filtered through the barred windows over our meager furniture: twin beds, one bookshelf—filled mostly with my journals, and a few of Milo’s drawings on the wall (hung with tape, not pins or nails).
I give an A for effort, but bars on the windows were less cozy hotel and more prison chic. And prisons were high on my list of things onto which I projected my trauma. I’d let myself be trapped twice—first Alaska and now here.
Never again.
Milo sniffed under his blanket, upset that I was getting out in the morning. I couldn’t fathom why. If I were gone, I wouldn’t miss me. But he was a sweet kid. I hated that he felt bad. I leaned over in my bed to try again.
“Milo, hey.”
“Don’t talk to me.”
“My secret is kind of a big one,” I said. “Like, huge. You’re not going to want to miss out.”
“I said, leave me alone.”
The pain in his voice—child-like and tear-choked—pierced the
