Fallin’ for You
a novel by
Anna Pope
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by Tijana Popov Trnovac
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Prologue
4 YEARS AGO...
The first thing Aria’s hazy mind registered was that she could barely move.
Her head was pounding, her left eye was completely swollen, and she was bleeding profusely from the wound in her abdomen if the warm liquid running over her hands was anything to go by.
She slowly managed to turn her head to the side in spite of an excruciating pain zipping through her neck and making her vision go white for a few seconds.
After everything came back into focus once again, the sight that greeted her made her remember the reason behind her current state.
“Please don't do this, David! Please, I’m begging you!” Aria moaned; her voice coming out hoarse and broken, so much so that she was left wondering if someone else had spoken on her behalf.
She saw him standing above her crying friend with the gun pointed straight to her head, the satisfaction of holding someone else's life in his hands, swirling in those dead, cold eyes.
Aria could still remember the time when she had foolishly thought that those were the most beautiful eyes that she had ever seen and now, after everything that had happened, she finally realized just how wrong she had been.
She felt helpless, as she lay there broken on the cold kitchen floor, unable to do anything to help her friend, as the horrifying guilt kept crashing over her in waves.
She knew the risk that they would be taking and she had chosen to ignore it, endangering her friend’s life in the process without so much as a second thought, too wrapped up in her own desires.
She knew that she shouldn't have brought anyone in her mess and had chosen to ignore it; and now because of Aria, Jamie was going to die.
There was a moment of complete silence only broken by Aria’s harsh breaths and soft pleads before she heard the sound of a gunshot, and then another and another...
“No!” she started to scream at the top of her lungs, as tears spilled out of her eyes before she saw Jamie falling to the ground; her friend’s pretty hazel eyes losing their light barely a few feet away from her.
Green eyes
She was running again, white puffs of air escaping her wheezing lungs as she jumped over a small bush, barely managing not to fall on her face in the process.
It was nighttime and the air was freezing cold, making Aria tremble in the flimsy clothes that did nothing to shelter her from the howling wind.
Cold rain droplets kept splashing across her face and combined with the pitch darkness of the forest, made it almost impossible to see where she was heading.
Her lungs felt like there were a thousand small needles puncturing them repeatedly, as she desperately tried to breathe through the pain; the wound in her stomach pulsing out more blood with each breath that she took.
All that kept going through her mind at that moment as she ran faster than she ever had before was the need to keep going and get away as fast as she could; from that house, and most importantly from Him.
And then, she was falling, her nose connecting harshly with a tree root sticking out of the forest dirt making her eyes water at the pain of it, as big hands wrapped around her ankles and started pulling her back to where she had come from.
Aria wanted to scream and beg for them to let her go, let her get away, but no sound left her mouth as the darkness swallowed her whole.
~
Aria woke up with a start, breathing harshly as if she had just finished running a marathon.
She sat up and leaned against the pillows, dragging a shaking hand across her sweat-covered face.
Another nightmare, she thought and closed her eyes with a tired sigh, disappointment prickling under her skin, feeling pretty foolish for hoping that the dreams had finally stopped since she hadn’t had one in the past couple of days.
For just a moment Aria considered calling Nura to ask her for her therapist’s phone number that the girl had offered her numerous times, but she quickly changed her mind like she always did.
The truth was that most of the time Aria couldn’t even think about the past without getting a panic attack, let alone talk to a stranger about it.
She quickly got out of the bed and went to the bathroom across the hall intent on getting a shower. After getting out of her soaked up shirt and the sweats that had seen better days, she stepped under the lukewarm water while she tried to calm her still rapidly beating heart.
She could feel the beginnings of a panic attack at the edges of her mind, so she started counting back from a hundred while breathing in and out slowly; one of the quickest ways to stop thinking about the agony of her dreams.
It didn’t matter how many times Aria had that same nightmare; the effects of it were always exhausting, leaving her a sniveling mess in the aftermath.
She quickly scrubbed her body with soap, trying and failing to ignore the marks carved into the pale skin that reminded her of the past that she was so
