The Possibility of Us

Table of Contents

Dedication

The Ballad of Love and Hate

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

About the Author

Other books by Lisa Burstein

Pretty Amy

The Next Forever

Dear Cassie

Sneaking Candy

Find out where Ben & Cassie’s love story began in

Lisa Burstein’s DEAR CASSIE

Read on for a sneak peek!

Dear Cassie - Chapter One

One weekend together could change everything…

When her friend called to tell her about the funeral, Cassie wanted to say no. She had enough to handle with her own hollow existence. But she knew she should pay her respects to her old camp counselor…as long as her ex, Ben, wouldn’t be there.

Except Ben is there. Still gorgeous, still angry, and still able to penetrate her defenses with one intense stare. All the reasons they left each other in a flurry of heartache start to fall away over one long, snowy weekend.

But tough Cassie can’t truly open up to Ben when she knows confessing her secrets will leave her raw, defenseless. And the possibility of forever might not be enough to gamble on all the impossibilities of now.

The Possibility

of Us

Lisa Burstein

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

Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Burstein. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

2614 South Timberline Road

Suite 109

Fort Collins, CO 80525

Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

Embrace is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

Edited by Stacy Abrams

Cover design by Brittany Marczak

978-1-62266-721-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition July 2014

To my amazing readers, you make this happen.

Love writes a letter and sends it to Hate:

‘My vacation’s ending, I’m coming home late

The weather was fine and the ocean was great

And I can’t wait to see you again’

Hate reads the letter and throws it away

‘No one here cares if you go or you stay

I barely even noticed that you were away

I’ll see you or I won’t, whatever.’

Love has been waiting, patient and kind.

Just wanting a phone call or some kind of sign,

That the one that she cares for,

who’s out of his mind,

Will make it back safe to her arms

The Ballad of Love and Hate

The Avett Brothers

Chapter One

Cassie

Ben better not be there, I said, wiping away the condensation that had built up on the window of Laura’s black Range Rover. The snowbanks whizzing past us on the side of the road were so white and flawless from the storm the night before, it made me shiver. I also could have been shivering because it was the first time I had been out of my brother’s apartment in months, other than working in the kitchen at the Veteran’s Association Medical Center downtown.

What am I, your ex-boyfriend’s keeper? Laura asked. She seemed more confident than she had been when we met at Turning Pines Wilderness Camp for Troubled Teens this past summer—calmer, less afraid—but that could have been because she was driving a car bigger than a damn elephant rumbling down the highway like a tank.

No, I said, preparing for one of my patented snarky comebacks, you’re a fucking— But I stopped. What happened with Ben hadn’t been Laura’s fault.

You’re ‘a fucking ex-boyfriend keeper,’ she pressed.

I felt my skin turn as white as the snow. It hadn’t been her fault, but that didn’t mean she needed to be a dick about it.

She turned to look at me, her mouth tight. It was obvious she wished she were mute again as soon as she saw my face.

Voluntary silence had been her issue at Turning Pines, but it was clear she had gotten over it. At least when she wasn’t saying something that made it look like her tongue wanted to fly out of her mouth so she could slap her words back in there.

But I knew being mute was what she used to cover up her real issue—diagnosed as kleptomania. Of course, her psychologist parents had attributed her silence to that, as well. They had told her she was stealing her words.

I’d been sent to Turning Pines as part of my probation for a drug arrest, for drugs that weren’t even mine. Of course, I did steal them. Maybe I was more like Laura than I even knew.

My real issue had been something only she and my brother knew about. A word I couldn’t even utter until after I’d spent thirty days at Turning Pines. I guess I’d covered it up with swearing and anger. My new issue had started once I met Ben.

Clearly, I was covering that up in much the same way.

Sorry, Laura said, staring straight ahead. Her sun-lightened blond hair was up in a bun. The severe bangs she’d had at camp had grown out, and her hair was slicked back as tight as a ballerina’s, her green fleece zipped up like a turtleneck.

Before, when Laura had been mute, when she communicated only with looks and a notepad, she had reminded me of a turtle.

Now she reminded me of a bitchy turtle.

I never should have let her convince me to come.

Two days ago, Laura had inserted herself back into the life I’d managed to carve out after Turning Pines, after Ben: subletting my brother’s apartment, working at the VA for the people who were lucky enough—or unlucky enough, depending on your perspective—not to be deployed again like he was.

As usual, I’d woken up and clicked into Facebook on my phone, ready to do my daily Internet-stalking of the people I’d spent thirty days with at good old TP—seriously, TP. It wasn’t until I’d left Turning Pines that I realized what the first two letters had been an abbreviation for. Hindsight really was fucking twenty-twenty.

It was the end of January. A whole new cold year had started. It had been six fucking months since then, and I wasn’t legally a minor anymore, but I guess I still felt like one, still frozen as the girl I was at seventeen.

As an adult now, I should have known who I was, who I wanted to become. But since leaving Turning Pines, I had lost Ben, turned eighteen, and was filling up my brother’s empty bed while he was fighting in Afghanistan.

Even with my job, it wasn’t much to Facebook-brag about.

I’d clicked into my news feed and started scrolling. Not like I could count on anyone saying on Facebook how they were really doing, but I wanted to make sure no one was doing better than I was. Pretty messed up, considering everyone I went to camp with was majorly fucked up and deserved to do better.

Well, except for Ben. He wasn’t fucked up at all. He’d been sent to Turning Pines because he was taking the fall for something his older brother had done, which might have made him codependent, but Laura was the one with the psychologist parents, not me.

The thing was even I deserved to do better. The life I’d carved out for myself was definitely not everything I wanted my life to be. Not yet.

That was what Turning Pines was supposed to have taught us: how to live without our vices, our demons, our unhealthy ways of coping with the shit of life, whatever they were. Some were easier to leave behind, like Laura’s. Some were harder to leave behind, like mine.

A chat box had come up from Troyer, Laura, once she noticed me online. I still thought of her by her last name sometimes. Still thought of everyone from Turning Pines that way, because, like the military-grade place it was supposed to be, it was how we had referred to each other.

Except, of course, Ben and me.

Go look at Rawe’s page, her message read.

Rawe, Fanny had been my counselor—the woman who’d made my life hell for thirty days, and then made me understand my life didn’t have to be hell anymore. I didn’t check her page much because she was always posting things about God. Not that I had anything against God, but it definitely felt like he had something against me.

Don’t want to, I wrote back.

Do it, Cassie, Laura wrote.

Surprisingly, I listened to her. I actually cared what she thought about me, even though I could give two shits about everyone else.

I clicked over to my friends and searched for Fanny Rawe—her real name and, honestly, probably the reason she worked at a place that used last names only.

But Rawe’s page wasn’t hers anymore. It was a tribute page, because she had died.

DIED.

She had been killed in a car accident that week, noted in a post on her wall from a youngish-looking woman with the last name Rawe, too. Probably her sister.

I couldn’t even imagine having to post something like that on my brother’s Facebook wall—to turn his account into a tribute page. It was something I worried about every minute since he’d been deployed again, but I also knew if he were safe here with me, he would have forced me out of his apartment by now.

I read on. The page also included the date and time of her funeral and a place to send donations and flowers. I started at the beginning and read the whole post again. Not because I didn’t believe it, but because I couldn’t believe it. My stomach was empty, hollow, as cold as the wind whipping through the snowbanks outside the windows of my brother’s shitty apartment. Rawe and I had our issues, but I never would have wished her dead.

DEAD.

I guess, unlike me, some people had gone on living the lives they wanted after Turning Pines. Living enough to die.

You going? Laura wrote.

Where? I replied like the total smart-ass I was. At least with Laura I could act like a smart-ass, even if I couldn’t usually get away with it.

Funny, she wrote. Actually, not funny at all.

I hadn’t checked anyone else’s pages yet, but my guess was no one from Turning Pines was doing worse that day than Rawe.

Why would I go? I typed.

Why wouldn’t you?

There were a lot of reasons. Even though I shuffled through that part of my life constantly while I lay in my brother’s bed at night trying to sleep, it wasn’t like I wanted to be around all those people again—especially one person.

I’ll pick you up. And don’t even tell me you’re busy, she wrote. You can DVR Jerry Springer for two days.

I sighed. Fucking Troyer.

I’d tried to deny how much I missed Ben, missed everyone from Turning Pines, but Laura could tell. She was no dummy. It was part of the reason I loved her so much.

Ben wasn’t ever my boyfriend, I said now, turning to look at Laura in the driver’s seat. I stared at the edges of her profile, her chin and nose as pointy as candy corn.

That was a lie. He had been, but now Ben was the guy whose heart I broke and who had broken mine.

Who had broken me.

Unfortunately, I’d learned the hard way that people who are broken can’t do anything but keep breaking when it comes to their hearts.

I guess he had, too.

Really? she asked, squinting from the reflection off the snow. What was he, then?

A fucking illusion.

She sighed and shook her head. You’re so dramatic.

I knew it sounded that way, but that was how everything seemed when it came to Ben and me.