Chapter 11
Bran
“Congrats,” I say, then take a swallow off the beer I just poured myself.
She turns slowly and looks at me. “Thanks.”
My eyes flick toward the TV. “Is that the friend that went to your grandma’s with you…the one you played the subway stations with?”
She nods. “All she had to do was open her mouth and people would stop and listen. My guitar case was always full of bills after just a few songs.”
“Well, the producers must have thought there wasn’t much suspense in keeping the audience hanging, or they wouldn’t have pulled her first.”
“I’m telling you, she’s going to win. Everyone knows it.”
I look at her a long second, her silver eyes stirring up my insides and turning them electric. Finally, I lean across the bar. “I want to kiss you again.”
She draws a shaky breath then swallows half her drink. “I told you, I can’t.”
She turns her attention back to the TV when the intro music for the show starts. The host announces the next act, Shiloh and two other contestants singing “Renegade.”
I watch Lilah, rapt with attention, a smile twitching her full pink lips as her friend sings. But I don’t hear anything up there that can touch what Lilah does with her voice. When Shiloh’s group finishes, Lilah drops against the back of the barstool and grabs fistfuls of her platinum hair. “Oh my god!”
“You’re better,” I tell her.
She straightens up and whips around, glaring me down as if I’ve slapped her. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
I shrug. “I may not know a whole lot about music, but I know what I like.”
She throws a hand at the TV screen in frustration. “She opens her mouth and anyone who hears her shivers. She hits a note and it sinks right through you and lodges in your soul. Her voice imprints on your DNA so you can never forget it.
No one
can do what she does.”
“I disagree.” I lean on my hands, pressing closer and lowering my voice. “Because none of those things happened to me when I heard her sing, but they
all
happen every time I listen to you.”
Her lips part as her face flushes, and for several beats of my heart we just stare at each other. Finally, she shakes her gaze loose from mine. “I should go home.”
“Not without me.”
Her gaze sharpens to a point and snaps back to my face. “I’m
not
taking you home, Bran.”
I haul a deep breath and blow it out. “I meant, I’m walking with you. You know, safety in numbers and all that.”
Her eyes soften as they trail over the damage to my face. “I can’t believe he…” She lifts her hand and I want so badly for her to touch my face again, but she lowers it and grabs her drink instead. She polishes it off in one long swallow.
I lift the rum bottle. “Another?”
She shakes her head, but she’s not looking at the bottle. Her eyes are fixed on my mouth. As they trace the lines of my lips, I feel that shiver she was talking about. I feel her gaze wrap itself around the deepest part of my soul and lodge there. I feel her presence weave into my DNA and know I’m never going to forget her.
No one’s ever done anything like this to me.
Every cell in my body is rioting against my head. My every instinct is to throw her on the bar and sink my cock balls deep inside her.
But I have to slow this train down. When I fuck her, it’s going to be because she begged me to.
“Carol!” I call across the bar, where she’s now sitting in the booth with the couple.
She looks up.
“You got the bar for a few?” I ask with a nod at Lilah.
She waves a hand at the door and a smile ticks one corner of her mouth. “Take your time.”
“C’mon,” I say to Lilah, coming around the bar. “Let me walk with you.” When her look grows wary, I hold up my hands. “The next time these are on you, it will be because you put them there.”
She nods and starts toward the door.
When I determine the sidewalk is empty, I scan for the red sedan. “I don’t care if it’s day or night, I don’t want you walking around out here alone.”
She starts toward her apartment. “He was pissed at you for making him look like the fool he is.” Her gaze finds my face as I keep step next to her. “He made his point, so I doubt he’ll be back.”
“Maybe you’re right, but I’m not going to chance it,” I say, casing the block ahead as we cross the street. “Call me if you have somewhere to go and you’re alone. I’ll come for you.”
“For how long?”
I stop and pin her in my gaze. “Until I know he’s gone.”
We walk, and my eyes are everywhere: in every alcove and recess of the storefronts we pass, behind us, ahead of us. Everywhere but on her.
But I feel her.
Every time her gaze flicks over me, it sends pins and needles over my skin and causes my breath to catch. When we reach her door, she’s already got her key out. She twists it in the lock and the door whines as she pushes it open. She steps up onto the landing at the bottom of the narrow stairs and turns back to me. We’re eye to eye and I feel hers draw me to her, like magnets for my soul.
But I need more than that if I’m going to touch her again. I need her to reach for me first.
After a long, electric moment, she backs a step deeper into the gloom of the stairwell. “Good night, Bran.”
“’Night.”
I wait for her to close the door, then test the knob. I still don’t like how flimsy the door is and I make a note to order her a steel security door at the hardware store tomorrow morning. I cross over to the other side of the street and head back to the bar. And when I glance back, Lilah is standing in the second story window, watching after me.
Chapter 12
Lilah
I fall asleep in eighth period algebra. Of course, I only know I’m sleeping when the bell rings and I wake with a start. The pencil in my hand goes flying and hits the football jock who sits in front of me in the back of the neck.
He rubs the spot and turns to smirk at me. “If you wanted my attention, you didn’t need to stab me in the neck. A tap on the shoulder would have worked.”
He’s reasonably hot, longish blond waves and blue eyes a few shades darker than Destiny’s. But he knows it, which makes him exponentially less attractive in my eyes.
I gather my things and shove them into my bag, and find he’s still watching me when I’m done.
“I’m Jon,” he says, handing me back my pencil.
“Lilah.” I shove the pencil into my messenger bag, then hike it onto my shoulder and start for the door.
He bounds up next to me before I reach it. “You coming to the Homecoming game tonight?”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
I keep moving toward the front doors and my escape. I haven’t seen Bran since he walked me home Wednesday, and I was hoping that two days would get me past whatever this infatuation I have with him is. But every night as I lay in bed, instead of the memory of his kiss fading, it’s set down roots and blossomed into much more. In my dream last night it progressed to its logical end, and as he sunk his thick length inside me, I came hard. It woke me out of a sound sleep and I lay quiet for a long moment, afraid I’d woken Destiny with my cry of pleasure. If he can do that to me in my sleep, I don’t even want to know what would happen if I let him touch me again in real life.
So I can’t.
I skip down the three marble stairs to the sidewalk and find Football Jon still on my heels. “You should go to the game. There’s a dance after.”
“Don’t do dances.”
He shrugs as he lopes along beside me like a big, gangly puppy dog. “No one really dances. We just hang out…hook up or whatever.”
I look at him again, closer this time. “Are you asking me to the dance so we can ‘hook up or whatever’?”
A lopsided smile pulls at his inordinately large mouth. “What would you say if I was?”
It’s Friday. I still haven’t found an after-school job, so I need to play tonight.
“Busy, sorry.”
His eyes light up. “But if you weren’t…you would have said yes?”
I think about that. Hooking up with a guy my own age might get my mind off the ex-Marine with the soul as dark as his eyes. A soul that speaks to mine in a way no one else’s ever has.
I stop and fix Jon in my gaze. This puppy dog is clueless. He hasn’t lived through anything that’s shaken his sense of safety and challenged him to define his place in this world. He’s like a whim…a child with the emotional depth of a mud puddle.
The polar opposite of Bran.
“Yes,” I say, telling him the truth. If I didn’t have to play, I’d go to the dance, see where it led. If it led to me forgetting about Bran for a few hours, then all the better.
A grin pulls his mouth wider than should be humanly possible. “So, change your plans. Come to the dance with me.”
I start up the sidewalk again. “I can’t. I’ve got a sort of job I need to be at.”
His brow creases in confusion. “A sort of job?”
“I’m looking for a real job, but this one’s temporary until I find something else.”
“What sort of hours you looking for?” he asks.
I shrug. “My sister’s making me go to school, so it would have to be weekends or afternoons.”
He looks at me, those puppy dog eyes full of curiosity. “You wouldn’t be in school if your sister didn’t make you come?”
“No. It’s pointless.”
“Huh,” he muses, scratching his head. “Never really thought school was a choice.”
“That’s the problem. It’s not. I looked into getting my GED, but you have to be eighteen and within six months of when you’d have graduated if you stayed in school, so…” I flick my wrist up the hill toward school. “Here I am.”
He’s still scratching his head, as if his motor program got stuck. “What about your parents? They don’t care if you’re in school?”
I huff out a derisive laugh. “They’re in jail because the only thing they cared about was getting stoned.”
His eyes widen and his hand drops. “Oh.”
When I realize we’re nearly to the bottom of the hill I glance at Jon. “I haven’t seen you walk home this way before.”
He gives his head an exuberant shake. “I have football practice after school. My car’s in the lot.”
“Then what are you doing here?” I say with a wave toward town.
He grins. “Getting a date to the Homecoming dance.”
I stop and heave a sigh. “What time is the dance?”
His hand goes back to his head and scratches, and I realize he really is part puppy. “After the game, so around nine thirty.”
“Can you pick me up?” I ask, knowing if I don’t have a ride, Bran will insist on bringing me.
He gives me that same manic nod. “Where?”
“Downtown, at Sam Hill Saloon. You know where it is?”
His nod gets more exuberant and his grin pulls wider. “I’ll jump in the shower right after the game and come for you around ten?”
I lift my brows at him. “Should I feel special that you’re showering for me?”
His expression tugs into a comic grimace. “You don’t want to smell me after I come out of that uniform.”
We reach the fringe of town and I can see the end of the block where our apartment is. I guess Bran would be happy I didn’t walk home alone.
Jon’s feet slow. “I gotta get back. We’ve got a team meeting and Coach will have my ass in a sling if I’m late.”
“Ten,” I say.
He grins and nods again, and I wonder that his head doesn’t fly from his neck.
“I need you to wait for me in your car.” I want Bran to know I’m going out with someone else—maybe cool his jets a little—but I’m not quite ready for him to know it’s a high school guy. “I’ll find you when I’m done. What do you drive?”
“White mustang. I’ll be out front.”
“Good luck at the game.” I turn and head home without looking back.
♫
I’m at the bar by seven and spend the next three hours trying to ignore that Bran’s gaze is burning me alive. When he lifts the rum bottle on my second and third refills, I nod. I’ve never done a high school dance and I’m really dreading it. But I need this…a distraction. A little before ten, I go to the bathroom to straighten myself up, then head back and start packing.
Bran comes around the bar. “It’s early. Where are you going?”
“I’ve got a date,” I answer without looking at him.
“A date.” It rolls out of his mouth and thuds heavily onto the bar between us.
I tip my head at him. “Is that a problem?”
He takes a deep breath and holds it, as if to steady his temper, before blowing it out. “You can date whoever you goddamn please.” He leans closer and his voice purrs in my ear. “But when you’re done with your playthings, you
will
come looking for me.”
I laugh and try to keep the shake out of it. “The size of your ego is staggering.”
I down the last of my rum and Coke, grab my tips from the jar, and head to the door. Parked at the curb is a shiny new white Mustang with the headlights on. I duck down as the window rolls down.
“Hey, beautiful,” Jon says, pushing my door open.
I slide my guitar into his backseat and climb in, and as we pull away from the curb, I look back and find Bran watching from the door.
“How was the game?” I ask, hoping he didn’t see my shudder.
“Won easy.”
I roll up my window. “Great.”
He smells good, like soap and some decent cologne. He’s in a hoodie and jeans, and he really is pretty good-looking. The rum has loosened me up some and I decide this is going to be okay. Maybe even fun.
When we unload in the parking lot, he ushers me toward the gym. “You okay hanging with my friends?” He gives an exaggerated eyebrow wiggle. “Or were you wanting me to yourself this evening?”
Oh, god. I hadn’t thought about friends, but if the alternative is leaving him with the impression I want to be alone with him, they’re the lesser of two evils. “We can hang out with your friends.”
We slip through the door into the gloom of the gym and he pulls me over to the corner near the locker rooms.
“Tyler and Cameron,” he says, pointing to a pair of guys hovering there in the shadows. “They’re on the team too.”
I follow half a step behind as he heads their direction. “Guys, this is Lilah. Lilah, the guys.”
The larger of the two, with deep set eyes and what appears to be a perpetual frown, nudges his chin at me. I look from him to Puppy Dog Jon and wonder how they’re even friends. The other one, a wiry guy with a bad haircut, reaches into his sock and pulls out a flask, offering it to me. “Tyler.”
Jon takes my hand and pulls me behind them to the corner. I take the flask and smell. Whatever it is smells nasty. I take a quick sip and hand it back, trying not to make a face. Each of the guys take a long swig.
“Here you guys are!” a girl’s voice squeals over the music. I turn and find two girls coming toward us from the dance floor, sweaty, out of breath, and holding hands.
The rounder of the two, with short dark hair and huge boobs, takes the flask from Jon’s hand and chugs, then hands it to the pretty Asian girl she’s with. She’s a little shyer about it, only taking a small sip.
Tyler grabs her long black hair and tips the end of the flask higher. “C’mon, Amy. Live a little.”
A dribble spills down her chin and Tyler licks it off then kisses her. He backs her into the shadows at the side of the bleachers and pins her against the wall. Her fingers weave into his hair and they don’t look like they’re planning to come up for air for a while.
Jon’s arm slips around my waist. “So, that’s Amy, Tyler’s girlfriend, and this is Melissa. She’s with Cameron.”
Cameron already has his hand possessively on her ass. “Hey,” she says with a wave.
“This is Lilah. She’s new.” He tugs me closer and shoves Cameron’s shoulder. “I scooped her up before any you assholes could fuck with her.”
“A regular fucking Clark Kent,” Cameron mutters. He goes over and grabs the flask from Tyler’s hand. Once his hand is free, Tyler instantly starts groping the front of Amy’s shirt. Cameron hands the flask to Melissa. “Wanna get out of here?”
She takes another drink and nods.
“What about you guys?” he asks Jon.
Jon looks at me. “Want to go party?”
I shrug. “Sure.”
Cameron shoves Tyler. “Come on, asshole. We’re heading up to Lover’s Leap.”
We all file out of the gym and are warned by the Leadership kids manning the door that there’s no re-entry.
Jon knuckle bumps one of them, a cute blond girl. “See you at home, sis.”
I glance over my shoulder at her as we pass and see the family resemblance. “What year is she?”
“Senior,” he answers with a squeeze of my waist.
“What about you?”
He looks at me. “Sophomore, same as you…right?”
I shake my head. “Junior.”
His eyes widen. “Thought everyone in algebra two was a sophomore.”
“I missed some school, so I’m a little behind on math.”
His mouth pulls into that exaggerated grin. “You just got so much hotter.”
I roll my eyes and let him load me back in his car. We follow two other cars up a long winding road into the mountains. There’s barely a moon tonight, so it’s pitch black when we get to a clearing and everyone cuts their lights. We pile out of our cars and Jon leads me to a path that winds out to a rocky outcropping. Everyone finds a seat and Jon settles against my side.
Tyler’s flask has been replaced by a full bottle of Johnnie Walker, and everyone takes their turn. When it comes to me, I take a swallow and it burns all the way down.
The guys shoot the shit about the game and their girls talk about some other girls that I don’t know. I tip my head back and stare up at the ocean of stars overhead. I’m just getting dizzy when I feel warm wet lips on my neck. I lift my head and realize the chatter has stopped. Tyler and Amy aren’t anywhere to be seen, but Cameron has Melissa flat on her back with his hand down the front of her shorts.
I look at Jon and he raises his eyebrows at me. “If you want to.”
I shrug. “Sure, why not.”
He closes the few inches between us and his mouth finds mine. His kiss is wet and sloppy, his tongue lapping at mine like a Labrador Retriever. So, now at least I know what breed he is.
We kiss for a while, and his hands never leave my waist. I close my eyes and wait for something to happen—a buzz in my chest or an ache or tingle or
anything
. All I feel is a wet tongue in my mouth that’s not mine.