by Easton, BB
“Let’s go!”
“Okay, okay,” I grumble, standing up and turning around so that he can drop that fifty-pound behemoth on my shoulders. “But, if there’s a redneck with a machine gun at the door, we’re coming up with a plan B.”
Wes laughs and spins me around to face him, gripping me by the shoulders so the pack doesn’t take me down. The way he’s looking at me right now, the way his strong hands feel on my body, the way his hopeful smile causes an entire swarm of butterflies to take flight in my belly, I’d probably face down five tattooed rednecks with machine guns if that was what it took to keep him happy. But I don’t tell him that.
A girl has to play a little hard to get.
Wes
I have to cut through the Burger Palace parking lot on my way to the highway. The line of people waiting to get in wraps around the building at least twice, but it’s hard to tell through all the fistfights. His royal highness, King Burger, is smiling down at the yelling, kicking, screaming, chest-shoving, hair-pulling mob from his throne up on the digital Burger Palace sign. I’ve always hated that motherfucker, even as a kid. I remember the way his glowing face would laugh at me as I dug through his dumpsters.
Rich prick.
I swerve to avoid hitting a naked toddler in the middle of the parking lot.
As I slow down to turn onto the highway, I notice that one of the floor-to-ceiling windows on the front of the library across the street has been broken out. A techno beat so loud I can hear it over my engine is pouring out of the place, and inside, colored lights are swirling around like it’s a rave. I imagine a bunch of teenage kids inside, guzzling cough syrup and passing out STDs like party favors, but as I pull onto the highway, a topless grandma comes stumbling out, holding what I swear to God looks like a—
“Dildo!” Rain screams, pointing directly at the old lady as we pass by.
I laugh and shake my head. “Guess the Franklin Springs orgy is BYOD.”
I don’t think I said it loud enough for Rain to hear me through my helmet, but she cackles and smacks me on my good shoulder.
“BYOD!” she squeals. “Oh my God, that thing was, like, a foot long!”
I twist the throttle and take off, causing her arms to snap back around my body and her fingertips to dig into my sides. It’s fucking stupid, but I don’t like Rain paying attention to somebody else’s cock. Even if that cock is made of rubber and belongs to Abraham Lincoln’s widow.
It’s getting harder and harder to navigate the highway, not just because of the abandoned and wrecked vehicles every ten feet, but because—thanks to the overflowing dumpsters and trash cans all over town—the road is now covered in garbage, too. I really have to slow down and concentrate to avoid hitting something, but that doesn’t stop me from glancing up when we pass Rain’s house.
It looks exactly the way it did last night, except now there’s a baseball-sized hole in the middle of the glass window on the front door.
Crazy bitch. I smirk.
As we drive past, I wonder what the hell went on in there last night. Rain seemed so upset when she came back from getting all those supplies, but while I was sleeping, she turned around and went right back in. Maybe she waited until her dad passed out. Or maybe her mom really did come home. Or maybe she just—
Bam!
A bump under the tires pulls my attention back to the road, and suddenly, it feels like I’m trying to drive through quicksand. The bike is dragging ass, and I have to grip the handlebars harder to keep the damn thing tracking straight.
“Shit!”
I pull off to the side of the road and want to punch myself in the face. This is exactly what I knew would happen. I let myself get distracted for one fucking second, and now, I have a flat tire. I don’t even know what I ran over; that’s how checked out I was.
I prop the bike up on the kickstand, yank my helmet off, and turn around, prepared to tell Rain to go the fuck home. I want to scream it at her actually. I want to jam my finger into her perfect little face and make her cry off all that fucking makeup. Maybe then she’ll stop following me around like a lost puppy, and I’ll finally be able to focus again.
But when I stand up, Rain loses her grip on my torso. Her eyes go wide, and her arms flail in huge circles as she falls off the back of the bike, landing on her giant backpack like an upside-down turtle.
“What the fuck, Wes?” she cries, rolling from side to side in a pathetic attempt to get up.
A laugh from the bowels of my tarnished black soul bursts out of me as I watch her struggling on the ground. She cuts me an eat shit look that only lasts a second before she starts laughing, too. When she accidentally snorts like a pig, her hoodie-covered hands fly to her mouth in mortification.
“Just take the pack off!” I cry through my laughter, watching her alternate between struggling to get up and succumbing to her own giggle fit.
Rain pulls her arms out of the straps as I reach down and lift her shuddering body off the ground. The moment she’s upright, she falls into my chest, snorting and hiccupping and burying her beet-red face in my freshly washed shirt.
And, just like in the nightmare, her touch is all it takes for me to lose complete control—of the situation, of my willpower, of my own body. Instead of giving her a swat on the ass and sending her home like I know I should, I watch like a prisoner in my own mind as my arms wrap around her tiny shoulders and pull her in closer.
No! What the fuck are you doing, pussy? Cut her loose!
I scream at myself, call myself every name in the book, but the voice in my head is drowned out by the euphoric rush I get from holding this girl. She coils my shirt in both fists. Burrows her face into my neck. Her breath comes in short, hot bursts as she giggles against my skin. Her nose is cold. And all I can do is watch in humiliation as the meat puppet I live inside of tips its face down and smells her fucking hair.
Oh my God, you’re pathetic.
Sugar cookies. She laughs like a farm animal. She looks like a discarded porcelain doll that raided a teenage boy’s closet. And she smells like fucking sugar cookies.
Let her go, dipshit! Supplies! Shelter! Self-defense! That’s what you need!
But the warning falls on deaf ears because now my stupid fucking cock has gone rogue, too. Why not? Nothing else is listening to me. It springs to life and rams itself into my zipper, seeking Rain’s attention as well. I take a small step back, just enough to keep from shoving my hard-on into her belly like a full-fledged creep, but she responds to my step back with one of her own.
And that’s it.
The moment is over.
The laughter is gone.
We drop our arms, and we begin walking.
I carry the backpack and push my bike—the front tire almost completely flat—as Rain falls in step beside me. I’m still hard, and I probably will be forever, thanks to the way she’s blushing and twirling her hair in her fingers. I decide to concentrate on watching the road for debris—what I should have been doing in the first place.
“So … how much farther until we get to the hardware store?” I ask, staring at the pavement in front of me.
“Uh …” Rain looks off in the distance like she can see it.
This part of the highway is nothing but old farmhouses, like hers, with a few untended fields and a shit-ton of trees in between them. No one is growing anything. No one even has horses on their land. Just a bunch of junk cars and a few rusty old sheds.
“Maybe, like, fifteen, twenty minutes? It’s on the other side of this hill, down past the skating rink.”
I chuckle and shake my head.
“What?”
“You just sounded so country.”
Rain scoffs. “If you think I sound country, then you haven’t heard—”
“No, it’s not your accent,” I cut her off. “It’s just the way everybody down here tells you the distance in minutes instead of miles and uses landmarks instead of street names.”
“Oh my God.” Rain’s mouth f
alls open. “We do do that!”
I smile even though my bullet wound is starting to scream from pushing my bike up this never-ending hill.
She tilts her head to one side, watching me. “You said everybody down here. Where were you before you came back? Somewhere up north?”
“You could say that.” I smirk, giving her a half-second of eye contact before resuming my death glare at the littered pavement. “I lived in South Carolina for a while, but before that, I was in Rome.”
“Oh, I think I’ve been to Rome. That’s close to Alabama, right?”
I snort. “Not Rome, Georgia. Rome, Italy.”
“No way!”
Rain reaches over and smacks me on the arm, narrowly missing my bullet wound. I wince and suck in a breath, but she doesn’t even notice.
“Oh my God, that’s amazing, Wes! What were you doing in Italy?”
“Being a colossal piece of Eurotrash mostly.”
Rain leans forward, devouring my words one by one like kernels of popcorn. So, I just keep spewing them.
“After I left Franklin Springs, I never stayed anywhere longer than a year—a few months usually—and then I’d get bounced to the next piece-of-shit house in the next piece-of-shit town. As soon as I aged out of the system, I knew I wanted to get as far away from here as fucking possible. I was sick of small towns. Sick of school. Sick of having no fucking control over where I went or how long I stayed. So, on my eighteenth birthday, I checked all the airline sales, found a last-minute deal to Rome, and the next morning, I woke up in Europe.”
“The system?” Rain’s dark eyebrows bunch together. “Like foster care?”
“Uh, yeah. Anyway”—I kick myself for letting that slip. It’s not that I’m embarrassed about it. I just don’t particularly want to talk about the worst nine years of my life right now. Or ever—“Rome is fucking incredible. It’s ancient and modern, busy and lazy, beautiful and tragic, all at the same time. I had no idea what I was gonna do once I got there, but as soon as I stepped off the plane, I knew I was gonna be all right.”
“How?” Rain is so engrossed in my story that she steps on a muffler lying in the street and almost busts her ass.
I try not to laugh. “Almost everybody was speaking English. There were signs in English, menus in English, the street musicians were even playing pop songs in English. So … I cashed in my dollars for euros, bought a spare guitar off one of the street performers, and spent the next few years strumming classic rock songs in front of the Pantheon for tips.”
I glance over, and Rain is staring at me like I’m the fucking Pantheon. Eyes huge, lips parted. I have to reach out and pull her toward the bike so that she doesn’t hit her head on the tire of the flipped Honda minivan we’re walking next to.
“Did you have to sleep on the street?” she asks, unblinking.
“Nah, I always found somebody to crash with.”
That makes her blink. “Somebody, huh? You mean, some girl.” When I don’t correct her, she rolls her eyes so hard, I half-expect them to fall out of their sockets. “Did you point guns at their heads and make them pay for your groceries, too?”
I raise an eyebrow at her and smirk. “Only the ones who talked back.”
Rain scrunches up her nose like she wants to stick her tongue out at me. “So, why’d you leave if you had it so good with your classic rock and your Italian women?” she sasses.
My smile fades. “It was after the nightmares started. Hey, watch out.”
I point to a shard of glass sticking up at a weird angle in Rain’s path. She glances at it just long enough to avoid it and then returns her rapt attention to me.
“Tourism totally dried up. I couldn’t make shit playing on the street anymore, and I couldn’t get a real job without a visa. I didn’t really have a choice, as usual. My roommate was an American whose parents offered to pay for our plane tickets back to the States, so … that’s how I ended up in South Carolina.”
“Did you love her?”
Rain’s question catches me completely by surprise.
“Who?”
“Your ‘roommate.’” Her big eyes narrow to slits as she makes sarcastic finger quotes around the word roommate.
I hate how much I like it.
“No,” I say honestly. “Did you love him?”
“Who?”
I drop my eyes to the yellow letters emblazoned across her perky tits. “The guy you stole that hoodie from.”
Rain’s eyes drop to her sweatshirt, and she stops dead in her tracks.
I guess that’s a yes.
Crossing her arms over the band logo, Rain lifts her head and stares at something off in the distance behind me. It reminds me of the way she looked when she was watching that family at the park yesterday.
Right before she flipped the fuck out.
Shit.
“Hey … look. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …”
“That’s his house.”
Huh?
I follow the direction of her gaze until I’m turned around, staring at a yellow farmhouse with white trim, set back about a hundred feet from the road. It’s nicer than her parents’ place, bigger, too, but the yard is just as overgrown.
“The boy next door, huh?” I try to keep the malice out of my voice, but knowing that the piece of shit who upset Rain is somewhere inside that house makes me see red.
When Rain doesn’t answer, I turn around and find her standing with her back to me. I stomp my kickstand down, prepared to chase her ass if she decides to bolt again, but the rattle of pills against plastic tells me that Rain isn’t going anywhere.
She’s found a different form of escape.
Rain pops a painkiller into her mouth and shoves the bottle back inside her bra. The whole time, I can practically hear the blood rushing to my extremities.
Whoever this kid is, he’s gonna die.
“Rain, I need you to give me one good reason why I shouldn’t storm up those steps, drag this punk out by the throat, and force him to eat his own fingers after I cut them off with my pocketknife.”
Rain lets out a sad laugh and turns to face me again. “Because he’s gone.”
I blow out a breath. Thank fuck.
“He left with his family a few weeks ago. They wanted to spend April 23 in Tennessee, where his parents are from,” Rain scoffs and rolls her eyes.
April 23. That’s what people call it when they don’t want to say the apocalypse. Like it’s a fucking holiday or something.
Rain looks back at me with a mixture of heartbreak and hate in her narrowed eyes, and fuck, do I know that feeling. The hate makes the heartbreak easier to take. Or, at least, it did for me.
Now, I don’t feel it at all.
Reaching across my bike, I wrap an arm around her shoulders and pull her toward me. Rain leans across the pleather seat to hug me back, and both my heart and cock swell in response. All I want to do is kiss the shit out of her until she forgets that this idiot farm boy ever existed, but I don’t. Not because she’s too vulnerable. But because I don’t trust myself to stop.
“Hey. Look at me,” I say, trying my hardest not to smell her fucking hair again.
Two big blue irises peek up at me from under two black-smudged eyelids, and the need I see in them makes my soul ache.
“Take it from somebody who’s a professional at getting left …” I force a grin. “All you gotta do is say fuck ’em and move on.”
“I don’t know how.” Rain’s eyes are pleading, begging for something to take the pain away.
I recognize the look, but I don’t even remember what it feels like anymore.
Because I’m the one who does the leaving now.
Pain doesn’t even know my forwarding address.
“It’s easy.” I smirk. “First, you say, fuck. Then, you say, ’em.”
Rain smiles, and my eyes drop to her lips. They’re dry and swollen from almost crying, and when they whisper the words, “Fuck ’em,” I swear, I almost come in my pants.
“Good girl,” I whisper back, unable to look away from her mouth. “Now, let’s go light his house on fire.”
“Wes!” Rain squeals, smacking me on the chest with a tiny smile. “We’re not lighting his house on fire.”
She turns and starts walking toward the hardware store again, and I let her lead the way. Not because I don’t want to torch that little shit’s house. I do.
But because there is a dead woman staring at me from behind the wheel of that overturned minivan.
Rain
By the time we get to Buck’s Hardware, I feel amazing. The sun is shining, my pills have kicked in, Wes is being nice to me again, and I cannot wait to climb that sign and paint a much-needed F over that B.
God, I can’t believe I told him about Carter.
What did you expect? You took him right past the guy’s house.
I’m such an idiot.
Note to self: take the trail from now on.
I nod to myself as I follow Wes across the parking lot. He’s all serious again, slowing down and reaching for his gun as we approach the busted front door. God, it must be exhausting, trying to survive the apocalypse.
I’m just trying to stay high enough to keep from crying all the time, and that’s hard enough.
Wes props his bike on the kickstand next to the front door and shoots a warning glance at me over his shoulder. The way he looks reminds me of the way he described Rome. Soft and hard. Old and young. Pale green eyes shadowed by thick, dark brows. Soft brown hair grazing a hard, stubbled jaw. A floral Hawaiian shirt covering jagged black tattoos. I’m attracted to the boy in him and scared of the man in him, and I’m pretty sure I’d take a bullet for both of them even though I don’t even know their last name.
But, honestly, I’d probably take a bullet for anybody right about now. This waiting around to die thing is killing me.
The glass in the front door has been smashed out, and Wes doesn’t seem too happy about it. He pauses against the wall next to the door with his gun drawn and jerks his head, indicating that I’m supposed to join him next to the entrance instead of standing right in front of it like a dumbass.