by Land, Alexa
“A lot! That’s the right answer! You don’t need this farmer’s market bullshit pasta. Also, I’ll bet the crooks who made this aren’t even farmers. I mean, we’re in the middle of the city, for fuck’s sake. What are we supposed to think, that someone’s got a pasta farm on the roof of their building?”
Nana looked at River again and he said, “Um...no?”
“No! There’s no such thing as a pasta farm. They must think we’re fucking stupid. Okay, let’s see what we got for our seven bucks.” She shoved her glasses on her face and glared at the little package. “Almost no noodles, a fancy label, and a plastic bag tied with a piece of hay. What the fuck! Why is this tied with hay?”
“I think that’s called raffia, Nana,” River interjected.
“What the hell’s raffia?”
“I dunno. Fancy hay?”
As Nana continued her rant, Vincent picked up my left hand and ran his thumb over the platinum band he’d given me. When Skye noticed this, he leaned in and whispered, “Weren’t you wearing that ring on your other hand before?” I nodded, and he asked, “Why’d you move it?”
“It used to be a promise ring,” I whispered with a smile. “But as of yesterday, it became something more.”
###
Thank you for reading!
Skye takes center stage and Trevor and Vincent’s relationship continues in Skye Blue, the sixth book in the Firsts and Forever series, available in late summer, 2014. A brief excerpt from Skye Blue is included at the end of this book. Enjoy!
For more about Alexa Land, please visit
http://alexalandwrites.blogspot.com/
Books by Alexa Land Include:
Feral
Tinder (The Tinder Chronicles, Book One)
Hunted (The Tinder Chronicles, Book Two)
And the Firsts and Forever Series:
Way Off Plan
All In
In Pieces
Gathering Storm
Salvation
Skye Blue (available late summer, 2014)
Bonus Skye Blue Excerpt
Chapter One
“Just do me, Christian.”
“What, right here?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Um, a million reasons?”
“Come on,” I said, “it’ll only take five minutes.”
“Now I’m insulted.”
“Don’t be! You know what I mean. You don’t have to buy me dinner first or anything. Just pop on a condom and relieve me of my virginity.”
“No.”
“Give me one good reason why not.”
Christian raised an eyebrow at me. “I’ll give you three good reasons, Skye. Number one, you’re my best friend and it’s way too weird. Number two, we’re about ninety seconds from getting arrested out here. And number three, I really don’t think Trevor would appreciate us getting down and dirty while he’s sitting two feet away from us.”
Trevor chimed in, “I’ll be scarred for life if I have to watch you two going at it.”
I sighed and rolled my eyes. “Fine. I’m telling you though, I’m over this whole virginity thing. Since you’re shooting me down, Christian, I’m going to have to go with plan B.”
“Do I even want to ask what that is?” he said.
“I’m going to say yes to the very next guy that propositions me. And you know what a crap shoot that is, given the fact that I’ve been participating in the horrors of internet dating so I can be supportive of my very single friend Zandra. I could easily end up saying yes to a scary fifty-year-old with super creepy little girl hands.”
“Ew! What, like in his pocket?” Christian exclaimed.
“Shhh,” Trevor whispered, “keep your voice down! Do you want the security guards to discover us?”
“No, not in his pocket,” I said, giving Christian a look that said oh-my-God-gross. “I just meant that the guy could have nasty, tiny, little effeminate hands at the end of his arms, and I’d still say yes to sleeping with him. You’re really twisted, Christian, to think I meant he was carrying severed girl hands around with him!”
“Hey, you’re the one who said it,” Christian reminded me. He took a drink from his silver flask and got up from his crouched position so he could peer through the chain link fence beside us. He immediately ducked back down behind the bushes, which I took to mean the coast was most definitely not clear.
“I did not say that! At least, not the way your demented mind interpreted it.”
“Whatever. I’m not going to devirginize you while we’re hiding in the bushes. Now can we concentrate on the task at hand?” Christian said.
“Ugh, at hand. That’s all gross now,” I said. He held out the flask to me and I took a drink before shuddering dramatically. “Bleh, I hate whiskey. What happened to my idea of carrying a margarita flask?”
“If you want a margarita flask, you’re going to have to start carrying your own,” Christian said.
I offered the whiskey to Trevor, who turned it down with a polite, “No thank you.” I took one more sip (ew!) before handing it back to its owner, then got up off the ground and assessed the situation.
We were at the top of a hill on the fringes of the Silicon Valley, outside a barbed wire-topped fence. Below us was a manufacturing facility that produced replacement parts for douchebags that blew out the engines in their flashy, overpriced jet boats. Sticking out of a dumpster beside the ugly cinderblock building was my prize, a huge bent and mangled boat propeller.
I ducked back down and told my friends, “The security guard is checking the doors. He’ll go around to the back of the building in another two minutes, and then Operation Upcycle can commence!”
“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Trevor asked nervously, for about the fiftieth time. He was new to a life of crime, so his hesitation was understandable.
“We absolutely should.” I once again explained my reasoning to him. “First of all, it’s in the trash, so we’re not stealing. Second of all, it’s totally irresponsible for that company not to recycle. They’re practically environmental terrorists!”
“Well, not quite,” Christian said.
“Close enough. Thirdly, the dudes that run that company are complete asshats. They could have just given me the propeller when I called and asked them politely for it, and explained that I wanted to use it in a sculpture that I was making in school. Instead, they hung up on me! They not only don’t support the arts, they don’t support education, and they deserve to have that prop stolen from them! Not that this is stealing.”
“How did you know it was here?” Trevor asked, popping up quickly, taking a peek at the facility, and ducking down again in a flawless imitation of a prairie dog (not that that was what he was going for, but still).
“I saw it when I was making my rounds.”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “What rounds?”
“A couple times a month, I drive to the South Bay and do a lap of all these different manufacturers that are located down here. Some of them are nice, they actually set stuff aside for me to pick up. Others, like the Doucharium here, not so much.”
“Have you stolen from this place before?” Trevor asked.
“Again, stolen: not my first choice of words. But I have conducted routine trash removal services at this facility.”
“How do you get over the barbed wire?”
“I don’t get over it,” I told him, “I get under it. Right over there.” I pointed to a spot a few yards down the fence line where someone (possibly me, but I can neither confirm nor deny that) had dug out enough soil to wriggle beneath the chain link.
“Do you really expect that big propeller to fit under the fence?” Christian asked.
“Hell no. We’ll have to huck it over.”
“We’ll have to what?”
“Huck it,” I repeated. “As in throw, pitch, heave, cause to become airborne.”
Christian looked at me over the top of his sunglasses. It was completely goofy that he was we
aring them at eleven o’clock at night, but my best friend liked to think he was a rock star. “Thank you for that, Merriam Webster,” he said. “The point I was getting at was that the prop looks heavy, and no way are you going to be able to throw it over an eight-foot fence.”
“Well no, I couldn’t,” I confirmed. “But that’s why I brought you and Trevor along. You guys are my muscle!”
“Oh man,” Trevor said, “if we’re your muscle, you’re so screwed.”
“It’s a critical mass kind of thing,” I explained. “While it’s true that you both weigh about a buck-fifty soaking wet, combined you have the brawn of one big, beefy three-hundred pounder!”
“This is what happens when you go to art school instead of college,” Christian deadpanned. “That’s the faultiest application of math and physics I’ve ever heard.”
“Suck it, Steven Tyler. You go to art school too, you know.”
“Okay, A,” Christian said, giving me another look, “Steven Tyler is awesome, so that totally fails as an insult. And B, I’ve always thought of myself as more of a young, gay Keith Richards. Minus the ability to play any sort of musical instrument.”
“You two might consider keeping it down,” Trevor whispered. “We’re going to get busted even before we commit felony breaking and entering.”
“I think this is more of a criminal trespassing kind of situation,” I corrected as I pushed my overgrown royal blue bangs out of my eyes. “But that’s still a good point. Be quiet, gay Keith Richards.”
Christian frowned at that. “Me? You’re not exactly in stealth mode, Mr. Mathlete.”
I pretended to grasp an invisible knife that was jutting out of my heart and fell backwards onto the ground. “Insulting...my...math skills. Ouch! Never...will...recover.”
“Could you two even pretend to focus?” Trevor said, doing another quick prairie dog impersonation. “The guard went around the back of the building. Isn’t that what we were waiting for?”
I leapt to my feet and took a look at the situation, then said, “It is! We only have a few minutes. Move out, troops!”
I led the way to the gap under the fence, dropping to the ground and executing a stylin’ barrel roll before crawling under on my belly, using my knees and elbows to propel myself forward. “It’s like fitness boot camp,” I said when I reached the other side and got up into a crouch, brushing some of the dirt and dried grass off my t-shirt and jeans. “I should be charging for this.”
“Um, no,” Christian said as he followed me and momentarily got hung up on the fence, “we should be charging you. What’s the going rate for henchmen these days?”
“I believe the politically correct term is henchpersons,” I told him as I came to his aid and untangled the back of his t-shirt from the chain link.
“You’re insane,” Christian said as he joined me on the other side.
“You’re both insane,” Trevor told us as he awkwardly stuffed his head and shoulders under the fence, then ground to a halt. “Also, this isn’t as easy as it looks. I think I’m stuck.”
“We’ll save you!” I exclaimed, putting my hands on my hips and puffing my chest out like a pompous superhero. “Grab a hand, Boy Wonder, and pull!”
Christian crossed his arms over his chest. “Oh, I’m Boy Wonder? Screw that. Clearly I’d be the superhero and you’d be the weird, blue-haired sidekick.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, I’m almost a year older than you, for one thing. Plus, I’m about two inches taller.”
“Oh, like that counts!”
“Um, guys?” Trevor interjected. “How about if you’re both the Avengers, and you team up to save your stuck sidekick?”
“Yeah, okay,” Christian said as he took hold of Trevor’s right hand, “but I call Captain America.”
“You can have him,” I said as I took hold of Trevor’s left hand. We backed up quickly and dragged our friend out of the gulley.
As Trevor got to his feet and brushed himself off, Christian demanded, “What’s wrong with Captain America?”
“Did I say there was anything wrong with him?”
“It was implied in your ‘you can have him’ comment.”
I whispered, “And stealth mode begins now.” I pantomimed locking my mouth shut and throwing away the key, then led my dusty little posse down the hill to the dumpster.
The propeller looked a lot bigger now that it was up close. It was actually kind of huge. I frowned at that, then whispered, “I’m going in. Cover me.”
“There goes stealth mode,” Christian whispered. “And cover you with what?”
“I dunno. Be creative.” I hoisted myself up over the rim of the dumpster, then lowered myself into it carefully. “Oh man,” I said as I sunk waist-deep in cardboard, garbage bags, and miscellaneous detritus, “I just flashed on the trash compactor scene in Star Wars.”
“Because that’s helpful right now,” Christian said.
I grabbed the prodigious propeller and attempted to heave it out of the dumpster. After a few moments of grunting and straining, I gave up and said, “Slight problem. I can’t budge it. One of you has to come in here and help me. We’ll hoist it up and hand it to whichever one of you is on the outside.”
Trevor and Christian shot each other looks, then did a rapid fire best-of-three rock-paper-scissors. Trevor lost (here’s a tip: don’t make a rock every time), and sighed as he struggled and tried to climb up into the dumpster. I love my friend, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not exactly the most athletic kid on the block. Christian gave him a boost, but definitely erred on the side of overkill and pretty much just chucked Trevor into the trash.
When my friend’s head emerged from amid the garbage, he looked at me and said flatly, “Remind me again why I agreed to help you.”
“Because you’re the world’s nicest person and a super awesome friend,” I told him with a big smile. He just rolled his eyes at me. “I’m going to owe you big time after this, Trev. Big time.”
“Yeah, you really are,” he said as he stood up and shook something brown and squishy off the back of his hand. Let’s just say that was a former banana peel.
“Shit, we’re fucked!” Christian announced. He then took off like a shot. I’d never seen anyone run that fast. I rested my arms on the edge of the dumpster and watched him sprint across the asphalt parking lot. If there’d been an official standing by with a stopwatch, my best friend would have undoubtedly qualified for the U.S. Olympic track team. He took the hill like a gazelle, and maybe two seconds later I saw the fence at the top rattle as he stuffed himself underneath it.
“Wow,” Trevor murmured as he too watched the retreat. “I had no idea Christian could move that fast.”
“He gets lots of practice running from the man as a graffiti artist,” I said as I craned my neck and looked to my right at the two security guards that were running up to the dumpster.
“Freeze!” The first security guard bellowed, his voice pure gravel and menace. He shone his flashlight directly in my eyes.
“Impressive. Do they teach you how to sound like Darth Vader in rent-a-cop school? They do, don’t they?” I asked, holding a hand up to shield myself from the optical onslaught.
“Hands up,” his partner barked. He drew his gun and pointed it at my head.
“Shit just got real,” I muttered.
“We’re going to jail, aren’t we?” Trevor asked as he put his hands in the air.
“Oh yeah,” I told him, raising my hands high above my head. “We are absolutely going to jail.”
*****
Skye Blue will be available
in late summer, 2014
For more by Alexa Land, please visit
http://alexalandwrites.blogspot.com/
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