by Easton, BB
As soon as I walked up and set down my backpack, Colton cried, “Kitten! Get your ass over here!”
I glanced down at Lance, who made no attempt to rescue me, and sighed. Getting up and walking around him, I embraced Colton, who had stood up and was waiting for me with open arms.
Feigning excitement, I said, “Hey, Colton! Oh my God! When did you get back?” as he squeezed the shit out of me.
“Last week,” he said, rocking me from side to side. “My moms got lonely. What can I say? Living without me is hard.” He pulled away and gave me a wink. “Isn’t it?”
I rolled my eyes in response, but I couldn’t help my traitorous smile. He really was cute. And he smelled squeaky clean. Like a girl. Colton had a thing for products—hair products, skin products. He was vain as hell and proud of it.
After giving me the once-over, Colton whistled. “Look at you. You’re making me wonder why I left in the first place.” I blushed and looked at the ground. “You wanna ride the bus home with me this afternoon? Just like old times? My mom just stocked the fridge with PBR …”
Yes. No. Kinda?
Before I could say something stupid, Juliet swooped in and rescued me. “She’s riding home with me, Colton. BB is my bitch now.”
Juliet set her tray down across from my backpack and glared at Colton. She never liked him. For starters, I’d kind of forgotten she existed after he and I started dating. I just started riding the bus home with him every day instead of her—a dick move, I knew, but I was fourteen, and he was my first real boyfriend. I was pretty sure “first real boyfriend” would be accepted as just cause for a temporary insanity plea in a court of law. But Juliet also hated him because I’d kind of blabbed to her about how hard he’d been pressuring me to do stuff with him. I would have given in, too, if he hadn’t told me he was moving. I was not giving it up to somebody who was just going to leave in a few weeks. Besides, I was saving myself for Lance Hightower.
Colton glared back at her for a minute. Then, he smiled and asked, “Can I watch?”
We all laughed, even Lance, who was watching the show with piqued interest. When I sat back down next to him (and away from the pheromone cloud that was Colton Hart), I let out a shaky breath and stared straight ahead at Juliet, thanking her silently. Lance, who had resumed his conversation with Colton, reached under the table and gave my thigh a reassuring squeeze. He left his hand there, and I prayed to every deity I’d ever learned the names of that he would slide it up a little farther. He didn’t, but he did absentmindedly lace his fingers through the holes in my fishnets as he spoke, causing me to stop breathing long enough to almost actually fucking die.
My mind was sufficiently scrambled when August, whom I hadn’t even noticed, spoke to me from the spot next to Juliet.
I had been friends with August Embry since first grade, when we wound up in the same first grade class. Back then, he was a shy, pudgy little thing with no friends, and I was a bossy, talkative little thing with no friends, so we’d just clicked. I loved him like a brother.
August was still a shy, round little thing. He hid his warm chocolate-brown eyes behind a curtain of dyed black hair, and every night, he painted his fingernails black to match. Of course, every day, he would pick them clean again—leaving little black flecks behind, like a trail of breadcrumbs everywhere he went. August was the sweetest, most sensitive person I’d ever met.
I could tell from his body language that August wasn’t exactly happy to see Colton either. He and Lance had become kind of close since Colton left. They both liked the same terrible music and competed over who had the best, rarest punk records in their collections, so Lance getting his best friend back didn’t bode well for August.
“Hey, A!” I cheered, trying way too hard to sound like a girl who didn’t have a boy’s fingers stroking her inner thigh at that exact moment. “I didn’t know you had this lunch period too! Are you growing your hair out? I love it!”
August just smiled and looked down at the food on his tray, which he suddenly decided needed rearranging.
I turned to ask Juliet if I could ride home with her and Tony, but she was gone. Her stuff was still on the table though, and I thought I could hear the sound of her voice. As much as it killed me, I moved Lance’s hand so that I could peek under the table. There she was, sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking on her cell phone, which was strictly forbidden at school. There was only one person she could possibly be talking to.
“Juliet,” I whispered.
She looked up, annoyed. “What?”
“Ask Tony if he minds giving me a ride this afternoon.”
She winked at me and whispered into her brick-sized Nokia, “Hey. BB’s gonna ride home with us this afternoon, okay?” She gave me a thumbs-up after hearing his response.
Cool.
Just then, I felt Lance’s hand press down on the back of my head and saw his crotch rise up to meet the side of my face. I screamed and tried to sit up, causing my head to smash Lance’s hand into the underside of the table. Laughter erupted from the cafeteria as I emerged, red-faced, looking like a girl who’d just eaten a punk rocker’s cock for lunch.
I glared at Lance, trying my best to look angry, but his eyes were shut, and he was laughing so hard, he wasn’t even making noise. Just the sight of that giant, Mohawked motherfucker smiling ear to ear had me reduced to a puddle of swoon juice in an instant. I burst out laughing right along with him and anxiously glanced over at Colton.
He was laughing, too, but his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. Guess he didn’t appreciate the entire lunchroom thinking his girlfriend was giving his best friend a BJ under the table.
In that moment, I knew that Colton wasn’t going to be a problem. Lance had just established, with dramatic flair and in front of everyone, that I was his girl.
All the hope and hormones had my insides on the verge of spontaneous combustion, so I barely noticed the loud slam that came from somewhere behind me. I hardly felt the resulting shudder that rippled down the length of the lunch table. And I didn’t turn to look for the source until the faces of all my friends fell and glanced anxiously over my shoulder. Swiveling around on my stool, I followed everyone’s gaze to an empty seat at the end of the table.
Um, anyway. Where was I? Oh, right. Planning my spring wedding …
That afternoon, I fought against the current of teenagers fleeing the building, dragging my swollen backpack behind me by one strap, in search of my new locker. According to my homeroom teacher, my old one had to be torn out over the summer to make room for the new science lab. She had given me a little slip of paper with my new locker number and combination on it, saying only that it was “somewhere over on C Hall.” I couldn’t wait to find that shit so that I could finally offload a few of the ten-pound textbooks I’d been given that day.
Clutching the piece of paper with my new digits on it, I scanned dozens of identical metal doors until I found the one I’d been assigned. It was almost at the end of the hallway, of course, near the exit doors that led out to the student parking lot. I felt relief wash over me immediately.
My first day of tenth grade was a wrap, and overall, it had been a smashing success. I’d smoked with the coolest of the cool kids; wound up with the same lunch period as Lance, Juliet, and August; got a bunch of compliments on my fishnets and new haircut; and now, I had a new locker on the same hall as all the seniors. Okay, so maybe it took me a few attempts to get my code to work, but once that shit was open, it was glorious.
As I bent over to take the last load of books out of my straining backpack, I stopped short, paralyzed by the sight of two black steel-toed boots with blood-red laces planted just inches away from my face … and pointing directly at me.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Not him. Anyone but him.
I took my time gathering my stuff, hoping that ignoring him would make him magically disappear. When I finally stood up, arms full of books, I mustered all the courage I had
and looked him in the eye.
Zombie eyes. God, his irises were such a pale, pale gray-blue that his pupils looked like two endless black holes in contrast. Two black holes that were sucking me in.
Speak dumbass!
“Um, hey,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound like it belonged to me.
He didn’t reply. He simply cocked his head to the side and studied me with those cold, dead eyes. It was the same way he’d looked at the kid in the parking lot, right before he smashed his face into the ground.
Swallowing hard, I forced myself to break the silence.
“I’m sorry, do you need something?” I squeaked out, trying to sound cute and tiny. I blinked and opened my eyes a little wider, feeling like a woodland creature in danger of being squished by a massive black boot.
“Your shit is in front of my locker,” he said. His voice was deep and clear and humorless.
“Oh my God! I’m so sorry!” Tripping over myself, I slid my lightened backpack behind me with my foot.
The skinhead immediately grasped the metal latch on the locker beside mine and gave the lower left corner of the door a swift kick, causing the fucker to pop right open, no code necessary. I shuddered involuntarily as my mind conjured images of that same boot landing square in the back of a scared little skater boy just a few hours earlier.
Afraid that he could smell my fear, I quickly hid my face behind the metal door of my own locker, busying myself by arranging my books and notebooks by size, color, the Dewey fucking decimal system, anything. Then, something occurred to me. Before I knew it, my stupid mouth was moving.
“Shouldn’t you be suspended?”
I felt my face blush crimson as the blond with the buzzcut slammed his locker shut and asked, point blank, “Why?”
Was he teasing me? We both knew what the fuck he had done.
“That, that fight. Today. In the church parking lot,” I said into my locker.
Thinking about that … attack had my blood pumping into my extremities and my mind screaming for me to run. I turned and went back to my organizing, hoping to conceal the terror and embarrassment that I was sure my big, dumb doe eyes were doing a shit job of concealing. My face always snitched on me, broadcasting my every thought. My every feeling.
My thin metal makeshift shield vibrated as he spoke, “I didn’t get suspended for the same reason you’re not sitting in detention right now for smoking. That shit happened off-campus.”
“Is he okay?”
God! My fucking mouth! Filter, BB. Filter!
“Who? That little pussy wipe from the parking lot? He’ll be pissing blood for a week, but he’ll live.”
Slowly, the door I had been cowering behind began to close. Moving out of the way so that the metal wouldn’t graze my face, I reluctantly turned toward the boy with the cadaverous eyes, who was deliberately pushing my locker shut. Once the door was firmly closed and I had nowhere left to hide, Zombie Eyes leaned toward me and reached around my body with his left hand. I squeezed my eyelids shut and braced myself for something violent and potentially bloody to happen.
With his voice lowered so that only I could hear, he said, “If you hit a fucker in the kidney hard enough … right here”—I suddenly felt a thick finger jam directly into one side of my lower back—“he’ll piss blood.”
My eyes shot open, and I immediately wished that they hadn’t. That gray-blue gaze was way too close, too intense. His finger lingered way too long, and there was a crackle in the air that had my senses on high alert.
Danger! Danger! Skinhead Boy is fucking touching you! He could kill you with that finger, BB! Kill you and eat your brains!
But those zombie eyes wouldn’t let me move. Up close, they were so clear. Like two crystal balls that I wished would give me a glimpse into this twisted creature’s soul. In my curious state of hypnosis, again, words tumbled unbidden from my mouth.
“Why’d you hit him?”
After a pause long enough to let me hope that maybe I hadn’t actually asked my question out loud, he answered, “Because he called your little boyfriend a faggot.”
About three million follow-up questions slammed into my throat at once:
A) Why would a Neo-Nazi looking motherfucker beat someone up that he doesn’t even know for calling some other dude he doesn’t know a faggot?
B) Shouldn’t he have given the kid a high five instead?
C) Why would he call Lance my boyfriend? Lance is NOT my boyfriend. I mean, I want him to be my boyfriend. Jesus, I want to ride him like a pony everywhere I go and have all of his babies, but he’s not my boyfriend.
D) Why would anyone think Lance was gay in the first place? He’s sooo dreamy.
But the only thing I could squeak out was, “You were defending Lance?”
I never knew an eye roll could be so terrifying. Shit. I’d done it. I’d finally pissed him off with all my stupid fucking questions. Why did I always have to talk to the scary ones?
My mom still loved to tell people about the time I’d picked up my Happy Meal and sat down with a group of leather-clad bikers at McDonald’s when I was three just so that I could ask the gnarliest-looking one why he had a ponytail. According to her, my exact words were, “Only girls are ’apposed to have ponytails.”
My curiosity was going to get me straight murdered one day.
The skinhead, who now looked positively murderous himself, removed his hand from my back and placed it on my locker, just above my head. Cocking his head to the side again, he watched me, as if mulling over the best way to skin me alive, and of course, I just stood there, blinking up at him like a fucking dumbass.
Basic bodily functions like speaking, breathing, and running were completely out of my grasp. It was as if I’d been cornered by a coiled rattlesnake. A rattlesnake that just so happened to smell like dryer sheets, cigarettes, and a sweet hint of cologne.
“No,” he said. “I was defending you.”
Too much. It was too intense. I broke eye contact and took a step backward, landing on the backpack I had forgotten was behind me and almost losing my balance. Turning around to pick it up, I took a deep breath and tried to regroup before facing him again. When I did, his ghostly eyes were crinkled at the corners, and his mouth was tipped up just slightly on one side. Fucker. He was actually enjoying watching me squirm.
Smirk still in place, he said, “When I was outside, I heard that little shit telling his buddy about the hard-on he had for ‘the little redhead in the fishnets.’ Couldn’t argue with him there, Punk. I think you gave every guy in that parking lot a semi.”
My face was suddenly on fire. Oh God. I’m blushing! Is this really happening?
He continued, but his smirk had been replaced by something that made my blood run cold. “When he saw that giant motherfucker’s hands on you, he turned into a pissy little bitch.” He spat the last word out through gritted teeth. “Told his buddy you must love taking it up the ass to be wasting your time with that queer.”
Gulp. Breathe. What?
“S-so, so you punched him?”
The zombie-eyed skinhead leaned down toward my ear and didn’t stop until I could feel his hot, venomous breath on my neck. “I. Beat. His. Fucking. Ass.”
My limbs were moving on their own accord. Legs stumbling backward. Hands fumbling with backpack straps. “Um, thanks?” I mumbled, eyes darting everywhere but his. “I, uh, have to go … I’m gonna miss my … thanks again …”
“Knight,” he announced as I turned and sprinted for the double doors. “Thanks, Knight.”
Fuck me.
Read the rest of BB and Knight’s story here!
Playlist
This playlist is a collection of songs that I either mentioned in Dying for Rain or that I felt illustrated a feeling or a scene from the book. I am grateful to each and every one of the brilliant artists listed below. Their creativity fuels mine.
You can stream the playlist for free on Spotify here.
“Army of Me” by Björk
“Artist and Repertoire” by Envy on the Coast
“Bandito” by Twenty One Pilots
“Black Out Days” by Phantogram
“Champion” by Bishop Briggs
“Champion” by Fall Out Boy
“False God” by Taylor Swift
“Graveyard” by Halsey
“Hallelujah” by Paramore
“I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie
“Jumpsuit” by Twenty One Pilots
“My Cell” by The Lumineers
“Neon Gravestones” by Twenty One Pilots
“Nightmare” by Halsey
“ocean eyes” by Billie Eilish
“Oh No!!!” by grandson
“Prison Sex” by TOOL
“Slip on the Moon” by DREAMCAR
“Start a Riot” by Duckwrth, Shaboozey
“Team” by Lorde
“The Ruler and the Killer” by Kid Cudi
“Weaker Girl” by BANKS
“you should see me in a crown” by Billie Eilish
Books by BB Easton
STAND-ALONE ROMANTIC COMEDY
Hilarious. Honest. Hot as hell.
44 Chapters About 4 Men: A Memoir
THE 44 CHAPTERS ABOUT 4 MEN SPIN-OFF SERIES
Darkly funny. Deeply Emotional. Shockingly sexy.
SKIN (Knight’s backstory, Book 1)
SPEED (Harley’s backstory, Book 2)
STAR (Hans’s backstory, Book 3)
SUIT (Ken’s backstory, Book 4)
THE RAIN TRILOGY
A gritty, suspenseful, dystopian love story.
Praying for Rain
Fighting for Rain
Dying for Rain
FOR UPDATES ON NEW RELEASES, SALES, AND GIVEAWAYS, SIGN UP HERE.
Acknowledgments
If you’re reading this, that means you made it all the way to the end of The Rain Trilogy! Thank you so, so much for taking this journey with me. I’ve never written fiction before. My five previous books are all based on my real life, so this was a challenge of epic proportions. But if you’ve read SUIT, you know that I love nothing more than a good challenge. I learned so much during this process—mostly that writing fiction is hard as hell, but also that I have the best readers in the entire world. You guys show up. Whether I’m writing a sexy, comedic memoir; an angsty, semi-autobiographical New Adult series; or a gritty, dystopian romantic suspense trilogy, you guys are here for it. I love you for that.