One day, old man, I think, feeling my quiet fury get the better of me. I force my expression into one of carefully practiced disdain.
“Aspen!” he says, waving at me with a single hand. I make my way past the next bouncer who carefully lifts the rope without question. My brother and I only arrived in this god-awful dump of a town two weeks ago and everybody already knows who we are.
Dad has been carefully cultivating his needs in the city of Springfield, hasn’t he?
“Have a seat,” he tells me, patting the spot beside him. I deign to accept the invitation but for one reason and one reason only.
I want to know about that old racetrack.
After all, I was there tonight.
I saw it.
I saw her.
My cock gets hard just thinking about her, so I cross my legs to stifle the reaction.
“I was curious if you had plans for the track in Prescott?” I inquire as politely as I can. It’s difficult to keep the sheer disgust and hatred out of my voice, but I’ve been working on this act for years. If my own father can’t tell what I’m up to, who else ever would?
“The track?” he asks, his face flushed with drink. I just study him with complete and total disinterest. “What about the track?”
I grit my teeth, nostrils flaring as I struggle to fight back a fresh surge of anger.
What right does this man have to be here getting drunk? He has a million better things that he should be doing. Not that he cares about any of that, really. So long as the end justifies the means.
I mutter a scathing insult under my breath in Japanese, but dear old Mayor Kelly has already moved on and doesn’t hear me. He turns back to the man on his right, letting out this guffawing laugh that infuriates me to no end. I’ve only been in this horrible place for a matter of minutes, and I can already feel myself starting to suffocate.
My eyes drift over to the dance floor, to the throbbing pulse of the crowd. There are a lot of pretty girls down there. I could take one home, fuck her hard, pretend that her name is Scarlett Force.
But no.
How boring.
I turn back to my father. He wasn’t this bad before my mother died, that much I know for sure. She kept him grounded. She kept his greed in check, his monster leashed. Whatever this thing is that he’s become, it’s bled into me. It’s bled into my brother even more so. Not that he wasn’t cruel before, but he hid it better; he pretended more often.
A strange tingle rushes down my spine, and I turn my head sharply, catching sight of the asshole in question as he makes his way through the crowd. His eyes find mine, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I am about to find myself in a world of hurt.
I shove up to my feet and take off before he can get to me. If I can make it out of here before he finds me, he’ll get drunk and maybe he’ll forget all about this.
Either way, we’re not eight years old anymore.
I’m not going to let him do the things he’s gotten away with in the past.
I slip out the back door that leads to a private alley. There are always a few bodyguards back here, just to make sure that anybody who needs to get out of the club without being seen has a means of doing that.
I ignore both men waiting beside the door and head back to my car.
My father’s new estate is only about fifteen minutes away from the downtown area, but it may as well be in the country for all the space it has. Fifteen minutes.
But much, much less if I’m driving.
The valet is already waiting for me; I’ve paid him to make sure he knows that I’ll never be staying long. He hands me my keys, and I climb into the driver’s seat.
I start the engine and lay on the gas, peeling out of my parking space and down the road with the stench of rubber in my wake.
Scarlett
That night, I get home, deal with the mess that Bohnes left, and then climb into bed. I’m out in an instant. Never did have trouble falling asleep. My demons don’t prowl in nightmares and twilight; I see them during the day, bright as the sun.
In the morning, I head downstairs to find my mom, my Aunt Anita, and my grandmother sitting at the small dining table in the backyard. It’s a shitty backyard, by anyone’s standards. It’s small, maybe ten by twenty, with a retaining wall, a sharp incline, and a huge stone wall that blocks off at least some of the grit and noise of the nearby highway.
My grandmother, however, has transformed the tiny space into a small oasis.
I slump down into the chair beside her, studying the humble but not unimpressive spread of food. A bowl of grapes, a stack of toast, some of my grandmother’s homemade jam, a plate of bacon covered with paper towels. Things used to be so much harder around here before my grandma moved in with us.
Before all of this, my mother had a revolving door of loser boyfriends. Same deal with my aunt. And then we had the car accident, and my aunt lost her damn mind (understandably so). Then there’s Alexis, my older sister by three years.
She storms onto the porch in one of her moods, clearly furious at one of us for an infraction of unknown origin.
“I can’t get an ounce of fucking sleep in this house!” she screams, shoving at a stack of plastic pots on a nearby potting table and sending them flying while the four of us sit there and watch her rage. What else can we do? “You guys kept me up all night long, making all that goddamn noise.” She plants her palms on the surface of the table and glares daggers at me. “I’m fucking tired.”
“I got you a joint,” my mother says, gesturing in the direction of the back door. “Why don’t you go get it and you can smoke out here, maybe have something to eat?”
Alexis lets her dark brown gaze shift over to her before standing up and storming back into the house as I watch in silence. I don’t antagonize my sister—I understand that she has mental health issues—but I can only take so much from her.
I get that the accident fucked her up. I get that her brain chemistry is wrong. I know what her ex-boyfriend did to her.
Still, it’s hard to be screamed at the way she does sometimes. Before my uncle—my grandmother’s youngest kid—moved out, Alexis used to go into these mad fits and say that he was raping her against the refrigerator when he was in his room with the door locked. I saw it with my own eyes, her sitting on the couch and wailing.
But I don’t blame her for that. They aren’t lies, really. She just doesn’t see reality the way everyone else does.
My mom gives me a look, as if to warn me off my sister’s back. She should know better than anyone else that I really try with her. If she lays into me though, I will correct her. Last week, she accused me of being patronizing when I told her I’d be happy to take her to the park so she could walk off some steam.
My response was simple: if you think this is patronizing, I’ll show you patronizing.
“What?” I ask, laying my phone on the table next to me and grabbing a plate from the clean stack. “Don’t look at me that way when I haven’t said a single word this morning.”
“We all know how you can be,” Geneva says, even as I know she’d hate to hear that I call her Geneva instead of mom inside my head most of the time. “Don’t antagonize your sister.”
“Did I do anything at all to her?” I ask, looking over at my Aunt Anita. She’s barely paying attention to the conversation, playing a game on her phone instead. I don’t blame her. The accident changed every single one of us. Her, more than anyone, I guess.
“Were you at the track again last night?” Geneva continues, deciding to shift the conversation away from Alexis. My mother is a psych-nurse so she thinks she knows best. She’s practically diagnosed Alexis herself: schizophrenia with some additional head trauma. Every time she tries to get my sister in somewhere, things go badly, and she never ends up receiving a proper diagnosis of any sort.
“Yep,” I say, thinking of the fifty-thousand-dollar check that’s burning a hole in the pocket of my jeans. First chance I get, I’m heading down to
the bank to deposit it. I consider offering up some to my grandma to help pay the bills, but then she’ll want to know how I got it, and how can I tell my seventy-year-old, very traditional grandmother that I bet my own body on a race?
It’s sick.
It’s twisted.
It’s beyond fucked-up.
Instead, I’ll use it to finance my way into the future. First stop, Portland. Then we’ll see where I can take things from there. I have skills; I just need a place other than Prescott to prove it.
My grandmother clicks her tongue in not-so-subtle disappointment. See, that kills me. But how can I ever explain to this kindhearted woman the way my veins run with lines of fire? How can I ever tell her that I only feel alive when I’m flying down the track? That putting my body on the line the way I did last night excites the twisted perversion inside of me?
“There’s no future in all of that,” Geneva continues as my Aunt Anita closes her game and stands up, offering the barest slip of a smile to the rest of us. My mom pauses to look up at her younger sister.
“I’m off to work. I’ll be home around five, so I can stay with Alexis if you want to go out.” Anita’s talking to me, I think, but she barely looks at me. She barely looks at anything anymore. It’s been almost two years since the accident, but that isn’t long when you’re looking back on the sort of loss that the Force family suffered.
“Sounds good,” I reply absently, my mind already straying back to the track. Will Aspen Kelly be there tonight? He said next weekend … Either way, I need to be careful around that man. He’s dangerous in a way that I don’t think Bohnes is.
Would Bohnes kill me if he thought he had something to gain from it? Probably. But would he rape me? No, I don’t think so.
Aspen … I grit my teeth, glancing up to realize that both my grandma and my mom are staring at me, likely trying to figure out the meaning behind my tense facial expression. I’m saved by the bell when Alexis storms back out, yanking Anita’s chair from the table and sitting down hard in it.
She lets her dark brown gaze slide over to mine. Other than our eyes, we look nothing alike. My hair hangs in a gentle wave, raven-black and so long that I sometimes sit on it. Alexis has curly brown hair that falls to her shoulders and frizzes into a poof at the slightest opportunity. We have different dads, so our dissimilarities make sense. It’s not just the hair though: it’s her nose, her mouth, the shape of her eyes, everything.
Our youngest brother … I exhale. I try not to think about him. Him, or my cousins. They’re the reason I hate the color red, but also the reason that I try so hard to push back against that pain.
Thus, my red car. My red heels. Red leather pants. Red on the pavement when I beat some bitch’s ass for disrespecting me.
That reminds me …
I pick up my phone to text Lemon. Dark goddess only knows she won’t be the one to message me first. I send over a quick hey, girl, call me and then look back up to see that Alexis is still staring at me.
“Hi,” she says, and I force myself to smile at her.
“Hey,” I reply easily, trying to maintain a pleasant facial expression. It isn’t easy. I don’t often wear pleasant facial expressions. Mostly, sneers or frowns or smirks. But my sister doesn’t deserve any of that.
“Can you take Alexis to the mall for me?” Geneva asks, and I nod.
I’ll take her—in Widow’s car.
Widow.
Adrian.
He’s as fucked-up and weird as Bohnes.
I won’t lie though: I got myself off last night thinking of his web-inked hand stroking his massive dick. The fantasy morphed into Bohnes about halfway through, pounding me against the side of the tree. I loved it, too. I loved having his cum in me while I kicked Aspen’s ass on the track.
See what I mean? There’s something wrong me. I’m as much of a psycho as all the rest of ‘em.
“Scarlett?” Geneva repeats, for what’s probably the fourth or fifth time. I notice that my grandma’s gotten up and left with a stack of dishes in hand. Shit.
“Yeah, I heard ya,” I snap back, rising to my feet and gathering the rest of the dishes to take into the kitchen. “Gram, I’ve got that,” I tell her, scooting into place in front of the sink.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” she says, and it has such a different ring when she says it. How come old ladies can use nicknames that melt your heart, but when some cocky prick says it, it makes your skin crawl? Aspen’s voice echoes in my head.
“You read my mind, sweetheart.”
Fucking sick.
I vigorously scrub the plate in front of me as Patricia offers me up a pat on my shoulder and moves away to her favorite recliner to rest her feet. I finish up the dishes, put the leftovers away, and head upstairs to change.
I can’t even believe I have to make a stop at the goddamn mall today. My mother forgets sometimes that it isn’t 1999 and fucking nobody wants or needs a mall. Whatever Alexis wants, she can order it online.
I don’t say any of that shit aloud though.
Instead, I suck it up, dress myself in high-waisted black sailor shorts that threaten to crawl right up my ass crack and pair them with a red and white striped top that tucks in. It’s got a nice, low-scooped neck that shows off my massive rack.
Ratchet as fuck and proud.
I’m slipping my feet into black peep-toe Jimmy Choos that I won on the track last week—massive score: these are worth about a thousand bucks—when Alexis moves into the room behind me. She gives me a dark look that I really don’t like. I’m looking at her over my shoulder as she shakes her head at me.
“You slept with Kellin,” she whispers, voice accusatory, and my mouth drops open.
“Does fucking everyone in Prescott know? Jesus.” I adjust my strap and put my foot down, crossing my arms under my breasts. Gossip travels fast around here—particularly when one of your ride-or-die besties runs her mouth off at the goddamn track.
My sister graduated Prescott High three years prior, but she’s as embedded into the dark fabric of this neighborhood just like anyone else. This place, it has claws. Once it gets ahold of you, it doesn’t let go without a fight.
Alexis isn’t able to put up much of one, so it’s going to fall to me.
My grandma is too old and too tired. My mother has—and never had—motivation of any sort. Aunt Anita is broken. My sister is sick …
It’s just me. It’s all up to me.
But I am more than up to the task.
“Everyone knows, but it’s not fair. Why wouldn’t you tell me first?”
I feel my eye twitch, holding back a sigh as I pause to use my lash brush to comb out my extensions. They’re big and full and dark, and they give me this doe-eyed look when paired with my brown eyes that’s total bullshit. All one need do is look at the shape of my mouth.
It’s built for sex and sin; that much is obvious at a single glance.
“Why does everyone care so much about me losing it to Bohnes? I wasn’t going to stay a virgin forever.” I snatch my clutch—I didn’t steal this one, Lemon did and then gifted it to me—and head for my bedroom door.
Alexis doesn’t budge, her eyes glimmering with hurt.
I messed up, didn’t I?
The thing with Bohnes though, it just happened. When it did, it was mine. It was a dark, dirty, heavy, sweaty secret. It was something of mine to keep in the shadows, to hoard in the dark. Now what do I do with it? When everyone will know that my smoke breaks in the woods are much more than that.
And … do I care?
No.
No, I don’t.
Yet, when I look at my sister, I see pain there that has nothing to do with Bohnes and everything to do with the fact that I’m growing up and things are changing. Alexis has a hard time with that sort of thing. She’s only had one boyfriend, and it didn’t go well for her.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze. “Bohnes isn’t my boyfriend, and he won’t ever be. He�
��s just a fuckboy. Come on.” I gesture with my chin in the direction of the door.
I’ll wash the dishes for my grandma, take my sister shopping … and then I’ll rip the angel wings out of my back and spatter the walls with blood. Demon wings, baby. All I need are demon wings, cute little horns, and a spade-tipped tail.
There’s a reason my car’s nickname is the Devil, after all.
It’s not just about speed. Violence is a thing, too.
Scarlett
The old track has no real name. It used to be called the Prescott Motor Racing Circuit, but none of the students who attend Prescott High now call it that. Once upon a time, there was a campground right off the side of it where our parents and grandparents used to come to make out or fuck, but suburban sprawl has cut right through the woods, edging up on our space.
It’s been getting a lot worse lately. Lots of houses, empty lots, trailer parks, and apartment buildings are being purchased by greedy developers.
Gentrifying the southside is the hottest new ticket to easy money.
Makes me furious as fuck.
“Did you see they just bulldozed the old party house?” I ask Nisha as I step out of Widow’s sexy little Stingray. As soon as I slid into the front seat today, I felt my body go white-hot, heat gathering at the apex of my thighs. Unfortunately, there’s nothing that dampens my sex drive more than the presence of my older sister.
On the way over to the track tonight though … I considered pulling over and rubbing one out, letting myself soak Widow’s pretty seats. After all, I’m not stupid enough to think I can keep this up forever. A guy like Widow? Someone who basically grew up behind bars, he’s scrappy enough to get his car back.
I should leave him a little gift for when the time comes.
A little taste of Scarlett.
“I saw,” Nisha agrees, her signature gold shadow caked on, cheeks dancing with stars in the light of the bonfire. Somebody’s set one up at the edge of the muddy parking lot. It’s been bright and sunny for hours, so it’s drier today than it was yesterday, but as usual, as soon as I step out of the car, my heels are stuck in it.
F*ckboy Psychos Page 7