Page 30 of Dirty Like Dylan

Even if Dylan asked me—fucking begged me—to join in, I wasn’t doing it. On motherfucking principle alone, that girl was not touching my dick.

I didn’t care how long it’d been since I’d been laid—too long—or how cute she was, or how fucking amazing it might feel to sandwich her, naked, between Dylan’s body and mine.

Dylan could just go ahead and fuck her himself.

Tomorrow, I’d just have to find some way to get her fired—again.

* * *

“I know you’ve been hurt…” Dylan said into the darkness.

It was late. Pitch-black outside, and all the lights were off.

Amber had stumbled back to my place a while ago, after polishing off that second bottle of Prosecco with Dylan and flirting with him like a horny schoolgirl on her first spring break, while he pretended not to notice. I still had no clue why he hadn’t ended up balls-deep in her. But here he was, with me.

The two of us were laid out on the couches in his living room. We were watching Shameless on Netflix, but I could feel him looking at me.

I glanced over; he was shirtless, sprawled out on the leather, his reddish hair all lit up in the glow of the TV screen. He looked all motherfucking beautiful, and accessible to me in a way that he really wasn’t. But if I let my mind wander a little, I could almost imagine…

That this was how life could be.

Dylan. Me.

Perfection.

Until he kept talking.

“Losing Elle…” he went on, and I fucking sighed. Here the fuck we go again. “Losing Summer. You’ve had other relationships that maybe didn’t work out how you wanted them to. Your mom fucking left you. I get it.” He counted off my relationship failures with annoying sympathy. “So this is what you do. You shut yourself down. You harden yourself. You make jokes, and when those don’t work anymore, you get mean.”

“Uh-huh,” I grumbled and took a pull of my beer.

“You gonna tell me I’m wrong about that?”

“Nope. You’re right. And I already know all this shit about myself, Oprah.”

“So then you know that you’re being an asshole to Amber because you feel threatened.”

Yup.

“Because you’re afraid you might actually like her,” he went on, “and therefore she might actually hurt you.”

Um, no. That would be where you’re wrong.

“I told you,” I said. “I’m not falling in love again. I was very clear about that shit.”

“Right.”

“I’m fucking serious. I start talking shit about going the distance with someone, picking out matching tattoos or whatever, you call Jude. You tell him to bring a gun. The two of you take me out back and you bury me in a fucking deep grave.” Felt calming, actually, laying it out like that. I figured that Jude, Dirty’s head of security, was the one person I knew who could be seriously counted on to bury a body if it came down to it.

Maybe I’d have to let Jude know the plan myself, though. Dylan was probably just gonna pussy out if he ever actually had to put a bullet in my head.

Even if it was a mercy kill.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Casual sex. No strings, right?”

“No strings.”

“You think Susanna comes without strings?”

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