Page 102 of No Romeo
I got into the passenger seat. “Seriously?”
“You expected me to get caught?” Smiling, he put it into reverse, then drove to the exit, running the red light and nearly getting us taken out by a cement truck.
“I’m still not sure how you got away with that. And I watched it happen.”
“I’m a confident motherfucker with no conscience when it comes to anything outside of you.”
And like the love-sick girl I’d always been for him, I swooned, then made him pull over a couple of miles up the road and screwed him on Wolf’s seat. He wasn’t blowing dust…
Chapter38
HENDRIX
Grinning, I thumbed through the four-hundred bucks we’d made at the raffle at the Trunk-or-Treat. Was it dishonest? Debatable.
Sure, we may have passed a stolen margarita mixer over to a blonde named Leah Duboise, but she seemed happy. It wasn’t like we just took the money and ran, and we were four hundred dollars closer to having the roof fixed.
I shoved the cash into the top drawer of my nightstand, right next to the little black velvet box. I snatched it up and flipped back the lid. A round, green stone sat nestled amongst the velvet. I’d wanted to get her a diamond, but the guy at the pawnshop had claimed my guitar wasn’t worth enough to make it an even trade. But the one I did get had small diamonds set in the band, like little glow-in-the-dark stars.
I’d kept the ring because I didn’t want to let her go. Now, I didn’t have to.
I took out the ring, debating on asking her to marry me the second she got back and asking her to go to the courthouse to make it official. I was nineteen. She was eighteen. But we’d been together our whole lives, longer than most marriages.
We already had all the responsibilities of “adults,” and not like life in Dayton would ever get any easier.
Pulling in a breath, I tucked the box back into the drawer and shut it before ramming my feet into my shoes and heading downstairs.
Zepp was out back, the rusted toolbox beside the front wheel of his motorcycle. Grease all over his shirt. “Did you drive this while I was gone?”
“No.” Once. And I almost wrecked it.
“It’s scratched.”
“Well, maybe you should be more careful, jailbait.”
He dropped a wrench into the box and glared at me. “Would you stop calling me that?”
“Prison changed you, man.” I crossed to the pile of ceiling debris we’d stacked in the back of the yard. “All sensitive and crap.”
He mumbled something, but I ignored him, pulling out pieces of wood. There were only a few worth a crap, but it was a start. I fished my phone from my pocket and shot off a text to Wolf asking him to grab some pallets from Wal-E-Mart on his way home from school.
It had taken me three weeks of evenings and weekends to build that treehouse as a kid.
I was expelled from school. I didn’t have anything else to do with my day once Lola went back. I bet I could finish the new one in a week.
Halfway to the porch, Zepp’s phone dinged with that annoying Sherwood Forest horn blare. I froze. That was the text alert for his redheaded succubus. The misplaced memory of why my brother had punched me flickered to life.
“You cocksucker.” I spun around and pointed a finger at him. “That’s why you left my birthday party. To go hunt down Red?”
“You can’t say shit to me. You let your ex-girlfriend move in with you.” He pushed to his feet and nudged the toolbox out of the way. “Now you're so deep in her pussy I don’t know how you breathe.”
I felt my face heat when he started across the dead grass. Lola was one thing. Monroe James was a whole other ballgame.
“If she comes over here and—”
“She’s already here,” he said, grinning like a dickhead when he passed by me to the back porch.
***
