Page 95 of No Romeo
“I’m partying like a sad panda with a broken nose from his dickhead, jailbait brother.” At least, that was what I thought he had said. He slurred so bad I wasn’t exactly sure.
“What?”
“Zepp punched me.” He sniffed. “Right in my pretty face. I think it’s broken.” He hiccuped. “Just like us…”
I straightened on the couch, ignoring what he said about us. “Did youlethim hit you?” Hendrix never got hit, and Zepp was his brother.
“No. I was already drunk. And he’s been in prison. His reflexes are all prison-like.”
That flicker of anger over strippers turned into an entirely different kind of rage.
A heavy, rattling breath came over the line. “Put Kyle on the phone.” He cackled. “He’ll think I’m Darth Vader. Kyle—” he made a gurgling, breathy noise—“I am your daddy...”
“Wow.” That was disturbing. “I’m not putting Kyle on. Put ice on your nose.”
“All the ice is gone. Why you gotta be so mean?” He sounded so emotional. About ice.
The music in the background faded until I could barely hear it. “I’ve just called… to say… I’m shitfaced,” he sang. “I just called… to say… how much I’ve drunk. I just called to say…I’m shitfaced. And I mean it from the bottom of my sad, broken-nosed panda heart…”
I pushed to my feet on a sigh and headed into the kitchen, covering the microphone while Hendrix continued to slur his obscure lyrics in my ear. It was what he always did when he was hammered.
“I have to go,” I said.
Kyle closed the fridge and looked at me.
“Hendrix had his nose broken.”
“Who would punch Hendrix?” His brows tugged together. “Are they dead?”
“Zepp. And I don’t think he’s dead.”
He nodded as though all was right with the world again. Balance restored.
I left his house. Two blocks over, music from the party could be heard. Screams. The closer I got, the louder it grew.
A mass of people covered the porch. I could just picture the carnage inside the party I wasn’t invited to.
I brushed past a guy pissing off the steps and walked into a complete disaster. Beer cans were everywhere, and some guy had passed out on the stairs already. Before I made it all the way into the crowded living room, I saw two naked girls lap dancing Wolf, one with her shaved pussy in his face.
“Where’s Hendrix?” I asked.
“Outside,” he said without tearing his eyes from her crotch.
I stormed through the kitchen, onto the porch, and past a guy hurling into a concrete planter.
A few feet across the dark yard, lo and behold, I found Hendrix starfished in the middle of the pine straw-covered trampoline.
“Hendrix?”
His arm shot straight up. “Yes?”
“Oh good, you’re not dead.”
“My heart is dead. My dick is drunk. Zepp hit me, and you went to see Chadwick Beaverlichtenstein on my exit-of-a-womb day.”
“Wow, you’re dramatic. I was at Kyle’s.” I crossed the yard and stopped beside the trampoline. “What did you do to piss off Zepp?”
“I called his Medusa a bitch.”
