Page 54 of Worse Than Wicked
“Because you know I’m good,” I say, looking him up and down as he stands there all wet, water clinging to the carved muscles of his torso. “You know how good we are together.”
“Duke,” he says. “We’re toxic as fuck together. I give you one thing you need that Mabel doesn’t. Don’t you see that? She gives you everything else. Just be happy with it.”
I shake my head. I don’t want to be with him and Lo. I just want him to tell me he wants it. He has to say it.
“If I went to Cedar Crest, even if I don’t need it, just to prove to you I’m sober, would you do it?”
“No.”
“Then who do I have to run over for you to consider it?” I ask. “That’s what Lo did, right? She ran over Dixie for you to get her out of the way. If I ran over Lo, you’d never forgive me. So what do I have to do?”
He shakes his head. “Listen to yourself. You sound deranged. Even my dick isn’t that good.”
“Fuck you,” I say, because I can’t say what I want to say, what I mean. That it’s not his stupid pierced dick. It’s everything—the way he hates me that brings me to my knees, the way he acknowledges what no one else does, that I’m not just some spoiled rich boy whining about my champagne problems. That he couldn’t do any better in my shoes, that he couldn’t survive what I have, and he doesn’t see my falling apart as weakness.That he believes I’m strong enough to fix myself, even when I don’t know how.
And maybe he’s right. That’s the one thing I can’t get from Mabel. What he doesn’t understand is that I can’t just be happy without it. I’ve tried. But even if she forgave me like Olive did, it would never go away. What I did will never go away. Nothing makes it go away except him.
I stumble back around the house and down the front steps. There’s some guy sitting at the picnic table on the front deck, a Darling man I’ve never seen before. I don’t expect to see anyone else when I look back, but Colt is standing there, frowning down at me.
His footprints glisten on the wood, incriminating evidence of his crime.
He followed me.
“You shouldn’t drive, Duke. You’re fucked up.”
“What do you care?” I shoot back. “If I drove off the road and wrapped myself around a tree, would you even come to my funeral?”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
I stare up at him, a lump suddenly in my throat. I won’t ask him what that means. “Would you cry?”
He shrugs. “Maybe.”
“Pussy.”
I turn around and walk away, and even though he said he cared, he doesn’t stop me.
When I reach the car Baron bought me, he finally calls after me.
“Duke.”
I stop and wait, but I don’t look back.
“My sister’s a good person,” he says. “If you can’t be happy with her, let her go.”
fourteen
Baron Dolce
It’s after five in the morning when the door finally opens and Duke comes stumbling in. He kicks the door shut behind him and doesn’t bother resetting the alarm before heading for the stairs. When I see that he’s going to ignore me entirely, I speak.
“Where have you been?”
He wheels on me, and I realize he wasn’t ignoring me. He didn’t notice me at all.
“What are you doing in the dark?” he demands.
“Waiting for you.”
