Page 24 of My Revenant
“Give me that,” I snapped, voice slightly raspy from my coughing fit as I reached for it. He pulled it out of reach.
“Nuh-uh. I know you’re not a smoker now, City Boy. These things are bad for ya.”
Indignation burned within me at his condescending attitude. “You smoke them!”
“Yeah. But I’m bad for ya too.”
I glared at him, not knowing what to make of that. Then I launched for the hand holding my smoke. No one was going to tell me what I could and couldn’t do. He was fast, twisting his body away from me. We fumbled in the grass as I tried to grab for it again.
The next thing I knew, Dex’s arm was around my waist as he tossed me onto the ground on the other side of him. I had a face full of meadow as I caught my bearings, and when I turned to glare at him he was soclose.
Like a deer in the headlights, I froze as he shuffled even closer.What the fuck is happening right now?There were no words, no thoughts, just his face, his lips, so close… My lips parted against my will. For what, I wasn’t sure, but it certainly wasn’t for the mouthful of smoke he force-fed me with his lips a fraction of an inch away from mine.
I shoved him away as hard as I could manage and scrambled to my feet, ignored the pain that flared in my leg, and marched away as quickly as possible.
“Running away again?” he called after me.
I didn’t even turn to look at him. I just stormed away from Dex fucking Ice-Eyes Weller. Away from hand-rolled cigarettes and cloud gazing in dying grass. Away from Meadow Park. Trying, while my gut told me I was heading in the wrong direction, to believe that he wasn’t the entire reason I’d come this way in the first place.
eleven
Dex - Past
FROM GOLD TO GONE.
“Three times,” I mumbled as Archer stopped yapping on about the things he’d heard through his connections about the Deltran Drakes. Stupid name, though ours wasn’t much better. Archer had been so pissed when they’d dubbed us the Port Skelton Strays, but I kind of liked it.
“Three times what?”
“Three times Jonah’s run away from me now,” I said, rolling my eyes, becauseobviouslythat’s who I was talking about. Who else would I give a fuck about? I wasn’t entirely surewhyI gave a fuck about him either, but that didn’t matter.
“Dex. Forget about Jonah Hargreaves, for fuck’s sake. This weird little interest in him has already caused me a fucking mess. We’re lucky no one ended up dead last weekend. End it now.”
“Ha! Good one, Archer.” Bryce laughed from his sofa like the idiot he was. “You know you’ve just made him more interested in Jonah now, yeah?”
Maybe he wasn’t such an idiot after all, because Archer telling me not to go after Jonah certainlydidmake me want to do it more.
“Who is Jonah?” spoke mister strong and silent from his brooding corner of the room. Henrik spent little time in Port Skelton, unlike his twin, but with tensions as high as they’d been lately between the two groups—perhaps largely due to myself—Archer had asked him to spend some moretime here.
His presence alone was definitely a deterrent. I’d been described as crazy before, but evenIwouldn’t mess with Henrik. Why would I? There was nothing to gain from messing with a guy who literally could not feel pain. All punching him would do was hurt your hand, and probably turn him on or something, I don’t know. Henrik was a weird fucker.
“Jonah Hargreaves. He used to live here like forever ago but then his sister died or something and he moved away with his bitch of a mom, but now he’s back and Dex is like crushing on him or something,” Bryce so eloquently explained, but there was a new piece of information there he’d neglected to share with me previously.
I sprung on him, wrestling as he tried to wriggle away, all bony arms and legs as he screeched like a dying chicken. “What the fuck?” he squealed.
“His sisterdied? You weren’t going to fucking share that with me earlier? You little fucking shit! I told you to tell me everything!”
“I forgot or something! I swear! Wasn’t intentional, man! Lemme go, you’re messing up my hair!”
Idiot. Never reveal your weaknesses. I grabbed a handful of artificial blue strands, not expecting them to be both crunchyandsticky. Disgusting. On point for Bryce, I supposed. I let him go, wiping my hand clean on his T-shirt before wondering if that was any cleaner.
“Tell me now. Everything this time,” I demanded.
“I don’t know everything.” Understatement of the year. “She was a few years older than us in school. They both just stopped coming one day, and then the school announced that she’d died, and there was like a vergal or something.”
“Vigil,” Archer corrected as he flopped down on another sofa, eyes on his phone. This place had been thrown together for when we met up like this. A bunch of furniture that belonged at thedump had been pulled from curbsides and shoved into this crumbling shack of a home in Meadow Park. Not that any of us actually lived here.
“Died of what?” I pressed Bryce for more information.
