Page 26 of Praying for Rain

Oh my God, you’re pathetic.

Sugar cookies. She laughs like a farm animal. She looks like a discarded porcelain doll that raided a teenage boy’s closet. And she smells like fucking sugar cookies.

Let her go, dipshit! Supplies! Shelter! Self-defense! That’s what you need!

But the warning falls on deaf ears because now my stupid fucking cock has gone rogue, too. Why not? Nothing else is listening to me. It springs to life and rams itself into my zipper, seeking Rain’s attention as well. I take a small step back, just enough to keep from shoving my hard-on into her belly like a full-fledged creep, but she responds to my step back with one of her own.

And that’s it.

The moment is over.

The laughter is gone.

We drop our arms, and we begin walking.

I carry the backpack and push my bike—the front tire almost completely flat—as Rain falls in step beside me. I’m still hard, and I probably will be forever, thanks to the way she’s blushing and twirling her hair in her fingers. I decide to concentrate on watching the road for debris—what I should have been doing in the first place.

“So … how much farther until we get to the hardware store?” I ask, staring at the pavement in front of me.

“Uh …” Rain looks off in the distance like she can see it.

This part of the highway is nothing but old farmhouses, like hers, with a few untended fields and a shit-ton of trees in between them. No one is growing anything. No one even has horses on their land. Just a bunch of junk cars and a few rusty old sheds.

“Maybe, like, fifteen, twenty minutes? It’s on the other side of this hill, down past the skating rink.”

I chuckle and shake my head.

“What?”

“You just sounded so country.”

Rain scoffs. “If you think I sound country, then you haven’t heard—”

“No, it’s not your accent,” I cut her off. “It’s just the way everybody down here tells you the distance in minutes instead of miles and uses landmarks instead of street names.”

“Oh my God.” Rain’s mouth falls open. “We do do that!”

I smile even though my bullet wound is starting to scream from pushing my bike up this never-ending hill.

She tilts her head to one side, watching me. “You said everybody down here. Where were you before you came back? Somewhere up north?”

“You could say that.” I smirk, giving her a half-second of eye contact before resuming my death glare at the littered pavement. “I lived in South Carolina for a while, but before that, I was in Rome.”

“Oh, I think I’ve been to Rome. That’s close to Alabama, right?”

I snort. “Not Rome, Georgia. Rome, Italy.”

“No way!”

Rain reaches over and smacks me on the arm, narrowly missing my bullet wound. I wince and suck in a breath, but she doesn’t even notice.

“Oh my God, that’s amazing, Wes! What were you doing in Italy?”

“Being a colossal piece of Eurotrash mostly.”

Rain leans forward, devouring my words one by one like kernels of popcorn. So, I just keep spewing them.

“After I left Franklin Springs, I never stayed anywhere longer than a year—a few months usually—and then I’d get bounced to the next piece-of-shit house in the next piece-of-shit town. As soon as I aged out of the system, I knew I wanted to get as far away from here as fucking possible. I was sick of small towns. Sick of school. Sick of having no fucking control over where I went or how long I stayed. So, on my eighteenth birthday, I checked all the airline sales, found a last-minute deal to Rome, and the next morning, I woke up in Europe.”

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