Page 60 of Brutal Prince

“Where’d you disappear to?” Marcus asks as he tosses his bag into the back seat and collapses in his bucket seat.

“Had to clear my head.”

“It work?”

I don’t answer. Ahead, I spot Indi walking out of school, head down and totally oblivious to the world around her. I throw the car into reverse and squeal out of the parking, leaving tire tracks as I head for the exit.

“Wanna talk about it?” Marcus asks.

“No,” I snap. I immediately regret the tone of my voice, but I refuse to apologize.

Marcus lifts his hands, steals one of my smokes, and lights it up without a word.

“I lost my shit today,” I say, glaring through the windshield.

Around me, pines begin dotting the landscape as the road inclines. Lavish always looks so fucking perfect. Sometimes, its beauty is like nails on the chalkboard of my fucking soul. Especially on days when I recognize just how far from perfect I am.

“Yeah, I kinda noticed.” Marcus hands me his smoke, and I let him hold it out for a second before I take it.

I exhale a plume of smoke, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. “Let’s just…let’s drop everything.”

“What, Indi?” Marcus chuckles. “A’right.”

I glance at him, but he seems genuinely unconcerned.

I open my window to ash, and leave it rolled down despite how the air tears into the car.

“Why’d you kiss her?” I ask.

“What?” Marcus leans closer, eyebrows lifting.

It’s loud in here, but it’s not that fucking loud. He’s a fucking dick sometimes, Marcus, but he’s still my closest friend.

In fact, he’s my only true friend.

He did what no one else would even have contemplated, and I didn’t even have to ask.

“Why’d you fucking kiss her?” I bark, slamming my palm into the steering wheel.

Marcus snatches the smoke from between my knuckles. “’Cos she’s got a sexy little mouth?”

I want to ask him why he felt he had to put his hand on her throat first. Pull her against him like that. But my chest’s too tight.

“It wasn’t part of the plan.”

“Thought the plan was to make her look like an idiot. I think we succeeded.”

I grit my teeth, but don’t respond. I never openly told him Indi was off-limits. I’d never thought she was. But when he touched her, when he dared put his mouth on hers…I could have spontaneously combusted how pissed off I was.

Can’t tell him any of that without revealing just how much Indi’s clawed her way into my mind. And then he’d be just how he was when I was catching feels with Jessica; telling me to fuck her and get her out of my system already.

I don’t know why, but Marcus seems to think love and all that shit is something reserved for old folks and bros that accidentally knock their chicks up. Anything else is just a one-night-stand. A fling if it happens with the same pair of tits more than once.

I thought I was in love with Jessica. Honest to God I did. But what I did to her wasn’t love. It was pure lust.

“You’re right. She’s not worth the effort,” Marcus says, sounding as if the thought’s coming from fuck-far away.

I say nothing, glancing at him from the corner of my eye.

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