Page 39 of Wicked

“Gross.” April scrunches her face. “You’re joking, right?”

“No joke. Scout’s honor. Look it up.”

April pulls out her cell from her backpack and starts tapping on the screen.

“Okay, you’re partially right. So gross.” She puts down her phone. “Does that mean you’ll help me?” Her brown eyes light up.

“Sure thing.”

She beams. “Cool. Thanks, Ryker.”

“Don’t thank me yet.”

Inside the pocket of my jacket, my cell rings. I pull it out and glance at the screen. It’s Shephard. I push answer and shove Ryker out of the booth.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hey.”

“Can I help you?”

“Fuck’s sake,he’swith you, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” I move closer to the small arcade and watch Ryker help April with her homework, their heads close together.

While she writes furiously in her notebook, he glances up and shoots me a smile. I smile back. He’s endearing and huge sitting alongside petite April.

A memory surfaces of me and Shephard seated at the kitchen table of his parents’ house. I’m stumped on a math problem. He talks me through the steps to getting to the answer. The sex noises from his parents’ bedroom is loud. When I’m over, his parents are either on the couch coming off their high or they’re in the bedroom having sex.

Shephard would continue explaining the steps, his dad’s grunts and his mother’s moans seeming to roll off him. My face heats. My hand goes low. I stroke a finger up and down his thigh under the table. Walk my fingers closer to his crotch.

“Don’t, Harper.” His voice is husky. Low. “Cross the line and it’ll never stop with us.”

The back door hitting the wall. Sam walking in. His smile slips when he sees us. The guilt on my face must’ve been clear as newly washed glass. It was the day the brothers’ war of wills and control started. I was seventeen.

I return to the present. “What can I help you with?”

“Two words. Missy Hayes.”

“Yeah?” Nervousness knots in my stomach.

“Why didn’t you tell me she transferred in last year?”

“It wasn’t important.”

“The hell it’s not.”

“How’d you know?”

“That douchebag, Brett. He brought her by the gym.”

“And?”

“I wasn’t there. I was in my office.”

The security cameras mounted inside the gym. Sam found his best customers at the gym, selling them uppers and downers, getting them addicted.

“She’s harmless.”

---