Page 12 of Wicked Me
“Turn right,” I said, pointing. “We’re looking for a yellow house.”
Tony turned, squinting at the road ahead. Judging from the leap his cigarette made from relaxed to jutting straight out, I could tell he was about as thrilled as I was to be in this neighborhood after dark.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
“No.”
“That makes me feel so much better,” Tony said.
He would go with me, of course, since he knew all about the debt to Hill that wasn’t mine, my family’s extracurricular activities, why my right hand looked mummified in gauze. That was why I’d asked him because I sure as hell wasn’t going alone. He’d had my back since eighth grade during a particularly risky Dungeons & Dragons mission. Those were the good old days. The good, geeky, I-didn’t-have-a-criminal-record-yet days.
A loud bass beat drowned out the classic rock station in Tony’s Buick and announced where a party was long before we saw it. Some girl stood in the doorway of a house—not a yellow one—shrieking and giving the full moon her middle finger. A built Asian was shoving a big, black guy between two parked cars, out into the street. Dozens of people stood around on the lawn, cans and bottles in their hands winking in the glow of Tony’s headlights in a sort of strobe-like warning that might as well have read#sorrynotsorry.
My stomach curled at that particular hashtag, made the backs of my eyes burn, my pulse pound, so I attempted to scorch that memory from my mind with another tilt of the tequila bottle. There. Not gone, but thoroughly melted and dulled into something rubbery I could wedge into place at the back of my mind.
“Not that house,” I said.
“Good because it looks like they started without us.”
I hated parties like those, so out of control and unpredictable, and I was about to contribute to it, to break these people even more than some of them probably already were. Unless they got their drugs from someone other than Slim at the yellow house. Which was two houses down from the party and the shrieking chick.
While Tony pulled in next to the curb farther down the street, I took another blast of liquid courage and elbowed the package hidden inside my leather jacket. All I had to do was get in, toss Slim his drugs, get out. Alive. That would be really great.
Except I had no idea who Slim was. This should be fun.
We strode toward the house with purpose, the bass beat thumping a new, louder rhythm for my heart from the party down the street. Get in. Get out. The guilt I felt for ruining lives could eat me alive, slowly, afterward.
“This won’t take long,” I said more for myself than Tony.
“Better not.Golden Girlsstarts at eleven.”
I glanced at him, not quite sure if he was fucking with me or not. The guy was a walking contradiction. He must’ve started lifting weights before I met him six years ago because dude had always been built like a truck. Yet he wore a light blue T-shirt with two orange kittens licking at bowls of milk plastered on each of his pecs. No one ever gave him shit about that shirt, either, or any of his cat shirts. One look at the size of his fists shut their mouths for good.
“Really?Golden Girls?” But he didn’t answer because the door to the yellow house opened.
A massive Latino guy stood there with some lady practically wrapped around the side of his hip. She giggled and hiccupped at the ceiling.
I’d seen that same glassy-eyed, lost expression in my baby sister while she tripped up the stairs at four in the morning. It twisted me up just as much now as all those times. This girl was battling a demon I couldn’t see, but I knew it by name. H, brown sugar, hell dust on the streets, otherwise known as heroin. The same thing that was hidden inside my jacket. The same thing that had nearly killed Rose.
The big guy ushered us inside, then shoved the girl at me so he could frisk Tony.
“You can’t see me because I have clear corners,” the girl whispered to me.
I faced her toward a red couch in the corner of a living room with two bottle blondes sitting on it so she’d focus on something other than the war inside her. Her pale skin felt cold and slicked with sweat, yet somehow hot at the same time. I hated how it felt, how it was like a punch to the gut because it was such a rough reminder of dragging Rose back downstairs and shoving her into the bathroom before Mom and Dad woke up to see the damage already done. When their little girl was near death, they had no choice but to see. So they swept Rose up into a tidy corner known as drug rehabilitation to forget about her while they plotted ways to keep it all a secret. We couldn’t have a U.S. senator who was incapable of running his own family become the next president, now could we?
The frisker pushed the high girl away from me then ran his hands around my waist, down my jeans, inside my jacket. When his fingers met the package, the tequila sloshed in my stomach. But he didn’t do anything other than reattach the girl to his hip.
Around us, another quieter, less crowded, party raged. It was hotter inside the house than out. Sweat poured down my back, soaking my shirt, making me even more uncomfortable. I wished like hell I could take my jacket off, but I couldn’t risk anyone other than Slim seeing the package.
Get in. Get out. Alive.
“Where’s Slim?” I asked, but the dude ignored me by plunging his tongue down the girl’s throat.
Pretty sure Slim wasn’t in her mouth.
Tony and I cut through the house, my gaze catching on a pair of grinding hips, perfect pink lips framed with flawless skin, and silky dark hair. Almost Paige, but not. The girl started toward me, her hips swaying, and all I could think about were what Paige and Riley might be doing right then.
Please, God, not fucking. Even if he did treat her right, I would lose my mind just hearing the sounds and seeing his smug expression every morning for the next six weeks. He knew how I felt about her, hadalwaysfelt about her, which would explain the glee all over the stupid prick’s face when he caught me spying their full-body hug. But if they weren’t fucking, she would be living in my house for six whole weeks.
