Page 75 of The Cruelest Chaos
I leave, slamming the door closed behind me, not at all sure I didn’t just fuck everything up.
Ella moves away from me. I let her.
“You almost kissed him,” she whispers a little breathlessly beside me as we stand on his porch, the grey day stretched out before us around our little cul-de-sac, these monstrous houses towering into the cloudy sky.
No. I almost killed him.
Chapter Fifteen
I don’t go home.Mom doesn’t call. For two days, we don’t leave Maverick’s house. Considering it’s got nearly as many rooms in it as a hotel, it’s not as if we’re missing out on anything.
Maverick doesn’t talk about his brother again.
I don’t talk about Shane.
We keep our secrets bottled back up, as if letting them breathe was too risky. Too dangerous. Too…close.
He doesn’t tell me about his back, and I don’t press it.
He hurts me. I hurt him back. We get off. I feel myself falling, and I want to stop. I want to hate his luxury and his fancy cars and the fountain in his backyard, the manicured lawn even in the dead of winter. To hate that he orders food to the house like spending money is nothing. That he has a walk-in closet, four guest bedrooms, a bonus roomanda basement I’ve yet to see.
I want to hate him.
I don’t.
He’s funny, especially when he’s high. And he really likes to get high. He’s also sweet, and that surprises me most.
And what surprises me even more is that I like when he’s nice just as much as I like when he’s mean.
He’s smoking a joint on Saturday afternoon, his feet up on the coffee table in the living room, his arm around me as we watch some horror movie that’s more cheesy than funny.
“We’re going out tonight,” he says, apropos of nothing.
I tense. Turn to stare at him.
He exhales, turning his head away from me. Then he meets my gaze and cocks an eyebrow. He looks sexy and dangerous when he does that, with his high cheekbones and those light eyes.
Sexy and dangerous.
Yeah. I guess he is that.
“Lucifer?” he prods me, as if I would have forgotten. How can you forget a name like that? The boy with black hair and blue eyes. Also sexy. With all that coke on his coffee table and the threats he snarled to Maverick, probably also dangerous.
Maverick didn’t say anything about him orSidwhen we left. But I remember what he’d called him:His brother.He’d called Sid his sister.
But Lucifer had said,You’d know all about fucking my wife.
I don’t ask. I don’t know if I want to know.
Now, I just nod slowly.
“He’ll be there. Maybe.” He shrugs, twirls the joint in his fingers, looking down. “Ezra. My other…friends.”
I swallow, look down at my hands clasped together on the blanket thrown across my bare legs. I don’t like going out. I like being in this bubble with him, as if we’re the only people in the world. As if I’m not throwing my life away by staying holed up here.
“It’ll be low key,” he says, as if he knows what I’m thinking.
“Why?”
