Page 15 of Dirty Rock

“Benji, stop it! You’re ruining everything This isn’t meant to happen yet!” Candy cried, but Benji’s cool was gone, and when I rolled to the ground in pain, I blinked up at him through narrowed eyes only to see a blurry giant in a dark suit towering over me. He looked big enough to eat me up in one gulp, and at that moment, Rhett Ryan the superstar couldn’t do anything for me.

Rhett Ryan, the boy who’d survived returned.

He came to the forefront of my mind, and he forced me to raise my legs and arms over my body to protect myself… right before the boot connected with my ribs and the onslaught began.

Unfortunately for me, that boy didn’t fight. He didn’t answer back.

The only thing he knew how to do was hold his breath, put up the walls around him, and wait for things to get dark.

They did.

Pretty quickly, too.

Chapter Five

“Rhett? Shit!”

I groaned, trying to blink away the dark, distorted shadows in front of me.

My knees scraped against the concrete pathways, and blood dripped from the corner of my mouth when I rose on all fours and felt Finn’s hand on my back.

“Fuck, careful,” I hissed, some kind of wound beneath his rough palm grating me.

Candy and her brute had fled only moments before, leaving me to pick up my own arse that was now covered in bruises.

“What the hell happened?”

I closed my eyes and dragged in a breath through flared nostrils. “I got fucked up.”

“By choice?”

Angling my head his way, I cracked an eye open. “Yeah, dipshit. I chose to come out here and get my fucking skull kicked in.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Finn dropped down to the ground with a thud, his arse planted in place as he pushed the heels of his hands against his forehead. “I thought you meant you got high. Your face is… shit, Rhett. You’re—”

“A mess?” I offered, collecting more blood-tainted spit and tossing it out of my mouth with a flurry. “You just gonna sit there like a useless lump, or you gonna help me up? My ribs fucking—” I didn’t get to finish before I hissed, my face scrunching up.

“Am I going to lose my job? I have a kid, man.”

“I don’t give a shit if you own a zoo filled with endangered animals. Could youpleaseget off your arse and help me the fuck up?”

“Right. Yeah. Sorry.”

I couldn’t argue with the way he picked me up with ease, moving me carefully until I was standing. I fell back against the nearest wall with a thud, my head cracking against the brick, but I was hurting in too many other places to care about more pain.

“We shouldn’t have come here,” Finn said after a minute of silence.

“No shit,” I huffed out, laughing.

“Where do you want me to take you? The hotel, or the nearest hospital?”

“First rule about celeb club: you don’t walk into public spaces with a bust-up face from a stripper-fuck gone wrong when you’re in celeb club.”

“Hotel, then?” he offered tightly.

“Think you can carry me?”

Finn’s smirk was slow to grow. “I’ve had bigger shits than you, Rhett. Let’s go.”

---