Page 34 of Lies and Other Drugs

"I don't do tattoos. Too permanent," I answered with a smile, enjoying the distracting flirtatious banter for a minute while I figured out what to do.

"Whatdoyou do then?" he asked while driving down the highway. We were leaving the city, I just didn't know where we were going.

I thought about my answer for a moment while unclasping my bra and pulling it off through the top of my dress before tossing it in the backseat with the other graveyard of women's clothing. "Whatever I fucking want," I replied.

And we drove. We drove until the city was long gone. We drove until the roads went twisty, and trees created a spring canopy over the pavement. "Okay okay," he said. "Let's play Marry, Kiss, or Kill," he said. We'd been playing games this entire time, stopping only for him to get fuel and for me to piss at a gas station shadier than Samuel Smith.

"That's a dumb game," I grumbled. The sun was coming up, an orange haze filling the edges of the night sky with a warm glow. "I'd just kill everyone," I said automatically.

"Says the girl with a gun loaded with blanks," he teased. So yeah, I told him what all had led up to this point. I told him about William. About Mrs. Mulberry. About how I wished I could have met Noah's daughter or seen Young and William interact. Were they affectionate, or did they do that cheesy shit where they just looked lovingly across the room at one another?

"I didn't know," I groaned for what must have been the thousandth time. “No one ever taught me how to shoot a gun!" I cried in mock outrage. The cool air blasting through his vents was keeping us both awake. Halfway through our impromptu road trip, he started getting phone calls. One after another. He just kept ignoring them. I didn't care enough to ask who was calling.

"Wanna learn?" he asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

I closed my eyes and sunk back into my seat. "Because I'd rather ruin him in other ways." I knew that I had already ruined him for other women. He wouldn’t be able to be with anyone else without thinking of me. We were too good together, and he was too addicted to the power of knowing what he did and watching me submit. I was going to ruin his family. His standing at the school. His reputation with women.

"I like the sound of that," Renon said before pulling a U-turn on the road and heading the opposite direction.

"You going to help me?" I asked with a grin.

Renon tightened his grip on the steering wheel, while twisting his face into an introspective expression. "I don't really do the whole 'help' thing. I kind of take care of myself, you know?"

Rolling my eyes, I responded. "Shocker, a selfish druggie.”

"For the record, aside from the occasional edible, I don't actuallydodrugs. I prefer to be addicted to power. I take paychecks."

Rolling my eyes, a gesture I seemed to be doing a lot of lately, I leaned back in his seat and rested my feet up on the dash. He scowled like any normal man would do when my bare feet were propped up, but he had the good sense not to ask me to remove my feet. "Wow," I began. "That was almost poetic. You should definitely put that in your next rap song."

Renon looked at me out of the corner of his eye. It didn't take much for me to be comfortable with a person, I just naturally owned who I was, and people generally fit within that. There was a certain freedom that came with not caring what others thought. It made it easier to befriend people. It took the pressure off, and our little road trip was just an easy ride between two people who knew that it didn’t matter and long term expectations were pointless.

“So what now?”

“Now I take you home.”

“What about Samuel?” I asked. Why wasn’t I ready for this to end?

“What about him? Samuel Smith will pay up, one way or another.”

Yeah. He will.

Chapter 22

Renon the Drug Dealer dropped me off at the hotel. I wasn’t even sure if Noah was there. The self-destructive part of me was thinking he’d gone back to LA to reconcile with his wife or some shit like that. I didn’t really say goodbye to Renon. Just before I got out of his sexy as sin car, we just exchanged that awkward wave two people shared that had an intense, deep moment but knew it was only fleeting.

I paused before getting out, cars honking at us to hurry. “You never told me how you knew William,” I said. I braced myself for his answer, not really sure I wanted to know that my brother was actually doing the one thing we hated most in this world.

Renon let out a sigh. “He was still on your parents’ health insurance and didn’t want them knowing that he was depressed. I was giving him Prozac. The legit stuff, too. The dude would have had a prescription if he weren’t so afraid to disappoint people. I see a lot of that shit in my line of work, people too embarrassed to get help, so they self-medicate,” he explained with a shrug that looked forced, like he wanted to seem unaffected. Renon looked outside for a moment before continuing. “But...he was a cool dude. Sad. Kinda spacy. But cool. What Samuel did was fucked up.”

I immediately responded. “I’m going to kill him.”

Renon let out a laugh and nodded towards the door, indicating that I should hurry up and leave. “Just make sure you use a gun that works next time? And if you could wait until I get my money, that would bedivine.”

“I’ll do my best,Renon the Drug Dealer,” I said with a wink before leaving his car and feeling both bad and good about how my night turned out. He sped off without a second glance.

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