17. Nolan
NOLAN
J uliet is quiet. Quiet for a girl like her is never good. She doesn’t get quiet. She gets even. She gets mad. She makes noise. That’s what I fucking love about her—she doesn’t shy away. She doesn’t always do what’s expected. She fights. She screams.
It’s clear she didn’t do what she was supposed to.
I didn’t have to ask Cory if she ever even showed up because she’s over ten minutes late to the meetup.
When we try to ask her where the hell she was, all she does is get out of the driver’s seat of Lex’s SUV and climb into the back.
It takes us a moment to realize she’s waiting for us to take her home and no amount of pressure or demand will get her to tell us what she did in the time between when she left school and now.
Lex drops both her and me off at my house and just as quietly as she shifted into the back seat, she crawls out and heads inside.
“Something’s up with her,” Lex says, watching her go, his brows drawn low over his face.
“Where was she?” I ask him. “You’ve got that tracking on her—I should’ve asked before.”
Lex pulls out his cell. A moment later, he answers me. “She was at The Dionysus Lounge.”
“The whole time?”
He nods and then lifts his head to stare after her.
I can tell he wants to be the one taking her home tonight, but he’s got Scorpion work to do.
It’s been over a week since we talked to Viks and we’re no closer to finding out who’s after her and who might be behind Donovan’s embezzlement fraud case.
I blow out a long breath. “I’ll talk to her.”
How much good talking to her will do when she’s in one of these moods, though, I don’t know. Lex is quiet for a long moment, long enough that I start to get an antsy feeling on the back of my neck like when I saw those coffins in Eastpoint.
Biting out a curse, I let my skull sink back against the headrest. “Just say it, man,” I order.
Lex doesn’t prevaricate. “She needs to be brought in.”
I look at the man like he’s lost his fucking mind. “No.”
“ Fully in,” he continues as if I haven’t spoken.
“Are you out of your mind?” I hold up a hand when he opens his mouth. “No, don’t answer that. I already know—you are.” I drop my hand again. “There is no way in hell we are bringing Juliet fucking Donovan in on our plans.”
“She’s already halfway there,” he points out.
“Not by choice.”
“Not hers or not yours?” he prompts.
Fuck. He has me there. I scrub a hand up over my face, feeling the stubble of my jaw tug at the skin of my palm.
“This is a fucked-up mess,” I admit. “I know you want her with us all of the way, but she’s not ready for it.
If she can’t tell us where she went then what makes you think she can handle what we’re doing? What we’re planning?”
“Jules wants out of this shithole town as much as we do.”
I glance back over my shoulder at the empty back seat. The person in question is no longer there, but I can still smell her telltale scent. Soft, feminine, fragrant. There’s another body that’s not there.
“I don’t like this,” I say. “But even if we do bring her in, we can’t be the only ones to vote to make the decision.”
“Gio will agree.”
Lex’s ready statement has me arching a brow. “You sound confident in that.”
“You saw the way he defended her at Trail’s End,” Lex replies. “He’s in this for her too. He hasn’t fucked anyone else since he’s had her.”
“And you think that makes him primed for her?” I punch the dashboard. “Fuck, Lex. This is more important than who he’s fucking and or not fucking. This is our life!”
“She’s part of that,” he argues.
“For how fucking long?” As soon as the question bursts out of me, I regret it.
There’s no taking it back now. I close my eyes and refuse to look at the man next to me.
Lex is one of my best friends, but he doesn’t know—it’s always been Juliet for him.
There’s never been another. If she walks away from us, I don’t know that there ever will be.
“You think she’d leave us?”
Slow and even, I suck in a shallow breath before releasing it. “I think it’s a possibility we need to plan for.”
“She won’t.”
Lifting my head and opening my eyes, I stare at him. “You can’t know that, Lex.”
He stares back unflinchingly. “I do.”
I grit my teeth, but talking to Lex is like talking to a brick wall sometimes. He has no give. He makes his stance and he cannot be changed. It’s how he came to fall for her. She was the one that saved him in his mind and because of that, she became his—whether she realized it or not.
My fingers curl into a fist, and I unbuckle my seat belt before reaching for the door. “We’ll talk about this later,” I throw over my shoulder as I hop out of the vehicle and lift my bag over my shoulder. “When we have G with us. He needs to be in this conversation before we make any decision.”
It’s not much of a buffer, but at least I have the excuse to put this off. Lex doesn’t say anything, but then, he doesn’t need to. We established our hierarchy long ago and like how he feels about Juliet, that’s another foundation he won’t change.
I trudge up to the front stoop of my house as the sound of his engine growls as he backs up and pulls away.
I don’t know how much longer we can keep going like this.
There are some people that strip you down to your base urges, the primal part of you that only cared about two things: surviving and fucking. Juliet is one of those people for me.
As I enter the house, I go in search of her and instead of finding her in the bedroom, I find her out on the back porch.
Her long blue hair has been pulled up into a messy ponytail and she’s changed out of her day clothes and into a pair of leggings and a loose t-shirt that probably belongs to me or one of the other guys.
She stands against the sagging railing of the porch with her eyes tilted up to the sky.
As the back screen door creaks shut, she lifts a hand and that’s when I realize she’s not out here for no reason.
The scent of weed hits me. Fuck. My mom is going to be so pissed when she gets home. That smell takes forever to go away.
Still, I can’t find it in me to chastise Juliet about it. There’s something driving her tonight and I plan to delve into her head and figure it out.
I step up next to her and hold my hand out. “Share?” I ask.
Her fingers brush mine as she hands over the joint and I put my lips to the same place she had hers.
I suck in a lungful and blow it out before handing it back.
Seconds pass and the only sounds around us are the low hum of the heating unit kicking on when the house gets too cold and vehicles passing nearby streets.
Someone’s dog barks and a car backfires.
“Wanna tell me where you went instead of going to Cory’s?” I ask.
Her answer is immediate. “Is it important?”
I watch her because I can’t not watch her. There’s so much about this girl that my eyes are drawn to her each and every time. I know staring at her won’t ever unlock all of her secrets, but I can’t help myself. She’s the sun and I’m just a planet drawn into her orbit. We all are.
“Depends.”
Her fingers tighten around the joint in her grip. “On?” She’s hedging, but she hasn’t told me to back off or go away. Whether she admits it or not, if she really didn’t want to be around me she would’ve gone back inside the second I stepped out here.
Juliet isn’t the type to suffer an unwanted presence in silence. When she’s calm like this, she is repressed chaos. Something happened today to upset her and just like if it’d been Gio or Lex, I want to fix it.
“It depends on if it’s the reason for your quiet,” I say.
She sighs. “Do I need to talk all the time for you to think I’m fine?”
“Fine is what people say they are to shut everyone else up.”
Juliet doesn’t respond to that and I reach up, sliding a hand over my cheek and turning away as I try to hide my smile. I used to think she was so damn hard to understand. Now, I know she’s quiet because she agrees with me but doesn’t want to admit it.
After a few more seconds of peaceful silence, I drop my hand and try again. “Is it about your parents?”
A long stream of smoke and the strong scent of weed fills my nostrils. “No.”
“But it’s bugging you lately, isn’t it?”
“It’s been bugging me for months,” she snaps back. “Still doesn’t mean that’s what this is about.”
“But you admit it’s about something.”
“Are you fucking serious?” Juliet glares at me. “Can’t you just stand there and look pretty for a change? Do you have to try and psycho-analyze me?”
I grin. “You think I’m pretty?”
She groans and slumps over the railing, the hand holding her joint coming out as she presses her forehead to the wood. “Fuck off.” The insult is muffled. My smile widens.
“Come on, Princess.” I nudge her side. “Tell me what’s up, maybe talking about it will make it better.”
She lifts her head and crystal blue eyes turn my way. “It won’t.”
The corners of my mouth dip as the smile fades. “How can you be sure?”
“Just am,” she mumbles.
Juliet’s profile is smooth—petite chin, angled jaw, a straight, pert nose. I trace it in the dark, standing back so the illumination of the lights coming from inside the house hits her just right to throw the other half of her in shadow.
“I went to The Dionysus Lounge.”
It takes me a moment to realize she answered my earlier question. When I do realize it, I stiffen. “You did?”
“Uh-huh.” She drops ashes over the side of the railing. “Asked Ma-Ri why she fired me and found out the reason.”
I close my eyes. Fuck. When I reopen them, she’s looking directly at me again.
“You already knew, though.” It’s not a question. I answer it regardless.
“Yes.”
She nods. “I figured that out.” Her eyes move back to the yard and the sky. “I was hurt, but then I realized that Ma-Ri doesn’t owe me anything. She was nice. She even tried to offer me severance money even though I’d only worked there a few months.”