Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Briar
I climb into my Mustang wearing a shit-eating grin and hum a nonsense tune to myself as I head home. I have to start getting Indi in trouble more often—especially if I can spend every detention with her.
My fuck, those sounds she made. The way she clamped around my fingers when she came…
I shift in my seat, but I don’t will my erection to fade. This time, I relish it. I don’t care how wrong it is letting myself get this close to her. I’m on a high I haven’t been since Jess?—
Squeezing my eyes shut, I shake my head. When my eyes pop open, it’s to glare at the station wagon in front of me.
Now I get it.
When I’m with Indi, I forget that I’m a monster. That’s why I can’t get enough of her. If it hadn’t been for Addy, we could have been perfect together. But the past will always creep in and contaminate what we could have had.
My phone rings, and I answer it through my car’s Bluetooth audio system.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, bro.”
I blink. Why the hell does Marcus sound so fucked off? “Hey, man, what’s up?”
The brief silence that follows weighs a ton. “You still coming through or what?”
Coming through…?
Fuck.
Fuck!
“Shit, man, I forgot I had detention.”
“Detention,” Marcus repeats.
“Yeah, I told you yesterday. ‘Cos of that shit with—” I cut off before I say her name, but that doesn’t make it any better.
“That’s cool man.”
I blink, mouth still open to protest. “Oh. Okay.”
What the fuck? I expected a meltdown of epic proportions.
“So you still coming through?” Marcus asks.
“Yeah. Sure.” I glance in the rearview mirror and put on my indicator. “Be there in five.”
We’re two beers in when things start getting weird.
“Dunno what I’m going to do,” Marcus says.
We’d been talking about coach’s obsession with the 46 defense.
“About what?” I don’t look at him, instead inspecting the rows of bottles stretched in front of us.
“Brandon’s being a fucking prick.”
“He’s back already?”
Marcus shakes his head. “Called me. Wants me working this weekend.”
“This close to finals?”
Marcus runs the rim of his beer glass against the bar’s scarred surface. “Doesn’t give a shit about that.”
“He should. Your grades?—”
“Mean nothing.” Marcus drags at his cigarette before crushing out the filter in our ashtray. “He told me attorneys won’t make close to what I will, working for him.”
I bark out a laugh, but my face falls when Marcus turns blackly somber eyes on me.
“Dude, what does that even mean? There’s no way you can make?—”
“Not the security company,” Marcus says, his eyes and voice dropping simultaneously. He leans in. “Brandon…his money never came from the company.”
I sit back, my eyebrows lifting to my hairline. “Then where?”
Marcus shrugs a little, and then takes out his vape. He offers it to me, but I wave it away—I’m much more interested in what he’s got to say than in getting high.
“My dad’s into some dodgy shit, okay?” Marcus hits his vape again, considers it, and then slips it back into his pocket. He shakes loose a cigarette, and this time when he offers I accept. I cup my hands around it to light it, and hitch up one foot so it’s on the highest rung of the bar stool. “Dodgy how?”
“Probably best if you don’t know,” Marcus says, his eyes going everywhere except to mine. He seems nervous, but it doesn’t look as if this is news to him.
“You’ve known about this?”
“Yeah,” he says, rolling the tip of his cigarette around in the ashtray until the ash forms a peak. “Helped him before. But…” He swipes at the air with his hand.
What the fuck is he trying to spit out? I do my best to be patient, but I realize I’m drumming my fingers on the table the same time Marcus does.
His spine snaps straight, and he downs the rest of his drink. “Forget it.”
“No, man, don’t—” I grab his shoulder and squeeze. “Just say what you gotta say.”
Marcus shrugs off my hand, but after another pull at his cigarette, his dark eyes dart over to me and fix.
“The first time he asked…” He licks his lips. “He caught me on a good day. Or a bad one, I guess. Made it sound easy. So I did it, but it all went to shit. And then…” He shrugs, and lifts the hand holding his cigarette to stroke his jaw. Smoke obscures his face before he sits back as if to get out of that toxic cloud.
“I keep going back and forth—hating it, loving it, hating it. What if I stop hating it?”
“What did he ask you to do?”
Marcus’s jaw bunches, and his throat moves as he swallows. But before he can answer, his phone rings.
I hold out my hand, telling him to ignore it, but when he looks at me, I already know he wouldn’t dare to.
He pulls out his phone, and his shoulders sag as soon as he sees who it is.
“Marcus.”
He lifts his gaze, and a rueful smile raises one side of his mouth. “What you gonna do, right? It’s family.”
My skin crawls at the bitterness in his words, but he pulls away when I grab him to keep him from leaving. He weaves his way out of the pub, lifting his phone to his ear as soon as he pushes on the door to go out.
Drumming out a relentless staccato on the wood, I finish the rest of my beer and order us another round. Hopefully, Marcus will feel more talkative after another.
What kind of dodgy shit could his father possibly be into? Money laundering? Drugs? Arms?
Christ, the list is endless, now that I think about it. And it’s starting to make sense; why his father is always out, the random violence when he comes back. I don’t doubt for a minute that you need to have a mean streak to make it big in the criminal underworld.
A hand falls on my shoulder, and I twitch as I’m hauled out of idle speculation.
Marcus sits, and taps his phone against his thigh for a few seconds before putting it away. He opens his mouth, but I don’t let him speak.
“I’ll call my dad tonight,” I say. “If I can get hold of him, then?—”
The bartender brings us our beers, and I wait for him to be out of earshot before I continue. “We’ve got like six months before the end of term. You can stay with me.”
Marcus swings his head to look at me, frowning hard. “I can’t do that.”
“Of course you can,” I say through a laugh. “I told you, my dad probably wouldn’t even notice. But I’d rather ask, then he doesn’t think I’m suddenly drinking twice the amount of beer as usual.”
Marcus’s lips lift into a phantom smile. “He won’t mind?”
“Fuck no!” I lift my beer bottle and tap it against his. “And long as you don’t hog the X-Box, then I don’t give a fuck either.”
Marcus lets out a laugh, but it sounds stiff and uncomfortable.
I clap a hand on his back, and lean in. “Now, wanna hear what I got up to in detention?”