Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 90564 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 453(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90564 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 453(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
“A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course. And no one can talk to a corpse, of course, unless it…” His slight smile dropped when he slung the baseball bat over his shoulder. “Has a dick. Then it gets no credit when it comes to you.” He chucked the bat to the corner of the porch, his blue stare aimed right at me.
What was wrong with me that I liked this crap so much? I always had, since the first day of kindergarten, when he caught a garden snake and put it in the teacher’s desk because she had separated us for talking and put me in time out.
I half rolled my eyes, trying not to smile. We were friends. Friends. Friends. Friends. “He was wearing khakis, Hendrix.”
“Did he have a dick in those khakis?” He shouldered past me through the door, dropping the baseball bat to the floor by the stairs.
I scooped up the stack of flyers and took them inside, dumping them into the trash. The robotic voice of a woman saying, “PlayStation,” cut through the speakers just as I stepped back into the living room.
Hendrix grabbed the spare controller and tossed it to the tattered couch cushion beside him. “Wanna play?”
Friends hung out and played video games, right? “Sure.” I took a seat beside him and picked up the controller.
Simpson’s Road Rage came on the screen, and I smiled. We used to play this with Gracie and Bellamy’s little brother, Arlo. They could barely steer their cars, but Zepp and Hendrix would always let them win. The Big Bad Bully with a soft heart had always made it impossible not to love him.
I won the first game, and during the second, Hendrix ran my car off the road.
“You’re such a sore loser,” I said, ignoring that, over the course of the game, he’d moved a little closer on the couch. “You know what else you’re a loser at? Hiding things. I found your stash.”
“My stash of what?”
“Pop-Tarts, obviously.” I leaned to the right, my shoulder bumping his as I attempted to steer my avatar’s car around a mud-filled hole in the road. “I don’t give a crap about your weed.”
He snorted. “What about my porn?”
I glanced away from the screen. A cocky, way-too-sexy smirk sat on his lips. If he was hoping the idea of him having porn would upset me like it did when I was fourteen, he’d be sadly mistaken. I’d take on-screen porn stars over his revolving door of girls any day.
“Don’t tell me you still have a horde of nudey mags and Debbie Does Dallas DVDs under your bed.”
His hard shoulder bumped mine when his avatar’s beat-up car sideswiped me. “Don’t act like you didn’t watch it with me. Judgey McJudgerson.”
“One time!” Because I wanted to know how to give a blow job. That video had traumatized me. So much so that four years later, I was still terrified of getting jizz in my eye.
“Wanna make it two times?” he asked.
The last thing I needed to do was watch porn with my ex, who I was trying not to fuck. “No.” I took advantage of his distraction and bumped his car into a chicken shack. “Ha! That’s what you—”
Without warning, he grabbed my face, slamming his lips over mine. My heart stuttered in my chest, and for a moment, I allowed myself to taste everything I craved so desperately.
Despite all the reasons I should have put a stop to it, I wanted his lips on mine. When he was this close, I struggled to remember all the reasons why this was bad, but when I did, I broke the kiss. “You can’t just do that, Hendrix.” Because my heart couldn’t take it.
“Would you stop pulling this bullshit, Lola?”
“It’s not bullshit.” It was. “We’re friends.” We should be so much more.
“It’s a massive bag of bullshit because when we were just friends”—his thumb swept my jaw— “this was how it was.”
He was right. Ever since the day we met, there was something between us, some connection. Something that made me feel like what we had was special. And how was I supposed to keep fighting this, fighting him?
He sighed, his grip on my jaw still strong. “I kissed you for the first time in second grade when we were wiping down the lunch tables. I asked you to marry me at the end-of-the-year party in third grade with a ring I got out of a bubble gum machine.” A frown shaped his face before his gaze dropped to my lips. “It’s never just been friends with us.” And there was something so desperate in the way he said that. “You’re just fooling yourself if you think it has.”
A lifetime of memories and lust and love swirled between us on that ratty couch, and I closed my eyes, leaning in to his touch. You could fight enemies, even friends, but it was impossible to fight someone you loved, and he wasn’t just someone. He was the one.