PROLOGUE
BOBBY
I ain’t gonna lie.
Jimmy Strong is one devastating son of a gun.
Especially with the wind blasting in through the driver’s side window, making his short brown hair flip and flop every which way. Well, the bit of his hair that isn’t squished down by that dang hideous red-and-white ball cap he stubbornly refuses to retire, despite its threadbare state, weird stains, and a hole in its bill.
But that’s the thing about Jimmy Strong: when the boy loves something, he won’t ever let it go.
He looks like he’s steering a grand chariot one-handed, the way he drives his prized red pickup. It’s with authority and pride that he pilots his big metal steed. I don’t think he’s let another set of feet inside this truck except me and maybe a past girlfriend or three. Ever since he was given this coughing, old piece of rumbly crap on his sixteenth birthday, they’ve been inseparable.
It’s a love story, really. A boy and his truck.
“Think she wanted to suck me off?”
I screw up my forehead. “The hell you talkin’ about, Jimmy?”
“You know who. That redhead at the store.”
“Who?”
I’m playing dumb. I know damned well who. The last stop we made for gas, the girl at the front counter was a seventeen-or-eighteen-something-year-old with wavy red hair tossed up in a messy ponytail. She had a spatter of freckles over her tiny nose and two sharp eyes. And when I went in to grab me and Jimmy a pair of ice-cold sodas, that redhead was already staring out the storefront window at Jimmy as he filled up his precious truck.
And it wasn’t just any stare.
Because when you look at Jimmy, you can’t just stare. You gotta drink in every damned thing about the boy. You look at his tight gray tank top, stretched over his slender pecs and dancing down his cliff-side abs. You bite your finger as your arrested eyes drag down his long legs and those worn, dusty Wranglers painted down them. You squint your eyes in anguish as you watch the way his ass moves when he struts right up to the pump like it owes him something. His lean, sinewy form holds your gaze so strongly, you forget what you were doing. He’s as lithe as a panther, probably as dangerous as one too, and you haven’t even seen his face yet.
It’s obvious the boy’s a dancer.
He’s got ass for days and swagger that kills.
And if you’ve seen him dance like I have—phew—all of this is just ten times worse, because you know how that boy can move.
I had to go up and damn near slam the two bottles of Pepsi on the counter before that redheaded clerk snapped out of her daze. “H-Hi, did you find everything you needed?” she asked innocently.
“Did you?” I returned sassily.
My mistake was in telling Jimmy all about her ogling after we were back on the highway.
As if Jimmy Strong needed his ego stroked any more than it already is on a daily basis just by existing.
“Whatever,” Jimmy finally throws back at me. “You probably made her all up. There wasn’t any redhead.” He snorts. “Or it was probably a dude.”
I shoot him a look. “Would that be a problem if it was?”
Now it’s Jimmy’s turn to throw me a look of fiery indignance. “Are you serious right now? Tell me your happy ass ain’t serious.” He twists the radio off so fast, he nearly breaks off the knob. “Who do you think you’re riding all the way back home to Spruce with, huh? Am I not the same dude who threw Kenny-fucking-Driver to the dirt the moment he said he was ‘sick of playing on the same soccer team as a homo’ back in high school?”
I sigh. Jimmy’s so easy to set off about this subject. “Okay, I got it, I got it …”
“Am I not the same dude who took you to prom because my date ditched me and you didn’t have one?”
“Ouch.”
“Am I not the same dude who’s been your roommate at South Wood University for the past two years? I’ve been naked in the same room with you more times than I can count.”
“Are you done?”
“Am I not the same dude—” Nope, he isn’t done. “—with a gay older brother who’s such a football legend at Spruce High that to this day, he’s still called the Spruce Juice, even while he coaches the team himself now? And I stood next to him, proudly, as his best man, when he got himself married to Billy Tucker. Does that sound like someone who’s got a problem with gay guys?”
“Good Lord in Heaven, Jimmy, you’ve made your point.”
Satisfied in an instant, he gives me one curt nod, says, “Damn right I did,” then cranks the radio right back up, twice as loud as it was before.