“Where are you taking me?” I ask, glancing around at the familiar streets.
“Home.”
“My dad will kill you.”
He snorts. “Your dad’s a joke. He’s weak, and he will cave.”
It’s my turn to snort. “Trust me, my father is not weak.”
“Any man controlled by what’s in his pants is easily controlled,” he says.
“First off, gross, and second, why are you taking me home?”
“You can’t go to school looking like that.”
“Are you fucking serious?” I ask. “You drove me to the ghetto, left me to fend for myself without a phone or weapons in sight, and now you’re worried what people will think of me without makeup?”
“I took you there to prove a point,” he says. “That’s where you belong. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have figured out your way around so fast.”
“Yeah, well, if I’m so trashy, why don’t you just humiliate me by making me walk around school looking like trash?”
He pulls up our driveway, all the way around the back to the garage. “You don’t look like trash,” he says, leaning over to slide a hand behind my head. He pulls my face around toward him, his gaze dropping to my lips. “You look like every guy’s wet dream.”
“What?” I ask, my heart hammering as I wait for the punchline.
“You look like you just got rolled in the sack,” he says, a rough edge creeping into his voice. “Only I get to see you like that.”
I pull away, shoving his hands off me. “Now you’re trying to tell me what to wear and how to do my makeup? What the fuck, Devlin. I’m not wearing dog ears for you.”
“My school, my rules.” He smirks as he unbuckles his seatbelt and hops out of the car, heading for the back door.
“You think you’re just going to waltz in through the door now?” I ask. “You’ve either got the biggest balls in the world or a death wish. I can’t tell which one yet.”
“No one’s home,” Devlin says, sliding a key into the lock and pushing the door open.
“How the fuck do you have the keys to my house?”
“I grew up here,” he says. “I know this house as well as my own.” He ushers me through with a light touch on my lower back. I try not to let it affect me, try not to notice that it does. Every touch from him is electric, even when I’m baffled by the audacity of this boy.
Trying to calm my racing pulse and jittery nerves, I stomp upstairs and into my room. I don’t even bother telling him to leave while I change into a red pencil skirt, a cream silk blouse, and a pair of pumps. He sits there watching me like some kind of overbearing creeper while I flatiron my hair, pull it back, and secure it into a smooth, low pony draped forward over one shoulder. He doesn’t say a word as I smooth down every last flyaway. He stares at me in the mirror while I do my makeup like he’s trying to memorize my routine.
I ignore him the entire time.
Finally, when I’m done, I turn and give him a curtsy. “Everything up to standards, Father Darling?”
“Don’t call me that,” he snaps.
Whoa. Okay, then.
“Want me to call you Daddy instead?” I tease in my most sugary voice.
“That’s fucking creepy,” Devlin says. “Now let’s go.”
“I would have thought you liked that,” I admit as we start down the stairs. “With all your nasty talk about my brothers when we were hooking up.”
“When you have a grampa like ours, who girls are throwing themselves at with that line, it kills the appeal real fucking fast.”
“You don’t like your grampa very much, do you?” I ask as we step out the back door.