I don’t look at her bare legs, muscled from running, long enough to throw over my shoulders while I pound her into the bed, strong enough to ride me while she grinds her clit on my pelvic bone until she cums so hard she can’t stop saying my name…
“Ignore him,” Lennox says, taking her hand. “He’s a sore loser.”
Fuck this.
I throw down the controller and stalk to the door, yanking it open and stepping out into the cloying, cold night. The rain has stopped, but the air is heavy with moisture, and the clouds are churning overhead, promising a second, more violent storm is brewing.
Reggie’s sitting on the trunk of his dad’s brown Oldsmobile across the street, smoking a cigarette. I cross and jerk my chin at the pack beside him. “Give me one of those, would you?”
He hands me the pack and leans back to fish out his lighter, his eyes staying on me. “Bitch problems?” he asks.
“Qué mas?”
“I saw y’all go in with Rae earlier,” he says, watching me light up. “Not giving you shit, man. I got plenty of bitch problems of my own right now.”
“Yeah,” I say, hoisting myself onto the trunk beside him. “Mariana your bitch now,o qué?”
He shrugs. “Si.Until her dad finds out and curb stomps me like a Skull Serpent.”
“Not gonna happen,” I assure him. “The Murder’s got your back.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to pay for all this shit,” he says. “She’s going to have to move in here, and then the baby…” He glances at me as he drags on his cigarette. “Lennox said he was going to figure out our cash problem.”
“I’m sure he’s cooking up something,” I say. Lennox is the brains and the moral compass of our crew, but the cash problem is one he can’t seem to solve. He wants to make the Murder of Crows a legit organization, to help our members and their families, to provide safe spaces for the kids to have fun and be normal, like Rae’s pool, and honest work for the parents. But to do that you need funding, and if there’s a legal way to make fast, good cash, he hasn’t found it yet.
“Maybe it’s time to think about moving a little product,” Reggie says.
“He’d never go for that,” I say. We’ve already had this conversation, so I know his answers, and they make sense, even if I don’t fully agree. But when it comes to the crew, we’re equals, and we need majority rule to move on something like that.
“Maybe he doesn’t need to know,” Reggie says, tossing his cigarette butt in the gutter. “For those of us who need the cash, we could run the whole operation without him being involved. Just for a little while, to get on our feet.”
“I know,” I say, holding up a hand. “I don’t disagree. But you know how he is. It’s the principle of it.”
“Fuck his principles,” he says. “We’re talking about a baby’s life here, man.”
A car turns onto the street, its lights sweeping over us, and I reach for my gun on instinct. But when it pulls up on the other side of the street, I see the pizzas stacked in the passenger seat.
“I’ll talk to him about it,” I promise Reggie, sliding off the hood of the car. “You’ve still got… What? Six months to go before it becomes a problem?”
He gets up too, and we clasp hands before I head across the street and pay for the pizza. The little dweeb looks like he’s about to shit himself when he sees all six-foot-four inches of my tattooed Colombian ass, and he splits with a quickness. I go inside, halfway expecting to see Lennox balls deep in Rae despite his good guy act earlier.
Instead, he’s sitting behind her on the couch, showing her how to play Grand Theft Auto. Somehow, that’s even worse. His thighs block her in on either side as she sits between them, and his arms bracket hers as he shows her how to hold the controller. She clutches it with both hands, a little stitch pulling between her brows. Her tongue pokes out the corner of her mouth in concentration, and it’s the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.
But that just reminds me that neither of us have any business destroying that.
twenty-two
#1 on the Billboard Chart:
“My Heart Will Go On”—Celine Dion
Rae West
It takes me a few nights to get used to sleeping in my new room, knowing the twins are just across the hall. They set up a squeaky old cot in the room, which is a little office space without a proper door. Lennox hangs a sheet over the doorway to give me privacy. Neither of them offer me their bed—not that I’d let them give up that much for me anyway. I’m pretty sure Maddox is intentionally being a dick to prove he doesn’t care about me, despite what he said before. Lennox is too nice to make me share a room with his brother—and too jealous.
By the time I’ve shared a roof with them for a few weeks, I can tell how deeply he feels the sting of rejection when Maddox gets chosen first. He knows that in every way that matters to people in high school, he’s inferior to his twin. I can’t imagine how much that blows, so I try to show him that I favor him over Maddox’s moody brooding. It would help if Maddox wasn’t so damn fine on top of being huge and good at sports and, for reasons I can’t figure out, far more popular with girls.
Valeria says I don’t have to pay her back and that I’m welcome to stay as long as I want, but I insist on getting a job anyway. She promises she’ll hire me as soon as a job opens at Hastings, but in the meantime, I get a job collecting the coins from the newspaper machines around town. The first few days, Lennox drives me around in the El Camino, but once I have enough to buy a used bike at a pawn shop, I assure him that I’m fine and go it alone.