“You got the beer?” Lucas said.
“Yes, sir.” I moved to the back of the car and popped the hatch. My car was sitting pretty, slammed low and wide as hell with that Rocket Bunny kit I’d finished installing last weekend. I still had a few weeks before my next competition, so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to show it off tonight.
Besides, it was good advertising for Manson and Lucas, considering they’d helped build the engine. Any business we could bring in was good for all of us.
“Let’s get it started then, boys,” Manson said, holding up a twelve pack of IPAs from his trunk. The box of cheap beer I’d brought was to share, but Manson had the good stuff.
“Why do we come to this shit?” Lucas muttered, puffing at his cigarette as he scanned the faces spread among the trees. “I fucking hate half the people here.”
“What about the other half?” Manson said, tossing a beer to me before opening one for himself.
Lucas shook his head. “Don’t like them either.”
Manson snorted. “Right. Let’s get some alcohol in you before you start shit.”
“I don’t start shit,” Lucas grumbled. He was about to pop the top on his can, but the cigarette suddenly went slack in his mouth as he stared toward the bonfire. “Holy fuck. I’ve just seen a ghost.”
We all turned; Vincent a little too quickly because he was probably anticipating an actual paranormal incident. But there was only one ghost who would make Lucas look simultaneously furious and confused. I knew who it was even before I saw her.
Jessica sat on the other side of the fire, her oversized hoodie unzipped and a tight cropped shirt hugging her cleavage. Her long blonde hair was swept over her shoulder, her legs crossed, seated in her folding chair with all the confidence of a queen.
My perfect mental calm instantly shattered.
I’d tried to keep her out of my head, tried to forget the fantasies that Vincent took such pleasure in forcing out of me. Sometimes it disgusted me that I thought about her at all. The woman who used to demand I do her homework for her, who cheated off my tests, and taunted me for everything from my clothes, to my soft voice, to my ears. She shouldn’t have come anywhere near my fantasies.
God, but she did. She popped up into my perverted daydreams again and again.
Jessica had never been a woman to back down from a challenge, never one to let anyone know she was afraid. As we stared, her eyes flickered toward us.
The look of absolute horror on her face when she realized we were looking back was priceless. She looked just as flustered as she had when Vincent and I ran into her at the car wash.
“I told you she was back in town,” Vincent said. He was holding back a grin, and I could tell he was reading way too much into this situation. We’d now seen Jess twice in a month, whichsurely meant destiny, fate, or some other grand mysterious power was behind it.
“What are the fucking odds she’d be here?” Lucas said.
“Considering there’s fuckall to do in Wickeston except this, pretty good odds actually,” I said. I set my thumbnail between my teeth and bit. If I had to stare at her all damn night, I’d have no nails left at all. “Have any of you ever known Jess to miss a party?”
Manson set his beer down on the Mustang’s roof, eyes fixated on the blonde woman like a dog that had spotted a fresh cut of meat.
“We should go say hello,” he said.
Vincent nodded quickly. “We should.”
Lucas shook his head. “We should stop trying to catch a ghost.” But his words didn’t hide his interest. He kept looking at her.
My common sense wanted to side with Lucas. But the obsessive side of my brain couldn’t leave well enough alone. I still wasn’t sure what it was about her that had always kept me so fascinated. She was a massive puzzle I couldn’t figure out, an unanswered question, a problem without a solution.
She was a challenge, and God, I loved a challenge.
“She gives good head for a ghost,” I said, and Vincent nodded his agreement again. The memory of Jess begging for a taste of my cock was one I’d never forget. It was the kind of surreal moment a guy like me could only dream of, the most untouchable girl in schoolwantingto take me in her mouth.
“Be nice, J,” Manson said, in that tone of voice that gave me a little chill down my back. Manson had his pills, his therapy, his meditation and all that shit, but there was still something dark in him that would never quite go away. Something born because it had to be, and alive because nothing could kill it.
That thing, that monster inside him, had gotten a taste of Jess and nothing else could satiate it.
I’d known better, but I think Manson had really believed something would come out of that night at the Halloween party. Something more than just a fuck. Maybe he thought Jess would change, that suddenly she’d realize how badly she wanted us. Maybe he thought she would stick around, integrate into our fucked-up family unit as if she didn’t already have a perfectly cushy homelife.
Fat fucking chance.