I exhale, my chest tight. “I love you, you know that,” I tell him, patting his leg.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t know, Lo,” I say. “I want to. I want to so f**king badly, but it’s not as easy as wishing for that kind of peace. I hate him for things he did to me, for the things he does to you.”
Lo shakes his head and sits up. He wipes his face with his shirt and his eyes turn cold again. “Jesus Christ,” he laughs a bitter f**king laugh. “You don’t get it. I deserved every word he said to me. You didn’t know me in prep school, Ryke. I was a f**king shit. I was terrible.”
I glower. “Don’t ever f**king tell me that you deserved it. No one deserves to be beat down every f**king day.”
He takes deep breaths, his muscles starting to relax. He looks up at me and says, “He’s never touched me.”
He knows that’s not what this is about. I don’t want to do this with him. We argue about this all the time. But I have to get it through his thick f**king skull. I lean forward and grab his face between both my hands. “Stop defending him. Not to me, okay?”
There are some things we will never agree on. No matter how hard he f**king tries to convince me. No matter how many times we end up on the ground.
He pulls away and I pull back, tension breaking between us. Silence thickens for a moment, and I think maybe he’s waiting for me to apologize or maybe trying to work himself up to it. But then he points to my face.
“That bruise right there, that’s for f**king my girlfriend’s little sister by the way.”
My stomach churns. What?
49
RYKE MEADOWS
Lo’s face sharpens again, but he flashes a half-smile. “Tabloids caught you making out just outside of Devils Tower.” He grabs his phone out of his pocket and scrolls through it. Then he chucks the cell at me. “The photograph is on every gossip site.” I avoid the tabloids, so I’m not surprised that I missed it. Just that it exists at all.
I stare at the picture with hard eyes.
Daisy is on my shoulders. We were putting a hammock up in the trees, and she tightened the straps on the last trunk. But the picture froze us in time: Her head dipped down, her lips against mine, my hand on her neck, my fingers stained with purple and pink dye. Her hair still wet.
She’s smiling as she kisses me, which pulls her long, deep reddened scar.
Her f**king scar—it’s all over the news. Her parents are going to find out about her face from a f**king tabloid. Dammit! My jaw locks and I throw the phone back to Lo with more aggression than I intended.
“Pissed you got caught?”
I don’t say word. I can’t speak without yelling.
“Please talk to me,” Lo snaps, “because I need to understand what’s going on or I may just punch you again.”
I shake my head, my voice deep and low. “It just happened.”
“It just happened?” Lo shakes his head, as though I always use that excuse. I’m sure I have before. “That’s a really shitty thing to tell me.” The red dirt coats our bodies and has turned Lo’s hair a shade lighter. “You f**k Lily’s little sister, and you say, oh it just f**king happened? What’d you fall on her? Did you add her to your tally of girls? Is it a one-night stand kind of thing?”
“That’s not what I f**king meant.” I grimace at all of those. I try to calm down about the photograph and about the truth reaching her parents before we could tell them. What’d we think, we could live in a fantasy forever? We should have told them about the riot before we left Paris.
“Then what did you mean?” he asks.
I meet his eyes. “It’s serious.”
“So serious that you shared it with everyone.”
“Because I knew you were going to jump down my f**king throat!” Anger catapults me to my f**king feet. He stands with me, both of us breathing heavily again.
Round f**king two.
“If you cared about her,” he says, pointing a finger at me, “then you wouldn’t be sneaking around like you’re doing something wrong!”
“Fuck you!” I shout. “You’ve made this impossible, Lo!”
“She’s EIGHTEEN!” Lo yells. He takes two hostile steps towards me, and even though my body screams to run at him with a fist flying, I have to take two steps back again. “She’s like my little sister. It wasn’t supposed to be possible! But you didn’t care. You still banged her.”
I’m so f**king screwed. The betrayal flashes in his eyes all over again.
I force down this emotion that threatens to rise and overtake me.
Lo glares. “Your c**k finally got the best of you, didn’t it?” He’s the worst devil on my f**king shoulder. And I love him. “She turned eighteen and you could finally stick it in—”
“No,” I growl. “It wasn’t f**king like that!”
“I should leave you alone in this desert,” Lo sneers. “I am kicking myself right now, for every time I let you near her, for every time I let you be alone with her—”
“You don’t know what you’re f**king talking about.” I think about all the times she was alone and afraid and hurt, and I was the one who was f**king there. No one else was around. He had his own shit to deal with, so why the f**k do I get vilified and then praised whenever it’s convenient for him?
“I don’t know what I’m talking about?” He rubs his lips and grimaces. “How long, Ryke? Tell me that, how f**king long have you liked her more than just a friend, and let’s see if it’s all in my head?”
“I don’t know.” I do though. I always have. I just can’t stomach admitting it.
“I’m going to ask you again,” Lo says, his voice rattling with anger. “How long—”
“Stop,” I say forcefully.
He takes one step closer. “No, how long—”
“FOR YEARS!” I scream, veins protruding in my arms, my face reddening, unleashing this thing held captive inside of me. I step towards him. “Is that what you want to hear?! Years, Lo.”
He clenches his teeth so hard. “You’re lying?” He didn’t want to believe it. He wanted to be wrong.
“I’m not,” I say, hot tears burning my f**king eyes. “I have been so f**king attracted to that girl. And I never planned on doing a f**king thing about it. I never was going to try. And I tried…” I point at him. “I tried so f**king hard not thinking about her like that. It was wrong. I knew it was f**king wrong. I suppressed everything as much as I could.” But when she was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—I was drawn to her in immeasurable f**king ways. The guilt was always there. I chose to ignore it.
“Then why not stay away from her?” Lo retorts. “Why not put a hundred f**king feet between you and Daisy? You flirted with her every day, Ryke. You became her friend.”
“I convinced myself that nothing would ever happen, so I thought it was okay to push further.”
“You’re a f**king idiot!” Lo yells at me.
I know.
“She was so hot that you couldn’t say no after she became legal—”
“No,” I cut him off before he continues. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it f**king like?!” Lo shouts.