Page 75 of Anarchy at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 4)
And I don’t like that. Not one motherfucking bit.
“I just wanted to see how bold he was,” Victor tells me, reaching up to push a particularly low-hanging bone away from his face. He’s goddamn terrifying, the way he looks after James. I think again about his hands around Logan’s throat; I wonder what the boys did to Kyler. He will not be attending school at Prescott High next Monday. That much I do know.
“And?” I ask, panting, sweating. For some reason, I’m so nervous all of a sudden that my stomach hurts. The reason Victor looks the way he does, the reason Aaron’s face is so dark and drawn, is because there are only two outcomes to this game: either we win, or we die.
That’s it.
Victor looks down at me with his endless black eyes, and I swear to god, the crowd makes a bubble around him. It’s as if they can sense the way he’s staring at me, like he’s going to consume me.
“Would you dance with my girl in front of me?” he asks, and I shiver.
No.
No, I most definitely would not.Any break from the nightmare that is Prescott High is a good break, even one that has me resting on the couch more often than not. I’m so fucking sore from dancing at the club that I fall asleep on it as soon as we get home.
When I wake up, Oscar is sitting on the opposite sofa and staring at me.
He’s shirtless and beautiful, his body dipped in ink by the hands of some dark, unforgiving goddess. He’s a wet dream on the outside, a nightmare on the in. The way he’s sitting with his back ramrod straight, the HAVOC tattoo on his knuckles stretched and straining with tension, I can tell he’s about to drop a serious bomb on my ass.
What that bomb is, exactly, I have no idea.
“We need to talk,” he says as I groan, sitting up and rubbing at the side of my head with the heel of my hand. What was in those shots?! I wonder, because I swear to you, I haven’t had a hangover since I was like, thirteen and got so drunk on a bottle of Everclear that Penelope had to sit up with me all night to make sure I didn’t choke on my own vomit.
I didn’t get drunk again after that, not until after she died.
“No shit,” I murmur, slumping into the cushions and then wincing as the edge of my phone digs into my ass. With a curse, I dig it out and check the time. It’s barely seven-thirty in the morning. No wonder I feel like such crap; I’m probably still drunk. “What do you want?”
I don’t mean to snap at him like that, but how can I be vulnerable with him? How can I show him a softer part of me, the way I do Victor or Aaron? Because every time that I do, he lashes back at me like I’ve wounded him. That sort of behavior starts to hurt after a while.
He just stares at me in that way of his, slate-gray eyes narrowed, jaw clenched. Whatever it is that he wants to say, he’s having to rip it from the very depths of his soul. Whatever it is, it’s been stitched into his spirit for so long that it’s become a part of his identity. Based on the tension in his shoulders and the frantic flutter of his pulse, I can only assume that this is about something I’ve done to him. Twisted him in some way. Broken him.
“The night we fucked, I was a virgin,” he tells me, and then he sips his coffee, holding it in two inked hands. There is an upside down cross on his stomach. He’s telling me he was a virgin.
My brain isn’t making the connection.
“I’m sorry, what?” I ask, because I know it for sure now. I’m still drunk.
Oscar stares back at me, his glasses sliding low on his nose as he holds his mug to his lips and blows on it, steam fluttering around in the gray early morning light.
“You heard me,” he says, and I did, but … I really am not getting it. I saw him put a gun to a pedophile’s head and pull the trigger as easily as some people might crush a spider. It’s death, sure, but it means nothing. “I wanted you to understand why I left.” He sips the coffee again, but he doesn’t stop staring at me.
“You’re a virgin?” I ask, but only my mouth is really asking the question. My head is still catching up to the idea. Oscar pauses with his mug halfway to his mouth.
“Was,” he corrects, and then the mug finishes its journey. The shape of that mouth … the sharpness of that face … I wish I were the mug in that moment. He licks his upper lip, and I close my eyes. “Was a virgin.”
