Page 64 of Dirty Hot Valentine
That was a lie. In the past couple of days, she never stayed out late or left the apartment after I fell asleep. A true friend that I loved so much, and with her petite self, she reminded me a lot of my sister.
My arms flung around her, holding her tight.
She hugged me back.
“Thank you, Ash.” I broke our embrace to look at her, tears burning around the corners of my eyes. “For everything.”
A warm smile lit her face. Then she shook the vodka bottle in my face. “We doing this or what?”
“Sure.” I sniffled. “I have a feeling we’ll be doing this every night from now on. Hangovers are good excuses to skip class in the morning.”
“Oh c’mon,” she said as I fetched two glasses from the kitchenette attached to the living room. “You can’t hide here forever.”
“Can’t I?” I sank in the couch, placing the glasses on the coffee table.
“Not if you wanna get your degree.” She blew a big puff of the joint and handed it to me. Then she opened the bottle and poured our shots. “You worked so hard to get back to school. You can’t throw that away because you think some dicks will look at you funny for being involved with the wrong boyfriend.”
Wrong.
No better way to describe it. Being with Dusty was wrong from the start. Wrong and twisted and sick.
Who could find love in such dark places where we’d been trapped? How could I fall for him so hard knowing exactly who he was? How could I fall at all after what happened to my sister? How could he after what I did to him?
But we did, and it felt so fucking good. Not wrong at all. Perfect.
Everything that had been traumatizing me since Annie’s abduction, all the pain, the sadness, the heartache I couldn’t shake on my own, melted under Dusty’s scorching touch. He burned it all away, replacing it with everything I’d ever been searching for my whole life.
Love.
Trust.
A lump clogged my throat. I sipped on the vodka, the weed already kicking in. “I know we didn’t look like the right fit, but he was… Everything was going so well. He was going to leave and stay here with me…” Tears streamed down my face, hushing me.
“Cameron, you gotta focus on your future, girl. You’re going to be an engineer. A great one. And you’ll have your own harem of sexy big man candies that aren’t on a killing spree.”
I couldn’t laugh. Actually, I got upset. I didn’t want a harem of anything. Wrong or not, I wanted Dusty. The idea of being with someone else was…beyond my imagination.
“Do you think…?” I bit my lips in pain as I imagined him thinking about being with someone else. Rosewood must have been swarming with sluts throwing themselves at him now.
“Cameron!”
Ashley’s yelp and the sound of glass breaking made me flinch. I glanced at her and then at my hand where she was staring. “Shit.”
“I’ll get you a towel and the first-aid kit.” She jumped off the couch. “You think we should go to the ER?”
I gazed at the blood and shattered glass in my palm. “No. I’ll be fine.” I took some of the pieces out of it and poured some vodka on the wound from the bottle. It seared my flesh, and I hoped it was ten times harder to mask the fire I had inside me.
13. Dusty
The afternoon sun penetrating the tall trees and falling on my face woke me up. I squinted at it as I sat straight. My fingers ran through my hair, and dirt and dry leaves fell off.
Great, I’d slept in the woods.
Standing, I dusted my jeans, and then I fished out my phone out of it. A few missed call alerts and text notifications stuck on the screen but none from Cammie. Of course.
Without thinking, I called her.
My heart banged as I anxiously waited to hear her voice, my feet crunching the twigs back to the house, the annoying dial tone ringing in my ear.
