Chapter 21

twenty-one

LOLA

I hadn't seen Hendrix since last night. He wasn't at school all day, and he wasn't home when I got there that afternoon. I wasn't his keeper, and he didn't have to tell me what he was doing, but still… He couldn't even send a text?

Well, screw him.

I took the opportunity to scout the house for his most recent Pop-Tart hiding spot. Five minutes into my search, I found them.

Under his bed. That was super original…

When I opened the box, I laughed at the sticky note taped to the inside flap—Hendrix's chicken scratch noting the number of packages inside. It was childish, but I'd always loved our stupid little wars.

When we were ten, he had spent two whole weeks slipping a whoopie cushion on my seat every time I sat down at school. I got so mad at him that I finally threatened to tell everyone his middle name if he didn't stop. Then there was my phase of putting his hand in warm water every time he fell asleep, just to try to make him pee the bed. Much to my disappointment, he never did.

We had a lifetime of history and friendship. Being "friends" with him had never been as hard as it was now, though.

I knew he wanted more, and it broke me not to give it to him. Often, I asked myself whether maybe, just maybe, the resentment I knew he had over my "cheating" might be bearable if it meant I got to have him. But I knew Hendrix, and sooner or later, it would eat him alive. We'd tiptoed around it, for the most part, ignored it, and as long as we remained friends and nothing more, we could keep doing so. And I could keep my secrets.

I took a foil pack, then tucked the box of his prized pastries back underneath the bed before I went downstairs to do my homework at the kitchen table.

The sunlight coming through the window faded. I glanced up from my English paper outline to the clock by the back door. It was past seven, and Hendrix still wasn't home. Worry crept into my stomach. I didn't want to be a mother hen, but…

I tossed my pen to the table, picked up my phone, and sent him a text.

Me: Hey. Are you dead?

SATAN: YES

SATAN: Put my body dust in a bottle and send it out to sea.

SATAN: Friend…

I rolled my eyes. Maybe he was with Wolf. Or at a girl's house…The usual sense of sickness accompanied that thought.

SATAN: Why?

I didn't respond to that. He wasn't dead. I didn't need his life story, though I was sure I'd get it. I went back to my paper and managed one word before my phone dinged.

SATAN: Miss my charming personality?

SATAN: Or my massive, pierced cock?

Me: Neither.

SATAN: I don't believe you.

Seconds later, a picture of his erect dick popped up.

SATAN: Hard as the flagpole at National Mall.

No words. I had no words. Just when I thought Hendrix could no longer shock me… National Mall…

I had to wonder where he could be with his hard dick out, who with… I hated the nasty little spike of jealousy that lanced through me, the way I zoomed in on the picture like some psycho looking for evidence.

I placed the phone down and took a deep breath before I went back to my paper.

My pen tapped the table in an angry rhythm as I stared, unseeing, at the words on the page. I tried not to care; I really did.

We were friends. I was the one telling him we could only be friends…

But screw it, we were who we were. A psycho is as a psycho does. If I had to be insane, I was taking him down with me.I tossed the pen to my book and snatched the phone, stamping my fingers over the device.

Me: I just wanted to check if I have a free house…

Bubbles immediately danced across the screen. Then stopped. Then started again. I could practically feel the rage coming through the phone, and I delighted in it far too much.

SATAN: For who? You and a soon-to-be corpse?

Me: Maybe…

SATAN: If you stick a soon-to-be-dead dick in you, you may as well just go ahead and call yourself a necromaniac. ‘Cause that fucker has one foot in a shallow-ass grave.

Me: It's a necrophiliac!

I smiled as I sent the text. God, I was a hypocrite for liking his volatile possessiveness.

SATAN: Same thing. They both end with ac and my baseball bat in their skull.

Yep. Insane. Both of us.

The doorbell rang. I tossed my phone to the kitchen table and got up, knowing it would drive Hendrix crazy if I suddenly stopped responding.

I answered the door to a scrawny guy in khakis and a dress shirt. He thrust a pink flyer in my face. "Our church is having a revival this week. Free pizza and root beer."

I glanced down at the crinkled paper while he rambled about the merits of his church—

Come one, come all, to the revival at Parkway Pentecostal Church.

Be touched by the Holy Spirit

and know the Lord.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. 8 pm.

He started in on how his preacher could save my soul. I couldn't get a word in edgewise. No doubt he was well versed in dodging the non-believers. I debated shutting the door in his face, but just as I glanced up from the pink paper, Wolf's truck rumbled into the drive.

Hendrix's head popped over the roof when he got out of the passenger side, then slammed the door. Glaring, he rounded the front bumper with a wooden baseball bat clutched in his grip.

I looked from him to Church Boy, remembering the text he'd sent moments ago about a corpse, a baseball bat, and a skull. Oh, shit.

Hendrix marched through the yard, swinging the bat like a psycho. As much as I secretly liked riding the crazy train, Church Boy was not going to be all aboard.

"Um," I said, interrupting his speech on the End Days. "You should go."

But he kept talking, obviously not one to be dissuaded by heathens trying to kick him the hell off their property.

Hendrix's footsteps clomped up the porch steps. He gave the guy's pressed slacks a very judgmental once over. "Shit. Your dick has never seen the light of day, has it?"

The guy turned round, slowly tilting his head back to take in Hendrix's muscular frame towering over him.

Hendrix snatched one of the flyers, skimming over it on snort. "Parkway. That's that cult church, isn't it? Don't you guys speak in tongues and have snakes and shit?"

The guy audibly swallowed. "Wh-why would we have snakes?"

"Why wouldn't you?" Hendrix glanced from the flyer to me, readjusting his grip on the bat. "Is this the soon-to-be corpse?"

Church Boy dropped his stack of papers and took off down the steps and across the lawn, tripping over himself several times before he made it to the street. Hendrix watched him go, baseball bat propped on his shoulder.

When the guy finally disappeared around a bush, Hendrix turned back to me. "Going for good boys now?"

"Uh, no. Give me some credit."

"A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course. And no one can talk to a corpse, of course, unless, of course, the corpse…" His slight smile dropped when he slung the baseball bat over his shoulder. "Has a dick. Then it gets no credit when it comes to you." He chucked the bat to the corner of the porch, his blue stare aimed right at me.

What was wrong with me that I liked this crap so much? I always had, since the first day of kindergarten, when he had caught a garden snake and put it in the teacher's desk because she had separated us for talking and put me in time out.

I half rolled my eyes, trying not to smile. We were friends. Friends. Friends. Friends. "He was wearing khakis, Hendrix."

"Did he have a dick in those khakis?" He shouldered past me through the door, dropping the baseball bat to the floor by the stairs.

I scooped up the stack of flyers and took them inside, dumping them into the trash. The robotic voice of a woman saying, "PlayStation," cut through the speakers just as I stepped back into the living room.

Hendrix grabbed the spare controller and tossed it to the tattered couch cushion beside him. "Wanna play?"

Friends hung out and played video games, right? "Sure." I took a seat beside him and picked up the controller.

Simpson's Road Rage came on the screen, and I smiled. We used to play this with Gracie and Bellamy's little brother, Arlo. They could barely steer their cars, but Zepp and Hendrix would always let them win. The big, bad bully with a soft heart had always made it impossible not to love him.

I won the first game, and during the second, Hendrix ran my car off the road.

"You're such a sore loser," I said, ignoring that, over the course of the game, he'd moved a little closer on the couch. "You know what else you're a loser at? Hiding things. I found your stash."

"My stash of what?"

"Pop-Tarts, obviously." I leaned to the right, my shoulder bumping his as I attempted to steer my avatar's car around a mud-filled hole in the road. "I don't give a crap about your weed."

He snorted. "What about my porn?"

I glanced away from the screen. A cocky, way-too-sexy smirk sat on his lips. If he was hoping the idea of him having porn would upset me like it had when I was fourteen, he'd be sadly mistaken. I'd take on-screen porn stars over his revolving door of girls any day.

"Don't tell me you still have a horde of nudey mags and Debbie Does Dallas DVDs under your bed."

His hard shoulder bumped mine when his avatar's beat-up car sideswiped me. "Don't act like you didn't watch it with me. Judgey McJudgerson."

"One time!" Because I wanted to know how to give a blow job. That video had traumatized me. So much so that four years later, I was still terrified of getting jizz in my eye.

"Wanna make it two times?" he asked.

The last thing I needed to do was watch porn with my ex, who I was trying not to fuck. "No." I took advantage of his distraction and bumped his car into a chicken shack. "Ha! That's what you—"

Without warning, he grabbed my face, slamming his lips over mine. My heart stuttered in my chest, and for a moment, I allowed myself to taste everything I craved so desperately.

Despite all the reasons I should have put a stop to it, I wanted his mouth on mine. When he was this close, I struggled to remember all the reasons why this was bad, but when I did, I broke the kiss. "You can't just do that, Hendrix." Because my heart couldn't take it.

"Would you stop pulling this bullshit, Lola?"

"It's not bullshit." It was. "We're friends." We should be so much more.

"It's a massive bag of bullshit because when we were just friends"—his thumb swept my jaw—" this was how it was."

He was right. Ever since the day we had met, there was something between us, some connection. Something that made me feel like what we had was special. And how was I supposed to keep fighting this, fighting him?

He sighed, his grip on my jaw still strong. "I kissed you for the first time in second grade when we were wiping down the lunch tables. I asked you to marry me at the end-of-the-year party in third grade with a ring I got out of a bubble gum machine." A frown shaped his face before his gaze dropped to my lips. "It's never just been friends with us." And there was something so desperate in the way he said that. "You're just fooling yourself if you think it has."

A lifetime of memories and lust and love swirled between us on that ratty couch, and I closed my eyes, leaning in to his touch. You could fight enemies, even friends, but it was impossible to fight someone you loved, and he wasn't just some one. He was the one.

But I had to fight it. "Why do you have to make this so hard?" I whispered, trying to extinguish every heart-breaking emotion rising within me.

"I'm not the one making this hard. You are. You wanna be friends." Both of his hands clasped my face. "This is as good as I can do." Then he kissed me again, and this kiss was different from the one only moments ago. Soft, reverent, adoring.

The rough sex and sizzling chemistry were one thing, but this felt like a vow of love and devotion. And that was so much harder to resist. I could survive without Hendrix, and I had, but I only felt truly alive when I was with him. Like this.

"I've missed this." He kissed me harder, tattooed fingers threading through my hair as I pulled him closer.

I wanted to climb into his lap, meld him to me in every way. I felt like a junkie, out of control and strung out, desperate for the high I could only find in him.

"God, I need you." He shoved me back on the couch.

Every inch of his hard body bled into mine, and it took every shred of willpower I could muster to tear my lips from his. But it didn't dissuade him. His mouth moved to my jaw, working over my throat. His hard dick pressed between my legs, and I was in danger of letting him give me everything we both wanted. This had to stop. Now.

"Hendrix. I'm not fucking you." If I kept doing this with him, what had the past two years been for? I'd broken us for a reason, and that reason was still very much there.

"Okay." His hand slipped between our bodies, dipping inside the waistband of my shorts. Before he could brush over me and crush the last of my resolve, I grabbed his wrist.

"We can't do anything."

His dark brows pulled together before he abruptly pushed off of me. "What the hell is going on with you, Lola?" His jaw set. "Are you fucking around with that Chad prick?"

I sat up. "No, of course not." He really thought that I'd have fucked him if I was with someone else? Of course, he did. I'd let him believe I was a heartless, cheating bitch.

He stared at me like he was trying to peel back every dark secret between us. Then his expression shuttered, and he shoved off the couch. "You know what. Fucking forget it."

"Hendrix—"

He rounded the doorframe. "I'm tired of the emotional rollercoaster, Lola." The creak of the stairs told me he was headed to his room. Seconds later, a door banged shut.

Tears stung my eyes. I loved him, and I wanted him, and I was hurting us both.

I had a renewed hatred for Johan Taylor. He'd broken me, ruined my life, and cost me Hendrix and my sister. But worse, two years later, he was still destroying me, and I was still protecting Johan from Hendrix and Hendrix from himself.

I knew if he ever found out what Johan had done, it wouldn't matter whether I was with Hendrix or not; he'd kill him. I also knew that was unlikely given the sealed records, but what were we going to do? Get back together and skip off into the sunset? He'd just asked me if I was with someone else. That seed of betrayal planted two years ago had grown roots and forced cracks into our once-solid foundation.

To keep Hendrix out of jail, I'd have to let him think I had cheated on him for the rest of our lives. Which meant he would never trust me, never truly forgive me, and I couldn't live like that.