“Everything is going to be okay,” he promises, though the way he says it, I’m not sure if he’s telling me or himself, then he jerks at the sound of the front door closing.
“Shit, he’s my ride,” he blurts, pressing a hard kiss to my forehead. “Talk to you later, Callie love.”
With the echo of Nolan’s feet clicking down the stairs, shouting after Connor, my aunt looks at me with one raised brow and a small smirk tugging at her lips.
“They’re just friends,” I grumble, fidgeting with the bedspread by folding it up in my fingers then spreading it back out.
“Mmmm,” she hums, going back to combing my hair that has pooled off the bed and onto the floor.
“They are,” I insist.
“I believe you,” she replies, sounding just the opposite.
My memories take this inopportune time to remind me of how it felt to kiss Nolan, to be wrapped up in Kaleb’s arms with his lips so close to mine, of dancing in a slow circle with Felix in a tropical paradise, the feel of sitting in Connor’s lap while his fingers trailed along my bare thigh, and the sensation of Donovan aroused against my back as we danced with Nolan at the party. Heat, that for once doesn’t have anything to do with embarrassment, spreads across my tingly skin.
We are just friends. Right?
Chapter 3
Donovan
Fuck me sideways. Fourteen, really?
Sitting at a stoplight, my fingers tapping against the steering wheel, I do the mental math of what grade Callie would’ve been in at the time of the accident, and my stomach sinks further.
Eighth grade. She was in eighth grade. Not even fucking high school yet.
As soon as the light turns green, I stomp on the gas, causing the truck’s tires to chirp.
Kaleb looks at me like I’ve lost my damn mind. “What is wrong with you? Why are you in such a hurry? You’re acting insane… well, more insane than normal.”
No way am I telling the dickless wonder that before all the demon shit, I was grinding up on her on the dance floor and trying to figure out how to ask if she’d be interested in a three-way.Next month I turn eighteen, and I may not have many scruples, but not fucking middle schoolers is one of them.
“It’s nothing,” I grunt, fighting off a full body shiver of disgust and trying to do Nolan grade gymnastics of logic to make this okay.
She’s mentally seventeen and girls develop early, right?Then, I remember she said the accident was right after her fourteenth birthday, which means days before she was thirteen, and the logic goes up in smoke.At least she’s aging now, and she’ll be in her seventeen-year-old body soon, right?
Instantly, I feel like an asshole, because she’s in a fuck-ton of pain, and here I am relieved that it will make me less of a creep to be attracted to her.
The truck rocks to the side when I take a corner too fast, and Kaleb braces himself, throwing his hands out on the dashboard.
“Clearly, it isn’t nothing,” he insists, glaring at my profile.
Sweat builds on my back, making my bare skin to the leather seats. “How about it’s not your fucking business?” I growl through gritted teeth.
“It is if you’re going to run us off the road or get us in an accident because you’re too distraught to drive like a normal person,” he shoots back, clutching the ‘oh shit’ handle near the top of the passenger window.
“Distraught?” I mock, shifting gears, the truck’s engine a throaty rumble. “You gotta stop reading those gothic romances Keziah likes.”
“They’re classics, and that’s not the point,” he seethes. “Slow down!”
“If you hate my driving so much, you fucking do it,” I argue, knowing he’d rather crawl over hot coals than drive.
“Podex perfectus es,” he spits, then glares out the window, his free hand curling into a fist in his lap.
“That I am,” I mutter, while I try to outdrive my own self-loathing.
∞∞∞
