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When nobody answered, I knocked again and tapped my shoe on the cracked pavement.
“Where the hell is he?” I muttered, debating on shouting his name so he could hear me through that open window.
João pulled up behind my car, almost immediately shutting off his car and rushing over to me. He grabbed my wrist and tried to pull me away. “What the fuck are you doing here, Imani? You can’t just show up at Landon’s place.” He nervously looked behind me at the front door. “Come on.”
Before we could get anywhere, the front door swung open, and a man swayed in its place with a can in his hand and the stench of beer coming off him in waves. “Who the fuck are you?”
João grabbed me forcefully and shoved me back. “Nobody, sir. She’s lost.”
“You know whose door you’re knocking on, girl? A girl like you shouldn’t be in these streets.” He pushed open the torn screen door and stepped out of the house, stumbling and waving his can at me. “You show up to the wrong person’s door, and bad fucking things happen.”
João cursed under his breath, pushing me farther behind him. “She’s leaving now.”
After crushing the can in his fist, the man tossed it onto the lawn and pointed a finger at me. “You look like my son’s age. Are you the whore my son’s been hanging out with at all hours of the night? He doesn’t even spend fucking time with us anymore. He’s up all night on that phone of his, doing who knows fucking what.”
The blood drained from my cheeks, my heart racing at how quickly he was approaching us.
I grabbed on to João’s bicep and sucked in a sharp breath. “João …” I whispered. “Is he going to hurt me?”
“Landon!” the man shouted. “Get your ass out here!”
A moment later, Landon stepped out of the front door. “What do you—” He stopped when he saw me, his eyes widening, and then he looked at his father and stepped between João and me and his dad.
João mumbled, “I’m out,” and shook his head, heading to the back of his house.
“Your whore is here,” Landon’s father said.
Something in Landon snapped, jaw twitching. “She’s not a whore.”
For a second, Landon’s father seemed as if he was going to snap, too. But then that woman caught his eye in the upstairs window, and he kicked the can of beer into the road and walked back into the house, mumbling something to himself.
As soon as he shut the door behind him, Landon grabbed me by the upper arm and hurried to the back, dragging me along with him. “Are you crazy, Imani? You can’t come here and knock on my parents’ front door! What the fuck are you doing here, anyway?”
When we approached a back door, I dug my feet into the dirt and ripped myself away from him. “I came here to see you. We need to talk. I need answers.”
Landon clenched his jaw, nostrils flaring. A strong fall breeze blew his hair into his face. “What kind of answers are you willing to get killed for? A girl like you shouldn’t be on the bad side of Redwood. Something might happen.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like you really care about that, is it?”
“Of course I care!” he snapped.
Almost as quickly as the words had come out of his mouth, he smacked his full lips closed. The anger dropped from his face, cheeks paling. A couple moments of silence passed between us, the air thick with tension.
He kicked his filthy white shoes against the dirt. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, but he couldn’t look me in the eye. “I just don’t want to clean up your guts from my front lawn, if something happens.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Suddenly, he turned away from me and pulled out a cigarette. “Now, what do you want?”
I stood completely still, watching the way the fire from his lighter glimmered in his pale eyes, and felt a warmth in my chest. A warmth that I didn’t like in the slightest because Landon wasn’t someone any girl dated. He was someone to sleep with and then forget.
At least, that was how I had seen him for years at Redwood.
Until now.
“Wh—”
“I’m sorry,” Landon said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and staring at the lit end.
