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“I can’t kiss you right now,” I tell him. “I’m already fighting an emotional breakdown, and your kisses seem to bring it out more … Make me feel too much.”
“Is that a good thing?” he asks, slanting back to look me in the eyes.
“Good and bad,” I admit. “I’m glad you’re alive, glad you’re here, but it makes me feel … sort of guilty about what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years. And I’m not used to guilt. It’s never been my thing, you know?”
“I do know that.” His voice is soft. “What you did … I’m sure you had to do it, right? To survive.”
I shrug, guilty knots winding in my stomach. “Yes and no. It wasn’t just that.” I can hardly look at him. “Honestly, I did it because I liked it. I liked how it made me feel on the inside.”
He presses his lips together with so much force the skin around his mouth turns white. “How did it make you feel?”
I glance at him with wariness. “You seriously want to know?”
He nods without looking quite so certain. “I want to understand what it was like for you these last years. I need to understand. All I have is that picture of what I walked in on when I went into the hotel room and saw you like that.” He squeezes his eyes shut, looking as though he’s in pain. “God, when I heard you scream, I thought I was going to find you dead.”
“It wasn’t always that way. Most of the time, it was fine.” I don’t want to tell him the real reason I did it, too ashamed. But when I open my mouth, it sort of spills out. “I did it because it made me numb. I didn’t have to feel death on my hands. You know as well as I do that messing around was always sort of a weird euphoric thing for me. Well, it started to be a self-numbing thing after everything happened, like taking drugs without the drugs.”
“Lolita …” He says my full name again, the sound rolling off his tongue like honey. “I’m sorry. I wish I could have found a way to tell you all this sooner, but I wasn’t even supposed to see you now … I’m supposed to be dead, but I had to see you. That night in the motel … and later at the house when you were looking at my car.” He drifts toward me again. “Tonight … I couldn’t let anything happen to you.”
I stare into his eyes, remembering all the things we used to be, remembering how it felt when I thought I’d never look at him, touch him, or kiss him again.
“Oh, my God, fuck it.” I drop the gun and smash my lips against his, kissing him with so much passion. And he kisses me back with zero hesitation, scooping me up in his arms.
I wrap my legs around him and hold on to him with one hand while my other travels downward.
“Lola …” Layton whispers between kisses as I undo the button on his jeans. “I need to tell you something else … Something really important.”
“Then tell me.” I know I should stop and listen, but I can’t bring myself to do so. I’m not ready to break the connection.
I nip at his bottom lip as I grind my hips against his, eliciting a groan from him. His hands wander to my breasts then down to my hips as he nips and bites at my lips, my jawline, my neck.
“I want you inside me again,” I practically beg, unsure if I’m seeking sex for all the right reasons, but I can’t stop myself from wanting it. Wanting him. “Please.”
I feel him smile against my lips. “I’ve never heard you beg, but that’s two times in one night. I must be good.”
“And you’ve never returned from the dead before.” I roll my hips against his again, growing impatient. “You’re such a cocky bastard.”
“Hmmm …” His fingers tangle through my hair as he presses a kiss to my jawline. “Maybe I should drag this out more … See what I can get out of it.”
A smile touches my lips. I realize how long it’s been since I’ve genuinely smiled. This is the Layton I know. The one I grew up with before everything was tainted, before our friendship was torn apart, before I killed, before I ran. He could always get me to smile before all that.
“I’d like to see you try.” I decide to act like the old Lola for a moment, though I’m not sure who that is anymore.
He lets out a deep, throaty groan, and then he is slipping his fingers inside my panties … inside me.
“Oh … My … God …” I moan, throwing my head back.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“Hate to break up the porn show in there,” Solana says through the door, “but we have a huge problem.”
Layton grunts in frustrations as he pulls his fingers out of me.
“I’m going to kill her,” I gripe as I lower my feet to the floor.
He sighs heavily. “Maybe you should try to get to know her. She is your sister.”
He might be right, but at the same time, I’m not sure if I want to, considering everything.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“We have company,” she says, banging on the door again. “Unless you want to die while fucking, get out here now.”
Shaking my head, I pick up the gun from off the floor. “God, I don’t want to kill again.” My breath falters, knowing I just might have to if we’re walking into an ambush.
“Don’t worry; you won’t have to.” There’s something in Layton’s voice that has me puzzled and a bit worried. Before I can say anything about it, though, he draws something out of his back pocket.
A syringe.
I start to jump back, but he grabs my arm and pierces the needle into my skin.
“You fucking bastard!” A spout of dizziness overtakes me, and I fall helplessly into his arms.
“I’m sorry, but it’s for your own good, Lolita,” he whispers.
The last thing I see is the remorse in his eyes. Then I pass out, unsure of what I’ll wake up to, or if I’ll even wake up.
Chapter 4
Layton
My life has been full of choices not made by me. It started when I was young, when my father sat me down in his office on my sixth birthday and told me I was going to befriend Lolita Anders.
“But I don’t want to,” I replied, being the typical six-year-old boy who hated girls because he thought they had cooties.
“You have to,” he said, sitting on the desk with his legs dangling over the edge as he looked down at me, making me feel incredibly small. “It’s for our family, for protection. Right now, the Anelli’s don’t like us very much, and we need them to like us. They’re too powerful for us to be on their bad side.”
It seemed like a silly reason, but I didn’t argue. I saw how arguing with my dad ended up. My mother argued with him all the time, and instead of yelling back, my father hit her. He also liked to hit the people who worked for him, and sometimes he even killed them. I wasn’t supposed to know it at the time, but I’d accidentally seen him shoot someone in cold-blooded murder when I’d been hiding in his office during a game of hide-and-seek with my brother.
I agreed and made a major effort to get to know Lolita Anders at school. As it turned out, I actually liked her, and the friendship grew on its own.
When I was fourteen, I realized I might like her as more than a friend, which confused the shit out of me, so I didn’t act on it. Then, when I was about sixteen, I realized I wanted to date her. I knew her well enough to know she’d never go for it. When I was seventeen, I kissed her for the first time. It was one of the best and worst days of my life because I realized I was falling in love with her, a foreign emotion to me growing up in a home so cold.
Like a dumbass, I ended up telling her, and to this day, I’m still waiting to hear those three words back.
I’m not surprised. Her mother stuffed her head with all this weird crap about relationships. My father said the woman was seriously messed
up; that she was still in love with Everson, the brother, but stayed with Larenze Anelli, Lola’s father, because it gave her stability and wealth, and that made her bitter.
When Lola’s mother died, Lola seemed to get worse. Tough as nails on the outside, she was a confused mess on the inside, and completely shut down. Then, when I went to work with Frankie … Well, I think she actually hated me.
I’m worried she’ll hate me again if I tell her everything. There’s so much I haven’t told her about our pasts and things going on now. I know if she was aware of everything about my family, she’d never forgive me.
“I still can’t believe you tranquilized her. I was betting that you’d back out,” Solana remarks as we drive down the desolate highway, heading away from the motel where I’m hoping Frankie’s men are still looking for Lola. We managed to slip out unnoticed, but I’m not sure how long it’ll be until they figure out we’ve taken off.
I’m worried. I’m supposed to be dead, and it took a lot to get to this place. Lots and lots of pain that I’d prefer never to experience again.
“I told you, if anything bad happened, I’d do it,” I tell Solana. “We talked about this.”
She props her boots on the dashboard. “Yeah, but I didn’t think you had it in you.”
I glance in the rearview mirror, my worry about being discovered by Frankie’s men briefly alleviating when I see no headlights behind us. “I didn’t want her to end up in any more situations where she had to kill anyone. Once was more than enough.”
“You and I have killed many, many more times,” she casually states, as if we’re chatting about the weather.
I’ve known Solana for a couple of years now, and this is the only mode she has—calm and indifferent. It was how she was raised to be in that god-awful place I still can’t believe my family is a part of.
“And we’re perfectly fine doing it again.”
“No, you’re perfectly fine doing it again.” I clutch the steering wheel until my knuckles turn white. “I hate doing it.”
“Yet you still do it if you have to.” She peers over her shoulder at Lola, who is passed out in the backseat. “She can’t even do it if her life depends on it.”
