“I’ve got to see if there’s some sweet under this act,” he muttered to himself and then he pushed me flat against the wall with one hand and drove his other straight down my pants.
I was drunk. Intoxicated on half a dozen tequila shots, a coupla beers and some kid’s shitty weed. But even drunk as a skunk and reeking like one from the booze, I was still Zeus Garro’s daughter and I knew how to fell a man.
My knee jerked up hard, straight into his unprotected balls and when he doubled over with an exhale of pain, I drove the heel of my hand up into his nose. The bone crunched like gravel under the impact, but it wasn’t enough for my alcohol strengthened sense of justice, so I unclenched my fingers, pinched the broken bridge and turned sharply so his blood gushed out of his nostril and covered my hand in warmth.
“Fuck!” he garbled through the blood in his mouth. “Fuck you!”
I kept hold of his nose, steadying his bent torso with a hand to his shoulder and bent close to whisper in his ear. “Next time you try to assault a girl after she says no, maybe you’ll think again.”
A strong hand clamped on my shoulder and I looked around just in time to see one of his buddy’s shove a hand into my chest.
“Get the fuck off him, you psycho!” he yelled into my face before shoving me again back against the wall.
“He was the one who wouldn’t get the fuck off of me,” I snarled at him. “And you touch me again, I’ll give you a matching broken nose.”
The guy, taller than me but not by much because I was tall, snorted and cracked his knuckles. “Yeah right. Don’t make me hit a girl.”
“You already did,” Lila pointed out, appearing beside me because my girl always had my back.
“This isn’t any of your business, cunt,” he spat at her.
Fuck that.
I leapt at him, locking my legs around his waist as I tore at his hair.
No one intimidated me, put a hand on me, but more, no one insulted Lila.
I could hear her drunken battle cry behind me and then a thunk as someone hit the ground.
Chaos descended, the party turning into a full-blown fight. It wasn’t totally surprising given that we were teenagers trumped up on drugs, booze, and hormones, but I was still thrilled by the anarchy of friends turning on each other in infectious bloodlust.
I’d noticed cocaine going around, coke tended to do that to people.
It didn’t last long, maybe ten minutes, before red and blue lights flashed through the front windows and the cops descended.
I was arrested for assault, Rick hollering out that he was going to press charges as a rookie officer cuffed me and escorted me into the back of his police vehicle. It wasn’t my first time wearing cuffs or being in that cage in the backseat, and the fight was worth it to prove a point, so I didn’t really care about spending the night in prison.
I’d have a phone call, I’d make it and my dad would get me out the next morning after making me pay penance by staying the night in an uncomfortable holding cell. It was his idea of parental justice and I had to admit, I kinda got it.
Only, I didn’t get a chance to make the phone call because almost as soon as they’d locked me in a cell with what looked like a strung-out hooker and a low-level drug dealer, Danner appeared between the bars.
I hadn’t seen him in three months. We both knew why but he hadn’t spelled it out for me. I couldn’t seem to stop myself from blatantly flirting with him, from goading him with sexual innuendos and wearing increasingly short shorts and deeper tops to catch his attention. I think we both knew that sometimes, I got in trouble just so he would show up and spend time with me.
It was easy to blame our distance on the fact that he’d gotten involved in The Fallen business when my brother’s babe Cressida got abducted under his watch and his fuck up resulted in Zeus’s increased hatred for him and solidified King’s growing disdain. But we both knew the truth. We’d find a way to spend time together even if it meant our family’s wrath, even if that time was spent platonically because I was too young for him and he was too good for me.
He looked good standing there then, done up in a navy-blue suit that fit his long, lean body perfectly and made his jade green eyes pop like precious stones. His arms were crossed, his face creased into eloquent lines of censure that sent a strangely erotic tingle down the ladder of my spine straight to my pussy.
Fuck me, but I’d never seen a man so sexy with anger.
He didn’t say a word as a uniformed officer unlocked the bars and opened them for me, and he didn’t even look at me as I carried my personal effects and trailed him out to his waiting Mustang.
It was only in the car when I’d reached over to tinker with his iPod and “Short Change Hero” murmured quietly through the car that he looked at me from the corner of his eyes as he pulled out of the parking lot.
“Seventh time you’ve been in there in the last five years.”
I shrugged because it was true and I didn’t want to give him any more fuel to add to whatever fire he was working up to lay at my feet.
“The officers call you ‘the wild one,’ you know that?”
I shrugged again and brought my feet to the dash, licked my thumb to rub some dirt off my rose embroidered combat boots. “They aren’t wrong.”
“You proud of that? You’re happy to know that those officers and their family, their friends, the people of this town you call home all know you by name and reputation as the princess of The Fallen, as “the wild one” that’s predicted to wind up in juvie sooner rather than later?”
I stared at his hands as they clenched the wheel, the dusting of golden hair and the delicious map of veins running down to his strong wrists. I wanted to press a kiss to each calloused fingertip and trace those veins with my tongue in a physical plea for forgiveness.
Instead, I clenched my hands into fists and let anger overwhelm the hurt.
“You disappointed in me again, Danner?”
A muscle in his jaw jumped. “I’ll be disappointed in you until the day you pull your head out of your ass and realize there’s power in being good and kind as much as being wicked and fierce. It isn’t the thorns that make a rose.”
“It’s what protects them, though,” I argued.
“It’s the contrast, the duality of hard and soft, dangerous and beautiful that make it covetable, Rosie. Don’t know when you lost your soft, but the girl I just picked up from jail who was comfortable being there and liked what it said about her… that girl’s lost sense of herself.”
We were quiet after that, listening to the lyrics of the song, made even more poignant by Danner’s lecture.
I wanted to spit at him, rally my forces to launch a counterattack that would leave him devastated. I wanted to see him burn with shame the way I did. And I could have, I could have dug up the grave of secrets I had on him, the fact that his dad was a corrupt asshole that was slowly forcing Danner into his gravitational pull, that he was too chicken shit to even think about what he wanted let alone go after it, that he loved me in a way that was more than white knight and damsel in distress and more Clyde with his Bonnie.
I didn’t.
Because as much as his words hurt me, it would hurt me even worse to see him lacerated by the accusations. There was also the fact that I knew the day was coming when he’d have to choose, leave me behind for a life of austerity in righteousness or go bad in order to join me in sinful revelry. I didn’t want to push him to that decision now, or really ever, because as much as I wanted him to pick me, I knew he never would.