“No, it’s Pocahontas. Yes, it’s me. Wake up!”
“Why? It’s too early, and it’s a vacation day. Why would you do this to me?” He pulled the pillow out from under his head, his face planting into the mattress below it. The groan was audible as he pulled the pillow down over his head, covering his ears.
“Drama queen, it’s Saturday tomorrow. I’m going to see Mom and Dad and I want you to come with me.”
“Now?” he asked, dumping the pillow off the side of his bed and propping himself up on his elbows to look at me. “It’s barely dawn, A. Why can’t we go later?”
Looking down at my hands, my fingers began to tangle over my thighs. There was a chance he would reject the idea, just like I knew Drew would be pissed if he had any knowledge of what I was planning on doing. I understood the risk. I understood that he wouldn’t appreciate what I was about to do, but I needed it.
“You want to go without a chaperone,” Tate said, his toneaccusing. He’d grown so used to Kenny tailing him that it was more like hanging out with a friend—which they were—than having some leather-clad bodyguard following him everywhere he went.
For the most part, it didn’t bother me having someone follow me. I liked spending time with Deeks, even when he was being grumpy and throwing his wisdom around. More often than not, he had some wild tale to tell about his days in the army and the glory days of the Hounds when they had traveled around the country almost three times over, looking for recruits and coordinating with the other charters.
Deeks loved the pack. He breathed it and lived it to the point I wasn’t sure he would know how to survive outside of it. He lived by their rules and honored them. He’d seen people come and go, and he knew when to keep his mouth shut. I wasn’t always sure that Drew and the others knew how lucky they were to have his loyalty. He was an asset, a living chronicle, a memoir dedicated only to the Hounds of Babylon.
Even with all of that, there were times I just needed to be alone. I needed to move around knowing there wasn’t a set of eyes watching my every move. Those measures were in place to keep me safe. I wasn’t naïve; I knew there was a set of cross hairs on my back, and not just from the Emps. After making it clear where my loyalties were cemented, the honorable Chief Sutton had declared Tate and me the enemy. He was gunning for us. Tate already had a ticket for littering when he’d thrown his gum wrapper at the trash can on Main Street and missed, and I’d been pulled over twice. The first was for being over the line at the red light and obstructing the pedestrian crossing, and the second for driving over the double white lines when exiting the highway to get to Rusty’s.
Both were things he would have normally overlooked in the past, but our association with the Hounds was a line drawn in the sand, one that was conveniently encouraged by the chief’s white trash wife and evil spawn. They just failed to realize we were made of tougher stuff than that.
“Do you want an audience when you’re talking to Mom and Dad?”
“Not really, but it ain’t like they’re gonna hang over our shoulders.”
“T, I need to see them.”
Tate flopped onto his back on the mattress, almost bouncing me right off. His hand clutched at the blankets covering him before he sighed heavily.
“Fine. You think you could make me some breakfast while I get dressed?”
“I think I could manage that. Do you want a toaster pastry or toast and grape jelly?”
“Toast, please.”
“Orange or milk?”
“Milk, chocolate if we have it.”
“You got it, kid. I’ll be in the kitchen. Please try to be quiet.”
I pushed up off the mattress and ruffled his hair, the indignant huff as he swatted my hand away making me laugh. It was another example of forgetting how young he really was. I seemed to have been making that mistake more often, leaning on him when I should have been the one he could depend on. With life finally settling down a bit, I needed to bring back some kind of routine for him.
I was halfway down the hall when I decided to turn around and make sure he had towels. I should have knownbetter really. I should have just kept walking. Nevertheless, I didn’t, and the moment I opened the door, I realized my mistake. Tate stood frozen. By some divine intervention his boxers were on and his sweats were halfway up his legs. On the other side of the bed, a HW whose name was Libby, if memory served, was struggling into her bra, her arms twisted behind her back, her denim skirt hanging on her hips and a hickey in a place I didn’t want to think about my brother's mouth being.
I covered my eyes with both hands, turned to face the door and then back around to double check I wasn’t seeing things.
It was a spur-of-the-moment reaction, but the disappointment I felt was more than I could take. My hands raised, palms toward them as I shook my head. “You know what? Don’t worry about it.”
“A!”
I shook my head and backed away. I’d never before felt as big of a failure than I did in that moment. I’d fought so hard to keep the whores from his bed. He was fifteen, his sixteenth birthday not even this side of Christmas. I couldn’t do anything about a girl his age. He was going to do what he was going to do; he was a teenager. A woman almost the same age as me, however, was a line I hadn’t wanted him to cross, and I felt as though I’d let him down, that I’d let our folks down.
I needed to speak to them even more than I had earlier. I needed to get all the twisted and jumbled thoughts out of my head. I needed to dump the guilt that was suddenly eating me alive. I just had to go it alone.
Before Tate could sort himself out, I was slamming his door and marching down the hall with intent, swinging by thekitchen only to grab my bag and keys before dashing across the minefield of half-naked bodies and out into the cold fall morning air.
Chapter Six
Drew
