I got up as fast as my hands and feet would let me, adrenaline and fucking anger like I had never felt in my life before burning a hole through me.
The bastard was trying to jump me.
My ownfuckingcousin was trying to jump me. Why was that surprising? Why did that make me mad? I wondered as I finally stood, looking down at the man blinking up at the sky on the ground, in a daze, groaning.
“LUNA!” Rip’s voice roared from across the lot, the sound of multiple sets of feet hitting pavement telling me he wasn’t alone.
But neither was I.
“Fuck!” the man with the voice I didn’t recognize hissed, forcing me to look at him just as he turned around and started running toward the lot’s gate. The gate that happened to be in the process of closing.
I’d swear on my life that my vision went red.
But the next thing I knew, I reached down and pulled my work boot off—thankful I never tied them too tightly—and I chunked it as hard as I could at the man trying to get away. I watched as my steel-toed boot hit him right between the shoulder blades, heard the “Oh!” escape him as it was his turn to go flying toward the ground, arms stretched in front of him. Heard the “Fuck!” that exploded out of him that told me it wasn’t just my boot that hurt him.
And all I could think of wasgood.
Behind me, I heard the footsteps stop, heard the sound of something hard hitting flesh.
But nothing could have prepared me for the sight of Miguel and Rip kicking the crap out of my cousin. My cousin who was on the ground, curled up on his side in a tight ball. Like the coward he was and always had been.
I added another thing on my list of stuff I was never going to feel bad over, and that was standing there watching them kick him. At least until I cut the distance between us and then aimed a hard kick right at his tailbone with my booted foot.
“What the fuck, Rudy!” I shouted at him, reeling back and kicking him in the ass again, seeing out of my peripheral vision that Rip stopped and took a step back, watching me, his handsome, harsh face flushed red, his hands hanging at his sides.
“You okay?” he asked, eyes going down to my forearms and wrists, taking in what I hadn’t even seen were scrapes all across and down them.
I looked at him, breathing so hard, I couldn’t catch it, breathing so hard I didn’t appreciate Miguel aiming another kick at my cousin’s lower half. “He just… ran up behind me and pushed me…” I tried to explain, losing my words between my breathing and just how fucking mad I was.
My cousin was going to jump me in the parking lot of my job.
He’d put his hands on me.
“Stop! God! Fucking stop!” my cousin yelled. “Jesus Christ!”
Miguel looked up at me, foot poised in midair, his normally easygoing features rearranged into genuine freaking anger and disbelief. “Want me to stop?”
“No,” I told him without thinking. “What are you doing, Rudy?”
The man only a little older than me stayed in the fetal position as he said, “Fuck you!”
“My wrist is broken, Rudy!” the man I’d thrown my boot at cried.
We all ignored him.
Rip kicked Rudy in the ass that time, way harder than I had.
“Fuck!” my cousin shouted again. “Stop!”
“What are you doing here?” I repeated, totally caught off guard by this entire situation, by the fact that he was here. In Houston. At my job.
How did he find out—
My dad had found my number. How hard would it be to find out my job in that case?
Had my dad put him up to this?
“We told you not to go back to San Antonio!” Rudy had the nerve to yell in his raggedy but pained voice. “We told you what would happen if you did!” he tried to use as an excuse, but all it did was make me freeze. “Should have gotten you outside your fuckin’ place—”
