Beside me, Beth takes a step forward, and I’m startled by the look of shock on her face. Unease settles over me all at once, the abundance of alcohol I’ve ingested tonight turning sour in my veins.
“Brian, I told you—”
“You told me what? You can keep having coffee with me, but what? You’re fucking March now?”
“No!” Beth denies it, and I don’t know why it pisses me off—of course she isn’t fucking me. But she’s not fucking supposed to be seeing Falco, either.
She starts to say something else, but I cut her off. “Keep having coffee with him?”
She swallows down her obvious anxiety, and my instinct is to soothe her somehow, but I also want to know what the fuck he’s talking about.
“You had coffee with him once. Like a month ago.”
Falco smirks in my peripheral vision, and I feel like a total fucking schmuck. Beth doesn’t say a word.
“I guess she’s been lying to both of us.” Falco’s voice slithers through my ears like a venomous snake, and I grit my teeth to keep from spitting in his fucking face. Because what the actual fuck? Why would she be going on fucking coffee dates with him? Does she want to get back together with fucking Falco? After everything he put her through? My hands clench into fists.
“So, what? You’re just a fucking slut now?” Falco’s words go too far, and I swing.
My vision fires red in an instant, all the sexual tension in my body suddenly rewired for violence, and it’s only when Reeve and Bogart are holding my arms and talking me down that I even realize I didn’t stop at one punch.
I look around in a post-homicidal daze—or a less homicidal one—heaving in deep breaths until I start to calm.
“Bea.” Where the fuck is she?
And then I catch her in my sideview, kneeling at Falco’s side as he recoils away from her like she’s the villain in all this.
It’s like a pickaxe to my gut. She ran to his aid? The scumbag who broke her heart and left her in motherfucking pieces, and then had the balls to say what he just did to her?
Well, fuck that.
But at least Beth doesn’t take any more shit from him—way too small a consolation right now. At his rejection, she simply shakes her head in disapproval and abandons him, making her way back to the solace of her girlfriends, who seem to have gathered for the show along with half the fucking club.
Beth’s arms hug around her middle as she fixes me with her glare. I reflect it right the fuck back at her. This is her fault, too. She’s the one who’s been seeing her piece-of-shit ex.
She’s the one who lied to me about it.
I march over and she meets my gaze with open defiance. “We’re leaving.” My words come out like an order, and I’m not sure I’ve ever used that tone with her before. I’m not sure I’ve used it, period.
But she doesn’t wait for me to lead us toward the exit. Instead, she lifts her chin, walks around me, and heads right out the door.
Chapter Thirteen
David
Age Sixteen
“’Night, kid,” I call out to Beth, who huffs past Cap and me and stomps into the house, no less pissed than she was when we left Cooper’s party fifteen minutes ago. I pretend it doesn’t sting when she ignores me, and instead light up the joint I expertly rolled on the car ride home. Well, not home—to the Caplans’s, but same thing.
I live a couple of blocks around the way, but if I cut through backyards and hop a fence or two, it’s barely even a football field to my house, so I usually just get out with Cap when we get a ride from somewhere. Sometimes I stay over—it isn’t like they don’t have the fucking room—but most of the time we end up chilling, or smoking, or both, and then I’m on my way.
“We’re going to have to do something about Falco,” I remind Cap. I already told him I caught him flirting with Beth at the party we just left, but we haven’t discussed how we’re going to stop it from happening again.
Cap’s lip curls in disgust at the mention of it. “Weren’t you watching her?” he asks, only mildly accusatory. I’m the one who convinced him to let her tag along tonight, after all. It was her first high school party, and she hasn’t even technically started high school yet. But I took no issue with Cap’s demand that I babysit, and Cap knows I’d barely left Beth’s side all night. We were having a pretty damned good time, actually…until Falco fucking showed up.
“She went to the bathroom, man, and I was waiting for her at the end of the hall. He had to have come around the other way on purpose.” I lock eyes with Cap. I know I might sound paranoid to anyone else, but I don’t believe for a second that Falco bumping into Beth was any kind of accident.
I pass Cap the joint. If it was football season, he wouldn’t risk touching the stuff, but it’s summer, and he’s free to do whatever the fuck he wants, just like me.
