look at each other and I know he knows I’m not happy with his obsession with her. He’s always been that way: clinically motherfucking obsessed. He also seems to hate her, but that part I don’t quite understand as well. “Now that she’s married to Victor, I assume we’ll all go back to having romantic lives of our own.”
“That’s not what Bernadette thinks,” Callum says, hopping off the window seat and moving into the kitchen. Hael tries to snatch the potato chips from him, but he almost quite literally skips out of the way to keep them to himself.
“She said she’d have no other girl in Havoc,” Aaron adds, pausing at the edge of the living room, one step down from the upper level where the kitchen is. The whole place is open and gaping, not a wall to be seen. I hate that open concept shit. I like a house where you could, say, live in the walls and nooks and nobody would notice you. “It’s pretty clear what she wants.” Aaron crosses his arms over his baggy pink t-shirt. It says Fuck Breast Cancer on it. Pretty sure Bernie gave it to him when they were dating freshman year.
“We are never adding another member to Havoc again,” Oscar agrees, pushing his glasses up with his middle finger. I’m damn near certain he does that when he’s annoyed but trying to maintain his temper. “That doesn’t mean we can’t fuck or date—with approval from the rest of us.” The sneer he levels on Hael is legendary. “Because your failure with Brittany Burr is still haunting us all. In fact, it almost got Bernadette killed.”
Hael’s face pales, his hand going white around the ice cream container he’s holding. He stares down at it with brown eyes, like he’s fighting to control his temper. He’s never been very good at that, at hiding his emotions, whatever they may be.
“Isn’t that why we agreed to have a Havoc Girl in the first place? To keep outsiders out?” Hael pops the top on the ice cream and moves over to another drawer in search of a spoon. “We’re all red-blooded men; we have needs. I just thought we’d finally, after all these years of bullshit, agreed to meet those needs with the one girl any of us has ever wanted.” He taps the spoon against the countertop for a moment. “She asked me not to sleep with another girl without telling her. What do you think that means?”
“I’m not giving her up,” Aaron says after several long minutes of silence. I flick the butt of the joint into the sink, my muscles tensing up as my gaze clashes with Aaron’s. We’ve had this feud for years, even if it was unspoken. He knows I’m his competition and, much as I’m loath to admit it, he’s mine.
They all are.
Goddamn it.
“We are not letting Bernadette break us apart,” Oscar growls out. His right hand, the one resting on the countertop, balls into a fist. Callum watches him the way an animal watches another when he knows he’s dangerous. Slowly, carefully, he shoves another chip into his mouth.
“She won’t break you apart at all if you stop fighting,” a husky voice says from the staircase. We all turn to look at Bernadette, her hair tousled from a proper fuck, her thighs bare and white and marked with bruises and hickeys beneath the hem of my t-shirt. She must’ve snatched it from the floor in a hurry to come down here.
I’m just glad she didn’t wear her wedding dress; it belongs to me now, and I don’t want another man to look at or touch her in it.
“Hey there, Bernie,” Cal says, putting on those bullshit smiles he only wears for her. He smiles like the old Callum, the one that had dreams of dancing. He stopped smiling like that for a while, but the expression is back. I should be happy about that, but I’m struggling.
I love my friends; I need my girl.
I slide a hand over my face as Bernadette saunters—doubt she even knows she’s sauntering—into the kitchen, yawning and stretching her arms over her head. The shirt rides up; we almost see her cunt. I growl without even meaning to.
“Why are you guys talking about me like I don’t have a say or an opinion?” she asks, commanding the room as effortlessly as she walks. I’m enthralled. Doesn’t take a fucking genius to see the rest of my degenerate friends feel the same way.