44 Chapters About 4 Men - BB Easton Page 0,18

night. The only problem was that I was still technically dating Knight and was afraid that parts of me might wind up in his basement freezer if I tried to break up with him.

In a stroke of genius, I realized that the solution to all my problems would be to drop off a break-up note with Knight’s mom on my way to the party, thus absolving me from any retribution should Knight find out that I’d banged Trevor on his bathroom floor that night. We would literally have been broken up for hours by the time I got around to discovering lithium’s unfortunate sexual side effects.

Looky there, Skeletor. Your mom even has it in writing.

I should have been a fucking lawyer because that shit was airtight.

Well, Knight’s mom must have delivered the message telepathically because I hadn’t been at the party long enough to finish whatever watered-down filth was in my Solo cup before I heard the unmistakable roar of Knight’s monster truck building in the distance.

Fuck me.

The phrase fight-or-flight should be amended to include freeze, because when my temporal lobes registered the low growl of that particular F-150 my ass froze like Bambi’s idiot mother…right before her head got blown off.

Ronald McKnight—the sadistic, homicidal, archfiend from hell—was coming for me, and all I could do was silently scream at myself from inside my paralyzed body.

Run! Hide! You’re gonna die, you stupid bitch! None of these anemic emo kids can save you! Abort! Abort!

But my steel-toed boots felt more like lead…and my slutty tiger costume began to feel more and more like a sick, ironic joke. Who was I kidding? I was no predator. I was a defenseless macilent, doe-eyed little fawn who was about to become roadkill.

All I could do was stand there in Trevor’s driveway, clutching my warm PBR, and wait for it. I was frozen like a deer in headlights, and the headlights weren’t even there yet.

Maybe he won’t kill me with all these witnesses. Maybe he’ll just almost kill me. Maybe he’ll just almost kill me…

For what felt like a lifetime, I waited, trapped inside the inanimate meat prison that had become my body, peering into the darkness like a woodland creature who had just heard the snap of a twig under a hunter’s boot, as the distant rumble of Knight’s truck grew louder. Just as the sound erupted into a screaming boiling crescendo, the headlights of his monster truck rounded the corner and descended upon me like the crosshairs of a rifle scope. And in the blink of my big dumb forest-green eyes, it was over.

It happened so fast that when I replay the events in my head, it comes out looking like a series of still photos, like a cartoon playing in slow motion.

Knight’s monster truck screeched into Trevor’s teenager-filled cul-de-sac like an apocalyptic bat or demon coming to claim my soul. The passenger door swung open before the roaring monstrosity had even come to a complete stop. Angel Alvarez, the skank he’d been cheating on me with, flew out toward me, screaming my name and flailing her arms, as if she were on fire.

My heart slammed repeatedly into my rib cage as if to say, Stay here and die if you want, but I’m getting the fuck out!

My mind oscillated between fear over my imminent death and confusion about why Angel was about to destroy me when she was obviously fucking my boyfriend. My body became rigid and tense, bracing for impact, as Angel’s red eyes and bared teeth closed in on me. And then my eyes widened with shock as she toppled over the curb and face-planted her seething contorted mug right at my feet, which were still rooted firmly to the driveway.

Before my stupid deer brain could register the fact that I was still standing and in one piece, Angel’s shrieking kicking, thrashing body rose before me and began moving backward, suspended in midair, as if someone had pressed the Rewind button on my worst nightmare.

The fuck?!

It wasn’t until my dilated pupils registered the silhouette of a formidable figure shoving her writhing body back into the truck that I realized that Knight had scooped up her crazy Daisy Dukes-clad ass off the driveway before she had a chance to lunge at me again. He was now putting those steroids to good use as he wrestled that syphilitic she-devil back into his eight-foot-high monster truck cab.

As they peeled away, it slowly began to dawn on me that I was not going to