Kiss and Break Up - Ella Fields Page 0,62

the question we all wanted an answer to.

Lars nodded. “She’s already a few months along.”

I didn’t think that meant she had to keep it, but there was no way I was taking part in a pro-life debate. I didn’t care enough to get that involved.

“What about Daphne?” Jackson asked, his hands hanging over the front of his handle bars. He was the only one not sitting. Instead, he hunched over his bike.

Lars made a grunting noise, and I glanced at him in time to see his eyes shut briefly. “Can we not? I …” He tossed his blunt, sighing as his head hung. “I don’t know.”

Maybe his heart was as fucked as mine after all. But I was still the winner.

“How did it happen? You didn’t wrap beforehand?”

I huffed, plucking out a cigarette and lighting it. “Please. As if he needs lessons on safe sex now.”

Rave grimaced. “My bad.”

“It broke.” Lars chuckled, the sound lacking humor. “It was hers, and when I’d asked if she’d butchered it on purpose, she’d laughed and said she would never tie herself to a guy on a scholarship with no money. She isn’t that stupid.”

“I beg to fucking differ,” I said through a laugh, then shut my trap when Rave glared at me. The way Annika had all but begged to suck my dick came knocking, interrupting my gloom. The look of dismay on her face when I’d left the laundry room at that party without fucking her now made horrifying sense. She was desperate enough to try to pin the pregnancy on someone else, anybody else so long as their bank accounts were fat enough.

For once, I chose to keep my thoughts to myself.

“I put it on knowing it was too small but not giving a shit. I’d done it before.”

We all mumbled our agreement. “Happens.”

“But I didn’t think it’d fucking break.”

Again, more silence.

I’d been at home all week with nothing but silence. I wanted noise. I needed mayhem. “When and where is the next party?”

They all looked at me like I was nuts, but Lars tipped his head back, thinking. “There’s a couple tomorrow night. One down by the bay and another at Rosetta Carmichael’s for her eighteenth.”

“You wanna go?” I asked him. “We can get fucked up.”

Lars nodded. “Hell yeah, I do.”

The other two nodded too, and then Lars moved the topic to me.

“Talked to Peggy?”

I flicked ash from my cigarette, laughing through a cloud of smoke. “Fuck no.”

Jackson scratched at his stubble. “She handed Byron his ass at school.”

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t need to know. “How?”

Mother of shit.

As if he could read the ongoing torment between my brain and heart, Lars smirked.

Rave kicked at his pedal, bending over to check it. “Marched over to the team’s table and made him follow her to one of their own.”

She’d let him touch and kiss her, then invited him to lunch? My fists clenched, and nerve-endings zinged as the cigarette crumpled, burning me. I dropped it.

“Pretty sure they broke up,” Lars said.

Jackson belched. “Yup. In front of the entire cafeteria.” He chuckled. “I’ve never seen Miss Peggy Sue look so mad. Not even that time you put ants in her lunch box.”

I scowled. “I didn’t do that.”

Jackson’s face scrunched as he prepared to launch into the bowl. “Ah, yes you did. And a million other fucked-up things.”

“I was her best friend,” I defended.

“And her biggest tormentor.” He took off, leaving me stupefied.

“Damn,” Raven said. “Ants? I reckon you should consider yourself lucky that girl even put up with you.”

I growled, getting up and swinging my leg over my bike. “Fuck all of you, you don’t know shit.” They didn’t. They didn’t know how close we’d come to venturing into something life changing. Instead, we’d ventured into something neither of us could recover from.

And it was all her fault.

Lars heaved out a sigh as he stood and picked up his piece of shit bike. It wasn’t shit, it was actually awesome, but it was old as hell. “I need a fucking drink.”

“I fucking hear that.”

Rave clucked his tongue. “So which one are we going to tomorrow night?”

“Any. Both,” I said. “Don’t even care.”

I might have been grounded, considering I’d been suspended from school, but I’d been grounded over a hundred times in my life and never once had I actually abided by it.

Dad was too busy screwing his secretary when he wasn’t doing actual work, and Mom was too busy floundering over Emanuel and her dumbass problems that weren’t even problems