RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,49
won’t fucking drop it.
The land surrounding the house is a bog. It rained all week, an incessant downpour that only paused long enough for Dashiell to talk me into a race up Mount Castor (which I won). This morning’s the first day that any of us have woken up to blue skies, and the pale, almost white dawn has made me unreasonably irritated. I liked the dense, angry cloud cover and the charged, threatening energy that’s been hanging over Wolf Hall. It exacerbated the roiling tension that’s been building between me and Elodie. It felt like that moment right before you come, when you hold your breath and you feel that pleasure mounting, and you’re riding this wave that will crest over you any second. This morning’s sunny, fresh beginning feels like that wave failed to crash, leaving me left unsatisfied and wanting.
Using sex metaphors is a mistake. I just have to think the word and my mind goes overboard, painting graphic images of Elodie, naked and spread out for me. I haven’t let myself imagine what it would feel like to fuck her. I can’t imagine it. In my daydreams, I get as far as hovering over her with my dick in my hand, rubbing the tip against her pretty, pink little pussy, and my mind just fucking blanks.
She isn’t a virgin. She’s been fucked before, I can tell, but that doesn’t matter to the cock-blocking bastard inside my head, who keeps telling me that she’s pure and my cock has no business being anywhere near her cunt.
Pax whistles through his teeth as he pulls up through the black, sucking mud in front of the house at the wheel of his Charger; he’s chewing on a tooth pick that he shuttles from one side of his mouth to the other, left to right, left to right, left to right. “You’re gonna owe me a car wash, you know that, right? This baby was clean when I pulled out of the garage and now look at her. She’s fucking filthy.”
“If you took as much care in your presentation as you do in that car, people wouldn’t mistake you for a vagrant all the time,” Dashiell says in a sunny voice.
“Fuck you, Lord Lovett.” When anyone else calls Dashiell by his full title, it’s typically said with a certain amount of gravity and respect. When Pax uses our friend’s full title, it sounds like he’s chewing on wasps. Dashiell’s impervious to Pax’s foul moods, though. He gracefully slides himself into the front seat next to Pax, folding his body like a fucking dancer as he crams himself into the car.
All of us are painfully aware of the fact that none of us should get along. Pax is the spikiest, angriest, poutiest guy I’ve ever met. The chip on his shoulder is glaringly obvious and kind of sad, really. Dashiell’s spoiled rotten and so hopped up on Valium and Xanax that his world is fluffy and so mellow through his medicated rose-tinted lenses that he barely exists in the same plane of reality as us at all.
And me. I’m the recluse. The pressure cooker. The guy who hardly speaks, who’s skin begins to itch if he has to say more than three sentences in public, in fact. Who hates almost everyone, and finds the idea of having friends hanging around utterly repugnant.
Pax and Dashiell somehow worked their way under my skin, though, until it felt normal that they were just there all the time, bickering and sniping at each other, roughhousing and calling on me to mediate their dumb, affectionate arguments; now it would be weird if they weren’t around, taking up space and irritating the shit out of me.
Pax cackles like a deranged hyena as he peels out of the driveway and heads in the direction of the academy. Any other day and the three of us would have run the two miles to Wolf Hall and wouldn’t have broken a sweat, but it’s Friday. We’ll be burning down the mountain the moment the final bell of the day rings, and we won’t be coming back until the early hours of Monday morning.
“How many people are gonna be at this thing anyway?” Pax grumbles.
“Five hundred and change. The crème de la crème of East Coast society. My father hasn’t set foot on American soil for three years, so even the most pampered, blue-blooded snobs, from the old money to the nouveau riche will be crawling out from under their rocks to