“Yes, please. Give me more,” she begged.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Preppy making a quiet move to leave out of the side door. “Prep,” I called out. He stilled. I unwrapped the girl’s legs from around me and took a step back, tucking myself back into my pants. “Why don’t you come over here and take care of this beautiful girl? She says she needs more and I’m not so sure I have much more to give her.”

At first Spring Break Chick was startled of Preppy’s presence in the room and looked at me like she was in shock, but as soon as Preppy stepped into the light, she smiled as if I’d just given her a puppy. He legs were still spread, her wetness glistening for him to see.

Slowly Preppy moved closer and closer, his gaze focused between her legs.

In my mind, I wasn’t just offering to share a girl with Preppy, I was offering him a chance at normalcy. A chance to just fuck and not be so caught up in the hows or whys of it all.

“Have at her bro,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder I left him to it and made my way back over to the party. I wasn’t ten feet away from the garage when I heard the scream. It wasn’t the kind of scream she’d made when I made her come, but the kind of scream that said “Someone just stabbed me,” I turned and ran back as fast as I could.

And sure enough…

The girl was no longer on the toolbox, but laid out on the floor on her side, crawling away from Preppy at snail speed, but where a snail left slime in his tracks, the girl left blood.

“He fucking stabbed me!” she shouted, grabbing her thigh which still had a pair of silver scissors sticking out of the top, gushing blood with her every movement. Preppy stared wide-eyed at the trail of blood and at the blood on his fingers, but didn’t make a move to help or even flee.

He just stood there with an unreadable expression on his face.

I picked the girl up and carried her out of the garage. One of the BBBs stitched up her leg and called her a cab home. I gave her a few hundred bucks to keep her mouth shut, and Preppy and I never talked about it again.

But I still felt him watching.

The next time I brought a girl into the garage and called him over, he looked worried. “I can’t,” he said, even after the girl said she was game.

“You want me to stay?” I asked in my most reassuring voice, wondering where it was in his fucked up mind that he went when sex was involved and what was causing the intensity that radiated off of him like he was a different person when he was watching. An entirely different version of Preppy. What shocked me most was that in place of his usual sarcastic and obnoxious demeanor, he was tentative. Shy.

It creeped me the fuck out.

Yet, I wanted to fix it for him somehow.

“Come here, baby,” the girl said, parting her legs. I sat up on the toolbox next to her and lifted off her shirt. I played with her nipples while Preppy suited up and pushed inside.

After a few seconds, Preppy looked up at me, his eyes dark and menacing. He looked like a fucking demon. “I want to hurt her,” he whispered. The girl, so involved in Preppy’s dick, thank fuck, she hadn’t heard him.

I shook my head, there would be no more scissor play if I had anything to do with it. “Watch, I’ll do it for you,” I said. I grabbed the girl’s throat in my hands and squeezed just enough to make it uncomfortable for her, but not enough to actually cause pain. She moaned and gagged at the same time.

“She likes that,” Preppy said, looking completely dumbfounded. He rammed into her at a furious pace while I held onto her tight. When I grabbed a handful of the girl’s red curls in my fist and pulled, ripping a scream from her throat, it sent him over the edge and he came with a groan before collapsing onto the floor.

I picked the girl off the tool box and started to pull her away from the garage. “Is he going to be okay?” she asked looking back, but I didn’t let her stop. It was better to let him recover than to leave him there alone with the girl and have to deal with the very real possibility it wouldn’t just be a thigh he carved into the next time.

“Thank you,” Preppy called out, still hunched over, face first on the concrete floor. His pants around his ankles.

It was the very first and the very last time I’d ever heard him utter those words.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same about the stabbing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Thia

“I’VE BEEN THINKING about it, and I think there’s something wrong with your dog,” Rage said. She was sitting on a barstool at the kitchen counter, painting her nails. Pancakes immediately took back his spot on couch the second Rage had gotten up, laying on his back with his legs spread and his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth.

“He’s a coyote,” I corrected.

She turned up her nose. “Well, that would be what’s wrong with your dog then.”

“Do you know what kinds of diseases dogs can carry? Never mind coyotes. I heard once that some dogs can carry STD’s on their tongues and with one little lick on the mouth…” Rage made an exploding motion with the hand she’d just painted. “Boom, herpes.”

I was only half paying attention, my mind and body still humming from my night, and morning, with Bear. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“I don’t know, maybe it was parakeets. Don’t you think that thing could be violent? You know a coyote is not the same thing as a dog.”

“Rage I’ve heard you say the same thing every day for six months.” I pointed to Pancakes who was fast asleep, still upside down, although now he was halfway off the couch, slinking further and further toward the floor with each little snore. “Does that look violent to you?”

“Do I?” Rage asked, blowing on her nails and flashing me her pearly white celebrity looking smile.

“Point made.”

“Can I ask you something?” Rage asked, getting up and strolling around the living room as she examined the pictures on the wall like she hadn’t been seeing the same ones every day for months. “Well, you drugged me so technically you owe me an answer.”

“I prefer to think of it as giving you some much needed sleep.” I struggled with the lid on a jar of peanut butter and was about to use my old bang-it-on-the-counter-until-it-submits trick when Rage walked over and grabbed it out of my hand.

“Hey, I—” I started, but stopped abruptly when Rage twisted it off in one try without putting any effort into it, while I on the other hand, was on the verge of popping a blood vessel in my eye when I had tried.

She handed me the jar and continued her stroll. “You and Bear. Did you… was he…” She sighed and I didn’t know if she was embarrassed to ask me her question or if she couldn’t find the words to ask it.

“Is this a sex question?” I asked, casually, trying to make it less awkward for her.

“Yes,” she answered, picking up a photo off the coffee table of me and my dad when I was still in diapers. He held me in his arms and I was reaching for an orange off the tree. She set it back down.

“What do you want to know?” I asked. Pancakes fell to the floor and startled himself awake. He looked around as if he were looking for whoever pushed him off the couch. Within a few seconds he was back up and back asleep.