How the hell did I go from walking away to this?
For the first time, I take stock of the bar around us. Broken glass. Broken furniture. The dude from the booth is long gone. A woman has her head poking past the kitchen door, watching me warily with her cell phone to her ear. The bartender is an older, chubbier version of Mr. Clean, and though he has a bat pressed beneath his palms against the wooden bar, he doesn’t look ready to use it.
I turn and head for the door, but even before the cop steps inside, I know I’ve got no shot at walking out of here that easy. The cop asks me what happened, but there’s no point in saying he started it like a little pansy. Not when you’ve got a juvy record. He gets the rundown from the bartender and the woman who called them. While a paramedic checks on a barely conscious Levi, I’m put in the back of a police car.
They say bad shit happens in threes, but I gave up counting a long time ago.
The bad seems to follow me. Or hell. Maybe Levi’s right. Maybe it’s me that follows the bad.
Maybe I don’t know who I am apart from that.
Chapter 3
Dylan
The plastic zip ties bite into the skin of my wrists, and I wait, my shoulders aching from having my hands bound behind my back. My heart is racing, has been since I refused the officer’s order to disperse from the protest and got arrested instead. I wonder how long my heart can beat this fast without giving out. Maybe I’ll pass out soon, and then I’ll get at least a modicum of relief from the guilt and fear gnawing at my insides.
The female police officer is finishing up my paperwork, while my friend Matt is being escorted away to the holding cell by another officer. He meets my eyes and makes a ridiculous face. I don’t know how he’s so calm. With his massive russet beard, he looks more scary than silly. He’s got a good six inches on the guy who arrested us, and I don’t blame the cop for looking nervous. Matty looks like he could go Sasquatch on everyone and bust his way out of here.
“Miss Brenner?” Officer Tribble stands in front of me. She’s in her mid-thirties, dark hair, and frown lines around her mouth. She knows my father. Everyone knows my father. It’s probably naive to think he’s not already aware I’m here. My stomach twists again, and I hunch over in my chair, hoping it will make the aching worry go away. But I don’t get much time to see if it works. She takes my elbow, her grip soft, and helps me stand, and then we’re walking in the direction Matt was taken.
At the end of a hallway are two holding cells, one across from the other. Lined with metal benches bolted to the floor, the cell on the left contains three men. A middle-aged man in a ratty T-shirt lays passed out on a bench in the corner. On the other side of the cell, I see Matt in all his bearded glory. Despite the fact that there are several empty benches, he’s seated on the one containing the third occupant of the cell. He’s talking, but his cellmate appears to be ignoring him, which doesn’t faze my friend in the slightest. He sends me a wink as Officer Tribble parades me past and stops in front of the empty cell across from Matt’s. I breathe a sigh of relief. Despite my fear, when Matt tilts his head toward his cellmate and waggles his eyebrows suggestively, I laugh. The guy next to Matt looks up, and the laugh dies in my throat.
He sports a bruised jaw, bloomed purple over stubbled skin. His messy hair is somewhere between blond and brown and tumbles over his forehead, leading me to a set of hazel eyes that are astoundingly pretty and at odds with the rest of his hard appearance. His knuckles, too, look ripped up, and his eyes follow my progress with an intensity that has my stomach twisting with a fear that is altogether different from what I’ve been feeling for the last hour. Even so, I continue watching him . . . watching him watch me, really, as Officer Tribble cuts off my plastic binds and locks me in the empty cell.
I move to sit at the same end as Matt, so we can talk to each other quietly, but the intense-eyed stranger sits closer to the bars, blocking all but the wave of red hair that adds an extra two inches to Matt’s already tall frame.
The guy is young, around my age, I would guess, and I wonder if the bruises have something to do with why he’s in here or if they’re just a separate part of his bad-boy mystique. Like oops, I forgot to put on leather before I left the house today, better get a little bloody instead.
Matt doesn’t seem concerned that he might be dangerous. Then again, Matt is rarely concerned about anything. When he leans his bulky frame around his cellmate, I finally manage to tear my gaze away.
“You okay, Pickle?” he asks.
I’m going to thump him for using that nickname later. That is not a nickname to be used in front of beautiful people, even potentially criminal ones.
“Fine, Matty.”
That’s what I tell him, but I hunch over again. The worry is a physical weight in my belly, a stone that presses down on my gut, and I wonder how quickly one can develop a stomach ulcer.
“You don’t look fine,” my friend says. “You look like you’re going to vom everywhere.”
Lovely. As if I weren’t mortified enough already by my actions today. But I can’t be mad at Matt. If he hadn’t stuck with me, I’d be here alone, which would be infinitely worse. “I’m sorry. This is my fault. I feel terrible that you stayed with me, and I got you into this.”
He shrugs. “No harm, no foul.”
Only Matt would call being arrested no harm. The guy is so laid-back, he’s like the human equivalent of Xanax. I want that. I need that. All I can think about is what my father might say, and whether or not this will go on my record, and if it will affect my scholarship, and what Henry will say.
I stop myself there. I don’t have to worry about what Henry will say because we’re over. That should bother me. We broke up a week ago, and after four years together, I should be devastated. I should be moving right past shock and denial into the never-wears-anything-but-sweatpants stage.
I don’t know what it says about me that I’m not. That I only think of him out of habit, nothing else.
I keep going, berating myself the way I wish Matt would. “We make plans for a reason, and I didn’t stick to it. I should have walked away as soon as they gave the dispersal order. Next time I do something this stupid, don’t you dare come after me.”
“Nah. Next time I’ll just clobber you over the head. Save us both the trouble.”
I roll my eyes because we both know that would never happen. Matt’s one of those guys who will always put themselves on the line for a friend. He could pretty much pass for a real-life Disney prince . . . if Disney made bearded, bisexual princes.