by Ace Gray
PRETTY YOUNG THINGS
Copyright © 2019 Ace Gray
Except the original material written by the author, all songs, song lyrics, and song titles contained in this book are the property of the respective songwriters and copyright holders. The author concedes to the trademarked status and trademark owners of the products mentioned in this fiction novel and recognizes that they have been used without permission. The use and publication of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or events is entirely coincidental.
Editing by Payne Proof
Book design by Inkstain Design Studio
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Other Books by Ace Gray
About the Author
To Staci, for inspiring this story.
And Charleigh, for reminding me of all the reasons to publish it.
I love you both forever.
Blood−bright red−bloomed across my palm, plump droplet by plump droplet. I smiled down at the line I’d carved in my skin as I pulled back my knife and wiped it on my jeans.
“Brothers?” I asked.
“From another mother,” Diego answered as he clasped his hand to mine.
“Until the surf drowns us,” Danger chimed in.
“Or the concrete shreds us,” Rousse finished.
All four of our hands pressed together. Blood brothers. Now and forever.
For a moment, the world froze and everything else faded away. I wasn’t a lanky kid fighting to figure out my place in the world. I got to forget about my beige life—parents who merely fed me, clothed me, and sent me to school—and play with color. These guys were my patchwork family, and we’d made a makeshift home here on the grassy ledge of the cliff we claimed as our own. We snuck out almost every night to hang out here.
Diego smashed the moment with a whoop then turned and kicked the glass bottle teetering on the log behind us. I turned and watched it crash into the rock ring of the fire pit, sizzling as it shattered. Things like this didn’t matter as much to him. He knew his place in the world—on top of a surfboard. His parents were so obsessed with smoking weed that they didn’t fight it. Or him. On anything. He liked the freedom. He liked to be wild.
Danger howled at the moon, hurtled the stump he’d been using at a seat, then hopscotched over the flames. He skittered on the graveled edge of the cliff on the other side.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Rousse sprinted after him, grabbing him by the shirt just as I was going to let loose a scream. Danger always looked his demons in the face and snarled. He was one of five brothers, all older. His house got crowded, stifling even, since they were all talented athletes, and I could never tell if these nights were his only release. The only time he didn’t sit in someone’s shadow.
“Yo, man. Why you gotta be such a downer?” Danger laughed as he used his momentum to spin back toward the flames.
“Because I don’t give a shit what you’re on, you can’t fly like an eagle.”
“Fly like an eagle…” Danger started singing Steve Miller Band at the top of his lungs. He threw his arms out and spun.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” I said as I jumped up behind him, flapped my wings, and cawed.
He shoved my shoulder, and I oomphed as I tumbled back. Danger was on me a second later, rolling, rough and wild. He and I were closest in size, both growing into our lanky bodies and hardening muscles as we’d practically cut our teeth wrestling each other.
“You guys are too close to the cliffs.” Rousse always worried that his klutziness was contagious.
Out of all of us, he was the careful one—always worried that he’d choke on the silver spoon in his mouth. And honestly, I would have too if I were a Berringer. We all knew his family. We all knew he had to behave. But on nights like tonight…
“Let the heathens roll off into the ocean and drown.” Diego snatched the long end of a thick branch from the flames, tossed a bottle in the air, swung, and cracked it. Rather than flying off the cliffs, the shards became shimmers in the night sky.
Covered in the mud of the earth and the salt of the sea, laughing as that little bit of blood seeped from our hands into the soil−into each other—Danger’s dark skin almost melted into the shadow of the night when he pressed up and away from me and the light of the fire. His loose fitting tank hung from his body as he shook his long limbs out. I shoved up after him and sat on the log between him and Rousse.
Diego was across the fire, letting shadow lap at his baby face where he’d pulled back his bleach blonde surfer curls. His bloody hand was full of mud now, and he used it to paint perfect dots above the line of his eyebrow. On his opposite cheek, he traced two thin lines.
The perfect Lost Boy face paint.
Because that’s what we were, boys without an anchor. Besides each other, of course. Our families were placeholders, people nearby that didn’t know us, not really. They didn’t understand us. But together we’d built a bond better than family. It was a type of ruddy glamor to be a boy that could run free beneath the moon. We were allowed to be wild, and it made me want to roar.
Diego let his crazy, chin-length hair down, shook it in the moonlight, and started laughing. He always seemed a little unhinged, but it was contagious. Who didn’t want to surrender to the heathen inside, the fever that burned like wildfire?
One by one, he painted our faces with muck and blood. Dots down my nose and matching stripes on my chin. Zigzags on Danger’s cheek. A crown of fingerprints beneath Rousse’s brooding bangs
.
Then he led us into the moonlight as we danced around the fire. Savages in our own right. Drunk on youth and freedom. Secure in the one thing we shared.
Brotherhood.
I traced the scar on my palm as we looked at the house just up from the cliff—our cliff. I couldn’t really believe our luck. That this house existed, that it had enough room for all four of us. That Rousse had figured out how to get enough money out of his trust fund to buy it. We would get to keep playing at wild savages together.
“What do you think?” Danger stepped up beside me and shoved his hands on his hips as he studied the house.
“I think it’s fucking awesome.” I couldn’t help but smile.
“Don’t you think it’s a little too convenient? I mean our spot is right there.” He pointed through the dense woods behind the house. “And there’s a trail to our beach.”
“That’s what makes it awesome. It’s, like, fate.”
“Fate seems like a heavy-handed bitch most of the time.”
I didn’t need to look over to know that Danger was narrowing his eyes, ready to fight fate herself. He was always primed these days.
“I want to make my own choices. I want to know I’m the master of my own destiny,” he continued.
I rolled my eyes. “Relax, Danger. Go with the flow.”
“You can say that because it tends to flow your way more often than not.”
I didn’t answer—what was there to say anyway? I was lucky. We sat in silence staring at the house for a little while. While I didn’t know what Danger thought about, I guessed it was something along the lines of our future. That’s where mine went anyway.
The four of us had stayed together. Blood-brothers in word and bond. Nothing had come between us, I was sure nothing ever would. Not girls, or jobs, or general debauchery. We weren’t going our separate ways like so many friends did when they turned eighteen. Danger, Rousse, and I were all going to college together, just down the Pacific Coast highway. Diego would be surfing just down the trail that lead from our back porch, except when he travelled to competitions or photoshoots. Just because we were growing up, didn’t mean we were growing apart. Nothing about the four of us had to change. It was the most comforting thing about staring down my future.
Brotherhood.
Five Years Later…
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. I leaned over and kissed the five freckles on Mercy’s bare back. Her silken skin was warm in the sunlight, and I nuzzled in as I studied the dots near the slope of her spine. They were each different colors, a spectrum of chocolate etched in my memory, and placed just so in the shape of the constellation Cassiopeia. I couldn’t help but trace the shape as she slept naked on her stomach.
“Mmmmmm,” she purred, tensed, then melted into the mattress. Her eyes fluttered open, staying lazy and hooded as she found mine.
“She was the most beautiful woman on earth. So beautiful, the gods placed her in the heavens for all of eternity to see.”
Mercy smiled as she curled her hands beneath her chest and nuzzled into her pillow. “She was so vain they put her upside down.” Sleep still hung on her beautiful soft voice.
“Zeus wouldn’t make the same mistake twice,” I murmured, bending down to kiss the skin I worshipped in a way Olympus had never known.
“You make me blush.” She giggled.
“The second most beautiful thing about your skin.”
“Tey…” The sound of want transformed my nickname into a moan and desire pooled in the pit of my stomach.
I gently pressed on her shoulder and turned her flat on her back. Her legs spread, and I slid between them as if it was the only place I belonged. I grabbed each of her wrists, slid them from her chest, and pinned them to the pillow on either side of her forehead. She twisted to one side and let her eyes close and her smile spread just before she reached to kiss my hand where I held her wrist. Her knees rubbed up along my thighs before her legs wove around me.
My lips wandered down her breastbone and between her teardrop tits until I couldn’t arch any further without losing the feel of her against me. I moved slowly back up her body, capturing one of her rosebud nipples in my lips, letting the edges of my teeth nibble on her sensitive skin.
“Tey,” she groaned.
I pulled her nipple taut then let it slip from my mouth at the last minute. She gasped only for me to swallow her sounds up with my kiss.
Her hips bucked against mine, coaxing me to move, to grind in the way that would make both our bodies tremble. Between morning and Mercy, I was hard enough it hurt but I held back, letting the slickness between her thighs build where her slit grazed the head of my dick. Pleasure jolted me, but I forced myself to move steady. Against her lips, against her body.
I buried my face in the crook of her neck to kiss against her sensitive skin while I teased her. While I breathed in the sweet tropics of her scent.
“I love you,” she murmured.
“Have mercy,” I growled into her ear as I finally slid into her.
She giggled and gasped like we hadn’t done this a thousand times before, like she didn’t know the shape and size of me. Like we hadn’t been fucking fashioned to fit together.
I knew her every curve, her every inch. The velvet of her skin and the depth of her eyes. The goodness of her soul. I loved her. I loved the pieces that made her up every bit as much as the things I knew that broke her down. I loved those pieces even more than the rest of them. That she trusted me to hold them in my big, callused hands.
I knew I would make her mine. With every action of my body today and all of my words for every tomorrow. The boys didn’t believe in soulmates, but me? I knew they existed and that she was mine.
Her moan lapped at my shoulder as I pumped into her again and again and again.
“Fingers,” she begged. “Fingers and then kiss me. Kiss me till I die.”
I let her wrists go and slid my hand between us. Mercy threw her head back and bucked her hips up into my hand, meeting my thrusts with her slender hips. I stroked her with firm fingers, creating the friction that drove her nuts.
“I thought you wanted kisses,” I taunted her with a smoky voice as I slid my nose along her jaw.
“Aaaaggghhhh,” she cried out then tucked her chin to reach up for me.
I took her lips roughly and nibbled on her bottom lip the same way I had with her nipple. Her hips gyrated against mine, against my fingers, as I moved in and out, in and out. Her moans were warm puffs against my skin, heating me in a way not even the sun could. The thin sheen of sweat building between us added salt to this overwhelming sweet.
My tongue swept across the seam of her lips, waiting for them to open again, to moan, to beg, to call my name, so I could breathe whatever she deigned to give me.
Her soft cry echoed in my mouth, and I knew I was about to get her best. Her orgasm always pressed her chest firmly to mine and made her knees clench on my hips. I lived for the feeling of that moment, that moment when she tried to burrow into my heart. I kissed her open mouth, desperate for the taste of her as she fell apart.
When her body stilled beneath me, and she sighed with a bold and beautiful smile, my world went as bright as the sunshine pouring in through my beat up blinds. A shiver ran down my spine and fisted in my balls. I had to pull out before I couldn’t convince myself to. With a grunt I slid out of her, missing her already, and shuffled my muscular thighs along her delicate body. I fisted on myself once, twice as her hand slid down the soft lines of her body.
“Fuck,” I swore through clenched teeth.
She reached for me and wrapped her hand around my dick, taking my place when she pumped. Her hand on me, framed by her tits, I found my release across the sun kissed skin I called home.
Mercy bit her lip as I shot cum across her chest, making my own type of constellation. And when I sagged, my shoulders rounded, and chest heaving from the effort, my weight pressed her deeper into our bed.
“I love you,” I managed
between tortured breaths.
“Have mercy.” She used my line back on me with her devious smile.
“I’m hoping I do.”
“Forever,” she said softly.
In that moment, I believed her. I believed in the forces of the universe that had brought us together. That I would have the good fortune to keep her. I slid from our bed, wanting to go back the second I couldn’t feel her, but reached for a small towel before I did. Gingerly, I cleaned all of me from her chest. A small part of me wanted to leave it, to mark her as mine, but I didn’t need to. She just was. It was the simple truth of our insides. Soon, the diamond I was saving for would say it to the world.
She smiled and bit her lip as she watched me. I wanted nothing more than to bend down and take that lip with mine and start this morning all over again. Want twitched in my belly once again.
“I need to make breakfast, Dantè,” she said with a husky chuckle as if she’d read my thoughts.
I nodded and tossed the towel toward the hamper and missed. “You want me to go out there with you?” I asked with an easy smile, smoothly rolling onto my back beside her and crossing my hands behind my head.
“No.” The blush that colored her cheeks in my periphery betrayed her.
“I don’t mind, Merce. I’d shield you from anything, even if it’s just those three giving you crap.”
“No, it’s okay. I don’t think they’re up. Danger is the only one who’ll say anything anyway.” She sighed as she walked to her set of drawers and pulled out a bikini bottom. The cut showed off her ass and long lean line of her legs. That her body matched the soul I’d get to keep made my smile spread. “Some days I can’t wait until it’s just you and me.”
“Some days?” My eyebrow arched up. “It’s every day for me.”
She shied away from me but I still caught the way her smile made her freckles dance across the bridge of her nose. I loved the way they folded up when she scrunched her nose.
And how she hated when people peeled oranges in the car.
I loved the scar on the pad of her big toe.
