“I’d love to get any information you might have about your neighbors and how they might’ve been convinced to sell or, better yet, your own personal experiences.” Emma Jean glances back at our house and then turns to me again. “Or, if not you, then whoever’s the head of your household.”
I immediately know that I don’t want this woman talking to my grandmother. It’ll only upset her, especially if Emma Jean tells her all the same things she’s just told me.
“We’ve had a half-dozen employees in fancy suits and even fancier cars show up here trying to buy our half of the duplex,” I admit, certain that none of this information could be used against my family in any way. If I thought it could, I’d tell Emma Jean to eat shit and escort her off the property myself.
Even that small bit of information has her honey-brown eyes glimmering.
“Do you mind if I record this?” she asks, pulling her phone from her pocket. I stare down at it and then lift my eyes to her face.
“Yes,” I say, and she nods, tapping her thumb against the screen. I reach out with my hand and grab her wrist. Our eyes meet. “Yes, I mind. Do not record me or put me on the record for anything. I’ll tell everyone you paid me money to lie.”
“But I—” she starts, and I cut her off.
“But you did. You paid me money to lie. You don’t want people to know about that, do you?”
Emma jerks her hand back from me, her lips turned down in a sharp frown.
“Since you’re here, and you did pay me, I’ll tell you this: Tommy Tits and Megan Face don’t own that property. They rent it. Their landlord doesn’t live here; he’s from Sacramento, California, so he doesn’t give two shits what happens here so long as he makes money.” I pause to lick my lips, considering my next words carefully. If Emma Jean is looking into this Archer Realty thing, good for her. I mean, I worry about her safety, but she seems scrappy enough. Anyway, whatever information I can feasibly give her, I will. Just … nothing that could ever come back on me or my family. “The offers we’ve been getting from Archer Realty are lowball bullshit. If we sold to them, we’d be in huge trouble. Rents have almost doubled in the last two years around here. We wouldn’t have anywhere to go.”
I release her wrist and take a step back, a clear dismissal.
“Would you be able to tell me the names of any of the employees who stopped by here?” she asks, but I’m already shaking my head. This conversation, as far as I’m concerned, is over.
“You should probably leave,” I tell her, glancing over and finding a white Prius waiting on the curb. Ah. I should’ve figured. Nobody in Prescott drives a Prius. “I’ll wait for you to get in your car before I head inside. Also, next time, if you want to ask a Prescott resident something, come up to the door and knock loudly and firmly. People in this neighborhood are jumpy. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
I hold my hand out in the direction of her car.
Emma looks at me for a moment before nodding slightly and then heading down the steep incline to her car. She looks back once before climbing in and then hurries back over to me.
“Can I give you my number, just in case you think of anything else?” she asks, but I already know the answer to that question. I’m not about to get involved with a reporter—nice as she may seem—that’s digging into corporate conspiracies. That’s a great way to end up six feet under real fast.
“No.” Just that. I turn and head for the front door without looking back.
I truly hope Emma Jean’s project fails—for her sake.
Whatever Archer Realty Investments is up to, it’s probably big news.
It’s also not my problem.
Not yet, anyway.
Scarlett
Widow keeps his distance from me for the next few days. He parks directly in front of or behind my car, but not in my spot. To be fair, I’ve been having Basti and Nisha grab it for me since they’re always early and I’m very often late.
I pause on the sidewalk when I see him sitting on the hood of his car, strumming his guitar. I feel like I recognize the song, but not quite, like he’s modified whatever tune it is. He lifts gold eyes up to stare at me.
“Are we going to pretend that you didn’t jerk off in front of me?” I ask, cocking my head to the side and knowing that it’s probably a mistake to bait him like this. His eyes harden, but he maintains that gripping glare of his as I smile. “Or that you left me a present on my steering wheel. Let’s neither of us act ignorant and stupid about what that sticky substance really was.”
Widow rests his guitar in his lap, his muscles tensed and poised, like he’s about to strike.
“Look at yourself,” he says, his voice this terrible monotone that belies a calmness without revealing the true anger underneath. “You’re fuckable. I don’t have to lie about that. It doesn’t mean that I like you. Don’t make such a stupid mistake.”
He adjusts the guitar again, strumming his fingers across the strings as I hold a strong debate with my inner self. Keep taunting the asshole or walk away. It should always be the latter, shouldn’t it? But I feel threatened in my own territory, and I don’t like that.
I don’t like how quietly dismissive Widow is while hiding clear sexual deviance underneath. He looks like someone who wants to be snapped, who wants to be broken out of their shell.
I move forward and, as his gold eyes flick up to mine, reach out and run a single fingertip along one of his side mirrors. In an instant, he’s on his feet and the guitar is tossed aside.
I’ve got just enough time to move back and out of his range, several of my girls popping their heads up from their phones as they lounge on Prescott’s front steps.
Widow is seething, his hands squeezed into fists, his eyes on mine as he struggles to control his breath.
“Do you have a death wish?” he asks me, and I laugh.
“Do you really think I’m afraid of you?” I ask, peering at him like I’m genuinely curious. He doesn’t need to know that I am, that I’d love to know why, as aloof as he appears to be, why he’d continue to egg me on. It’d be easier for him if he just stepped aside and parked somewhere else. He doesn’t seem to want trouble. He ignores the boys that throw paper clips at him in the hallway, or the girls who chuck erasers or rolls of paper at the back of his head.
So why not avoid me and my crew? Hmm?
“You should be,” Widow says, and I try to think of him as ‘Adrian Lawless’. It’s a nice name, much kinder than Widow. Although to be fair, the nickname suits him better. Descriptive, too. It lets the whole world know his sins in two simple syllables. “If you didn’t have a crew, you would be.”
“Would I?” I query back, shaking my head. “I don’t think so.” I nod my head in the direction of the boot—basically a large metal casing on a wheel that keeps a vehicle from being driven—on the right rear wheel of his Stingray. “But I see that you are. You’ve finally learned your lesson, eh?”
I don’t tell him that I can get a boot off as quickly as anything else; he doesn’t need to know that. Or maybe he already does?
“It’s important to learn the ins and outs of one’s enemy,” he says, reaching back for his guitar, his eyes flicking immediately back to me. His purple, teal, and black hair catches the weak sunlight streaming through the clouds, the color reminding me of peacock feathers. “And make no mistake, Scarlett Force: I consider you one.”
I shiver at the sound of my full name rolling past his pouty lower lip.
The bell rings and we both turn to look up at the building before returning our gazes to one another. Widow waits for me to smile and raise my brows at him before I turn and head up the steps, collecting my girls as I go.
But I can feel him as he ascends the steps behind me, an impossible presence to ignore.
During fifth period, Widow comes to the library again, curling up with a book and ignoring me as he usually does. What I’ve started to notice over the last week and a half is that he has a certain type of story
that he prefers: romance novels.
He actually reads fucking bodice rippers, erotica, even alien romance. Our school has it all—we take whatever gets donated and on the shelves it goes. Besides that, the librarians that work there take a quiet but very firm stance on censorship.
“Who cares what these hoodlums are reading, so long as they’re reading?”
I’ve heard that many a time, and I can’t say that I disagree. Reading books about people fucking or falling in love is one of the less terrible things a Prescott student might be doing. I shelve several books in view of Widow, taking advantage of the short skirt I wore today and letting it ride up my thighs to show a tantalizing tease of my silky black panties.
Whenever I think I feel him watching me, I look back, only to find myself disappointed. Either he’s anticipating my glances and reverting back to reading or else I’m imagining the entire scenario altogether.
Once I’m certain that he’s satisfied with my presence in the library, I slip out and go down the steps, hooking a sharp left around the building and using the hole in the chain-link fence to crawl out. It’s been here for years—and likely will continue to be here for years to come—and is usually hidden by a dumpster.
Any student worth their weight in salt at Prescott High knows it’s there.
I slip through and make my way around to the front of school—and straight to Widow’s car. Despite the boot, and the steering wheel lock, despite the GPS trackers that he’s undoubtedly replaced, and whatever other security he’s added, I’m still able to pick the lock and open the door.
I slide into the driver’s seat, shifting my eyes around the empty streets. There’s nobody out here, but I likely don’t have a lot of time. If Widow catches me in his car like this … I ignore the small spike of adrenaline in my blood, teasing my fingertips across the wetness of my panties.
He defiled my car; I’m going to defile his.
Leaning my head back against the seat, I work the hardened nub of my clit through my panties, the precariousness of the situation adding spice to my already heated blood. Widow can pretend to be disgusted by me all he wants, but there’s a reason he comes to the library and sits in that same goddamn chair every day.
It isn’t just to read. After all, he could read anywhere he wanted, couldn’t he?
I can’t close my eyes—God forbid I miss Widow coming out and seeing me in his car—but my lids droop as I slip two fingers beneath my underwear, pushing them inside my hungry cunt and feeling my silken walls clamp down.
All the while, I’m thinking of Widow and his hand wrapped around his cock, the way he stared at me and said, “How dare you?” as if he had any right to the high ground, caught with his dick out like some sort of sexual deviant.
“Fuck, that feels good,” I murmur, pushing my fingers deep and drawing them out, over and over again until I’m coming hard, liquid drenching my knuckles as my body pulses and milks itself. My mind is occupied with the smell of Widow—that black plum and woodsy pine scent—that permeates the interior of the car along with the memory of his amber eyes hard and defiant as he met my gaze. It isn’t often that somebody stands up to me. It turns me on, can’t lie about that.
I finish with a sharp little gasp, slumping back into the seat and then removing my wet fingers. I make sure to play with his steering wheel, his gear shift, the supple leather beneath my bare thighs.
Once I’m certain that I’ve left a similar enough gift to his, I climb out, lock the door, shut it, and head into the bathroom to wash up. When I get back to the library, I see that Widow’s still there.
He looks up at me for once and our eyes meet again. I smile at him and then proceed with my duties, making sure to bend down again so that he can see how wet my panties are now.
When I stand back up and turn to look at him, he’s gone, and I’m left wondering if he knew what I was up to all along.
Scarlett
After school, the girls—including Basti—and I meet up in our usual spot, an abandoned jail on the north side of town, to go over our plans. Since we can’t do our job properly until after dark, we chow down on burgers, fries, and cherry cokes from Wesley’s while we wait for the time to tick by.
See, ‘work’ for us has a very specific meaning.
Not a single one of us cares for the type of ‘work’ available to economically disadvantaged girls—except for maybe Lemon. There’s a shared sentiment among us that we’d rather die than end up ‘empowered’ for twenty bucks a fuck.
No thank you.
Instead, we play a little game with rich assholes on the highway. There are a lot of them nowadays, more than there used to be. In the past, it was more about getting lucky, waiting for hours on the crest near Coburg Road and hoping an Oak Valley Prep brat might come past.
With the influx of fresh blue bloods into Springfield and Eugene, there are plenty of juicy targets to prey on.
“Basti, you’re on lookout duty,” I say, and he nods.
“Yes, Queen,” he says, reaching up to ruffle his dark, wavy hair.
I turn to Nisha.
“I’ll take point,” I tell her, and she nods, climbing into her Lotus as I retreat to the Pantera. We’ve done this enough times that we ride like a well-oiled machine. Anyway, I’m sure I’m not the only who’s noticed that there are far less cops in this area than there used to be.
I haven’t seen anyone but Officer Molester since last week.
Huh.
Not my problem anyway. Less cops is good news for us.
I sit in my car, my phone in my hand, and I wait for a message from Basti. As soon he spots a suitable target, off we’ll go. Until then, I’m left to my own devices. Could be minutes, could be hours. I used to hate it, used to get edgy and let my nerves get the better of me, but nowadays, I find the alone time refreshing.
A text from an unknown number pops up on my phone, and my eyes widen at the picture of my bliss-ridden face inside Widow’s car. Who the fuck? I wonder, sitting up straight as I stare at the picture and grit my teeth.
Who took this? And if they’re attempting to blackmail me with it, they can get fucked. I’m the last person this sort of tactic would ever work on.
What are you up to, Force? is what comes through next. It takes me a second to figure it out, but then a lightbulb goes off and I wet my lips with my tongue.
How did you get my number, Bohnes? I ask, wondering if I haven’t made a huge mistake by involving myself with that man. I can’t even say what started this affair. I barely paid him any notice before that night in the woods, but I guess in the dark like that, in the shadows, with the looming heat of adrenaline from my upcoming race, it was easy to be swept up in the natural chemistry between us.
One of your girls owed me money. She had few choices.
I read that and sigh heavily, reaching up to rub at the bridge of my nose, adding another line item to my already overwhelming list. I’ll have to figure out who it was and beat her ass. Giving out my number is a huge fucking no-go.
Do you know anything about Widow? I reply, but I know as soon as I hit send that I’ve made a mistake.
Wrong answer, Force. That’s what Bohnes sends back, making my blood go cold. If you needed to get off in the middle of the day, you should’ve come and found me.
I start to type up another response when the call from Basti comes in.
“Talk to me,” I say, putting him on speaker and tossing the phone onto the passenger seat. As if any Prescott brat has Bluetooth in their car. That’s funny as hell. We barely have phones. We only have cars because we know how to buy junkers for cheap, steal the right parts, and put the work in.
“There’s a black Lambo heading your way, but you gotta be quick. He’s clocking in at ninety, at least. Maybe more than that.”
I’m already pulling out of my space when I see a black bullet shoot past me, tearing down the back country road like he owns it. I hit the gas hard, more than up for the challenge of trying to tail this motherfucker.<
br />
It’s like another race except this time, there are no rules. It’s just me and this douchebag, and my girls for backup.
I manage to catch up to him fairly easily, sweeping up in the left lane as he stays hugging the right. It’s a tricky maneuver to whip my car in front of him, and brake-check the asshole—risky, too—but I make sure there’s enough room for him to stop.
He releases the gas but doesn’t hit the brakes the way these rich fuckers with more car than they can handle usually do. He controls the slide in a way that makes me wonder if he doesn’t at least have some experience on the track.
Nisha is right there behind him, another of our girls in the left lane. We usually (though not always) choose to do this at night for a reason, right?
Anyway, the asshole comes to the same conclusion they always do, pulling onto the gravel shoulder near the river where more of our girls are waiting. Out come the spike strips, and then the Lambo is rolling across them with the sound of popping tires, skidding dangerously close to the guardrail.
I park just in front of the Lamborghini, Nisha behind, our other girl blocking it in from the left. The Lambo ends up pressed to the guardrail with nowhere to go. Not that it could drive properly anyway, with four flat tires.
I’m out and at the driver’s side window, wearing a black balaclava and holding a Glock 19 in my hand. It’s my grandmother’s actually. I’ve been stealing it from her nightstand drawer since I was sixteen years old.
She’d be horrified to know about any of this. She taught me better. But you can only protect someone from the world they live in for so long. I’m a part of Prescott; it’s in my blood. It’s the monster that made me, and I’m unashamed of what I’ve become.
The world is cruel, that much is obvious.
I may as well be the crueler of the two.
The driver’s side window comes down—it doesn’t often roll down that easily, usually more threats are involved—as I allow a pretty grin to stretch across my lips beneath the mask. Nisha has the cell phone blocker in her car, preventing our target from making any phone calls to the police, to his bodyguard, to whoever the fuck.
F*ckboy Psychos Page 11
