Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 90564 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 453(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90564 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 453(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
“Road head? You must be shooting dust by now.”
“Only one way to find out.” He went for his fly and ran a stop sign.
“If you steal something without getting caught, I’ll fuck you in the back seat of this truck.” Because I was nothing if not a basic creature when it came to him, and I liked to incentivize him into not going to jail.
“Human amoebas all over Quasimodo’s upholstery.” One of his dark eyebrows lifted like this was some kind of dare. “Motherfucking deal.” Then he floored it and clipped a mailbox.
He’d never been a great driver, but damn… “Maybe I should drive.”
“Like you’re any better. I taught you how to drive, which means I’m your Mr. Miyagi.”
This was the old Hendrix. Squirrely, high on life, and the easiest person to be around. He was unpredictable, chaotic, and fun, and I loved him for it.
“You are not my Mr. Miyagi. And I’m a girl, which instantly makes my sense of self-preservation far superior even to the average man. Your cracked-out ass sure as hell isn’t average.”
He glanced away from the road, and the truck drifted over the reflectors in the middle of the road. “You think crack is a laughing matter?”
Rolling my eyes, I yanked the steering wheel to move us back into an actual lane. “Shut up, Hendrix.”
“It’s not a laughing matter, Lola. It’s an epidemic.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Of all the words he could say and use in the right context… “You can say epidemic, but not semantics?”
“I can say semantics. I just choose not to.” He ran through a fresh red light. Horns blared as he continued to drive like a reckless asshole.
“Bullshit. You thought it was a chain-length fence for fifteen years.”
“Easy misunderstanding. It has chains, and it has length.”
“It also has links. And what about mahogany? You thought the lyrics in “Tiny Dancer” said ‘Hold me closer Tony Danza’…Iceberg lettuce was grown on an actual iceberg…”
“You thought girls got pregnant from boys peeing in them until you were eleven.”
“It’s the same hole! You didn’t even know girls had two separate holes.”
He swerved into the Bullseye parking lot. “Like that’s obvious. Never once have I watched porn and gone, shit man, look at the pee hole on that girl.”
I snorted. It was like we’d never been apart. “You have issues.”
The brakes screeched when he threw the truck into a space, then untwisted the dangling wires. Wolf was going to kill him.
We got out, and Hendrix stopped halfway across the parking lot, staring straight ahead at the supercenter. “I hate this red monstrosity with a vengeance.”
“You’re so weird.” Not like I didn’t know it, but sometimes I had a moment where it really slapped me. Like his hating an entire shopping franchise.
I still didn’t know why he hated Bullseye so much. It couldn’t just be the greeter thing—
“They don’t even have the decency to have a greeter,” he said. “How am I supposed to enjoy myself if no one welcomes me in?”
There you go. “You want someone to welcome you in so you can enjoy yourself stealing their shit?”
“Exactly.”
The doors slid open. The cold air hit me just before the scent of week-old fish in the deli.
Hendrix grabbed a buggy before passing the old-as-dirt security guard with one cloudy eye.
We passed an aisle of Halloween decorations. I was at the end before I realized I’d lost Hendrix, who was shoving a pumpkin carving kit down the front of his jeans. Why? Not like he could steal a damn pumpkin, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to buy one.
“Hendrix,” I whisper-shouted.
His head snapped up like a prairie dog, and I pointed at the ground beside me. “Get over here.”
He glared before cramming a flashlight down his pants and following me to the kitchen electronics section. We stopped in front of a four-foot-tall margarita maker box. There was no way he was getting past the security guard with that.
“I told you; you can’t steal that.”
The challenge rose in his eyes. “If I waltz my ass out of here with this box, I’ll let you get on your knees and suck me off like the dirty little god of thievery I am. Then pound one out in the back of Quasimodo’s truck.”
“Wow, you are no Romeo.”
“Maybe not. But tell me you wouldn’t stab a sword in your chest if you woke up to my dead carcass on some tomb floor.”
He knew the plot of Romeo and Juliet but couldn’t say semantics or monogamy…
He grabbed the two-hundred-dollar Margaritaville Mixer—who the hell paid two hundred bucks for frozen drinks? No one in Dayton, that was for sure—and wedged it into the cart. “All right. Let’s go.” Then he whipped the buggy around and headed to the other end of the aisle.
I’d watched that boy get himself out of some crap; he’d even told me to take tampons out of the box. “You’re just going to walk right out with that?” I hurried to catch up.