The Girl in the Love Song (Lost Boys #1)(35)

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know. Besides, you don’t want to hear the shit I’ve been writing.”

“How the fuck do you know that?”

“What kind of music do you listen to?”

“Heavy stuff. Melvins. Tool.”

“Yeah, what I play is not that. Mostly, I’ve been writing songs for a girl.”

“A girl.” Ronan popped another beer and handed it to me. “Now I really feel bad that you can’t get drunk.”

“Amen.”

We clinked beer bottles.

“What’s the story?”

I peered suspiciously at him. “You’ll just call me a pussy, tell me to fuck someone else and get over it.”

“Yeah, maybe I will,” he said with a faint grin.

I laughed, then shook my head. “It’s hopeless, is what it is. She’s perfect and rich, and I’m a poor bastard without a working pancreas.”

I gave Ronan a brief rundown of my relationship with Violet. After a time, he nodded. “Yep. You need to fuck someone else and get over it.”

We shared a laugh, watching the flames, then Ronan’s voice grew low.

“Nah, that’s bullshit,” he said. “You need to tell her.”

“She’s hellbent on us being friends. She thinks it’d ruin us if we tried to be more.”

“So? Tell her anyway.”

“I can’t. She’d shoot me down, and things would never be the same. Though, I guess they’re pretty fucked already.”

Ronan nodded. “So don’t talk to her. Just…I don’t know. Kiss her.”

“No way.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Uh, fucking boundaries, for one thing. She’s told me how she feels, explicitly. Friends. I have to honor that.”

Ronan snorted and drained his beer.

I leaned forward over my knees. “What can I do? I told you, we swore a blood oath.”

“When you were kids. Does she suspect you like her?”

I don’t like her. I love her with every goddamn piece of my soul.

Ronan’s thick eyebrows went up, waiting.

“Not exactly,” I admitted.

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know.” I gave the sand at my feet a little kick. “There’s a party tonight. She’ll be there.”

“So, go to the party and tell her.”

“I just said—”

“You gotta fight, man,” Ronan said, his deep voice rising, his eyes flared in anger. “You fight because if you don’t, it’ll be too late. And too late is fucking death.”

He looked away quickly, his hands balling into fists, memories that had nothing to do with me coursing through him like blood.

I waited until they let him go, then said into the twilight, “She needs me to be her friend. She needs…me.”

“So you’re her pack mule. You carry all her shit and try to make life easier on her because you care about her. What about you?”

Ronan swung his head my way, his eyes asking the question beneath the question: Do you want to be needed or do you want to be loved?

Maybe the beer was making me tipsy, or maybe it was just the plain simple truth of it all. Violet’s home life might be crumbling beneath her, but mine was fucking on fire. If I didn’t salvage something good, there’d be nothing left.

I stood up, brushed the sand from my ass, and took up my guitar case.

“You want to come?” I asked. “I mean, it’s probably going to be a bunch of drunk jocks playing beer pong to shitty house music.”

Ronan got to his feet too and kicked sand over the fire. “I’m coming. I told you. I got your back.”

I started to smile as something like happiness tried to fill in my cracks. Suspicion got there first. “Why?”

“You don’t annoy the living shit out of me. Good enough?” His tone was harsh, but I saw a tinge of warmth in his slate gray eyes.

The happiness came back. “Good enough.”





Chapter Seven





Chance Blaylock’s huge two-story on Ocean Avenue was blaring Eminem’s “Godzilla” over a hundred laughing conversations. I felt the base even out on the street as Evelyn and I headed up the walk, muttering a curse. I was at war with my tight minidress; a constant push and pull between tugging it down and hauling it up to better cover my boobs.

“Will you relax?” Evelyn said, looking stunning in black leggings and a black bustier-style top. “You are fire. River is going to lose his shit when he sees you.”

“I feel half-naked.”

She smirked. “Exactly.”

In my past life, I’d never worn more than jeans and sweatshirts to social events. This was my first house party, and I felt like an imposter. Or a spy from the “other side” come to see how the cool kids do it.

They’re going to see right through me.

Then I chastised myself for being silly and remembered what David Foster Wallace once said: You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.

Inside, the house was dark with only small lamps lit here and there and a string of lights over a sound system. Bodies filled the rooms, talking, dancing, making out. Most with a red solo cup in hand. The music and people filled every corner of the house, upstairs and down.