ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(55)

Goon and Rage never stood a chance.

Maybe in another lifetime, Hope and Nolan could be together, but this wasn’t another lifetime, and I hadn’t been Hope in years, if ever.

“Not tonight,” he said, I covered the phone while I exhaled.

“You sure you’re done there?” Smoke asked.

“Positive. If I got you what you needed then I’m on to the next,” I said, clicking the End button and picking up my bag. I took one last glance around the room and my chest grew tighter.

The feeling only worsened when I drove off on my scooter.

For the first time since I’d left home, the freedom I’d longed for, the freedom I gave up everything for, that had held me together for so long, now felt dark and empty.

“Fuck, baby. You really are gonna kill me,” Nolan had said.

Tears formed in my eyes. I tried to blink them away. I managed to allow for only one to fall down my cheek.

“Not today at least,” I said, wiping my face and sniffling. “Not today.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO




Nolan


I should have known the f*cking yawn was fake. I even saw her practicing weeks ago, but I still couldn’t see past my blue balls long enough to put two and two together.

I’m not a f*cking *. I wasn’t raised to be a *. I didn’t cry during sad movies.

When my grandparents died, it f*cking sucked.

When I had to kill my parents, it was revenge. Sweet dick-hardening revenge.

The way I felt at my grandparent’s funeral, as shitty as that was, had nothing on the way I felt when I woke up in an empty bed.

Again I knew.

Rage was gone.

Nothing I’d ever felt before compared to how I felt when I saw the note she’d left, written in letter magnets on the refrigerator.

I AM 1 OF THE BAD ONES

I’d always thought a “broken heart” was just a saying, an exaggeration. I realized I’d been wrong the moment I saw her note, because it felt as if all the air was being sucked out of my chest. I could feel the snaking lines of breakage slicing through me, like someone was slashing through my heart with a razor blade.

That’s the moment I felt my heart actually break. It actually f*cking hurt. I bent in half and grabbed my chest as if I’d been shot.

I wish she had shot me.

It would have hurt less.

I was shattered…and then so was the sliding glass door.

I picked up a chair from the dining room table and launched it through the glass with a guttural roar as deep and agonizing as being left behind by the only person I’d ever really loved with only a f*cking magnet note as a shitty good-bye.

I watched the jagged pieces of glass as they crashed to the floor. They cut into my feet as I stepped over them onto the deck. The hurt turned into something else entirely, and I only felt one thing.

Rage.

I didn’t give a f*ck what she thought. This wasn’t over. It was far from f*cking over.





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE




Nolan

Six months later


Restless.

That’s what I’d grown in the months since Rage left without so much as a good-bye.

Fridge magnets didn’t f*cking count.

So restless, in fact, that I finally got around to cleaning the pool and fixing the filter. What was once a green mote of filth was now aqua blue and sparkling.

Syphilis free.

Rage would approve.

Which only pissed me off more.

It may sound stupid, but my biggest regret was not claiming her * before she took off. That way, at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing that she was somewhere out in the world with my invisible mark on her. Although a visible one would have worked too. A tattoo. A f*cking forehead stamp.

Rage was mine and I needed the world to know it.

First, I needed her to know it.

My leg had gotten much stronger. I was no longer using the crutches, and I’d been spending a lot of time running on the beach and working out on the deck to gain the strength back I’d lost.

No amount of working out was going to strengthen my mind into not thinking about her, though. No amount of running. No amount of jerking my cock.

And I’d been f*cking trying.

Day in and day out was a lesson in patience and willpower and every day, when I hoped it would be the day that either my thoughts of her would start to fade or that I’d get a call with her location, neither happened. Search after search after search without a damn thing to show for it.

I was also in memory hell, tortured by the thoughts of a girl who’d been gone for a lot longer than the time I’d had her.

Actually, it was more like a purgatory of my own making. I was at a complete and utter standstill.

I’d hung my cut on a nail by the front door—a reminder of what was waiting for me. Putting it back on meant that I’d given up on hockey and on getting my scholarship back, something I wasn’t entirely ready to do. My leg was in good shape. All I had to do was make a call to the coach, ask for one of the team doctors to check me out, and see what they thought.

I didn’t.

Until I found my girl, everything else was on hold.

Maybe my inner turmoil was partially due to going so long without *.

“Don’t matter how long you stare at that cut, it ain’t gonna suck your dick,” a voice said from behind me. A voice I recognized instantly.