Praying for Rain (Praying for Rain Trilogy, #1)(21)

“BYOD!” she squeals. “Oh my God, that thing was, like, a foot long!”

I twist the throttle and take off, causing her arms to snap back around my body and her fingertips to dig into my sides. It’s fucking stupid, but I don’t like Rain paying attention to somebody else’s cock. Even if that cock is made of rubber and belongs to Abraham Lincoln’s widow.

It’s getting harder and harder to navigate the highway, not just because of the abandoned and wrecked vehicles every ten feet, but because—thanks to the overflowing dumpsters and trash cans all over town—the road is now covered in garbage, too. I really have to slow down and concentrate to avoid hitting something, but that doesn’t stop me from glancing up when we pass Rain’s house.

It looks exactly the way it did last night, except now there’s a baseball-sized hole in the middle of the glass window on the front door.

Crazy bitch. I smirk.

As we drive past, I wonder what the hell went on in there last night. Rain seemed so upset when she came back from getting all those supplies, but while I was sleeping, she turned around and went right back in. Maybe she waited until her dad passed out. Or maybe her mom really did come home. Or maybe she just—

Bam!

A bump under the tires pulls my attention back to the road, and suddenly, it feels like I’m trying to drive through quicksand. The bike is dragging ass, and I have to grip the handlebars harder to keep the damn thing tracking straight.

“Shit!”

I pull off to the side of the road and want to punch myself in the face. This is exactly what I knew would happen. I let myself get distracted for one fucking second, and now, I have a flat tire. I don’t even know what I ran over; that’s how checked out I was.

I prop the bike up on the kickstand, yank my helmet off, and turn around, prepared to tell Rain to go the fuck home. I want to scream it at her actually. I want to jam my finger into her perfect little face and make her cry off all that fucking makeup. Maybe then she’ll stop following me around like a lost puppy, and I’ll finally be able to focus again.

But when I stand up, Rain loses her grip on my torso. Her eyes go wide, and her arms flail in huge circles as she falls off the back of the bike, landing on her giant backpack like an upside-down turtle.

“What the fuck, Wes?” she cries, rolling from side to side in a pathetic attempt to get up.

A laugh from the bowels of my tarnished black soul bursts out of me as I watch her struggling on the ground. She cuts me an eat shit look that only lasts a second before she starts laughing, too. When she accidentally snorts like a pig, her hoodie-covered hands fly to her mouth in mortification.

“Just take the pack off!” I cry through my laughter, watching her alternate between struggling to get up and succumbing to her own giggle fit.

Rain pulls her arms out of the straps as I reach down and lift her shuddering body off the ground. The moment she’s upright, she falls into my chest, snorting and hiccupping and burying her beet-red face in my freshly washed shirt.

And, just like in the nightmare, her touch is all it takes for me to lose complete control—of the situation, of my willpower, of my own body. Instead of giving her a swat on the ass and sending her home like I know I should, I watch like a prisoner in my own mind as my arms wrap around her tiny shoulders and pull her in closer.

No! What the fuck are you doing, pussy? Cut her loose!

I scream at myself, call myself every name in the book, but the voice in my head is drowned out by the euphoric rush I get from holding this girl. She coils my shirt in both fists. Burrows her face into my neck. Her breath comes in short, hot bursts as she giggles against my skin. Her nose is cold. And all I can do is watch in humiliation as the meat puppet I live inside of tips its face down and smells her fucking hair.

Oh my God, you’re pathetic.

Sugar cookies. She laughs like a farm animal. She looks like a discarded porcelain doll that raided a teenage boy’s closet. And she smells like fucking sugar cookies.

Let her go, dipshit! Supplies! Shelter! Self-defense! That’s what you need!

But the warning falls on deaf ears because now my stupid fucking cock has gone rogue, too. Why not? Nothing else is listening to me. It springs to life and rams itself into my zipper, seeking Rain’s attention as well. I take a small step back, just enough to keep from shoving my hard-on into her belly like a full-fledged creep, but she responds to my step back with one of her own.

And that’s it.

The moment is over.

The laughter is gone.

We drop our arms, and we begin walking.

I carry the backpack and push my bike—the front tire almost completely flat—as Rain falls in step beside me. I’m still hard, and I probably will be forever, thanks to the way she’s blushing and twirling her hair in her fingers. I decide to concentrate on watching the road for debris—what I should have been doing in the first place.

“So … how much farther until we get to the hardware store?” I ask, staring at the pavement in front of me.

“Uh …” Rain looks off in the distance like she can see it.

This part of the highway is nothing but old farmhouses, like hers, with a few untended fields and a shit-ton of trees in between them. No one is growing anything. No one even has horses on their land. Just a bunch of junk cars and a few rusty old sheds.

“Maybe, like, fifteen, twenty minutes? It’s on the other side of this hill, down past the skating rink.”