Series: Like Us Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 241
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 236417 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1182(@200wpm)___ 946(@250wpm)___ 788(@300wpm)
“Yeah, no,” O’Malley forces. “Do I think she’s cute? Yeah.”
I suck in a boiling breath and try to calm down.
“But I wouldn’t date a girl eight years younger than me, and I definitely wouldn’t go for someone like her.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shakes his head a few times, searching for the words. “I’d never trust her.”
Fuck me, I’m burning alive again. If snow were falling, it’d melt as soon as it kisses my skin. “Sleeping around while you’re single doesn’t make you a cheating whore.”
“Just a whore, right? You would know.”
I rub my face with both hands. Beyond aggravated. We haven’t broken our stride. “So you’re not in love with me. You don’t want to fuck me. You’re not jealous.” I drop my hands and shake my head now. “What’d I do to you?” I glare at him. “The way you act around me, it’s like I fucked your girlfriend.”
O’Malley staggers. He falls a couple steps short, and I spin around on him, my pulse shooting to my throat.
“Wait…did I…?” I breathe.
The flashlight hurts my eyes as the beam hits me, but he fists the neck of the handle, letting the light shoot to the sky. We’re illuminated enough that I see visible pain sharpening his cheekbones.
“Who? When?” I question, trying to rack my brain for a name or a face. “How?”
42
PAUL DONNELLY
“Forget about it,” O’Malley mumbles, about to continue hiking down the road, but I catch his elbow. He jerks out of my grip. “It was forever ago.”
“Yeah, and you still haven’t let it go.”
He laughs. “How can I? It was the worst year of my fucking life, and to top it off, she cheated on me with you.”
My head is spinning. “Who?”
“Mikaela Fleet.”
I shake my head slowly. It’s not ringing any bells.
“Five foot two. Brunette. Neck and arm tattoos.”
My brows jump. “You were dating a girl with neck tats?” That doesn’t seem like his type of classy. It’s mine, yeah. Not his.
“Never again,” O’Malley says coldly. He shivers as we stand in place but neither of us restarts the trek to a gas station. “The whole two years with her was toxic, but that year…” He stops himself, like the words are excruciating to unearth. I’m getting the sense he rarely talks about her.
“What about it?”
“She drove every knife into me you could think of. She would break up with me, then get back together, then break up again. Over and over. Like she had a sick fascination with seeing me agonized over losing her, and I was young and too in love to see what she was doing.” His face twists at the memories. “Then she pays to have sex with you. While we’re still together. A guy she knew I didn’t like. And she tells her friends about it. It was humiliating.”
My stomach clenches. I guess that’s why he’s never brought it up. He’s even shaded with embarrassment now, and he avoids my eyes.
As sad as his heartbreak is, something…isn’t calculating here. “You sure I slept with her?”
“She had pictures. Not of your face. But how many guys have a scorpion tattoo above their dick?”
“True.” I rub my arms a couple times, warming myself. I did let some people take pics of my body. That’s ‘cause I turned tricks before I got a job in security, and I wasn’t too cautious about what anyone could post on the internet. I didn’t care.
I wonder if she wasn’t someone who paid. Did I just meet her at a bar? She’s not the type I would’ve went for though. I’d hit on sorority girls, law students in pencil skirts, pre-med perfectionists wanting to let loose—not saying they can’t also have neck tats, but that combo is harder to find.
Just thinking about all of this is making my stomach overturn too. Feels like I’m mentally betraying Luna, and I hate digging that far back. In my mind now, she’s my first and last pussy.
“You’re positive she paid me to sleep with her?” I ask him.
O’Malley glowers. “She told me she did. Who the hell would lie about that?”
I shrug. “I stopped turning tricks when I was twenty-three.”
“It was before that.” He shivers. “I was twenty, so you must’ve been twenty.”
Twenty.
I stare up at the beam of light. His worst year was one of the darkest years of my life. My parents were released from prison. I’m back in Philly more often that year. I’m happy to see them. They start off sober. The summer is blistering hot, and my mom asks me to come over one night for dinner.
She’s high.
She shows me to her friend. Who pulls out cash. He asks me to get on my knees.
My pulse races, and I blink and blink.
“Donnelly?”
“Hmm?” I look at him. “Twenty?”
“Yeah…?” His concern is so rare, I almost believe a UFO flew by and we’ve been abducted.