Leaving the door wide open for Harley James to waltz through.
I had just turned sixteen. I had just gotten my first car. And I had just gone through my first real break up. What better time to hook up with a sexy, carefree, blue-eyed, blond-pompadoured, tattooed mechanic? Harley was fun and flirty and bad to the bone. He organized illegal street races, sold illegal street drugs, had a cache of illegal firearms, and had been in and out of jail more times than Lindsay Lohan.
To a girl with a bad boy problem, Harley was perfect.
His tattoos, on the other hand…not so much.
Harley had the worst tattoos I’ve ever seen on a real person. Sure, we’ve all seen bad tattoos on the internet. We’ve even shared them with our friends and had a good laugh. Well, some of those tattoos are Harley’s. I know because I’m the one who submitted them to badtattoos.com in the first place.
I was able to overlook a lot when it came to Harley James—his lack of intellect and formal education, his criminal record, his trunk full of sawed-off shotguns—but the one thing I was never able to see past were those horrible fucking tattoos. In fact, they were the cause of our first breakup.
Or maybe our third? I can’t remember. We broke up a lot.
Harley had been telling me for weeks that he wanted to get a huge tattoo of me, right on his bicep. He had me draw dozens of mock-ups for him: sad clown BB, sugar skull BB, Bettie Paige BB, bionic angel BB, anime BB, hell, even pirate wench BB. So, when I got the call that Harley was at the tattoo shop and needed a ride home, my heart and my Mustang practically defied gravity as I sped over to see which design he’d chosen.
I lurched my car into the first parking space I could find and bounced through the front door, ready to see myself immortalized in ink. Harley gave me a smug, sleepy-eyed grin from his tattoo chair, where a hulking beast of a man was putting the finishing touches on his upper arm. With a skip and a hop, I landed right next to Harley, where I stared in horror at a gray cartoon donkey with a pink bow on its ass.
Eeyore.
My boyfriend had gotten Eeyore, the depressed jackass from Winnie the Pooh, tattooed on his arm. Forever.
Make that my ex-boyfriend. I high-tailed it out of there and vowed to never be caught in the same room as that fucking tattoo ever again. I was done. I had dignity, goddamn it. I…
Still needed a prom date.
Shit.
After pouting and screening Harley’s calls for a week, I finally answered and told him that if he scrounged up a tuxedo and took me to prom I’d consider taking him back.
Harley wasn’t real excited about my proposition, considering the fact that he was a) a grown-ass man, and b) had been expelled from Peach State High School, but he said he’d see what he could do. Which I knew was code for, I’m going to get high and forget we had this conversation in five…four…three…
One
“Eeyore?” Juliet’s cackles flooded out of the dressing room she was thrashing around in, causing everyone in the quiet dress shop to turn and scowl in our direction.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Goth Girl deadpanned from the purple tufted ottoman she had commandeered in the seating area. Of course, she’d already found her dress. She’d simply walked in, grabbed the first floor-length black thing in her size, and parked her Wednesday Addams-looking ass down to wait in annoyance while Juliet tried on every other dress in the building.
Juliet tossed the curtain back dramatically. She had on a shimmery, midnight blue strapless thing that looked like it was meant to be worn in front of a wind machine.
“So what did you do?” Her almost black irises twinkled as she beamed over my misfortune. Juliet had real problems—like, an eleven-month-old at home and a baby daddy in prison kind of problems—so Harley’s little Eeyore tattoo was the highlight of her week. That and getting her mom to babysit so that she could go dress shopping.
“I just left.” I shrugged.
Juliet laughed and slapped her hand on the side of the fitting room. “You just left him there?”
That pulled a grin out of me. “Yeah, and I didn’t answer his calls for a week.”
“So, is he coming or what?” Goth Girl asked, lazily looking over the top of a Bridal magazine. I was kind of surprised something that girlie hadn’t spontaneously burst into flames in her hands.
My shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. He said he’d try, but…it’s fucking Harley. You know how he is.”
My friends both nodded in morose silence.
“You know what will make you feel better?” Juliet asked, her usually bitchy voice more cheerful than ever. I turned and looked at her skeptically. “Trying on this dress!”
“You’re not gonna get it?” I asked, admiring her again. She was standing in front of a full-length mirror outside of the fitting room, holding her long black braids up with one hand. I had to admit, as much as I loved the dress, it wasn’t right on her. Juliet had dark skin thanks to her African-American mother; dark, almond-shaped eyes, thanks to her Japanese father; and killer curves, thanks to motherhood, but that dress did little to accentuate any of it. She needed something bright. Something form-fitting. Something low-cut.
She needed to remember what it felt like to be a slutty teenager again.
I, on the other hand, had zero curves, green eyes, freckled skin, and couldn’t wait to grow the fuck up.
“Yeah, okay. Fine.” I sighed.
I grabbed the smallest size they had, pulled it on over my head in the fitting room without even bothering to take off my skin-tight jeans or combat boots, and tossed open the curtain.
Juliet’s mouth fell open, and Goth Girl’s drawn-on eyebrows lifted almost to her hairline.
“You have to get it. You have to.” Juliet whispered. I glanced at Goth Girl, who gave me an apathetic nod of agreement.
“Dude, it’s like,” I lifted my arm to peek at the price tag, “two-hundred dollars. And I don’t even have a date.”
“You have Harley!” Juliet beamed. She was wearing a sequin-encrusted body-hugging, halter-top number with a slit all the way up one thigh. It was red. It was slutty. And with some matching lipstick, it would be perfect.
“If he bails you can always just go stag,” Goth Girl drawled, not even glancing up that time. “Or I can break up with Steven, and we can go together. I hate that asshole anyway.”
I snorted out a laugh as excitement bloomed in my belly. Glancing back and forth between my two best friends, I smiled and said, “Fuck it. I’m going to prom.”
Two
A few minutes later I came skipping out of the store two-hundred dollars lighter, plus tax, but with my signature cockeyed optimism fully restored. I hugged my friends goodbye and strutted over to my little black Mustang hatchback with my head held high, squinting into the warm, spring sunlight.
I don’t need no man.
I smiled, hitting the unlock button on my key fob.
I’m an independent woman.
I pulled open the driver’s side door and laid my garment bag across the backseat.
I can go to prom all by myself.
I sat behind the wheel and tossed my purse onto the passenger seat.
In fact, maybe I will. Maybe I’ll just call Harley up and tell him to go fuck— My inner pep-talk was interrupted by the sound of my cell phone ringing.
Oh, shit! Maybe that’s him!
I sprang into action, afraid that I’d pussy out if I waited too long to talk to him. Yanking my slouchy, fuzzy, tiger-striped shoulder bag into my lap, I dug through the contents until I found the source of the noise. Jamming my thumb into the TALK button, I lifted the phone to my ear on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“…You answered.”
Most people have a fight or flight response to fear. I have a freeze response. Like a stupid fucking deer. With those two clipped words, all of my bodily functions seized up completely. My blood turned to ice. My feet to lead. And my lungs to deflated balloons as I exhaled his name.
“Knight.”
Swallow, BB.
I swallowed.
Blink, BB.
I blinked.