Rowdy - Jay Crownover

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      It was so hard to keep the memories at bay once the door they had all been closed behind was flung open. One after another they chased me across all of my waking hours and danced behind my eyelids at night.

      I remembered the first time Poppy ran across the yard between our houses and asked me if I wanted to play. I was so used to being overlooked, so used to being forgotten and alone, that I almost ran in the other direction. She was so cute—all knobby knees and long pigtails. She smiled at me and told me we could be friends forever and I remembered even at ten years old thinking I never wanted to be without her smile and her kindness.

      I remembered Salem being patient and funny as two kids trailed after her like she was the queen of the world. She never tired of the questions, of the attention, of fixing up my hurt feelings when I had a bad day at school—which there were a lot of—and she never looked at me like she found me lacking even when everyone else in my little world was trying to guide me in a direction I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. She was always my biggest cheerleader and it never mattered if it was because I scored a touchdown or drew her a picture.

      Along with all those memories came the other ones, the ones that made it hard to breathe and made my head throb and my heart hurt.

      I remembered Poppy and her big, sad eyes telling me she would never love me the way I loved her, that we would always be from two different worlds, and therefore it would never work out. I literally put my young and soft heart in her hands and she had chucked it back at me like it was nothing. I had had a crush on her—was so sure that I’d loved her—for what felt like forever. I just knew she was my one. She was steady. She was unfailingly kind and generous. She was lovely inside and out, but to her I wasn’t enough. I didn’t have the right background, the right upbringing, and in all honesty the right skin color for her to ever be able to bring me home and tell her dad she was spending the rest of her life with me. I would have given her the world—only she didn’t want it—or me.

      I also remembered standing in the driveway watching Salem and her dad scream at each other while she threw all her things into the back of a rusted-out Bonneville and her telling him point-blank she was never going to step foot in his house or in Loveless again. She was my best friend. She was the one that always made everything better, and even at fifteen I remembered thinking I would never make it the rest of the way through high school without her. How was I supposed to pick which college I was going to go to? I was going to tell my foster parents, Poppy, everyone, that I didn’t want to play football, I wanted to paint and draw. I wanted an art scholarship not an athletic one and Salem was the only one that would support me in that. I needed her to give me the strength to fight for it, but in the blink of an eye she was gone.

      She saw me where I was lurking and got back out of that car so that she could give me a kiss—a real kiss—on the lips and I remembered she tasted salty and sweet because she was crying as she told me good-bye. It was my first kiss and the memory of it was tied to watching yet another person I cared about leaving me on my own. She tried to tell me she would write, call, send a carrier pigeon, but I just walked away from her because I couldn’t listen to it and I knew she was lying. Once she was gone, I wouldn’t matter anymore, which had proven to be true.

      Now all those memories were tangling and colliding with the new ones I had of the way grown-up Salem felt pressed against me. The memory of the way my dick twitched when I saw her standing at the top of the stairs that first day she got hired to work at the shop. There was the irritating remembrance of the way she burned as hot as the sun when I touched her and that she still tasted salty and sweet, but now I was old enough to want to know if she tasted that way everywhere on her body, not just on her pouty lips. I couldn’t stop seeing the way her dark eyes gleamed like polished onyx, or stop thinking about the way her full mouth felt better than anything I could ever remember feeling, and the fact she tasted like chocolate and history in the best and worst way was haunting me every minute of every day. I knew that if her phone hadn’t gone off I was a split second away from trying to get my hands in the waistband of those short-shorts she had been wearing, and even closer to tugging the shoulder of her sexy top the rest of the way off. I wanted to touch all that caramel-colored skin and put my mouth on the pointy tips of her breasts that I could feel poking into my chest.

      It was all crashing and colliding so loud and hard that I felt like I couldn’t see or hear anything else. I actively avoided going to the new shop and even harassed Rule into taking my shift that week so I didn’t have to see her. I couldn’t get on top of it and as a result I was drowning in the past and running away from the future. I was exhausted.

      Even though I told her I would get her some drawings by the end of the week, I totally blew it off and now it was Thursday night and I was well on my way to getting absolutely shit-faced with my friend Zeb at the Bar. I also fully intended to take Dixie home because the quickest way to get over the idea of someone was to get into the idea of someone else. And even if Dixie wasn’t game to play surrogate lover, then maybe I would take the blonde that was eye-fucking me from the end of the bar home with me and her hot, brunette friend was totally welcome to join us. I smiled at her for good measure and saw her flush and turn to whisper to her friend.

      I caught Asa’s eye; he was watching the show with a smirk and shrugged. I turned back to Zeb, who didn’t look half as impressed as the southern bartender did.

      “What?” My tone was a little surly and a whole lot sloppy. I was chugging Jäger shots like they were water and I think they had finally caught up to me.

      Zeb Fuller was a good dude. He had been a client first and then morphed into a friend after we spent several hours covering up the nasty jailhouse tattoos he had gotten over the couple of years he had spent locked up. The guy was an amazing craftsman. I was pretty sure he could build a house with nothing more than some Elmer’s Glue and some toothpicks, but life hadn’t always been a picnic for him and such being the case, I had wanted to help him out. I was the one that suggested Nash and Rule look into hiring Zeb as the contractor on the new shop, and much to my relief it had worked like a dream for everyone involved.

      With all my friends being married, or having babies, or settling down with sexy nurses, I was on my own way more than I was used to be, so I had taken to calling Zeb when I needed a drinking buddy for the night.

      Zeb lifted his Jack and Coke and just looked at me over the rim of it and told me “nothing” in a tone that clearly meant something.

      I squinted my eyes a little and tossed back the newly filled shot Asa had placed in front of me with a lifted brow.

      “What’s with the look, then?”

      Zeb was a massive guy. I think he was even bigger than Rome, which was almost unheard of as far as I was concerned. He was as covered in ink as I was, and with his shaggy dark hair and scruffy face he was one intimidating bastard. I think I was lucky we were friends or else I might have regretted being a dick to him.

      “I don’t know what’s more pathetic, the fact you are wasting your game on some random bar chick . . .” He grunted at me when I scowled at him. “Or the fact that you’re a grown-ass man trying to drink your girl problems away.”

      I was twenty-five but felt like I had lived a hundred lifetimes from the moment the cops had showed up at the apartment door in the middle of the night to tell me my mom was dead. They had explained that she had taken a bullet when some punk kid tried to carjack her when she hadn’t moved fast enough to suit him. They put me in the system that night and I had never escaped. I had been a grown-ass man since that moment on, and Zeb was right, I should be man enough to face Salem and the way she had me tied up in knots.

      “What do you know about it?” I sounded petulant and irritable.

      Zeb rolled his dark green eyes and his normally unsmiling mouth twitched at me in unsympathetic humor.

      “I know she’s about this tall.” He held his hand out to about shoulder height. “She has a figure that makes it hard to think and eyes and hair that were made to get lost in when the lights go out.”

      I felt a muscle tic in my jaw as I leaned on the bar and asked Asa as he walked by, “You telling

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