Craving Absolution
Page 4

I’d had a long-ass day. My best friend, Callie, had left that morning to force some kind of showdown with her man, leaving her two-year-old son, Will, with me. I loved the little bugger, but he hadn’t been happy that Callie left, and it had been a rough day for both of us. I didn’t mind watching him, though, even when he was being a pill.
When I was sixteen, I’d taken the Callie under my wing even though she was older than me, but it hadn’t been long before those roles had become blurred. We’d gone through a hell of a lot since the day we met five years ago, deaths and attacks and the birth of Will, but somehow we’d come out the other side stronger. Her grandma had adopted me into their little family, and aside from the serious case of lust I had going on for her little brother, Cody, the bonds had formed with no cracks in sight.
I loved Callie, Gram, and Will more than I’d ever thought possible. And Cody? Well, I wasn’t sure how I felt about him. Our relationship was complicated, dragged through the mud too many times to be clean or wholesome. He’d witnessed me at my worst, a situation that I didn’t ever think I could be comfortable with, but there was still a pull there. We were like two magnets that snapped together whenever we were too close, so I’d spent the last few years making sure that we never were.
I finally dropped Will next door at Gram’s house for the night when I knew he’d be falling asleep soon, and decided I deserved a little pampering after chasing him around the house all day. I was painting my toenails, watching Almost Famous play on the television, and wondering if I could pull off the beachy waves Kate Hudson was sporting when someone started pounding on my front door. It startled me so badly that I dropped the bottle of Purple Passion nail polish onto the coffee table and watched it splash in slow motion across the thighs of my favorite sweatpants. Mother. Fucker.
Whoever was on the other side of the door was going to die by nail polish wand in about two seconds. I stomped around the couch in that funky walk that only girls do, balancing on my just my heels as I tried to keep my freshly painted toenails pristine, and swung the door open expecting to see a religious nut trying to save my soul.
“I already bought my ration of Girl Scout—Cody?” I asked incredulously. What the hell?
It took me a minute to wrap my head around the fact that the one person I’d been simultaneously dying to see and trying to avoid was at my front door. I hadn’t seen him in months. My gaze roamed down his torso, checking out his snug T-shirt and jeans before snapping back up to his face to catch him smirking at me. Smirking. I hated the word, almost as much as I hated the action.
“Callie’s in Oregon,” I said with a snort, once I’d gotten a handle on my eye-fucking idiocy. “She left this morning to see you.”
I watched him closely as he stared at me, taking in everything from my messy ponytail to my bare feet, and I started to worry that I had food on my face or something because he didn’t say a word. When he still didn’t speak for almost a minute, I had to bite my tongue so I wouldn’t chatter like a crazy person just to fill the silence. Cody had always had that effect on me, and it made my normally composed facade seem like a thing of the past.
Well, screw that.
I met his eyes with a droll look and spun around as gracefully as I could, pretending a nonchalance about his appearance at my door. “Come on in, if you want. I was just making myself pretty.”
Cody’s large hands gripped my hips from behind before I could get more than two steps into the room, and I stopped abruptly as I felt him step forward and press his body against me.
No, no, what was he doing? I couldn’t think with his hands on me! We needed to keep a distance between us; it was in the damn unwritten rules we’d lived by for years.
I closed my eyes and vaguely noticed the sound of the front door closing as his breath fanned against the side of my face.
Oh shit.
“I’m not here to see Callie.” He spoke quietly, bumping his nose against my ear. “I’m here to see you, and you’re already beautiful.”
Every muscle in my body froze at his sensual tone, at the memory that slammed into me from out of nowhere . . .
• • •
The apartment had been quiet that night as I’d tiptoed toward the living room to check the locks, but I jerked to a pause when I got there.
Cody had been asleep on the couch, his arms wrapped around a pillow with little pink flowers all over it. I couldn’t help but smile; he looked like such a kid. When he was awake, the cocky way he carried himself belied his lack of life experience. It was only when he was sleeping that he looked so innocent.
The exact opposite of me.
My smile faded as I realized he was sleeping on top of my hidden stash of vodka. Why the hell wasn’t he sleeping at his grandmother’s? I clenched my hands at my sides and then needlessly flipped him off before spinning toward the bathroom in frustration. He really needed to stop sleeping in our goddamn apartment. This was a testosterone-free zone, damn it.
I made my way into the bathroom and closed the door before turning on the light. I avoiding looking in the mirror before dropping to my knees and opening the cupboard under the sink. Inside was a supersized box of tampons, scented ones that I knew Callie wouldn’t try to steal. She made fun of me trying to make my vagina smell like a flower, but it was easy for me to laugh it off. I never actually used scented tampons.
The truth was that I never used any kind of tampons. When I’d started losing weight, my period stopped and it hadn’t come back.