Boys Club by Selena
six
Harper Apple
Inside the house, I can hear people running, breaking shit, and yelling. A group of football guys is ripping the support beams down from the porch, trying to tear the whole thing off the house. There’s a giant crash that shakes the ground, and I turn to see part of the fountain rolling down the drive, water rushing across the ground after it. The front door swings open, bringing my attention back as I’m pushed inside with the flood of bodies. The house shakes with the footsteps of the stampeding herd. I dart out of the way of a falling light fixture and step into a living room, where a handful of guys are hurling a leather soft out through the picture windows.
Hysterical shrieking fills a side hallway, and I turn to see some guys carrying a blonde woman in a nightgown down the hall. “Lindsey,” she howls in terror, groping at the air.
“Come on,” Royal says, grabbing my hand and pulling me toward a set of winding stairs, the kind you see someone walk down in movies during the big prom scene. It’s a stairway for making an entrance—and we’re entering.
“Par-tay, par-tay,” shouts a chorus behind me, and I glance over my shoulder to see their whole crew behind us, pumping their fists.
“Time to break some shit,” Royal says, grabbing pictures off the wall on the stairs and turning to bash them against the banister. He hands some to me, and what can I say, I like breaking shit. For a minute, I get caught up in it, the sweeping hysteria of it, the gleeful demolition, the mob mentality. With a whoop, I lean over the railing to hurl the pictures at the floor. I’m sure these people have insurance, anyway, and ripping up a rich person’s house is a dream I never knew I had until this moment. I grab more pictures, smashing them on the railing and the floor below with abandon.
I’m about to hurl another one when I see a familiar face staring back at me from the frame.
Somehow, I didn’t put it together when I heard the woman screaming for her daughter. This is Lindsey Darling’s house—Faulkner High’s equivalent of Gloria Walton, the queen bee, the head cheerleader and student body president and perfect applicant to any Ivy League school. I went to school with her for the past two years, and though she’s never said a word to me, everyone loves her. She’s not a bitch like Gloria. She smiles at everyone, even me, when she passes in the hall.
But I don’t know her, and I’m swept up the stairs, and then I forget all about her. Royal drags me into a bedroom, turning to pull me into his arms. He kisses me hard on the mouth, and I kiss him back, clawing at his back, swept up in the mayhem. He pushes his thigh between mine, pressing his solid muscle against the softness between my thighs. At the same time, his hands cradle my body, one of them behind my head, his huge palm covering the back of my skull, and his other hand on my lower back, bringing me flush against him. The contact has me instantly breathless and wet with desire.
I open for him—my thighs, my lips, my fool heart. Angling my head, I slide my tongue over his, deepening the kiss, clinging to his shoulders and trusting him to support me, letting him bend me back with the force of the kiss, with all the need I can feel radiating from him. My own hurt and anger from the last week twines through the relief I feel at joining with him again, being absorbed back into his orbit so that, for a moment, I feel like part of something instead of outcast and alone. We don’t speak. We don’t need words. We only need each other, the one thing we can’t have.
The light blinks on, flooding the room and interrupting us as Baron and Duke charge in. “There’s time for that later,” Baron says, yanking at Royal as he passes.
Royal thrusts his tongue roughly against mine one more time, grinding his hips forward and flexing his quad against my hot center before slowly drawing away, leaving me breathless and throbbing with lust. Still cradling the back of my head in his huge palm, he pulls me forward and presses his forehead to mine. “To be continued,” he whispers against my wet lips.
“Destruction waits for no man,” Duke yells, ripping a Willow Heights pennant off the wall. He jumps onto the big bed, jumping up and down with a frenzied glaze to his eyes, like he’s not just having fun but intent on going balls to the wall until he crashes and burns. Baron has the same manic glee in his eyes as he runs to a trophy case on the far side of the huge room. He kicks the glass in, and it showers down around his feet. Reaching through the jagged shards left of the doors, he grabs out a tall football trophy and swings it like a baseball bat, smashing the glass case and sending more trophies tumbling to the floor.
“Don’t wreck the bed,” Royal says. “I want to fuck her on it later.”
Duke hops off and stumbles into an attached bathroom, and a second later, more glass shatters. I glance around at the bedroom, simple and clean with an air of disuse. Unlike Mabel’s bedroom, though, this one feels like someone lived here once, like he might come back. It has an impersonal but sophisticated masculine feel, although that’s quickly being pulled under by the havoc the twins are wreaking. Royal joins, ripping a huge piece of art off the wall above the dresser and smashing it on the floor.
“Let’s burn this fucker,” Duke yells, staggering out of the bathroom with a lighter in one hand.
“Like we did his face,” Baron says, with a huge grin that’s more than a little unhinged. “That’ll teach him to fuck with our cars.”
“You think he’s here?” Duke asks. “Where would a cockroach hide?”
He turns to me, and they all wait, like I have the answer. I want to tell them it would hide in plain sight, that I’m right in front of them. I know they’re not doing this just because I keyed their car, but that’s part of it. I let them believe it was someone else. And I’m standing here, knowing I’ll tell Mr. D everything they do to this house tonight. I’m the fucking cockroach.
“In the basement?” I say, because a cockroach doesn’t give itself away if it can help it.
Duke and Baron charge back out the way they came. I glance at Royal, but our moment is lost. He’s busy yanking out the drawers from the dressers and smashing them onto the frames. The urge to join the chaos disappeared with our passionate kiss. I turn and leave the room, suddenly feeling a little sick.
I hear a commotion down the hall, the echoes of cruel laughter I’ve heard way too often in my life. My mother, the Dolce boys, assholes at Faulkner… There’s a certain laugh that comes from a bully when they’ve cornered weaker prey and are caught up in the rush of destroying it.
I head that way and push through a group of people standing in another bedroom, outside an open closet door. Inside, at the back of a closet half the size of my bedroom, a little figure huddles against the back corner. She’s wearing a frilly pajama shirt and matching shorts, her face blotchy and tearstained, her fine blonde hair in disarray. I barely recognize her without a full face of makeup, heels, and her designer clothes. She looks plain and young and helpless without it.
“Y’all are heathens,” I say, shoving past Dawson and grabbing Lindsey under the arms.
She shrieks and cowers away from me, hyperventilating and blubbering at once. I slap her across the face, feeling the satisfying sting of my palm against her wet cheek. Never thought I’d slap the daughter of the founding fathers, but here I am. Desperate times.
Everyone cheers, but I didn’t do it for them. Lindsey sucks in a shocked gasp, and I haul her to her feet. “Let’s get you out of here,” I say, grabbing a trench coat from the section of jackets that’s as big as my entire wardrobe. I drag her out through the crowd of jeering Willow Heights students who boo me for ruining their fun but don’t dare contradict a Dolce girl. Outside the bedroom, I pause to wrap the jacket around Lindsey’s shoulders. “Most people here don’t even know who you are,” I say. “Get it together, and you can walk out the front door without anyone paying you any mind.”
She nods mutely, wiping snot off her nose and onto her sleeve without noticing.
“Good,” I say, and I grab her hand tightly in mine and drag her down the hallway and the stairs, even though she cringes every time we pass someone. No one’s here for her, though. They’re just here to dismantle her house piece by piece.
The living room is empty except for a rug and the sound system, which is blasting music. Someone is doing a keg stand, and a group of people dance in the shards of broken vases and the dirt from the smashed, potted plants. Lindsey starts sobbing, but I pull her past the living room, through the foyer, where more smashed pottery litters the floor and a crystal chandelier hangs sideways, dangling halfway to the floor.
“Food fight,” screams a voice from the kitchen, and I hear clattering and shrieking, objects smashing on the floors and the walls. I imagine all the food in the cabinets in a house like this, how it could probably feed Mom and me for a month. No time for that now, though.
Outside, the porch is completely dismantled except the stone patio and steps. The supports and roofing lay scattered over the bushes and one side of the yard. DeShaun is trenching the lawn in his jacked-up truck while Gloria, Cotton, and some of their football friends cheer him on and offer direction.
“My house,” Lindsey mumbles, sounding shell-shocked and far away.
“It’s just a house,” I say, though I know that means something different to people with houses like this. Still, I don’t know what to say to a girl like Lindsey, a girl with something to lose.
“My car’s in the garage,” she says, stepping toward the edge of the house.
I catch her arm. “The road’s blocked.”
“I’ll sit in it,” she says. “They won’t find me.”
“If they haven’t made it to the garage, they will,” I say. “You need to go somewhere else. Do you know anyone in the neighborhood, somewhere close enough to walk?”
“Y-yeah,” she says, gulping. “Chase lives down the street.”
Of course he does. His dad owns every car dealership in town. He’s rich as fuck.
“Then go there,” I say.
She grabs my hand, clinging on, her eyes huge and terrified. “I can’t go alone,” she wails. “Come with me.”
I glance at the house, but there’s nothing for me there. I did my little act of vandalism, smashing a few pictures, but the extreme shit, like tearing down the porch, is a little outside my wheelhouse. When I look back at Lindsey, so lost and small, I sigh. “Fine,” I say. “But I’m just dropping you off. I don’t want anyone seeing me with you.”
She nods, sniffling and wiping her nose again. We start off in the direction she indicates, though we make sure to cut through the back yard and along the back of people’s fences instead of walking on the road. Half a block later, I think we’re safe, and I pull Lindsey out to the road, so we’re not stumbling through the dark. When we reach the sidewalk at last, I realize Lindsey’s barefoot. Fuck. I grabbed her a coat, but I didn’t get her any shoes. She didn’t even say anything when we walked across the broken pottery. Maybe she’s in shock.
“You’re bleeding,” I say.
“Oh god,” she says, swaying and grabbing onto me like she might faint.
“You probably just cut yourself a little,” I say. “Are they hurting?”
“I… I don’t know,” she whispers.
“Why don’t you sit down for a minute and check that you don’t have any glass shards in there?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t. You do it.”
“Hell, no. I’ll carry you before I go poking through your blood.”
“Can you?” she asks, swallowing hard, her big blue eyes filling up with tears.
I sigh, deciding it’ll be easier and faster to carry her than deal with her pitiful ass right now. “Fine,” I say, crouching so she can climb onto my back. She can’t weight a hundred pounds soaking wet, but it’s still tiring. I’m strong, but I’m not much bigger than her.
Again, the richness around me makes me feel like I’ve stepped into another dimension. I stagger down the block, wondering why the fuck rich people have to have such big neighborhoods with trees and shit between their houses. I’m literally carrying a rich girl on my back because she can’t stand the sight of her own blood. Ain’t that some shit. I feel like there’s a metaphor there, or at least some cruel irony, but I’m too busy carrying her ass to point it out.
“This one,” she says, leaning sideways toward a paved driveway that winds up a gentle hill.
“Not carrying you up the hill,” I say. “But you can use my phone to call him.”
She takes my phone and walks away in the grass. I gaze longingly back at her house, wanting to be there for whatever’s going down, even if I’m not really a part of it. Lindsey sobs into the phone for a few minutes while I try not to eavesdrop. Sure, the chick’s pathetic as fuck, but considering what just happened to her, I’m probably being too hard on her. I’m not sure there’s anything in the world that could break me bad enough to make me stop fighting, to give up and just sit there and cry.
After a bit, she comes back and hands me my phone. I hang out until I see headlights at the top of the driveway, and then I make myself scarce. Lindsey showed no sign of recognition, probably thinking I’m just some Willow Heights bitch, but that doesn’t mean I’ll get lucky again. I had classes with Chase, and he’s not going to be so shaken up that he doesn’t notice a familiar face. So I duck behind a magnolia, grateful for the full foliage of our version of an evergreen this time of year.
When the car has come, gotten Lindsey, and gone, I jog back to the Darling house. From the outside, it looks like the shell of a home, like a bomb went off inside. Every single one of the huge windows is gone. Jagged pieces of the wood trim stick up where they’ve been torn away. The dismantled porch, broken furniture, and personal affects litter the yard, including family pictures, clothes, and books. I spot a broken trophy in a sad tangle of trampled shrubbery. Inside the house, the party rages. Someone has set up colorful strobe lights that flash out the gaping windows, and music spills across shredded lawn where DeShaun’s truck sits, the bed full of girls dancing with beer bottles held high.
I stand there watching for a minute, my poor girl heart breaking at all that waste. I bet I could have sold that furniture and half the other stuff out here being trampled. I know zero about art, but I bet the paintings and vases and pottery could keep our bills paid for years. All destroyed. The excess, the waste, the gluttony of destruction—it sits funny in my belly.
“Harper Apple, get your ass up here and dance with me,” DeShaun says, holding a hand down to me. I take it, and he pulls me into the truck bed, where everyone’s grinding. He pushes a cup of beer into my hand and flashes me a smile. “First one’s free.”
I quirk a brow at him. “Is that because one’s all y’all need to get a girl passed out so you can date rape her?”
“There are a dozen people here who just saw me hand you that beer. If I slipped something in it, first of all, I’d be as good as dead, and second of all, no one here would lay a finger on you even if you were passed out without a stitch of clothes on you. Now get that uptight look off your face and feel the music, baby.”
“Well, thank you, I guess,” I say, sipping the beer. He touches his cup to mine and puts a hand on my waist, smiling down at me as we dance. He doesn’t push up on me, though, which I appreciate, even though I know it’s out of respect for his boy, not me.
“I met your dad the other day,” I say. “I didn’t know y’all owned Cliff’s.”
“Best steakhouse in Arkansas, three years running,” he says. “You there with Dolce?”
“Yeah,” I say, a bad taste returning with the memory of that night and the knowledge that he went to Gloria’s afterwards. I know jealousy-green isn’t a good look on anyone, though, so I resist the urge to ask DeShaun about them or to look around and see if she’s still out here. I won’t think about what she might be doing if she’s inside, if Royal would’ve pulled her into that room and kissed her, if he’ll fuck her on Preston’s bed because I’m not there to fuck when he’s ready.
“You know, I’ve known Royal a while,” DeShaun says. “He doesn’t get smitten.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Listen, I’m gonna be straight with you,” he says. “I’m a bros before hoes kinda guy. If y’all break up, there’s a one-hundred-percent chance that I’ll have my boy’s back, not yours. But I think you’re pretty damn cool, Harper Apple.”
“Thanks,” I say. “The feeling is mutual.”
“That being said, watch yourself, okay? You’re traveling in uncharted waters, and those waters are like the Bermuda Triangle. Know what I’m saying?”
“That I might disappear and never be heard from again?”
“I’m saying don’t mess with his head,” he says. “The Dolce Triangle’s waters are infested with sharks, a couple kraken, and Godzilla himself. You cross a Dolce, you don’t come back from it.”
“Like them?” I say, nodding up toward the house.
“Exactly like them,” he says.
“And what do you get out of it?”
“This,” he says, spreading his arms wide, a beer still in one hand. He grins, and I take it all in. The drama and chaos, the unending stream of booze and girls, the Gatsby-esque glamour of the nights of debauchery and destruction. Yeah, I can see why guys flock to the Dolces, too.
“There’s one of them now.” DeShaun nods behind me, and I turn in time to see Duke come listing out the door, his drunken stagger taking him sideways instead of forward toward the stairs. He steps off the side of the stone porch, all that’s left of it, and crashes to the ground.
“Mm’okay,” he mumbles, holding his beer bottle aloft. Everyone around us bursts into laughter and applause.
I sigh and hop down from the truck bed, jogging over and grabbing his hand. I try to pull him up, but he weights a fuck-ton more than me, and instead of getting him up, he ends up pulling me down with him. My knee lands on a framed picture of Lindsey’s family, splintering the glass. I pick it up and tap the glass from it. There’s Lindsey, and the lady they carried out earlier, who must be her mom. A young blond guy that must be her brother, and an older blond man who must be her dad.
Preston’s dad, the Darling who’s in jail and can’t fight the Dolces but who might be gathering information about them for when he’s released. What will he do when I tell him about tonight?
I want to look longer, to stare into his eyes, as if that could somehow tell me if he’s Mr. D. But Duke grabs the photo and yanks it out of the frame, crumpling it in his fist. “Fuck Preston Darling right up the ass with a grenade,” he says, his eyes falling halfway closed. “He tried to rape my sister.”
“Duke,” I snap, grabbing his chin. “Get up. I’ll get you to the car.”
“Cherry Pie,” he slurs, grinning crookedly at me. “Take me to the car and ride me, baby. I’ll pop that cherry for you.”
“Unless you’ve got a time machine that’ll take you back several years, you’re too late for that,” I say. “Now, you should probably puke now if Baron’s particular about his seats.”
“I don’t puke,” Duke slurs. “What kind of pussy do you take me for?”
“Come on,” I say, shrugging under his arm. Even that weighs a ton. These boys are big as fuck. I struggle onto my feet, half dragging, half carrying him to Baron’s car, as it seems I’m on babysitting duty tonight. I open the door, and he falls in, landing face down on the seat. I tuck his legs in and close the door.
Just as I turn, Royal looms over me. My heart skips. I never know when he’s going to be pissed about something I did or didn’t do that he wanted, and when he’s going to be human. We’re out by the road, and though I still have a full view of the house and yard, his face is in shadow, his back to the brightly lit house.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he says.
I swallow and press my palms my thighs. “Here I am.”
He steps forward, and my heartbeat begins to pick up speed. “You’re good with him.”
“Not my first time wrangling a drunk asshole into a car.”
He backs me against the Tesla. “I saw you take off with Lindsey.”
“She didn’t do anything to you.” I press my palms to the cool metal to ground myself. “She doesn’t deserve this.”
“She doesn’t deserve you,” he says, lifting a hand to stroke my hair back. Relief floods through me, and I can finally breathe, knowing he’s not pissed about it.
“Guess you didn’t find Preston,” I say.
“Didn’t expect to.”
“What would you have done if you had?”
“We would have dragged him,” he says, closing the distance between us and pressing me up against the car. He pushes his thigh between mine again, cradling my face and leaning down to kiss me. I try to focus on his mouth and not the image of them killing Lindsey’s brother in that particularly barbaric, redneck way. Dragging is exactly what it sounds like—tying someone to a truck and dragging them behind it until they’re dead.
He breaks our kiss, pushing my chin back and dipping lower to kiss along my neck, sending shivers racing through me. I’m so fucking attracted to him I can’t stand it. “You’re sick,” I whisper, burying my hand in his thick, dark hair.
“You love it,” he says, rocking against the apex of my thighs. The seam of my jeans bites into my flesh almost painfully while his tongue traces the shell of my ear.
“Does hurting people turn you on?” I ask, dropping my head back against the car but clinging to his shoulders, loving the size of them, the way my hands only begin to cover the huge muscles.
“You turn me on,” he says, nuzzling my shirt down, his chin rasping against the swell of my breast as he runs his tongue over my skin. “Sometimes I just gotta destroy something before it happens.”
His fingers undo my jeans, slipping down the front. I catch his wrist, trying to slow my breath and stop my head from spinning. “I haven’t shaved in a couple days,” I say.
“I can feel that,” he says, his fingers spreading my lips to find my swollen clit.
I suck in a breath and nearly go weak, but my own sense of self-preservation kicks in and I start wriggling against him. “I fought tonight. I haven’t showered.”
“Good,” he says, pulling back to watch my face as he slides a finger through my soaked slit. “I want to lick your dirty cunt until you make a mess all over my face, Harper. I want to smell you all over me when I go home tonight. I’ll cum just thinking about the way you taste.”
“I thought you didn’t like—” I break off with a gasp when he thrusts a finger deep inside me.
“I told you not to believe a word I say,” he says, pumping his finger rhythmically into me. “I fucking love the way you smell, the way you taste, the way you cum. It makes me lose my fucking mind. Now lean back and wrap your legs around my neck and let me suck the cum out of your cunt.”
“People can see us,” I say, closing my eyes and gripping the car, afraid I’ll collapse if I try to stand on my trembling legs. We’re too far from the house for anyone to see us in detail, but they’ll be able to tell what we’re doing.
“Let them watch,” Royal says, easing my zipper down. “They’ve never seen their king on his knees.”
