Girl Code (5 page)

“Why are we back here?” I choked out, eyes wide and wild.

“If I don’t take care of this now, Rico will have the entire school believing something happened that didn’t,” he said harshly, but then he froze. He looked over at me, looking grim and unsettled. “What did happen, Tabitha?” he asked tentatively in a whisper. His eyes flickered down to my hands where they held my shirt together. “Was it…something you…wanted?”

“Did I want to drunkenly lose my virginity at a house party?” I snorted. I felt tears falling from my eyes once again. “No, that isn’t something I wanted, Pesciano.”

Leo’s eyes widened. He looked both shocked and pissed off at the same time. “You lost your vi—”

“No,” I said, cutting him off. “But…almost,” I whispered. “I guess. Maybe.”

I angrily wiped at my tears. I blamed the constant crying on the alcohol. I felt very sober, but I knew that biologically speaking, it was impossible.

Leo used the sleeve of his Mercury High Football sweatshirt to wipe tears off of my cheeks. I wanted to bat his hands away and snap at him for touching me, and give him the same bitter attitude I had been giving him for months, but I didn’t. I accepted the gentle gesture and said nothing about it.

“What are you going to do?” I asked him as he began to open his door.

“I’m going to convince him it is in his best interest to not start any rumors about you,” Leo growled.

He threw open his door and jumped out before I could object. I started to also get out, but he instructed me to stay in the truck.

“I’m not staying in the truck,” I snapped. I struggled with the door as Leo walked around the front of the vehicle. I was turned in my seat, prepared to climb out, but he blocked my exit. He suddenly seemed so much older and bigger than his fifteen years.

“Stay in the truck,” he said so harshly that I froze for a moment. A muscle in his neck bulged and his hand curled tightly on the inside door handle, centimeters from my own hand.

My tremoring voice dropped to a whisper. “You don’t have to go in there. It’s just me. I’m not worth whatever trouble you’re about to get into.”

Our eyes locked. It was a movie moment, for sure. If I didn’t dislike him only hours before and if my best friend was not his girlfriend, I would have leaned forward and kissed him. The compulsion was so intense that my fists balled in my lap. The hunger to press my lips to his both thrilled and frightened me at the same time. I remembered thinking about him as Rico kissed me and I was hit with regret and shame so deep that I could choke. Leo wasn’t mine to want to kiss, or to think about during my first kiss. He was Leslie’s, and I never coveted anything she had, nor was I about to start. Just thinking about his mouth was just as good as breaking the code.

“I don’t know why you would believe that you’re not worth it—” Leo’s soft voice washed over me as he firmly pushed me back into the truck, “—but you are. Just let me be your hero for the night. You can thank me later.”

He reached up and gently pushed loose strands of hair off of my cheek. I trembled slightly. Warmth spread down my spine as another shiver hit me when his fingers grazed down my face and onto my neck. I hated the way he was making me feel. I hated that I liked it. I hated that he was being so gallant and I hated how relieved I felt to have him on my side.

“Why are you doing this?” I repeated in a barely audible voice.

Surprisingly, a sly smile appeared on his face. “I’m the only one allowed to raise hell in your life. I don’t like to share that with anyone else.”

“You are really good at being a pain in the ass,” I agreed in a quavering whisper.

Leo’s smile warmed as he again reached up and pushed hair behind my ear. The smile faded, and his expression turned serious.

“Stay in the truck, please,” he said quietly but with authority.

Silently, I nodded. He closed the door and left me alone to go avenge my honor.

Chapter Three

Leo had come out of Rico’s house looking so angry that his body appeared to be steaming as snow fell on him. There was blood on one corner of his mouth, a bruise forming under his eye, and his right fist was red and bloody. He had found Rico in his bedroom with another girl already. He convinced the girl to step out so he could talk to Rico, but it apparently had not gone well. Leo was too furious to continue speaking about it during the ride back to my house. I insisted that he come inside so I could tend to his injuries.

We walked into my house, unimpeded by my parents as I expected, and made our way downstairs to the finished basement. I snagged a t-shirt out of the dryer and changed out of my torn shirt before pulling Leo into the small bathroom.

“You’re a mess,” I said, wiping blood away from his mouth with a cloth. He winced but didn’t pull away.

The bathroom was so small that neither of us could move without brushing up against each other. We were close enough that I felt the vibration in his chest as he spoke.

“I look better than Rico does right now,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have gone in there,” I admonished as I rinsed the cloth under running water.

“I had to go avenge your honor.” His small smile made my breath catch.

I cleared my throat to hide it and said, “You didn’t have to do any such thing, Pesciano. I bet Rico will still have a lot to say.”

I gingerly took his injured hand and held it under the water. He grimaced but held still.

“Rico won’t be saying anything for a few weeks.”

“Yeah, right.” I glanced up at Leo’s face with doubt. He was absolutely serious. “Oh, my god, what did you do?”

“I punched his teeth out of his mouth,” he said so casually that he could have been speaking about schoolwork.

I stared up at him, frozen. “You’re serious?”

He looked back at me, his eyes roving over my face. “Yeah, I’m serious.”

My mouth was open again. I looked away from his face and looked at the blood on his shirt. I didn’t know if it was his or Rico’s. His act of violence was unsettling, a bit thrilling, but very unsettling.

“What if he calls the police?” I asked, looking at his face again. “What if they want to press charges? Leo, that was so stupid!”

“Oh, sweetheart, I didn’t know you cared,” he said and put his uninjured hand to his heart as he smiled down at me.

“Of course, I care.” I snapped and dropped his hand so that I could get the peroxide. “You could be in a lot of trouble for something you did for me that you shouldn’t have done. That was stupid. You shouldn’t have done it, especially for me.”

I grabbed his hand and held it over the sink.

“He’s not calling the cops. There’s enough drugs and alcohol in that house to—shit!” Leo shouted the expletive when I poured peroxide over his open wounds.

“Hold still,” I commanded.

“That shit burns!” Leo objected and started to pull his injured hand away.

“You should have kept your little man-boy fists to yourself,” I snapped and roughly pulled his hand back over the sink. “Stop being a baby.”

“He deserved losing a few teeth, and more,” Leo muttered and then hissed when I poured more peroxide over the broken skin along his knuckles. “I tried to just talk to him and he just kept spewing verbal fecal matter.”

I paused and looked at Leo with wide eyes. A corner of his mouth twitched until the cocky grin the girls go crazy for appeared.

“Did I shock you with my vocabulary?” he asked.

“Yes, yes you did,” I admitted. I refocused on my task and proceeded to wipe that grin right off his face. “I didn’t think you were capable of stringing so many intelligible words together into a complete sentence.”

“Thanks a lot.”

We fell silent as I bandaged his hand. I paid close attention to what I was doing, but I could feel Leo staring at me. His eyes were burning a hole in my skin. I felt his breath on the side of my face and my neck, and for every breath he released, his chest brushed against my arm. It felt as if there was an electric current blasting through the bathroom, swirling around us and through us. I had never felt anything like it in my life.

As soon as I was finished, I left the first aid supplies on the vanity and hurried out of the tight space I was sharing with Leo. He hesitated and looked out at me in the small hallway for a moment before following me out.

“So, what did he say?” I asked him when he stepped out. Once again, he was very close to me. I started to move away, but he gently grabbed a hold of my forearm. I started to object, but his fingers skimmed over a dark blue mark just above my elbow I hadn’t even noticed before.

“Did he do that?” Leo asked, his voice quiet and tight. His fingers carefully pushed up the sleeve of my shirt and danced across the skin there. “And this one?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said softly as I watched his fingers move over my flesh. His touch was voltaic, full of energy and red-hot. My skin felt gloriously singed wherever his fingers touched it. I dared to look at his face. I wanted to know if he felt it, too. His eyes met mine and I knew instantly that he felt the same thing.

I wondered if Leslie felt it when he touched her, and then I pulled away from Leo.

“What did he say?” I asked again as I moved out of the little hallway and in to the open space.

“I don’t even want to repeat most of it,” Leo said on a sigh. “But he was talking his shit and I was trying to remain calm, but when I looked down at the bed, I saw buttons that had to have come from your shirt. They were on the bed and on the floor and Rico kept talking about what a good lay you were and how good you sucked…”

He stopped suddenly, and I saw a hint of the fury that I had seen on his face when he came out of the party. I was absolutely mortified by what he claimed Rico was saying. Of course, none of it was true, but I felt humiliated anyway, especially since Leo was the one relaying the story to me.

“He said a lot of shit, like I said,” Leo said quickly as he averted his eyes. “But when I saw your buttons all over the damn place, I was done listening to him. It doesn’t matter what he said now, because he won’t be saying it again. I’m sure some rumors will fly, but it won’t be as bad as it could have been.”

I was horrified that Leo, a boy of almost sixteen, had turned into a lethal animal and broken a boy of nearly nineteen, who was almost twice his size. I was stupefied that he had done so for me. I had not been kind to him since the first time I laid eyes on him, and I had been especially nasty after he started dating Leslie, but he did this thing for me and I could not figure out why.

“Why did you do this for me?” I asked quietly.

He shrugged and tried to feign indifference, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.

“Despite everything, I think of you as my friend,” he said casually. “I would have done it for any girl I know.”

Why did I feel disappointment at his answer? I should have been satisfied and relieved with it, but I wasn’t.

“It was stupid,” I said. “But…thank you.”

I let out a long breath and dropped onto the couch. I rested my elbows on my knees and put my head in my arms. I was exhausted and had a nasty headache forming. The night had been unbelievable. I had been terribly wrong about Rico and I felt fury and embarrassment for allowing myself to be so easily misled. The night could have ended so differently if I had not taken that opportunity to knock Rico’s balls into his skull. Still giving him the benefit of the doubt, I wondered if he would have really taken it too far, if he really would have pushed me into something I didn’t want to do.

My brother was right. I was too young for this shit, and Leo was too young for this shit. He shouldn’t have been driving for one, but he shouldn’t have had to go into Rico’s house and fight him like a man. We were all just kids, even Rico. We were only kids.

“You’re shaking.”

I jumped, almost completely off of the couch when I felt Leo’s hand touch my back. I didn’t even notice when he sat down beside me.

“You’re shaking really bad,” Leo said worriedly. “Maybe I should wake up your mom.”

“No!” I cried out, gripping his sweatshirt in my fingers and looking at him with wild eyes. “She’s the last person I want. She won’t even care, anyway.”

Since he had started dating Leslie, he had been in my house with her frequently. He had seen firsthand what my relationship—or lack of relationship—with my parents was really like, but Leo still had his doubts. He had a loving, caring mother, so of course, it was hard to believe that mothers like mine existed.

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I do know, Leo,” I said, pushing a shaky hand through my hair. “Just leave it alone, okay?”

“Well, what would your brother do? I feel like I should be doing something more than sitting here like a dumbass.”

I stared at a picture of me and my brother after one of his championship football games. He was all sweaty and stinky in his gear, but I didn’t care. I had my arms wrapped around him as we grinned at the camera.

“Tack would have yelled at me for going and then he would have gone and knocked Rico’s teeth out,” I said with a cynical smile. I looked back at Leo. “You’ve already done all of that.”

“What else would he do?” Leo asked, watching me carefully.

Nibbling on my thumbnail with raw nerves, I thought about what Tack would do. My brother would hold me tight and tell me everything will be okay, but then he’d give me a piece of good advice.

I managed a small smile. “He would tell me to pull my shit together,” I said and sat up straight. I inhaled deeply and let it out fast. “So, I’m going to pull my shit together.”

And I did just that. I took a few deep breaths under Leo’s watchful eyes. I was still shaking a little and chewing on the tip of my thumb when I sat back on the couch, but Leo didn’t comment on it.

“The whole night is all kinds of screwed up,” I said quietly, as I stared ahead at the blank television. “And this is going to sound really stupid, but one of the worse things about tonight is that Rico was my first kiss. It wasn’t at all how I imagined my first kiss would be, and maybe the writer in me is just a little too dreamy, but I’m kind of pissed off that I will always see his face when I think of all of the firsts I’ve had and will have.”

Leo cleared his throat and I felt him shift on the couch beside me. “Well, it could have been a worst kind of first,” he said softly.

I let out a small, humorless laugh. “Yeah. You’re right.”

We sat silently for a couple of minutes. Leo shifted again and threw an arm across the back of the couch behind me. I became hyper-aware of how close he was to me. Our thighs were touching and my shoulder and arm were against his side.

“I can…erase it, I mean…” Leo paused and then his voice dropped an octave. “I can give you another memory so that when you think of tonight, you’ll think of something…better.”

My head swung in his direction, confusion written all over my face. “What are you talking about? The only good memory I’ll have of tonight is watching you cry like a little girl when I poured peroxide on your hand.”

He grinned, but it was brief. His face grew serious and his eyes dropped to my lips. I inhaled sharply, dropping my hand away from my mouth. My fingers curled into fists in my lap. He pulled a corner of his bottom lip between his teeth and now I was looking at
his
mouth. I was about to look away when his tongue swept over his lips. Dear god, I couldn’t look away, even though it was so wrong. So, very, very wrong; I couldn’t look away.

Leo’s arm slid down the couch and landed gently across my shoulders. His fingers lightly gripped my shoulder as he leaned in close to me. My heart felt like it was going to cut its way out of my chest. He was going to kiss me, I was sure of it. His mouth was so close to mine that I could feel his breath on my lips.

If Leo kissed me, I would have to tell Leslie, and then what would become of our friendship? She would hate me forever. I had a traumatic night and my decision-making was poor at best. My attraction to Leo was…maybe it wasn’t real. I was only fourteen and clearly, after disobeying my brother and going to Rico’s, I was unable to make sound decisions. I had a code to adhere to, but besides that, Leslie was my best friend. With or without girl code, my lips should not be centimeters from her boyfriend’s, regardless of who started it or why it was happening. I was the worst kind of friend.

I put my hand on Leo’s chest and pushed him.

“Dude, personal space!” I said and pushed him again.

Surprise, disappointment, and maybe pain flashed on his face for merely a second before his naturally cocky grin took over.

“The closer I am to you, the more of my awesomeness you get to experience.”

“I think you confused that with lameness,” I said, rolling my eyes. I got to my feet and said, “Thank you for being my knight in shining armor tonight, but get out.”

He leisurely got to his feet, still sporting that grin. “You love me.”

“We had this discussion before,” I said, crossing my arms. “I don’t like you.”

“Oh, come on.” He walked around the couch toward the stairs. “Behind Leslie, I’m totally your best friend.”