Untouchable (Unstoppable 1)

She looked thoughtful for a moment, then she snorted through her nose. “You fucking did this on purpose, didn’t you?”

My brows knitted together.

“You can throw me the damn party!”

A wry chuckle escaped before that cloud descended once more and I squeezed my eyes closed. “I’ve fucked everything up.”

She bumped her shoulder into mine. “It’s not fucked up, Ri. It’s just a bump in the road—”

“Bump?” I turned to her with a brow hiked. “Really?”

“Shit! That was totally unintentional.”

Pushing to my feet, I nodded and sucked in my bottom lip. A bump in the road. I hated driving. And I couldn’t even let someone else take the wheel this time. I could distract myself, though. I had to plan a party. There was so much to do.

“What theme are we going for?”

“No theme!” she said, adamant. “Not even if it’s triplets!”

A full body shudder rolled through me. Then I firmly lowered the shutters on that section of my mind. Not yet.

Not yet.

Thirty-Seven

Riley

“Oh my god, I did something stupid! Something so incredibly fucking stupid, Riley!”

“Um... hi to you, too,” I said, balancing the phone between my ear and shoulder, a basket of clean laundry hiked high on my left hip.

“Yeah, hi, hello... fucking hola! But I did something I shouldn’t have, and really, it’s all your fault. And I know I can’t blame you because you’re all... that thing we can’t talk about, and have like actual problems to deal with, but... I did something really fucking stupid!” She was out of breath by the time she’d finished, the words spilling like verbal diarrhea.

“Start at the top, Liss.” I set the basket down on my bed, dropping the phone beside it and putting it on speaker. There was no-one to overhear Liss' dramatic confession. My mom was at Marshall’s, again. Not that anything Liss had to say would offend her.

I heard Liss' measured intake of breath and smiled as I folded a sweater, suddenly eager to hear about someone else’s drama. The-thing-that-couldn't-be-spoken-of wasn’t so easy to brush aside in my head. For every minute I didn’t think about it, I could count ten that I did. It was surreal, and I couldn’t convince myself it was real because I had no symptoms. Well, my boobs were bigger, which I’m sure was a thing, and then there was the obvious lack of my period. A fact I’d failed to notice for a decade. But really, I was all good. Except I wasn’t because... well... but I wasn’t thinking about it right now.

“You refused to hang out last night, and I made a horrible mistake!”

“Okay, tell me all about your stupid mistake. Did you meet the guys at the cornfields?” My lips immediately moved to form the question I wanted to know the answer to—was Reno there?—but I caught the words before they left my mouth. I’d told him I wasn’t feeling great when he’d texted. It wasn’t a lie.

“Yes. Which is how everything got fucked up!” She muttered a curse, then paused. It dragged on for so long, I was about to ask if she was still there. Then she said, “I kissed Leon.”

“What?” I screeched. It was possibly the last thing I would have expected to fall out of her mouth. If she’d told me she’d killed a guy last night, wrapped him up in an old carpet and we had to bury his body in the woods, I’d have been less stunned. “Leon? Like Leon, Leon?”

An extended gargled groan type noise served as confirmation.

“Wow! I thought you guys hated each other.”

“We did!” she yelled, then immediately corrected. “Do! We do! That’s why I don’t get how this happened. I didn’t even drink, Ri! I can’t blame alcohol. I was giving him a ride home when the stupid jerk spilled a full cup of beer all over my car. I pulled over, tossed his ass out, or rather he fell out, and we were yelling at each other. One minute I wanted to wrap my hands around his throat and strangle the life out of him, and the next... the next he pushed me up against the side of the car and we were attacking each other like horny rabid animals! What the fuck, Riley?”

I pressed my lips together, fighting the laugh that would earn me an ear bashing. “There’s a th

in line between love and hate, Liss. I think you crossed it.”

“No, with us there’s hate and more hate. He fucking confused me, and it won’t happen again. But there’s no way I can face him so soon, which is why I’m not coming tonight.”

“What!?” I yelled for the second time in as many minutes. “It’s your party! You have to go. You’re going.”