The Fall of V (The Henchmen MC 13)

But it was nice in a way to be given a wide berth at school since I didn't get one at home.

Which brings us to my mistake.

My epic, world-changing mistake.

Because it was my birthday, darn it.

The big one.

Sixteen.

The one that meant something still, even if all that cheesy 'sweet sixteen and never been kissed' thing was the stuff of history. And my parents had put their feet down about it.

No party.

No night out.

No nothing except a cake at freaking Hailstorm.

And while I normally understood - and respected - the fact that they did things that they thought were for my best interest, I could not understand why they couldn't give me one of their armed details that would make the offspring of a president or diplomat raise their brows... just so I could go and have fun with a few of my girlfriends.

Which was something I had even suggested, even if the idea of a bunch of my parents' friends trailing behind me and listening to everything I said to my friends filled me with dread, at least it wasn't a lame sweet sixteen stuck on a hill behind electrified fences and metal walls being suckered into playing Barbies for the third night in a row.

So, I came up with a plan.

I got two of my closest friends in on it.

We wouldn't get away with it for long, we knew, with who I had for parents and extended family, but at least it would be something.

At promptly one-fifty, we would excuse ourselves from class to use the bathroom, walk down the hall by the music room because that was an empty period for the teacher who took a nap behind a locked door and would not notice the three of us moving down a hall we were not meant to if we were, indeed, on the way to the lavatory.

We would skate down the hall of lockers to the side entrance to the stage for the auditorium, then climb down the stairs that would lead us into the abandoned locker rooms, the kids who had a class needing to run the mile that day on the side field. Which meant we could each sneak out that unlocked door to the back field, slide down the side of the building to a line of pine trees that led to the woods. Where we could be completely hidden from the eyes of any teachers, and take off for our outing.

Iggy had an older brother who was a year out of high school and drove this amazing vintage T-bird that would have made Uncle Repo weep who had agreed to pick us up and drive us out of town since anyone who saw us out of school and unaccompanied in Navesink Bank would likely call my dad on me.

Vance, Iggy's brother, was someone who always went through with helping his little sister accomplish her plans for little rebellions, having grown up in the same oppressively strict family. He had rebelled young and hard, and encouraged his sister to do the same so she didn't, in his words, Become some fucking Stepford Wife with no brain and ten kids shackling her to a man who had never fucked her right in twenty years and expected her to bow and kowtow to his will like some king.

Okay, so I maybe had a little crush on Vance.

And by little, I meant huge, mushy, stupid, can't-think-straight-in-his-presence-because-I-was-thinking-about-what-it-would-be-like-to-have-his-guitar-playing-hands-on-me kind of crush.

He had that thing going for him, something I didn't quite have a word for, something that old musicians did. Like Jim Morrison, like Prince, like countless others did - a cocky, confident, sexually-charged aura about them like a cloud of smoke. In Vance's case, literally. He smoked. And, sure, smoking was bad for you, but he rolled his own cigarettes that he claimed were much better for you because they weren't full of all that 'big tobacco crap' that could give you cancer just from secondhand breathing it in.

The Indigenous have been using tobacco for generations, after all.

He was also gorgeous, of course.

Too gorgeous, really.

So much so that girls were always flocking around him, putting their hands on his chest or stomach, giving him come-hither looks, whispering in his ear.

I couldn't help it. I knew it was weak and petty and beneath me, but I hated each and every one of them, stared daggers at their bodies that had the time to round out better than mine had yet, at their clear sexual confidence that likely came from experience which I was still lacking in.

But he was tall, and a lithe kind of strong. I knew the latter part because Iggy's parents had a pool. And while we girls were required to wear tankinis if we wanted to swim, he could go in just in his swim shorts. Even when he was just seventeen instead of nineteen like he currently was, he had nice etches of muscles. And, yeah, that trail of hair that... well, you know.