Ruthless Love (Ash and Innocence 1)

I was only following her to be sure she didn’t blab to her parents first thing and send them to my place with pitchforks and torches. Keeping an eye on Wheels was going to be a necessary evil for the time being, I decided.

I found a good spot behind a patch of trees where I was relatively sure I wouldn’t be seen and crouched down in view of her house. She wheeled herself toward the house, but her mom was already waiting outside. The woman was imposing, I had to give her that. She looked like she might have made for a better offensive lineman than half the idiots on our team.

Her mom rushed toward Kennedy when she got a little closer, cupping her face and assaulting her with a barrage of questions, which she interrupted with fierce hugs that looked tight enough to kill. I wasn’t close enough to hear much of it, but I watched with vague curiosity when her mom started producing orange prescription pill bottles from her purse in rapid succession. She even had a little water bottle she gave to Kennedy as she had her down at least half a dozen different pills.

Kennedy looked like she was trying to explain something to her mom. She was gesturing to her legs and head and then tried to stand, but her mom sat her back down in the chair and handed her more pills. Finally, Kennedy seemed to give up the struggle and finished off the course of medicine letting her mom push her chair inside the house.

I scratched my chin in thought. Judging by the fact that her mom hadn’t already come back outside with a shotgun, I thought Wheels might have done the smart thing and kept quiet.

I waited, watching the house for a few more minutes, even though I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for. The light upstairs flicked on, and then I noticed a silhouette in the downstairs window. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like the person was looking toward me, so I decided to head back home and start cleaning up the mess from last night’s party.

A few hours later, I had made a decent sized pile of trash bags full of cups and beer cans out front. Cassian pulled up in a Rolls Royce Phantom. My parents were loaded, but Cassian’s were richer than God. His folks also hadn’t moved to the other end of the country and forbidden him to follow, either, so I guess he had that going for him.

Gage and Logan filed out of the car behind Cassian.

Cassian had black, curly hair that he kept short. His jaw was square and his cold, blue eyes always seemed to be slightly narrowed, as if he was about to say something cruel.

Gage was just behind him. He was cleanly shaven and wore a high-collared leather jacket, like some modern-day version of James Dean. His dirty blonde hair was straight and cut shorter on the sides. His family was no stranger to money, either, as his dad was a world-renowned mystery author. Being the son of the famous Ken Winters meant Gage was no stranger to paparazzi and the public eye. It also meant he had a habit of disappearing whenever we were about to get into something stupid, probably because he knew it’d make headlines.

“Coach canceled practice today,” Logan flipped the football up and snatched it out of the air with one hand. “We wanted to get some reps in.”

Of course, Logan did, I thought. He was the only one of us without the money to pay his way into any college he could want. Football was his ticket to a future, and he never seemed to forget that.

“I’m busy,” I turned my back, scooping an armful of trash from the porch into a bag.

Cassian kicked a trash bag, sneering. “There’s this thing called money. You give it to people who need it, and they do shit you don’t want to do. Hey, here’s an idea. Logan, you want to clean this up for a couple hundred?”

Logan stared at Cassian, jaw flexing silently.

Gage tossed a football to Logan, who caught it without taking his eyes from Cassian. “We going to practice, or eye fuck each other all day?”

“I told you. I’ve got to clean this shit up. Unless you idiots want to help, then you need to wait or do it without me.”

“Come on, Tristan,” Logan urged. “Coach installed a shit load of new formations. I need my QB to get the right kind of reps in.”

“Then I suggest you quit whining and start cleaning.”

Cassian scoffed, walking back toward his car as he pulled out his phone. Gage and Logan started scooping up cans and shoving them into plastic bags.

I stopped when I saw a small figure coming down the road toward my house. She was riding a wheelchair as her red hair blew across her face. Fucking Wheels. It hadn’t even been twelve hours since I thought I’d made myself painfully clear.