Bad Habit (Bad Love 1)

“Good luck out there, Dad. Drive safely.”

He grunts, but his eyes are soft. “Ditto.”

After Mom is settled in the car, Dash comes up to stand next to me on the sidewalk, resting his elbow on top of my head. We stay and watch until their taillights fade into the distance, and then we make our way back inside.

“Did that really happen?” I laugh. My parents are control freaks. They’re distant and uninterested, but control freaks nonetheless. My mom is probably more nervous about what might happen to her house without her here, rather than her kids.

“You’re definitely the favorite. There’s no fucking way they would have let me stay behind when I was seventeen.”

“That’s because they know you’d have had the cops called in two point five seconds and would live off nothing but beer and pizza.” Twenty-one-year-old Dashiell can get a little rowdy, but seventeen-year-old Dash? Let’s just say that being young and having an unlimited supply of money was not a good combination for someone like him.

“Touché. So, what are you doing tonight?”

I shrug. “Nat wants to hang out with some friends. Some end-of-the-year party.” Natalia Rossi is one of the best people I know. She’s hilarious, outspoken, ridiculously beautiful, and fiercely loyal. I met her in dance class on the first day of sophomore year when she was horrified to learn that she’d been given the elective. She annoyed the dance instructor until she let her withdraw, claiming there must have been some mistake. She ended up switching electives, but when I saw that I had her in my next class, I decided we needed to be friends, and the rest is history.

“All right, I’m heading out, too. Lock up when you leave. Don’t call me unless you’re dying.”

Rumors of my brother’s sexual proclivities are widely known, but I’ve managed to stay ignorant to the details. But it’s his first weekend back from college, so it’s not hard to figure out what he’ll be up to tonight.

“Noted.”

I run upstairs to hop into the shower. I throw my hair into a messy bun on the top of my head to keep it dry, then run a razor over my legs and quickly wash up. When I walk back into my bedroom, I’m not even a little surprised to see Nat. She’s making herself at home, sitting cross-legged on my floor, using my makeup in front of the full-length mirror that hangs off the back of one of my closet doors.

“Get dressed, bitch. We’re going to The Tracks,” she says, waggling her brows before applying another coat of mascara. My heart jumps in my chest, both scared and excited. The old trotting track was abandoned in the 1960s and hasn’t been touched since. It’s said to be haunted, s

o, naturally, that’s where you can find the cool kids on any given Friday night. A frisson of both fear and excitement sweeps through me at the thought of being there. I’ve never ventured inside, but Asher brought me there once.

“Can you take me somewhere?” I asked on the verge of tears. Everyone was fighting. Dashiell was fighting with my parents, and my parents were fighting with each other. I was so sick of the yelling. Asher had been here when the argument about Dash’s choice of college started, once again, and we were both hiding upstairs, avoiding them like the plague.

“You know I can’t do that,” he said, looking up at me from his spot at my brother’s desk as he looked up music videos online. “Your parents already hate me.”

“I don’t care,” I stressed. “I just need to get out of here. Anywhere. Where do you go when you need to get away?”

His eyes lock onto mine. “Here.”

“That’s helpful,” I said, fighting an eye roll.

“There is one other place,” he admitted. “But I don’t know if it’s your kind of place.”

“Anywhere but here is my kind of place,” I said, grabbing my phone and making my way over to climb out of the window. I wasn’t normally rebellious, but I knew my parents wouldn’t notice I was gone. They’d argue with Dash until they were blue in the face, then they’d have a cocktail and stay in their room for the rest of the night, like every other time they had this fight.

“Wait,” Ash said, pulling me back inside, and at first, I thought he was going to stop me. Instead, he surprised me by saying, “Let me go first.”

He jumped down and held his arms out to help me down after him. It wasn’t a far jump, being a single-story house, but I landed on a rock and rolled my ankle. He caught me under the arms before I went down, and we both stood there awkwardly for a minute or ten, our chests touching, neither one wanting to pull away. Ash swiped a thumb underneath my eye to wipe away a stray tear, and my eyes fluttered shut, loving the feeling of his skin on mine.

Finally, Ash cleared his throat and backed away. I smothered my smile and followed him to the old, beat-up GMC Sierra that he spent his entire summer last year working to buy. It was older than me. Red with a thick, white stripe. The interior was this ridiculous red velvet, and it smelled like cigarettes, but I loved it. And so did he.

We sat in silence as he drove. I didn’t know where we were going, but I was just happy to be anywhere with him. When we pulled up to our destination, I was just as clueless. It was this massive building in the middle of nowhere. It was pitch-black, and I couldn’t make out any distinguishing characteristics that gave away what it was. Asher drove right up to the fence and cut the engine.

“Where are we?” I asked, leaning on the dash and scanning the foreboding building in front of us.

“The Tracks,” he explained. “Horse racing. It’s been closed down for years.”

“Are we going in?” I asked, gripping the metal door handle. It screeched as I pulled, but Asher grabbed my left hand that sat on the bench seat, stopping me.

“No. It’s not safe inside.”

“But you go inside?”