Switch. Megan Hart

hit him more than once or twice, but the spectators leaped out of the way of her drunken tornado performance. She was shrieking insults, mostly stupid and incoherent ones.

      Jack gave me an angry look that pissed me off. It wasn’t like I’d told Kira he and I had hooked up or anything. Her issues with him were his own problem and had nothing to do with me. He pushed her off him firmly and grabbed her arm at the same time so she wouldn’t fall. She kept trying to hit him and missing.

      “Stop it,” Jack told her and gave her arm a little shake before letting her go. When she flew at him again she managed to knock his cap off. I stepped forward, wishing I’d gone with Austin and left Kira to her theatrics alone. This was a scene I really didn’t want to see.

      “I hope your Prince Albert fucking rips out and you have to piss through three holes!” Kira screamed.

      “Kira, c’mon.” I reached for her.

      Kira allowed herself to be led away, still shouting insults. By the time we got to the parking garage the crowd had thinned and we had a better shot at hailing a cab. I rubbed my bare arms and shivered, but Kira had anger as her cloak and she danced back and forth on the nubbly pavement, waving her hands and muttering curses.

      “He’s not worth it,” I repeated. “Jesus, Kira. What’s wrong with you?”

      “He’s a jackass,” she said sullenly. Her makeup had smeared, her hair tangled. She needed to be in bed.

      Fuck. I wanted to be in bed, and not alone. Yet here I was, instead, babysitting her while she had a tantrum about some guy she’d had a crush on a million years ago but had never even dated.

      I didn’t correct her, even though I didn’t agree. “You’re drunk. Call Tony. Go home.”

      She sniffed and crossed her arms. “Oh, you don’t care! You’re going to screw Austin. What difference does it make to you if my heart is broken?”

      I laughed and knew I’d made a mistake by the way her brows pulled low over her smeared eyes. “Your heart’s not broken. You didn’t even go out with him. He doesn’t even have the Prince Albert anymore.”

      She glared at me. I thought suddenly she was maybe way less wasted than I’d thought. “Did you fuck Jack?”

      “It was ages ago.”

      “You fucked Jack?” Kira’s fist clenched at her sides, then opened as her shoulders slumped. “I thought you were my friend!”

      “Kira, it was years ago, and you weren’t—”

      “That doesn’t matter!” she cried, and I knew she was right. “You knew how I felt about him! I loved him!”

      I’d never loved him. At least there was that. “I’m sorry.”

      Kira whipped her phone from her purse and stabbed the buttons with her fingernail. She turned her back to me. I should’ve counted myself lucky she didn’t try to punch me in the face the way she’d done Jack. As it was, I was cold and my stomach had begun to churn.

      “Your sorry is shit.” Kira spoke into the phone next. “It’s me. Come pick me up. Yeah, I know what time it is. I’ll be waiting at Tom’s Diner on Second Street. Harrisburg, you ’tard.”

      She hung up and stalked off down the sidewalk without looking back.

      “Kira!” She flipped me the bird without even pausing. There was no way I was going to run after her, not in my four-inch fuck-me pumps. I managed a hobble, though. “Kira, c’mon. Wait.”

      “You’re supposed to be my friend,” she said, and the quiet affront in her tone was worse than an insult or a punch. “God, Paige. Just because you can doesn’t always mean you should, you know? This isn’t high school anymore.”

      I stopped trying to follow her. “No shit, really? And calling out some dude on the street when he’s with another girl, that’s not straight out of high school?”

      “That’s different!”

      “How is it different?”

      “You knew how I felt about Jack!” Kira shouted.

      We’d have attracted more attention if it wasn’t Friday night just after the bars all closed, but as it was we were just two more drunk sluts fighting over a guy. In high school I’d have shouted back at her, maybe even done a little hair pulling.

      But as we’d already established, we weren’t in high school anymore.

      I trapped my tongue between my teeth to stop myself from shouting back, but even then my voice came out clipped and sharp. “I said I was sorry. You weren’t with him. You never even dated him. And you weren’t even speaking to me at the time.”

      She faltered for a moment, her lashes batting and her mouth working as though she meant to say something really awful but could only come up with “…Yeah, well. You shouldn’t have.”

      I didn’t point out the number of boys I’d liked that Kira had fucked, or tried to fuck, or lied about fucking just to needle me. I said nothing, just stared, and she at last had the grace to cut her gaze from mine. She shrugged instead of speaking.

      If you’re lucky, the friends you make when you’re sixteen stay with you for the rest of your life. If you’re smart, you know when it’s time to let them go. I stopped walking. I watched her walk toward the diner, where drunk and hungry people would order eggs and stiff the waitress and steal the silverware. I let her go there, even though she’d been drinking and she needed a ride home and I couldn’t be sure the person she’d called would come to get her.

      Yeah. Some friend.

       Chapter 04

      “I’m really glad you came,” Austin said this as soon as he opened the door.

      I said nothing.

      He closed it behind me as I moved past him and into his living room. I recognized the chair and the couch. It had been mine, once. The chair had been his and he’d been welcome to it, but I’d paid for that couch.

      The couch didn’t matter.

      “You want something to drink?”

      I turned to look at him, this boy grown into a man. “No. I didn’t come here to drink.”

      Austin smiled. “So, what did you come here for?”

      I pulled him forward by his belt. Two steps. He didn’t stumble, but he did put his hands on my upper arms. I must have caught him by surprise. I looked up, up into his face. But when he bent to kiss me, I turned my head.

      “Let me guess,” he said into my ear. “You didn’t come here for kissing?”

      “You can kiss me.” I took his hand off my arm and put it between my legs. “Here.”

      I looked at him, then, and his expression gratified me immensely. His fingers curled experimentally against me and pushed at the soft cloth of my skirt.

      Austin blinked, slowly. His smile didn’t fade so much as leak away. “Paige?”

      “We both know what I came here for.” I curled my fingers around his wrist and moved his hand down to the hem of my skirt, then up again to replace his palm against my panties. “Let’s not pretend anything else.”

      I thought, for one brief, strange second, he was going to turn me down. The heat of his hand seeped through my panties, but the flash of ice in his eyes left me cold. Suddenly I had no trouble remembering why I’d left him.

      He didn’t let me pull away. “Fine. I’m not pretending.”

      “Good.”

      “Good,” he said. His fingers slipped inside my panties and found me already wet. Again, his gaze flickered. “Fuck, Paige.”

      “Yes,