Losers: Part I (Losers, #1)

by Harley Laroux

You fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us. You’re either with us or against us. Maybe the others were fine with her little games, but she made me feel like I was going to lose my mind. She walked the knife’s edge of my patience, an edge that had grown so abysmally thin I was shocked she managed to keep her balance.

she’d always surrounded herself with the worst kind of people, like a shield of assholes around her own insecurity.

Jess was a bitch, but Alex was worse. If someone was going to mess with her, it was going to be me or my boys.

She needed someone to protect her from all this petty shit, from the snakes among her own friends. I was a fool to even let that thought cross my mind.

He smelled like tobacco and cinnamon gum, dangerous and unbearably sexy.

A taste of your own medicine, little ghost.”

I’d memorized which floorboards creaked in the house. I used to know exactly how wide I could open a door before it squeaked. I’d trained myself to walk silently, to breathe softly, to lower my voice. Like my dad was a bomb and the slightest sound would set him off.

I told myself I wasn’t afraid, but the closer I got to him, waiting there with a cigarette hanging from his lips, the farther I got from myself. I was gone and what remained was a terrified child, small and alone. Looking for an exit, desperate for a place to hide, sitting with his back to his bedroom door with the hope that his own body could serve as a barricade.

The sound of his voice felt like getting punched in the chest. My body flushed rapidly hot, then cold.

In my mind’s eye, I could see myself slamming my fist into his face again and again — blood spattering, his nose breaking, teeth cracking. How many times had I thought about killing him? I used to dream about it, how I’d stand up to him one day, how I’d prove he never broke me. I’d relish the shock on his face before he died. I even used to imagine what would happen after I killed him; what I’d say in court, how I’d survive in prison.

But that would have made me just like him, capable of the same violence. It would prove that the cycle continued, pain begetting pain.

The same blood in our veins that made me want to cut them open and bleed them out, if only to be rid of any trace of him.

But the rage still sat inside me, shuddering like a beaten dog.

Violence was like an infection inside me that I couldn’t dig out. I couldn’t fight something that was in my blood, seared into my brain through years of repeated exposure. I couldn’t change the mold I’d been formed by, and failure felt inevitable.

My own inner voice sounded like him. Like he could never fucking leave me alone. Even when he was dead and gone, his voice would still be there.

The adult tantrums, fists thrown into walls; plates, cups, and valuables broken. Using violence as strength, as intimidation. It made me sick to see it come out of me, leaking like an infected wound. But that was all my dad had left me with: festering wounds that refused to heal.

And you know what really fucking sucks? I loved him. Mom loved him. What do you do when you love someone so goddamn much that you’ll let them hurt you and even let them destroy you? Just hoping they’ll love you back? Hoping you’ll earn it?”

He was able to do what I couldn’t, and although he kept trying to drag me along with him, I still lived with the fear that eventually, he’d fix himself and I’d still be broken. Too broken for him, for any of them. We’d met each other at our lowest and risen out of that together. We’d been desperate back then, searching for any reason at all to keep going, and we’d found that in each other. How selfish was I to worry that he might not need me anymore?

“Now I’m telling you the same thing. Don’t walk out on me.” He tapped the side of my head with his finger, his tongue running slowly along his lower lip before he said, “When you’re physically in front of me but not with me mentally…I can’t stand it. I need you with me, Lucas. Do you get it?”

He was intoxicating, a flawed god I couldn’t resist worshiping. His imperfection made him sacred, his strength made him holy. But the lust he inspired in me made him wicked, and the ease with which he bent me to his will was the closest thing to divinity I could imagine.

“If you can get through the night, you’ll see the sun again,” I said, repeating the words he’d told me back then. “Keep chasing the next sunrise.”