Losers: Part I (Losers, #1)

by Harley Laroux

To the losers, the freaks, and the outcasts. Keep chasing sunrises.

He’d tasted like peppermint gum and tobacco when I’d kissed him. He’d felt like corruption, like a sin. He’d put his hand around my throat and squeezed when he kissed me, and ever since I’d been unable to shake that feeling of his fingers digging into my flesh.

I wanted to feel it again, feel it harder. I wanted to rip open his viciousness and take it all in. I wanted to ride this man like a goddamn rollercoaster and then take his friends for a spin too.

Manson nodded to Vincent first, silent words passing between them. Then his eyes fell on me and his lips parted to give me a wide, bloody smile. It was feral — a beast’s grin. Wild, reckless and, finally, victorious.

“Knife boy seems a little obsessed.”

She was so fucking beautiful. Heartlessly perfect. The cruelest joke life had ever played on me.

If a guy couldn’t play with my masochism as enthusiastically as he played with my pleasure, then I didn’t want it.

Was I asking for too much? Probably. But I’d been demanding too much for my whole life and I wasn’t going to stop now.

When the universe flows, flow with it. Let fate take its path.

My obsession with them felt like an illness, an addiction I couldn’t shake. I’d become a voyeur, watching their lives from afar and never reaching out.

“I’m going to watch them fucking destroy you, angel.”

Manson had his pills, his therapy, his meditation and all that shit, but there was still something dark in him that would never quite go away. Something born because it had to be, and alive because nothing could kill it. That thing, that monster inside him, had gotten a taste of Jess and nothing else could satiate it.

God, why did he look at me like that? Like he was enraged and fascinated at once. Or like he was holding something back…

“Is it really that hard to give an inch, Jess?” “Yeah, Jess.” Jason meandered closer beside me, sipping his beer. “Can’t even give an inch when Manson gave you eight?”

Sigmund Freud could have developed a whole new complex around me being so obsessed with someone so unreachable. Then he could develop another one around the fact that I didn’t only want Jessica for me, I wanted her for us.

Part of me still felt so angry, fury pulsing in my chest. But it was impossible to look at her without my heart softening. I was weak as hell for this woman. She could stab me in the heart and I’d probably still forgive her.

How was it possible to detest someone and yet want them so damn badly?

She fit perfectly. Like a puzzle piece tucked against my side, soft and warm. Her hair smelled sweet and slightly fruity, like strawberries. But my scent was there too.

“Damn right, baby. Want a hit?” I wasn’t going to think too deeply about the way him calling me baby made me feel. I was going to ignore the fact that it brought my heart stuttering to a stop before it flew off again at a gallop.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions,

“That’s how I got away with it,” I said. “People don’t suspect the quiet ones.”

I looked at her and knew I was fucked.

“An angel should worship her God.”

“You’re fucking perfect, angel. So perfect you’ll make me lose my goddamn mind.”

I’d never thought that hearing “our girl” from his lips would give me butterflies.

It gave me a shiver of pleasure to see the way my man had already claimed her, and I brushed my fingers over the cuts, before hurriedly tugging down my boxers.

I’d found someone I trusted enough to be vulnerable with, something I thought was impossible.

“You’re what I need,” I said.

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.

“I love you.” He rested his head against my back, his breath warm on my skin. “I love you, too.”

It used to scare me the way I loved him, just like it scared me to love Jason and Vincent. It was so much to lose, too much. And now… Now there was Jessica.

“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.”