Hooked

Copyright © 2015 by Ashley Valentine.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without the written permission of the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

Hooked is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

I can hear the music from almost a block away as I walk the street to his house. My feet

are killing me from the journey, but I'm itching. I need a fix. Something.
Anything
.

I roll my eyes as I ascend the driveway, passing his big white Escalade truck. Brand new rims. He thinks he's the shit.

I
know
he's the shit.

I remember the first time I met him. Back before I was a druggie. It was my first summer out of high school, and I was fucking invincible. We were still too young to drink in Cali, so me and bunch of my friends drove down to Mexico and laid out for a couple of weeks, just getting shit-faced at the bars all night long, and sleeping in lawn chairs out on the beach during the day.

He had come along with my friend Sam and her older brother Randy. Sam had told me that he was Randy's age, and they partied together all the time, but I didn't care who he was or why he came, I just knew that he was fucking sexy. And he had bomb ass weed. We would sneak off from the group together-me, him, Randy, and Sam-and roll up the windows in the car and get high as a kite before hitting the beach with everyone else.

And did I mention he was fucking sexy?

We always had this weird chemistry before we even knew each other's name. It seemed like I would always look across a room and see him staring at me, and when we hit the bars at night he was always pushing up on me, touching me in ways we both knew were inappropriate.

He was a typical L.A. bad boy: beanies and bucket hats, diamond studs in his ears, tattoos down his arms and on his neck. And normally I hated that shit, but with him it made my fucking legs quiver. He was a wet dream. I secretly loved it when he would come up to me all slow, trying to turn me on just by looking at me the right way with those steel blue eyes, running his game. I would ignore him for the most part, run my smart ass mouth off, but my panties were always soaked when he walked away. Damn him.

We started hanging out once we got back from Mexico. Sam told me that he was always asking Randy about "your sister's friend," and sometimes when I was over at her house hanging out, Randy would disappear to make a phone call. And the next thing I knew Lex was at the front door.

Oh yeah, his name is Lex.

The four of us would shoot pool in the basement and Randy would buy us beer because he was twenty-one, and me and Sam would drink ourselves into giggles and the boys would just laugh at us.

But that was five years ago. Boy, how shit has changed since then...

The first time I did coke was at Lex's house. He had called me and asked me to meet him in town because he was starving; I was kinda hungry myself and wasn't doing shit anyway so I said alright. We had been hanging out for almost three years at that point, and he had kind of tried to step into the brotherly role, being my buddy and having a bit of a protective edge over me, but if we ever went to a party together and got wasted he was always whispering in my ear and confessing how much I turned him on sometimes. But we usually just ignored it the next day.

We were sitting inside at Wendy's eating when he said the words for the first time.

"I got my hands on some coke."

Of course I fucking flipped out because at that time in my life the idea of something like coke scared the shit out of me. I bitched him out when he told me he had tried it once or twice with some of his buddies and he admitted that he had actually liked it. But then he told me he really wanted me to try it, if I wanted to. He promised he would babysit me my first time through, that no one else would be there, and I could only do a little. But I was fucking petrified.

"Lex...you know if I was gonna do some shit like coke...I would only do it with you. You know that. But I'm fucking terrified. I'm too scared of that shit. Weed is different. God, we can go get stoned right now, but coke...I don't think I can do it."

When we had gone back to his house after eating I got curious about the coke again.

Goddammit.

I asked him a million questions in depth about what it was like, and he made it sound harmless. Could I be anymore stupid than to think cocaine was
harmless?
But I trusted him. I trusted him because he made me feel safe and he promised he would take care of me and not tell a soul if I wanted to do it. And something inside of me wanted to do it.

So I did it. And I fucking loved it.

And now here I am.

I curl a fist and beat his front door with it. No fucking sense in knocking quietly with music blaring like that, and he's probably strung out anyway. It could take an hour for him to hear me at the door.

He opens it slowly, peering out through the crack. His eyes are red and barely open, and he licks his lips slowly. "Sup?"

"I need my shit." I'm almost shaking now, and it isn't even cold out.

He just shakes his head, and walks back into the house, leaving the door standing open. "Come the fuck on!" he calls over his shoulder, and I step inside quickly, pushing the door shut, turning the lock.

I follow him to the living room. Seated...the usual suspects. Each in a progressing stage of intoxication. Some passed out. Some taking their first hit.

It doesn't even phase me anymore. I come to get my shit, and I leave.

Unless he's alone.

If he's alone, I stay. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes for days.

He materializes out of the backroom, the stash room, "the treasure chest" they call it affectionately. He pushes the brown paper bag to my chest with no expression on his face, but as he turns away I grab him by the jaw and snatch his face back to mine, pressing my mouth to his aggressively, tongue sliding past his lips as I slip the roll of bills into his jacket pocket.

He grabs my waist, "I haven't seen you for days," nose to nose with me when he says it, breath hot on my face. I can barely hear him above that fucking music. Eminem, or some shit like that.

It's a love-hate thing now, me and him. We get strung out on each other, just like we get strung out on the drugs. We shoot up and fuck. Smoke and fuck. Snort and fuck. Drink and fuck. Sometimes we just fuck. And sometimes we just get wasted. Sometimes we don't see each other for days or weeks even, except when I come to get my shit.

But I always come back, and he's always waiting.

No matter what it is, we're in it together. We hate each other because we can't quit each other, and we can't quit the drugs.

I love him because he's got the shit, and he loves me because I need the shit.

But he hates me for keeping him tied to the business, and I hate him for getting me hooked.

"Fuck that! Tony isn't an all-star, why the fuck does he want powder?" Lex bangs his hand against the steering wheel, his face flushing with anger at the recipient of his threats.

"No, he only moves trees..." he continues fiercely into the cellphone. "Yeah, from here to fucking Mexico, why do you think he's a hide-out all the time? I know he's just trying to sell that shit out from under me... I don't give a
fuck
who his brother is, Tony isn't gonna black-ball me for nose candy when that motherfucker banks on reefer up and down the west coast. It's hard enough for me to get business in L.A., I don't need him trying to run me out of shop!"

He always does this, making business calls in the car. And it fucking pisses me off. I don't know why he can't just talk to
me
. As soon as his ass hits the seat, he's on that cell phone. The "business phone." The one that always rings. And he always answers.

He has two others: a Sidekick he uses to stay connected with his runners during the day, and a Blackberry he uses for data entry after every sale he makes...all of which is dumped into an Excel spreadsheet on his computer and then purged from his hard drive onto an unlabeled disk. A single piece of worn plastic that can make him thousands of dollars when he decides to slip out of the business. Selling your numbers, they call it.

I'm sitting in the passenger's seat, knees up to my chest, arms crossed, looking out the window. I gaze at the houses as we pass them by, trying to imagine what kind of people live there - do they have a normal life, a 9-5 job, or are they are in some fucked up mess like me?

Sometimes I get carried away with thinking about how other people live, but right now I'm just trying to tune out his "business call." He's a fucking pusher, and I just have to get over that. This is my life, for now.

I start to itch a little, and I squirm in my seat. "Hey..." I lean over to him, but he's still talking a hundred miles an hour. He doesn't look at me, just holds a finger up to me, and I wanna break it off. Business always comes first for him, but fuck that right now. I hate it when he ignores me.

I push on his leg, "Hey," and he snaps his head over to me, not stopping his conversation, widening his eyes at me in an irritated manner. He clenches the fist that was previously holding up the finger, shaking it at me and gritting his teeth menacingly before turning his focus back to the road.

I sit back for a second, frustrated, and needing some kind of buzz, just to hold me over until we got back to his house. We were on our way to make a transaction at Ray's house, a hand-to-hand; I had been with Lex when he got the call, so of course I had to come with him.

He never left me at the house alone.

He said it was because he didn't want me as a liability, taking too much shit and kicking the bucket right there in his fucking living room while he was gone, but I think he wanted to protect me. If anyone was going to come by the house ready to throw down over a bogus deal or some mishandled business, he didn't want me to take the bullet for him.

But I would have.

I reach over to run my index finger up his chiseled jawline from chin to ear, laying my head back against the seat, just watching him, trailing my finger down his neck, over the black "L.A." tattooed on the skin there. He licks his lips before turning his eyes to me, pulling the phone down from his mouth.

"What do you
want
?" His whisper is tight in his throat, but his eyes are soft.

"Do you have any weed?"

He shifts his eyes to the glove box, nodding toward it in a silent gesture, and then goes back to business on the phone.

I open the glove box of his truck and see the familiar pack of cigarettes laying there. The wolf in sheep's clothing. I grab the box with shaking fingers and open the top, sliding out the slender stick, carefully hollowed and re-stuffed with weed. The easiest way to hide it. I grin at his clever trick. Sometimes it kills me to know that he's so intelligent and he just wastes it...but then again, look at me.

I reach over into the cup holder for the lighter, cracking the window halfway, and I light up, taking a long drag and holding it for a few seconds before releasing the smoke.

Buzzin'.

We pull up to Ray's house and he parks on the street. He leans over and presses his open lips right beneath my ear and I feel the tip of his tongue touch my skin as he sucks lightly before pulling away, leaving a small wet spot on my neck.

"Give me five minutes."

But I know it won't take that long.

He strolls across Ray's yard quickly, and I'm anxious in my seat, a little baked but still anxious, because Ray doesn't live in the best neighborhood. None of Lex's customers do. As much as I like spending time with him, I hate making trips like this all day.

I've asked him time and again about getting just one more bag boy so he can basically run his operation from the house, but he doesn't have enough business surpluses right now to pay anyone else, what with Tony getting into that shit down in Mexico and almost swiping every pothead out from under half the dealers in L.A.

At least there's still the regular coke deals to fall back on for a while. Plus, in a business of deception, finding trustworthy employees is a challenge, and he says he prefers making a certain percentage of his deals himself, to get his face out there and build up a trust with the buyers. "It's PR, baby," he always says with that charming, cheeky grin.

I'm lost in my thoughts until I get a glimpse of someone in the side mirror of Lex's truck. A young girl, probably my age or younger, dressed in a wife beater and cut off shorts, walking fast up the sidewalk. Sinking back in my seat a little as she approaches the truck, I curse myself for leaving the fucking window halfway down while Lex is inside Ray's with the keys.

"Hey!" She's strung out, hair a mess, purple and red around the eyes. A junkie. She's gotta be on some bad shit. I freeze. "You're Lex's girl, right?"

I swallow hard. In the drug business, you're not always sure if the answer to a question like that will get you killed or commended. I narrow my eyes at her a bit.

"Where is he? I've been comin' by the house and he's never home." Her speech is slurred, and she's leaning in closer through the window. I can smell alcohol and filth on her, mostly filth.

"He's handling business. Who are you?"

"HEY! Not today, Alice! Nobody wants your business around here!" I hear Lex shout across the yard suddenly, and he's hurrying back to the truck. She meets him in his path and tries to grab at him a little, but he pushes her off. "Not today, bitch. Go back to Mikey's. I'm not even playing with you. Get outta here."

He climbs back in the truck, putting the key in the ignition fast and rolling my window up. "Fuck...you okay?"

I just nod and he tosses the paper sack into the floorboard on my side. Inside could be twenty, fifty, a thousand dollars. I put my feet down to hold it steady.

"Don't leave my windows down when there's idiots running around on the streets all lit up like fucking Christmas. What the fuck were you thinking?" He raises the back of his hand to me but then just clenches it with a growl, hitting the steering wheel.

I flinch, but I know he wouldn't hit me. His lectures and empty physical threats are just his way of showing dominance.

"Who was that?" I finally ask him, my voice flat as we drive away.

"Just a fucking bag bride, Leala. Stop sweating me." He adjusts himself through his basketball shorts.

"Oh so you sell to
whores
now?"

"Come off that shit, alright? I've never touched that pussy with a pinkie finger, so shut the fuck up. Don't give me the run down."

And I know he's telling the truth. I've never known him to fuck another girl besides me. He looks. He looks even when he knows I'm watching him, but I couldn't give two fucks because I know that dick is mine.

I'm his girl.

I remember the first time he ever said it to me. We were at a bender about three years ago, both of us just druggies with baby habits, trying to get high. It was right before he became a Big Man and we were across town in some fucked up apartments. I think the guy's name was Felix, but I don't even remember.

The music was so loud I could feel the bass thumping against my back as Lex pressed me against the hallway wall, warm hands all over my hips and down my thighs, crotch pushed against mine, grinding against me to the beat of the music... indistinguishable to anyone but the two of us. He was nose to nose with me, but he wouldn't kiss me, and every time I tried to close the space between us he would pull back just slightly with that cocky grin before bringing his face back to mine.

"You know you're my girl, right?"

His breath fanned my face, lips almost touching my cheek, and I just took my bottom lip between my teeth, smiling a bit, giggling and high. He laughed. That deep, lazy laugh that I love. And then he finally let me kiss him.

We made out in the dark hallway and stumbled our way to the bathroom and locked the door, not even bothering to turn the lights on. He tugged my shorts down and moved my panties aside and I slipped him out over the waistband of his sweats. And we fucked for the first time in all those years we'd known each other, quick and quiet against the wall, my leg around his waist.

And then we got high again.

That was the end for us. We were hooked after that.

Soon he became a drugpin in L.A., the real deal. He made the jump from addict to pusher smoothly, from a fake thug kid to something that resembled the real thing. He walked with a no-bullshit swagger. And I was his girl. He never says he loves me and I never ask him to, but after being so close for five years, now I think it's just understood.

I'm not even always around. I spend a lot of time at my apartment, back and forth on the idea of trying to get clean. I want to so bad, but it's tough, mostly because he's my supplier...my provider. He doesn't just give me drugs. He would give me anything I needed if I just asked, but I try not to. I'm addicted to him enough as it is, I don't need to become completely dependent on him.

But something inside always tells me that it's already come to that...

We drive back from Ray's to Lex's house mostly in silence. For once he's not on the phone, but of course he has nothing to say to me.

His phone rings. The
other
phone. The one phone that is actually traceable, attached to his name, and intended for phone calls that have nothing to do with deals and purchases.

I peek at the name on the outer screen.
Damon.

I look up into his face and see him peer down at the phone lying in the center console. His expression doesn't change.

"You should talk to him, you know." My voice is soft, but I know he won't, no matter what I say.

He reaches down to silence the ringer on the phone, ignoring the call, and I sigh.

"Lex...it's your fucking–"

"I don't wanna hear it, ok?!" he cuts me off dryly. I know better than to rag him about it, but I press on. I'm sick of his shit for today.

"He's your fucking brother, Lex! Jesus Christ..."

"What the fuck am I supposed to say to him?"

"Just
talk
to him at least...he's your
brother
."

He sighs, shaking his head. "You don't fucking get it."

But I do. I get it completely.

Damon is Lex's little brother. He was all of ten years old when Lex left his parent's house and promised he'd come back, and of course now Damon still doesn't understand why his big brother, his hero, hasn't come back for him, and it's been five years.

He doesn't call often, in fact their parents eventually told Damon they would ground him if they found out he had gotten in touch with Lex after hearing about him being this big drug dealer. But there's always that one occasional phone call, and Lex knows that Damon snuck away long enough to just call on a whim, even at fifteen years old now, thinking his big brother might answer the phone and come back home.

"It's...it's just been too long." His voice has a tone of finality in it, and I know not to speak another word about it. His family is a soft spot with him. So is mine.

The truth is...neither of us came from fucked up families. I think that's what makes our story even more tragic. We're just two kids who had everything they wanted, but still felt like they needed more. And now, all we have is each other.

And the drugs.

_______________________________________________________________

The next morning I awake slowly to the sound of sniffing. I know he's getting high, right next to me in bed.

I groan a little as I roll around, naked and twisted in the soft sheets of his queen-sized bed, and look up at him slowly, my eyes traveling up his slim torso, taking in all the patterns and texts of his tattoos.

He's still sniffling, running the back of his hand under his nose, pinching it between his middle finger and thumb, and sniffing again, sighing a little when it all goes down. His head is back against the headboard, eyes closed, and I look down into his lap to see the mirror, razor, and short straw. One lonely bump looks up at me, pure and white, just waiting. I want it so bad, but I'm not ready. Not yet.

I look up into his face again and he's staring down at me through half-open lids, eyes bloodshot. He's lit already. I sigh as he reaches to stroke my blonde hair slowly, pushing it off my face and tucking a few messy strands behind my ear. The powder line just sits in his lap, waiting...

Fuck, I'm ready now.

I moan softly, raising myself into my elbows, and leaning over his lap. He gathers my hair and holds it back off my face as I lean down and take the straw, sniffing quickly, hating myself inside. I roll onto my back and pinch my nose, squeezing my eyes shut, sniffling again and once more until I'm breathing clear.

He moves the mirror to the nightstand and shifts back down under the sheets, pulling me tight to his body. He loves to get spun and lay in bed with me; it's kind of a sick scene. He particularly likes to fuck after we do coke, and I figure it won't be long before he's pushing up against me, moaning, and touching me.