Good Girl Complex by Elle Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page B

beside me, laughing yet skeptical.
    “I shit you not.” Evan puts his hands up in a show of innocence. “Coop’s sitting with this damn goat in the back of the squad car, and it’s scared, thrashing around. Kicks him in the forehead, and Coop starts gushing blood everywhere. So he’s trying to calm the goat down but everything’s all bloody and slippery back there. There’s blood all over him and the goat, the windows. And I’m driving this stolen cop car, the sirens are blaring, lights are flashing and shit.”
    I laugh at his crazy description and animated hand gestures. Evan seems more playful than Cooper, who comes off as a bit intense. Their faces are identical, but it’s easy to tell them apart. Evan’s dark hair is cut shorter, his arms devoid of ink.
    “And we can hear them on the radio,” Cooper says, his way too attractive face a dance of light and shadow from the fire between us. “They’re all, some damn fool kids stole a goat and a car. Set up a perimeter. Lock down the bridge. So we’re thinking, crap, where are we taking this thing?”
    I can’t peel my gaze off his lips. His hands. Those muscular arms. I’m trying to trace the outlines of his tattoos as he gestures through the air. It’s psychological torture. I’m strapped to a chair, my eyes held open, driven mad by images of his dark eyes and crooked smirk. And although Evan literally has the same face, for some reason I’m not responding to
him
. Not even remotely. Just Cooper.
    “We’re thirteen years old and set off a chase through town,” Evan continues, “all because Steph saw this goat chained up in someone’s yard and hopped the fence to liberate it just as the owner comes out with a shotgun. And Coop and I are thinking, aw man, she’s about to get her crazy ass shot over this goat.”
    “We jump the fence after her, and I’m smashing the lock with a hammer—”
    “You happened to have a hammer with you?” Even my voice sounds strange to me. I’m out of breath because my heart is pumping so fast, though I’ve been sitting the whole time. Perfectly still. Caught in his spell.
    “Yeah.” He looks at me like I’m weird for asking. “It’s a cheap lock. You smack it good a couple times on the side, and the little parts inside break apart. So Evan grabs the goat and we’re dodging buckshot, because the owner is drunk off his ass and can’t aim for shit.”
    “But where’d the cop car come from?” Bonnie asks.
    “We’re running with this thing on a leash when a cop corners us, right?” Evan becomes animated, gesturing with a bottle of beer that he brought to the beach with him. “He draws his Taser but there’s three of us and a goat, so he doesn’t know who to aim at. He leaves the door open, so I’m like, screw it, hop in.”
    “Evan and I dive in,” Cooper says. “Steph runs to distract the cop. Anyway, so the goat kicks the hell out of me, and I’m back there getting woozy, about to black out, when Evan says, bro, we gotta ditch this car and run.”
    “So what happened to the goat?” I demand, now sincerely invested in the fate of this poor animal, but acutely paranoid that everyone notices how out of sorts I am. How hard I’m staring.
    “Evan pulls onto this fire road that cuts through the state park and somehow wrestles that thing out of the backseat and takes it into the forest. Leaves me passed out on the ground beside the car so when the cops get there and see me unconscious and covered in blood, looking dead as a doornail, they all start freaking out. They get me in an ambulance, and I wake up in the hospital. In all the confusion, I slip out of there and meet Evan at home like nothing ever happened.”
    “They never caught you?” Bonnie hoots with laughter.
    “Hell no,” Evan says. “Got away clean.”
    “So you left a goat by itself in the woods?” I stare at them, amused yet horrified.
    “What the hell else were we supposed to do with it?” Cooper sputters.
    “Not that! Oh my