House Rules: The Jack Gordon Story by Liz Crowe Read Free Book Online Page A

grabbed his gut. He tried not to shake her.
    “Told
him what?” He croaked out.
    “I
told him he could keep his money. That I….” She looked down again, biting her
lip. “I promised him I wouldn’t tell you this if he helped me…now.”
    Jack
dropped to his knees, a raging desperation roiling through him. “I love you.
I’m sorry. Don’t go. Stay. I want to be with you…please…it’s okay. A baby, it
will be…fine.” He heard himself begging and hated it, but couldn’t halt the
rush of words. “Mindy. God, please….” He dropped to his knees, held onto her
for dear life.
    She
threaded her fingers in his hair until he got control of himself again and
stood. He tried to kiss her but she kept avoiding him. “No, Jackie. You don’t
love me. And the last thing you need is to…well, let’s just say it’s one thing
your father and I do agree on.” She took a breath. “I did love being your
first.” She touched her fingers to his lips. “I only wish….” Then she stopped
and broke off a little piece of his heart in the process.
    She
got into her car without another word. He knocked on her window, fear at her
leaving for good making him breathless. He hated how he felt right then. Wanted
that terrified sensation gone, never to feel it again. That dependence on
someone else—it was…not good. He had to banish it. She shook her head and
wouldn’t roll down her window. So he stepped back as she gunned the engine and
peeled out into the street.
    His
head pounding with fury, he jumped into the truck and headed straight for
Brandis’s place. “Let’s go,” he called out to his friend who sat on the edge of
the pool behind his house. “It is party time now, my brother. Jack is ready to
roll.”
    “What
about…the secretary?” His friend waggled his eyebrows at Jack.
    “Screw
her,” Jack said, sinking into his dismay nice and deep.
    Brandis
shrugged and didn’t say anything else about it, thankfully. He got dressed, and
they headed to a party, which blended into another and another for the entire
summer until all Jack knew was how many girls he could fuck and not give two
shits about, every single night.
     

Chapter
Seven

     
    After
his senior year ended Jack spent a surreal few months filled with beer, pot,
and pussy. When he wasn’t working his ass off for his father, learning
everything he could about all aspects of building a house, he was studying for
his contractor’s and electrician’s licenses.
    And
when he wasn’t doing those things, he was out deflowering virgins. He and
Brandis had developed an unspoken and very successful tag-team system,
approaching each party with two goals—getting drunk and getting laid,
preferably by more than one girl. Jack prided himself on identifying the
cherries, zeroing in on them, and relieving them of their burden, typically
with enough finesse they hardly noticed it was happening.
    Brandis
claimed not to enjoy that, saying it was too much work for too little reward.
But Jack felt as though he was on a mission. He wanted every one of the girls
he had to have a positive first sexual experience and took the whole thing on
as a personal challenge. By the time they graduated and were into that unique
position of freedom—no more high school, yet not yet in college—Jack was firmly
entrenched as the life of pretty much every party.
    “You
are a man whore, you know it?” Brandis declared from his perch atop a float in
the middle of his pool. Jack shrugged and drifted off in the sun, on one of his
very rare days off, dreaming as always of the lovely and giving Mindy.
    When
he woke, the place was crawling with girl-flesh barely covered in bikinis. Beer
was flowing, and the party was on yet again. Sitting and sipping and taking it
all in his brain slipped out of “missing Mindy like a bitch” mode and into
locating his target for the night. He tried not to grin too widely when he
spotted her, a blonde, unfamiliar to him, sitting with another girl nearly