Eye of the Sh*t Storm by Jackson Ford (most romantic novels .txt) 📕

I tilt my head, and the bikers go flying. Thrown right into the air, my PK manipulating their bodies like it was nothing. Moving organic matter used to be almost impossible, but not any more. They yell and flail their limbs, crashing into the narrow channel of water running down the centre of the storm drain.

Another biker, coming at me from the side, trying to flank me. He’s got a big-ass combat knife, seven inches of serrated steel. I stop both the knife and his arm so suddenly that his ulna breaks, and his scream of pain is sweet.

There’s music. No: humming. I’m humming, and it takes me a very long second to recognise the tune: the opening bars of “The Next Episode”, by Dre and Snoop.

More phones are in the area, the people on the surrounding streets coming to investigate the ruckus. I brick them all, reaching out and crushing them with a single thought. It’s scary how good it feels to be this powerful, scary because I keep thinking of Jeannette. I ignore the thoughts, grabbing hold of two of the black SUVs, sending them flying like a grenade went off underneath them, boom, just end over end, metal and glass crunching.

Holy shit. I’m actually horny.

Sex is usually off the table for me. I lose control of my PK when I come, throwing everything around me into the air. As you can imagine, that severely limits who I can sleep with. Why yes: it sucks exactly as much as you think it does. I’ve mostly dealt with it by not thinking about it, not making sexual pleasure into something I chase, and I’ve been pretty successful thus far.

I’m not a virgin. I popped my cherry with a bartender here in LA, getting him drunk and taking him into the woods to fuck, where my PK wouldn’t have any inorganic objects to grab onto. It sucked. I hated it. I stopped trying.

Now? Jesus Christ with a butt-plug, I am ready to fuck anything that moves. It’s like all the sex I could have been having these past few years has built and built and built, and now it’s all clamouring for release.

Every one of our pursuers is on the run, booking it up the sides of the channel. I raise my arms, eyes closed, grinning at the sky, and trip the bikers up. What the South Africans call an ankle tap. I don’t really want to keep them here. I just want to remind them who they’re fucking with. It distracts me from the hot, flushed feeling of need.

All at once, my legs turn to jelly. I don’t feel woozy or anything – I’ve never felt so clear. But the lower half of my body isn’t paying attention. I sit down clumsily, amid the fire and rubble and smoke, the blue sky above me, and the storm building to the north, at my back.

The van we were driving is still burning behind us, nothing more than a gutted shell now. At least we took care of the meth. I lie down, head resting on the concrete. After what I just did, I should feel drained, wiped out. But I’m still so freakin’ wired. If my legs were actually listening to me, I’d start running. Probably in the direction of the nearest human being, so we could find a hotel room somewhere and fuck each other’s brains out. I giggle, my fingers twitching.

A shadow falls over me – no, two shadows. Annie and Africa. Oh good – they made it.

“Shit.” Annie’s voice is pinpoint-sharp, like it’s coming from inside my head. “That was…”

“Yaaw, Teggan, what did you do?” Africa doesn’t sound pissed. He sounds amazed. His eyes are wide, his shoulders and knees twitching. Annie too.

Looks like I’m not the only one who got a dose of the powdery meth. Although I think I got it a lot worse than they did.

I’m starting to get a headache. Building insistently at the back of my skull. Africa is still talking, the words coming in a rushing torrent. “When I see you lift the bridge, I try circle around to cut off the biking gang, you know, maybe make sure they do not spring a surprise, but then you throw them, yaaaaaa, like nothing, I never see you do that before. Hey, lotta people saw you, what you did, there gonna be all sorts of videos and Snapchat things out there, yaaw?”

Suddenly, he gets a look on his face. A horrified, disgusted look, as if he’s only now realising that we’re all high. And he’s probably thinking of Jeannette too. She’s clean now, but she’s relapsed before, something Africa refuses to talk about. Africa has had to chase her more than once, find her in the mess of Skid Row, go back to the world of homelessness and addiction that he thought he’d escaped.

“Relax,” I tell him. “I took care of the phones.”

I push myself to a sitting position, refusing to give into the thoughts – after all, it’s not like I did meth on purpose. All the same, there are… a lot of people out there now, on either side of the storm drain, pushed up against the chain link fence and gawking at me. Twenty, thirty, maybe more. And I just gave them the full Teagan experience, something I am explicitly not supposed to do. Ever. There won’t be video, no proof, but…

I may be in trouble.

Good thing the worried part of brain isn’t driving the bus. I tilt my head back, warbling at the sky in a fake-deep voice. “Smoke meth every day.”

“What you mean, smoke meth every day?” Africa goggles at me, horror spreading across his face. “That is a very bad idea.”

“No, dumb-dumb, it’s like the last line of the Dre song. “The Next Episode”? Nate Dogg telling you to smoke weed every day?”

Another giggle worms its way out of me. I should stop that.

“You know what would