Criminal - Couverture souple

I’D BEEN DREAMING I WAS BEING CHASED BY A GIANT PIT bull. It was barking, and then it opened its mouth and I heard Doooom. Doooom. Dooom. Dooom, the bass beat sound Dee’s phone makes. It was ringing somewhere on the floor, under our clothes. My eyes opened as he leaned off the narrow futon to answer it. We hadn’t been touching because he can’t sleep with anyone touching him. But I could still feel him moving away.

“We have to go,” he told me when he hung up. He hadn’t said much into the phone.

I watched the stretch of his ribs as he pulled last night’s T-shirt over his head. The tattoo on his bronze chest disappeared: N—for Nikki—surrounded by swirling angels’ wings. I smiled, seeing it. Thinking of my lips on it last night.

“Get up.” He didn’t look at me.

“Are you okay?”

“Get some clothes on.” He walked out of the room. To the kitchen, or to find whatever narrow scrap of joint was left in the ashtray from last night.

I heard him muttering to Bird and her muttering back. Both of them low, short. I lay there hoping that Dee would say something to Bird about where we were going, what the phone call was about, but really I knew that hoping Dee and Bird would talk much to each other was like hoping the last scratch-off number on your ticket would reveal you’d won the whole $25,000 pot.

I kicked the blanket off and reached for whatever pair of shorts lay handy. I didn’t know where we were headed, but wherever Dee needed me to be, I was going to go.

What would you do for love? Nikki helps her boyfriend commit murder in this “dark, devastating, and realistic portrait of a girl in over her head” ( Publishers Weekly).

Nikki’s life is far from perfect, but at least she has Dee. Her friends tell her that Dee is no good, but Nikki can’t imagine herself without him. He’s hot, he’s dangerous, he has her initials tattooed over his heart, and she loves him more than anything. There’s nothing Nikki wouldn’t do for Dee. Absolutely nothing.

So when Dee pulls Nikki into a crime – a crime that ends in murder – Nikki tells herself that it’s all for true love. Nothing can break them apart. Not the police. Not the arrest that lands Nikki in jail. Not even the investigators who want her to testify against him.

But what if Dee had motives that Nikki knew nothing about?

Nikki’s love for Dee is supposed to be unconditional…but even true love has a limit. And Nikki just might have reached hers.