Dare Me (Dare Me Series Book 1)

Dare Me (Part 5 - Alexis)

"I've got to go." He hits the wall, snapping me out of my trance. I look over at him. "What's the hurry?" "Headed home to get anther merch deal finalized with Gage," he says, taking his smoke from behind his ear. "Who's Gage?" I follow him into the living room so I can lie down on the couch. "Guy whose club we were at last night." "Why didn't you introduce us to him?" Claire says, following behind me. I flop down on one end of the couch as she does the other. "You got sick." "Oh yeah," she groans. "No liquor holding ass," he says playfully, resting the cigarette between his lips. I grin. "I can hold my liquor just fine. I didn't eat anything." She tosses a throw pillow at him, and he laughs as he catches it against his chest. "You two are going to run out of pillows eventually." He lets it land on the floor along with the one I threw. "Do y'all remember anything?" I look at Claire, and she shrugs. "Fireball makes you forget shit." "Like how you begged the bartender to get you a can of beer so you could shotgun?" Brennen says. I scrunch my face up at her. "So redneck." "Hey, you can't take the girl out of the country. If you're born there that's how you'll always be " She shrugs. I turn and lie back so my feet are in her lap. "I'm never drinking again." "Hey, I said that last night." Claire laughs. "At least I remember something." Brennen smirks. "I'm gone. Call me later." He opens the door, and we say bye from both of our resting spots. After the door clicks shut, we stay quiet. I close my eyes and try to recall more from last night. After walking into the club, I remember Claire taking my hand and heading to the bar. I open my eyes and sit up on my elbows. "You didn't happen to see a guy standing on those stairs last night, did you?" She looks down at me. "I saw lots of guys last night, but no, I don't think I saw anyone on those stairs except that bodyguard down at the bottom. Why?" I shrug. "I saw a guy standing in the middle of them before I took my first...well, second shot, and then as soon as I took it, he was gone."  "Hmm," she says. "I never saw one person go up there or come down actually." "Yeah. I never did again after that." I wonder what's up there and why he was the only one. And then the bodyguard down at the bottom. Ugh, this is all too much right now. He was just a guy, Lexi. Just some random guy standing on a staircase. You just got out of a relationship. Who cares who he was or why he was looking at you? More than likely you'll never see each other again. "You sure are thinking hard down there," Claire says with a grin. I laugh. "It's starting to hurt." My stomach growls again. "Pizza?" she asks. "I'm down. You order. I'm going to scrub all this filth off my body." Grabbing the coffee table and couch, I pull myself up. Claire leans, reaching for her phone, making a dramatic show of it. "Come to me," she says, wiggling her fingers. "I'm pretty sure you haven't gained any superpowers between last night and now." I toss the phone onto her lap. "Hey, a girl can wish. You want pepperoni or all cheese?" "Give me the meat," I call back before I shut the bathroom door.

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I exit the ice cream shop on a day hotter than a mile south of Hell. Claire and I ate pizza for two days and watched almost a whole season of The Vampire Diaries. During this time, I decided to let Mark go and made up my mind that our split was a good thing. I need to enjoy life more, and I surely wasn't doing it with him. I need to hang out with my friends, and more importantly, I need to focus on buying that coffee shop where I work. I will say, the one good thing about being with Mark was he refused to let me pay for anything. So, I put every dime I could into a savings account. I've just got to go to the bank and see what I can get to help pay the rest of it. That's where the problem will come in. When I was eighteen, the monster who raised me stole my social and got a credit card in my name instead of working. As a result, my credit is complete crap. I lick my vanilla ice cream cone as my all-black Chucks make way down the sidewalk in downtown Atlanta. Looking down at my hand when some drips on it, I get knocked sideways by a beast of a man. "Watch out," he says in a way that sends chills down my back. I turn my head, but he doesn't stop, and I notice he's wearing a freaking hoodie. What the hell? It's a hundred degrees out. I stare at his back until I realize I'm in people's way and more ice cream starts to drip down my hand. I shake my head and continue my walk. The smell of coffee hits my nose, and I open the glass door to my place of work. A burst of cool air brushes over my sticky skin, and I sigh, spotting Claire sitting in a comfy worn chair toward the right of the shop. "Hey." I slouch down in a seat across from her. "Some guy almost knocked me down out there, and get this, he was wearing a hoodie." She reaches for her cone, and I lift my hair away from my sweaty neck. She has a newspaper in front of her and a red marker between her teeth. "Did you dropkick his dumb ass?" she asks. I laugh. "No. I'm a little rusty. Didn't wanna embarrass myself. What's with the paper?" "Trying to find a job," she says, removing the marker. "Mom and Dad can't pay my half of the rent forever." Claire's parents are wealthy, and suffocating. They own a nice piece of land in the country. She grew up riding four-wheelers and mud bogging. Having dogs around her and sitting shotgun in some boy's truck while they rode dirt roads. I grew up poor and unwanted. Two totally different lives but in search of the same thing. Freedom.