The Heavens Rise Read Online Free PDF Page B

his chest up against my back, and once both of our arms were raised at the same time, Anthem Landry wrapped his fingers around both of my wrists, turned me as if we were going to dance, and kissed me with a gentle determination that made me lose my balance and fall against him.
    I had known the bonds of friendship before that night. I had known loyalty and unshakable commitment of a certain chaste kind. And while there had been a few fumbling experiences where I’d let boys get to second base, pure romantic affection had been unknown to me until that very moment. Until Anthem Landry took me in his powerful arms and kissed me, I had never known what it was like to become briefly lost in someone else’s desire to know your smell and your taste. And that’s what I became; blissfully, irretrievably lost.
    Bloodred plastic beads bearing the Krewe of Ares logo—a spear and Spartan helmet—slammed to the pavement all around us, some of themsnapping upon impact. From a few yards away, Ben watched, slack-jawed with amazement. But I was lost to everything except the scotch-sharpened breath of my first and only real lover.
    Ironic, I guess, that I experienced this kind of intimacy for the first time at a Mardi Gras parade named for an ancient god of violence and war. Or perhaps not, considering everything that came later.

II
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BEN

6
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    TANGIPAHOA PARISH
    APRIL 2005
    A nthem Landry considered it a miracle that Nikki took him back, and every hour since that fateful phone call, he felt like an electric-chair-bound convict rescued by the governor’s pardon at the last possible second. He’d turned into one of those chatty, cheerful jackasses who could make conversation about almost any topic with any clerk in any place of business. His older brothers, who only rallied around him when he was down, had taken to calling him Cool Whip, which was really just a version of the term pussy whipped that they could use when their mother was in the room.
    For Anthem, the real discovery was that none of the begging, none of the sobbing late-night phone messages and none of the long letters he had tucked under the windshield of her Toyota 4-Runner, letters in which he had pled his innocence to kingdom come, had done the job.
    Once again, it was Ben who had come to the rescue. The kids and teachers who’d observed their little trio from a distance over the yearsalways wrote Ben off as their third wheel, the nerdy hanger-on Nikki stayed loyal to because they’d been besties since birth. It was horseshit, and Anthem told them so whenever he got the chance.
    Ben Broyard was their glue, their rational mind, the provider of their few deep breaths. And in the past twenty-four hours he’d averted the end of Anthem’s whole world. Sure, he was barely five foot two, and had a high-pitched nasally voice that wasn’t about to get him work on WWL radio, but when the little dude set his mind to something he could marshal as much wallop as a hurricane. And for the past two weeks the most important project in his life had been getting Brittany Lowe to admit that her story about hooking up with Anthem was a complete crock. How he’d done it, Anthem wasn’t exactly sure. All that mattered was that he’d tape-recorded the lying skank’s confession and played it for Nikki.
    And the rest, as they say, was makeup sex.
    “Why?” Anthem had asked Ben after things were reconciled, after a night spent inhaling the scent of Nikki’s perfume and feeling like he’d been pulled up and over the edge of a cliff by one arm. “Why’d she lie?”
    “I’m workin’ on it, A-Team” was Ben’s cryptic reply.
    That had been three days ago, and now the two of them were flying across the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, bound for Elysium. Of course, someone was missing, and in light of recent events, Nikki’s absence from his pickup truck that night left knots of tension across Anthem’s upper back. It wasn’t just a housewarming party they’d be attending in