He looks me over like I mean too much and nothing all at once. I don’t get it, what our issue is.
“If you think I’m going to sputter around and deny this, you’ll be sorry.” Parrish’s frown turns into a smile, one as cruel and wicked and obscene as everything else about him. He’s a villain in a very pretty story, that’s what he is. And once he’s set you as a target, that’s it. I can feel it now: he’s bringing me down. At least … he’s going to try. And he can try his fucking best. “I’m going to embrace it. Actually, I’m going to start spreading rumors of my own. Just remember that you brought this on yourself.”
He leans down beside me and presses his lips against the side of my jaw, his kiss iniquitous and violent and searing as anything I’ve ever felt. Heat flares through my veins and I shoot to my feet, but all that really does is put us closer together.
Parrish gathers my head in his hands and then his mouth is on mine, his tongue stealing between my lips as they seem to part of their own accord. Oh my gods, what the fuck am I doing?! I wonder as my arms go around his neck and I end up on my tiptoes in an attempt to deepen the kiss. Parrish seems mildly surprised, but then his arms are around my waist, squeezing hard enough that it almost hurts.
When he pulls back from me, his lips move near my ear.
“That’s what I thought, Gamer Girl,” he says, releasing me like I’m venomous and stepping back with a confident smile warping his lips. Lips that are just this side of glossy from kissing. From kissing me, specifically.
Oh shit.
Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
Did I … was that … oh hell, that was my first kiss?! With Parrish of all people? What the actual fucking fuck is wrong with me? I clamp a hand over my mouth as my cheeks flame and that ember in my belly turns into a raging fire, crawling through my veins and burning me up from the inside.
He can sense it, too, the way he’s looking at me, all smug and shit. He warned me not to fall in love with him and I hate him and I would never and yet I kissed him and now I’m standing here looking like a total moron and everyone is staring and multiple people have their phones out andohmygodthisisgoingonthegoddamninternet.
“Clearly that was your first kiss,” Parrish remarks absently, frowning down at me in that way of his, that way that makes me wish I knew how to acquire ricin poison to slip into his morning coffee. Every goddamn day he makes a cup with Tess’ five-thousand-dollar espresso machine and sits there sipping it in his Whitehall uniform, and it just pisses me the fuck off. I hate the way he drinks coffee, slowly and contemplatively, like there’s actually something going on inside his stupid, ugly head. “But I’ll keep that to myself or else the rumors I’ve spread won’t make much sense.”
He has the audacity to smile at me. I feel like a fucking tea kettle boiling over and steaming.
“Shows what you know because it obviously was not,” I snap back, but he just keeps smiling in that infuriating way of his.
“Then I guess you’re just a shitty kisser. Less spit, less tongue flapping, less desperation, Gamer Girl. If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll let you practice a little.”
“Stick your dick in a meat grinder,” is all that I can manage to get out. I’m losing this battle, no doubt, but I think by befriending Lumen and impressing the students at the party I might be able to win the war.
“Dick can’t be all that small if you’re gonna kiss him like that,” Chas says finally, lifting up his drink in salute and then downing it as several of the people nearest him laugh. Someone lays out a line of what I think might actually be cocaine on a table nearby, and I feel my face pale.
Maybe I’ve just stepped into something I’m not quite ready for?
What was it that Parrish said to me: Hope you’re ready. Because it only gets worse from here on out.
I’m starting to wonder if he was right about that.
By the time I find Maxx and the Jeep Gladiator, it’s twenty minutes past the time we said we’d meet. For his part, X doesn’t seem particularly bothered, offering up a tight smile when I climb into the front seat beside him.
“It seems like you’ve made quite a name for yourself,” he tells me with a raise of his brows. “Good work, Kota. You’ve nailed the Whitehall Prep test.”
“There’s a test?” I ask, but I know what he means. The test of whether I belong here or not. Apparently, I meet their required level of drama, lucky me.
Parrish climbs into the backseat about five seconds later which is both good and bad because I want to get the hell out of here but also, I want to be nowhere near the guy. He’s a disease that I can’t stop obsessing about, and now have inextricably tied my reputation at Whitehall to.
I should’ve stayed home and headshotted some aliens. Or had a heart-to-heart with Tess which, other than this party, sounds like the worst possible thing in the world right now.
“That was an interesting night,” Parrish remarks, like he didn’t stick his tongue down my throat thirty minutes earlier. “Let’s get out of here before things get dull.”
“God, I hate you,” I murmur, closing my eyes in frustration as he laughs behind me.
Neither of us is laughing by the time we get back to the house to find that most of the lights are off.
“Stop here,” Parrish tells Maxx, causing his friend to roll his eyes and sigh.
“This isn’t my first time doing this, you know?” X reminds Parrish as he pauses at the street corner and both Parrish and I hop out. I turn to thank Maxx for the ride when I realize that Parrish has just taken off without me.
“Thanks, I’ll talk to you soon,” I tell him, starting to shut the door. Then I pause and frown. Maybe I’ll talk to him soon? Maybe not at all? It might be better if I didn’t. I glance over my shoulder and notice that Parrish has already unlocked the gate and is strolling through it.
“No problem, anytime,” Maxx replies, but he’s hardly paying any attention to me. Instead, he’s watching Parrish walk away with a strange expression. He quickly returns his green eyes to mine and smiles again. “See you next time Maxine is in Seattle.”
Our goodbye gets suddenly awkward, so I slam the door shut, take a huge breath and close my eyes while Maxx drives away. As soon as his taillights are around the corner and up the hill, I turn and head for the gate.
Realizing that it’s about to close, I start to jog and then sprint, but I don’t make it in time, and the gate slides shut.
“Hey Parrish,” I call out, before he’s too far ahead. I can’t exactly shout to be heard without waking Tess or Paul up. Or hell, Kimber. She’d probably break sibling code right off and run to her mother with the news that I’d snuck out.
Parrish’s walk slows slightly but doesn’t stop.
“Can you please come back and open the gate?” I ask, but he doesn’t turn around. In fact, he doesn’t even stop walking. I gape after him as he slips around to a side door and lets himself into the garage and then, subsequently, into the house. I can see his shadow against a dim kitchen fan light as he passes by.
With a sigh, I pull my phone from my pocket to look up the gate code … and find out that it’s dead.
“No, no, no,” I murmur, frantically squeezing the power button. “This is not fucking happening to me.”
But the phone stays dead, and the front gate stays closed, and I find myself shivering with my arms crossed over my chest. I walk the edge of the property, but there’s no other way to get in, and there’s no way in hell that I can climb it. It’s an eight-foot-tall metal fence with absolutely zero in the way of ornamentation.
Fantastic.
It takes two rounds of pacing outside the fence for me to give in to the inevitable: I am stuck out here for the rest of the night. Tess is going to find out that I left the property. Sure, I could lie about the party but what’s my excuse?
After a while, I end up sitting with my knees pulled up to my chest outside the gate, waiting for morning. If I’m lucky, maybe Parrish will let me in before breakfast? That
still gives me several hours of sitting out here in the cold, but at the very least, I’ll avoid Tess’ wrath.
My mind goes immediately back to that awful kiss. I mean, it wasn’t awful in the moment—actually, it was kind of nice—but then I remember the smug look on my stepbrother’s face and I want to scream. How could I have kissed him like that? Wrapped my arms around his neck, lifted up on my toes, leaned in.
My cheeks flush but at least there’s nobody out here to see it.
How dare he lock me out like this, I think instead, realizing as I sit here that he isn’t coming back. No, he’s planning to leave me out all night. In the cold. In a neighborhood that I don’t know. He did say he was going to bury me, so I suppose I should’ve expected this.
I need to push back, swing harder, fight dirtier.
I’m already fantasizing about ways to ruin his life when, much to my surprise, I hear the gate start to slide open. I don’t have a phone or a watch, but I’m guessing it’s only been a couple of minutes. The asshole was just trying to make me sweat.
Shoving up to my feet, I notice a shadow standing on the other side of the fence.
It’s Parrish.
“I’ve been watching you the whole time,” he says, which should be creepy but comes across in a different way somehow. Observant, really, like he expected less out of me, and I surprised him.
I move toward the gate, and he waits until I’m on the other side before pressing the button to slide it closed. As I follow him up the curving driveway toward the front door, I hear something over my shoulder and turn to look.
It sounded like there were footsteps there in the dark, but now that I’m looking, the moon is full and the darkness has been driven back to the shadows of foliage and the looming rectangles of houses. There’s nothing there, and the sound is gone.
I’m sure I imagined it.
When I squat down in front of my bedroom door, Parrish does the same. He's picking his lock, same as I am.
“Do you need a spare bobby pin perchance?” I whisper back, trying not to notice the nearness of his body. I should rightfully want to kill him for locking me out, but then, he did come back so I suppose that helps. He pauses briefly, his voice softer and quieter than I’ve ever heard it. And not just because we’re both whispering to avoid detection. More than that. Something else.
“No, thank you. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this.”
That’s when I realize it.
The reason we're having such problems, me and my new stepbrother.
I bite my lower lip and try to shove that knowledge back in the dark box of my mind where it belongs, right into the same place I’m keeping my natural attraction to my sister’s boyfriend, and the pain I feel every day I wake up here and not back home with the Banks.
The thing about doing that, about stuffing emotions away where you can’t see them, is that they fester and rot and morph into something so much worse. Monsters, that’s what they become. Fucking monsters.
I pause and exhale, knowing that I’m starting to run out of space in that box.
“Parrish,” I start, reaching up to put the bobby pin in the lock. But my door is no longer locked or … it never was? It swings open slightly, revealing the dark bedroom beyond it.
Huh.
“Yeah?” he asks, his voice strangely receptive. He’s probably still drunk. But still, it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. I decide that I must not have closed the door all the way and push the worry aside.
“Do we have a thing, maybe?” I ask, because I can’t forget the way he looked at me at the party, like something he shouldn’t want but did anyway. Of course, I could’ve just imagined it. It’s also possible that he was simply looking at Lumen. “Is that one of the reasons we hate each other so much?”
He says nothing, but I can hear his clothes rustling as he stands up behind me. I stand up, too, and turn. Almost too quickly, my green and black hair flying out and smacking him across the face. Oddly enough, he doesn’t seem to mind. Instead, his brown eyes are locked on me with an unnerving amount of focus and attention.
My breath quickens, my heart pounds, strange things happen in my lower belly.
I shift uneasily on my feet.
He doesn’t have to answer me: I can feel it.
The same sort of natural attraction I felt toward Maxx, I feel it toward Parrish. I feel it, and he feels it, and we’re as impossible as me and Maxx. More so, really. Because I know that, more than anything, Parrish loves Tess. She’s as much his real mother as she isn’t mine. And yet, she considers us both her children.
Also, I hate him. There’s that, too. Natural chemistry doesn’t make up for the fact that Parrish is an insufferable tool who’s chosen to make my life hell for no other reason than that he feels like it.
“There is nothing between us,” he says, but the way he’s looking at me says he’s a skilled and consummate liar. His eyes rake my body, from my mussy hair to my mismatched shoes, and he sucks in a sharp intake of breath. “I told you, Gamer Girl: I don’t do incest.”
“That kiss might prove otherwise,” I retort, but he pretends not to hear me.
Parrish turns on his heel and disappears into his room. At first, it feels like he might very well slam his door and give us both away. But at the last minute, he slows it and then very carefully pushes it shut. I hear the lock click into place, standing alone in the hallway and panting like I’ve just run a marathon.
My hand comes up to my chest as I struggle to catch my breath.
Is my type just ‘emotionally unavailable and impossible’? No. That isn’t me. I’m not into guys who behave like jerks. I don’t … I’m not finding myself attracted to Parrish just because he’s hot, or because he’s a bastard. No, it’s in spite of those things. It’s the way he watches out for Tess, how he cares so much that it’s hurting him.
I recognize that because I do it, too, put other people first at the expense of myself.
As Maxx Wright is the opposite of me, an ideal of confidence and self-care that I ascribe to be, Parrish is just the same as I am.
The question is: do opposites really attract? Or can we fall for ourselves in somebody else?
With a huff, I turn on my heel and shove open my bedroom door, neglecting to turn on the light as I flop onto my bed in the corner. Outside the wall of windows, Lake Washington sparkles under the moonlight, white crested waves beating a steady and comfortable rhythm against the curvature of the shore.
Standing up, I pad over to the windows and find that none of them open. None of them. Not a one. Here we are with this beautiful view—this privileged view—of the water and yet I can’t crack a window?
Suddenly desperate for the steady heartbeat of mother earth, I turn and head into the bathroom, finding that at the very least the window above the bathtub opens. I push it as wide as I can, manipulating the screen until I can pull it into the bathroom and toss it aside. Crossing my arms on the windowsill, I lean out and close my eyes, letting moonlight and the distant taste of sea salt from the Puget Sound wash over my face.
Even with Parrish’s brush off, I feel better somehow, like I at least understand where he’s coming from.
I'm going to be okay, I tell myself, because in that moment, with the sound of the water, and the wild thumping of my heart, it truly feels like I will be.
That is, until I wake up the following morning.
I come to at the sound of knocking on my door, a small groan slipping from between my lips as I turn over and find my freshly charged phone. It’s not quite ten in the morning, but it’s also Sunday. Do the people in this house never sleep in? I’m tired from the party, but there’s also no way to admit to that without admitting to sneaking out.
With yet another grumble of disapproval, I stand up and pad over to my bedroom door, opening it to find Tess waiting with a handful of balloons. They say Happy Birthday on them. I blink a few times in surprise and then try to force a smile.
“Whose birthday is
it?” I ask, wondering if it’s Ben’s or perhaps the twins’. Hopefully it isn’t Kimber’s. Tess laughs, like I’ve just told the most wonderful joke. Apparently, I’m the butt of one. Or … I’m about to be.
“I don’t know how you usually celebrate,” she starts as I look past her shoulder and notice Parrish relaxing in the doorway to his bedroom, leaning shirtless against the doorjamb with his arms crossed over his chest. He’s watching me carefully, frowning as usual. It feels like things should be different between us this morning, considering we were partners in crime last night, but apparently I’m the only person who feels that way.
I’m also the only person in that house who doesn’t know that it’s my birthday.
“Oh, you just wait until you see what you’ve gotten as a birthday present.” Parrish said that to me the other day, but I didn’t … I thought he’d meant for next year or … something. Shit.
Dakota Banks’ birthday is October twenty-fourth, exactly one week before Halloween, sixteen years ago.
Mia Patterson’s birthday, apparently, is February twenty-seventh.
I wasn’t sixteen until … now. I’ve been fifteen for four months longer than I expected.
A chasm opens up beneath my feet, and I feel suddenly like I’m falling. Somehow, I manage to stay on my feet, but I don’t feel good. No, my head is spinning, and my belly swims with nausea.
Tess hands the balloons out, but I can’t seem to force my hand to move to take them. After several long, agonizing seconds, I do. Mechanically. My face feels frozen into this caricature of a human being.
“Come downstairs,” she says excitedly, and I realize that she’s been waiting for this moment for fourteen years. Fourteen years of missing Mia, of missing her birthdays, of finding February twenty-seventh roll around again and again as hope dwindled. I’ve often wondered what sort of thoughts went through Tess’ head during that decade and a half. It’s an important part of empathy, after all, trying to understand what others are going through.
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