Getting Over the Bully-Sh*t: Chosen Book 22

by J. D. Light

  Copyright © 2019 J.D. Light

  Edited by Ann Attwood Editing and Proofreading Services

  Prologue

  There are two things I'll never forget in life. The moment I looked into Asher Douglas's eyes for the first time. And the moment I looked into them for what I hoped was the last.

  The first was the first day of my sophomore year at Riverview High School, a tiny town in Northern California, and I'd just walked in the doors my first day. My brother Kendrick had been so excited for me to go there, telling me how amazing it was and that I was going to have the best times.

  I hadn't burst his bubble, though it was a real temptation, but I was pretty sure we were on two totally different social scales, and I didn't have the athletic ability nor the inclination to gain one that might resemble Kendrick's. I was pretty sure our high school experience was going to be night and day from one another's.

  Kendrick had headed down south for college, leaving me to deal with a slightly overbearing mother who I'd actually had to run and hide from when she parked the car in the parking lot to the side of the school, so she didn't try to walk me to each of my classes to make sure I knew where to find them.

  It was when I was rushing around the corner of the building, hell bent on not spending the next fifteen minutes of my life cementing the fact that I should most definitely be a target for bullies, that I smacked into a wall that grunted.

  I staggered backward, my hand immediately flying to my nose as it started to bleed. "Sorry," I said quickly, frantically looking for a bathroom to try to stem the flow of my lifeforce and hope that it didn’t make a complete mess out of my clothes.

  "Oh shit!" Someone said, and a hand wrapped around my forearm and I was suddenly being dragged along.

  I glanced up to see the wall was pulling me into a bathroom. Before I could even register that the room was way too white for a boys' bathroom, I had a wad of toilet paper being shoved into my hand, and I frantically took it, pressing it to my nose.

  "Are you okay," a deepish voice asked, and I looked up into the prettiest dark brown eyes I'd ever seen in my life.

  I nodded, my own eyes wide and blinking, and he smiled before turning and grabbing the trashcan, setting it directly in front of me and then going into a stall to get more toilet paper.

  "Your nose is probably going to be pretty sore," he said, motioning with his head for me to drop the soiled paper in the trash before he handed me another handful.

  I nodded again, making him chuckle.

  "I'm Ash," he said, after a moment of silence where I just stood there like an idiot, staring at him. "Well, Asher, but most of my friends don't call me that."

  "I'm Warren," I said, my voice muffled. "I'm sorry about running into you."

  He huffed, smirking. "You did me a favor. You probably didn't see her due to the bleeding thing, but there is this girl who seriously won't leave me alone. She called me all summer."

  His smile was breathtaking, and my little sophomore heart nearly exploded out of my chest.

  I managed to get myself cleaned up with minimal damage to my clothing. My mom must have given up and left, because when Asher and I emerged from the bathroom and I did a quick peek outside, her car wasn't in the lot any longer.

  "Escaping someone?" Asher asked, noticing.

  I sighed in relief and turned, smiling for the first time that morning. "My mom can be a little intense sometimes."

  He blinked at me, watching my face for several long moments before shaking his head and smiling. "Yeah, but aren't all moms?"

  I shrugged, completely spellbound by him. "I have no idea."

  The bell rang, bringing our interesting morning to an end, and though Asher and I weren't in the same social class at all, he always made it a point to say hi to me when he saw me in the halls, giving me a genuine smile that made me feel eighty feet tall. We had one class together where he sat next to me and occasionally asked me questions. It was always the highlight of my day, and it was woodshop, so that was saying a lot.

  I didn't think he was into me the way I was him, but that didn’t stop my teenage brain from dreaming up all kinds of scenarios where he snagged me by my forearm one day in the hall, dragged me off to our bathroom and kissed me until neither of us could breathe.

  His friends were dicks, but I let myself believe that the sweet boy who'd saved me that first day was different. That he would never join in on the constant barrage of insults, or the occasional shove when one thought I was in the way.

  That might be how the second unforgettable moment in my life managed to be such a successful endeavor.

  I hadn't told anyone I was gay yet. In a small school with people I barely knew, I hadn't found the comfort with my situation one usually needed for something like that.

  So, when I found a note sitting in the bottom of my locker that had been clearly written by a male and said, our little secret on the outside, I was leery, and intrigued.

  It wasn't the first thing to be left in my locker. Somebody liked to leave little gorillas of different materials in my locker. I had a wax one someone had probably made at the zoo. I had a couple of stuffed ones, one I'd gotten around my birthday and the other around Halloween which was dressed like a vampire, then I'd also gotten a plastic one that was a windup toy. When you wound it up, the gorilla swung around a pole.

  But there had never been a note, and there definitely hadn't been any indication that the person might be interested in me romantically.

  Hey, War. I 've been thinking a lot. Actually, I can’t stop thinking. I think about you all the time. I haven't been ready to come out yet, because I’m nervous, and I haven't really had a good reason. Until you got here. Now I finally feel like I'm brave enough to be myself. Would you like to go on a date with me? Meet me in the parking lot after school with your answer. I'll be waiting.

  There were mistakes to go around. I'd honestly fallen right into their little trap. I'm sure all it took for anyone to see how much of a crush I'd had on Asher at the time was for them to look at me when he was in the room. I probably had heart eyes and drool dripping from my lip. And why I'd thought I––at that gangly awkward point in my life––would be the cause of someone as handsome and fun to be around as Asher to think about coming out, I just didn't know. It was ridiculous.

  It truly didn’t matter, though, because I was an idiot who was being led around by my hopes that the note could have been telling me he wanted to get abducted together and let aliens do experiments on me, and my over-eager little ass would have been like, I love probes.

  I'd walked right out there in that parking lot with my shoulders back and my head high, and I walked right up to the gorgeous boy who might have been the only one I'd ever met ever that didn’t go through a really ugly period in his life, and I said, "Yes."

  It was super dramatic, and I'd just known I was about to get swept up in a movie worthy kiss that would have the whole school cheering.

  What I wasn't expecting, was for Asher to look down at me with a confused half smile on his face like he was trying to figure out what language I spoke, just before he reached out and shoved me.

  I fell to the ground hard, my hands and tailbone connecting with the pavement first, and then my body just kinda crumpled against it. That was how the first bucket of dog shit missed me, but the next two hit their mark and I was suddenly covered to the point of not being able to see and definitely not wanted to open my mouth.

  Unfortunately, dog shit was one of those lovely adventures that triggered that gag reflex every single time. I threw up until there was nothing left of me. I might have thrown up a chunk of stomach that day.

  Somebody was
yelling and they sounded furious, but I couldn't really hear beyond the rushing in my ears. Eventually the yelling ended, and I got the impression there weren’t very many people around anymore, but there was a soothing hand on my back, rubbing circles.

  I wanted to tell the person they shouldn't touch me, but I was still dry heaving hard enough I thought my eyeballs were going to shoot out of their sockets.

  I still couldn't see when I finally stopped, but someone was helping me to my feet, and I hoped they weren't getting dog shit all over them.

  "Here, I'll take him and make sure he gets cleaned up," a sweet, familiar voice said, and I welcomed Ellory's kindness. "You need to calm down and get cleaned up before work anyway."

  "Yeah," a deep voice answered, a strange almost growling quality to the tone, almost animalistic.

  "Don't worry, bro. I'll take care of him," Ellory said, and I allowed myself to be led away.

  She led me off to the boys’ locker room, where, thankfully, no one was, and I showered. She had a towel and clothes waiting when I got out, and when I left the locker room, she was there with a big hug.

  Before I even made it home that day after school, the video was up. I never got up the nerve to watch it, but I'd overheard plenty of people talking about it.

  It started out on a close-up of the note, then cut to me running up to Asher to tell him yes, and finally to Asher shoving me to the ground while his friends dumped shit on me.

  It had all been horrible, but the video made it worse. It spelled out my naivety and spread it around to all the people who hadn't been there to witness the fun first hand. I'd made it through the last week of school before winter break, but that had been all I could stand, and I'd begged my mom to transfer me.

  My next school wasn't completely free of bullies, but at least there hadn't been an Asher Douglas there to draw me in with his faux niceness and his ridiculous handsomeness. And my ability to know who to trust and who not to had gotten much better.

  Well…

  Chapter One

  I leaned closer to the window, trying to figure out what the gorgeous blond man was trying to cut out. I'd seen him use a string and a nail to measure out a circle, but I was pretty positive he was cutting an egg out of the plywood. A super wobbly egg. Like the kind a kindergartener draws on Easter.

  "No," I told my brother distractedly, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing when the not-so-handy man tried to step back to examine his wobbly leg and tripped on a bundle of rope, wadding the white nylon twine around both feet and falling backward on his ass.

  "Just have dinner with us. Please?" Kendrick said, falling to his knees on the floor at my feet and clasping both hands in front of himself. "He really is a nice guy."

  I blinked down at him. "No," I said dryly, looking back out the window over my kitchen sink where Asher was out in the side yard, putting on the most accidentally entertaining program I'd seen in a long time.

  "You are the most stubborn person I've ever met," Kendrick grumbled, picking himself up off the floor.

  I shrugged. He probably wasn't wrong about that.

  "Turner, help me." Kendrick flopped into the chair next to his mate with the temperament of a six-year-old denied ice-cream.

  "No," Turner said simply, reaching out to pat Ken's head.

  "What?" He whirled around sideways to look at Turner, nearly tipping his chair in the process. "You like Asher too."

  Turner caught my giant, idiot brother's chair before it could tip, and nodded. "I do like Asher, but I also didn't go through what Warren did."

  Sighing, I turned back to the spectacle going on in the side yard as the man pulled out a four inch nail and a hammer, and I frowned as I realized he was about to try to secure that rope to the board with it.

  "What the hell is he doing?" I asked, shaking my head when he finished with one and pulled out another.

  Kendrick huffed, clearly not interested in answering me, but Turner got up, moving over beside me to look out the window.

  "He's building a tree swing." But he didn't sound sure. And he shouldn't. Nothing about that monstrosity spoke of a tree swing.

  "Why?" I asked, turning my head toward my brother's mate and one of my favorite people in the world, but my eyes didn’t follow, focused on the man who seemed to have finally finished nailing his rope to the board and happily held the ugly thing up so he could examine it.

  "He didn't say. " Turner frowned, looking a little horrified. "I don't know that he should be using a saw. Not even a jig saw."

  "He was shit at woodshop," I mumbled dryly. "I was in that class with him. He actually managed to staple himself to the ottoman everyone had to make. Well, he stapled his shirt to it when he was putting on the batting and the material. He also somehow ended up with one leg longer than the others." I glanced over at Turner, blinking. "They were pre-fab legs. Like, seriously, the teacher had all the same legs delivered from Lowe's."

  Turner cringed and I nodded just as Kendrick stood to come watch the farce unfold.

  "Someone should help him," my brother said, when Asher looked up to the sky like he was asking for guidance, and then proceeded to put another nail in the thing like that was what it was missing.

  Turner and I both looked over at Kendrick, our expressions telling him to go for it, but he shook his head looking back out the window. "Nah. It looks like he has it."

  "He just used four-inch nails to secure the ropes to a three-quarter-inch thick piece of wood. From the bottom," I informed him, illustrating with my fingers and hand what that meant and he cringed.

  He looked back out the window as Asher once again held the thing up, that time by the rope so we could test it, but it leaned sideways. "Well, from the looks of everything else, I doubt anyone is going to sit on it anyway."

  "Maybe you should go help him," Turner said, reaching over to pat his mate on the back.

  Kendrick jerked his head back, looking at Turner like he'd lost his mind. "Help him how?"

  "You know." Turner said, making a motion like he was hammering something. At least I thought that was what he was doing. He could have also been telling my brother to jack off awkwardly while making a monkey face. "Build something."

  "Oh sure. That sounds just like me," Kendrick said sarcastically, and I chuckled. "A handyman if there ever was one."

  Sighing, I left the two of them standing at the window, arguing over whether or not Turner should go help since he healed the fastest, but was just as handyman inclined as Kendrick and Asher.

  I didn't really know why I was doing it. I had pretty much decided I was never going to talk to the man again when I’d handed him my statement about everything that happened after my tennis instructor had drugged me and practically shipped me off, but something was pulling me toward him, and had been since I'd seen him again for the first time in years.

  Though watching him struggle with the thing that honestly resembled some kind of torture device rather than a tree swing was a bit humorous, I'd hate for someone to actually try to use the thing.

  "What the hell are you doing?" I demanded, when I rounded the side of the pool house I was renting from Turner that was practically in his back yard.

  He jumped, spinning quickly in my direction. "Hey… Ow! Fuck!" He looked down where he'd stepped back on his swing seat, his foot having landed on one of those long-ass nails and was sticking out of the top of his tennis shoe, near the toe. "That's not a very good seat."

  "Nope," I said, staring in shock where he was slowly trying to pull his foot free from the board, his face screwed up in a cringe.

  When he finally managed to get un-nailed, he plopped down on the grass, pulling off his shoe to examine the damage. "I'm glad it went between the bones."

  Shaking my head, I walked over and grabbed the hammer he'd left on the picnic table turned makeshift workbench, then back over to the swing, hammering the nails out backwards before pulling them out with the claw.

  "It's a good thing you're a shifter," I s
aid, looking over long enough to see that the skin on his foot was already completely healed.

  "What are you doing?" He asked, when I’d pulled the third nail. "I made that for you!"

  I paused, looking down at the funky looking danger-egg and then back at him. "You made me a tetanus magnet?" I blinked a moment before going back to pulling nails. "Thanks. I didn't realize you cared so much about me."

  He sighed, wrapping his arms around his knees. "It was a really good idea… until I remembered how badly I failed shop class."

  I struggled not to smile, keeping my face as passive as possible. "Yes. I remember. So, why are you trying to make me a swing?"

  He perked up, smiling, and I cursed the part of me that found him absolutely adorable. "You told me once that you used to have a tree swing in your yard that you would spend hours swinging on, but lightning hit the tree and it fell down."

  Slowly, I turned my head in his direction, narrowing my eyes. "It split in half," I said hesitantly, tilting my head as I tried to read his overly handsome face. "I didn't tell you that story."

  I hadn't really talked to him much at all during my time at that school aside from that first day. Not that way at least. We always exchanged pleasantries and he would always pick the station right next to mine in woodshop, so we sometimes worked on projects together, but we didn't discuss childhood memories or anything of that nature.

  His beautiful dark brown eyes widened slightly, before he gave me an overly bright smile and shrugged. "Maybe I was around when you were telling it."

  Damn it, he was still gorgeous. Like, way too damn gorgeous. The man should be a fucking model. It sure would have been nice if Karma had gotten him even a little. Like, couldn't a mad boyfriend whose girlfriend he'd flirted with have punched him in the face and broken his perfect nose?

  I'm pretty sure I would have known at that age if you were close by. Then, like now apparently, I'd been highly aware of every move Asher made when we were in the same room. There was no way the guy could have been standing close by when I was telling a story like that, because I would have clammed up.