“Fuck! You're so annoying!”
Abi shrieks laughing when Chaz walks out of the pool and shakes his dripping hair on her, lifting her off her lounger and holding her tight to his dripping wet body.
Chaz chuckles.
“That’ll teach you to wear a white cover up over your bikini. I’ve got a fucking awesome show!”
Abi's about to retort something but Teague arrives from the house and his blue eyes caress my body in a hot but lazy perusal.
“Yeah I don't blame you, Chaz. That's how Aubrey and I met. Tell him princess. On the first day of school she was my very personal Miss Wet T-shirt.”
“Dude! I can't believe I missed that!”
Tyler is walking towards us from the patio doors with Margaux on his arm.
After our confrontation at their house just before the State Championship final, we had time to talk and she apologised to me so many times about what she did to me and the guys at the beginning of the year that I gave her a second chance.
I admit that the fact that she's Knox’s sister was a huge factor in getting over Margaux's actions but I don't regret giving her a chance.
Once you get to know the real her, you realise that the mean girl attitude is mostly a façade to protect herself from getting hurt.
And I do call her out on shit, if I think she's in danger of falling back into her old ways.
After all, changing her attitude helped her bag Tyler for real.
They've been dating since Winter formal and were crowned Prom Queen and King, after Tyler guided BHPA’s lacrosse team to win their own State Championship title.
So Margaux has the popular boyfriend she's always wanted and the pair hangs out with us all the time.
“So, have you decided if you're gonna be my roommate or you’re gonna live with your guys at Harvard?”
I see the disappointment in her face when I tell her that Devon's father bought a huge house twenty minutes away from campus and that Devon asked us all to move in.
“Aww! My dad said that I can get my own place but it won't be fun on my own!”
Tyler hugs her from behind and whispers something in her ear making her turn around in his arms squealing and covering his face with kisses.
“Omg, yes! Of course I’ll move in with you!”
Tyler looks satisfied and he explains:
“I was gonna wait to surprise you next week for our six month anniversary but I don't want you to be sad, babe. My parents got me a penthouse with three bedrooms and ... Oh, fuck it! I'm in love with you, Margaux. So I don't want that sexy ass too far away from me unless strictly necessary.”
He kisses her passionately and lets her go only when Knox clears his throat.
“Dude! Can you wait to suck face with my sister when you aren't making me puke before breakfast?”
We never hear Tyler's reply because Alex intervenes.
“Yeah, well if Karma isn't a bitch, I don't know what is! I have to watch both my little sisters always sucking face with one of you punks. So now you know how it feels, Marks!”
Chaz chuckles and my big brother catches him in a friendly headlock.
“I wouldn't laugh if I were you, Atwood! If I remember, you have a little sister too, right?”
Chaz protests that his sister’s only thirteen and Alex promises him that teenagers these days grow up faster and faster.
“Talking about sisters, has anyone heard from your oldest sister?”
Sam exits the house followed by Ayla, Tuna, Devon, and Landon.
Knox satisfies his curiosity.
“Not directly. The school agreed not to press charges for the most serious offences after my parents donated funds for a new Olympic pool. But both my dad and the principal were adamant that she shouldn't get away with her actions scot free. So she was actually sued for stealing that school ID and breaking and entering and damage to school property. Because while it could open doors inside the building after school hours, a student ID wouldn't open the main gate and give her access to the building. And she might have hacked the security cameras by Aubrey’s locker but she wasn't smart enough to do the same with the ones outside. So she was convicted and she has to do a hundred hours of community service. She avoided jail time because it was a first offence and again, my dad has a lot of influence in LA. So as we speak, Michelle’s spending her Memorial Day weekend cleaning trash off the side of the highway.”
“Hey guys since there's a lot of us, I’ll grill tonight but what about going to the Country Club for breakfast? My treat.”
Chaz’s proposal meets everyone’s approval and we all go get dressed appropriately for the swanky outdoors restaurant of the club.
Before I know it, we’re all sitting at a huge table at the edge of a terrace overlooking the beach.
The day is spent swimming, laughing and hanging out with the people I love the most in the whole world and we're given some excellent news when we hear that Alex, Sam, and Tuna proposed to Ayla and she said yes.
We all start asking questions about how they’ll solve the problem of there being three of them and only one Ayla.
Sam explains that the private island that his stepfather owns belongs to a small islands nation federation.
“Their local religion allows polygamy, so there it's legal. We’re gonna tie the knot on Labor Day weekend and you guys are all invited. The marriage won't be legal at home but we've decided that Ayla should legally marry Alex at home.”
I’m about to ask how they decided when my brother smirks evilly:
“I guess that's one thing I have to thank Dad for. He's being civil to Ayla but I know he doesn't approve because she doesn't come from money. So why not piss him off? My brothers agreed that’s a worthy cause, because after all, that’s just a piece of paper and the island ceremony is the one that matters for us.”
We stay out laughing and drinking and dancing under a bright half moon in the warm spring night.
When people start to retire to their own bedrooms, Devon approaches me and asks me if I’d take a walk on the beach with him.
He takes my hand in his and we walk quietly, enjoying the fragrant sea breeze and the sand under our bare feet.
Devon stops by a cluster of rocks, takes me in his arms and kisses me.
His lips are warm, soft, and teasing.
His kiss is playful, not as demanding as usual.
When I pry his lips open by licking at their seam, he opens his mouth to my kiss and presses his hard body against mine, making me shiver with desire.
And this is when I recognise the spot: this is where at the end of last summer, we had sex for the first time.
My first time.
He remembers too, because he breaks the kiss and whispers against my lips.
“This is where it all began. And that night I screwed up in so many ways. For example, I should have told you that I loved you. I felt too scared that it was too soon, because we’d only known each other for a couple of weeks. But you know what?”
“What?”
I whisper back.
“I do love you, Aubrey. With all my heart. It was true then and it's true now.”
I’m about to tell him that I love him too when I'm interrupted by Knox's deep voice.
“I love you too, Aubrey. And Devon might be a dumbass most of the time, but it was the same thing for me: I started falling for you the minute you sat by my side in that classroom.”
Devon lets Knox take me into his arms and I give myself completely to his hot kiss, when I feel Teague's warm lips on the sensitive spot behind my ear.
“I started falling for you in that parking lot, when Devon’s dumbass drenched us both with water after almost running you over.”
I turn around to kiss his lips and I spot Landon, standing behind Teague.
After Teague gives me a dizzying kiss, I walk to the sweetest of my boys and wrap my arms around his neck.
“Aubrey, I love you. You were my first and you're my one and only.”
He takes my lips in a scorching hot kiss and I lose myself in the sensation of his mouth fused with mine.
The others surround us and I feel feverish hands take off my dress and trying to lower my panties.
When I see Knox and Teague beginning to shed their clothes, I realise that the guys want to have sex on the beach.
Memories of sand getting in the most remote places make me draw back from their touch.
“Fuck no! If you want me, it'll have to be away from this evil, glassy sand.”
Knox picks me up as if I weighed nothing and starts running towards the sea, followed by the others who run behind him in all their naked glory.
When the water reaches his thighs, Knox lowers me into the ice cold Atlantic Ocean and there's only one thing I could possibly blurt out:
“Fuck me!”
THE END
BONUS CHAPTERS
Bully Her
1.
Rebuild
Michelle
Somewhere Along the I-10
I SPEAR A USED CONDOM and shake it off into my trash bag: eww, fucking eww!
I wipe sweat off my forehead and squint to see if the supervisor’s looking my way.
Or should I say warden? That woman hates me because I’m young and pretty and she’s fat and has frizzy hair and she’s probably poor since she works for LA County supervising community service workers.
I can’t fucking believe that some people actually volunteer for this shit: we have been cleaning trash off the side of the highways around LA.
This was my punishment for providing my little sister Margaux with slimming pills and diuretics to roofie the school quarterback, who didn’t give her the time of day.
Originally I was just planning to help her get back at a guy who ignored her, I mean she’s my little sister and I couldn’t let her be disrespected that way.
I’ve always been selfless and totally misunderstood, believe me!
Teachers, boys, and even my parents don’t get that I’ll do anything for my loved ones and that includes payback when needed.
But then, when I caught wind of the fact that my sister’s rival, the girl who’d stolen her man was Alex Richmond’s little sis, I decided to get some retribution of my own and convinced Margaux to take her original plan one step further and pin the whole thing on Aubrey.
But my sister’s weak and chickened out at the last minute, when the guys she drugged believed in Aubrey’s innocence.
What Margaux doesn’t get is that to succeed in life, you have to be prepared to go the extra mile and see things through until your enemy is completely destroyed.
So I took matters into my own hands and if she hadn’t been a total wuss, we would’ve destroyed Aubrey’s life the same way her brother destroyed mine by getting me expelled from BHPA.
This is why I planted those pills in Aubrey’s locker and stole Margaux’s ID to break into school.
But we all know how things turned out thanks to Margaux being a stupid Twunt and that useless goody two shoes of my little brother Knox falling in love with Aubrey and convincing Margaux to ‘do the right thing’ and snitch on me.
Obviously Alex Richmond got involved and my plan was discovered and they managed to get my confession on tape.
I only have the fact that Aubrey didn’t wanna hurt Knox by pressing charges and that my dad donates literally millions to BHPA every year, to thank for getting away with community service and no jail time.
Dad donated a new winter sports centre to the school and the principal agreed not to press charges as long as I was punished some way.
So here I am on Memorial Day Saturday, cleaning trash off the I-10 instead of partying like I deserve.
The only good thing about this whole situation is that it helped me get back into my Dad’s good graces.
When I got expelled from BHPA three years ago, Dad was appalled by my stealing the Latin tests from Ms Webber’s locker and using them to improve my grades and to blackmail Tuna into bullying Ayla.
So he cut me off.
He changed the terms of access to my trust fund, making it accessible when I’m thirty, rather than twenty-one and he kicked me out of the house, closed my bank accounts and he even took back my cellphone.
He enrolled me into a public school to graduate high school one year later and I’ve had to take a gap year working to save money for college.
I don’t qualify for financial aid because my dad’s a fucking billionaire, so I had to do it on my own saving every cent I made working.
All I could afford was a little unknown college in Arizona, a far cry from my family legacy of Yale.
I hated every minute of it, I missed Beverly Hills and its luxuries and all I could think about was getting revenge on Alex.
So when Alex and Ayla caught me after messing with Aubrey, I had a complete meltdown.
And how can you blame me?
Everything, everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life is because of him.
This whole situation began because I had a huge crush on Alex Richmond, since the first day of freshman year but he never noticed me.
He tolerated me because I was popular and he allowed a distant friendship when I started dating his best friend Sam to make him jealous.
Everything I’ve ever done, everything good or bad, has always been for him, to make him notice me, to make him fall in love with me.
But everything went wrong and instead Alex despised me, so when they got me on tape, I couldn’t stop yelling at him about how much I hated him and I ended up in a mental institution for a couple of days.
My Dad got really worried about my mental health and decided to welcome me back into the family, help me get into UCLA for my sophomore year, where he could keep an eye on me.
The only conditions were that I completed this community service and I agreed to see a therapist twice a week.
And my therapist is a woman, a fucking bitch if you ask me: I know she reports to my Dad, doctor-patient confidentiality my ass!
Obviously Dad chose a female therapist because he knew that I would’ve tried to get favourable reports from a male doctor using my body as a bargaining chip.
Yeah, because that’s the only thing in my life that’s actually amazing right now: I’ve been so stressed out with the post-apocalyptic wasteland that my social and academic life has become thanks to Alex Richmond that I can barely eat and I went from a size 0 to 00 because the only thing that seems to make me feel better is working out.
Ironically, that’s the suggestion my shrink gave me to ‘work out my aggression and obsession. Yeah, because haven’t I told you? Her diagnosis is that I’m obsessed with Alex Richmond.
She used the words ‘manic’ and ‘paranoid’, whatever!
She’s trying to convince me that Alex doesn’t care about me, that he doesn’t hate me and that everything that happened was just a consequence of my own actions.
That Alex doesn’t hate me like I hate him. That I should forget about him and accept that I’m not even a blip on the horizon of his thoughts.
“Hey, would you like a bottle of water? We’re done here and they’re taking us to the next location, so we have a ten minute break.”
A big hand is extended towards me, offering a cold bottle of water and making me snap out of my reveries and lift my gaze towards the guy whose features are shadowed by the sun behind him.
He looks surrounded by a golden halo and when he steps closer to me, I meet his dark blue gaze and I can’t believe my own eyes:
“Alex Richmond!”
Bryce
“ALEX RICHMOND!”
The pretty blonde girl I finally summoned up the courage to go talk to looks at me with widened light blue eyes and more than taking a step back, she stumbles backwards as if she’d seen a ghost.
She looks at the bottle of water I’m trying to hand her as if it could bite her.
Maybe she has sunstroke? It must be well over ninety degrees today with eighty-five percent humidity, s
o maybe I should have her sit in the shade for a little while and hydrate.
“My name isn’t Alex, I’m Bryce. And you are?”
She still looks confused when she tells me her name.
“Michelle.”
I take one step towards her and put my hand on her elbow to guide her towards a copse of trees where she can cool down.
She follows quietly but when I try to make her go deeper into the shaded area, she looks at me as if realisation had dawned on her at last.
“Oh, I think I know why we’re here. If you heard that I give blowjobs, it’s not a thing. I only offered Bob to blow him in exchange for doing my work for me, so I could spend the time here on my Instagram. But that fucking Miss Crabble takes her supervisor position really seriously and she told me she’d report to the court that I wasn’t doing my hours. So no blowjobs I’m afraid.”
I don’t even know how to respond to this, I mean, I’ve been looking for the right time to talk to Michelle to ask her out ... so obviously I find her very attractive and I might have thought about her a few times during ‘private time’ and imagined her lips wrapped around my cock, but I’m not a fucking caveman and I set her straight.
“Duly noted. FYI, I normally buy girls dinner before I offer them dessert, so I’d never ask you to blow me right off the bat.”
She reacts with an eye roll and a scoff.
“Right! You’re a knight in shining armour, got it. So what got you spending your Memorial Day here, Jon Snow?”
“I volunteered.”
The lie comes out of my mouth before I even realise what I’m saying and I purposely ignore her insult.
“What about you?”
She shrugs and fixes her gorgeous eyes on me.
“A misunderstanding.”
“Yeah?”
She doesn’t offer any further explanation and I decide not to press her, after all, I got ordered to do community service after a prank gone wrong, so to speak.
Michelle takes a sip of the bottle I offered her and keeps her gaze on me before looking at her smart watch and I know that our break is almost over, so I ask what I approached her for.
Beverly Hills Prep Academy The Complete Boxset : A Light Bully Romance Page 93