Love Bites
RACHEL K. BURKE
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HarperImpulse an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2014
Copyright © Rachel K. Burke 2014
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Rachel K. Burke asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are
the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is
entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © December 2014
ISBN: 9780007556731
Version 2014-11-28
Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Praise for Rachel K. Burke
“I loved everything about this book. The writing was great and the characters are so likable that you will be rooting for them the whole way.”
Book Briefs
“When a book makes you smile as much as this one did, you know you’ve found a good thing.”
The Bookish Babe
“Seriously, the CUTEST story I’ve read in a long while!”
The Chiq Blog
“Have you ever just connected with a person and had to fight to be with them? Well if you have, this book is for you.”
Diary of a Book Addict
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Rachel K. Burke
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Also by Rachel K. Burke…
Rachel K. Burke
About HarperImpulse
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
What do you do when you fall in love with your best friend’s boyfriend?
There it was: the question I had been asking myself since that first day. The day I met him.
The day that changed everything.
It was the question I had analyzed endlessly, hoping to find some sort of answer. The only problem was, there was no answer. Because when you’re forced to choose between the two people you love most in the world, either way you lose.
Sure, I know what you’re thinking. Best friends don’t fall in love with each other’s boyfriends. They can’t. It’s an unspoken rule. Even if the guy is downright perfect, the fact that he’s with your best friend prohibits you from falling for him.
Right?
I can honestly say that anyone who believes this has never, ever felt the way that I felt about David Whitman.
My name is Justine Sterling. I grew up in Rockland, Massachusetts, a small town south of Boston that most people have never heard of. With a population of under 20,000, there wasn’t much to do in Rockland growing up, but when you’re young, you have no idea how much of the world you’re missing. I thought the rest of the world was just like Rockland. I imagined kids all over America living their lives exactly the way we did – riding bicycles, walking to the local convenience store, begging our parents to drive us two towns over to the nearest shopping mall.
For me, Rockland was the greatest place on Earth.
Still, there was always something missing, and I finally discovered what that was when I met Renee Evans. I never held an interest in sports or cheerleading, so in a limited-activity town like Rockland, my happiness stemmed from new CDs, new clothes, new posters. Only I never realized how much more fun those things were when you had someone to share them with. Someone who appreciated them just as much as you did.
I met Renee during my freshman year of high school. She had just transferred from a local Catholic school, and seeing as how Rockland High didn’t have many new students, she was immediately scrutinized and labeled “the new girl.” Everyone in Rockland had grown up with one another, and their families had grown up with one another. No one left Rockland. It was an intimidating place to start over.
When I first met Renee, she was a mess. Catholic school clearly didn’t exemplify fashion. Her hair was blonde and thick, and ended abruptly at her shoulders. It looked similar to the way a horse’s tail would look if you cut it to be six inches long. Like a bush that only grew sideways. And even worse, she had bangs too. I remember wondering what on earth had possessed her mother to give her that haircut, as her hair wouldn’t have been that bad if it was long and weighed down. We didn’t have hair-straighteners back then.
Looking back now, it makes sense to me. Mrs. Evans, Renee’s mother, was a very sweet woman, but fashion was not one of her strong suits. As teens, Renee and I labeled her mother’s sweater collection the “Bill Cosby Sweaters.” Each of them shared the same blend of neon colors, knit together like an afghan. So it was of no surprise that Renee showed up to Rockland High her first day looking like she’d just stepped out of the Salvation Army.
Even worse than her hair were her clothes. They weren’t bad per se, just much too big for her. It was like someone had dressed her up as a boy and forgot to tell her. Baggy clothes were the style in the nineties, with it being the grunge decade and all, but there were still ways to maintain your feminism.
What I liked about Renee was that she didn’t seem to care. She was naturally pretty, but she didn’t know it. She didn’t give a second thought to her appearance. She was so happy to get the hell out of Catholic school and surround herself with normal people that she just took it all in. She was like a kid at Disneyland. She didn’t say much. She didn’t try to impress anyone. She just observed.
After striking up a conversation with her, I learned that this little fashion-deprived creature was actually quite intelligent. She knew a lot about music. More than anyone I’d ever met. I think she was so isolated at her previous school that she befriended rock and roll and never left its side.
I asked Renee once about Catholic school. She said that the kids
were nice, just different. She told me that she wore an Aerosmith shirt to school on a casual day and all the kids teased her, chanting that Steven Tyler looked like an old lady. She said, “All I could think was that Steven Tyler was one of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen.” It didn’t bother her that the kids made fun of her. She just seemed genuinely confused as to how these people could view the world so much differently than she did. I think it was then that I fell in love with her.
Over time, Renee’s image slowly began to develop. We went shopping at the local favorites, Hot Topic and Newbury Comics. We bought blue mascara and purple lipstick, oversized moonstone rings and bicycle-chain necklaces. We replaced Renee’s skateboarder pants with tighter jeans, and her baggy band t-shirts with fitted ones. She grew out her bangs and put layers in her hair to offset the bush look.
And thus, Renee Evans was born.
Ironically, if you met Renee now, you’d never guess that she once dressed like a lumberjack. She has a very tall, modelesque presence, perfectly put together, like a stylist dressed her. Her thick hair is always immaculately curled, her makeup like a cosmetic ad, her scarves and boots matching the exact shades of her latest ensemble. But back then, Renee didn’t care what people thought of her. She didn’t try to fit in. Renee was who she was, without apology. And I loved her for that.
I fell in love with David Whitman the first time I saw him. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but trust me, no one thought the concept of love at first sight was more ridiculous than me. Up until David, I was a self-proclaimed serial dater. Renee was more of the relationship type, and she somehow managed to find great guys who also happened to be single. I never had such luck. I always found the ones who were single for a reason. Needy, jobless, womanizers, alcoholics, not-really-single-pretending-to-be-single, you name it. Deep down, I wanted to find true love, but it just never worked out that way.
Renee always teased me for my ever-changing love life, calling me a game player, telling me I loved the thrill of the chase. But the truth was, I hated dating. I hated the disappointments. That’s what dating was: one disappointment after the other. I guess I just hoped that eventually I’d find someone who would make all the bad dates worth it.
And I did. I just didn’t expect him to stroll through my living-room door with my best friend.
David Whitman. Renee had told me all about him. In fact, he had been the sole point of our conversations for weeks. When Renee had a new love interest, it was all she talked about. At the time, we were both seniors at UCLA, and Renee was interning at Pace, a local LA magazine. David was the sports editor, and every day Renee came home with a new story about him – what he was wearing that day, how he’d brought her a coffee, how all the girls in the office loved him. That was the funny thing about Renee. She called me a game player, yet she generally only liked a guy if a) he didn’t like her, or b) everyone else liked him. So essentially, she played games too, she just didn’t know it.
Before I met David, I wasn’t sold on the idea of him. Renee was a creative soul. A creative soul who was now dating a sports editor. She hadn’t mentioned a single thing they had in common, or that she found interesting about him. It seemed to me that she felt she had won the hunk of the office and wanted to parade around with the prize on her arm. Sure, he sounded nice and cute and all, but I knew Renee. Eventually, she’d want more than that.
When David walked through my living-room door that first night, everything in my body stood still. I understood now. None of his personal history or interests mattered. It was the effect he had on you. Those eyes. That smile. He could be a needy, jobless, alcoholic womanizer and it wouldn’t have mattered. You would have followed him to the end of the Earth anyway.
From the instant I met David, I felt an immediate connection that I had never experienced before. It was the way he looked at me. Maybe he looked at everyone that way, but he still made me feel like I was the only person in the room. Intense brown eyes and the faintest hint of a smile on his lips. Like he was looking through me. Like he knew that he could have me if he wanted me, even if it meant ruining a lifelong friendship. He had that power.
I hated him for that.
And at that moment, for the first time in my life, I hated my best friend.
Chapter 2
Los Angeles, CA
January 2009
During our senior year at UCLA, shortly after Renee landed an internship at Pace, I landed one of my own at Sphinx, a local video-game company. I have no idea why they hired me, because I didn’t love video games. I didn’t even like video games. I was just desperate for a paying internship. But as it turned out, Sphinx was exactly what I was looking for.
After several major switches, I’d decided on communications because it allowed me to take photography courses, which had always been my true passion. I loved photography because it was the only art that allowed you to capture truth in the visual sense. Renee loved music because it captured truth in the audio sense, but for me, I loved the visual. The lens didn’t lie. It highlighted the little beauties of everyday life that were often overlooked, and there was something so raw and honest about that. But I also knew that photography was a difficult business to earn a living at, therefore I picked a major that included creative courses that still had a business aspect to them, such as marketing and media studies.
I had just completed an interactive marketing course on social media outreach, as well as a media literacy course in which we were assigned to read about the psychology behind role-playing video games. So when I came across Sphinx’s ad stating they were looking for interns with experience in online marketing and knowledge of video games, it sounded pretty perfect. I may not have been much of a gamer, but my last two classes had provided me with all the knowledge I needed for the position. Not to mention, it paid a lot. More than most internships.
Before I was called in for an interview with Sphinx, I was contacted by a local health insurance company, HCG, who was looking for an intern to manage their website and social media pages. I like to call these kinds of experiences “blessings in disguise.” Because if I hadn’t had the opportunity for comparison, I never would’ve realized how utterly perfect Sphinx was for me.
The HCG office was located next to the LAX airport. I was greeted by a man named Jason Porter, who introduced himself as the Human Resources Director. He cleverly referred to himself as the resident “herd,” then had to draw me a verbal map to his joke, spelling out the acronym for Human Resources Director: HRD. He chuckled at his own irony. I did not find him funny.
Jason brought me to his spacious office, then sat down at his desk and motioned for me to take a seat across from him. He began the interview with some small-talk, asking me why I moved to LA, why I chose my major, what courses I had taken thus far. As I answered his questions, I noticed that he was actually quite good-looking. Olive skin, green eyes, nice smile. I suspected he was older than he looked, as he had the slightest hint of gray in his brown sideburns. Early forties, maybe.
These good looks slowly disappeared less than ten minutes into the interview. After the small-talk concluded, Herd wasted no time getting down to business. He made it very clear that, when I was not in class, every spare moment would be spent working for him. On the days I did not have class, I would be expected to work a full eight-hour day, beginning at 8am, and wear a suit. I almost choked on my own disgust. I was not a morning person, nor was I a suit. And five days a week? I had envisioned working a few afternoon hours after class, three days a week at most. Herd had other plans for me.
It only got worse from there. Herd went on to tell me that he expected the internship to become a full-time position once school was complete. He emphasized that he worked between fifty to sixty hours a week and expected this person to follow suit. No pun intended. He droned on about his role in the company and how much impact he’d had since he came on board. It wasn’t even an interview. It was Herd talking for the sake of hearing himself talk. I couldn’t get out of th
ere fast enough.
When the interview was finally over, Herd handed me his business card and frowned when I placed it in my purse.
“You know, you should really buy a briefcase,” he scoffed in a patronizing tone. “Placing business cards in a purse is just so… unprofessional.” He laughed mockingly and shook his head, having his own little private business joke with himself. “And also, Justine, you should always wear a suit to an interview.” He looked me up and down like I was a toddler who’d dressed herself for the first time. I followed his gaze, glancing down at my black-collared shirt and charcoal dress pants. Judging by his expression, you would’ve thought I’d shown up dressed for a hip-hop video.
As I headed toward the elevator, I passed by the work area, where all the insurance agents sat next to each other in tiny cubicles, wearing blazers and headsets. Their desks were lined with tiny bags of junk food. Most of them were overweight. They looked tired. I felt sad for them.
Herd shook my hand goodbye at the elevator, but I no longer saw him as good-looking. I saw him as a man with a condescending, insincere laugh, who had bags under his eyes from working sixty hours a week. A man with no social life and no family, only a mahogany desk and an oversized briefcase. A man who owned an expensive house with expensive things that never got used.
It’s funny how, in the course of thirty minutes, you can learn very, very quickly what you want in life. And, more importantly, what you don’t want.
As a precaution, I went out and bought a suit. I refused to be humiliated twice. Luckily, I didn’t need it, as Sphinx was as far from a suit shop as you could get.
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