Pretty Reckless

by Shen, L. J.

  The hot water soothes the past twenty-four hours as it hits my body from four different showerheads. I tilt my head back, close my eyes, and moan. I can handle Penn. I’m the goddamn queen of All Saints High, and he’s just another random from Las Juntas. Whatever happened between us is water under the bridge.

  The kind I can’t let drown me.

  I step out of the shower to stand on the bathroom rug. I left my pink towel on the floor by the counter next to the door yesterday. I tramp toward it, dripping water, as the door swings open.

  “Bailey!” I gasp, but instead of meeting my baby sister’s big blue eyes and tiny frame, Penn is standing in front of me, up close. His body fills the doorframe effortlessly, and he looks like a venomous kiss. Dark and sinful and irresistible. His jeans ride low on his hips, and a wallet chain hangs from his right pocket. His sleeveless black tank top has a hole where his heart is because, of course, he’s an edgy asshole like Vaughn, and his arms are big, tan, and full of veins and muscle. His cuts are purple against his moss-hued eyes. And those greens are descending my body like a whip, potentially deadly, but for now, tender. I resist the urge to flinch, knowing the painful stroke is about to hit me. He drinks it all in.

  My breasts.

  My stomach.

  My thighs.

  And that private place between them that clenches hard against nothing right now.

  A slow smirk tugs at his cracked, heart-shaped lips. I cover my necklace—of all things—more embarrassed about it than anything else.

  “Oh, my freaking Marx. Penn. Get the hell out!”

  It’s the first time I call him by his name. Officially, I’m not supposed to know it. His face is still vacant. He is gripping the door handle, his knuckles ghostly white against his tan skin.

  He picks up the pink towel, throwing it at me, and I catch it with shaky fingers, wrapping it firmly around my body and tucking the sea glass into it.

  “Like what you see?” I flip my wet hair. My pride is beyond wounded. He just saw me completely naked and didn’t even acknowledge me. All my guilt and good intentions wash away and are replaced with a weird desperation to show him that he’s a peasant and I’m a queen.

  “Hate,” he corrects, rubbing his thumb over his lower lip. “I hate what I see, and plan on seeing very little of it. You’re Daria, I assume.”

  He is still not making a move to get out. This guy is unreal. I’m so mad, I could punch him in the face. Maybe I should. He won’t hit me back. And it would hurt him like hell since he’s already beaten to a pulp.

  “Don’t pretend we haven’t met.” I reach for my brush and comb my golden locks in front of the mirror. Might as well. Asshole’s not going anywhere.

  “We have, but we never exchanged names, just fluids,” he barbs, “which begs the question, how the fuck do you know mine?”

  “What fluids? You were too chicken to seal the deal,” I purr, wondering if he really doesn’t know my name. We’re both pretty big deals at our schools.

  I think about the sea glass necklace, watching my face turning scarlet in the mirror. Am I an idiot for taking what he gave me, turning it into jewelry, and making it my talisman? The sea glass is a functioning organ of mine now. It reminds me that good people exist.

  Only, I don’t know if Penn is that good anymore.

  I think I may have ruined him.

  Watching him in the steamed mirror, I lean against the vanity. I can tell when a guy is checking me out, and he’s not doing that. He’s more like assessing the damage he wants to inflict on me. I know his hatred for me runs deep because when he talks to me, every word is a blade, causing a shiver to roll down my spine. Instead of ending in my toes, though, it explodes between my legs.

  “This ain’t shooting the shit, Daria. You stay out of my way; I’ll stay out of yours.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” I mumble. “Shouldn’t you be at school? And don’t tell me what to do. You’re nothing but an unwelcome guest here.” I snort out a laugh.

  “I ditched, like you.” He runs his eyes over me as if I’m nothing. Air. “And agreed on my guest status. I’m a reluctant one, at best. But the offer was there, and I’d be stupid not to accept it. I see the way you look at me. Oh, Skull Eyes…” He throws the nickname in my face as though the past few years didn’t happen. Then he takes a step toward me, his devious grin back in full force. “This round, I’m going to fucking destroy you.”

  I turn to him fully, dumbfounded. I’m clutching the edge of the marble sink with one hand, not sure how or when the tables turned. He’s talking like he’s the master of the manor and I’m a pawn at his mercy. I narrow my eyes, trying to crack his façade, but alas, it remains tough as steel. Penn Scully actually believes he owns me. Me. Daria Followhill. The most popular girl at All Saints High. I need to try to remind myself that his mother just died. That he is acting out. That this morning, he thought he was homeless.

  “I don’t want you transferring to my school,” I hiss out. Melody would gladly file a transfer request, and Principal Prichard would salivate over the chance to snatch him up for our football team.

  “That won’t be a problem. You guys suck so much ass, you have shit-breath.”

  “Still smells better than poverty. You’re poor, right? Your sister was just bullshitting about being rich.”

  When someone hits me with a stick, I run over them with a tank. I’m so mean to him I want to throw up. I hate this part of being me. The striking harder at all costs part.

  “Just to make things clear”—I put the brush down, batting my lashes—“you’re not my step-sibling, foster brother, or a part of the family. You’re a stray dog, last of the litter, most unlikely to be adopted, and a charity case.”

  Penn takes a step toward me, and my heart is fighting its way out of my rib cage. The closer he gets, the more I realize that my heart might succeed. Penn’s eyes remind me of a snake. Mesmerizing but inhuman altogether. They weren’t like that before.

  His scent messes with my head. I want to reach out and caress his face. Kiss his wounds better. Beg for forgiveness. Curse him. Push him away. Cry on his shoulder for what we’ve done. For how it ended. For what we became afterward. Because I’m full of crap, and he is totally empty.

  We ruined ourselves the day of our first kiss.

  When Penn looks down at me, time stops. It feels like the world is losing gravity, floating into a bottomless depth in space when he clasps my chin with his thumb and finger to lift my head. I can’t breathe. I’m not sure I want to, either. My towel drops to the floor with a thud even though I secured it over my chest, and I realize that he tugged at it intentionally. I’m naked. My body, my soul, my heart. All my walls are down. Somewhere in my head, a red alarm blasts, and my inhibitions are arming, ready to fight back. I’m trying to decode his expression. He is amused, irritated, and…playful? The mixture of emotions doesn’t make sense.

  “Mess with me, Followhill, and I will ruin you.”

  “Not if I ruin you first.” I can’t hide the lust in my tone.

  A beat pulses between us.

  “Actually, you’re right. I do like what I see. Some of it, anyway.” His fingers slip around to the back of my neck, and my eyes flutter shut. My brain is screaming at me to open them.

  This is a hoax, the alarm screeches. He hates you.

  “I definitely like what I see.” His breath is sweet and hot. It caresses the tip of my earlobe, and a shudder ripples through me. My nipples pucker so hard, even the faintest brush of air makes me drip between the legs. This could go in so many directions, and I have no control over any of them.

  His mouth crashes against mine, and I yelp into his open lips just when his tongue invades me. He is swallowing me whole, and I’m so frustrated with my sick attraction to him. I bite his lower, bruised lip and feel his blood gushing out, warm and coppery. My hands clutch the fabric of his top, clawing to find the hole and fill it with my greedy fingers. He grabs the back of my neck and clutches like a lio
n taming his lioness as he deepens our kiss. There’s nothing shy or experimental or promising about our second kiss. We’re not the same kids. Not the same hopeful human beings. Our teeth clash, but we don’t laugh it off or stop. At the same time, it feels like we’ve never moved from that spot next to the trash can. We’re hungrier, and wiser, and angrier.

  I’ve never been kissed this way before.

  Not by him. Not by anyone.

  His mouth disconnects from mine, and it takes me a few seconds to register what’s happening.

  “The rarest thing in the world should not be given to a basic bitch. I hope you didn’t save me your firsts because I have no interest in taking them,” he whispers into my ear, and my eyes snap open. Penn shoves something into his back pocket, then steps back. He turns toward the door, and before I have time to tell him to go screw himself or drop dead, he coils his head over his shoulder.

  Those snake eyes, they speak to me.

  They tell me that he doesn’t want to be my friend.

  That he is fully prepared to be my enemy.

  “Nice seeing you again, sis.” He slams the door in my face.

  My hand jumps instinctively to my sea glass necklace, preparing to clutch it in shock.

  It’s gone.

  Like all families, mine has a mind-numbing routine that rarely changes and includes me very sparsely.

  When Melody picks up Bailey from school every day, they go straight to ballet, and Dad comes home from work around six. That means I have at least four more hours to avoid the jerk living under my roof, and I’m starving, thirsty, and constantly reaching out to play with the necklace before realizing it’s not there anymore.

  I pace my room, text Blythe and Esme, then decide to write an entry in my little black book.

  Entry #1,298:

  Sin: Snuck into Penn’s room when I heard the bastard taking a shower and stole his pencil (Who uses pencils anymore? Is he five?). Swirled the eraser around my clit and masturbated with it. Put it back in his pencil bag.

  Reason: Jerk walked in on me naked. On purpose. And I didn’t hate it. At all.

  Sometime after exchanging texts with my friends, I crash in front of Teen Mom. I wake up to a gentle knock on my door, the colors from the TV frame dancing over my bedroom walls.

  “Lovebug, dinner’s almost ready,” Mel singsongs from the other side. I fling an arm over my eyes. I don’t want to face him. I especially don’t want to face him after he saw me naked and kissed me and made my nipples hard and then told me he doesn’t want anything to do with me.

  “Coming,” I yell. I change into super short plaid shorts and a tank top. I’m going for the unaffected-by-your-bullshit look with a touch of just-because-we-kissed-doesn’t-mean-I-want-you-loser.

  Mel and Bailey are in the kitchen. Bailey is chopping vegetables, and my mother is marinating the chicken breasts. They’re talking ballet. I ignore the sting that accompanies being an outsider and plop on a stool by the kitchen island. It’s all cream-colored wood with dark brown granite counters. I pluck a cherry tomato from the salad bowl and pop it into my mouth.

  “Hey, Bails, how was school?”

  “Bumpin’. I have a new lab teacher, and she says I can use it after school under her supervision.” My sister flashes her braces with a smile, each band a different color, like the LGBT flag. One day, she’ll be a rose in full bloom, but for now, she is content being a wallflower. Her petals are already beginning to open, and I need to come to terms with that.

  “How was yours?” she asks.

  I think about Principal Prichard and my latest visit to his office.

  About my new, humiliating classroom.

  About the text messages burning my cell phone.

  “Amazeballs.” I flash a white-toothed, straight smile. My eyes are already drifting. I try to find Penn around the open floor plan.

  “Can you be a doll and take this to your dad? He’s on the patio.” Mel doesn’t lift her head from the chicken.

  I take the platter of marinated chicken from her hands and pad barefoot toward the patio, ignoring the heat spreading through my cheeks. My dad and Penn are standing over the grill, and I chuckle bitterly. She didn’t even give me a heads-up that he was here. My dad uses the tongs to flip the steaks. Each of them is holding a bottle of beer, and they seem to share an easy conversation.

  Dad is drinking beer with him? Great. Penn is only eighteen, but it doesn’t surprise me. My parents sometimes let me sip wine at family dinners. They firmly believe that if you make teenagers feel responsible about booze, they won’t go around getting shitfaced when they finally get their hands on alcohol. I never get drunk at parties. Sobriety equals a certain amount of boredom, which is necessary to make sure my game face remains intact.

  I slide the glass door open and stop to watch them.

  “I don’t make a habit of trusting boys with busted knuckles around my daughters, but my wife loves to fix things, and since I’m a past project of hers, I thought it would be fair to pay it forward,” my dad drawls. Penn stares at him with guarded curiosity.

  “I appreciate your help, sir, but I don’t need fixing. I ain’t broken.”

  “You’ve been through a lot,” Dad presses. “It’s okay not to have your shit together at eighteen.”

  “Don’t worry about my shit,” Penn retorts. “I’d appreciate if no one knows I live here. It’s not my school district, and I’m the starting wide receiver at Las Juntas. My scholarship’s on the line here.”

  “Graduating from a prestigious high school like All Saints would look better on your college application.”

  “It’s too late to transfer. I’m a captain of the rival team. There’s no way I’d fit in at All Saints High. Besides, All Saints already has a wide receiver even though he’s a total prick,” Penn says point-blank. A giggle tickles at the back of my throat, but I swallow it down. They still don’t know I’m here. I think.

  “Point is, you live under my roof, you do not touch my daughters. Don’t try me, boy. I have ties older than you. Word to the wise? These tongs”—Dad snaps them in Penn’s face while the latter taps an unlit cigarette over his thigh—“they’re good for more than just flipping steaks, kiddo.”

  “No offense, sir, but one of your daughters is entirely too young for me, and the other is entirely too Daria for me.” Penn’s voice is like black lace wrapping around my throat. I don’t think my dad notices the dangerous tilt in his tenor, but I do. That’s how I know that while my father is still oblivious to my presence, Penn isn’t. Those words are meant for me to hear.

  “What does that mean?” Dad growls.

  “I think you know exactly what it means.”

  With that, Penn spins in place and gives me a close-lipped smirk.

  Those eyes saw me naked. Those lips were on mine this afternoon.

  Then they told me to get lost.

  I remember Via was gorgeous, which bothered me, of course, but I don’t remember her being that pretty. No guy has ever affected me like him. Ever. Even if I take all my encounters with hot boys and combine them, it still doesn’t match the feel of just one measly look from Penn. He grew up from a dirty duckling to a dark swan.

  “Chicken,” Penn hisses, his lips maneuvering into a smile that is too calculated for a teenager. He tosses the unlit cigarette into a nearby trash can, his eyes still on mine. Where did he learn to be so sophisticated?

  “Excuse me?” I arch a threatening eyebrow.

  “Thanks for the chicken, sis.” He walks over with the beer in his hand, snatching the tray of marinated chicken from me. He is taunting me with this sister BS. I bite my inner cheek because Dad’s here, and his big thing is thinking before acting.

  “No problem. Anything else I can do for you?” I smile sweetly.

  “I think you’ve done quite enough,” Penn says. I look over at Dad’s back, and his shoulders are shaking with laughter. I think he’s relieved we’re not flirting.

  “I see you’ve already met.” He
stacks the steaks onto a plate.

  “Oh, yeah,” I retort. “Penn has seen quite a bit of me.”

  At dinner, we all sit at the table and eat as though the world is not ending. As if Penn is a legitimate part of our family. I push my food around. Mom and Dad introduce Penn as a family friend to Bailey and me, and I snort while she shakes his hand over the salads and crystal diamond water pitchers. Tasmanian rain, if you must know. Expensive and pretentious, just like us.

  Penn is open and kind even though he talks like a boy from the hood. His speech is lazy and confident and mesmerizing. He makes a point of ignoring me. His eyes and cheeks are still a nice shade of purple, but I can tell that in a few days, the bruises will fade, and then his stunning, immortal god face will haunt me on a daily basis. No one talks about the unfortunate state of his body or why he is here until Bailey raises her head from her plate.

  “What happened to your face?” She covers her mouth to hide her braces as she speaks.

  “Bailey,” Mom scolds at the same time Dad groans and shakes his head. Penn flashes her an easy smile. I stare at him, seeing what I don’t want to see. That when he’s not dealing with me, he’s not a douchebag.

  “I punched a door.” He throws a Brussels sprout into his mouth, chewing.

  “You did?” Bailey’s eyes widen as they assess his knuckles.

  “Swung right back and punched me harder.”

  “It looks awful.” Mel states the freaking obvious, pushing a forkful of sautéed spinach into her mouth.

  “You should see the door.” Penn leans over to catch Bailey’s gaze. Then everyone but me bursts out laughing, and I can practically hear the crack of the ice as it breaks around the table. The only problem is, there are two icebergs. They’re on one, and I’m drifting away on another, far away from them.

  Penn clears his throat, running a hand through his hair.

  “I didn’t have the best summer, and I needed an outlet. The door turned out to be…tougher than I thought, but it led me here.”