by Lexi Ryan
She lowers the zipper halfway. “You’ll get to meet him soon. He flies in tonight, but your dad said you already have plans?”
“I’m staying with Willow,” I tell her. “But I promised Dad I’d be home in the morning so we could all have breakfast together.”
“That sounds wonderful. I’ll make pancakes.” She grins, and I slip back into the dressing room.
When I’ve changed back into my clothes—distressed jeans and a strapless pink top—Becky’s waiting for me at the register, chatting with a bright-eyed blonde. When I put the dress on the counter, the blonde looks at me and her eyes light up with recognition.
“I know you,” she says. “Gee-Gee, right?”
My “friends” at the coffee shop today notwithstanding, I haven’t been called Gee-Gee since I was fourteen. Hearing the name makes the acid churn in my belly. I lift my chin. “I go by Grace now.”
“Oh my God! Your stutter is, like, all gone. That’s amazing. I heard you were here last summer but I never saw you. You, like, totally disappeared after . . .” She shifts her gaze to Becky, then drops it to the counter before meeting my eyes again.
“We had to move for Dad’s job,” I lie. Even if a career move for Dad was the excuse we used, everyone knew why we moved after that night. If Dad hadn’t wanted to come back here when he took an early retirement, I never would have returned. But he’s a Texas guy at heart, and this is where he belongs.
I stare at the girl’s hands, willing her to move faster so we can pay for the dress and get out of here.
She doesn’t move, and when I look up, she’s staring at me and chewing on the corner of her lip. Is she wishing me dead, like so many other girls did back then, or is she trying to work up the courage to ask if I started a career as a call girl? A couple of people asked me that while I was here last summer. Apparently it was a rumor that circulated for a while.
God, I hate this town.
“Do you take Visa?” Becky asks.
“Oh, yeah. Sure we do.” The girl snaps out of her inspection and gets busy ringing up the sale.
When we leave the store, Becky is too quiet, and she stops at a Starbucks kiosk in the center of the mall. “Do you want anything?” she asks.
“La-la—” Fuck. I take a breath and count out the syllables in my head before speaking them. “Latte with four pumps of caramel.”
She’s studying me. She doesn’t ask if I’m okay or to explain what the cashier was talking about. I could count on one hand the number of days I’ve spent with Becky, but sometimes it feels like she sees me more clearly than my father ever did.
Right now, I wish she were as oblivious as everyone else.
Chapter Two
Grace
“Oh, my God! Grace Lee! My favorite girl!” Willow Myers steps out into the dark, rainy night and wraps me in a hug so tight I can barely breathe.
“I missed you.” I squeeze her back.
There’s the kind of friend who makes you smile, who you always know you’ll have a good time hanging with, one you can count on for a laugh and a drink after an exam sucked the life out of you. And then there’s the kind of friend who knows you inside and out, who knows the secrets you never imagined sharing with anyone, who knows your ugliest pieces and parts and still thinks you’re beautiful. That’s Willow for me.
“I missed you too. Let’s get out of this rain.” She tugs me inside her parents’ three-story brick home.
I spent a lot of time here last summer. Willow and I were practically roommates for all the time we spent together between here and Dad’s house. Maybe this summer would have been the same had things played out differently. But last summer’s stupid, drunken decisions brought my past back to haunt me, so instead I do everything I can to avoid long stretches in Champagne.
“How was your flight?” she asks as I toe off my shoes. “Have you seen your dad yet? What about your new stepmom? You said she’s nice, but is it weird to know you’re about to have a new stepmom when you’re a grown-ass woman? Have you decided if you’re going to call her Mom?”
I can only shake my head at the rampage of questions. We text incessantly, but Willow is nothing if not curious. “Good, yes, yes, kind of . . .” I struggle to remember the last question.
“Will you call her Mom?”
“Oh. No. I don’t think so.”
“I made us strawberry daiquiris,” she says. “What do you say we have a proper slumber party?”
I look down at my clothes. It’s raining so hard out there, I’m soaked just from the walk from the car. “If by ‘proper slumber party’ you mean change into our PJs and drink too much, I’m in.”
She cocks a hip to the side and arches a brow. I’ve always thought she matched her name—long, dark hair and limbs that go for miles. She’s a goddess, I swear, with beauty inside and out. This girl is the light inside the darkness I feel when I’m here. “Is there another definition?”
I follow her upstairs to her bedroom, taking my overnight bag with me. Willow pulls a pair of fuzzy pants and a Wonder Woman T-shirt from her chest of drawers, and I grab my sleep shorts and tank from my backpack.
Willow’s parents are the kind of people who spend more time traveling than they do in their own home, and right now they’re in Rome, so I don’t have to worry about her dad seeing me wandering around his house braless.
I use her bathroom to strip out of my wet clothes, and through the bathroom door I can hear Willow singing, “Reunited and it feels so good!”
Once we’re changed, we head back downstairs and to the kitchen. We pour our daiquiris into tall pilsner glasses before settling into the overstuffed cushions of her living room sofa.
“To braless PJ parties,” Willow says, raising her glass.
I tap it with mine. “I’m pretty sure that’s the name of a porno, but I’ll drink to it anyway.” We take long pulls off our sugary, slushy drinks. My chest fills with a warmth that is partly due to the proximity of my best friend and partly due to the irresponsible rum-to-mixer ratio filling my glass.
“I can’t believe you’re going to live with your stepbrother this summer,” she says.
I shrug. “There’s nothing that could keep me in Champagne for a whole summer, since you’ll be off living the glamorous life in London.”
She snorts. “Oh yes, changing diapers and wiping noses is oh so glamorous. Do you think I should pack my diamonds?”
Willow’s a few years older than me and just graduated from Baylor. She’s putting her art degree to as good a use as any and spending the summer in London. She’ll be the au pair for some Hollywood couple who’s shooting a film there. The agency that vetted her and set her up with the job only told her the ages of the children and the length and location of the assignment. She won’t find out who the celebrities are until she arrives.
“Think it’s Brad and Angelina?” I ask.
“This couple only has two kids,” she says. “Isn’t Brangelina up to, like, forty-three kids or something by now?”
“Bummer. I was having fantasies of visiting you and getting to know Brad.”
“Ha! I’m sure Angelina wouldn’t let any nanny that close to her husband. Back to the stepbrother, please. What if he’s a pervert or something?”
“Then I’ll chop off his dick.” I grin and take another drink. I can’t imagine sweet Becky having a pervert for a son. “He sounds like a good guy. Becky says he volunteers with Big Brothers, Big Sisters and is a straight-A student. If he’s anything like her, birds probably start singing when he walks outside.”
“So you’re saying your stepbrother is a Disney princess?”
I shrug. Maybe I should feel weird about committing to spend my summer living with some guy I’ve never met before, but I was already scrambling to find an excuse not to come back to Champagne between semesters. When Dad and Becky told me they wanted to travel around Europe for their honeymoon, I had the perfect excuse. Dad doesn’t feel comfortable with me staying at his house alone—even if I
am legally an adult now—so I jumped on the opportunity to live somewhere else.
I tried to talk my dad into paying for an apartment for me in New York, but since I couldn’t secure an internship or a job more “educational” than my usual coffee shop gig, he wasn’t having it. Apparently, the idea of me living alone in New York terrifies my father more than the idea of me living in Champagne without someone keeping an eye on me.
“Either way, he’s giving me a room for the summer. I’ll get a job and keep to myself. Dad’s happy, and I’m not in Champagne. It’ll work out fine.”
“I guess.” She frowns. “I still wish I had a chance to meet this guy so I could feel better about your arrangement.”
“To hear Becky talk about him, he seems practically perfect in every way.”
“Which is he? A princess or Mary Poppins?”
“He’s a football player.” I grimace at that unfortunate fact about my new roomie.
“Now I’m picturing Mary Poppins in a football helmet.” She draws her legs onto the couch and tucks them under her. “What’s his name again?”
“Dash.” What the hell kind of a name is that, anyway? It’s as if Becky knew her son would become a football player and named him accordingly.
Willow swishes her drink in her glass, watching the slush swirl. “Dash what?”
“Dupree.”
“Have you looked him up on Facebook?”
I give her a pointed stare. “You know how I feel about social media.”
“I keep telling you to make a fake account so you can spy on people.”
I shudder. “I’ll pass.”
“Oh well. I’ll look him up later myself. Dash Dupree.” She says his name as if she’s trying to place it, and shakes her head. “I’ll have to ask Robbie if he knew him in high school.”
“Could be. They both played football at Towers, but the name doesn’t ring any bells for me.” Willow went to Champagne’s Catholic high school, so she didn’t know any of the people who tortured me at Champagne Towers. I went there less than three months before we moved to Maine, but my time there certainly made an impression.
Willow and I met last summer after Dad moved back here and she and I both had gigs at the local coffee shop. She was the very best part of being stuck in this city, and when my otherwise carefree summer ended in a shitstorm of my own making, she was there for me in a way no one else could be.
“Not all football players are assholes,” she says.
“I will agree that Robbie is an exception,” I say. Willow’s boyfriend plays ball at Baylor and is really sweet, if a little dense. I knew him during my brief stint at Champagne Towers High School, and he may not have registered my existence, but at least he never mocked my stutter by calling me “Juh-Juh-Gee-Gee” like half the other guys on the team. “Speaking of Robbie, how’s he handling your impending departure?”
She sets her drink on the coffee table and sighs. “He still hates it, but I keep telling him the summer will go fast. He’ll be busy with football, and I’ll be back soon enough.”
We talk about college and our plans for the fall, and when the pitcher of drinks is empty, she makes us another, and soon we’re giggling without reason and she’s telling me about the time she and Robbie had sex in the locker room at Baylor and she ended up with foot fungus and a bruise on her ass in the shape of a locker vent.
“It’s depressing that I’m so sexually deprived that I’m even jealous of sex that ended in foot fungus,” I tell her.
“What about that guy you were dating when I came to visit on spring break? The one with all the tattoos?”
I shake my head. “He was hot but there wasn’t much going on upstairs.” To be honest, I knew that when I started dating him, but I figured I could handle a lower IQ in exchange for hard abs and barrel-sized biceps. I know it’s clichéd, but I have a serious weakness for muscle, which probably explains my history with football players.
She arches a brow. “You are so picky. A guy doesn’t have to be a genius to treat you right.”
“Willow, one day I said something about my commander in chief, and his response was, ‘I didn’t know you were Native American.’”
“No!”
“I’ve sworn off pretty idiots, but I miss sex.”
“My poor, horny Grace.”
“That is accurate.” I take another long swallow from my drink. I’m not sure if the sugar buzz or the alcohol buzz is going to hit me first. “Actually, ‘horny’ is a terrible word. Don’t use it to describe me ever again, please.”
“No kidding, but there’s no good alternative short of calling yourself randy, and that makes me feel like I should be picking up men at the local seniors’ club.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Randy might be worse than horny. But whatever I am, I blame those books you recommended. Those books made me . . . what about thoughtful? It’s the thoughts that get us in trouble, isn’t it?”
“I prefer thirsty.” She nods, satisfied with her word choice. “You’re thirsty, and who could blame you? Maybe your stepbrother has a hot friend you could entertain yourself with this summer.”
I drain my glass and close my eyes, imagining bonfires and tattooed country boys with ripped muscles from bailing hay—or whatever they do in Indiana. Surely Dash has some good-looking friends who could entertain me. “God, it’s pathetic, but I’m kind of counting on it.”
Willow’s phone buzzes and she grabs it off the coffee table and grins as she looks at the screen. “It’s Robbie. He wants to swing by. Is that okay with you?”
I shrug. I’m all warm and fuzzy from the rum. He could bring a dozen friends with him and I probably wouldn’t care. “That’s fine with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“You guys have two days together before you leave for London. Seriously, live it up. I was thinking about crawling into bed with my book anyway. I want to read the one about the fisherman again.”
“You don’t need to go to bed. Robbie and I can be together without screwing.”
I cock my head and frown at her. “You want to tell me that you’re half drunk and your boyfriend’s coming over, and you want to sit out here and chat rather than jump his bones?”
She laughs. Willow’s laugh has to be one of the best sounds in the world, full, and real, and unapologetic. “You know me too well.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “Seriously. I’ll sleep in your sister’s room.” Her older sister is out of town for the weekend, and I probably would have slept in her room anyway just to have my own bed.
“You’re the best.”
The doorbell rings, and I stand. “I need to use the restroom. I’ll talk to you two lovebirds in the morning.”
“Don’t feel like you have to turn in right away. I have another pitcher of daiquiris waiting in the freezer and a stack of Christina Lauren novels on the kitchen island. I think the fisherman one is somewhere in there.”
“God bless you,” I call over my shoulder as I push into the bathroom. I pee forever—I really drank too much of Willow’s mostly rum concoction—and wash my hands. I hear laughter, then feet on the stairs, and the thunk of Willow’s bedroom door before I leave the bathroom. They’re wasting no time getting down to business. Good for them. At least someone’s getting lucky.
I planned on going to bed, but I like Willow’s suggestion better. Sleep never comes easily for me, so daiquiris and a yummy romance novel sound like the perfect way to pass a couple of hours.
Except there’s a broad-shouldered dude sitting on Willow’s couch, his head of shaggy hair bowed.
I groan inwardly. Muscle is my kryptonite. I’m seriously tipsy and thirsty, and I don’t need to be tempted into bad choices with some jock Robbie dragged with him to his booty call.
“Hey,” the guy says. “Sorry to invade your space like this.”
“No worries.” I say, then he looks up and my breath leaves my lungs in a rush when I see his blue eyes. Damn. It’s one thing to be thirsty and have bits and pie
ces below the belt zipping ideas to my brain. It’s quite another thing when my other organs get involved. Like my heart. And maybe my lungs, because breathing isn’t coming very naturally right now.
I know this guy. He wasn’t around last summer, but we went to the same high school when I was fourteen. Five years ago, before Dad moved us away from Champagne and away from my damaged reputation, and before that night, I knew that face and those stop-a-girl-in-her-tracks sweet blue eyes.
His shaggy hair was shorter then, his shoulders a little less broad, and he had smooth cheeks where tonight they’re covered in stubble. But I would know the face of Chris Montgomery anywhere. A girl doesn’t forget blue eyes like that, especially when they were the first she ever fell for. Especially when it all ended with a new life and a broken heart.
“Hey there,” he says again, looking at me this time. He grins. Holy shit, that smile. Those dimples send me back in time, and all the feelings come back in a rush. The high school crush that I didn’t dare speak of. The boy who was so far out of my league I couldn’t bring myself to talk to him. The ache I felt in my heart every time he was in the same room as me.
Chris Montgomery is fucking perfect. He’s the guy that every girl in high school swooned over. All he had to do was walk by, flash those dimples, and wink, and girls would practically knock each other over for the honor of dropping their panties first.
He’s hot. He’s smart. He’s some sort of football genius—or was back in high school. And he’s a fucking gentleman.
He was always so kind to me—genuinely kind, not like other boys who’d tease and flirt but never bother to look me in the eye. When I was surrounded by guys who couldn’t keep their eyes off my tits, Chris gave his attention to my face when he talked to me. To be fair, this only happened once, but I was fourteen and the contact required for falling in love was minimal.
I was so pathetic. Still am, apparently, because my cheeks heat and the room spins sideways. I feel like I’m fourteen again, still madly, naively in love with the boy who doesn’t know I exist.