by Julie Kriss
Spite Club
Julie Kriss
Contents
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
Also by Julie Kriss
Copyright © 2017 by Julie Kriss
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Spite Club
First Rule of Spite Club: Don’t fall for your fake boyfriend.
Here’s what happened: My boyfriend cheated on me with Nick Mason’s girlfriend.
We’re both angry. What better way to get revenge than to pretend to get together out of spite?
Nick is rude and rebellious and completely freaking gorgeous. He's not my type, and I'm not his. There's no way we would work outside of our little game of dirty sex and well kept secrets.
The problem is, he's an addiction. Or maybe a plague. The more time I spend with him, the more I risk my good-girl image and my carefully built life.
I might want what's bad for me. I might want Nick. And I might have to convince him - if I can survive him.
*This book is a standalone, full-length story with no cliffhanger.*
One
Evie
It started with a phone call at one o’clock in the morning.
I’d put my pillow over my head to block out my roommate’s music, and I pulled my head out when I heard the ringtone, my hair falling over my eyes as I reached for my phone. I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”
A strange man’s voice on the other end said, “Evie Bates?”
“Yes?” I croaked, half into my pillow in my dark bedroom.
“Is your boyfriend a guy named Josh Brantwell?”
“Yes.” I sat bolt upright, shoving my hair back. “Oh my God, is he okay?”
“Not for long.”
The man’s voice was rough, as if he’d been shouting over a bar band all night, and I could hear the faint sounds of street noise in the background. I had never heard that voice before, and for a second I got a strange chill down my spine, like a premonition of doom.
“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
There was a pause. Then the man’s voice came again, dark and cold. “Look, Evie Bates, I realize this is probably bad news, but I’m about to go beat your boyfriend to a pulp.”
For a second, the words didn’t compute. “Who is this?” I nearly shouted, standing up in the dark in my old pajama top.
“It’s going to be bloody. I just thought I should warn you first.”
“Is this a joke?” It didn’t sound like a joke. It sounded like someone was about to beat up Josh. Was he being mugged? No, muggers didn’t phone their victims’ girlfriends first. And Josh couldn’t get mugged unless he was out on the street somewhere, when I knew exactly where he was. He was—
“No joke,” the strange man said. “My girlfriend is at Josh Brantwell’s place right now. And I’m about to go mess him up.”
That stopped me. It made no sense. “There’s no girl at Josh’s place,” I said stupidly. “He’s there alone.”
“You sure about that?” the man said. “Because I followed my girlfriend tonight. And she came here.” He rhymed off an address that made my stomach drop to the floor. “Resident is one Josh Brantwell.”
“What is she doing there?” I said.
“Fucking him, I presume,” the man said bluntly. “I’m pretty pissed off about it, I have to say. I’m about to go in there and give him a beating. But I looked him up first, and I saw that he has a girlfriend. So hey, Evie Bates, your asshole of a boyfriend is cheating on you. I thought you should know.”
“I—” I couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. Josh? “I—”
“Well?” the man said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah,” the man said. “I thought so. Bring bandages, a towel, maybe a mop.” Then he hung up.
For a second I stared at the wall of my bedroom, my mouth open.
Then I grabbed my clothes.
There was no way Josh was cheating on me. Simply no way. There had to be a mistake somewhere.
We’d been dating for four months. I met him at the bank where we were both tellers. He was dark-haired, clean-cut, good-looking, and when he asked me out I said yes. Of course I did. Josh was the Yeti of boyfriends: straight, single, sober, no baggage. I was twenty-five, and I was supposed to have a boyfriend like that. It was flattering that he’d picked me, when the other single women at work were circling him like sharks. I hadn’t asked a lot of questions—I’d just gone on the date.
And it was going well. We got along. We liked the same TV shows. The sex was normal and semi-regular. I’d met his family, and he’d met my mother, who had pulled me aside and told me in a low voice that she could see a future for me with a young man like that. Finally, finally, I was putting in place everything I needed: a good job, a nice boyfriend, a regular life, my mother’s approval. It was finally happening.
The call could be a fake. Maybe this guy—I had no idea who he was—was just crazy. Maybe he was a serial killer, trying to lure me to my death. But I thought about the voice I’d heard on the phone, rough and a little dangerous, and I felt that chill again. The stranger hadn’t sounded like a serial killer. He’d sounded honest and very, very pissed off.
Still, I told myself there was a mistake somewhere. The stranger’s cheating girlfriend had gone to a different address, not Josh’s. Or something. Because Josh was definitely, definitely not cheating.
Right?
I gripped the wheel and pulled up to Josh’s condo complex and thought about signs. Were there signs when a guy was cheating? What were they supposed to be? We didn’t have sex often, but then we never had. That was what happened when you were in a regular relationship, I’d told myself calmly. That was real life. No one went around having sex all the time, anyway. You did it on a schedule, when you were free and you were both in the mood. Had we been having sex even less than usual? When was the last time? I stared at the door of his building and thought back. Saturday night? No, he’d gone out with his friends. It must have been before that.
How else was I supposed to know he was cheating? We didn’t fight. He got a lot of attention from female coworkers and customers at work, but he didn’t make a big deal about that. He didn’t act furtive, and I hadn’t caught him lying. In fact, I’d been starting to think about having the Big Conversation with him. The one about Us and Our Future and Maybe Moving In. I had a schedule. I needed a schedule. Without a schedule, I would mess everything up. I was determined not to mess up this time. I was determined to make it work.
Bring bandages, a towel, maybe a mop.
I got that chill of premonition again.
No. Just no. I was going to handle this. And everything would be fine.
It was raining, a warm June rain. We’d just come off of a cold, shitty Michigan winter, and even the rain was welcome after the months of snow. I g
ot out of the car and walked up Josh’s driveway, letting myself get wet. Josh lived in a complex of townhouse condos, attached in a long line like one of those cutout crafts you did in public school. The complex was brand new. It was his first place, bought with his nice bank salary. In every way, my boyfriend was on the way up.
There was a second car in the driveway, parked behind Josh’s treasured Mustang. A pretty little car, as red as lipstick. And beyond that, parked on the street, was another black car I didn’t recognize, inky in the darkness.
There was no one around. This was a neighborhood of nice young professionals, tidy and brand new, unlike the rest of Millwood, Michigan. This wasn’t where the drunks and the teenagers and the pot dealers hung out. This was where people had jobs they had to get up for in the morning, and they all went to bed at ten.
There were lights on in Josh’s place. An upstairs light, and a light downstairs in the living room. More ominously, the front door was open. Just a little—it was a few inches ajar—but it was open. And something was going on inside. A man was bellowing. A woman was shouting. There was a thump, a crash of something breaking.
Oh, shit.
I ran the rest of the way up the driveway. A neighboring door opened, and a woman of about thirty-five stepped on to her porch, giving me a total bitch face that could turn you into stone from twenty feet away. “I’m about to call the cops!” she shouted at me. “See if I don’t! I can hear them straight through the connecting wall!”
“Don’t do it!” I shouted back. I ran past her to Josh’s doorway.
Inside, the living room was carnage. Josh’s nice Ikea coffee table was overturned, and one of the brand-new blinds had been ripped from the living room window—it hung crazily, making the whole room look like it was on an angle.
Josh was lying on the floor, curled up in pain, his hands over his face. Blood seeped through his fingers. He was wearing nothing but a pair of tighty whities, his gym-toned body on display. Standing next to him, shouting Stop, was a woman with long, dark curly hair. She was gorgeous and sexy, and she was wearing a t-shirt I recognized as Josh’s, and obviously nothing else. I could literally see her bare ass.
That answered the cheating question, then.
Something inside me snapped, and I went numb. I stopped seeing Josh’s nice living room, where we’d watched TV and made out with his hand down my pants. I stopped seeing the nice furniture, some of which I’d helped him pick out. I stopped seeing his nice body, that I’d had sex with on a nice regular schedule for four nice months. I stopped seeing anything at all except that woman’s bare ass, perfectly round and much smaller than mine, beneath the hem of my boyfriend’s T-shirt.
Was that feeling heartbreak? I didn’t know. Embarrassment? Pain? Maybe it was just the feeling of all of your life’s plans flushing down the toilet in a single second.
Then I noticed the man.
Standing over Josh, looking down at him, was a guy I didn’t know. He was wearing beat-up jeans, motorcycle boots—one of which was untied—and a gray T-shirt so worn that the hem had come unstitched. A brown leather jacket lay discarded on the floor at his feet. His hands were curled into fists, his arms flexed. They were impressive arms, sleek with muscle. In fact, all of him was impressive—his shoulders, his back through the thin shirt, his narrow waist. He had tousled brown hair, a scruff of stubble, a face that knocked me back. My first thought was Jesus, he’s good-looking. Everyone in this little scene was good-looking except, maybe, me. And they were all so focused that not a single one of them had noticed me.
“Hey,” I said.
Everyone turned and looked at me. It was like a crazy tableau, and for a second it hurt so sickeningly much that I felt like laughing. Evie Finds Boyfriend With Pants Down. I was breathless with pain, but I was also a little detached. Is this really happening? Why can’t I feel anything? What’s wrong with me?
Josh dropped his hands from his face, and I could see blood dripping from his nose. “Evie!” he said, in a tone of such pure horror it was almost comical. I felt like laughing again. Or maybe screaming.
The bare-assed woman took her turn. “Oh, my God!” she cried, dropping to her knees. “Josh!” She touched him gingerly, getting close to but not quite touching any blood. She looked up at the man above her. “Stop hitting him, Nick, you asshole!”
But Nick, the asshole, wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking at me.
He was still poised in his fight stance, his fists curled, but instead of looking angry or threatening, he looked… distracted. His gaze took me in, up and down, and then it rested on my face, his eyes catching mine, as if he was trying to figure something out.
I was wearing a green T-shirt and denim overalls. Okay, fine, overalls aren’t exactly fashionable, but they were the first things I pulled off the floor. The overalls, plus the gray cardigan I’d put on, hid the fact that I wore no bra, so that was a win. May in Michigan, especially in the middle of the night, is not exactly warm, and my nipples were showing the fact behind the overalls. I had flip-flops on my feet—my toes were wet and freezing—and my shoulder-length hair was a mess, my face devoid of makeup and probably creased with sleep. I wasn’t exactly Giselle, but at least my ass was covered.
“Evie,” Josh said from the floor. “I can explain.”
“Nick, he’s bleeding!” the beautiful woman shrieked. “Should we call an ambulance? What do we do?”
“No ambulance!” Josh replied. He rolled over and groaned, cupping his bleeding nose. The only person who didn’t say anything was Nick, who was still looking at me.
Despite the craziness of the scene, and my hurt, and the fact that my boyfriend had—it seemed likely—recently put his dick into the bare-assed girl, I was calm. Be polite, my mother had always taught me. No one likes a girl who makes a fuss. That’s who I was now. I was the polite girl, after years of failure at it. I ran a hand through my hair, thinking maybe I should make a fuss in this situation—but then again, Josh and the gorgeous woman were making enough of a fuss for everyone.
I met Nick’s gaze without flinching. I couldn’t read his expression.
“The neighbors are about to call the cops,” I told him in my oddly normal voice.
He blinked once—his eyelashes were ridiculously dark—and looked down at Josh, who was still moaning. I watched him uncurl his fists. He toed Josh with his boot, nudging him in the ribs as the woman poked at him, still not getting bloody. “Hey,” he said, the voice I recognized from the phone call. “Shut up.”
The woman wasn’t done. “You asshole!” she shouted at Nick again.
Nick actually sighed. “You shut up, too, Gina,” he said. She went quiet, still glaring.
I should be screaming, or crying maybe. I should be losing my shit. Instead, I watched as Nick bent and picked up his brown leather jacket, shrugged it on. He scrubbed a hand over his face. His knuckles were red—he’d given Josh a hell of a hit. There was a second of furious satisfaction at that, and then I pushed it down again. That wasn’t me.
Ignoring the two on the floor, Nick walked toward me, his untied boot clomping loudly. I felt a jolt of alarm low in my belly. I’d met bad boys in my life—even done things I shouldn’t with a few of them, back when I was Old Evie—but I’d never seen one like this. This Nick guy owned a room without even trying. He probably wrecked things without even trying, too. Lives. Women. Virginities. Reputations. He was that kind of guy.
Still, I assumed that with his ass-kicking finished he would leave, and Old Evie felt a pang over it. I didn’t know who Nick was, but he was very fucking cool, and I envied him that. Old Evie would have followed a guy like this like a lapdog. “Thanks for the phone call,” I said to him.
He stopped, looking at me again in that way he had, like he was figuring something out. “Yeah?”
“I mean it.” I did. If he hadn’t called me, I would have continued getting cheated on, not knowing about it. It wasn’t his fault. “It takes guts to be the bearer of bad news.”
It was a strange question, but somehow it fit the strange, surreal night I was having. I looked past him at Josh and naked girl, who were watching us. Josh had sat up, and I could see his nicely styled hair, his washboard stomach. He’d had sex with me a week ago, on my bed in my apartment. I remembered now.
Old Evie would have screamed at Josh. New Evie didn’t make a fuss.
But maybe both Evies were angry.
I nodded, answering Nick’s question. “Yeah. I think I’m pissed off.”
“Yeah?” Nick said. “Okay, then. You hungry?”
Another weird question, but suddenly I was. I really fucking was. It was like he was hypnotizing me. I shouldn’t do this, not even a little. I should tell him to take a hike.
I should go home and get back in bed and pull up the covers and handle this like an adult. I should get some sleep so I’d be ready for work in a few hours. I should be rational and work through it and partake in self-care and do whatever you were supposed to do when your boyfriend cheated on you. I should work on getting past this and healing. I should get through this and come out better and stronger than before. Giving in to base instincts was not going to help with any of that.
I looked at Nick. It was two in the morning. I was pissed. And he was ridiculously hot.
Bad idea, Evie.
Shut up, Old Evie said.
“I’m starving,” I told Nick.
He nodded back. It was like he understood everything.
“Me too,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Two
Evie
His full name, it turned out, was Nick Mason. Half an hour later we sat in an all-night diner, ordering food from the pasty waitress. Millwood was a trucker’s town, a factory worker’s town—or it had been until the gentrifying started—and all-night places weren’t all that rare here. Even now, a trucker sat at a table nursing a cup of coffee, and another one wolfed down a piece of pie before hitting the road again. Outside, the rain had turned into wet mist that beaded in your hair and on your clothes without really turning into rain again.