A need to prove I was wanted.
I know it’s messed up, but try living your life with a mother who ignores you and a father who harps on you every day. Validation became an addiction, and I was able to get my fill in spades.
And while I had girls in my bed who would make a priest cry, I never stopped dreaming of Stacey. She was like this siren in my mind that taunted me. I gave in because there were no consequences in dreams.
And then she walked through the door.
Heart-shaped face, full lips, and an hourglass body, she looked like a pinup model. Her shoulders were broad from years of swimming, and her waist tapered into hips that made you want to grab them. She was more beautiful than I remembered, and I instantly regretted telling Chad she could move in.
Seeing her every day was messing with my head. She was hot, and yes, I had these dreams. But she was always and would always be Chad’s little sister. There was a code. I’d like to say it was an unspoken code, but Chad had stated a million times in our lives that his sister was absolutely, unequivocally off-limits.
He said it in middle school when our friends started to notice girls—I mean, really noticing them. His first response was, “Stay away from Stacey.”
Sophomore year of high school, she walked into the building, and Chad’s first words to every guy in the school were, “Stay away from Stacey.”
The day before she moved in, he gathered every guy on the team and threatened their lives. “Stay away from Stacey or else.”
I was used to it by then. Hell, I’d made a childhood career out of making her social life a living hell. Part of it was for her own good. The rest, well, Chad and I certainly had some fun times. Bygones were bygones in college, and we were all going to live like the reverse Three’s Company.
That all changed the minute I saw the guys drool over her at the apartment. That porn incident had me clenching my fists for the first time in my life. It was a mistake, I knew, but she stuck to her guns, and I had to do everything I could not to look at her because when I did, I saw her not as a girl, but as a woman.
And then she went to the frat party.
I never had a sister, but I just assumed that was why I didn’t mind being so protective of her for Chad. It was like my mind knew I had to keep her from all the wrong guys while he was running around with Nicole.
But Dammit, Stacey had to push. She challenged me, and the lines started to blur. I fought it. I told myself she couldn’t be with anyone because no one was good enough for her, but that wasn’t true. It was because I wanted her and I knew for a fact that I couldn’t have her.
It scared the shit out of me.
I shouldn’t have crossed that line. I knew it was wrong. I knew Chad wouldn’t approve, and he acted exactly like I’d thought he would. He was right though.
I deserved it.
Just like my dad has said to me a thousand times before. I’m a complete fuckup who will never do right and only ruin the lives of the people around me.
Only difference between Chad and my father is, I absolutely deserved every mean, hurtful thing Chad said to me.
That’s why I knew I had to leave. He was right. I had done it time and again to girls, and he’d seen every one. I always felt he knew me more than I knew myself. He just proved my dad was right this entire time. I’m no good for anybody.
I couldn’t fight it because I understood why. Not only had he heard my innermost feelings about relationships and things I never wanted, but I’d also only made one promise to him. Multiple times. And I broke it.
I broke the trust of my best friend, the only real friend I had.
And now, he hates me.
It guts me to my soul, knowing I let him down. Knowing I became the man my father always said I would be. A total fuckup. I fucked up my friendship. I fucked up the only family I had. And I fucked with Stacey’s heart.
I knew we couldn’t be together, and yet I still let it happen. I let my dick lead me.
No.
I take a deep breath.
It wasn’t my dick at all with her.
It was my heart. But the heart only wants what it can’t have. I should have known that.
Moving out of our place was painful, but it needed to be done. I wouldn’t put Chad through anything else. Breaking my promise to him was bad enough.
But hurting Stacey was the hardest of all of this. I had to. I had to sever the line completely, so she’d never want me back. It was a dick move and selfish of me, but that’s me, a major dickhead.
Getting in my car, I still can’t believe I’m doing what I’m doing. Going to visit my parents is the last thing I want to do, but it’s fucking Christmas, and apparently, that’s the shit you do on the holidays—visit family and pretend you like each other.
Who am I kidding? This is a total fake Christmas. My parents went to Monte Carlo for the week between Christmas and New Year, so they’re having a celebration now with their only son to make up for it.
Gee, aint that sweet?
Their new house is in Silicon Valley. A Spanish-style mansion in a gated community, surrounded by palm trees.
I ring the bell and have to stand there for a solid three minutes while I wait for someone to answer the door.
“Wesley,” my father says when he finally does.
He’s wearing his golf attire, which is interesting because it’s supposed to be a holiday dinner. Even I came in fucking slacks.
“Hey, Dad.” I hand him the bottle of wine I brought. It’s a three-hundred-dollar vintage he likes. When I went to the Brightmores’ for Thanksgiving, I brought a hundred-dollar-bottle that Laura raved about all night. I doubt my dad will even uncork this one.
As the door closes, I notice he’s staring at me with raised brows, like he’s waiting for me to announce something.
I hold my arms out in confusion. “What’s up?”
“What’s up with you?”
“Nothing.” I search around. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Do you need money?” His words are said slowly.
“No.”
“Then, why are you here?”
The breath I take is so deep that my nose is suctioned to my face. “Because you invited me over for Christmas.”
He snaps his fingers, as if he just remembered something. “That’s right. We were going to do our little holiday thing today. That was on the calendar, but it was canceled. Did your mother not tell you?”
“What?” My chest starts to pound as I clench my jaw. I just drove for almost two hours in horrible traffic to be here on time.
“She flew out to Vail. A friend of hers is opening a gallery—or is it a restaurant? I can’t remember. She took off two days ago, and I haven’t heard from her since. I probably won’t hear back from her until next month.” He levels his eyes with mine. “You know we were just together for a week. We needed a breather.”
“Can’t imagine why,” I grunt.
“Well, I have a tee time, but you’re welcome to stay and help yourself—”
“Can’t you stay? I drove over here for a holiday that you forgot to tell me was canceled. Least you can do is sit and have a drink with me.”
“Wesley, really. You know how I hate to cancel on Mike and the guys. It’s our bonding time.”
“Fine. I’ll see you after. We’ll have dinner.”
He doesn’t even pretend to be upset as he says, “I have dinner reservations with Pamela.”
I roll my eyes. Pamela is one of the women he’s been seeing. She’s an heiress from Santa Barbara. My parents won’t divorce because of how it will look in the eyes of the community, yet everyone knows they have a horrible marriage with multiple counts of adultery against the both of them.
I turn to leave. “Good seeing you, Dad.”
“Now, wait. I can spare about ten minutes. You’re here, and clearly, you want to talk. What’s going on with you? I haven’t heard from you since the alumni game.”
I stop on the cultur
ed stone walkway. “I took all my finals.”
“Aced them, I’m sure.”
“I think so. GPA is 3.7, last I checked.”
“Why not 4.0?” he has the nerve to ask.
I bite down and control myself. “Because I thought, Why would I want a perfect score when I could piss my dad off?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. You’ve always fallen just shy of perfection. If you just applied yourself and stopped partying, then you would be something.”
I grit my teeth as I take a deep breath and then shake my head. Fuck it. “Do you even hear yourself?”
“Yes. I’m telling my son if he applied himself, he could be great.”
“Why can’t I just be great? Every other parent looks at their kid like they’re the greatest creation in the world, and mine looks at me like a disturbance. A visitor who came in and ruined his afternoon plans because he came for fucking Christmas.”
His eyes narrow. “What has gotten into you?”
“Nothing. I should be used to coming here and getting the cold shoulder.”
“Well, maybe I’d be more receptive if you were choosing a better profession. A degree in social work is a waste of a Berkeley education.”
“I want to help people.”
“Then, help them as an attorney. A doctor. What will you make? Forty thousand a year? That’s not a way to sustain a lifestyle.”
“Not yours, but I’ll do just fine.”
He exits his house and steps closer to me. “That’s the problem with you, Wesley. You don’t think anyone has anything important to say but yourself.”
“Is that all?”
“No. Before you go, there are boxes in the guest room. They were your grandmother’s. Your mother said you should take them since you’re the only one who liked the old woman.”
Dad leaves, and I’m here, standing in a home I despise. Turns out, it’s not just my childhood home I can’t stand. It’s any home my parents occupy.
I don’t even know where the guest room is, so I walk around this vault of a home in search of it. I figure out which is my father’s bedroom and then my mother’s bedroom before I uncover the guest room with a box sitting on the bed. I sit down and take it in. It’s pretty big, and it seems to have been manhandled a bit.
Propping open the top, I look inside to see it’s filled with photo albums.
I’m surprised when I see how many of them are of me. I never knew what I looked like as a baby until my grandma showed me because my parents had zero pictures of me in their home.
Graduations and milestones, all of it is captured in pages of the albums, tucked inside plastic before printed photo books were a thing. She even saved the holiday cards I’d sent her over the years. My handwriting was chicken scratch over the construction-paper cards. My drawings were kinda cute though.
Grandma loved me. That’s probably the only thing that got me through. If there was one person who told me I was good, that I was perfect the way I was … it was her. That’s why I couldn’t let them toss her away when Alzheimer’s started to set in. I needed to see her, to remind her that she still had many good days left as well as a boy who loved her.
She told me hundreds of stories, making sure they were all passed down to someone since her own daughter didn’t have a care in the world about her or anyone else besides herself. I have them all though. Sometimes, I share them with my friends. I change the names and pretend they just happened, but they’re hers. Tales from a day where she ran wild in Los Angeles.
I open another box and see photos of her. A film actress in her youth, she was gorgeous. She could have been famous, but she met my grandfather and fell madly in love. They had my mother, and she chose to stay home to be a wife and a mother. How Mom ended up as selfish as she is, is beyond me. It’s why I lost hope in everything at all.
Another album has pictures of her wedding day. I never met my grandfather. He passed in a car accident when he was only thirty-seven, leaving my grandmother as a widow at a young age. Grandma talked about him like he was magnanimous. She was so in love.
We didn’t have any other family here, so she surrounded herself with friends. It was something she valued greatly in life. Friendships.
It’s funny; the day Chad and I became friends is probably the best and worst day of my life.
I was ten years old and riding my bike in town. I stopped at a store when I saw my father walking out of a restaurant. It wasn’t a usual occurrence for me to see my dad out and about, so I shouted his name.
He saw me, and instead of a smile that a father would have at seeing his son, he had a scowl. He was angry. Angry to see me.
He shooed me away, but I didn’t move. I didn’t understand why he wanted me to go. Like I was someone he didn’t know and he was embarrassed I was bothering him.
Confused. I was so damn confused.
And then the woman appeared. She walked out of the restaurant, saw my father, and smiled. He kissed her, acting as if he were leisurely waiting for her to come outside. He placed his hand on the small of her back as the valet brought the car around. When they got in and drove away, it was without a second glance in my direction.
That was the day I learned two things: My father was having an affair, the first of many. And he didn’t love me.
I was devastated. My shirtsleeve was a tissue as I walked my bike home. I didn’t even have the energy to ride on it.
Then, I saw Chad. I didn’t know where he had come from, but he was just standing there, watching me. If he had seen what my dad did, Chad never said.
All he did was say, “Hey. You go to my school.”
I nodded. “So?”
“I dunno. I just thought I’d say so.”
“Well, you said it, so move on.”
Yeah, I was a jerk back then too.
“All right. You wanna come over to my house?”
“Why would I do that?”
He shrugged as he brushed back his shaggy hair. “Because I have a trampoline in the backyard, and my mom says I can’t be too rough on it because my sister cries when I bounce too hard, but if I had a friend over, she’d let me bounce as high as I wanted.”
The kid had a trampoline? I was sold.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Cool! You play baseball? I just got a new glove. If you don’t have one, you can have my old one. I need someone to throw to. My dad kinda sucks, and I wanna be a Major League Baseball player when I grow up.”
The kid never stopped talking. I never stopped doing whatever kind of crazy thing he wanted to do next either.
That day, I made my one and only best friend. My brother.
I reach in the box and pull out a picture of Chad and me at a Little League game. I remember the first time Grandma met Chad. He rode his bike with me to visit her. She told me he was the forever kind. A true friend.
“Cherish someone like that,” she said one day when I was reliving stories of Chad and me.
“Everyone else teaches you family is the most important thing in life,” I said.
“Meh.” She brushed the notion away. “Blood is thicker than water, but water tastes better.”
I wish she were still alive. I need her guidance. I need her to tell me it’s okay that I want to be my own man. Congratulate me on my GPA or tell me how good my swing was. Not because I need the acceptance, which I do, but because hearing it from her made me feel like I was human. Like I mattered. The Brightmores made me feel that way too.
Now, that’s a family. Not just in the nuclear sense. They get their children and love them unconditionally.
I know that’s why I was so drawn to Chad all those years ago. I bet he doesn’t even understand why. As close as we were—and we were close—there were certain aspects of my life I kept inside.
The only other person I told was Stacey.
God, I miss her.
I haven’t been acknowledging that, for fear that I’ll do something stupid, like call her. I can’t. Chad was right. Just like
my dad was right. I’m selfish. I do what I want, and someday, I would have just hurt her.
To think, I almost told her I was ready to tell Chad about us. I wanted to give us a real shot, and then … I don’t know.
She never loved me. I saw the way she looked at me as I walked out the door. She was betrayed and disgusted, and she was right. I’m better off, staying away and bedding any other woman who walks in front of me.
What am I even doing?
I’m obviously not a man who deserves her if I’m hiding out and thinking these stupid-ass thoughts.
Grandma isn’t around to help me, and the only other person who I would turn to hates me.
Looking down at the picture of my grandparents, I stare at the man I never had a chance to meet and ask him his advice, “What the hell do I do?”
He doesn’t answer, but something inside me tells me I know exactly what needs to be done.
I reach for my phone and call Laura, Chad and Stacey’s mom.
“Hello, Wesley! How are you?” she sings into the phone, putting my worries instantly at ease.
“I’m good. Thank you for taking my call.” I lean forward on my knees, taking a deep breath.
“Oh, sweetheart. Why wouldn’t I take your call? I’ll admit, I was surprised. Is everything okay?”
A slight laugh escapes my lips. “Have they not told you everything?”
“Quite the opposite actually. Stacey is … well, I can’t speak on her behalf, Wes. I hope you understand.”
I rub my hand down my face. “I do, ma’am. I actually have something else to ask you.” My hand is shaking as I rake it through my hair. Unsure of exactly what I want to know from her, I ask the first thing that comes to my mind, “Why did you take me in all those years ago?”
“Take you in? I’d hardly call having my son’s friend over as taking you in.”
My heart drops into the pit of my stomach. I grab it and let out a hard breath.
Laura sighs. “Do you remember that time you and Stacey tried to save the wetlands?”
“It was for a high school project. We got an A-plus.”
“Not then. Years before. They had put up a sign that there was a new development going up. Stacey was livid. She came home and was ranting and raving about the ecosystem, the animals, the environment. There was nothing I could do to change the mind of my impassioned daughter. So, I took her around the neighborhood to get signatures to stop the development. And would you believe who we saw while getting signatures? This handsome young boy with brown hair and a lopsided grin. You came up to us and asked if we’d sign your petition to stop the redevelopment of the wetlands. Well, Stacey was up in arms because someone else was beating her to saving the wetlands!”
Rebel Roommate: A Brother's Best Friend Romance Page 19