by Aubrey Irons
Yeah, mission accomplished.
I tell myself I was just curious when I stopped to watch him box.
I tell myself the heated feeling and the heaviness of my breath was just the humidity in the air, or me just being tired after a long night.
I tell myself it was Josh I was thinking about, because there’s no way Bastian Crown makes me wet.
No way. Not a chance.
I tell myself all these sweet, pretty lies and more as I try and fall asleep, twisting under the covers and squeezing my thighs together.
The lies don’t help.
They never do.
Present:
My dad’s old pickup truck rumbles to a stop in front of The Walrus - an old South Neck mainstay of a bar that’s been around forever. I shut off the engine, my head swimming even if the stiff drink I’ve come for hasn’t even touched my lips yet.
Bastian’s words are still ringing in my head like a horrible song on repeat as I blow into the bar like a storm hitting a shore.
I spent years shutting that night away. And then dragging it back out of the shadows and analyzing it, again, and again, and again, until it’s worn through.
Because for all of Bastian’s cruelness - for all of his perfection of his role as asshole extraordinaire, that night took the cake.
The night he humiliated me.
The night he found that one part inside of me he hadn’t dug into yet, teased it out of me with sweet whispered lies, and then stomped it into the ground.
The TV above the bar flickers, and for a second, I remember the flash of the camera. I remember the nervous smile dropping from my face like a stone. I remember the horror washing over me as I saw the stony indifference on his.
For about the millionth time, I wonder why the fuck I ever came back here.
“Anastasia Bell.”
My thoughts tumble back out of the memory, and my eyes dart from the glass of white wine in front of me up into the cool, piercing, gorgeous blue eyes of Tyler Van Der Haus.
I blink in surprise, startled by yet another ghost of the past. Another Prince of South Neck.
I never had much to do with Tyler, with him being part of Bastian’s crew of high school royalty. And he never had much to do with me, with me being, well, not.
I’m pretty sure neither of us lost sleep over that.
But rich, arrogant, charming prick or not, there’s no denying that Tyler Van Der Haus is gorgeous, in that kind of genetically unfair way that comes from generations of rich, physically perfect people having babies with other rich, physically perfect people. Piercing blue eyes, blond hair, sharp, aristocratic cheekbones and jawline, a perfect flash of straight white teeth in that Armani-model smile.
He’s like a pretty version of Bastian, really - Sebastian without the storm clouds.
He smiles that perfect grin at me, dimples and all - the kind of practiced, honed smiled that’s specially designed to make women’s pulses beat a little faster whenever he flashes it.
…And God damn if it doesn’t work.
I resist the instinct to smile back, though. I resist that part of me that wants to beam right back at this stupidly handsome man. Because this isn’t just “some guy” with a charming smile. This is one of the four Princes of South Neck, but I spent enough time living two hundred feet from their main castle, with their ridiculous parties, no rules lifestyle, and endless parade of girls to know them better as the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
“Tyler Van Der Haus,” I say evenly, my brow still slightly furrowed at actually seeing this man again, ever.
He grins a little wider as he nods his perfect chin.
“I’d heard you were back in town.” He brings his glass of what looks like scotch to his lips before he raises a brow and nods at the booth seat across from me. “Mind if I sit?”
I chew on my lip.
“Look, Ana,” his brow creases. “I owe you an apology.”
The guarded look on my face finally breaks, the smile coming through out of sheer curiosity.
“For?”
“Can I sit first?”
“Sure.”
He grins as he slides into the booth across from me before he clears his throat.
“I was a real dick in high school.”
“You were.”
He laughs. “And that wit hasn’t changed, I see. Look, I just saw you over here, and it brought back what a little shit I was back then. I just wanted to come over and apologize, and tell you I’m a way different guy now, that’s all.”
His eyes dart over my face before he nods crisply and starts to stand.
“Anyway, that’s all. Nice to see you, Ana. Enjoy your drink.”
He’s half-turned back to the bar when I purse my lips and shake my head.
“Hey, Tyler?”
He turns back.
“Thanks.” I shake my head. “Sorry, I’ve just had a weird day. You can totally sit and join me if you’d like.”
He grins, those perfect, sharp blue eyes twinkling. “I would like.”
In some ways, Tyler is right - he has changed from the arrogant little shit I knew from high school. In other ways, however, he’s exactly the same.
Other ways like the fact that he’s criminally charming. And damn if I’m not eating it right up. One drink turns into him insisting on buying me a second. He flashes that grin again as he comes back from the bar with it, and this time, it does more than make my pulse beat a little quicker.
He sits, rolling the sleeves of his perfectly tailored dress shirt up, the corded muscles of forearms rippling as he reaches for his scotch.
“All right, I have to ask.”
He gives me a curious look and I gesture around us at the dingy old, wood-beamed-ceiling of the Walrus with my eyes.
“Not exactly your speed, is it?”
He laughs. “I’m here all the time actually. It’s the first place in town that took cash instead of an ID when I was a teenager. Call it brand loyalty.”
I roll my eyes, but I laugh nonetheless.
We chat about what we’ve been doing since we were eighteen. I tell him about New York, and now LA, and my music. And he listens, raptly, nodding, and smiling, and laughing along with me. He tells me about starting the acquisitions firm with Dylan Forbes, and living in New York, and how he’s just home for a week visiting his mother - how he was engaged briefly a few years ago but now he’s not. And if you didn’t know us and just happened to be sitting at the table next to us, you’d assume we’d been the best of friends back in high school instead of at the opposite ends of the social spectrum.
The second drink goes down faster than the first, for both of us. But when he offers another round, I shake my head.
“No, thanks though.”
“Really? It’s early you know.”
There’s that crazy charming smile again - charming enough to almost make me forget that I’m sitting having drinks with one of the infamous Princes of South Neck.
“I know, I just—”
“We’ve still got the boat in the water at my mom’s place.” His eyes hold mine, just enough of a fire in them to make me shiver. “Got a stocked bar on there if I can interest you in a nightcap.”
Another night, on another boat, with another Prince - darker, more broken, more edged - flashes in my mind. But I quickly chase it away with the last of my drink. I raise my eyes to Tyler, biting my lip, but already knowing what I’m going to say, even if the wine, and that smile, and the pulse beating a little faster in my veins says otherwise.
“I- I should go home, actually.”
His brow furrows a little. “Something I said?”
I shake my head. “No, I just have a big day tomorrow.”
“Working for Crown.”
I shrug. “Something like that.”
He makes a tsking sound with his tongue on his teeth, leaning back in the booth and raking his fingers through his perfect hair.
“C’mon. One drink.”
“I c
an’t, sorry.”
The number of girls I went to school with who would - to this day even - lose their minds at me saying no to a drink on Tyler Van Der Haus’s boat, and everything that it implies, is almost amusing to me.
His eyes fiercely hold mine for another second or two, before he smiles, nodding.
“Okay, okay. I yield. You just—” he grins, shaking his head. “You look really great, Ana.”
I blush. “Thanks, Tyler.”
“So when’s the next night that fucker lets you off the leash? There’s no gardening at night.”
I laugh, shaking my head and searching for a way to even begin to answer that when he holds his hands up.
“Okay, tell you what. Just give me your number. I’ll text you mine, and you can call anytime you feel like taking me up on that nightcap.”
I nod, biting my lip. “Sounds good.”
We exchange numbers, Tyler gives me a hug that lasts a little longer than a normal one might, and then he’s gone.
I drive home slowly, my dad’s old Patsy Cline tape playing quietly through the rattily old speakers.
And I like this feeling. I like the flirtation, and the lingering smile still on my face, as bizarre as it is with someone like Tyler.
Relationships and I have never really gotten along, I guess. I have no idea what it is about me that sends men running away, but, that’s just the way it’s always been. There was Josh back in high school - the one I thought was the one. And I know how silly it is to think your high school boyfriend is “the one”, but I did. That is, until I walked in on him cheating on me with Kendra Wallace right before prom.
That one hurt. But I guess all first relationships hurt when they end.
There was Sean Harper, the captain of the football team, who, somehow for some reason, pursued me for half of senior year, even if I was the last girl he’d be seen with. He finally asked outright, I said yes, and then he never showed up. Never talked to me again, either.
That one I can chalk up to high school weirdness, or some bizarre prank or something. But since then, this has turned into a pattern in my life. I’ve had boyfriends, but it never takes. That, or guys just like to cheat on me for some reason.
Jason, freshman year of college and the boy I finally ended up losing my virginity to - though I never told him that - was around a while. A while until he suddenly decided to leave me for some girl from his lab sciences class and transfer to Colorado State with her. Garret, the cute boy with the man bun and the gorgeous forearms who played his own songs on the guitar on the same club circuit I did in New York stopped calling. Stole my favorite damn necklace, too.
And then there was Chris, in LA. Chris who I’d spent two years with. Chris who I lived with, whose family I spent Christmas with in Missouri last year. Chris whose stuff was out of our apartment one day about eight months ago, without a single word or sign of warning
“I’m feeling trapped. I just need a change, Anastasia.”
And just like that, two years comes to a close with a single phone call.
This is me. The very cheatable, very leaveable Anastasia Bell.
I know who Tyler Van Der Haus is. I’m not an idiot. I see the charming smile, the perfect hair, the twenty-thousand dollar wristwatch, the Amex black card he casually flashed when paying for our twenty dollar bar tab. I see the practiced, easy laugh, the suggestion of a nightcap, the casual-but-not-so-casual hug at the end for what it is.
It’s pursuit, and I know exactly the kind of guy Tyler is. Rich. Powerful. Used to getting what he wants. He might not be the royal prick he was back in high school, but I sincerely doubt he’s gone through any sort of momentous changes to who he is.
But, is that a bad thing?
I bite my lip, still thinking about it with a small glowing smile on my face as I climb the staircase by the kitchen back at the Crown Estate.
So what if Tyler’s basically a rich, handsome, two-dimensional lacrosse jock turned finance guy? So, yeah, a good-looking guy from high school wants to see me and get drinks on his boat sometime?
Yeah, color me interested.
I take a breath as I undo the buttons of my blouse, shrugging it off and reaching for a T-shirt from the top drawer of my dresser.
Or, at least, color me should be interested, right? I mean, a little fling of romance while I slave away for Bastian the Bastard might be exactly what I—
“Where the fuck have you been?”
I shriek, whirling at the sound of his voice from my doorway and clutching the T-shirt across my front.
“What the hell, Bastian!”
“Where.”
I swallow the heat from my face, my pulse hammering as I meet his eyes, not four feet from me.
“How long have you been standing there!”
“Answer my question.”
“No.”
He tenses, his dark, piercing eyes blazing.
“Answer me.”
“Get out of my room!” I spit, my voice feeling tight in my throat.
“My room, actually,” He says without blinking. “My house, my room. My rules.”
“What rules?”
“The rules that you fucking tell me when you’re going to be leaving.”
“You’re aware I’m not a slave, right?”
“And you’re aware that you are what I say you are, right?
I laugh, even though my blood is pounding in my ears, my body trembling under his ferocious gaze.
“Oh, and what am I, Bastian? Enlighten me.”
“Impossible,” he growls.
My smile fades.
“I was on a date, actually.”
The fire roars in his eyes. And somehow, I knew it would, even if I’m not sure why.
“With who,” he hisses through a clenched jaw. He’s without his cane this time, his hand clutching my doorframe instead with an iron, white-knuckle grip.
“None of your—”
“WHO!” he booms, his lips curling back in a ferocious looking snarl.
I swallow thickly, my whole body shaking a little at his sudden jump from asshole to terrifying. Where I was wasn’t a “date” by any metric, but something tells me that letting Bastian know I was out with one of his friends wouldn’t be a good idea.
“You don’t own me,” I say quietly in the ensuing silence.
“You keep saying that.”
“But you really don’t,” I spit back.
“Who.”
I bark a laugh. “Nine years later, and you're still mad that I was the one girl in school who wouldn’t fuck you, huh?”
I’m not sure what reaction I’m expecting. A grin isn’t it though.
Bastian chuckles, his eyes burning fiercely into mine. “That what you think this is? You think it was just a numbers game for me?”
“Wasn’t it?”
His smile holds, his eyes still blazing into mine. “No, Ana, it wasn’t.” He steps right into my room, and I gasp, taking a step back until I feel the dresser at my back.
I swallow, acutely aware that I’m topless with just a T-shirt clutched over my breasts as he advances on me.
“It was a power game.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“And you didn’t say no to me.”
I freeze, the memories of that one night coming rushing back.
The saying yes.
The ignoring every single warning bell in my head and saying yes to the very last man in the world I should have been saying yes to.
The camera flash, and the sickening embarrassment and dawning horror that followed
The tears the came after that.
Something hardens in my heart like it did those years before, and my face pulls back in a sneer as I glare right up into his smug, asshole face.
“Get the fuck out of my room,” I hiss.
Bastian doesn’t budge.
“You know, it doesn’t matter that you didn’t fuck me, Texas,” he purrs, grinning. “What matters is that we both know you wer
e ready to drop to your knees and worship my—”
I slap him.
Hard.
“Fuck you.”
He roars as he whirls back, rage billowing around him like a storm cloud.
“Do not do that again,” he growls.
I’m shaking my head, tears as hot and as bitter as the ones from that night threatening to spill down my cheeks.
“Why, Bastian?”
It’s the question I’ve never asked him.
“I mean what is wrong with you? Why the hell would you—”
“Do it?”
His lips pull back in a mirthless smile.
“Because I could, that’s why.”
He turns, his steps staggered without his cane.
“Oh, and Texas?”
He half-turns his head over his shoulder, though his eyes don’t meet mine this time.
“There’s a lot wrong with me. I thought you were smart enough to know that before you stepped onto that boat that night.”
10 Years Ago:
It was the routine that sucked after it was all over.
When you’re with someone, especially in high school, you have a routine. A schedule. Familiarity. With Josh, the routine was easy. He’d pick me up outside the front gates of the Crown Estate, drive me to Dunkin Donuts so I could get my coffee before he went to Starbucks to get his. We’d pull into the school parking lot, and if we had more than a few minutes before the first bell, we’d make out a little before homeroom.
We’d see each other between second and third period, and then again at lunch. After school, and after his lacrosse practice, we’d meet up again for more making out. I knew it’d get further than that soon, but, I wasn’t there yet, and Josh understood.
Or at least, I thought he did.
Because then was the day he wasn’t around after practice. Bastian, of all people, in some random bout of being a normal human, had given me a ride to Josh’s house. I’d walked right in, because why wouldn’t I have. I ignored the clues, because why would I be looking for them. And I even ignored the sounds as I walked up to his closed bedroom door, because why would I be hearing those sounds?