“Oh, shit, I was kidding. So, she’s a hottie?”
“I’m only tutoring her.”
He can see I’m lying, so he starts to get animated, gesturing with his arms and tapping his foot. “Ah, you like this one.”
“I dunno. M-maybe.”
“She a blonde, brunette, redhead? Nice tits?”
“Jesus, this is why I h-hate telling you anything.”
He gets up to get two beers from the fridge and throws one at me. “Yeah, but you still do. Because you know your bro always has the answers.”
I laugh. “Shut up. She’s smart. And f-funny. And very direct.”
Jude twists the cap off his beer and takes a swig. He gets a drop on his chin but wouldn’t dream of wiping it on his sleeve. Instead, he grabs a napkin and dabs at it. “Mmm, I like direct. And a bit mouthy.”
I can tell his thoughts have drifted to a specific girl. Good. I hope it’s someone as amazing as Lizzie. He deserves that.
I set my beer down on the table. “But seriously. H-how do I avoid completely messing this up?”
“For starters, have some confidence. You’re my brother, for Christ’s sake.”
Easy for him to say. When Jude was sixteen, our high school English teacher hit on him. Surprisingly, even he knew that was creepy. Point is, Jude is like catnip for women—confident, good-looking, and uncomplicated. Or at least he lets them believe that, and they don’t bother to dig too deep because they like what’s on the surface a lot. Jude has decided that women are for recreational use only—like pot or a basketball. He and I don’t see eye to eye on this. It’s true he’s never disrespectful, never mean or abusive. He doesn’t trash-talk about girls or do anything pervy, and they’re using him too. But to me, withholding yourself from other human beings is its own particular form of selfishness and punishment. I know why he does it, but it bothers me.
“Are you still h-hooking up with that girl? She sounds nice-ish,” I say, because I don’t want to talk about myself anymore.
“Megan? Eh. I’m going to dial that back. She won’t exactly be heartbroken, which is good.”
“Don’t you ever want someone to hang out here with you? To spend the night? I can vacate.”
“No,” he says, his voice firm. I wish he were lying.
The next morning, as I head out for class, he pulls me into a hug.
“Just be yourself, Ry. Then it will all be fine.”
I’m sad no one but me will ever see who Jude really is.
CHAPTER 3
Jude
I have the house to myself tonight. Cum over and service me, Megan texts me.
Like I’m her personal fuck toy. If I had known Megan was so exhausting when she hit on me, I never would have taken her up on it. She’s only twenty-two, but I’m fairly certain she’s worked her way through most of this town and all it has to offer. I admire that she knows what she wants, but I don’t need to be in the path of that particular tornado.
Yesterday, she wanted to have sex in the copy room at work. Bad enough I broke my rule about sleeping with someone from the office; no way would I screw her in the building.
Still, I’m bored, and one final hookup won’t hurt.
Be over in an hour, I type.
I’ll tell Megan tonight that we should stop seeing each other. I already know she won’t care, thank God. Maybe I can try staying friends with her—or not.
She texts me a winky face.
Damn, she makes me feel old. I may only have four years on Megan, but I’ve spent them so differently than she has.
I barely remember a time when I wasn’t responsible for Ryan. Walking him home after school, getting him a snack, making sure he did his homework. I would complain to Mom sometimes. “Why does he always have to tag along? Why can’t someone else watch him?” But he’d stare at me with those big brown eyes and ask me to teach him to skateboard, and I’d feel kind of proud. Ryan finally got old enough that he was fun to hang out with, and we’d go fuck around the neighborhood with other kids, doorbell ditching, playing football. Despite our age difference, he was my best friend. Still is.
Right before Mom died, she asked me to take care of Ryan, and that changed things. Hard to be a friend—or even an older brother—to someone when you feel like their dad. I tried to remind myself daily that I wasn’t his father—I could never be. But when Ryan got hurt, I was the one that drove him to the emergency room. I made him soup when he had the flu. Ryan’s well-being became the only thing I could focus on, and it kept me sane. I wouldn’t trade my life for Megan’s, but to say hers has been less complicated is an understatement.
Thinking about complications brings to mind Elizabeth, with the Rapunzel hair and sassy mouth. When I met her last week, it felt a bit like putting on a condom: uncomfortable, maybe even painful, but worth the effort. I know I insulted her. I probably should have apologized, but chances are good I’ll never see her again. That thought makes me both relieved and irritated. If she had taken me up on my offer, I could have had a hot round with her, gotten it out my system and been done with it.
Maybe it’s the challenge drawing me in like a bee to honey. I haven’t had that in a long while. Ryan would say I’m an asshole for admitting that, but he doesn’t know how boring it is to never have to work for it that hard. And the kinds of women who are a challenge don’t want a guy like me. Fair enough.
I pull up to the curb outside Megan’s Spanish-style apartment, which she shares with Angel. This would be a hell of a lot easier if I could bring women home with me. I know Ryan’s not a kid anymore, and that he wouldn’t care, but I can’t shake the feeling my mom wouldn’t like me parading girls around the house. Plus, it keeps things from getting messy.
Maybe if Ryan had a girl, I wouldn’t feel as guilty. Fuck if I know how he’s going to get one, though. With his lack of confidence, I’m amazed he meets anyone. Ryan’s dated before—even had a long-term thing in high school—but it’s like every time he finds a girl he’s attracted to, he’s starting from scratch. Sounds like maybe this new chick is promising. Definitely has him all bunched in a twist.
I knock on the door. When it opens, Elizabeth is standing on the other side. I have to blink a couple of times. She’s wearing jean shorts, and her hair is in two long braids—like a hot milkmaid.
“You,” she says. Her frown makes it clear she’s not happy to see me either.
“Elizabeth,” I say in greeting as I move past her into the house.
“It’s Lizzie.”
“I don’t think so.” Only a woman who doesn’t take herself seriously would use “Lizzie” when she was named after a queen. I can feel her throwing off anger behind me, and that delights me.
I see Angel and Sam off to the left in the front room, and Megan is straight ahead in the kitchen. Before I can say hi, she runs toward me, full of energy. Her eyes are glassy, and her cheeks are red, so she’s already had a few drinks. “Oh, my God, I forgot Angel was having poker here tonight,” she says.
“I didn’t know girls even played poker.”
Angel, Sam, and Elizabeth all turn to stare at me as if I have two heads. “Vanessa Selbst ring any bells for you, dillweed?” Elizabeth says.
Hearing this come out of her mouth is a massive turn-on. I love poker—all cards and games, actually. Maybe it was those old TV show reruns where the parents always had gin-rummy parties, but there seems to be something so normal about playing games as a group. So I know Vanessa Selbst has won a lot of money at professional poker tables. I just didn’t know that college girls would know that.
“What the hell is a dillweed?” I ask, and the girls all laugh, Elizabeth louder than the others.
Her face lights up when she laughs, and it seems like an excellent time to get the hell out of here. “Why don’t we go out?” I ask Megan.
“We have space at the table. Too afraid to play with the girls?” Angel dares me. I could pick Angel up and toss her across the room, yet she still kind of scares me.
&nbs
p; “No throwing punches tonight, Angel,” Elizabeth says.
“She can’t even reach my face, so I’m not that worried.”
Elizabeth’s lips curl up in a delicious smile. “Never underestimate her. The night I met Angel, we were at a bar and some guy grabbed her butt. She winked at him, ordered a vodka, took a sip, and threw the rest in his face. All hell broke loose, and she’s been my hero ever since.”
“Sounds about right,” I say.
“Alright, enough already,” Angel says, waving her hands at us to stop. But I can tell she’s proud of her reputation.
We head to the card table the girls have laid out in the front room. Could be fun taking their money tonight.
After a couple of hours, that fantasy is gone because I am losing my shirt. Megan and Sam are not a challenge. Sam still needs to reference the chart of what beats what, for God’s sake, and calls clubs “clovers.” But Angel and Elizabeth are good. Plus, I can’t stop noticing the way Elizabeth tosses her braids over her shoulders, and I get distracted.
Sam and Elizabeth chitchat about the medical field, since they are apparently premed and nursing majors. Most of it goes over my head, and I try to keep it that way since I hate hospitals and everything related to them. But words like “hospice” and “acute care” are invading my peace, so I finally cut them off.
“Wait. Why the fuck do both of you want to work around sick people all the time?”
Sam starts to say something about helping people who need it the most, while Elizabeth stares at me and thinks before she answers. This gives her the upper hand because she refuses to be baited. I have never seen someone besides Ryan do this, and I can’t take my eyes off of her.
“Because someone needs to,” she says, and it feels like that moment when you get the last piece of a Rubik’s Cube into place.
“Check this out,” Angel says, startling me. “My mom just sent it.” She passes around her phone, which has a picture on it of a huge group of people smiling for the camera. They all look vaguely like Angel.
“Is that your family? There are so many of them,” I say.
She laughs. “They’re in Mexico. I miss them. What about you? You have a big family?”
“Why? You hoping there are some brothers like him back home?” Megan teases, saving me from providing a vague, awkward response. I never talk about my family. Period.
All the girls laugh, because the thought of Angel and I dating is like imagining a bulldog and a Chihuahua going at it. And I know I’m the Chihuahua in this situation.
“Angel’s taken. And Lizzie doesn’t need help finding a guy, either.” Sam runs a hand through her dark, pin-straight hair. “I am apparently the only one at this table who cannot get a penis of her own.”
“Even Jude could get one if he wanted to,” Megan says, tossing back the last of her beer. “With that face, who’s going to say no to a quickie? But I bagged him first, ladies.”
Elizabeth looks disgusted—why, I don’t know. Maybe because Sam used the word “penis.”
“Whose lucky dick are you taking for a joyride these days, Elizabeth?” I try to keep it light, but I really want to know.
She glares at me. “No one’s.”
“Yet,” Sam says and laughs. “She’s setting a honey trap for a guy in one of her classes.”
“Here’s a tip: College guys shouldn’t need that much encouragement. He’s probably either gay or uninterested, if he hasn’t closed the deal yet.”
The girls laugh and shake their heads, but Elizabeth narrows her eyes, which doesn’t bode well for me. “Not everyone uses girls like Kleenex.”
Luckily, Megan is too drunk by this point to realize she’s been insulted as well. “You’re hitting it hard tonight,” I say as she opens another beer.
“I’m taking a breather.” She raises her bottle in a salute, but tips to the side.
“Oh s-s-shit, I should get to bed,” she slurs.
That’s my cue to be a gentleman, which I try to do on occasion to balance my karma. “Say good night, Cinderella.”
Megan waves to the girls as I lift her out of her seat and carry her up the stairs. I tuck her in, but I don’t have sex with her as she requests. I’m not that guy. I may never be the guy, but I’m still not that guy. I kiss her forehead and tell her good-bye, knowing that from here on out, we’ll probably be casual friends at best.
When I get downstairs, Sam is gone and Elizabeth is helping Angel clean up the card table.
“Sam had to run to the hospital. Can you give Lizzie a ride home?”
Elizabeth doesn’t seem pleased, but she doesn’t say anything.
My thumbs are drumming a beat out on my thighs. “No problem.”
Angel sees us to the door and says good night. We head down the driveway to my Audi, walking in awkward silence.
“You’re not bad at poker,” I say, knowing damn well this will get a rise out of her.
As I open the passenger door for her, I smile so she knows I was kidding.
“Jackass,” she says with a smirk as she shuts the door on me.
I get behind the wheel, and the engine starts with a purr.
“Nice car.” She runs a finger over the dashboard.
“Thanks.”
“I have to crank my Honda a few times to get it started. At least I don’t have to worry about it breaking down in the snow here. But yours is so shiny.”
“I get it waxed.”
She laughs, and the sound is warm and husky and slithers down my neck. “Of course you do,” she says.
She tells me where she lives on campus and sits and stares out the window as I navigate.
“Sorry we screwed up your night,” she finally says, reverting to what I can tell is her norm: polite, thoughtful, and a bit distant.
“It’s fine. Megan and I are only friends.”
“Sure. I’ve seen all my friends naked.” Her eyes start to close as she leans against the window.
Something comes over me, watching her like this—sleepy, vulnerable. “Why so tired?”
“I’ve been working extra shifts, and my classes are ridiculous this semester.”
“Do you graduate this year?”
“Nursing is a five-year program. So one more year to go after this one. I’ll be hanging on by my fingernails until then.”
“And then back to Utah?”
Her eyes open and she gets a faraway look. “I don’t know. I love the weather here. The food, the people. My life. But I miss my family.”
“I picture, like, a hundred of you living up in the mountains in a commune or something.” I make a right turn, taking the long way back to campus.
“Way to stereotype. We’re not Mormons, which is what I know you’re assuming. We’re more like “Jack Mormons,” which means we broke from the church a couple generations back.”
“Big family though, right?”
“Yeah, there are seven of us, including my parents. We live on a big plot of land, so my brothers and I ran wild—kept each other entertained. We didn’t have TV. We almost never went to the movies. We did lots of outdoor activities as a family—hiking, biking, road trips, stuff like that.”
This makes a lot of sense, because she doesn’t speak like most girls her age, and she is sort of a nerd. But that’s probably why she’s more interesting, too.
“So deprived. No television,” I say.
She takes a good, hard look at me. The last time she did this, she made me feel stripped down to the skin, and I didn’t like it.
“Ooookay, someone has a chip on his shoulder.”
“I was kidding.” I fiddle with the heating system.
“Nuh-uh.” She shakes her head, and one of her braids flips back and forth.
“That’s your argument?”
“You think I had it easy. That’s okay. I guess I used to. You’re the second person this week to point that out to me.” She turns toward me, and I can feel her staring.
“What do you mean you used to?”
I almost laugh but don’t. I’m a freak in comparison to this girl, with her big happy family. It’s nothing new. All through high school and college, people bitched about their parents and how much they sucked. They had no fucking clue how it feels to have empty photo albums your mom never filled. To fight through panic attacks alone when the world gets so scary you can’t breathe.
Or to celebrate year after year of milestones that remind you of what you’ve lost. On my twenty-first birthday, people kept telling me what a big deal it was. But Uncle Rob had been dead almost a year, it was only me and Ryan, and I had felt like an adult for a long time already. I was working my ass off while trying to get through endless fucking classes and papers, and I was burning out fast.
On the big day, Ryan baked me a cake, which cracked in half. He filled it with thick white icing, and tried to write “Happy Birthday, Jude” on it, but the “Birth” part fell into the crack. He bought a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store and made me Kraft mac and cheese with salad. And I loved him for it.
But Ryan wasn’t old enough to buy me drinks, so he forced me to go out that night with some guys from school. They took me to a couple of bars, and we kept ordering shots. They kept going on and on about girls and what their dream jobs were, as if I had time to think about any of that stupid shit. At one point, I was drinking shots out of some girl’s belly button, getting more and more depressed with each one. All I could think about were the endless days of work and struggle ahead of me, strangling me like a vise.
Later that night, I blacked out. My so-called friends took me home and left me passed out on my front lawn. Ryan sleeps like the dead, but luckily my neighbor came home late and called 911 when he saw the condition I was in. They pumped me full of fluids, gave me some oxygen, and prevented me from drowning in my own vomit. I woke up the next day in the hospital feeling like I was going to die, maybe wishing I had. Thinking that the burden my life had become was too much, too hard, too soon.
Then I thought of Ryan waiting at home, worrying, and I wanted to kick my own ass. I was all he had left, and here I was in a hospital gown feeling sorry for myself like a stupid fuck. I texted Ryan, called a cab, and hauled my ass home. When I walked in, I told Ryan I had slept it off at a friend’s house. Then he made me pancakes that I forced myself to eat but threw up afterward.
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