Not My Prince: A Dark Bully High School Romance

by L V Chase

I can’t believe you told the school I was bullying you.

  Thought a city girl could take a joke better than that.

  You think I was mean before? I can ruin you.

  I haven’t told anybody about anything. I learned long ago that you fix your own problems or you shut up. Ratting another student out at my old school was practically the worst thing you could do, a surefire way to guarantee a fresh set of scars, or worse.

  Grayson snatches my phone, tossing it down on the counter. “When you’re in front of a man, you give him your full attention.”

  “Well, when I’m finally in front of a man, I’ll keep that in mind,” I say.

  “Cute,” he says. “Serve me the drink you offered. The glasses are in the cabinet to the left of the stove.”

  I fill him a glass of water, trying to push Aurora from my mind. I bring the glass over to him, touching his knee as I set it down in front of him.

  “Is that supposed to tease me?” Grayson asks, rapping his fingers against the metal table.

  “If I wanted to tease you, I’d talk about your clothes,” I say. “You know you can buy a plain white t-shirt for five dollars? How much more did you have to pay for that logo?”

  “Enough to keep you on your knees for a week,” he says. “Now, hand the glass to me again, but treat it like it’s an offering.”

  I pick up the glass. I take a long drink from it, keeping my eyes on him the whole time. I set the glass down for him again and kneel in front of him. I press my hands together in prayer.

  “Please, please, Lord Voss. Answer my prayer and banish every man from this earth.”

  He gazes at me. For once, he’s not angry. “Stand up.”

  I stand. Maybe I’m getting tired, but it’s getting easier and easier to just obey him. On some level, I could see myself enjoying this dynamic with someone I actually trusted. After all of the bad decisions in my life—like getting drunk with Aurora or trusting her at all—letting someone else have all of the control would be a blessing in the right circumstances.

  “Turn around,” he says.

  I slowly turn around. His fingertips trail down my back. They stop at the waistline of my jeans. He tugs me back. I trip, falling onto his lap. His arm quickly wraps around my abdomen, his other hand on my throat. He doesn’t tighten his grip, but the pressure of his hand is heavy enough that I’m certain he can feel my pulse skyrocketing. His lips move near my ear. I try to pull away, but the position of his hand and arms restrains me too well.

  “You know there’s nothing you can do. Why keep fighting?”

  “To piss you off,” I say. “The real question is why you’re doing all this. Aren’t there lines of prettier girls waiting for you to give them stripper lessons?”

  “I need you to fit in,” he says, his thumb stroking down the center of my throat. “Do you know why this school is so famous? Why it’s so successful? Because everyone knows her place. You don’t. You need to become part of the group. Do your job, and everything else will click into place.”

  His answer sounds like bullshit, but it makes more sense than anything else I could come up with. If I fit in with everyone else here, it means I’ll fawn over him like all of the other girls. I’ll drop to my knees, ready to suck his dick like that girl in the tunnels.

  He pulls his hand and arm away from me. He pushes me up, and I stumble back onto my feet.

  “You should go,” he says. “It’s late. Don’t you have homework to do? After all this effort to better yourself, you wouldn’t want to flunk out.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck you too,” I mutter, grabbing my bag and walking away.

  I don’t look back. I swear I felt his cock getting hard underneath my ass. I’d like that, making him lose control.

  The first thing I hear in the dining hall the next morning is a loud voice, deep and bitter, cutting through the low rumble of whispering and cooking. I take a few steps deeper into the building. The students here like to backstab, but they aren’t exactly the type to go for a full-frontal confrontation. I don’t know why they’d start acting that way at seven-thirty in the morning.

  Near the center of the hall, an older man is facing away from me. Aurora is in front of him, her eyes glossy as she looks up at the man. She’s trembling.

  “You’re worthless,” the man spits out. “It took me decades to build a legacy and you, like a fucking moron, try to ruin it over some trailer trash. If people think I can’t keep my children in line, do you think they’ll be afraid of me? What will they think, Aurora? Answer me!”

  Aurora flinches as his hand swipes upward in emphasis. I take a few steps closer to them. The man is Lawrence Voss. He looks exactly like the photo from the article my mother had shown me. Aurora appears more realistic and Grayson more enticing, but Lawrence is the same—large than life with an iron fist.

  “I-I didn’t d-do anything,” Aurora stutters.

  “Bullshit,” Lawrence snarls. “You’re a goddamn liar just like your mother, but you’re even shittier at it. Do you think I’m happy constantly cleaning up your messes? The damn dog causes fewer problems than you, but we can’t expect everyone to be as smart as a Tibetan mastiff, can we?”

  Aurora looks like she’s barely holding it together. Her whole body is shaking and slowly slumping down. But all of her friends are staring down at their untouched food, and everybody else is pretending to be fascinated by their breakfast or deeply invested in what’s on their phone.

  “Every day, you become more of a disappointment.” Lawrence shakes his head. “If I knew you’d be this pathetic, I’d have told your mother to get an abortion, and you’d never—"

  “Hey!” I cut him off, walking straight up to him.

  Aurora steps aside, a trail of tears starting down her cheeks. Lawrence looks down at me with pure disdain.

  “Get off her back,” I say. “What kind of man needs to insult his daughter to feel better about himself? She isn’t the one ruining your legacy. You’re doing it right now, embarrassing yourself in front of a bunch of teenagers.”

  His face turns deep red. “Little girl, you think you can talk to me like that? This is a family affair. Mind your own business, and I’ll mind mine.”

  “Family affair? Is that what you call it? Because all I see is a senile asshole picking on his own kid to make up for the fact that he can’t get it up anymore.”

  He lurches toward me, but I don’t flinch. All these men act the same. They’re always puffing out their chest, but there’s nothing behind it.

  “I won’t argue with dredge,” he says. He looks back at Aurora. “And you’re barely any better. Don’t bother crying to your mother about this. She knows you deserve this.”

  He bumps into my shoulder as he walks past me. As everyone hears the front doors slam shut, the dining hall bursts back to life. I rub my shoulder as Aurora wanders through the tables, wiping at her face. She leaves the hall, heading toward the bathrooms.

  I take a few steps toward her. Despite everything that’s happened between us, I can see why she might have become so cold and calculating. If I can get through to her now, I might be able to save us—save myself from her wrath and save her from taking her father’s ugly words as facts.

  Someone grabs my wrist. I recognize the grip as Grayson’s before I turn and see his face.

  “That was fucking stupid,” he says. “He’s never going to forget that you tried to humiliate him in front of others. He’ll make you pay, and, quite frankly, you can’t afford the price.”

  I stare at him. Lawrence is Grayson’s father as well. It doesn’t excuse his behavior, but I’m seeing him differently now. I can see someone struggling under the mask of cold cruelty he likes to wear. Maybe he could be saved from his father, too.

  Or maybe I’m a naive idiot.

  19

  Grayson

  I stroll into the classroom. Hessler, a balding short man, is in the middle of fiddling with the LCD projector. The screen's pulled down, the window blinds are shut, and eve
ryone's watching the economics teacher unplug and plug in a bunch of black and gray cables. Hessler doesn't even look at me as I come in late and take my seat at the back of the class.

  "There we go," Hessler says as the projector lights up, displaying a blue background with faint text on the screen. He moves towards the light switch and turns them off.

  I sit in the darkness, barely hearing a word he says as more text and graphs appear on the screen. I'm thinking about her, almost chuckling to myself.

  She really had the guts to stand up to Dad. Cin versus Dad. Did she even know who Dad was, who he really was, and what he was willing to do? His plans for girls like Cin?

  Somehow, I think she still wouldn't back down. Hell, she might fight harder, the way she was.

  I shake my head. It's a damn shame. I'll have to break her, remake her if she's going to have a chance with anyone else. She'll scare all the nicer guys away, the ones that would give someone like her a chance to be their Cinderella.

  I change my position in my seat so that I'm sideways, leaning against the backrest with my left side, my dangling arm tapping the plastic surface.

  Fuck, why am I doing this again? Is this really to keep her out of Brady's hands? I’ve been telling myself that I’m doing her a favor, but I can't stand the idea of anyone else, even if it's some smiling softy pansy, laying a hand on her. Maybe that's why I've got to do this.

  I'm already thinking about her too much. She's poisoned honey. Grayson fucking Voss is not going to pine away for some nobody from nowhere. I just have to think about Trisha and Aurora. And my dead mother. Is that what I want? Hell, no. I slap the side of the seat, hard. The droning hum from the front of the class stops.

  "Grayson?" Hessler asks.

  "Nothing," I say. "Had a bug buzzing around me."

  "I can buzz, too, if you'll slap me," a girl's voice calls out from the darkness. The voice is familiar, but I don't keep track of the names half the time.

  A few people giggle.

  "Buzz, buzz," someone else says from the seat behind. Kayla, I think it was.

  "I might take you up on that," I say. "After class, though. Go on, Hessler. Don't mind me."

  "Er, thank you, Grayson." Hessler goes on lecturing.

  Class goes by quickly. Kayla massages my shoulders to make it pass even more quickly, which eventually involves sliding one hand down the front of my shirt and whispering to me in the darkness that her other hand is down her pants. Before it's all over, she holds a finger under my nose. I smell the sweet musk.

  "Taste me," Kayla coos into my right ear.

  All I can remember is the way Cin smelled when we took her out into the tunnels at night. She was standing there with nothing but her oversized shirt. Kayla's scent fills my nose. It's…wrong. I get up and leave even though class isn't over.

  Eric's in English. I head over to his class and rap on the door's glass window. The teacher, a graying tall woman with small gray glasses, opens the door.

  "Yes...oh." She turns to the class. "Eric?"

  Eric's looks like he's playing some kind of cross between strip poker and a ring toss in the corner of the room, laughing loudly with four other girls. I think the frazzled teacher's relieved that he's leaving.

  Eric looks up at me, twirling a lacy black bra by its strap around one finger. All the girls still have their outer clothes on, but various colored bras and panties are looped onto his arms like streamers on a Christmas tree.

  "Gray, want to join us?" Eric asks.

  The old teacher's eyes widen in sheer terror.

  "No," I reply. "You hungry yet?"

  "I'm always hungry," he says, licking his lips while eyeing the nearest girl, a brunette in a short pleated black skirt that barely covers her ass.

  "Let's go." I wait in the hallway, giving Eric time to say his goodbyes, because god knows he loves to say loud goodbyes.

  Sure enough, there's a scream, followed by another, although they're thrilled, wild screams, not frightened ones. I don't bother to see what Eric's up to. He soon steps out into the hallway.

  Eric's going on about how you can tell what kind of woman someone is by the type of panties she wears. He has this complicated theory that doesn't make any sense to me. He's always bullshitting like that. I just listen along and nod, the same as I do to Hessler and the others.

  "Not too far one way or the other," Eric says. "Like if she's got a thong, yeah that's better than a pair of grannies, but you know the real deal, the freakiest ones that’ll do anything? They've got those church-type panties, but not white. White's no good, but when it's the same color as her lipstick, jackpot. The problem is that amateurs don't know the difference between grannies and churchies. You know what it is? It's some subtle shit."

  "No, what is it."

  We turn the corner way to the dining hall, when Eric slows.

  "Gray." His rapid-fire chatter stops like that.

  I look up to find Dad standing in the middle of the hallway with crossed arms. He's in a gray suit with his back's turned to us.

  "We going? Or..." Eric lets it hang. He knows better than to probe too much into Dad and me.

  Eric thinks I'm in trouble, which is probably right, although I'm not sure what the fuck this is about. I don't even know why he’s at school in the first place. He could have just called if he wanted something from me or Aurora.

  "It's alright." I walk forward, and Eric follows. "Dad," I call out.

  Dad takes his time turning around. He gives Eric a tight smile. "I need a word with Grayson."

  "Sure thing, Mr. Voss," Eric says.

  For once, Eric acts serious and respectful. I have to hand it to Dad. He can even keep Eric in line with one look, something most adults couldn't do without a pair of brass knuckles. And even then, he wouldn't go down quietly. Kind of like Cin, now that I think about it, although she'd probably say I'm crazy comparing her to my best buddy.

  "Later." Eric waves and heads back down the hallway.

  "What's going on?" I ask Dad.

  "Is there somewhere quiet, where we won't be disturbed?" Dad asks.

  "The library," I reply immediately. "Ally's the only busy body there, but she takes off for a break at noon. It's dead empty during lunch."

  "The McCulloch girl?"

  I'm surprised that he knows her by name, but I suppose that it’s his business to know. They're competitors, not head-to-head, but in their own way.

  "Yeah. It's this way."

  Dad takes long, fast steps at my side. Even though I'm supposed to be the one leading the way, someone watching would think it's the other way around. He's probably not even trying to teach me a lesson or anything. It's just the way he always is, the way I should be, too.

  Once we're in the library, I do a quick check to make sure no one's around.

  "Looks empty," I tell Dad, who nods.

  "Good." Without any warning, Dad slugs me in the stomach, hard, with a balled-up fist.

  I bend over, clutching myself as Dad kicks me in the legs.

  "That's for embarrassing me in public," he growls.

  "The fuck?" I manage before he kicks me again. He tries to kick me in my lowered head, but I cross my arms so the blows land on them instead.

  He's not holding back. I grimace from the pain across my legs, arms, and side, a surge of rage welling up inside. I'm an inch away from lunging and tackling him to the ground. He wants embarrassment? I'll give him fucking embarrassment.

  "It's your fault," Dad says. "It's your job as a man to keep that worthless girl of a sister in line. So, when she's causing problems, it's on your head."

  Aurora? This is about Aurora? Dad catches me off guard and clips me on the edge of my chin, jamming my teeth shut with a loud click. I take three more kicks to the arms before I manage a reply.

  "If she's my sister, you're her father," I say. "If you can't keep your little girl in line, that's your problem. Not the first time, either, is it?"

  His reply is another flurry of kicks into my ribs a
nd legs. I almost fall over, but I hold my ground, taking the punishing blows. I could take him if I wanted, but now that I know what this is about, I'll know it'll only make him take it out harder on Aurora.

  I don't even like Aurora. She's irritating, not to mention that bitch Trisha's daughter. And I know Dad has plans for her, but there's cruel, and then there's fucking evil. As much of a bitch Aurora is, there are some lines I don’t want to cross. I know Dad doesn't have the same limits, and I don't want to push him past them. Or maybe I’m just worried that once Dad crosses certain lines, there’s no going back for any of us, me included.

  So, I take the kicks silently. I got my one word in to show I wasn't backing down. It's good enough.

  After a minute, Dad stops. He's bent over, panting like he was the one that got beaten, not me. I wince as I test my side. Nothing's broken, as far as I can tell. He hits don't hurt as much as they used to, either. He's getting old.

  I stand up tall, not even breathing hard. I crack my shoulders. "You done?" I ask.

  He used to say the same to me when I was a little brat trying to fight him. He'd take all my puny six-year-old punches, then smile, ask me if I'm done, and proceed to beat me soundly.

  There's a crack in his stony face, just a crack. For one brief moment, he might have looked worried that I was about to give him what he deserves. But I don't. He knows what I can do, and that's enough for now. He knows he can't break me, not directly like that, but I if I wanted to, I could take him.

  "You done?" I repeat quietly, pretending that my body's not burning with pain and fury.

  "Get that insolent smirk off your face," Dad replies as he straightens out the knot of his dark red tie. "And get your damn women in order. I won't have my son turn into a pussy."

  He leaves without another word. When's he's gone I head over to a wooden chair to sit, but a shuffling sound catches my attention.

  Someone's here.

  Despite my aching body, I dash over to the area where the noise seemed to come from. There are large shelves with some kind of archives or storage. Thick dusty volumes and large metal filing cabinets. I run past one row, then the second, to find her.