Crush (7 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

BRAD

Standing in the downstairs bathroom of Michael’s house, I fumbled with the hot water tap, trying to get the water in the shower to heat up. It was stone cold, and no amount of playing around with the taps seemed to be able to fix it. I thought I remembered Michael mentioning something about it being broken when I’d arrived in McComb the other night, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember exactly what it was that he’d said.

Oh well. I’d just have to use the upstairs bathroom. Thinking about that reminded me of when I’d gone upstairs after breakfast yesterday to see Mia washing her face and staring into the mirror, her face stricken. I had to admit, after the way she’d spoken to my Mom, I’d been royally pissed at her at first, but when I’d realized what her tantrum was about, I’d softened a little. Until yesterday, I hadn’t known exactly what happened to her mom, but Michael had taken me aside afterwards and explained that she’d died of breast cancer when Mia was only ten years old.

The grief that she tried so hard to hide had come to the forefront when she’d thought my Mom had replaced Michael’s old wedding pictures. No wonder she always had that sad tinge in her eyes. Her mother’s death still affected her a lot, and the shock of the new marriage had made it all well up inside her and flood out in a torrent of misplaced anger. I guess I couldn’t fault her for being human. Everyone screwed up and threw irrational tantrums occasionally, and while she’d been a bit of a bitch yesterday, I could see where her feelings were stemming from.

When I’d seen her in the bathroom, looking guilty as hell, I’d almost said something to her about it. I’d wanted to tell her that if she ever wanted to talk to me about her Mom, then she could feel free to do so, but I decided against it. She still didn’t like me, and I was probably the last person she wanted to talk to about it.

Still, I felt like I understood her a lot better now, and to be honest, letting out all her feelings in that crazy display yesterday seemed to have done her some good. She’d been much chirpier for the rest of the day, and her birthday dinner last night had run smoothly. Today had been much of the same. I hadn’t really spoken to her, but I’d noticed she’d spent a lot of time chatting to my Mom, and they seemed to be getting along really well now.

Grabbing my towel, I headed upstairs. The bathroom door was shut, but it wasn’t locked, so I assumed it was free.

Apparently not.

The minute I pushed the door open and entered, I saw Mia standing on the bathmat, soaking wet and stark naked. She’d obviously just stepped out of the shower, and little droplets of water ran down her sexy curves in rivulets, making her smooth skin shine. Goddamn…

As soon as she heard the door open and saw me standing there, she screamed and grabbed a towel off the rack on the wall. Fuck, I wished I was that towel, as creepy as that probably sounded.

“Brad! What are you doing in here?” she screeched, hastily wrapping the towel around herself. “Did someone leave your cage open?”

I chuckled at her cage comment. “Oh, ha
ha.
I couldn’t get the hot water working in the other bathroom. I think the shower is broken or something, so I thought I’d come in here. I had no idea you were in here.”

She glared at me and sighed heavily. “Ugh, you’re about as useful as a knitted condom. It’s not broken. There’s a switch right on the wall in that bathroom. If you turn it on, it activates the hot water booster.”

Useful as a knitted condom, huh? I had to admit, she was witty. I was definitely going to be adding that insult to my own repartee.

“Oh. Right. I forgot this place has solar hot water.”

She stood there with her eyebrows raised, and I realized I was still staring. “Er…sorry. I’ll go back to the other bathroom.”

She gave me a ghost of a smile. Even the tiniest of smiles from her was enough to make my pulse double. “No, it’s fine. I’m done anyway,” she said. “Sorry about yelling at you. I’m just not used to being walked in on when I’m naked. It’s kinda embarrassing. Dad’s always used the bathroom downstairs, so I’ve never gotten into the habit of locking the door.”

“Don’t be embarrassed. I’m sure no one would ever complain about seeing you naked.”

She rolled her eyes, and I could tell she was annoyed all over again. She’d tried to be nice for one second, and I was making lewd comments in response. Oops, my bad.

“Are you always a sleazy idiot, or just when I’m around so you can annoy me?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

There was a twinge in my guts as she spoke. I wasn’t stupid, but around her…well, I
was
an idiot, just like she said. I couldn’t help it. Every time she lit a room with that smile of hers, I was a goner. Every brain cell ceased to function, and that damn fine body of hers didn’t help matters one bit. Fuck, did I want to kiss her…but that ship had sailed.

Not that I hadn’t thought about it every day since I met her.

“Just when you’re around,” I finally replied in a joking tone, trying to defuse the awkward tension in the room. She didn’t need to know it was true. “Anyway, I forgot to ask you earlier, are you going to that party in Hattiesburg for Halloween? I thought I heard you talking about it on the phone this afternoon.”

“You mean the one at the Alpha Sigma Zeta frat house?” she asked, pulling her towel up even further around her body.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, I’m going. Why?”

“That’s my frat house. Got a date for it?”

She averted her eyes for a second. “Um…not sure yet. Maybe.”

“Cool. I have three,” I said jokingly.

“Three dates for the party? Please, the only date you could ever get is on a calendar.”

I laughed and then feigned a downtrodden expression. “Yeah, I know. I was kidding about the three dates. I’m actually wide open for that night…in case you know anyone who’s interested.”

I winked at her as I said that last part, and her eyes widened. “Um…I have to go find my pajamas,” she mumbled, hurrying out of the bathroom.

I watched her scurry down the hall like an irate crab, and I couldn’t help a little smirk from turning up the corners of my lips. That teasing comment of mine had totally gotten to her. Maybe there was something between us after all.

Not that it could ever happen.

She was my stepsister, and I didn’t want to do anything to create problems for my Mom in her new marriage. Michael made her really happy, and she deserved happiness after all the shitty luck she’d had with men until now. I guess I just had to push any feelings I had for Mia aside and pretend she wasn’t the sexiest girl I’d ever laid eyes on.

Fuck, that was going to be next to impossible.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MIA

“And this is why racial relations in Mississippi have been so different from those in other places in the States, such as California and New York. If we consider the context of…”

The professor droned on at the front, and I covered my mouth as I yawned. It was an interesting class, but I was dead tired. I’d ended up staying an extra two days in McComb to get some more quality time in with Dad and Karen, so I’d been up late last night driving back to Overton. By the time I’d made it back to my dorm, I could have slept for a year. Unfortunately, today’s eight A.M. class was compulsory.

Tamara was sitting next to me in the lecture theatre, a small laptop perched on the little flip desk that came up from the side of the seats. I stole a glance at the typed notes on her screen to see which areas of the lecture she was focusing on, but I was distracted by the vibration of my cell phone a second later.

I furrowed my brows as I saw that it was a text message from Brad. We’d added each other’s numbers to our phones in case we ever needed to contact each other about family emergencies, but so far, we’d never called or texted each other. Worried that something bad had happened, I surreptitiously opened the message, not wanting the professor to think I was being rude by using my phone in her class.

Holy hell.

I almost let out a strangled gasp as I saw what the message contained. It was a picture message…and it was a dick pic. Ew, ew, ew! Why the hell did guys ever think it was a good idea to snap a shot of their junk and send it out to girls? And what on earth was Brad thinking? Why would he send it to
me
of all people? Maybe it was some twisted way to make me feel better about the fact that he’d accidentally seen me naked the other night when he’d barged in on me in the bathroom. God, that had been horrendously embarrassing.

In all my fantasies about him, I’d always pictured his cock to be long, thick, and smooth. A pretty penis. As pretty as a penis could be, anyway. But this picture was decidedly
not
pretty. It was kinda wrinkly, and there were angry red ingrown hairs around the base where he’d tried and failed to shave his pubic hair properly, which made it look like he was having a herpes outbreak. The whole picture sparked a sense of revulsion in me.

Urgh. I was totally going to barf.

I scrolled down a little, and there was a misspelled message attached to the picture. ‘
Hay sxy,’
it read. Jeez, for a pre-med student who was meant to be smart, Brad had the spelling abilities of a lobotomized lobster.

I tore my eyes away from the message and nudged Tamara. She pushed her reading glasses up her nose and turned her head slightly. “What?”

“My stepbrother just sent me a freakin’ dick pic,” I whispered.

Her face scrunched up in horror. “Ew! Really?”

“Yes!”

“Can I see?”

“Trust me, it’s gross,” I replied.

“I still wanna see,” she whispered. “I don’t know why, but it amuses me to look at disgusting things. I have a morbid curiosity.”

“Okay. I guess if he sent it, he mustn’t have a problem with people seeing it,” I said, passing her my phone.

She took one glance at it and almost burst into laughter. “Holy crap. That
is
gross. Looks like someone needs to invest in a better razor…or some Valtrex.”

I stifled a giggle as well, and the professor glanced up at where we were sitting.

“Excuse me, ladies sitting at the back. Is there something you’d like to share with the rest of the class?”

Crap. I needed an excuse.

“Sorry, my penis…er, my pen is broken. I was just asking my friend if she had a spare,” I said.

My face immediately turned flaming hot. I’d practically said ‘my penis is broken’ because I had the word on my mind after the horrible photo Brad had sent me. The professor didn’t seem to notice, and she nodded and carried on with the lecture as Tamara shook with silent giggles next to me.

Ten minutes later, the class was over, and she was still giggling as we all filed out of the theatre.

“I can’t believe you said that,” she gasped out. “Oh shit, that’s hilarious.”

I lightly elbowed her. “Oh, shush. Do you think anyone else noticed?”

“I think a few people near us did, yeah,” she said before dissolving into laughter again.

“I’m calling Brad right now and finding out what the hell his problem is,” I said, grabbing my phone from my bag.

According to evolution, humans were distantly related to apes, but with the way Brad was behaving, he clearly hadn’t evolved as far as the rest of us had. Any similarity between him and other humans was purely a coincidence. Prick. I still couldn’t believe he’d sent me a dick pic.

I dialed his number, and he picked up on the fourth ring. “Hey, sis.”

“Don’t ‘hey sis’ me, you animal,” I hissed. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Huh? What did I do now?”

“You know what you did,” I said. “Here’s a hint for your future, though. Instead of wasting your time sending gross pictures to me, why don’t you go trawling through Ebay and see if they have a life to sell to you?”

“Hey, you’re the one who needs to get a life. You seem to spend half of yours coming up with inventive ways to insult me. So tell me, what gross picture did I allegedly send you?”

I ducked into a corner, away from a crowd of students who were milling around the main entrance to another lecture theatre.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. The picture you sent me twenty minutes ago! The…um…the dick pic,” I said, dropping my voice to a whisper.

“
What?
Hold on a sec.”

I heard him put the phone down on a hard surface, and I could hear several male voices conversing in the background for a moment.

“Mia? You still there?” he said when he returned.

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, I’m really sorry. I don’t have a lock screen on my phone, and when I was in the bathroom a while ago, one of my buddies apparently thought it would be funny to send dick pics of himself to half the female contacts in my phone. I guess you’re just the first one who called to yell at me about it.”

“Oh. So it wasn’t…it wasn’t yours?”

For some reason, I was filled with a strange sense of relief that the ugly penis didn’t belong to him. I guess that meant I could keep fantasizing about him having a nice one, as sick and twisted as that made me.

“Of course it wasn’t mine. Did you really think I sent it? Trust me, sis, I don’t have to send out dick pics to get girls interested in seeing it.”

Even though I couldn’t see him over the phone, I could practically feel him smirking. God, he was arrogant.

He took my lengthy silence as a means to antagonize me further. “But if you
want
a nudie pic from me, all you have to do is ask,” he said, a hint of amusement in his voice.

“Ew. No thanks. By the way, if you want to be a smartass, you have to actually be smart first. Otherwise you’re just an ass.”

“I’m an ass? Hey, you were the one who brought this up in the first place by calling me and asking about dick pics,
sis.
”

“Whatever.”

“Ah, ‘whatever’. The classic response from someone who’s been outwitted.”

“No, it’s the classic response from someone who’s no longer interested in the conversation. Bye, Brad,” I said, not wanting to admit that he was right. My brain always seemed to melt when I spoke to him, and right now I had no more smart responses to give.

“Bye, Mia. Oh, and I’ll see you at the Halloween party next weekend.”

Urgh. I’d almost forgotten that he was going to be there. Oh well, the party was going to be a rager. There were going to be so many people attending that there was a very high chance I wouldn’t even run into him and his posse.

Or so I hoped.

***

The following Saturday night, I met up with Tamara and Ben at Ben’s dorm. I’d ended up telling Tamara that I’d go with Jeremy to the party as a sort of ‘date’, but we were all riding down to Hattiesburg together in Ben’s car. Tamara had family there, and they’d said we could crash at their house after the party, seeing as we’d all be having drinks and wouldn’t be able to drive back.

I was wearing the black and gold dress Tamara had picked out for me last time we’d gone shopping, and I waited nervously for Jeremy to come up to the dorm. He wasn’t late; I’d been early. As I picked at a fingernail, there was a knock at the door, and Tamara grinned at me.

“Ooh!” she said, raising her brows at me. “Looks like your Prince Charming has finally arrived.”

I smiled and dramatically rolled my eyes at her, and Jeremy stepped into Ben’s dorm a second later. He was wearing black jeans and a button-down shirt, and I had to admit, he was cuter than I remembered. Still, I felt nothing when I looked at him…no emotions whatsoever. Not even a little tingle.

I had to try, though. I needed to work through my ridiculous feelings for Brad and get over them, or I’d be single forever.

Tamara elected to sit in the back seat of the car with me, while Jeremy rode up front with Ben. Jeremy and I hadn’t really talked much yet, but there’d be plenty of time at the party, and Tamara figured that if we sat together on the ride to Hattiesburg, it would give us some time for a girly conversation, which we both knew was code for a gossip session.

“So, what do you think of his haircut?” she asked in a low voice, nodding towards the front passenger seat.

“Hm?”

“Jeremy. He got a haircut. He looks even better now, doesn’t he?”

To tell the truth, I hadn’t even noticed.

“Oh. Um, yeah, he does,” I said to appease her.

We chatted for a while, and after half an hour, there was a lull in our conversation. Fragments of Jeremy and Ben’s conversation had been drifting back to us all night, but now that Tamara and I were quiet, we could hear every word.

“Yeah, so I don’t know why everyone has such a problem with this wage gap thing,” Jeremy said. “It’s great. I mean, if I ran a company, I’d love to hire women. Then I could pay them all seventy-seven cents on the dollar. It’d save me heaps!”

My eyes widened as he guffawed, and the general atmosphere of the car immediately descended into an awkward silence. I turned to Tamara, my mouth open, and I mouthed three words to her. “What. The. Hell?”

She shook her head as if to say she had no idea Jeremy was not-so-secretly a sexist pig, and Ben broke the tense silence.

“Dude, was that meant to be funny?”

Jeremy looked into the backseat and then over at Ben, a confused expression on his face. “Yeah, it was a joke,” he mumbled. “Sorry. I heard it on the radio the other day and thought it was funny. I wasn’t being serious, I swear.”

Riiiiight.

Maybe we were being a little too sensitive and easily-offended. Still, his ‘joke’ had rubbed me the wrong way. He’d seemed quite nervous earlier, though, so perhaps I needed to be lenient with him.

Tamara leaned over to me as Ben put some music on in the front. “Oh god, I’m so sorry. He’s always seemed really nice whenever I’ve been around him. But if you feel too weird around him, I can hang around you guys all night and make sure he knows it’s no longer a date,” she whispered.

I shook my head. “No, it’s okay. I think he’s just nervous, and he was trying to be funny, but it totally flopped.”

“Yeah, I guess. But let me know if he annoys you, okay? Ugh, I feel bad for trying to set you up with him now.”

“Don’t feel bad. You’re just trying to help,” I replied with a reassuring smile.

Finally, we arrived in Hattiesburg. The frat house where the party was being held was huge, and I felt a tinge of envy as I stared up at it. It made the little dorm I lived in seem like a shoebox…a mouse’s shoebox.

It was a little chilly outside, and Jeremy came up to me as Tamara linked arms with Ben.

“You left this in the car,” he said, handing me the black cardigan I’d brought along with me. “I thought you might need it.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said earlier. It was honestly supposed to be a joke, but I guess it was in really poor taste.”

His eyes were wide with regret, and my heart melted a little. “It’s okay,” I said. “I get it. We probably overreacted a little. Don’t worry, it’s not going to spoil the night or anything.”

He smiled, and his shoulders sagged with relief. “Thank God. I thought you hated me already, and that’d suck, because you’re the prettiest girl I’ve seen in…well, forever.”

“Thank you,” I replied, giving him a shy smile.

He stuck his elbow out, inviting me to slip my hand into the crook, and I followed his lead and took his arm. Tamara and Ben turned and saw us, and Tamara winked and then headed up to the front yard of the frat house, where several people were standing around with drinks. Music blasted from inside, and my stomach flipped over. I was more than a little nervous. In my whole time at college so far, I’d never been to a frat party, and I had no idea what to expect. I’d seen wild frat parties in movies, of course, but I had no idea if those movies were accurate in any way at all.