Unleashed (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) (8 page)

To Las Vegas!

It’s just another item on a long list of him disappointing me.

Chance’s words echo through my head:
Great speech.

Really, the speech was anything
but
great. It wasn’t even good. It was bad, boring, unoriginal.

I think to my ending:

And so this new generation sets off into the world, wary of the conventions set down by the old. We hope to improve, but betterment so often comes in the form of subversion, of questioning. We hope that you don’t judge us for our life decisions. The world is forever in flux, and so let us be different. Let us look at your methods, and adjust them or strike them out so that we might forge newer, better ways.

Let us change. Support our change.

Because when you were our age, that’s what you would have wanted.

I groan. It sounds so trite in my head, so vague and so boring. All the typical clichés. All samey, no punch. No zest or zing. Not even a funny barb or joke.

“No, it wasn’t a good speech,” I say to Chance. I assume he was being sarcastic when he said it – I can’t read his tone at all – but I feel the need to clarify where
I
stand.

I keep my eyes off his, fix on a bright red car in the distance, but soon it turns a corner and disappears out of sight.

I’m sitting on a bench waiting for the bus to take me home – Dad took the car and left it parked at the airport – and in my gown the sun is making me feel more than a little warm.

Everyone else has taken off their gowns, but I haven’t. I worked so hard for this, to graduate top of the year, and one entire grade early. I took extra credit, advanced courses, and now I get to go off to college a year earlier for it.

I get to get out of this town, start my own life, do my own thing, actually be around people who are like me.

And I can’t wait.

Chance is standing right in front of me, and try as I might to not look at him, it’s practically impossible for me not to.

When I do, I see that he’s got his strong arms folded across his chest. The tattoo that coils around his forearm is dark, fairly fresh, and it disappears up beneath his sleeve. I don’t know what it is; all I see is something that looks like a serrated serpent’s tail.

He tilts his head down a little, narrows his eyes, and his lips are just frozen in this amused smile.

What’s he doing?
Considering
me? Why does he do this, put me on the spot, try to make me feel uncomfortable?

I don’t want to respond to him in any way. I’ve been taking it from him all year.
Mr. Popular
, school star athlete, and all he’s ever done is try to get a rise out of me.

All he’s ever done is wink at me when he’s walking past trailing a line of puppy-dog girls. Of course, I get death stares from all of them afterward.

He used to sit on my table, ask me what I was up to when it was clear I was working, and he was disturbing me.

He’d come to the library during lunch where I volunteered to work at the desk, and do his best to try and get me into trouble.

Chance is just like the rest of those assholes. He thinks because I do well at school
on purpose
that I’m somehow weird, somehow different.

Does that make me worthy of teasing? Of being a target?

So I don’t look at his face. It’s a silly act of pushing back – why don’t I just tell him to leave me alone?

Good question, but for some reason, I just don’t say the words.

Instead, I look at his body. His t-shirt is tight, and it only takes a tiny bit of imagination to know that he’s got a great bod. Tight, lean, strong, and sexy.

“What do you want, Chance?” I finally ask when I realize that he’s not going to leave.

I don’t bother hiding the impatience in my voice. I don’t bother playing nice or blunting my attitude. We’re not friends. We never have been. I dislike him intensely. He’s everything I’m not. He’s everything I don’t like.

Chance never worked hard in school a day in his life, and yet if he chose to, he could go to any college he liked on a sports scholarship. He was listed as one of the top five up-and-coming wrestling stars in the country.

Not that fake crap they put on television, but real wrestling, without the cheesy acting.

“Nothing that you’d give me,” he says. “Yet.” He smirks at me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Why are you so sensitive all the time?” Still his lips are pried apart, almost nastily. He thinks he’s such hot shit. I can’t understand why he behaves this way. He’s so repulsive.

“I’m
not
sensitive. I just don’t like you.”

“Why? Because you want me?”

He doesn’t move. His hands don’t move. He doesn’t fidget. He’s just so damn
comfortable
all the time. I find my eyes going to his lips… and I hate that I love the shape of his lips. Full, smooth, bright… they are the softest thing on his hard, angled face.

Well, except for maybe his eyes. If he wasn’t always posturing, swaggering, being the
bad boy
…

His tongue darts out to wet his lips, and for reasons completely unknown to me, I imagine him kissing me.

I blink the thought away forcefully.

I just can’t see why the most attractive boy in school is also the most assholish. It
bothers
me. Is there some kind of script we all adhere to? Why does it happen so often that it’s become a cliché?

What cliché am I? The nerdy girl who did well in school? The geek girl who never had a boyfriend, who was hall monitor and a teacher’s pet?

Well, I wasn’t a damn teacher’s pet. I wasn’t anybody’s
pet.
I worked hard for myself. I have a future planned. I know what my life is going to be like, and nothing and nobody is going to derail that.

There’s this little voice in the back of my head that tells me,
Cassie, don’t you know that nothing ever goes according to plan?

I shake my head. “I
don’t
want you,” I tell him. “Leave me alone, please.”

“Sure you don’t,” he says, sitting down next to me on the bench at the bus stop.

He spreads his arms out on the backrest behind me, runs his finger along the top of my shoulder. “So, why are you waiting for the bus, then?”

“My dad is away. He left the car at the long-stay parking at the airport, and we only have one car.”

“He didn’t come to your graduation?”

“No.”

“My mother didn’t, either.”

“Really?” I ask, looking at him. For the first time, I feel there might be a thread of similarity between us, but he ruins the moment.

“But it’s not like I give two shits. I couldn’t care less.”

I balk. “You don’t care that your own mother didn’t attend your graduation? Figures. You must be dumb.”

“Oh, I’m certainly not as smart as
you
. Best student in the history of our school?”

“Hey, I worked hard for this. We’re in a weighted-GPA school. Do you know what that means?”

He shrugs. “Jack shit, truthfully.”

“It means that you are awarded more for harder courses, and less for easier courses.”

“So?”

“So?” I echo, exasperated. “It means that I’m not just any little-miss-smart or whatever. I worked for this. I took the toughest courses and I aced them. I did extra credit. I took classes in the grade above me!”

“So? So what?” He looks at me and grins. “What’s it going to get you?”

“Well, it got me into LSE. That’s the London School of Economics, in case you weren’t aware. It’s one of the best universities in the world.” I peer at him. “You’ve probably never heard of it.”

He grins, like he’s enjoying this, and it just pisses me off.

“You’re a bit of a snob, aren’t you?” he says.

“I’m not a snob. I’m just telling it how it is.”

“What’s that super-prestigious degree going to get you, then? Run through your plan with me.”

“Why should I?”

“Well, the bus isn’t here yet, and you’re enjoying talking to me.”

I make a face.

“So, what’s it going to get you?” he pushes.

“I’ll graduate with honors in political science.”

“And then what?”

“I’ll do my master’s.”

“And then?”

“I’ll teach.”

He scoffs. “You’ll teach? That’s it? That’s your sole ambition? That’s the final step in your plan?”

“Hey,” I say. “The world needs more teachers. Good ones. Smart ones.”

“You’ve got this little plan all worked out. You think that it’s all going to depend on how well you do in your classes, what grades you get. Let me ask you, we go to a good private school, right?”

“Yes,” I say, nodding.

“What do you think of Dunham?”

“He’s my history teacher. He’s—”

“A fucking idiot.”

“No he’s not.”

“Yes, he is.”

“He’s got a doctorate, he’s written books on the first and second dynasties of Chin—”

“And
this
is where he is! Why do you suppose that is, if he’s so accomplished?”

“No shame in teaching in a good school.”

“Why don’t you ask him if he wanted to teach a bunch of rich, stuck-up teenagers all day?”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Do you even know the point you’re trying to make,
Chance?
We happen to go to a
very
good school. You’re kind of undercutting yourself here.”

“He doesn’t know anything about anything useful. He couldn’t change the tire on a bicycle! Is that what you want to be? In some stupid little corner, some narrow field of study, that nobody else gives a shit about? You want to go into academics? You want to live and die by what you publish? Have your work peer-reviewed by a bunch of cliquey circle-jerkers? You know they all just suck off their friends, don’t you? You know it’s all one big boy’s club.”

“Can you not be so vulgar? And, anyway, I’m not afraid of being a woman in academics. The world’s changing, and even if we still fight an uphill battle now, it’s not as bad as you make it out to be.”

“Take your head out of the sand.”

“Also,” I tell him, “Political science is
not
a narrow field, and my options will be open. I could go into academia, or I could go to, shock horror,
politics!
”