ARROGANT PLAYBOY (31 page)

“Are
you curious about me, Jensen?” she purred. Her overfilled lips curled into a smile.
“It’s okay if you are. I won’t tell anyone.”

“I
wouldn’t say I’m curious,” I said, sitting frozen on the edge of my bed.
Juliette had never come onto me like this before. “Juliette, have you been
drinking?”

Her
fingers traced down the front of her white silk blouse until they found the top
button. One by one, her blouse came undone. She stepped toward me, reaching
down for my hand and placing it over the outside of her bra. The warmth of her
body radiated through my palms and her breast overflowed in my hand.

“You’re
not a virgin, are you?” she asked with a wicked glint in her eyes.

“You’re
not going to tell my dad, are you?” Not that I cared what he thought, but I
wasn’t in the mood for another one of his lecture-and-beatings.

“We’re
on the same team, you and me,” she whispered, pretending like my hand on her
breast was the most natural thing in the world. My eyes trailed up to her
pretty face. Her hollow cheeks and hollow eyes were shadowed, covered up by
layers of makeup. For the longest time, I wondered why she wore so much of it,
and then I saw the bruises. “We’re stuck here. We’re bound to him. What if I
told you there was something we could do to make ourselves feel better about
our… situation? Don’t you want to feel vindicated, Jensen? Satisfied?”

I
wasn’t sure what she was getting at. Scratch that—I knew damn well what
she was getting at. I just couldn’t believe it was really happening.

“You’re
testing me.” I retract my hand from her bra cup.

“Oh,
but I’m not.” Her face fell, morphing into something I could only describe as
the greediest lust I’d ever seen in my entire life. “He punishes us all the
time. Let’s give him something to punish us for.”

“Why
don’t you just leave him?”

I
was sixteen. I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t leave unless I wanted to dive
headfirst into foster care, but Juliette? She could walk out the door at any
time and never look back.

“It’s
complicated,” she cooed, raking her pink fingernails through my hair and
pouting. She reached back and unhooked her bra, her double-D tits bouncing into
a perky position. Her nipples hardened. “Adult stuff. Someday, you’ll
understand.”

She
climbed onto my lap, sending my cock throbbing. Grabbing fistfuls of my shirt,
she tugged it over my head before pressing me back onto my mattress. “God,
Josiah would be so pissed if he knew…”

Every
beating. Every harsh word. Every hypocrisy. They all rushed through my mind at
the same time, painting a picture of the monster that lived and breathed and
abused us both for no other reason than to build himself up, make himself
stronger.

We
could fight back, her and me, in small, stolen moments and behind locked doors.

I
stared into her despondent gray eyes, and I decided then and there that we
could help each other. We could fuck the shit out of each other and not feel a
damn thing except revenge toward my father.

“I never knew you liked to
draw,” Waverly says, snapping me into the present moment. I can’t help but feel
dirty against her pure-white presence.

I pull the sketchpad out of her
grasp and shut the cover, shoving everything back into my bag. Mrs. Davenport
is talking at the front of the classroom. The hour is over. Waverly’s stare is
invading, intrusive. She can have me at face value. I’ll give her that. But my
past? That’s something she’ll never touch. I won’t allow it. She wouldn’t
understand.

“Do you have more of those?”
she asks. She won’t fucking drop it. I’m not sure why she cares.

“Of you? No.”

“No, any more drawings.”

“In my art class, sure.”

“At home.”

I shake my head. “Left
everything at the old house.”

It was true. I left that place
with a few clothes shoved into a duffel bag. Juliette cried as my dad assured
her since I was eighteen that it wasn’t statutory rape. I’ll never forget my
father standing there, knuckles bruised and bloody, and he’s calm as a fucking
yoga instructor as he shoots the shit with the cops our neighbors called when
they heard Juliette’s guttural shrieks. I left with a bag of clothes and the
social worker. As for Juliette’s fate, I’m sure my father roughed her up pretty
good, and for the first time, I wasn’t there to protect her.

“You’re incredibly talented,”
Waverly says.

“You seem surprised.”

“It’s not a bad thing. I’m
impressed, is all.”

Claire Fahlander spins around
and shoots Waverly a dirty look before shushing us both. I have half a mind to
break her heart just for the sport of it. I bet she’s one of those girls who
ugly cries.

“That’s what happens when you
judge a book by its cover.” I smirk.

She leans close, her steady
breaths tickling my ear. “
Likewise
.”

I knew it.

I fucking knew it.

Underneath her prim and proper
façade is a girl dying to break free from the confines of her ass-backward
religious restraints. She’s straddling the line. I can see it. It’s written all
over in the way she looks at me, like I make her feel things that terrify and
excite her all at the same time.

Any guilt I might have felt by
pushing her buttons last night evaporates. I have my work cut out for me,
that’s for sure, but I’m so not done with her yet…

WAVERLY

I forced myself to talk at dinner tonight.
I couldn’t take another family meal smothered by the weight of Jensen’s stare.
I’m a big girl. I made a decision. I touched myself last night, and I enjoyed
it.

End of story.

Bellamy always says everyone
has secrets; some are just better at hiding them than others.

So now I have a secret. It
burns hot inside me, fresh as the instant it was placed there by the most
earth-shattering orgasm I could’ve ever dreamed up. But it’s there now, and
there’s no getting around it.

I finish dish duty and glance
out the sliding door toward the backyard, where Jensen is outside playing with
Gretchen and Gideon after the light drizzle we got that evening. They’re
half-siblings, but they look nothing alike. They have soft features like Kath
does, but their hair is almost colorless. Dad said his hair was that pale when
he was a kid. The twins are like two effervescent angels. Jensen is dark and
hardened. The three of them all laughing and playing together is a sight to
see.

A warm hand wraps around my
shoulder. “You okay, Waverly?”

It’s my father.

“Of course I’m okay.” I force a
smile and pray to God he can’t see right through me.

“Is Jensen bothering you?” His
lips go straight and his brows meet in the middle. “You haven’t been yourself
since he came around.”

“School stuff,” I say, placing
my hand over his. “Getting nervous about getting into college. Still haven’t
heard from my number one and graduation’s coming up.”

His face relaxes as he kisses
my forehead. “You worry too much about your future. You know I’ll always make
sure you’re provided for.”

“I appreciate it, Dad, but this
is my dream.”

Dad leans down, kissing my
forehead. “You’re a good girl, Waverly. Heavenly Father has big plans for you.
I feel it in my soul.”

“After college, Dad.” I smile.
“I just want to study literature, make some friends, and then I’ll settle
down.”

He doesn’t say much, which
concerns me, but I chalk it up to my anxiety about not hearing back yet from
the University of Utah.

“I’ve been doing good, though,
right, Dad?” I glance up at him, meeting his eyes with as much hope as I can
muster. “I’m doing all the right things. Making you proud. Showing you I can
handle being on my own for a few years.”

“We need to get through the
rest of the summer,” he says, his eyes whipping outside to Jensen. “A lot can
happen after high school graduation. People change. Attitudes change.”

“Dad.” I tilt my head. “You
know me. I’m not like most young women my age.”

I glance across the room at
Bellamy. She’s sitting in Dad’s overstuffed club chair flipping through a
Better Homes & Gardens
magazine. At
almost twenty-two, she’s never moved from home, not even after finishing her
associate’s degree last year.

I love my sister more than
words, but I have no desire to still be living at home at this age, waiting to
be married off—if that’s even what she’s doing. I want to settle down
someday, but I want to live a little first.

“You could always go to
Whispering Hills Community College.” Dad loosens his grip on my shoulder and
pats my back. “Bellamy loved it.”

Bellamy is a closed book.
Sometimes I think she talks about everyone else’s secrets just to cover up the
fact that she has a few of her own. None of us know what she’s thinking half
the time. She could’ve hated college, for all we knew.

“You know where I want to go,”
I say to Dad. We’ve had this talk before. I applied to four in-state schools,
though my first pick is Utah. As long as I get accepted and get a partial
scholarship, I can go. Dad, even on his pharmacist’s salary, can’t afford to
send me away. He has way too many mouths to feed here.

He made the requirements
crystal clear to me last year. Walk a straight line. Get a scholarship. That’s
all I have to do to get out of here.

“Listen, everything will work
out just the way Heavenly Father wants it to.” His words, normally a downy soft
pillow of comfort on which to land, don’t offer the same effect this time. Dad
releases my shoulder from his grip and disappears, retiring to his den for his
nightly devotions.

I plop down into a nearby
chair, resting my chin into my palm. The solid ground upon which I’d been
building my future seems to be shakier than before. The only thing I can pin it
on is Jensen. Something about him is making my father doubt my ability to go
out into the world on my own.

“I found out what happened to
Jensen.” Bellamy’s words hook me hard. “Why he was sent here.”

“Oh, yeah?” I take the chair
next to her and do my best to pretend I’m not overly interested. “How?”

“Overheard Mom talking to Kath
and Summer.” Bellamy licks her index finger and pages through her magazine. She
rests it in her lap for a moment, glancing out the sliding door to where Gideon
is stomping into tiny water puddles and splashing Gretchen. Jensen clearly
taught him that.

“Okay, so what happened?” I
hate that she’s keeping me on edge, but I can’t let on that I care as much as I
do.

Bellamy folds her magazine and
turns to me, leaning in. I do the same. Her face holds no expression. “He slept
with his stepmother.”

I want to throw up.

My stomach sours and I fight
the retching that threatens my throat. It’s the most vile, disgusting thing
I’ve ever heard in my entire life. How can Bellamy just sit there and pretend
like we’re discussing the weather? How is she not equally as disgusted?

I remove my gaze from outside,
where Jensen’s still playing. I can’t look at him the same, not anymore. I’m
not sure what makes me more nauseous—the fact that he slept with someone
who was essentially his stepmother, the fact that he convinced me it was
perfectly natural to touch myself while thinking of him, or the fact that I
willingly did it.

I was a fool to think he
actually gave a shit about me. He’s a manipulative con artist, filled with sin
and blackness, and I was nothing but a pawn in his twisted game.

I walked right into his web.

I took the bait.

I fell for his cunning lines.
His persuasive insistence. His charm.

Nothing but one giant act to
cover up his incestuous cravings.

I’m stunned senseless.

I’ve never hated anyone in my
life, but as of right now, I hate Jensen Mackey.

JENSEN

Waverly disappeared after dinner tonight. I
watched her clear the table with her mom and sister until Kath asked me to go
outside and play with the kids.

“They need to get to know their
big brother,” she said with a soft smile. “You need to get to know them too.
You’re family.”

I put on a good face, slipped
on my jacket, and headed outside to teach the small kids the joy of good,
old-fashioned puddle jumping.

Mark can thank me later.

After a solid hour, Summer
called all the kids inside and they filed to their respective houses for what I
can only assume is their bedtime routine. Everyone seems to head to bed around
seven thirty in this family.

I trek up the stairs after an
hour of watching public television documentaries about dead presidents and pass
by Waverly’s closed door. I knock lightly and hold my ear up against it.

“Go away, Jensen.”

“How’d you know?” I whisper
through the closed door.

It’s silent on the other side,
but my feet cement to the floor. I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got all night. My
devious mind doesn’t shut off until half-past midnight, most nights.

The door swings open. She’s
standing there in floral pajamas, her hair piled on top of her head and her
face scrubbed clean. A small bedside lamp illuminates her otherwise dark room,
and a book is lying open-faced on her bedspread.

“You always bother me this time
of night.” There’s an auditory huff in her hushed words.

“I
bother
you? I thought you enjoyed it.”

“Never.”

“Lying is a sin.”

She squints, a feeble attempt
at a dirty look. It’s cute at best. A wasted effort. “Go to bed, Jensen.”

She tries to shut the door in
my face, but I block it with my body. I step inside, one foot on her blue
carpet. “I’m not tired. Are you tired?”

“Exhausted.”

“You hide it well.”

“What do you want?” Her crystal
eyes lock into mine. I like her this way—feisty. Feisty Waverly is sexy
as fuck.

“I want to talk.” I stand firm.

She studies my face, and maybe
she’s trying to summon strength from her God or whatever, but she and I both
know I’ll knock down any walls she tries to build in two seconds flat.

“We have nothing to talk
about.” She crosses her arms and steps away from me. I take it as an
invitation.

“I want to talk about last
night. We didn’t have a chance earlier. I just wanted to make sure you’re
okay.”

Her eyes fall to my feet, her
arms locked tighter than ever. I hear her inhale. “I
was
okay with it, until...”

“Until?”

“Until I realized what a lying
piece of garbage you are.”

Goddamn
it.

She’s the prudish,
eighteen-year-old, modern-AUB version of Josiah-fucking-Mackey. I refuse to
stand there and let her judge me when she doesn’t know half of what my life’s
been like.

My fists clench at my sides.
The nerve she’s just struck is raw and stings like hell, but I grit my teeth
and breathe through it.

“What did I lie about?” My jaw
is set so tight it’ll take a pair of pliers to pry it apart.

She steps back until she falls
on her bed. “You convinced me to… touch myself… but you did it for yourself.
For your pleasure. I know what you did, Jensen. And it’s disgusting.”

“What did I do, Waverly?” I
prepare myself for a whole host of things. I’m not a saint. I never pretended
to be one.

“You slept with your
stepmother,” she hisses. Her words cut me, but only because she doesn’t know
the half of it. She’s judging me, looking at me with cold, piercing eyes I’d
once found alluring.

“Don’t fucking look at me like
that.”

“Like what?”

“Judging me, like you know fuck
about what I’ve been through.”

“You’re a sexual deviant, Jensen.
You get off on… incest.”

“We’re not fucking related,
Waverly.”

“I can’t be around you
anymore.” She folds her arms. “I’m going to ask Dad to move you into Summer’s
house tomorrow.”

Have
fun explaining that…

“Whatever helps you sleep.”

I toss my hands up. I don’t
appreciate being treated like a shit stain, and I fucking hate assumptions. My
nostrils flare, and my blood threatens to burn clear through my veins if I
don’t do something quick. I could stand here and explain myself to her, give a
crash course in my life that would leave her disturbed, tell her things she’ll
never be able to un-hear.

Or…

I can just leave. Walk away.

For the longest time, I didn’t
have that option with Josiah.

I have it now.

I can just walk out of here and
mourn the words I’ll never have a chance to say because no one tries to fucking
understand.

Besides, I don’t need to
explain myself to her. My life is none of her damn business. I’m not sure what
I ever saw in her anyway aside from the fact that she was a sexy as fuck,
impossibly uptight virgin I was dying to unwind. I thought I maybe there was
something good in her, something worth salvaging. A hunger for something real
behind those pale blue eyes.

I was dead wrong.

Fucking waste of time, is what
she is.

That’s fine.

We’ll live like two passing
ships in the night for the next few months. As soon as August comes, I’ll slip
out of here and buy a bus ticket to L.A. She can marry some secret polygamist
who receives her father’s stamp of approval, and she can pop out a bunch of
babies and judge people to her little heart’s content.

I must have blacked out between
that moment and now, because suddenly I’m sitting behind the driver’s seat of
my truck, my left foot on the clutch and the right one on the brake as I start
her up.

She’s loud as hell, and I might
wake up the whole neighborhood, but I don’t care. I fly across town, getting
the fuck away from the Miller Circus, and speed into a parking spot outside the
shop. The light is on at Liberty’s place.

I’ve only worked with her a
couple days, but she seems like a pretty cool chick. She’s the only friend I
have in this stupid ass town, and right now I need to get as far away from
everything as possible.

“Hey,” she says as she pulls
the door open. She lives in a little apartment above her father’s shop. “What
are you doing here? Need into the shop?”

There’s music coming from
behind her, which I assume is her guitar-wielding boyfriend, Kian. I met him at
work yesterday when he came in to drop dinner off for her.

She examines my face and chews
on her lip. “Shit go down at Uncle Mark’s?”

I shrug.

“Oh, God. What’d he do?”
Liberty pulls the door wide and welcomes me in. I lock eyes with Kian, who’s
cradling a cherry red Fender guitar and gives me a tightlipped smile.

Kian’s wearing a white tank top
that shows off his sleeves. Every inch of his arms is covered in multicolored
tats.

My
people.

“Mark didn’t do anything,” I
say, taking a seat on a stained, velour sofa. I’m not sure what color it’s
supposed to be, but it ain’t pretty. Judging by the general appearance of her
apartment, it’s been ridden hard and put away wet one too many times. Empty
beer cans line the kitchen sink, and there’s a perpetual beer-burp scent in the
air. These are the people my father warned me about, and they’re the nicest,
most laidback people I’ve ever met in my life.

“Oh.” Liberty scratches the
side of her head and slides in next to Kian, resting her head on his shoulder
as he picks the strings of his guitar like he’s in his own little world.
“Waverly?”

I shrug, as if to neither
confirm nor deny. She sees right through it.

“Not Waverly.” Liberty laughs.
“She’s so sweet and innocent.”

Kian puts his guitar down and
pulls a cigarette from a pack in his pocket. He lights up and passes it to
Liberty, who takes a long drag and gives it back. Watching them together is
like watching the inner workings of a clock: intricate, intentional, and in
sync.

“What’d she do?” she asks,
exhaling a lungful of smoke.

“Not in the mood to talk about
it.” I recline in my seat and rest my hands behind my head. Her walls are
covered in posters of various rock and metal bands. How she and the Miller
girls could possibly be from the same genetic pool is beyond me.

“Anybody want a beer?” Kian
sits his guitar aside and rises up.

“I’ll take one,” Liberty says.
I found out earlier that day that she was twenty-one. She appears a lot
younger, minus the tattoos. “Jensen, you want one?”

“Got anything stronger?” I ask.

Kian laughs. “You’ve got a lot
of balls, man. I like you. You sure you’re still in high school?”

“Told you,” Liberty says. “He
acts older than the two of us combined.”

I feel old as fuck sometimes.
It tends to happen like that when you spend the majority of your youth raising
yourself, questioning authority, and growing up long before everyone else.

Kian comes back with two Pabst
Blue Ribbon tallboys and a fifth of off-brand vodka that’s half gone. “Take
this. You can have it. Hide it. You didn’t get it from me.”

I accept his offering. “Thanks,
man.”

Kian winks. “I know what it’s
like.”

He leaves it at that, and I’m
not in a mood to pry. It’s none of my business, and Kian seems like the kind of
guy who doesn’t appreciate another man prying into his personal affairs, much
like myself.

Kian’s phone dings.

“Who the hell’s texting you
this late at night?” Liberty’s entire demeanor shifts. Her blue eyes burn dark
and she sits up. Kian yanks the phone away from her like he’s hiding something.

“Okay, well, I should probably
head out before anyone notices I’m gone…” I rise, shoving the half-empty fifth
of vodka into my interior coat pocket and heading toward the door. They
continue bickering like cats and dogs, and I’m not even sure they saw me leave.

Liberty will probably apologize
tomorrow at work. Then again, she might not. She doesn’t seem like the kind of
girl who’s sorry for a whole lot. I like that about her. She’s a
take-me-or-leave-me kind of girl.

She’s earned my respect, that’s
for damn sure.

***

I park in front of the main
house, fully expecting Mark to be standing in the living room window again,
hands on his hips, ready to give me a talking-to, but the house is dark.

Either no one noticed I left or
no one fucking cares. The latter wouldn’t surprise me.

I carefully pad up the sidewalk
and ready my key.

“Jensen.”

My heart drops. I don’t startle
easily, but when you’re trying to sneak in to your own house and someone
whispers your name from the bushes, it has a tendency to do that to a person.

Bushes rustle to my right, and
I squint only to find what looks like Bellamy crouched down in between two
trimmed hedges.

“What the hell are you doing
down there?” I hop off the steps and reach for her hand, pulling her up. She’s
dressed like a five-dollar hooker. Well, not quite. She actually looks hot as
fuck. Two-dollar whore is what Josiah Mackey would call any woman who wore
anything that showed any bit of skin. Juliette was the exception. She couldn’t
hide her curves behind even her most conservative Sunday best, and Josiah liked
that.

“I’m locked out.” She stands,
smoothing the creases of her tight, dark dress. A small fur something-or-other
hugs her shoulders. Other than that she’s got a whole lot of skin showing for a
cool spring night like this.

“How were you planning to get
back in?”

“I saw your truck was gone. I
figured you’d be back soon.”

“And if I didn’t come back?”
She’s shivering, though she tries to fight it. I grab her arm and lead her to
the door, slipping my key in slowly and quietly praying the lock doesn’t clack
enough to wake up the Big Man. I’m shocked he doesn’t have a security system
installed.

“Guess I’d have frozen to
death.” She laughs as if it’s funny—like she doesn’t care. Her eyes dart
down to my jacket. “Your liquor’s showing.”

I feel like I’m talking to a
complete stranger, and while I’ve only known Bellamy a few days, I’m starting
to realize she is absolutely nothing like she seems. I know she commutes to a
job in Salt Lake City. I know she walks a straight line when Mark’s around and
keeps her mouth shut. That’s it. She’s pretty quiet most days, and it looks like
she has damn good reason to be.

She pushes past me the second
we get inside, removes her heels, and tiptoes up the steps. Her strategic
maneuvers indicate she’s done this before. She seems to avoid the creakiest
boards. I take note and follow suit.