My Best Friend's Brother (A Bashir Family Romance Book 1)
MY BEST FRIEND’S BROTHER
Kennedy Claire
First Edition, March 2015
Copyright© 2015
by
Kennedy Claire
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced nor used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission or the publisher except for use of brief quotations in a book review, interview or article.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
“
I must have loved you for years
,
only I was such a stupid fool
, I didn't know it.”
–Scarlett O’Hara,
Gone With the Wind
T
he air smells of incense and is heavy with humidity. I am reclined in a bed that is not my own as I survey the dark room. It is a simple space, sparse in décor, the windows open; plain white curtains bellow softly over the warm sea-air that pours in.
A man comes to me. He is foreign to me, and yet in this dream, I seem to know him well. Dressed only in long, loose white pants, his muscled chest draws my attention as he walks over with a steaming cup in his hand. I look hard at him because I feel I must know him, I feel so at ease in his presence. But there’s no light save for the fading moon outside and his features are shadowed.
His hair is long and curls at the ends over his broad shoulders. His skin is brown and smooth. I feel suddenly more supple and soft, more like a woman, a contrast to his hard edges and taunt muscles.
He sits on the edge of the bed and leans in slowly to kiss me on the forehead. The tea is warm, but his lips are like fire on my skin. I stare into his dark eyes, pools of black, mysterious, almost haunting.
“Drink,” he commands in a whisper. His penetrating gaze suggests there are other things on his mind. I let the warm liquid, infused with cinnamon and cardamom, slide down my throat. He takes the cup from me and sets it on a bedside table next to a book covered in words I cannot read. Arabic? Hindi?
Do I care right now?
I’m there, but I’m not. Who is this woman? She is me, but not the 17-year-old me I am now. She is more worldly and experienced. She knows what she wants…and it isn’t a second cup of tea.
The man and I smile at each other like lost lovers reunited. That face, so familiar…
He grazes my cheek with his long fingers, as if I were a fascinating work of art. I shudder at his touch. I don’t want him to stop. I feel I will die if he stops.
He tenderly kisses my neck and I pull him closer, an invitation for more, an unspoken “yes” to what his body is asking from me.
“I’ve waited so long for this, Scarlett,” He breathes into my neck, in between kisses. That voice…I know it from somewhere. Who is this man I seem to love?
He leans into me, his weight a happy intrusion. His mouth meets mine for the first time. He kisses me slowly at first, and then loses control and consumes my lips with his. I want more—much more—than what he is giving me and I’m actually afraid he may stop.
Don’t stop. Don’t stop.
My thin, silky robe is open, and my soft breasts unite with his firm chest. He slides his hand down the inside of my thigh and I instinctively open up for him. Our bodies merge in a pleasure I don’t yet understand as a naïve teenager, but I’m more than willing to explore in this dream. Unknown pleasure radiates and overtakes me. I moan in my dream, his mouth to my neck…a climax of sensations ripple through my body.
My lucid mind wonders,
is this what it’s like?
The morning sunlight breaks through the window over the calm ocean outside. For the first time, I can see his face clearly over me. The mature woman in my dream seems to love this face, but the young girl I am now jolts awake in utter shock.
Has my subconscious turned on me?
The alarm clock screeches next to my bed. I hit the snooze out of habit even though I am more than awake. The dream still dominates my thoughts...and my body. I know who he is now, and it makes no sense at all.
Dev? My best friend’s brother?
The one person I loathe.
T
he best gift my mother gave me was naming me after the bold, beautiful and unstoppable heroine from
Gone With the Wind.
In fact, it might be the
only
thing she gave me—I can’t recall anything else. That selfish, feeble inadequate excuse for a parent left me and my dad when I wasn’t even two years old, so I had no collection of embroidered blankets, birthday cards, jewelry or other sentimental things a daughter could expect from her mother; things that my best friend, Annika, had in droves.
Sometimes I envied Annika and her shelves of fancy trinkets, visual evidence that she was loved and adored. But would I trade my cherished moniker for all of it? Would I choose to live life as a dull Jessica or a tedious Samantha or—god forbid—a weak, needy
Melanie
?
Not a chance.
As soon as I was old enough to read, I got my hands on a worn out paperback copy of
Gone with the Wind
from a library sale for fifty cents, and I read it cover to cover. And then I read it several times after throughout my youth. When kids at school made fun of me for my shoddy thrift store clothes or because I lived in a trailer park, I held my head high and imagined this was how Scarlett must have felt when she worked in the cotton fields to save Tara after the Civil War. She did what she had to do to pull herself up and out, and I decided I would do the same in my life.
That book saved me.
So, even though my mother was a loser of a parent and was probably drinking herself to death in California, maybe something inside of her knew I would need that name and the resilience and strength that came with it. Maybe she guessed it would give me the fortitude to dream big and work hard to make something of myself and eventually move out of the rusty mobile home I shared with my dad—a man who stopped dreaming altogether the day she left him.
My name was one of two things that helped me survive growing up poor and motherless. The other was my best friend, Annika, and her family, the Bashirs.
I lived right on the border between the dust-covered trailer parks on the outskirts of Fairview, Texas and its wealthy, upper-class neighborhoods with manicured lawns and security guards stationed at the entrances to their gated communities. I was part of the ten percent of the student body who really didn’t belong there. But I learned quickly that money didn’t always buy you acceptance.
They Bashirs were from exotic and colorful India by way of civilized and stoic Britain, and practiced a narrow, esoteric sect of Islam—I found them fascinating and interesting. But according to the mostly white, Baptist population this meant they were outcasts, too, despite their wealth and status.
I was in fourth grade when Annika, shy and dark-skinned, was introduced to our class. She had a slight English accent from having lived in London since birth, and this only confused everyone in our class even more. “What
is
she?” They would whisper indiscreetly.
We bonded quickly one day when things got out of hand at the elementary school playground.
“My dad says you’re going to hell,” sneered Colby, a blonde boy with a thick Texas drawl. I saw Annika freeze on square number four in hopscotch, her eyes filling with tears.
Colby’s father was the pastor of Fairview Baptist Church, so Colby thought of himself qualified to evaluate the spiritual correctness of everyone around him. My dad had brought me to that church once or twice on Easter, and I distinctly recall the looks of pity from the older women in their tailored Sunday dresses with matching hats. It bothered me so much even as a child that I begged we never go back.
A small crowd gathered around the confrontation. With his “congregation” growing, Colby got even bolder.
“Annika, why do you
hate
Jesus?” he asked threateningly, standing two inches from her frightened face. The crowd of 9-year-olds echoed his line of questioning, getting angry and restless.
As a social reject myself, I had nothing to lose, so I stepped in.
“Leave her alone…or you’ll regret it,” I shouted with a clenched fist to back it up.
Colby laughed, calling my bluff.
So I punched him.
I almost got kicked out of school, but I made a friend for life in Annika. In fact, s
he was my
only
friend
growing up and we were fiercely loyal to each other, like sisters.
Her mother, Mrs. Bashir, would me let come over and play after school for years, feeding me Indian samosas and chicken biryani, and washing it down with large gulps of coconut water from the coconuts she would order direct from Thailand. She taught me how to add just a pinch of this and pinch of that to transform plain white rice into something befitting a four star Indian restaurant. Even better, Annika let me have free reign over her mountains of toys in her perfectly pink room. We would giggle together uncontrollably and play hide-and-seek for hours.
And as we got older, we would talk about boys and wondered who we would eventually marry.
That’s when I started to learn that the Bashir family was a little different from mine.
“Stephen Pearsall…he’s the one for you!” I teased Annika. Stephen was a freckled-faced, red-headed boy who always seemed to sit next to her, but was too shy to talk to her.
“No way! I am not marrying a boy with red hair! Scarlett, that’s bad luck. Besides, would he be red…
everywhere
?” she asked with a mischievous glint in her eye.
“Why don’t you ask him,” I challenged her.
“Or better yet, steal a peek in the boys’ locker room!”
We were 13 at the time and starting to think about “real things,” like which hot celebrity we were going to marry and what mysteries lay under a boy’s boxer briefs. We were starting to have sincere and heart wrenching crushes, which seemed to consume us in the most pleasurable way. I always thought Annika secretly pined for Stephen but, for some reason, she would never admit it to me.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Annika uttered, forlornly burying her face in her ruffled, pink fringed pillow, a far cry from my tattered, plain polyester pillow on my dingy bunk bed back home.
“Why? What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s just that…well…I can’t marry anyone like
him
. I have to marry someone…
you know
.” She looked at me like I should know. I didn’t have a freaking clue.
“With brown hair?” I guessed.
“No, a boy who is Indian like me. And Muslim. And not just Muslim, but our
kind
of Muslim.”
Annika looked at me trying to gauge my reaction. Would I understand?
I didn’t.
“You’re kidding me! In the United States of America you are actually
forbidden
to marry someone different from you? I mean, you can’t marry a regular white boy?” I said, feeling and acting very Civil Rights lawyer-ish.
Annika sighed. I noticed a small pang of sadness in her eyes. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
“That’s cool,” I said. “We’ll just have to find the right boy for you.”
Annika laughed and threw the pillow at me.
