Stepbrother Wow! (Bad Boy Frat #1) (4 page)

“Right—well, you probably wouldn’t have let me on
the team if I didn’t try to go big. Besides, I landed that same move the next
time I went on the track just fine.”

“
Gonna
have to work hard,
can’t have you pulling us down,” Jaxon said, but he was still smiling, his eyes
full of mischief.

“I not only won’t pull you down, I’ll do better than
you in our first competition, just you see.” Jaxon extended his hand on me.

“You do better than me at the first comp; I’ll buy
you a bottle of whiskey to celebrate with.”

“Done.”

“Don’t you want to know what will happen if I do
better than you?” I shrugged.

“It won’t happen so it doesn’t matter.” Jaxon rolled
his eyes, grinning.

“Get in the car,” he said, gesturing to the
passenger side. I threw my gear into the trunk next to his and got in.

CHAPTER
4

After the first practice, when I got onto the team,
I noticed that Jaxon’s demeanor towards me changed; when I hung out at the frat
house he noticed me more often—but I figured at first that it was just because
I was on the team. But it was obvious as the week went on that he was actually
seeking me out on campus; and he ramped up the flirting in a big way.

When I was walking to the dining hall from one of my
classes, starving and more than ready for lunch—even if what the dining hall
put out
could not, strictly speaking, be considered
food all the time—he ran up behind me and called out my name before pulling the
hood on my hoodie over my head. “Big improvement,” he said with a grin. “You
look like way less of a babe this way.” I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t you want me to look like a babe? I could
distract the other teams that way.” Jaxon laughed.

“Yeah, but you’d be distracting your own team while
you were at it. That’s it, Mia: from now on you have to wear a hoodie or a
beanie any time you come to practice.”

“You’re just worried I’ll beat your score in the
first comp.”

“Hey, if you can beat me, I will buy you two bottles
of whiskey.”

“Upping the ante, are we,
Jax
?
That’s not wise if I’m such a distraction.”

“I can use the distraction. I’m not like those guys
you dangle at the end of your hook in the Tau Delta frat.” I snickered. It was
kind of true; I was friends with the Phi Kappa boys, but at one of the frat
mixers a group of Tau Delta Epsilon guys had noticed me. Tau Delta was made up
almost exclusively of tech guys, nerds who were not all that unattractive, and
who were definitely doing better in their math classes than I was doing in
mine. I’d used it to my advantage more than once already in the semester,
convincing one of them to help me out with free tutoring in Pre-cal.

“I do not dangle them at the end of my hook!” I said
,
just to be contrary. “I can’t help it if they’re in love
with me.”

“You could wear the hoodie around them; see how much
free help you get then.”

“I will get just as much because they will see me
for the stunning beauty I truly am.”

When we were around the other guys, Jaxon didn’t
flirt with me as obviously, still treating me like one of the guys—which was at
least a lot more comfortable and what I was used to. I got to hear chapter and
verse about the girls in the sister sorority to Phi Kappa, and told them they
were all crazy—Jaxon included—for thinking any of the girls had any intention
of just hooking up with them. “Look guys, it’s simple,” I said, shaking my
head. “They wouldn’t have joined that particular sorority if they didn’t think
they’d snag themselves a hot guy they could get their hooks into.” Jeremy
agreed with me.

“She’s got a point, there are lots of sororities—and
anyone can see they’re totally into us.”

“Yeah, but they like hookups just as much as we do.”

“They think they’re going to not just hook up but
hook you,” I insisted. Someone changed the subject to the most recent
Preds
game and I was back on normal guy footing once more.
Everything was how it was supposed to be.

It bothered me a little bit that when we were with
the rest of the frat, Jaxon didn’t make a move to flirt with me—but when we ran
into each other on campus, he would touch me; tousle my hair, poke my ribs, he
even picked me up and slung me over his shoulder once when I told him I didn’t
want to go to the frat until I’d had a chance to shower. Everything had changed
between us, but only when we weren’t among the other guys. I shook it off as
best as I could; I figured he didn’t mean anything about
it,
it was just a matter of practicing his skills. I flirted back—stealing his hat,
or jumping onto his back and demanding a piggyback ride, responding to his
little comments about how hot I was—but I reminded myself over and over again
not to expect anything to come from it. After all, if he had any intention of
doing anything with me, he would have told the rest of the guys that I was
off-limits, and there were still some of the members of the frat who flirted on
occasion.

The thing I was most afraid of was that if anything
ever went farther than flirting between
me and Jaxon,
it would ruin all of the friendships I had in Phi Kappa. The last thing I
wanted to have happen was that things would suddenly get weird, and I would
lose my spot in their midst as just another one of the guys. If Jaxon slept
with me, or even if he dated me, and things didn’t work out—and I knew well
enough that it would be easy for things not to work out—everything would get
awkward. I could technically still go to parties, and still hang out in the
frat house, but the guys would feel weird around me. I felt comfortable around
the Phi Kappa guys—I didn’t want to have to change the group I hung out with
just because things had gone weird with Jaxon.

And anyway, just because he was flirting didn’t mean
he had any intention of doing anything about it. I told myself every time it
happened that I’d seen Jaxon flirt with tons of girls that he never even tried
to kiss; he was the kind of guy who flirted as readily as he breathed. If I
read something into every little remark he made or every time he touched me,
I’d be as crazy as any of the girls in the sororities who insisted that
so-and-so was totally into them because they hooked up at a party. I would just
accept that Jaxon was that way, and that since I was a girl—in spite of being
treated like a guy—he flirted. I couldn’t make myself take anything that
happened seriously, because I had no proof—not even a hint—that Jaxon meant any
of it seriously. It was all fun, all playing around.

Nothing changed among the guys at the frat, and I
still went over as often as I could to catch a game or just to hang out and
play cards, or study. It wasn’t as quiet as the library, but I didn’t
particularly like to study in a quiet place; I liked to have some background
noise. When I went to the gym to work out, or went out onto the court to join
in a pickup game, everything was the way it had always been, and I would take
that over having a shot at a guy like Jaxon any day of the week.

CHAPTER
5

After the second and third practices, it got harder
to think that Jaxon didn’t have any kind of intentions at all towards me. It
seemed like whenever I wasn’t in the middle of the group of guys I normally
hung out with at the frat, Jaxon managed to find me and we ended up hanging out
together. He asked me about my classes and teased me about getting more
tutoring help. I was good in English and History but horrible in Pre-Calculus
and Biology—and he taunted me over and over again about taking advantage of the
Tau Delta boys by asking them for help. He offered to help me out in Bio after
class, running into me seemingly by accident as he was leaving one of his
professors’ office
hours
appointments. “You know, I
got straight As in Bio,” he told
me, reaching out and
tweaking at one of my braids
. “So you can stay in your normal couch
potato position and not go running off to Kenny over at Tau Delta—I got you
covered.”

“I’ll have to see your transcripts for proof,
because I can’t believe you put in enough work on any subject to make straight
As,” I told him, tugging my braid free of his fingertips with a grin.

“I will show you proof, come on; let’s go to the
computer lab and you will see that I am the all-time Phi Kappa master of
biology.” He pulled me into the closest lab room and dragged me over to the
computer, where he logged into his account and pulled up his transcripts. True
to his word, he’d managed an A on all of the major assignments.

“Okay, so you did well in Bio. I suppose I could let
you tutor me.” He lifted me up onto his shoulder and carried me across campus
like that, dragging me all the way to the frat house and not putting me down on
my feet until we’d gotten to the mailbox outside.

It would have seemed weird if he started talking to
me like a normal girl; he spotted me at the gym and we talked about hockey or
football or even basketball, sizing up each other’s favorite teams,
trash-talking just like we always did. In practices for the snowboarding team
he seemed to always be on hand when I flubbed a trick or botched a landing,
giving me advice on how to do it better and cheering me on when I tried it
again. After one practice, where I’d twisted my ankle, he carried me out to his
car and then into the frat house, rolling his eyes as the rest of the guys
hooted and hollered; he dumped me on the couch and went into the kitchen to
grab me an ice pack. “You should sleep here,” he suggested. “Don’t want you
walking across campus with your ankle messed up like that.”

He got me through a big Bio test, quizzing me on the
parts of the cell until I could have recited them in my sleep, and he had an
uncanny knack for knowing what drinks I liked when I would party it up with the
guys—but in every other respect it was just the way it had always been, and
after weeks of flirting with nothing happening, I had to assume it was just
Jax’s
way of being friends. It wasn’t as though he didn’t
help out the other guys on their own tests, and the other members of the team
got treated almost the same as I did whenever they got injured in practice. But
I couldn’t help noticing that we were spending more and more time together.

After the night I spent on the Phi Kappa couch,
sleeping with my ankle wrapped in someone’s enormous tee shirt, Jaxon walked me
to my first class using the excuse that he wanted to be able to carry me to the
campus nurse if I looked too shaky. “Can’t have you making your ankle worse
when you have practice next week, and you end up not mastering your Wildcat
because you had to take time off,” he told me. He broke off to go to the dining
hall and I didn’t see him the rest of the day, but the next day he managed to
catch up to me on the way to the same class.

“Do you even have anywhere to be this stupid hour of
the morning?” Jaxon shrugged.

“I was going to hit the gym anyway; I just don’t
really like walking alone.” Since I didn’t really enjoy it myself, I was happy
for the company.

By the next week, he was walking with me to all of
my classes, meeting me on the quad or catching me as I went past the dining
hall. I never figured out how he knew when and where my classes were, but I
must have told him at some point while we were hanging out; I couldn’t think of
any other way. But it was nice to have someone to walk with and talk to,
especially in my early morning classes—when half the campus was still asleep. “I
don’t know why you picked classes at eight in the morning,” Jaxon said, shaking
his head as he walked next to me across the campus to English.

“Because that way I get them over with before all
the good games are on,” I countered, feeling sleepy and still a little
irritable.

“Good point,” Jaxon said with a grin. “But it’s no
wonder you’re struggling in Bio if you have to make your brain work on a Monday
at 8:30. I can’t even understand how you’re passing at all.”

“I have natural genius and several excellent
tutors.”
Jaxon pretend-scowled at me.

“Hey, are you cheating on me with other tutors?” He
pretended to pout. I rolled my eyes.

“We don’t have an exclusive agreement, Jaxon, and
anyway why would I go to anyone else when I have you?” I stuck my tongue out at
him.

Apart from the flirting, it was absolutely normal:
talking about sports, the latest gear and upgrades for our boards, different
techniques for working out. I couldn’t really get what was going on between us,
but I told myself that it was just one of those things. Jaxon liked me well
enough to hang out, and he flirted naturally, so in spite of the fact that I
was spending more and more time with him, there was nothing I could point to
and say that he was interested in me.

I’d even seen him flirting it up with a girl at a
party, disappearing into his room for at least thirty minutes before he
appeared—the girl never turned up again, though; I suspected she either passed
out on his bed or snuck out after the hook up and I just didn’t see. If he was
hooking up with girls, he couldn’t possibly be all that interested in me. It
obviously wasn’t a matter of him being too shy to make a move—he wasn’t shy
about making a move on anyone. So I appreciated the company on my way to
classes and the help in the gym and on the practice track and assumed that it
was all there was to it. I wasn’t going to just be some stupid girl hanging on
his every word, especially if there were plenty of other guys who were
obviously interested in me. I didn’t go after any of them, but I didn’t rule
any of them out either, even though I hesitated—just a little bit—to go for any
of the other guys in the frat, because it would make things weird between
me and
Jax
.