For Authentication Purposes (2 page)

One last glance at my tired green eyes in the mirror and I pushed away from the sink, shuffling into the hallway and down the corridor to the lab. Pulling my sweatshirt down over my hands, I bunched the material in my fists and opened the door with my foot to step inside.

Which is when I stopped dead in my tracks.

Warner was hunched over my computer, his face pressed close to the screen and his hand clutching the back of his bright red neck. My heart stopped and then restarted thunderously as I darted toward him and grabbed my computer from his shaking hand.

His eyes lifted to mine, wet with tears and laughter as he released his neck and offered up both hands in innocence.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I noted that he was indeed looking at my story, making my anger rise. “This is private property, and you could go to jail.”

He choked on his laughter and ran a hand through his wayward dark-chocolate-colored locks. The front stood on end as he chuckled, gasping for breath.

“Oh, Bunny Dawn . . .” He shook his head as if he were disappointed. “Do your parents know what kind of a sexual deviant you are?”

Dawn

I moved to Ohio when I was fourteen. Trust me when I say that I still remember it like it was yesterday. Growing up in a military family made us nomads of sorts because when your grandpa and dad are both Marines, you kind of learn to adapt. My mom was used to it, and that’s why we never settled down until I was in eighth grade. Half the school year was already over by the time I walked into the classroom.

I remember that my outfit didn’t match.

And I also remember that the first person I laid eyes on was Warner Green.

He was so cute with his untamed hair, bright pink cheeks, and a devious look in his eyes. I noticed he had one foot propped up on his desk as he looked me over like I was a piece of meat. He was a fourteen-year-old bad ass.

I’d taken my seat next to a tiny redhead who told me to steer clear of him right away. By the next day she told me that Warner had been telling people on the basketball court that he was going to “do” me.

Fat chance.

I wasn’t doing anybody, much less some guy who hadn’t even introduced himself to me.

Little Red ended up being a plethora of gossip and would give me daily accounts of when Warner was looking at my ass and what he had said about me. By the second week I had been there, I’d had enough. Warner was standing off to the side of the track in an open field, beyond the perimeter where the rest of the students were doing PE.

I’d stood by his side while he looked at the woods just beyond the fence we had to stay in, his hands stuck in his jeans pockets and a faraway look in his eyes. He’d made an excuse not to participate. Again.

“Quit telling people you want to have sex with me,” I told him with a whisper.

He’d turned and given me a look with one eyebrow raised. “My mom says that sex is a beautiful thing between two people. You shouldn’t be ashamed of sex.”

My eyes were no doubt popping out of my head at that point because I remember making a sound like I was going to throw up and making a face at him before declaring that he was stupid and running off to join the rest of the class before the mile run was over.

After that Warner became Weirdo (which my mom said was rude) but I said it wrong
once
and it came out like Wardo, which he made fun of to no end, and it just stuck. It was necessary to have something to call him when he would start the “Bunny” shit.

That boy was a staple of my adolescence, always in my classes, walking down the hallways or riding the bus. I tried to sit as far away from him as possible, but somehow he always managed to get the seat in front of me.

I knew he made remarks about me when I started getting boobs because someone told me he was walking around saying they weren’t real. I saw him staring at me from the end of the lunch table. He was everywhere and nowhere all at once. A constant buzzing in my brain or hum in my ear.

By the time high school rolled around, I was trying to fit in the best I knew how. We never hung out. I wanted to make good grades. I wanted to be popular. He wanted to talk about tits all day and get in fights. I guess being seen with him would have ruined what little credibility I did have within my classes.

But he never gave up all the way, and after a while, we kind of fell into a habit of talking to one another in passing, but only when no one else was around. That is, until the day of our school carnival. It was 1950s themed, and a few of us had volunteered at the concession stand to wear roller skates and deliver hot dogs to people. It was all good until right there, in front of the entire school it seemed, he skated by me with his hand stretched out and yelled, “Marry me!”

I wanted to die.

The other girls in their poodle skirts fell all over themselves laughing at my embarrassment. I was mortified beyond belief and ran off to the bathroom, locking myself in. I wanted to stay there until I disappeared down the toilet. Soon, I heard some girls come in, and they started talking about how cute Warner was and how they liked bad boys, and then I understood the stigma attached to him. He’d always been good-looking. I’d always liked him a little. But if those other idiots were going to go after him, then I was going to get to him first. After all, he’d already staked his claim on me years before.

I pushed my way out of the bathroom in those stupid skates, across the gym floor before I stumbled up to the bleachers to find him chilling out in a dark corner. Watching me.

It was like he was always watching me.

Coming to rest next to him, I plopped down and let my feet stretch out in front of me, the wheels of my skates dragging along the wood as we watched people walking across the floor.

“You really wanna be my boyfriend?” I asked him over the music.

“Duh. That’s why I asked you.” He laughed like I was an idiot.

I took a deep breath and leaned forward so that he could see my face. “Fine.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me again. “Serious?”

“Yes. Now leave me alone,” I mumbled and stood up to skate away from him.

Less than thirty minutes later, my mom was picking me up. Less than five minutes after that, Little Red, who had been bumming a ride that night, revealed that I had a boyfriend. Thirty seconds later, I no longer had a boyfriend and was told that I needed to break the news to Warner the following day.

Talk about a nervous wreck. I avoided him until lunch the next day when he walked by me to flip my hair before taking his regular seat at the far end of the table. When we were dismissed, he sauntered by me with his tray and I blurted out, “I’m not your girlfriend.”

He just laughed and shrugged. “Yeah, I know.”

So we did this little dance for a while. I knew he liked me. He knew I hated to like him. On a Saturday while I was eating Cheerios in my room and watching a rerun of
The Soup
, our doorbell rang. I heard my mom open the door and a deeper voice spoke to her before she responded and closed the door again.

“Who was that?” I asked, turning the corner and holding my T-shirt over my thighs to cover my underwear.

My mom shrugged. “Warner Green. He came over and asked if you could come out to play.”

My face turned bright red in an instant. “So you told him to leave?”

She laughed. “I told him you weren’t dressed and to come back later.”

I pressed my hands to my face and screamed. “Why would you tell the school pervert that I was naked?” I ran to my room and slammed the door. Curled up on my bed in the fetal position, I knew damn good and well that the cocky bastard was walking home thinking about me without any clothes on.
 

That summer he called me once or twice, but it felt weird, and he would say strange things like he was throwing pocketknives at his wall. Or his walls were made of carpet. I imagined him in a dimly lit, cell-looking room, throwing knives at walls covered in puke-green-colored shag. Then one day the phone calls stopped, or I stopped answering. I’m not a hundred percent sure anymore.

By our junior year he was hanging with a different crowd than I was. I was academic and trying to find my place. He was with the stoners and showing up to school whenever he felt like it. He may or may not have been the one to make a nasty fart sound when one of the cheerleaders was thrown into the air and did a spread eagle. He may or may not have been suspended for it. He may or may not have been single-handedly to blame for the school not being allowed to have any more pep rallies that year.

For some reason, I was embarrassed for him. Maybe for myself, too. Because with as much as we didn’t hang out, the rest of our class knew that he and I had a bit of a history, so whenever someone mentioned his name, I got the side-eye. And I hated it.

After a while I found a group of friends through afterschool activities and built up my own little world that way. Ignoring those who thought they were better than me and anyone I wasn’t friends with. Halfway through that same year, I had a crush on a senior, but he barely even knew my name. Regardless of that fact, I wanted nothing more than for him to take me to prom. Instead, he ended up going with one of my closest friends who already had an older boyfriend, but he didn’t want to take her. I only had eyes for the one guy, and hadn’t given anyone else the time of day. I was to be dateless. And wouldn’t you know it? One of my friends just happened to have a stepbrother who wouldn’t mind taking me.

How was I supposed to know that Candace Jones was the stepsister of Warner Green? I didn’t. She never once talked about him. I never saw them in the halls together. I never saw them speak. Ever. But when I accepted, he was cocksure, thinking it was all kinds of funny.
 

I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt because I was hard-up for a date and at that point I didn’t even care that everyone in our school was going to see us together. At least I wasn’t going alone.

Then he showed up late to pick me up because his car had gotten a flat tire and he’d changed it in his tux. His white tux. The same white tux that he had gotten oily black shit on. The same white tux that didn’t even match my deep green dress that I had to borrow from a friend because getting a date so late in the game had left me without any choices.
 

When we took pictures, that oil got on the waist of the dress, where the satin ribbon was tied in a perfect bow. And the pictures later revealed that he was looking down my sweetheart neckline.
 

My parents were less than impressed.

Yet we had fun at prom and he humored me with the Macarena and some other stupid dances that went with songs. Halfway through the night, he disappeared and I was left wandering. I noticed that there were glass double doors leading out to a patio, where I spotted him leaning against the wall, smoking. He’d been smoking for an hour.

Yeah, it pissed me off.
 

Why would he agree to take me to prom when all he was going to do was ignore me and leave me on the dance floor by myself to feel like an even bigger loser? If I had gone stag it would have felt less awful.
 

So the night ended with us at a friend’s house. I stayed downstairs bundled in a sleeping bag at midnight, and he was in the hot tub with God knows who, drinking God knows what, until God knows when. Then Candace had to drive me home the next morning because he had a hangover.

We went our separate ways after that. He’d let me down, and it hurt my feelings.

His mom and Candace’s dad ended up getting divorced our senior year. Candace moved in with me for a while so she wouldn’t have to transfer out of the school district like Warner did. I never saw him again. I went to college where I didn’t apply myself—perhaps because I’d been so grade-oriented in high school and it was fun to let loose a little. Okay, maybe a lot. So much so that I was forced to come back home and try to rectify my life.

When I lost my financial aid, it became important for me to find a job so I could pay for my own classes. But it also meant slinking back home when everyone else I ever knew was still away at the universities of their choice. I felt like a failure, so I made a point to get a place of my own and I started writing historical romance in my free time. After I gained some footing, I joined an online writers group and started getting feedback. So many of them suggested I post my stuff online, which I did and reviews started coming in. People really liked my work and were telling me so and I stopped feeling like a failure.

My stories had a following. I was semi-famous on the Internet. It felt like I was accomplishing something. At last. A ton of people said that they’d buy one of my books if I ever published one. So before I had a chance to chicken out, I did it. I took the plunge and I started my book.

The same book that was now making me feel inadequate.

The same book that was causing me to have panic attacks because I couldn’t find the right words and tone to move forward with it.

The same freaking book that caused Wardo Green to laugh like a crazy person in the middle of our college class we were supposed to be partnered in.

My face must have been as red as Elizabeth Berkley’s tits in 
Showgirls
.