Kissed (10 page)

“You’re too young.”

She actually laughed at that. “What’s the right age, huh? If not twenty-one, when? Twenty-five?” She cocked her head to the side. “How old do you have to be to
screw
a prostitute?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been with one before you, and frankly, I didn’t pay for you.”

“No. You let David pick up the tab.”

“Your
decision
to have sex with me had nothing to do with money.”

“I’m sure you’d like to think that,” she said cruelly. “But I have a couple thousand dollars in my bank account that says otherwise thanks to you.” She watched me for a moment. “And I’m guessing you don’t work for free, and since we already know everything you do is somehow related to manipulating David into behaving, I think we can reasonably draw the conclusion that
everything
that happened between us had something to do with money.”

I looked down at the floor between us. There wasn’t much I could say to refute that, and I was silent for a moment. “Have you stopped to think about how much you’re jeopardizing
your
reputation?” I asked quietly as I looked back up to her. “It’s not just David’s reputation on the line here.”

She scoffed. “Oh, fuck you,” she muttered angrily under her breath. “You don’t give a shit about my—”

I ignored her. “What happens if you’re photographed together? Huh?”

She suddenly went silent, and her body looked unnaturally still and rigid. I’d brought her up short on that one.

“He’s connected, he’s known. Barely two weeks goes by without some mention of him in some random article. What?” I focused on her wide eyes that were staring back at me. “Think it can’t happen?”

She shook her head in disagreement, but her brow flinched. “No one has ever taken a picture of us together.”

I nodded slowly. I wasn’t agreeing. “You would never know if someone did. If it hasn’t happened already, I guarantee you it will at some point, and then what? You think they’ll let you keep that nice pretty picture hanging in the stairwell when they impeach your ass for selling it?”

Her lips pursed in anger. “Is that why you came here? To try to scare me straight?”

“If I thought it would work,” I muttered. She glared at me in response, but when she glanced away, she started gnawing on the inside of her lower lip. She really was scared. I finally shook my head. “Believe it or not, I don’t want to see you get hurt by all this. And I’m here because you were upset earlier. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Her eyes returned to me. “
You
wanted to make sure
I
was okay?” she mocked as her brow furrowed.

I clenched my jaw tightly as I watched her, refusing to play into her attitude.

She held her arms up as if proving she was in one piece. “Never better.” But her tone was mildly bitter. “You should probably leave.”

I ignored her and walked to the bed instead, sitting beside her. She let out a huff of frustration and started to stand, but I grabbed her by the wrist. She paused for a moment before she sank back down to sit on the side of the bed, but she wouldn’t look at me. I stared at her profile waiting to see if she’d meet my eyes. She didn’t. My fingers squeezed gently on her wrist, but she still refused. Instead, she turned her head away.

“I do know you’re a real person, Gabe. I’m not confused about that. The problem is…real people, decent people, don’t always fare so well in these situations.”

I watched her throat as she struggled to swallow, and I didn’t miss her farthest hand rising to her face. She was brushing away a tear and doing everything in her power to hide it from me.

That same feeling of nausea came over me again.

“I’m not going to use what we did to hurt you.”

“You were going to,” she admonished me quietly, still refusing to look at me.

I closed my eyes for a moment, shaking my head. I wasn’t disagreeing. There was a time I’d been more than willing, hell, I’d relished the idea of shoving Gabe and me down David’s throat to make my point, but then I’d touched her. I’d tasted her. I’d fucked her. I’d kissed her. She’d felt more real and human than most people in this world, including myself.

“Yes,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t have had sex with you. It was a ruthless move, and it was wrong to put you in that position. I’m sorry.”

She finally looked at something other the wall behind her headboard—sadly, it wasn’t at me. She stared down at her legs, clasping her hands in her lap. She sighed and shook her head. “You were right. You didn’t force me to do anything I didn’t want to do.”

“Why did you?” I wasn’t sure why I needed to know, and I sure as hell didn’t deserve to know.

“You let me pretend to be something else for a while,” she whispered. “I liked it.” She finally glanced up at me, her eyes still shimmering.

I nodded. “I liked it too,” I said quietly.

We were silent then, sitting side by side on the bed.

“You really do have to go,” she finally said. “It’s getting late. Catholic school, house rules. No overnight guests of the opposite sex.”

I chuckled as I ran my hands over my face. How the hell could I possibly be here in this world of hers? “Wow,” was all I managed to say as I stood up.

I followed Gabe back downstairs, and when we passed the living room again on our way out, the eyes followed us once more. She closed the door behind us, wrapping her arms around herself as a cool breeze blew through the porch. It was pushing late October, and summer was most definitely over.

“I’ll see you later.”

It was supposed to just be the standard closing statement before I left. That’s what I’d intended it to be when I said it, at any rate. But she cocked her head to the side, her eyes narrowing slightly.

“Not if you have your way with David you won’t.”

I didn’t say anything at first. She was right. I didn’t even know how to call this woman, and there was certainly no good reason why I should. She deserved to be left alone and left out of this mess.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Goodnight,” I finally said, but it came out as a whisper.

And then I walked away.

Chapter 8

Gabrielle

“I
just think using the cramps excuse week after week as the reason you’re not participating in PE until the nurse calls you in to discuss possible uterine problems was perhaps poor planning on your part. Did you just not feel like being creative with your excuses?” I looked down my nose at Jessa as I pulled a scarf off the hook inside my closet.

“Stop being a beehive, G-Dog. Can I help it if my uterus is special?”

I glanced at Jessa again, pausing as I wrapped my scarf around my neck. She was sprawled out on her back on my bed, and I rolled my eyes. “Beehive?”

“Yeah.” She tossed my hat, which she’d been fiddling with for the past five minutes, up in the air while I lectured her about school, which was actually laughable, not to mention hypocritical, coming from me, and when the hat came back down, she smacked it across the room, making no move to pick it up. “That’s my code for bitch. I use it now to avoid getting detention.”

I sighed. “Please tell me you didn’t get in trouble for calling a student—”

“Ms. Pimple Face Plimpton.”

“A
teacher
?” I practically shrieked at her.

She sat up. “She told me I wasn’t
investing enough of my heart
in my writing. I said, ‘I’m all heart, bitch.’ It didn’t go over well.” She shrugged as though she failed to see what she’d done wrong.

“Jessa, you cannot keep doing this. You’re supposed to be mature enough to handle being on your own, remember?”

She sighed. “Yeah. I know.”

This was nothing new for us—Jessa misbehaving, me ragging on her. But Jessa struggled to conform to much of anything, including the wishes of her older sister. In truth, I likely trusted Jessa to manage herself without constant adult supervision
because
of her brazen personality. She wasn’t known for taking crap from pretty much anyone—like teachers, the principal, any person with an opinion that differed from hers.

I shook my head as I finished stuffing my wallet in my purse. I grabbed my fleece jacket off the back of my desk chair and pulled it on. Jessa crawled from the bed and followed me downstairs. Casey met us coming off the last step.

“You two be careful today in the big city.” Her nose wrinkled up as she smiled. I hated Casey’s smile. Actually I just hated Casey. Casey liked to passive aggressively disrespect me any chance she got. She didn’t like that I was president of our sorority. She actually cared far too much about the fact that I’d been voted in as president at the end of the last school year, which was odd because I cared very little about the honor.

Don’t get me wrong. There’d been a time when I lived and breathed sisterhood, but that seemed like a long time ago. It wasn’t. It had only been a year and a half since I’d traded being a normal college kid focusing on grades and social events to being…something else. But it felt like forever ago. It was odd the way time slowed down when all you really wanted to do was move forward. I wasn’t elected because I was the epitome of sisterly integrity and other such bullshit. Again, there was a time. No, I’m pretty sure I was elected out of sympathy. Sympathy.

I wanted the honor. I did in a sense at least. It’s probably more accurate to say I wanted to
want
the honor because I could remember a time when I truly did dream of it. So tossing my hat into the ring seemed like the thing to do. Smile until you’re happy. Fake it till you make it. I thought if I could thrust myself back into this thing I’d loved once, I could capture it again, I could be that person again, I could just get back to a place I’d once loved being.

The problem was…I couldn’t. I went through the motions, I sat through the committee meetings, I tried to pretend I gave a shit about rush week, philanthropy, mixers, all of it. But it was gone from me. There weren’t many college girls, and by
many
I mean none but me, who could literally leave a committee meeting to plan a charity meal for the homeless to go fuck a man who’d paid for her pussy. It, without doubt, made it difficult to concentrate on my duties.

But Casey, on the other hand, was all about duty, and she loved to rub my faults in my face every chance she got. This was why I hated Casey—because she saw every single shortcoming I already knew I had, and she exploited them to make herself feel good.

“We will,” I said with mock cheeriness over my shoulder, catching Jessa sticking her finger down her throat. Jessa was with me in the Let’s Hate Casey Fan Club, though for decidedly different reasons.

Jessa might not be in college yet, but there was no chance she’d ever choose a life of “organized lady lunacy,” as she called it. Alas, though, she was my little sister, and the sympathy others felt for me extended to her.

I pulled the door open and froze when I saw Keegan standing on the porch, his hand still lifted toward the doorbell. I gaped at him as Jessa walked into my backside, pushing me into Keegan’s front side. Keegan gripped my arms as he staggered back for a moment, and when he righted himself and me, he watched me with a wrinkled brow.

His attention shifted over my shoulder to Jessa. “You must be Gabe’s sister. You look a lot alike.”

“Yeah,” Jessa said rudely. “What of it?”

“Jessa,” I snapped as I looked over my shoulder at her.

Keegan chuckled quietly. I couldn’t say I was surprised to see him taking Jessa’s attitude in stride so quickly. He seemed to have the uncanny ability of taking pretty much everything in stride easily. When I turned back to Keegan, he was studying me again.

“Hi.”

I took a deep breath. “Barely been a week, and here you are on my doorstep on a Saturday morning. You just can’t seem to stay away from me,” I said sarcastically.

He nodded slowly, but his expression was serious. “I need to talk to you about something.”

I glanced at Jessa again. “Can you wait inside for a couple of minutes?”

“No.” She smirked. “Not until you tell me who the stiff is.”

I shook my head, releasing a huff of frustration. I turned back to Keegan, finally taking in his appearance. He was dressed casually in worn jeans and an oatmeal-colored cable-knit sweater. He looked as casual as I’d ever seen him—barring perhaps when he’d been naked. But Jessa thought he was a stiff. Of course she did.

Jessa, on the other hand, was wearing dark skinny-leg jeans, Converse hightops, an old dingy black T-shirt that had some faded logo on it which was indecipherable at this point, and a gray hoodie. Her hair was dyed entirely too dark, given she came from the same genetic makeup as me, and I wanted to take metal snippers to the nose ring in her nostril.

But she was still damn cute.

“I’m Keegan.” He held his hand out to her, not waiting for me to get my shit together and introduce them. “I’m a friend of your sister.”

She shook his hand, eyeing him suspiciously. “What kind of friend?”

He shook his head. “Uh…how do you mean?”

“I
mean
”—she drew out the word—“you dress like a yuppie,” she said pointedly in a mocking tone. “And we don’t run with that crowd, dude.”

He looked down at his clothes. “I dress like a yuppie, do I?” He didn’t look at all offended. “Well,
you
dress like a street bum. Your point?” He cocked his head to the side, but he was smirking.

I couldn’t help but smile. It was a very good analogy after all, though I preferred to call it her Fuck-the-World style.

Jessa busted out laughing. “Yeah… Okay…” She nodded as she opened the door again. “I’ll be inside. Hurry it up, Gabe. We’re going to be late for all the boring shit you have planned for us today.”

I waited for the door to close. “I really wasn’t sure I’d see you again.”

He hummed as he started wandering down the sidewalk, clearly expecting me to follow him. “Well, that would have been unfortunate for both of us,” he commented over his shoulder.

I wasn’t sure I could disagree with him. There’d been something oddly depressing about the notion that I might not see him again, even if it was likely for the best. I followed him, not sharing that bit of insight.