Her shrill-as-fuck giggle as they made their way to my other brother’s room was like nails down a chalkboard.
You’re welcome to him, the stubborn side of me stated.
When I heard that they were well out of earshot, I pushed Phoenix’s door closed and slid my back down the surface to sit on the floor. My head was a ramble of thoughts.
Drawing my knees up, I took a deep breath. How drunk was he that he thought I was her? Our builds werenothingalike. And taking her into his brother’s room, how gross was that?
Her reply to his suggestion of using Micha’s room replayed in my head, making my blood boil further.
“Whatever you want, Nixy.”
FuckingNixy? I didn’t know whether I wanted to yank out Courtney’s hair extensions or kick Phoenix in the nuts.
The girl’s voice grated over my skin.
As I thought about the two of them together and in the room next to mine, a wave of sadness washed through me.
Phoenix and I had our daggers drawn on most days, and I was getting tired of it. I needed to move the fuck on and accept that it wasn’t meant to be. We shared a mother figure now and lived in the same house. Surely, anything happening between us would be wrong on every level. Plus, he’d let me down once; there was no doubt in my mind that he would do it again. It almost killed me the last time.
Don’t go there. Eventually, everyone will fail you. It’s human nature.
It hadn’t always been toxic, ourrelationship, if you could call it that. One time, Phoenix looked at me like I truly meant something to him. But it was all lies. As soon as I was out of sight, I was out of mind.
I glanced around Phoenix’s pristine bedroom with a shrewd eye, wondering whether to mess it up. Out of all my foster brothers, he was the tidiest andhatedmess. If you made the kitchen cluttered after cooking, the boy tore you a new one. If you put girly shit in the bathroom, he threw it out of the window. I’d left my full set of Harry Potter books in the den once, and a day later, I found them in the trash. When I yelled at him for touching my shit, I’d been chewed out for trying to nerd up the place, the den being a boy’s space. Anyways, you get the general idea.
After staring at his huge, perfectly made bed, I decided I couldn’t be bothered to deal with the fallout. All my non-blood-related brothers were temperamental, but Phoenix’s man-tantrums were the worst,especiallywhen you provoked his OCD.
I returned to my room, feeling like an outcast, a square peg trying to squeeze herself into a round hole, yet again.
On the outside, I was a sassy teenager who didn’t take shit from anyone. But on the inside, I was slowly dying. And what made things worse was that Phoenix knew that and yet did nothing about it.
As was the usual cycle, I felt a burst ofbelongingbeing close to Phoenix, only to have that feeling snatched away seconds later. His leaving me there whilst he went off with someone else struck a chord in my chest.
It was like he was abandoning me all over again.
TWO
PHOENIX
I woke up with the hangover from hell, and what the fuck was that taste in my mouth? As I opened my eyes and looked up, I realized I wasn’t staring at my bedroom ceiling. What the actual fuck!?
My stomach churned. Oh dear. Barfing in a stranger’s bed would be so uncool.
A female groan came from beside me, and I twisted my head, the light from the window piercing my retinas. Why hadn’t I closed the drapes?
I swear, I was part vampire as Ihatedthe sunshine. That shit did stuff to me, albeit even more so after sinking half a bottle of Jack to myself the night before.
Through squinted eyes, I saw the half-naked cheerleader I recognized as Courtney Swan on the other side of my bed. Wait, what?Mybed? Nope, wrong answer. It appeared I was in Micah’s room. In all honesty, I would have preferred the stranger’s scenario.
The girl I assumed would have been last night’s fuck was beside me with bedhead hair and makeup smudged across her face. And then a sense of relief kicked in as I noticed she was fully dressed. One tit was hanging out of her top, but the rest of her clothing was intact. When I fucked a girl, I got her naked, end of. That meant Ihadn’tgone there. Phew.
Meaningless hook-ups had started to bore me. I was at college now and was supposed to be cleaning up my act. That’s what I’d promised my brother Hudson anyway. He was now happily wifed-up to Molly Miller, which in my mind, made him as dull as fuck. They’d been together over a year now, and I missed the oldHudson. He used to be wild and unpredictable. Now he played by the rules and expected the rest of us to do the same. Yawn.
I was told to stop dicking about, which I hadn’t agreed to yet. Although I had decided to meet him halfway after his lecture ongoing nowhere fast. I’d started to do my own homework instead of paying some dork to do it for me. And so far, that semester, I’d only skipped two classes. I was smart and could do the work; I was just a lazy fucker.
Hudson and Molly’s advice that I cut down on the amount of pussy I enjoyed was the hardest bit to follow.
I surrounded myself with other women to keep my mind offher.
