All the blood drains from my face at once.
“Because you’re full of shit, David! You still see me as a child and you know it. You may get drunk and act like every other fucking guy alive—shoving your tongue down the throat of the first willing girl you find—but you don’t trust me with Brian because you think I’m still the weak kid I was at fifteen!” she hisses right up into my face. “And you don’t trust me dancing with Steven for the same reason. What? Are my silly little girl senses no match for his masculine prowess?”
My hand tightens in her hair, cutting off her rant, and all I want to do is shut her up with my mouth on hers. To prove her wrong, and right, and more right than she even knows by consuming every last word she has left, straight from her lips to mine. But I don’t.
Instead I release her, and push off the mattress and back away, glaring my resentment as if I could shoot each reply currently lodged in my throat like arrows straight into her heart.
“Contrary to your fucking belief, I don’t want to get in your way, or to ruin your college fucking experience. And I didn’t want to have to take extreme measures to deal with shit I thought I could handle on my own. But apparently I was fucking mistaken, because that counted on being able to fucking trust you!”
Beth’s gaze fires right back at me, and if I wasn’t so damned mad right now, it might shrink me down a size or two. “So I’m just shit you thought you could handle?”
“That’s not—”
“And your next move is to threaten to ‘take extreme measures’? What does that even mean? And this is supposed to prove that you don’t treat me like a kid?”
“I have you living in my fucking apartment! I took you out to an over-twenty-one club tonight!” I remind her.
“So you could keep your eye on me!”
Now it’s my turn to glare again. I’m starting to lose track of whose move it even is in our little eye-war, and I liked it better when hers were filled with desire instead of anger and indignation.
“You still see me as Cap’s kid sister—whatever regrets your dick got you into tonight—and we both know it. You’d still be calling me Bits if I hadn’t asked you not to.”
Definitely still my move. “Ironic that you fault me for treating you like a kid, considering we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if you weren’t acting like a little fucking brat!” I can’t even get through the sentence without losing my temper all over again.
“I’m fucking nineteen!” Beth launches back.
“Then fucking act like it!” I roar. “Stop sneaking around behind my back like a hormonal brat with an overbearing father!”
“Then stop acting like the overbearing father!”
Fuck this!
“I can handle Steven, and Brian, for that matter!” Beth asserts.
And like an uppercut to the jaw, Beth hits me with the name I just can’t fucking stand hearing from her mouth right now—the mouth I just tasted every last inch of. Fucking Brian.
“So fucking handle them, then,” I murmur, low and bitter. And then I turn and walk the fuck out.
Chapter Sixteen
David
Three Years ago
Cooper’s party is even more packed than usual. With the school year winding down, the energy is growing restless. Us juniors are ready to be seniors and the seniors are ready to get the fuck out of here, run away to college, and chase a future that will probably be a letdown for all but a few.
And then Falco is in the distance, high-five-ing Cooper, presumably over something stupid, and my gaze does a quick survey to confirm that Beth didn’t change her mind and come to the party after all.
But he’s alone, which means Beth is home. Probably still in those tiny white shorts and that tight tank top she usually wears to bed—the one she’s almost always still wearing when I manage to fight a hangover enough to come over and lift with Cap on weekend mornings.
Falco leads Cooper and two of their friends around to the side of the pool house, presumably to spark up a joint—stingy pricks. But when the familiar scent doesn’t start wafting over a couple of minutes later, I become curious.
My boys are engaged in a competitive round of beer pong, and they don’t miss me when I slink off toward the empty pool house. I catch Cooper’s voice from around the bend, and keep myself tucked along the wall so as not to give myself away.
“I call bullshit, man,” Cooper says with a ball-busting chuckle. “You’re telling me she held out for ten fucking months, only to give it up after a date at fucking Matteo’s?” He laughs even harder.
My gut rolls at the implication, my hands tightening into fists at my sides. Matteo’s is Beth’s favorite restaurant, and I know Falco took her there for dinner earlier tonight.
