“Yeah, you don’t own a green top with pink flowers.”
Apparently, luck has abandoned me. Disappointment flickers through me as Alessia calls my bluff.
She runs her eyes over what I’m wearing. Well, that’s unfair. She can’t judge me on the attire I choose for my little mission, which required stealing stuff.
I have other clothes... and they’re all...
“Your entire wardrobe is made up of black and black and has been for an entire year now.”
Not completely true. I have those wisps of red that I hide in my bottom, bottom drawer to remind me of my shame, my dark and difficult times.
Ugh. Worst night of my life. But whatever, I’m trying to make a statement by wearing black all the time. I’m edgy and a little goth since they mercilessly shunned me.
No, I’m not really a goth girl. I’m a mess. Unrequited lust is hard. So very, very hard.
Chapter Two
Clover
“Mind your own business, Alessia,” I say over my shoulder as I pass her, pulling my bags behind me.
But then, because the universe is against me, one of the bags snags against the leg of a table and bursts open slowly as if I’d taken a scalpel to it to perform surgery, but instead of blood and organs spilling out, it’s just my questionable life decisions that spill out in the form of snowy white boxer briefs.
Alessia picks one of them up and frowns at it. Guess the boxers are out of the bag.
“You didn’t,” she says, a look of astonishment on her face, her eyes so big she could engulf me.
“What exactly do you think I did?” I ask tentatively. Maybe she thinks I robbed a men’s underwear store. If so, I’ll go with that. Sounds much more plausible than what I actually did.
“You stole their underwear,” she shrieks.
“How in the heck did you know that? These could belong to some other guys I have crushes on.”
“Excuse me, Clover McAllister, these are custom-made boxer briefs by the most sought-after designer ever. No one in the world has them. They’re made of mulberry silk, Egyptian cotton, and bits of cashmere and Vicuña wool—Vicuña wool, Clover. These were made especially and only for—let this sink in—for Kellan Gardner, Nolan Williams, and Oren Flynn. The hottest billionaires alive. Your brother’s best friends who happen to be your obsessive crushes. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Well, if you insist, you’re wrong,” I say, haughtily, while hanging on by a thread. Not a Vicuña wool thread, though. But I laugh in the face of remorse because I have none. They deserved this.
“Oh, babe, I thought you were over them,” Alessia says gently.
“I know,” I cry, kneeling down to stuff the boxers—my god, they do feel extremely expensive—back into the trash bag.
Alessia drops to her knees as well to help me, huffing all the time about how I was going to end up in prison, how she’d have to come and visit me, and how she could possibly carry on living like normal until I was released.
“I just went a little crazy, is all. I was coming off my last shift, and their stupid faces were staring up at me from a magazine, and I cracked.
“I mean, their faces weren’t staring up at me from a magazine out of thin air. I passed a newsstand, and I saw their stupid faces on the cover of a fashion magazine, bought the lot and all the chocolate bars, and had a disturbingly quiet tantrum stuffing my face with sugar and poking my fingers into their eyes on themagazine covers in my car,” I say, looking down. Not my finest moment.
“Then, before I knew it, I was on my way to their penthouse to seek my revenge.”
Yes, I have the code to their apartment and the code to their private elevator. They’re my brother’s best friends; they know everything about each other, and I know everything about them through my brother.
“They broke my heart, Sia.”
“Oh, Clo. I get it. But why didn’t you consult with me first? I would have gotten someone else to do it for you; that way, your fingerprints wouldn’t be all over this. Because what happens when they find out it’s you?” Alessia asks as we carry the bags upstairs to my bedroom.
Thankfully, I have the house to myself. My dad is away on a work trip until next week, so at least he won’t have to wade through men’s underwear in the foyer that costs more than he could make in I don’t know how long, as a salesman.
And my brother is somewhere in the world. He never tells me where; he just bosses me around all the same.Lock the doors. Look behind you. Check your pepper spray. He’s in the military.
