Make My Move

by J Bree

  I hate it and then I hate myself for how much I fucking hate it.

  I kick my shoes off, close enough to the door that I can ignore the daggers shooting out of Avery’s eyes, and say, “If he’s picking I’m going to need a beer.”

  I head to the kitchen to wash my hands and Ash covers for me by rifling through the cupboards and saying, “Fuck it, I need something stronger than beer to get through this. Where are you hiding the good stuff, Floss?”

  Lips doesn’t notice what we’re up to, or it’s not important enough to register in that super genius brain of hers, and she stalks over to get settled onto the couch. Avery fucking preens with satisfaction, homemaking joy just fucking oozing out of her at us all being here together.

  She glances down at my knuckles but doesn’t say a word about it as she messes around with the coffee machine and gets shit together for her and Lips. She already knows that if she doesn’t hand the kid from Mounts Bay food, she’ll just starve.

  They all broke me out of that shit years ago.

  I grab enough beer to deal with whatever bullshit Ash and Morrison are going to pull on us all and then park my ass on the couch next to Lips. Floss leans forward to give me a look but I ignore it easier than breathing at this point.

  I pointedly refuse to look Ash’s way and catch the seething jealous judgement from his hypocritical ass.

  I get started on the beer and even grab a handful of the popcorn in Lips’ lap, trying not to get pissed the fuck off at how uncomfortable she seems to be jammed between me and Floss. She wasn’t at all fucking uncomfortable when she was grinding on my dick but, for my own goddamn sanity, I let it slide.

  Until she sighs and nudges me gently.

  “Can you grab me the blanket you’re sitting on? My nipples can cut glass at this point and I’m not ruining my new bras.”

  Fuck.

  I can’t be thinking about her tits right now or her nipples, which I was fucking robbed of seeing by a bottle of whiskey and my own fucking conscience.

  Avery giggles as I scoff, shifting and handing her the blanket. Ash watches the three of us like we’re prey and then gives Lips a sly look, drawling out, “Which ones are you wearing today?”

  She chokes on her coffee, sputtering, “Uh no, my underwear choices are not going to be a daily conversation starter.”

  Two things become very clear to me.

  Lips and Ash have been hanging out without me being aware of it, and I don’t fucking like it. This feels like Ash’s warped version of flirting and there isn’t enough beer in the fucking world for me to sit through it without breaking his fucking jaw.

  Ash shrugs. “Might help me like you.”

  “Hard pass,” she snipes back and I thank small mercies that at least she’s not playing along. Fuck’s sake.

  “They say women pick their colors according to their moods, so which is it Mounty. Red? Are you feeling feisty today?”

  She throws a pillow at his head which saves his life because Avery uses the distraction to text me all of the ways I’ll fuck everything up if I say a goddamn word right now. I hate her almost as much as I hate Ash right now, but I keep my mouth shut and let my Mounty girl deal with him on her own.

  “Black, now fuck off.”

  “Depressed or horny?”

  Blood explodes in my mouth as I damn near bite my tongue off to stop myself from butting the fuck in. To her credit, Floss is just as pissed but the biggest surprise comes when Morrison steps the fuck up and snaps, “Lay off, man. She’s not here so you can poke and prod at her for your own enjoyment.”

  Ash shrugs and drinks his bourbon like this is all nothing.

  It’s not fucking nothing.

  I ignore the look Avery shoots my way, and snap at Ash, “Why are you asking her about her underwear?”

  Lips panics.

  She fucking panics as Ash smirks at me and says, “We picked out her entire collection together this week. Why do you care?”

  I’m going to kill him.

  Lips nudges me again, always so fucking gently like she thinks she’d actually be able to hurt me, and says, “He decided our path to friendship is going to be paved in lace. I decided he’s a perv and it’s easier to let him go than fight it.”

  He fucking would too.

  “Crap, we haven’t gone down to the laundry yet to ask about the thief,” Avery mumbles but she doesn’t look up from her phone.

  Thief?

  Blaise looks up from the floor at us. “Someone is stealing your underwear?”

  “Her used underwear,” says Ash.

  What.

  The.

  Fuck?!

  I glance down at her but she’s staring up at me like this is all so fucking normal, like I didn’t just find out that there’s a whole new fucking subset of bullshit going on with her that I need to sort out. “Are you a magnet for fucked up shit and psychos?”

  Avery laughs. “Why yes, Arbour, she is.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Blaise

  The first time my father told me I was a mistake was the day my manager came home with a NDA he’d forced out of a groupie who’d taken photos of me eating her out after one of my first gigs. I was too fucking drunk, and young and stupid, to do a decent job of it and she was out there in the world talking shit about me.

  My straight-laced, incredibly bigoted father almost dropped fucking dead on the spot.

  Sometimes I imagine that Blaine Morrison must only have bland missionary sex in the fucking dark on a night that’s been marked in the calendar for the last six months, because that’s the good and proper thing to do. It makes me sick to my fucking stomach.

  So I already know exactly what the fallout is going to be when my agent calls me with the news of what Annabelle has done. It has to be Annabelle, she’s the only bitch who hasn’t given up on chasing us all. Fuck, she’s still panting after my trust fund and Ash’s billions every chance she gets.

  Explaining this to my father doesn’t fucking work, all he sees is his fuck-up son once again making mistakes, so I do what I always fucking do when I know I’m going to have to deal with this.

  I get fucking wasted.

  I head back to my room from the dining hall before anyone can stop me and I start with Ash’s top-shelf bourbon, sculling that shit down until I find myself at the bottom of the bottle.

  Then I start in on Harley’s whiskey.

  He keeps this shit for emergencies, some Mounty fucking quirk he has that none of us question because that’s what friends do, but it barely touches the sides as I chug it down.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, I told you there was something wrong.”

  The bottle is wrenched out of my hands. I’d put up a fight to keep ahold of it but the perfume is Avery’s and I’d never, ever fucking disrespect her or Ash like that. If she broke a nail in the struggle? No fucking thanks, the fallout isn’t worth the shitty whiskey.

  “What the hell are you doing letting that fucking snake into your room? Morrison—”

  “Drop it, Floss, he’s already in the fucking hole.”

  The hole.

  The deep, dark place inside of me that swallows me until there’s nothing fucking left. Sometimes it feels fucking pathetic to be here because Harley watched his dad’s brains get fucking scrambled and Avery was choked to death by her own brother.

  Why do I get to be this depressed over my asshole father?

  Words aren’t that fucking bad, Morrison, for fuck’s sake.

  “Just shut up and put your fucking arm around my neck. We’re going to the girls’ room. Hold the hell onto me, I’ll be fucking pissed if you eat dirt right now.”

  My words are slurred and running into each other as I fumble out, “I’m fucking pathetic.”

  We’re about the same height and Ash is a fucking solid wall when he wants to be, draping my drunk ass over himself as he walks for both of us. “He’s pathetic, not you. You were drinking and having fun in the photos, they’re nothing. If he’s pissed
about the letters then that’s his own shit, not yours.”

  My legs stumble underneath me but Ash’s grip never falters, muttering under his breath about how all fathers should just be wiped off of the face of the Earth, and I guess I can get behind that sentiment.

  I finally open my eyes back up when we stop, Avery furiously texting in one hand and unlocking her door with the other.

  I wonder if Lips will be here?

  Ash probably wouldn’t let her come here but I wish she would be. I wish she could just… be here.

  The door finally shoves open and Avery stalks in, leaving Ash to move me by himself. “Sit him on the couch! I’ll grab the bed out and then I’ll deal with this.”

  Except Lips is here, and she gets to work rolling the spare bed out from under one of the beds, frowning and glancing over to where Ash sets me down on the couch.

  I feel both pathetic and relieved she’s here.

  Avery collapses on her bed and starts furiously texting.

  “Can someone please explain to me what the fuck is going on?” Lips says, hesitant even as she witnesses this new low of mine for the first time.

  Oh no.

  Nope.

  Goodbye whiskey, my stomach starts to heave right as Arbour saves the day by shoving a bucket under my nose. Ash parks his ass next to me, ready to jump in if I pass out in a pile of my own puke, and this right here is the reason why I won’t jump off the roof.

  This lot are worth the pain of living, even if I am in the goddamn hole again.

  “Didn’t you read it? See the photos?” Ash snaps and if I wasn’t swallowing bile down, I’d call him out for being an ass to her.

  “Obviously not. If it’s personal then I’m not fucking looking.”

  That’s pretty fucking nice of her.

  I puke.

  I puke so hard I feel the blood vessels around my eyes burst, and I want to die. Downing two bottles of spirits like that wasn’t fucking clever. It was a shit decision and maybe I do need to grow the fuck up a bit, get over this self-destruct mode I’ve built into my being. Harley grabs a bottle of water out of the fridge and presses it into the back of my neck. He’s an asshole most of the time, but he’s still one of my best fucking friends.

  Dammit, now I want to fucking cry over this like a pussy.

  I need a beer.

  “It’s Annabelle right? It has to be; she’s the only one who’s been in our room. Dammit Morrison, I told you not to let her in there! She’s a fucking snake,” Harley says as he starts to pace again.

  Ash groans. “Drop it. It’s out now; all we can do is deal with the fallout.”

  Then my goddamn, fucking asshole of a phone rings and the entire room stops breathing.

  We all know who it is.

  I’m fucked.

  “Just leave it; you can speak to him tomorrow,” says Ash, in a tone he usually only uses at Avery. A knot forms in my stomach.

  “I’ll get it out of the way now. No use putting it off,” I mumble and then I hit answer, the tirade of vitriol starting down the line before I get the phone to my ear.

  “—incompetent, selfish cunt! You’re paying someone to take your tests for you, aren’t you? I knew it. I told your mother there’s no way you’d get your GPA up on your own. My God, is it too much to ask for you to think about someone other than yourself for once? How was I cursed with such a fucking useless excuse of a son?”

  I should hang up.

  I know it, but sometimes I think I’m addicted to this kind of pain… like something in me is so fucking twisted and perverse that the gut-wrenching feeling of my own father telling me how fucking terrible I am soothes me.

  I mean, if by soothing I mean tearing my soul up into strips, lighting that shit on fire, and then burning it to the ground.

  “Do you have any idea how shameful it is for me to see these photos? I’ll have to deal with the fallout at the next Kora board meeting; I have important stakeholders who respect me, and now they’re going to be too busy fucking gossiping about my delinquent son to focus on what’s happening in my business. If you can’t pull your fucking head in then I’m cutting you off. Say goodbye to every last luxury in your life; I’m done bankrolling your deviant lifestyle.”

  That doesn’t faze me at all really. He only pays for my phone on the regular, and Ash will get me a new one the second my dad cuts it off. It’s more the idea of him cutting me off that stings.

  I should really tell that to Annabelle to get her to leave me the fuck alone.

  “I suppose we should be grateful it’s not that Beaumont boy with you; I suppose you have those photos locked down tightly.”

  Of course.

  Because I couldn’t possibly offer Ash or Harley or Avery anything but my fucking body in my father’s eyes. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him that I’m straight, I must be a fucking defect in his bigoted eyes.

  “If I find out you’ve shown those letters to anyone else, boy, I will ruin you. I’m already trying to get rid of you, the succession plan has changed, but if you try this shit again to drag me to hell with you, I will ruin you.”

  Finally he gets sick of listening to his own goddamn voice and hangs up.

  I throw my phone at the wall.

  If he’s going to cut it off anyway, why the fuck not?

  “Well, that’ll shut him up,” Ash drawls, opening the bottle of water and pressing it into my hand.

  It won’t though.

  Nothing ever shuts him up.

  I drink myself into an oblivion all day Thursday.

  Lips doesn’t drink with me—annoying as hell because a drunken hookup is exactly what I need to get me through this—but she skips classes to babysit me. Only, it doesn’t really feel like the usual suicide watch that I’m put on when I’m in the hole.

  She wakes up before I do, and she makes me French toast for breakfast. I don’t want to eat, because it’ll take me longer to get wasted later, but the syrup and rainbow sprinkles are so fucking out of place that I find myself taking the plate from her and digging in. They’re delicious and in the quiet of the morning room, I find myself calm for the first time in what feels like weeks.

  Doesn’t stop me from chugging back the drinks all day.

  She studies and cleans, folds laundry, scrubs at a pair of her Docs, paints her toenails, reads a book… she does everything possible in this tiny fucking room while she watches me slam back drink after drink.

  I can’t remember passing out, but I wake up Friday morning lying in the rollout bed with my head over one side, heaving into a bucket while Avery mumbles curses and threats at me as she wipes down my sweaty brow.

  When I stumble out of the shower later, the alcohol is gone, disappeared, poof into thin air.

  I’m like a fucking crackhead chasing a hit, and this is not the bullshit I signed up for. When I finally find the stash, Lips narcs on me to Arbour and the fucking traitor comes running for his little love, taking all of the booze with a smirk my way.

  I think about killing them both.

  By Saturday, I’m climbing the fucking walls and even Lips is sick of listening to me rage about sobriety. It doesn’t make her give in though, fuck my actual life. Her answer is always fucking coffee.

  “Fuck coffee, haven’t you ever heard of the hair of the dog? I need tequila.”

  But still she doesn’t break.

  I refuse to admit that the only reason any of this is fun for me is that I get to be here with her, messing with her and watching her rein herself in. She always holds back around me, and I find myself poking and prodding at her more and more just to see if she’ll snap.

  It backfires on me when the others get home to see it.

  Ash smirks when he sees the look on Lips’ face, joy oozing out of him at the thought of me pissing her off. It gets my hackles up, like me pissing her off is fine but him enjoying it takes shit too far.

  I’m completely fucked in the head.

  “How is suicide watch going? Have you hidden
the bed sheets from him yet? Why are you still using real forks? You should switch out to plastic until he’s come down from the ledge.”

  Harley walks in with arms full of my shit, including a guitar so at least I’ll have something worth doing tomorrow.

  “He’s better. He spent all morning whining before I left so progress is being made.” I almost miss the cutting edge to Avery’s voice as I watch Lips and Harley circle each other.

  Fuck.

  I think she likes him too.

  Fuck.

  If they’re going to start dating I need more alcohol, like fucking now. “I wouldn’t be whining if you let me fucking drink. The Mounty is practically a fucking AA sponsor and she needs to lighten the hell up. Let’s go to the bar in Haven; they do the best cheese fries.”

  Lips glares over at me as Harley hands over stacks of paperwork, notes he’s taken just for her.

  Fuck, she really is falling for him and his nerd brain.

  “Drinking is making it worse. Harley brought your guitar, write a song and chill the fuck out. Eat ice cream. Watch your shitty movies. Do homework. Do not drink and do not get high,” Lips drawls, and Ash glances between us all like there’s a love triangle going on… except there’s not.

  Lips and Harley are in love, and I’m fucking worthless.

  I kick the coffee table.

  Dumb move. I know the second the thump reverberates through the room that I’ve royally fucked up and, sure enough, Avery cusses me the fuck out.

  She marches over to me and jabs me in the chest sharply. “Just so you know, you ungrateful little shit, I’ve had the posts taken down and I’ve contacted your agent to release a statement on your behalf claiming the entire thing was a slanderous hoax concocted by a jilted ex. He doesn’t give a shit about the photos and the press is lapping it up. You’ve even had a spike in sales! I’ve also burned the letters and sent your father a gift basket with a lovely note telling him to choke on the fucking pretzels. Ash and Harley will now be opening, reading, and destroying any correspondence from that man before you see it. So get up. Eat something substantial, have a shower, do your homework. No one fucking cares that your dear old daddy is scum. I don’t, Ash and Harley don’t, and, if she were honest, Lips would tell you to tuck your vagina back into your jeans and get over it.”