Stolen Crush

by Stunich, C. M.

  I pissed Tess off enough by being gone, I shouldn’t poke the bear. And yet … I’m going to poke the bear.

  I let my hair out of its bun long ago, so it’s all mussed up. And my blazer is still wet because I’ve been sitting hunched up and didn’t give it a chance to dry. This must really look like something it isn’t.

  I keep staring at my birth mother.

  “What the—and excuse my language—fuck were you thinking?” Tess’ eyes water, but she manages to keep her expression what I’d call ‘bitchy neutral’. Like, she’s clearly ticked-off but she isn’t expressing that. Yet. Her eyes flick to Chasm. “I’m disappointed in you, too. How could you drive my daughter around all day and not think to bring her home or answer your phone?”

  Parrish appears in the doorway behind Tess, frowning as he drags his gaze from my borrowed wet blazer and up to my face. My eyes catch his and stick there, my palms sweat, my heart begins to race.

  Oh. Oh. Ohhhhh. I have a crush on Parrish.

  Fuck.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  I have a crush on my stepbrother. If I were at the screaming/silence cabin (how is that not a title of one of my bio mom’s books already?), I’d definitely scream right now.

  I look back at Tess.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Vanguard,” Chasm says politely, which is as nice as I’ve ever heard him. He must be terrified of Tess to act that nice. I’m under no such curse. She’s done enough to me that I’m numb to it now.

  “I’m not.” Shit, did I just say that?

  “Excuse me?” Tess asks, blinking at me like she can’t quite believe I just said what I said. Parrish looks apathetic to all of it, as he always does, but I’m hyperaware of his presence in a way I wasn’t before. It just … happened today. Like lightning in a gray and distant sky.

  “I’m not sorry because I told you I didn’t want to be interviewed, and you didn’t care. You knew my grandparents were going to be on the show, and you didn’t tell me.” I’m shaking with frustration, but I don’t move. Instead, I just stand there and squeeze my iced coffee like a stress ball. The sound of the cup denting seems so … loud.

  “None of that excuses you for running away for an entire day.” Tess steps forward and holds out her hand, palm up. “Phone,” she says, wiggling her fingers. “Give it to me. I know you have it.”

  “I really don’t though,” I say with a small cringe, shaking out the pockets on the blazer so she can see there’s nothing in them. I already thought about this and stashed my phone under Chasm’s seat. Like Parrish, he seems fine going along with it.

  Tess drops her arm to her side with a dramatic sigh, but where can we really go from here?

  “You’re grounded again, Dakota. For a month. How does that sound?”

  It sounds like I made the right choice when I threw your envelope away, that and the stupid key you have yet to explain. Doesn’t matter. I’d throw the tennis bracelet away, too, if I didn’t think I could sell it and buy myself a plane ticket back home instead.

  “Dakota,” she says, and it’s clear in the way that she chooses to emphasize my name that she’s trying here. It feels ‘too little, too late’ to me. “I understand why you’re upset—”

  “Do you?” I ask, wishing I could just open the garage door and start running. Couldn’t I? Would she physically chase me down and drag me back here? Or could I escape? Permanently. The thought crosses my mind and disappears just as quick. Of course I wouldn’t do that. Not to Tess or my grandparents … That moment of selfish introspection at the cabin makes me feel jittery. “If you did, you wouldn’t be trying to punish me right now, would you?”

  I move past her and into the house, pausing briefly beside Parrish. We look at each other for a breath, but then Tess is following me, so I’m forced to keep going.

  I make it to my room just before her, close it, and then lock it before she can open it. I’m convinced she’s going to pick the lock from the outside and let herself in, but she doesn’t.

  I flop down on my bed, leaving the lights off and wondering when my furniture is going to get here. I’m still staring at the ceiling when someone knocks a few hours later, sitting up and heading over to crack it open. Somehow, I think I already know who it is.

  “Here,” Parrish says quietly, handing my phone over to me. “Chas gave it to me before he left.” He pauses and his eyes flick to the side for the briefest instant before coming back to me. It feels like he’s looking right past all the bullshit for the first time since I got here.

  Opposites attract. Sometimes you start falling for the person you hate. Sometimes, you’re not even sure they are your opposite. Maybe they’re just so much like you that you can’t tell the difference anymore?

  I go to take the phone, but Parrish whips it out of my grip for a moment.

  “Don’t fall for Chasm,” he tells me, and it takes me nearly a minute to process that he’s just said that.

  “Why not?” I ask, but he just shakes his head and pushes my phone against my hand. “Parrish?”

  But he turns and disappears into his room without answering me.

  Dick.

  But I am grateful to have my phone. And I thankful for him distracting Tess all day.

  I bite my lip and throw my phone on the charger—but without turning it on. I won’t risk it, not tonight.

  That is, until the memory of waking up in the woods, alone and cold and scared, hits me like a freight train. Never mind. I’d rather risk Tess finding—and subsequently stealing—my phone than waking up outside with a needle mark in my neck.

  I turn my phone on, doing my best to ignore the barrage of messages flooding through on every channel. Comments, tags, DMs, emails, texts, voice mail. Just thinking about it makes my stomach flip with nausea, so I don’t bother looking. I set the phone up on the tripod and then do my best to disguise it with random junk like a half-empty bottle of lotion and some paperback books.

  Only then do I let myself relax, curling into a ball in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar state of mind and doing my best to fall asleep.

  One sentence keeps repeating itself in my mind, loud and clear—and so do the unspoken implications that followed it.

  Don’t fall for Chasm—fall for me instead.

  The first thing I do when I get up is check the footage.

  Not only am I super curious to get to the bottom of the mystery—like, am I sleepwalking?—but it also gives me something to do that isn’t checking my messages, looking at social media, or leaving this room. I pause with my phone in my hand and then lay my forehead against the edge of the dresser with a groan.

  “Why did I say those things yesterday?” I breathe, second-guessing myself as I stand there and sulk. I feel trapped, both physically and online. Where can I go that I won’t be bothered? I end up running myself a bath as I replay last night’s interaction with Tess in my head. “I’m not. I’m not sorry …”

  Cringe.

  Internally and externally.

  I just fucked that up, didn’t I?

  My skin gets prune-y before I get out, and I’m dragging my feet like crazy. Leaving this room means all sorts of things that I don’t want to think about right now. Tess. My grandparents. Being kidnapped. Parrish.

  I grit my teeth.

  Fucking Parrish.

  I scrub my hands over my face, thinking about Chasm and how comfortable I felt being around him last night. In reality, the last thing in the world I need or want is a romantic interest. Why do I have to be meeting all these people at once? I feel cursed.

  “Okay, Dakota, let’s just get this over with.” I drop my arms to my sides, shaking out my hands and taking several deep breaths to make sure that I’m calm. Either Tess grounds me or she doesn’t. Either Parrish admits to the implications in his words last night or he doesn’t.

  Parrish’s door is closed when I open my own, and a quick check down the hall shows me that Tess isn’t in her office. Fantastic. I head downstairs to the main area of the house,
and there they all are, dressed and awake on a Sunday the same way they are on Mondays. Every single one of them—but me. Because, of course, I belong here like a fish belongs out of water.

  “Good morning, Dakota,” Tess says, very prim and proper and closed-off. She came close to being human last night, but apparently when the moonlight goes, so does my bio mom’s feelings.

  “Good morning.” I pause awkwardly in my shoe-less, prune-y pajama state, and I think about Chasm. Mostly, I think about the way he waited while I sat in the yard and did my own thing. For a minute there, I didn’t give a shit what anybody else thought of me.

  So I move over to the cabinet and start yanking things out. I have to improvise since the Vanguards don’t have the most well-stocked pantry in existence. I click a few buttons on the wall oven to get it preheating. Nobody says anything as I start recreating one of my grandfather’s recipes from scratch.

  But they all are staring at me when I glance up from stirring a from-scratch bowl of cornbread batter.

  “Would you like to discuss last night?” Tess asks, holding her coffee mug in one hand while the bottom rests in the palm of the other. From behind her, Parrish watches me, sitting at the table between his father and Kimber.

  We make eye contact again, but all he does is blink at me, nice and slow.

  “No, thank you,” I reply, because if she’s asking it as a question then I have a right to say no, don’t I?

  Another long pause. The TV is playing a conservative news channel in the corner, but nobody’s paying much attention to it.

  “Are you making cornbread for breakfast?” Tess asks as I spoon the yellow mixture into a pan.

  “Why can’t I have cornbread for breakfast?” I reply, looking back up at her. Kimber’s back to scrolling on her phone while the three younger kids move on, chattering with each other. Paul, Parrish, and Tess are all still watching me though.

  “Dakota, we need to talk,” Tess finally says, setting her coffee mug down hard on the counter. Coffee sloshes over the edge, but she makes no move to clean it up. She’ll leave it to Delphine, I’m sure.

  “About what?” I’m purposely avoiding her eyes as I slip the cornbread into the preheated oven. After that, I wash my hands and start loading the dishwasher.

  “You’re grounded for a month, starting today,” Tess begins, and I pause, turning slowly to look at her. Who is this person that’s trying to order me around? I don’t know her. I know the Banks, who, apparently lied to me. But who is this? Tess Vanguard, bestselling author. That’s all I really know.

  “I’m grounded for which part, exactly?” I cross my arms over my chest and lean my butt against the edge of the counter. For the briefest of seconds, I swear I see the edge of Parrish’s lip curve up in a sardonic smile, but in the span of a blink, it’s gone and I’m left wondering if I’m only seeing what I want to see.

  “For disappearing with Chasm all day and not contacting me.” She sounds resolute, sure of herself, like this is a rule crafted of iron, one that can never be broken.

  “If you wanted me to contact you,” I start slowly, meeting her eyes, their color so like my own that it’s startling. I know we’re mother and daughter, but did we really need to look so similar? Lots of people don’t look like their biological parents, at least not to this degree. “Then you shouldn’t have taken away my phone. Or … planned to take my phone away.” I grin at her, which is maybe a bit cheeky but which I do anyway. “I lost it, but if I found it, you’d just take it anyway so …”

  Tess takes her coffee mug from the counter and dumps it into the sink, frowning so hard it looks like she’s leaving permanent creases in her face.

  “Don’t try to pretend that you didn’t at least have access to Kwang-seon’s phone.” Uh-oh. If she’s calling Chas by his real name, she must be extra pissed off. “And there’s no excuse for you leaving the studio without telling me and then staying out to all hours of the night.” The way her gaze sweeps me, I feel immediately judged. “Did something happen between you and him?”

  My mouth drops open, and I just blink at her in surprise.

  “Happen? Do you mean, did I have sex with him?” I ask, and Tess cringes. “Seriously? That’s what you’re concerned about? No, I didn’t have sex with him because I was too upset about finding out that one, my grandparents lied to me. And two, that you knew they’d be on the show and you didn’t care. You didn’t care that you’d make them look like monsters in front of the whole world.”

  “They are monsters!” Tess screams at me, and the force of her anger causes me to take a step back. Both Paul and Parrish stand up from their seats as Kimber pries her eyes from the screen of her phone to stare. “They are monsters, Mia.”

  Mia.

  There it is, and very pointed, too.

  “They’re my grandparents—” I start, but Tess isn’t in the mood today.

  She moves across the kitchen to stand right in front of me, an imposing figure in her designer heels and skirt suit. I’m proud of myself for meeting her eyes and standing my ground, as if the heat of her fury isn’t searing my skin.

  “They are not your grandparents. Your grandparents—my parents—are dead. The Banks are just … people. Strangers. Maybe they didn’t kidnap you with their own hands, but they aided and abetted that maniac; they knew the truth years ago, and yet they kept you from me. So I’m sorry, Mia, if I don’t feel any sympathy toward them.”

  “Don’t call me Mia,” I choke out, but the words are caught behind a wave of emotion. They feel weak, and I don’t want to be weak. “And don’t call Saffron a maniac, she’s … sad. Her baby died—”

  “Yes,” Tess says, her voice sharp as a knife as she stares down at me. Now I see how she’s become such a powerhouse in the publishing world; she’s fucking terrifying. Even if her manuscript sucked—they never do, her books are always painfully well-written—anyone publisher in their right mind would drop to their knees and beg for forgiveness if she looked at them this way. “Her baby died. Dakota Banks died of SIDS. And that’s very sad, but my baby didn’t die. My baby is standing right here.”

  “I am not your baby,” I breathe, but I can’t deny it. Three DNA tests and one quick look in the mirror is all it took to confirm that beyond a shadow of a doubt. “Not just your baby,” I amend, because I feel cornered. I feel fucking trapped.

  “Mom,” Parrish starts, but Tess lifts up a finger to silence him, staring down at me with her raven-black eyes.

  “Not just my baby?” she clarifies, her voice cooling from red hot to ice cold. Shit, shit, shit. I feel instantly like I’ve made a mistake, but where can I go with this now? Besides, I have a point. If Tess feels her biology allows her instant and permanent access to me—as well as absolute control—then what about my dad? Don’t I at least deserve to know his fucking name?

  “I have a father out there somewhere, a man that you refuse to talk about.” I keep my eyes on hers, even as my blood pounds in my skull and I feel my heartbeat thundering a million miles an hour. “You say he was a random one-night stand, but I don’t believe you. The way you acted when I brought him up was … weird.”

  Tess’ face pales slightly, and I feel an instant spike of guilt. What if she was … raped or abused? What if my father is a monster? The thought makes me so nauseous that I feel almost dizzy. I’m not out to hurt other people, I’m really not. What if Tess was trying to protect me by not bringing him up? What am I even doing right now?

  “If your father cared about you, don’t you think he’d have stepped forward when our story appeared on every major news site in the country? Don’t you think he’d have found you on social media and reached out? That he’d hire a lawyer to fight for the right to see you?” Tess stands her ground, regaining that fiery rage, that righteous superiority. “You are grounded for four weeks, whether you like it or not. If your father steps forward to claim half his rights, you can take up your issues with him then.”

  If your father cared about you …

>   I swallow hard, struggling to rein in my emotions. If I fully understood what they all were, maybe I wouldn’t have such trouble pulling myself together.

  Instead, I turn to go and Tess grabs my arm, causing me to stumble slightly. My phone falls from my pocket and my face blanches just before she picks it up off the ground and stares at it. Her eyes lift to mine for the briefest of seconds before she throws it in the sink as hard as she can, shattering it the same way Parrish did Kimber’s.

  This time, when I start to run, Tess doesn’t follow me.

  But somebody else does.

  Parrish grabs me from behind just as I step into my room, heeling the door shut behind us. His hands spin me around and then he’s crushing me into the sweet-smelling fabric of his hoodie. His fingers hold the back of my head, his other arm wrapped around my waist.

  I’m crying without even realizing that I’ve started. Even though I should rightfully shove him away from me and tell him to get fucked … I find my fingers curling into his Whitehall Prep sweatshirt, squeezing it tight as tears and snot stain the fabric.

  I’ve ruined Chasm’s and Parrish’s clothes in a twenty-four-hour period.

  Chasm.

  Something feels off as I snuggle into Parrish and he holds me close, stroking my hair and saying nothing. Is this wrong or … is it exactly right? He’s my stepbrother, but that doesn’t really matter, does it? What does matter is that he’s Tess’ son, more so than I am or ever will be her daughter. That’s the problem.

  Also … also …

  I lift my face up to find Parrish staring down at me with an inscrutable expression. His almond-shaped eyes are dark, the copper color of them obscured with anger. At who, exactly, I’m not sure. Tess? He couldn’t possibly be mad at Tess, right? Not on my behalf anyway …

  “Why are you …” I start, but he doesn’t let me finish. Instead, he puts his hand on the side of my face and leans down, his eyes closing as he drops his lips to mine.