Hating Him Wanting Him : A Contemporary Romance Collection

by Summer Brooks

  “Screw you, Howard,” Marvin laughed. “Hey, stand between me and Tom. You know Tom, right?”

  Of course, I did. Tom was a journalism senior, and if the rumors were true… he was Fiona Davis’ number one friend-with-benefits.

  “How’s Fiona?” I immediately went into it, knocking my beer against his.

  “Oh, shit,” Tom Birchwell said, shivering. “Bryant. Look, I just help with odd jobs on her YouTube channel. I don’t really, like, write the script or anything.”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” I countered. “Just asking how a friend of a friend’s doing, you know?”

  “I guess Fiona’s alright. She’s not really one for parties like these.”

  “Marvin would probably have a few very heated things to say to her if she did show up,” I shrugged. Tom was cowering a little, feeling like he was being cornered. Marvin looked at me with a sly grin.

  He was a good friend. Dragging Tom into the circle meant I had one way to occupy myself without thinking about Sam — I could let out some steam about the whole Fiona nonsense.

  “Wh-what’s that?” Tom asked.

  “This idiot broke my laptop because he saw that new episode, got so mad he forgot his own strength,” Marvin complained smoothly. We had a great rhythm going on — this was kinda like back in high school when me and the other guys of Broad Ripple’s football team would corner people.

  Ugh, this wasn’t me, though. I didn’t need to distract myself from my own head by going for some alpha-dog domination of some guy like skinny Tom Birchwell.

  “You want to smoke some weed?” I asked Tom. “You look a bit tense.”

  “Uh, no thanks. I had some edibles just now. Thanks anyway though,” he said.

  I leaned away from him, giving him just enough space so he could make an excuse to go. “Yeah, you go get that beer, Tom!” I laughed.

  Marvin slapped my back. “Can you imagine the dynamic of Tom and Fiona in bed? Ten bucks says they’re crazy kinky. Whips and chains. Fiona wearing a corset, eyeshadow up to the max, Tom saying, ‘yes ma’am, no ma’am’ on command.”

  I made a face.

  “Rather not think about that, Marvin. You’re a sick boy.”

  “You’re the one who borrows my laptop to look at porn.”

  “I don’t use it for that, bro!”

  Marvin brought his voice down. “Not so loud. Shit. I think you’ve got incoming.”

  I glanced to where Marvin’s gaze was fixed and saw that Samantha was pulling both her friends towards me and my buddy.

  Mia was there too. She was looking away. I guessed this wasn’t a surprise to her — she looked like she was unenthusiastically bracing herself to have to say hi.

  “Shit, could this night get weirder?” I muttered to myself. “Sam, baby, hey. Tiffany, hey to you too. And… holy shit, is that… Mia?”

  Sam raised an eyebrow as I skipped kissing her to open my arms wide to offer Mia a hug.

  Mia visibly shrank at that offer, pulling her hands close to her as if she needed to get away.

  “Bryant. Nice place,” she said.

  She even had those clear-framed glasses she bought during our junior year of high school, the ones I tried to compliment but ended up just making a fool of myself when she got all sensitive about it.

  When she said that I had a nice place I half-expected a follow-up remark about how my daddy must have paid for it, but if she thought it, she held it back.

  Whew.

  “Thanks, I guess,” I just said. Sam reached forward and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Uh, so… how are you guys doing? Party’s starting to get good. Someone must be curating the music because my Bluetooth speakers are sounding great.”

  Tiffany shrugged. “It’s a bit last season. You should get me and Sam to DJ next time. You know we’re doing music production, right?”

  “Yeah, how could I ever forget?”

  I glanced over at Mia. “You don’t have a beer.”

  “Nobody’s offered to get me one,” she said, maintaining that icy pleasantness. I was okay with that.

  “Marv — be a gentleman, okay? Get this lady a nice rosé or something. Maybe a Cosmopolitan. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Sorry, it’s all beers here.”

  “One Ward Lager then,” Mia said, her eyes glimmering as she finally dared to bring up the family connection.

  “No Ward Beers here, honey,” I said, tutting. “We’ve got everything else. Get her a Miller Lite, man. Just go, Marvin!”

  Marvin laughed and decided he would do me a favor this once.

  “You know, not being extra sarcastic or anything, but I actually like the beers your billionaire dad’s huge capitalist empire makes,” Mia said.

  I chuckled. I was clear-headed enough to know she was just playing with me, not actually being a bitch. “Cool, cool. Next party, maybe. He does a lot of business in Florida. Spring break makes him a billion bucks alone, I bet.”

  Although if she countered with a joke about how I was going to just coast along on my dad’s money, I would get sensitive again…

  She didn’t.

  “Hey,” I said, exhaling awkwardly, just as Marvin came back with two beers, one for Mia and one for me. I had forgotten I was still holding an empty bottle. “So… I don’t know. Make your own entertainment, the house is all yours. Sam, Tiff, Mia… drugs? We’ve got weed, we’ve got coke, lots of fun stuff, anything you want. Go get high.”

  Sam and Tiffany exchanged looks and grinned. “Okay…”

  “Mia?” I asked.

  “I don’t do that sort of thing,” she said, wincing as if she was scared to telegraph how painfully uncool she was.

  I shrugged. “Me neither. It’s not so bad going without.”

  Well… only because I didn’t want to risk getting drug-tested between now and the end of the season.

  And Coach Frost would literally kill me, damn.

  I excused myself as Mia tagged along with Sam and Tiffany, Marvin getting all desperate for female attention as he followed after them.

  He stopped just long enough to whisper in my ear, asking, “Do you really want to break up with Sam? She’s looking hot, dude!”

  “Yeah, well, hot doesn’t make up for clingy and annoying. Didn’t you see the way she, like, reached over from across the room to kiss me on the cheek? Like a fucking giraffe leaning its head down or something,” I joked.

  Marvin just shrugged. He wasn’t exactly a big philosopher when it came to girls: if he could somehow fumble his way into bed with a girl, that was good enough. Everything after that was a bonus.

  Weird that someone as talented and physically gifted as Marvin was such a horn-dog when it came to women. Well, that wasn’t the weird part. Of course, you’d expect a guy as built and alpha as him to be that way. But I was constantly surprised by just how little game he had. He was always chasing girls, clueless about how to actually handle them.

  I wasn’t going to say I was really all that much better. Marvin may have me beat on size and sheer muscularity, but I had the good looks, the great hair, the charm. I knew women loved that, and honestly, getting female attention was something so natural to me that I never had to even really think about it.

  So Marvin might be right that I was being ruthless at the idea of dumping Sam for being a little clingier than your average college girl, but that was because I could have a revolving line of girls if I so chose.

  I needed space. The whole house was starting to stink of weed. Jesus Christ, it was like the DEA started burning a whole field of marijuana crops here. How the fuck did a hundred college kids smoke so much weed?

  It was Russel’s job to acquire extra party accessories like drugs. I didn’t touch them, and I was honestly a little scared about getting into it. I knew the kind of person I was. I got hooked onto things easily. I didn’t want to be an addict, fuck, I’d never want to be an addict.

  I think that was the natural reaction of growing up as Sergio Howard’s son, telling myself my dad was
just absent because of work, not because he was actually cheating on my mom in New York as he built his company to a multi-billion-dollar enterprise for the specific purpose of screwing Mom out of his earnings… all so he could make sure it stayed with his new family.

  Craving approval and attention was a drug, maybe even a crazier drug than the ones on offer here tonight.

  I could at least go for a cigarette, even if it fucked with my lungs and I didn’t want to have my endurance weakened with practice scheduled for the next few days.

  This was just stress.

  Was it? I couldn’t really tell. As I stood on the lawn, leaning against the stucco wall of my party house, I wondered if Mia’s sudden appearance had started to mess with my head.

  Maybe it was a good thing. A way to spur on competition. No, of course she wasn’t competing to take my quarterback spot, what, that skinny nerd with glasses? Come on.

  It was more that even I had to confess that she had this effect on me where she drove me on to do great things, just so I could prove to the world that I wasn’t the fuck-up I kept second-guessing myself as. She kept me sharp. Even when she was being a bitch to me.

  Damn, I never thought I would find myself grateful to see Mia Cowell.

  Speak of the Devil, there Mia was.

  She was walking around the outside of the house, following the walls, brushing her fingers idly against them as she aimlessly walked. I wondered what she was thinking.

  Mia used to do a lot of that in school. I made fun of her for doing that, saying she was ‘straying’. She hated it so much, it was so funny. I figured this was her coping mechanism, just walking and letting herself think.

  “Nobody slipped a tab of acid in your mouth while you weren’t paying attention, I take it?” I said to her, walking over to her from my perch at the wall, facing all the cars parked in my spacious front yard.

  “Hah,” Mia shook her head. “Friend or not, if anyone tried that on me, I’d straight-up spray them with this baby right here.”

  She patted a small can of pepper spray she had on a keychain from her handbag.

  “Cute bag,” I pointed out. “Looks designer.”

  It sounded a little elitist of me to say that: I didn’t mean to suggest she couldn’t typically afford anything nicer than department store stuff… which, let’s be real, was also pretty true.

  “I saved up for it, actually. It’s this brand I like from Sweden that does a lot of ethical sourcing,” she said. I could tell she was proud of herself for doing that, and I was glad she didn’t take my words as an attack.

  “Yo, that’s cool,” I said. “Everyone’s getting high and we’re talking about ethical sourcing. I’m all about the environment, this is cool stuff.”

  “You’re still the worst conversationalist I’ve ever known,” Mia said, shaking her head with a small smile. “Why aren’t you getting high like everyone else?”

  I was ready to tell her the Mike Liotta story, but maybe that was too much for a newbie at Florida University. “Eh, not really my thing.”

  “Because of sports?”

  “Because of… personality.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Tenth grade at Kim Jonas’s party you brought some weed in a baggie and made a big fuss about how you weren’t going to share any of it because we were dumb kids who couldn’t handle it.”

  I burst out laughing. “Oh my God, I was such a poser back then.”

  “You were always a poser, Bryant,” Mia grinned. “It wasn’t actually drugs, was it?”

  “Oh God, no. It was oregano. I read it in a book somewhere and wanted to, you know, look cool.”

  “Why does a cool kid even need to pretend?” she giggled. “That’s so weird.”

  “You’d never understand,” I said, shrugging.

  “Because I’m not a cool kid? Because I’m a nerd with glasses?”

  I winced. “You know, today that doesn’t exactly sound like me at my most… eloquent.”

  “Big word for a dumb football-playing primate,” Mia said, her eyes twinkling as her gaze met mine.

  Fuck, this felt weird.

  We were actually connecting.

  Mia and I continued to walk along the veranda, where a bunch of people were just lying down on the wooden parquet floor, relaxing as they traded joints and tabs and who knows what else.

  The idea of connecting with Mia seemed a bit weird. I kind of felt guilty, and it freaked me out that I was feeling that way.

  So I had to swerve into some other topic.

  “You okay?” she suddenly asked.

  “Eh…” I said, trying to find anything random to say. The anxiety I was feeling made me come off a little aggressive “Hey, you’re not wearing your glasses anymore. You were four-eyes just now, though.”

  She pursed her lips. “I don’t really need them. They’re in my bag.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said, pausing before a laugh escaped me.

  “You’re a dick, Bryant. Well, you haven’t changed.”

  “Hey, hey, hey, sorry, I wasn’t trying to be that way,” I said. “I’m just preoccupied.”

  I stopped and sat down on a bench.

  “Well?” Mia asked. It was weird she was prodding me this way. It wasn’t like her to be this interested in my life.

  “I think I’ve just made a big decision about my life. I’m gonna break up with Samantha. I’m kinda sick of her, damn.”

  I regretted the words as soon as I said them, because when I heard a gasp behind me, I realized Sam was sitting down on the veranda, joint in hand, just a few feet from us the whole time.

  5

  Mia

  “Sam!” I said, chasing after my friend as she ran away from the house. I was mad, alright: I turned around to glare at Bryant.

  He was a bad guy. It didn’t surprise me at all that it only took him literally a few minutes to ruin everything, now that I was here in Florida.

  “Sam, please!”

  As much as she seemed like a changed girl now, my best friend was very much the same Samantha I had grown up with, and I could see that as I chased after her, a scene that you could have taken from any number of previous moments of breakups and drama.

  “Sam!”

  “What?”

  She had run back inside the house, moving around the various drunk and stoned partygoers who were here at Bryant’s place. I could see tears in her eyes. And her look of rage could have mirrored mine.

  Twinsies.

  We knew each other best for a reason. Sam could have fooled herself into thinking Bryant was a good guy, but with some things you just can’t beat the truth.

  “Hey…” I murmured, walking up to Sam, reaching for her hands. I brought them up to her chest, squeezing her hands with my palms. I had done this so many times for her, and she had done the same for me.

  Boys. Always boy trouble.

  “You’re right to be angry. But don’t let some jerk ruin your night, Sam,” I said, lowering my voice, hoping to soothe her.

  “Some jerk, Mia?” Sam’s voice slurred as her eyes flashed with malice, and in that moment I realized something that didn’t quite make sense to me.

  She thought I was the bad one here.

  “Not some jerk,” Sam continued. “My boyfriend. You’re so freaking prejudiced against him. Bryant’s my boyfriend, okay? He’s the most important person in my life. You may have thought it was you, but then you had to… you disappeared on me. All because you didn’t like that I was dating your high school enemy. You could’ve just grown up, Mia. Babe, you’re so pathetic sometimes.”

  I reeled at her words, letting go of her hands and stepping back — literally flinching. “Sam…”

  “You’ve had it in for him since… I don’t know, since forever. I don’t get it. He’s not a bad guy.”

  “Are you really defending him after he just said he wanted to break up with you?” I said in disbelief.

  “Well, he’s just saying that because you, like, twisted him into thinking that. Th
at’s what you always do. You can’t help but try to mess things up for Bryant.”

  I laughed at just how ridiculous Sam was sounding right now. “No, Sam, I think this is for the better. Because Bryant honestly is a bad apple. Like I can tell you right now, if he wasn’t going to do this to you tonight, he was going to pick some other awful time to break your heart. Have you thought about the possibility that he’s the asshole here?”

  “Whatever. You’re jealous.”

  I laughed again. Not a giggle, not even a polite laugh: this was me laughing at her, letting my best friend know just how dismissive I was at the thought of her ridiculous claim. “I think you’ve been wanting to have a big blow-up fight with me like this for ages, Sam. I don’t get it. We’re practically sisters. Can’t you see that I’m not the bad guy here?”

  “So what are you saying, then? All guys are douchebags? No. Of course you aren’t saying that. You’re just saying that Bryant is. My boyfriend.”

  I made a face. “Well, for one, he’s probably going to take offense to you calling him that still. Because it’s pretty clear to me that he doesn’t think he’s your boyfriend, Sam.”

  Sam’s lips quivered, like she was about to say something, but she bit it back and burst into tears instead. Her arms went slack, falling to her sides. I immediately went forward, hugging her tight.

  Sam might be wrong, but she was still my best friend. And being best friends meant having the energy to support her even when I was pissed off at the whole situation for other reasons.

  “Don’t worry, Sam. I’m here. We’re here, together. We’re strong. We’re sisters, remember? Twins. Nothing we can’t do if we put our minds to it.”

  I felt someone shift near us as we hugged, and I was ready to lash out, thinking it was Bryant waiting to cause more damage. But it wasn’t. It was Tiffany, somehow having tracked us.

  “She’s high as fuck, Mia,” Tiffany said. She was slurring too, her eyelids fluttering from smoking too much too quickly. “Let’s take her home.”

  “No!” Sam struggled, protesting. “I don’t want that. Fuck it. I’m going to just have a good time here. I don’t care about Bryant.”