Crush: A YA Romance Collection

by Lavinia Leigh

  “I’m Damien. I’m your lesbian friend’s hook up when she wants some real action,” Damien stated coolly as his eyes met Austin’s in the rear view mirror. Austin knew it was a lie, since he was my actual hook up, but I could see that he didn’t like that I had said it was okay for Damien to come along with us.

  “He’s the senator’s son. She clearly didn’t want either of us there so we left her with my father and the golden girl,” I said, in order to ease some of the tension in the car.

  “The golden girl?” Austin asked without taking his eyes off of Damien as we pulled to a stop at a red light.

  “My sister. She’s my mother’s star child, and according to Jade, I’m the one who causes father’s to hide their, what did you say again? Oh, right, virginal daughters,” Damien said as his hand playfully slapped my back. “Don’t worry, Jade, I can help you lose that quality.”

  “Well, according to that phrase, I already lost that quality. As you saw at the restaurant, my dad didn’t hide me from you.”

  “Well, that was a poor decision in his case. Marrying my mother will be yet another poor choice.” Damien’s dark eyes flicked to mine in the mirror. The second our eyes met, a shiver went up my spine at the emotions in his eyes.

  “What are you two talking about? I didn’t come to pick you up so I could hear your incestuous flirting,” Austin groaned as we turned a corner and headed down the street.

  “Incestuous? We aren’t related, so it’s not incest, and even if my mother does marry her father we aren’t blood related,” Damien clarified. “I can innocently flirt with any girl who I choose to.”

  “It’s still disgusting to hear!”

  “Feeling left out are we?” Damien mocked with a smirk as Austin’s face turned beet red and he looked away from us to focus on the road.

  “Where am I going?” Austin asked in a huff as he changed lanes and sped through a yellow light.

  “Go to your house. I definitely don’t want to be at mine when my dad gets back. I can only imagine what he’ll say about the photos.” I cringed at the thought of having him come home to yell at me for my actions and then spend hours giving me a lecture that he knew I wouldn’t take to heart.

  “I would still love to compare the birthmark photo to the real thing. Maybe we should go back to my house and take a look,” Damien suggested as he leaned forward to whisper the last part in my ear.

  “I don’t think so,” Austin said as he pulled into his driveway and parked the car. “Unless you want to walk there,” he added before he got out of the car and slammed the door behind him.

  “I can see that he and I are going to make great friends,” Damien pointed out with an eye roll as we got out of the car and followed Austin up the driveway to the house.

  “Yeah, you’re a real Taylor Swift when it comes to guys I can see.”

  “What does that mean?” Damien questioned with a lift of his eyebrow and a slight tilt of his head.

  “It means you turn them off and they leave you,” I stated with a smirk as he stood behind me, injured by my words.

  “Well, that’s fine. Guys can feel free to run away from me, but I think you’re running toward me, so I don’t mind. Just no lesbian stuff, it’s just you and me only.” He gave me a wink as he walked past me and into the house which Austin had left open for us. I followed Damien in and shut the door behind me to see Austin glaring at Damien as he was talking to Brooke.

  “Oh, so this is your lesbian friend! I can see why you two chose each other as partners.” Damien smirked as he looked Brooke over, just as he had done to me outside of the restaurant.

  “Yeah, that’s me, but I go by Brooke when Jade and I aren’t engaged in sexual activity,” Brooke stated as she walked away from Damien and left him to stare at her butt which had been photographed and put in the papers.

  I was about to say something when Austin grabbed my hand, yanked me toward him, and steered me out of ear shot. “I don’t like him,” Austin growled in a low voice.

  “You don’t have to like him, you just have to deal with him,” I responded, yanking my arm out of his hold before going to follow Brooke and Damien into the kitchen.

  Damien’s eyes left Brooke’s body when I walked into the room and immediately went to mine again. He didn’t hide the fact that he was looking at me either, and it was making Austin mad because he was never able to do that with Brooke around. His feelings were going to cause trouble if he didn’t get over it quickly. The fact that Austin couldn’t control his emotions for me bothered me more than my dad having a nickname for Alyssa. If he didn’t stop I would have to end the hook ups because he was getting way too attached.

  I groaned to myself. Just thinking about the emotions and the relationship Austin was hoping to have with me was getting on my nerves. “Brooke, pour me a drink from Amanda’s stash. I definitely need one.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” she responded. I watched as her eyes took in Austin’s rigid posture. She didn’t know why he was so angry, but she knew a drink would calm him down.

  “Do you mind if I join in? You seem to have a lot of fun when you’re drunk, unless you went skinny dipping sober.” Damien smiled at the thought of those photos from the newspaper.

  “We were sober, but we are far more fun drunk. Let me show you,” I suggested as Brooke handed me the signature white bottle of Malibu rum and I began pouring everyone a drink.

  Chapter 6

  A few drinks in we all decided to migrate to the basement. Brooke and I sat on the loveseat, while the two guys sat across from us. Damien laid back in the reclining chair and Austin sat unhappily on Brooke’s pink beanbag. Austin tossed a glare Damien’s way, who responded with his hands raised in a surrendering motion. “Hey, you snooze you lose.”

  That statement sent Brooke, who was going to be the first to be cut off, into a fit of giggles. Brooke leaned over the couch, her long, blonde hair grazing the ground as she grabbed the nearly empty bottle of coconut Malibu rum and a brand new bottle of mango Malibu rum off of the floor. Uncapping the nearly empty bottle, she pressed her lips to the opening and raised it up high into the air. Her body swayed as the liquid ran down the foggy glass bottle and into her awaiting mouth.

  Damien watched wide eyed as she guzzled the last bit of the drink and pulled it away from her lips. Once she finished, she tossed the empty bottle to the ground where it bounced on the carpeted floor, and threw her hands up into the air. “Drinking game! Let’s play a drinking game!” she screeched loudly, bouncing in the chair for a moment before bending over. I wouldn’t doubt it if the motion had made her sick.

  “I’m in,” Damien responded coolly, sitting up in his chair.

  Austin shrugged his shoulders. “Why not?”

  “It depends what game,” I said, biting my lip. I wasn’t in the mood to play anything that involved a lot of activity and I knew from how Brooke was bent over the arm of the couch that she wouldn’t be able to keep her balance if she was standing. “What do you wanna play?”

  Brooke shrugged, uncertain of a game because she was probably too intoxicated to process what I had just asked her.

  “How about we make up a game? Do y’all have a deck of cards we can use and a beer can?"

  Nodding, I hopped up and ran up the stairs. I grabbed a deck of cards off the kitchen table, got a beer from the lowest drawer in the refrigerator, and headed back to the basement. My feet thudded along the floors, and the stairs squeaked as I made my way to the bottom of the steps where I headed back over to my seat. I plopped down next to Brooke and tossed Damien the cards.

  “What do you have in mind?” I questioned, my eyes focusing on his big hands as he opened the cards and pulled them out of the case.

  “It’s a game I made up with some of my friends. This guy I knew, a real ladies man from Germany, taught me. All you do is take the face cards and the aces from the deck. It’s a variation of Kings, if you have ever played that, where the kings is make a rule, the queen is questions,
the jack is never have I ever, and the ace is a screw you card.”

  “A screw you card?” Brooke asked hopefully as she eyed Damien with a suggestive eyebrow lift. I guess it’s time to cut off Brooke, I thought to myself as Damien gave me a smirk.

  “Not that kind of screw, Blondie,” Damien said with a smile.

  Austin and I exchanged shocked glances when Damien turned down Brooke and didn’t give her a sexual answer. All day the boy had been making advances toward us. He just seemed like a flirty guy from what I could tell, and I hadn’t even spent a full twenty-four hours with him yet.

  “With every card you draw, you take a drink and you put the card under the beer tab. The loser, aka the person who pops the tab, has to chug the beer. I should warn you that I have never lost this game,” Damien said confidently as he eyed me from across the room, which promptly made Austin agree to the game and Brooke soon follow.

  “I guess I’ll play.” I didn’t see how this game would be too hard for Brooke to participate in, and I was exceptional at holding my liquor. “One thing though; the king and the jack are easy, but what is questions?”

  “Well normally it’s when you answer a question with another question and whoever actually answers the question loses. In this case, we are going to get to know each other a little better. Since I know nothing about any of you except your sexual orientations and first names, when someone flips a queen they have to ask a question, and then everyone has to answer it.”

  “So if I ask, are you having sexual fantasies about anyone?” I prompted Damien for an example.

  “My answer would be you."

  “Then I’m in,” I stated confidently as I laced my words with a double meaning and leaned forward to play the game, ignoring Austin’s burning gaze on the side of my face.

  We made it through a few rounds, taking drinks of the mango rum with every card, and following the rules well, but what Damien didn’t warn us about is how drunk you get from the game, or how quickly. My head was starting to spin after just a few rounds, but I wanted to keep playing because I realized just how much Damien and I had in common.

  Damien became rebellious after his parents divorced. To this day, he doesn’t even know what happened, except that his mom came home one day and told him his father wouldn’t be around anymore. He had a strong feeling she kicked him out or something, but she never gave him an explanation. I could sympathize—I hardly spent time with my father anymore since my mother’s death. My mom was the glue of our family, and as soon as she was diagnosed, and given an “expiration date,” as she had once joked, the whole dynamic of our family changed. My dad became distant, and I spent a lot of time trying to find things that would help me forget that my mom was slowly dying right in front of my eyes.

  “He’s just changed. It’s like my mom was never alive. He just wants a new life with the perfect family he has always wanted and I’m not a part of the life he wants,” I stated honestly due to the alcohol impeding the ability to lie. My heart ached as memories of my mom filled my mind. I glanced down to shield my face from everyone, took a deep breath, then took the bottle from Brooke’s hands and took a long gulp.

  “We hardly even see our parents since they moved. It’s like Amanda is our mom, just much cooler and more relaxed,” Austin said as Brooke slurred a yes in agreement.

  Damien furrowed his eyebrows at that. “Your parents moved away and left you guys here?”

  Brooke nodded her head fervently. “Child neglect!” she yelled, holding her fist in the air. “I propose we call child services and get an opinion on this matter,” she said, slurring and stumbling over a few of her words.

  “Yeah, we can do that tomorrow,” I joked, patting her shoulder to calm her down.

  “Good,” she responded, slumping back into the chair.

  Damien raised an eyebrow at me and Austin, waiting for an answer to his question.

  “My grandpa on my dad’s side is the only living grandparent that we have left and he’s been having a lot of health issues lately, so my parents rented out a townhouse near his retirement home so they could be closer to him.” Austin shrugged his shoulders as he continued, “They left last year and decided to let us stay here for school. They trust us, and they visit every two weeks. Sometimes we go and visit to see our grandpa too. They only moved three hours away. It’s no big deal. We can take care of ourselves just fine.”

  I ended the disclosure of family affairs by drawing a card, a queen. I smirked and looked Damien in the eye. We had all geared our questions to him first since we knew each other and I could tell he was getting sick and tired of it. “So, Damien,” I stated as I drew out his name. “When did you lose your virginity?” I questioned, knowing that it would answer two questions, if he was a virgin or not and when he lost it if he wasn’t.

  “Eighth grade to some high school girl who just wanted to get it over with, but not have to worry about seeing me in school afterward,” he stated nonchalantly as he smirked and waited for my answer.

  “Ninth grade to a guy who dropped me the day after we did the deed,” I answered with a forced smile. Brooke knew the story, but after constantly asking who had been the jerk to hurt me, and always receiving no name, she gave up on trying to figure out who my first had been. The only ones in the room who knew personally what had happened were Austin and me. That was the way I wanted it to stay.

  Austin stated that he lost his in ninth grade to a popular girl in school who wanted to be the first to lose it within her group of friends. Brooke lost it in tenth grade to her constant hook up for the next two years until she found out that he cheated on her with a girl who had more sex than the average porn star.

  Damien flipped over the last card to reveal another queen. “Worst thing you’ve ever done?” he asked curiously as he eyed my body again.

  I glanced at Austin who gave me a knowing look, but silently begged me not to tell. “I had sex with a guy who ended up breaking my heart.”

  “That’s the worst, really?” Brooke questioned curiously since she knew all the things I had done growing up with her and she couldn’t believe that that was the worst.

  “Yeah, everything else was fun, this ruined me in a way, so it’s the worst I can think of because it hurt me,” I explained with a shrug as I looked back at Damien. “What’s yours, masturbating to those photos of me in the paper?”

  “You wish. I was house sitting for one of my mom’s friends and got bored of it the second day because there was no cable and no Internet available, so I threw a party in their house. There was a lot of drinking and the cops were called for a noise violation.” He started to let the sentence fall as if he forgot where he was going with it, but then picked up the conversation again. “My mom was able to cover it up, but she was so pissed that she hit me. Like, full on slapped me right across my face. So in retaliation, I stole her Mercedes; it was her favorite car at the time. She called the cops, and I got into a car chase, but got far enough ahead of them at one point where I had enough time to convince, and pay, some random guy to get in the car and get arrested for me.”

  “How much did you pay him?” I blurted out, completely bewildered by his story.

  “Well, I figured I would have had to pay more, but this guy did it for three hundred. I just paid him with my mom’s money and walked off,” Damien stated with a shrug as he leaned back into the chair to relax.

  “You’re a mother-freaking genius!” Brooke squealed as she finally wrapped her mind around the story enough it give a drunken reply. “I think the worse thing I ever did was almost burn down the house smoking pot for the first time,” Brooke stated with a grimace as she remembered running around the house trying to put out the fire she started when she fell asleep smoking and then had to try to cover it up before her parents got home.

  “I’ve never done anything really bad. I think the worse thing I’ve ever done is hurt one of my best friends,” Austin said with a sad look in his eyes as he glanced toward me. Just him reminding me of how
much it hurt made me want to flip him off. He was only sorry now because I wasn’t interested in him and he was hoping that was really going to change. Too bad for him, it wasn’t; the damage was done. Our bodies are our most powerful weapons against mankind. Everyone just chooses to use their weapon differently. Austin had chosen to use his against me, and I would never be able to forgive him for that, or at least never have those feelings for him again.

  “I have one more question,” Damien announced just as we all relaxed into our seats to take a break from the game. “Have you ever been in love?”

  “No, I just have fuck-buddies,” Brooke announced proudly as she gave Damien a wink.

  “Who are they and where do they live?” Austin asked protectively, even though he was no doubt grimacing on the inside.

  Brooke waved her hand dismissively, telling Austin to drop it and answer the question.

  “I’ve been in love," he admitted as he looked at the ground, not willing to take the chance to steal a glance at me.

  “No, I’ve never been in love. I was too naive to ever know what love was,” I stated bluntly as I saw Austin try to hide his expression; pain and guilt.

  “Maybe I can change that for you,” Damien said with a wink as he stood from his chair and came over to me. When he leaned down toward me, my first thought was that he was going to kiss me, but all he did was grab the rum to pour himself another drink.

  Chapter 7

  We stopped drinking long enough for Brooke to regain some form of coherency that comes with being sober. At least that’s what I thought, until she opened her mouth and ruined it. She wanted to take Austin out and get him to do something bad, since during the game he had said that he’s never done anything bad. Meanwhile I had fucked him behind his sister’s back, she had nearly burnt the house down, and Damien had stolen a car.

  “It would be like family bonding!” Brooke squealed in excitement over her idea.