Don’t You Dare

A tap on my shoulder scares the shit out of me while I’m in the middle of playing yet another round of Escape From Tarkov on my PC. I probably jump a foot out of my desk chair before shoving one half of the headset off my ear and spinning in place.

As expected, I find my sister standing there, looking over my shoulder at the computer uneasily. Sometimes, I swear she thinks I’m gonna be watching porn whenever I’m on the thing. Which is sort of awkward, considering I’ve barely left this spot all summer.

“What is it, Lex? I’m in the middle of a raid.”

Her hazel eyes, the same shade Dad’s used to be, dart back to my face and she shrugs. “Mom said that dinner was ready. She told me to come get you.”

Rolling my eyes, I spin and turn back to my game. “Not hungry,” I mutter, shifting my headset back into place. “Don’t forget to close the door on the way out.”

I start playing again, but after a couple minutes—and right when I’m about to get to my extraction point—someone pops out from behind a building and lights me up. I’m dead in under two seconds, and I let out a sharp curse before yanking the headset off entirely, letting it clatter to my desk.

“That was anticlimactic,” a voice mutters behind me.

My sigh of irritation must be hard to miss, along with the glare on my face, because when I turn to find Lexi sitting cross-legged on my bed while she stares at me, her eyes pop a little wider.

“I told you to leave.”

“No, you actually told me to close the door on my way out. But I never left.” As if knowing my next statement, she adds, “Mom told me not to take no for an answer since you haven’t left your room all day.”

I grumble a little at that. The whole point of not leaving my room is so I didn’t have to talk to anyone and I can mourn the death of my friendship with Aspen in peace. Mope around and be pissed and sad and completely destroyed without having anyone watch.

Mom is the one I’m trying my best to avoid, though. It isn’t fair to her because I know she cares, but the last thing I want to talk about is him or how I’m feeling right now. Which is exactly what she’d try to make me do, just like she has every single time we’ve been in the same room since we talked after the dramatic events of Family Night.

I just need a break from her constant bombardment of questions.

Have you talked to him?

Do you know where he is yet?

Why don’t you try reaching out first?

Or one of the hundreds of others she has ready in her arsenal.

Plus, if I don’t leave my room, there’s no chance for me to look outside at the Kohl’s driveway across the street, only to feel another rush of disappointment when I don’t find the Impala sitting in its usual spot.

Of course, why would it be, when Mom let it slip a few weeks ago that Pen just up and left. No call or text to tell anyone. He’d only told his mom that he’d check in periodically—again, according to my mom—and ever since I found that out, all other information’s been strictly withheld from me.

But seeing as I’m a masochist, I check for updates on his social media platforms to get a clue of where he is or who he’s with.

It’s pathetic, but not as pathetic as the ache in my chest when I come up empty every single time.

“Do you wanna talk about it?” Lexi suddenly asks.

My attention shifts back to her, brow raised in question. “Are you being serious right now?”

Another shrug. Jesus, is that all this girl does anymore?

“Well, not talking about it is clearly doing you a whole lot of good. And I’m currently out of tea to keep me occupied since the news about Derek cheating on Laney has already fizzled out. So your drama will just have to do.”

I scoff. “Thanks, Lex. I feel the love.”

“No problem. Now spill.”

Shaking my head, I make a buzzing sound with my lips. “Not fucking talking to you about this shit. It’s weird. Not to mention you were in love with Aspen since you could walk.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, but he’s yours, Kee Kee. Always has been.”

I open my mouth to disagree, to tell her it sure doesn’t look that way right now, but she starts picking at her cuticles, seemingly uninterested in what I have to say. Which irritates me, because she just came in here and told me to spill my guts to her, only to act like she could give two shits?

Yeah, that’s not gonna fly.

So I give her some of the juicy bits while still keeping it PG-13 enough for my little sister. And boy do I have her attention from the second I mention the first kiss at the end of high school.

That leads to the incident at the party earlier this semester. The weird tension between Pen and me until we finally talked about what the issues were. And then his stupid idea to explore things together. I unload all of what happened with us in a beautiful display of word vomit.

And then I tell her about how it all came crashing down, thanks to Avery fucking Reynolds and his brilliant idea to go through my phone while I was in the shower one day after practice, only to find that photo and email it to the team’s PR coordinator from my email account, asking them to add the image to my family slideshow at the last minute.

The only reason any of this was found out is because Kaleb watched it with his own two eyes. Having been smart enough to realize I wasn’t the one to hand that photo over willingly, he came forward to tell Coach and the school’s athletic director about what he knew the day after Family Night.

Avery was tossed out of Foltyn, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I also clue Lexi in on why Avery decided to detonate my entire life the way he did.

As it turns out, he’s none other than my Toppr pal, balls4lyfe.

Needless to say, I didn’t see that one coming.

Sure, I knew balls4lyfe was one of my teammates, but I thought maybe it was one of the younger guys I didn’t know that well. Hell, I even thought it might’ve been Kaleb, since I never see him with girls. Overall, Avery was the last person I suspected, thanks to all the homophobic, asshole remarks he’d made over the two years I’d known him.

So why did he light the fuse on this ticking time bomb?

I guess it messed with him hard when I broke things off that day when we were unknowingly on the bus together. Or, at least, I didn’t know it was him when it happened.

He knew he was talking to me the whole time though, thanks to those damn freckles on my stomach. It’s such a unique pattern that he’s seen quite often in the locker room, and pairing it with my admission about unresolved feelings about my sexuality and that we pinged within such a close location on the bus and at the Chi O party…I’m honestly not surprised he put two and two together.

Add in that I admitted to seeing someone—and the only logical person for it to be was Pen, since I’m never seen with anyone else—and jealousy took over. And a bit of fear, thinking I knew who he was too, and that was part of why I cut ties.

And here we are.

Me, with my life in fucking shambles…and Avery, kicked out of school for being a douchebag.

The only reason I found all this out was because of the long-ass text message he sent me, apologizing and explaining everything from his side. Probably looking for some sort of absolution, if I had to guess.

I didn’t respond and blocked his number just to be safe.

It’s by the end of that ridiculous saga that Lexi is staring at me, wide eyed and in complete shock.

“Holy…shit,” she mutters, shaking her head. “Your life’s a mess, Kee Kee.”

I snort. “Thanks for the reassurance, Lex.”

“So, apart from this Avery guy being a complete dick, this doesn’t seem very complicated to me.”

Leave it to a sixteen-year-old girl to think of falling in love with my best friend, who doesn’t do anything more than emotionless hookups—only for us to be outed publicly in front of thousands of people—as uncomplicated.

If that’s really the case, high school must be a joy these days.

I give her a dubious look. “Really? That’s what you have to say about everything I just told you?”

She shrugs. “Okay, look. I’m gonna give it to you straight—which is a funny thing to say now that I’m not the only one with boy problems in this house.”

I chuckle at that, my lips quirking at the corners. Damn kid. “Okay, Lex. Give it to me straight.”

“Aspen’s your best friend. He always has been, right? So is it really worth losing that friendship just because he doesn’t want to be your boyfriend?”

The way she deduces it so dramatically is something of an artform. Truly. Because it seems like she was barely listening to a damn thing I said the entire time I was talking.

“How can I be friends with someone I love, especially when he doesn’t feel the same? That sounds like a miserable existence to me.”

She frowns. “I mean, why couldn’t you be? You’ve always loved him, so there’s not much change there.”

I roll my eyes. “I mean, in love with him.”

This time, she nods. “I know. And I stand by what I said. You’ve always felt that way about him.”

Has she lost her damn mind?

My head cocks to the side, and I stare at her, a mixture of bewilderment and awe etched into my frown. “I didn’t even know I was bi until this year.”

Her brow raises, as if to say so what?

I scoff, reading her attitude easier than a picture book. “How would I have been in love with him for our whole lives if I never knew until recently that I like guys? It makes no fucking sense.”

And now she’s looking at me like I’m the stupid one. “Love has nothing to do with how you define your sexuality. It’s all about the heart.”

I blink at her, not sure I heard her right. And then I blink again, because I’m convinced my sister was just taken over by some Greek philosopher or self-help guru. But nope, it’s still my shithead little sister sitting in front of me.

Well, fuck. I guess it’s true, what they say about girls maturing emotionally way faster than guys, if she just pulled that shit out of thin air.

But as her words sink in through the surface, an agonizing ache forms in my chest. One that doesn’t go away, even when I rub at the space where my shredded heart still beats behind my ribs.

Clearing my throat, I meet her gaze and sigh, the words on the tip of my tongue tasting like the ash from Aspen’s cigarettes. “His heart doesn’t want mine, Lex.”

She snorts, shifting on my bed to make herself more comfortable. “That’s a load of crap if I’ve ever heard it. He’s been in love with you just as long as you’ve been in love with him. Maybe even longer.”

I shake my head, both in denial and disbelief. There’s no way she’s not pulling a bunch of bullshit out of her ass now. “You’ve officially lost me.”

A roll of the eyes is what I get, then, “Try to keep up, Neanderthal. Why do you think none of the relationships he’s ever had lasted?”

“He didn’t have any relationships.”

“My point exactly,” she says, clapping her hands together. “And why do you think that is?”

I guess I’ve never really thought about it. But when I take a moment to really analyze it, I don’t come up with a whole lot.

“Because he never liked them enough to do more than fuck them?”

Her face curls up in disgust, and she cringes. “Ugh, no. Stop. I get that you two are soulmates or whatever, and I’m fine with that…but for the love of God, don’t talk about my first crush that way. You’ll ruin what’s left of the fantasy.”

It’s my turn to grimace at the image of my sister fantasizing about—

Okay, nope. Not touching that with a bucket of bleach and a ten-foot pole.

“Then why? Why wouldn’t they last? It’s not like he hasn’t had fuc—” I catch myself and reroute, “I mean, friends that he kept around for a while. He and Bristol were seeing each other pretty regularly for almost a year.”

The arch of her brow tells me I must truly be an idiot if I’m not seeing the answer.

Well, someone get me a damn dunce cap, because I still can’t figure it out.

“Okay, I’m just gonna spell it out for you, because you’re kind of a lost cause.” She pauses, ever the drama queen. “It’s because he couldn’t trust them, dingbat. You know, the foundation of any relationship, but especially when it comes to dating? And if he couldn’t trust them, then I’d bet a whole year’s worth of allowance that he also couldn’t be himself around them.”

The kid’s definitely got a point there. I mean, it’s like Pen always told me. He keeps the emotions out of sex, even though we both know it can be so much better when you care about the person too. We’re living proof of that.

Lexi takes my silence as permission to keep going. “I mean, let’s be real here. Did any of them even know about how much he loves photography? What he’s going to school for? Or even something more superficial, like his favorite video game or color?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think anyone knows that stuff about him, Lex.”

“Ah, see. But you know those things.” She crosses her arms, clearly pleased with herself. “You’re the only person he trusts to see the real him, Kee Kee. You’re special to him. You always have been. What else would you call that besides love?”

The pieces all make sense on paper; I have to give it to her. They’re still not quite believable enough to make me do anything about it, especially with how he left things. Namely, by straight up just running away from the problem.

And honestly, I’m far from ready to reopen a wound that’s barely begun to heal.

Sighing, I lean back in my chair. “How the fuck did you get so smart?”

She shrugs, her face the picture of impassiveness. “Two X chromosomes.”

My lips quirk, and just like that, her composure cracks and we’re both busting a gut like no other.

Once we finally manage to calm ourselves enough to speak, I rise from my chair and hold out my hand for her and drag her from my bed. “C’mon. It’s time for dinner.”