Kylie Bray (Love, Hate and Billions)

"That man better learn to treat me good, 'cause one of these day's I'm gonna plant a bug up his ass 'n it's not going to be the eight legged kind." Diamond's threat is no idle one. I know she'll do it. Scratch that, what I mean to say is I know that she is going to do it.

The groan from Vincent matches my internal one because I know who is going to be cleaning up her mess when she is done.

The only difference between him and myself, I had ten years to learn to figure Diamond out, he barely has one.

That is how long he has been back in our lives.

It is how long I have secretly fallen in love with the man,

KNOWING that he will never love me back.

To Vincent Stone I am just an eighteen year old girl he has to babysit. He always said it.

My stepbrother has never failed to remind me of my non-existent place in his life. It wounds me deeper every time.

But his words only make me bleed on those rare occasions when we're alone.

I fool myself into believing that just maybe he's not so cold,

Just maybe he DOES feel something for me besides me being the nuisance he is stuck to hang around with.

I fool myself because I am not one of those people who remain strong when faced with unrequited love.

I am the person that always gets hurt, because I choose the wrong guy.

Vincent is the wrong guy, I know that, but even knowing, my heart isn't accepting.

'There is nothing there,' he couldn't have made himself more clear.

To Vincent Stone, we are not related,

NO, not related at all,

oh and not friends,

definitely, not friends.

I'm just the unfortunate task he gets stuck with on a few occasions.

When I was sixteen I crushed on this boy, his name- Dexter Kent.

Yes, The Dexter Kent, blonde hair, green eyes and rough falsetto smile, also soon to be the youngest CEO of Kent Vaults International. Though two years younger than me, there was just something in Kent's eyes that made me blush. I was sixteen and I thought it was love. After months of watching his pimple free face, I built up enough courage to ask him out.

My brother Jace, told me I had to make the first move 'cause I was a Bray. No guy in their right mind would ask me out, least not a fourteen year old. Dexter said sure, like it wasn't a big deal, like I wasn't a big deal. At sixteen and my 'world revolves around me' phase-

I was crushed.

I locked myself in my mama's rose house and curled on the bench next to a red rose bush.

My family obviously looked for me. Mama found me pulling the pebbles off a red rose.

I knew that they tracked me using the watch I got for my birthday.

I wasn't stupid, at the time I just didn't care. My heart was dying.

Mama didn't say a thing for a while, just sat quietly on the bench next to me. It was the first and only time I asked mama for advice. I asked her about love, what was it like. I figured she had to have known, she loved Hector.

I was certain because when he walked in the room my mama always stopped breathing when his eyes finally found hers.

Wasn't that love?

My mama picked her own rose that day before she answered, she was so thoughtful, serious and for once since I turned thirteen I listened as she spoke,

"Love is a way of life, it's not just an emotion Kylie, it's sacrifice, time and hard choices."

She twisted the red rose carefully between her fingers, her eyes lost to that simple task,

"Loving someone is understanding them, knowing that like a rose grows in different shades, a human is made up of different pieces."

She picked a dried pebble off the rose before she looked at me and said that some people were a bit rusty around the edges, mixed between dark and light, but like the rose, If you peeled the outer parts it always revealed the true beauty within.

Mama said that the ones that die on the outside are the most beautiful once you've peeled off the outer layers.

She removed the dead pebbles from that rose and handed it to me as she stood up,

"How can you not love that rose Kylie?"☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐