Instead I have to be here, with a mommy blogger-slash-Real Housewife and her spoiled socialite daughter, the hotel heiress. I hope they don’t mind a guy in the corner wearing a Comic Con tee-shirt and testing out games on his three different devices at their black tie affair.
2
Ridley
Wrapping myself up in my favorite cashmere blanket scarf, I wind my way through the hustling and bustling party planners in the kitchen to check on the pregnant Sassy.
Sassy is my cat. Well, not exactly my cat. She’s a stray cat who showed up in the pool house one day last summer and I fed her. Mother told me not to feed her, which compelled me to feed her again the next day.
When the temperatures began to drop, I was able to pull at Mother’s calcified heartstrings hard enough to convince her to let me keep her. I bought a heated dog house on Daddy’s credit card, because Mother refused to let Sassy come inside the house.
I peek inside the cat house and Sassy pads up to me. I scratch her behind the ears and she purrs. Her belly is getting bigger, and I’m getting nervous. I’ve looked it up on the internet and I know there’s not much for me to do. The vet says everything looks normal, too. But I just have a bad feeling about it. Maybe because she was so scrawny when I found her.
While I pet her soft fur, she scratches her sandpaper tongue against the inside of my wrist. The more time I spend petting Sassy, the more I think it’s probably for the best that we’re going to spend the Christmas holiday here at home. I don’t really trust anyone else to look after her.
After I make sure Sassy has everything she needs, I step back inside the kitchen and the warmth of the house makes me regret leaving Sassy outside. The kitchen windows are decked out with faux greenery. Nothing is what might be considered traditional decorations, and frankly, the colors leave me cold. Everything is expensive, spiky, and untouchable in chilly shades of blue, silver and copper.
Mother has gone with an “icy” theme for the holidays this year, for the sake of standing out for her social media followers. I’ve had very little input in how she decorates for the holidays. As you can imagine, I’m just here to be the dutiful daughter, another Christmas ornament decorating her home for her party guests.
Usually at this time of year, I’m jetting off with Mother or Dad to one exclusive Rushmore resort or another. But Dad is acting hella strange and talking all about how I need to learn a work ethic, whatever that is. He even spoke to me about my graduation present. Apparently I won’t be getting a new car, I’ll be driving his hand-me-down Land Rover. How hard have I busted my ass at school, and now I won't even be getting that new car smell?
And Mother isn’t fighting Daddy on any of this. She’s so obsessed with her gold digging yoga instructor, she’s actually invited him here, him and his super-nerd son who plays video games for a living. Or something like that, I’m not sure.
Either way, whether I spend the holiday with Daddy or Mother, this is not where I thought I would be at Christmas.
Earlier this semester, I complained to my best friend Hadley about all these changes coming. She rightly pointed out that perhaps I’d be receiving some good guilt presents. In the past, when he was feeling bad about their divorce, guilt presents from Daddy included front row seats to Fashion Week.
Maybe Daddy got his new attitude about me when I scratched my heat at the first swim meet of the season in protest against Coach Ford. Maybe that, or when I got suspended because of it for two subsequent meets.
But what Daddy doesn’t know is, Sassy has done something to me. I don’t much care for other people—I barely have any respect even for half of my friends who follow me around at school—but maybe, now that I’m a senior at Greenbridge Academy, I’m figuring out who I am, finally. I think I might be an animal person. If Sassy needs me, Fashion Week can go kick rocks.
As I text with Hadley, I round the corner into the library and hit a brick wall, sending my phone skidding across the marble hallway. I lunge for it, but a big, masculine hand already has it.
“Excuse me. Are you OK?”
I pop up and take in the tall brick shithouse standing there holding my phone out to me. Very large but dorky hiking boots are partially covered by woefully outdated and frayed cargo pants that barely hide leg muscles that could put Jason Momoa to shame.
The hand that holds my phone is big with long, strong fingers. My eyes travel up his arms to take in his biceps that stretch the short sleeves of his tee-shirt. He has the shoulders and neck of someone who either works out a lot or is in the military. And his face. Oh my god. His hair is too long and unstyled on top with curls everywhere, but the big, gray-green eyes and unforgivably long lashes draw me in like catnip.
I put my hand out to take my phone and he turns his hand over, placing it in my palm. I rein in my ogling and smile as if I’m totally unfazed. I’d better be unfazed. Mother’s new fiancé is a total snack — an entire meal, in fact — and the holidays are about to get super awkward if one of us thinks the other is hitting on them.
“I’m fine. Totally. Fine.”
When I take the phone, I feel the brush of a finger. It’s almost undetectable but I definitely felt the heat of one finger pad against the meat of my palm.
Our eyes meet, but neither of us says anything for a few seconds. I casually let my eyes travel from his face back down to the chest that I just bounced off of a few seconds earlier. That’s when I notice his worn-out olive green tee-shirt has a cross section diagram of a spaceship and the word “Serenity” above it. The shirt is so geeky it makes me mad. I don’t know what Serenity is but it looks like the ultimate geek boy tee-shirt, evoking the image of people with poor hygiene who spend all day in basements commenting online about superhero movies.
And then it hits me.
Oh shit. This is not Neil, my mom’s fiancé. This is Neil’s son, Crosby. The dorky game designer something-or-other and my soon-to-be stepbrother.
He is gorgeous. So gorgeous it makes my heart not just skip a beat, but pole vault over a beat and clumsily hit a ceiling fan. His eyes, his chest, everything about him puts me at risk of acting like a swooning schoolgirl. I have to check myself as my eyes keep roaming from his full lips to his beautiful lashes to his bulging biceps. There’s not a single spot on this man for me to look without getting turned on.
Wait, there has to be. Elbows? Nope, they’re too closely connected to his
thick, sinewy forearms. Adam’s apple? Come on, eyeballs, it’s like you’re not even trying now. Finally, I spot the slightly crooked front tooth in his smile. Clearly nobody took care of his orthodontia as a child. But damn if that tooth is not utterly charming and makes me imagine the pattern of bite marks on my skin.
“You must be the gamer boy,” I say, making it look like I’m smirking at his stupid tee-shirt when really I’m ogling his jacked pecs that are right in my face.