“Maybe I came this way.”
“You want to play, little girl?” He starts to pull his shirt off, and I know he’s going to put it on me. I grab it to stop him. I don’t need all the girls fainting looking at him with no shirt.
“It’s in my bag, and don’t call me that,” I grit out. I hate when he calls me a little girl. We both know why he does it: to remind me that I’m just some little girl while he’s a man who would only ever want a woman. Each time he says it to me, it reminds me of the way he hurt me.
He reaches into my bag and pulls my dress out. “Don’t you know that you don’t go into girls' purses? It's a well-known rule.”
“Don’t have a lot of experience handling women’s purses.” I shake my head at him but put my flowy blue dress back on.
Blue, Chase’s favorite color. I know because he once told me. A dark blue. The same as my eyes. He hadn’t said that last part, but when I was a little girl, I told myself he loved blue because of my eyes. They aren’t solid blue. They fade from light to dark. I got them from my mother. I actually got a lot of my looks from her. It’s bittersweet because my mom might be ugly on the inside, but she’s beautiful on the outside.
“Let’s go.” Chase still doesn’t give me my purse back. In fact, he digs in it again to find my keys before he grabs me by the arm.
“Chase, don't leave.”
“Emily, introduce us,” I hear a few girls from my cheer team say as I’m being pulled away.
“Let go.” I try to jerk my arm from his hold.
“Not happening.”
“Hey—” I stop talking when he suddenly does release his hold on my arm, but it’s to grab a boy I don’t recognize. He’s probably from another school.
“You have a staring problem.”
“Not my fault her tits are out,” the boy responds. I glance down to see I do have a nice amount of cleavage showing, having tugged too hard on my dress when I pulled it over my head.
“Hope you can swim.” Chase shoves the boy who is fully dressed in khakis and a pink polo shirt backwards right into the pool. “Actually, I hope you fucking can’t.”
We don’t get the chance to find out because Chase once again has me by the arm, pulling me around the side of the house toward the front to where I parked my car. I don’t try to break his hold on me again. I should, but part of me loves it, and I’m going to soak it in even if for only this short moment because I can’t remember the last time Chase touched me.
3
Chase
That little shit wasn’t wrong. When did Emily get those tits? She is no longer a girl, but on some level she will always be my girl. When we were younger, it was a protectiveness I had over her. Hell, I could be more overbearing than Asher when it came to her.
Emily spent so much time at my house when Asher and I were in high school. At first, he would ask me if he could bring her, but then after a while, he always did it without a thought. She became just as much a little sister to me. I was sure I was trying to protect Emily from her own mother, but as time went on and she grew up, things started to change.
There was a moment in time I thought something was wrong with me. Girls in high school wanted to date or fool around, but it never interested me. I thought I was so involved in making sure I was learning all the ins and outs that I might need for taking over the Silverstein business that I didn't have time for any of that.
Then there were my parents. They were the epitome of a happy, healthy relationship. They were even high school sweethearts. I never missed the glint in my mom's eyes when she said Dad would only ever belong to her.
My father could be very possessive of her, but that was her way of showing her possessiveness. I wanted to be able to give that to my wife one day. Getting a front row seat to Asher's parents' marriage, I knew what I wanted, and I wasn’t going to settle for anything less than what my parents had.
Then one day, my father pulled me to the side. I think prom was coming up or something. He told me not to take a date or maybe not to go at all. Honestly, prom hadn’t been on my radar. But the words he said after that stuck with me.
“The greatest things in life are often the things that we wait for. That we cultivate and let grow. We must give them room to bloom because our shadow might not give them all the light they need, son, and I promise you that you don’t want to look back and not know if they fully chose you because knowing they did is the greatest gift you’ll ever receive in life, and it’s not one that can be bought.”