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“Whatever,” I say on a sigh, and they jerk their heads to glare at me. “Sorry, it’s just all a little ridiculous, the whispering and obsessing about him.”
Ellie shoots a knowing glare to Marissa. “Oh, of course. How could I forget that Brooke is too cool to give a shit about James Ashwood. Every other female in this club has a GPS tracker on him, but not you. Why is that exactly?”
I pin on a bored expression. “Not my type.”
They both crack up at that, which is fair. I’m not that good at lying.
“Riiiight. What else isn’t your type? Breathing?”
In the three months I’ve worked at Twin Oaks, James Ashwood has been talked about way more than the bevy of professional athletes and famous locals who also frequent the club. A royal asshole. A major dick. A shrewd businessman. A big tipper with an appetite for everything luxurious: beautiful women, top-shelf whiskey, and expensive cars. I’m confident it’s mostly fiction, made up by some kitchen staffer bored with plating $90 filets.
I’m about to tell both of them to go to hell when Ellie’s face flushes light pink.
“It’s him. It’s him,” she hisses, stepping up to the podium and grabbing for a pen. She finds one, drops it, and then smooths down the front of her dress. Marissa straightens her back and pushes out her chest. It’s mating season at the hostess stand.
I’m facing Ellie and Marissa as they watch him approach, and it takes all of my willpower to keep from joining in on their ogling. After all, Mr. Oil Tycoon forced me to miss James getting out of his Porsche when he first arrived; it’s only fair that I should get to turn around and see him now, just for a second.
I swear if I concentrate hard enough, I can hear his deep voice over the soft ambient music playing overhead. He’s getting closer. My hands fist at my sides and I know if I stay any longer, I’ll cave and turn.
Instead, I wave goodbye to Ellie and Marissa and rush into the dining room—away from him. I pass through the bustling kitchen and head for the locker room so I can change back into clothes I feel comfortable in and get the hell out of here. Unfortunately, there are more women in here whispering about James. I swear, they make him seem larger than life. We have all sorts of rich and famous members in the club, but no one has a cult following quite like James Ashwood. I refuse to drink the Kool-Aid.
“Did you see him out there, Brooke?” someone asks as I bang my locker closed.
“Oh, I see a lot of things,” I joke, deflecting any more talk about him.
Although, it is true—I do see a lot behind the scenes at Twin Oaks.
But I’ve never seen anything quite like him.CHAPTER TWOMost members of the country club live tucked away inside gated mansions, within gated neighborhoods. They buy houses in which most rooms exist for the sole purpose of employing a squadron of maids to dust them. By contrast, I live in cooperative housing north of the University of Texas campus. The co-op itself is an old two-story bungalow that’s been added on to and redesigned so many times over the years that it looks like a bad kindergarten art project, all popsicle sticks and macaroni.
There are 10 rooms total, full of creative types, mostly artists and musicians in their 20s. We each have our own bedroom, but the communal spaces are shared, one big hippie family. It has its drawbacks—like how my expensive toilet paper always seems to get shared when the others’ scratchy one-ply hemp runs out—but the rent is cheap and I like the people that live here. They are the polar opposite of the people I wait on at the country club. My neighbor on the left, Jackie, is a performance artist who moonlights at a bakery, and my neighbor on the right, Ethan, is a documentarian. They hook up every so often, and in exchange for enduring the noise (the co-op has very thin walls), Jackie brings me day-old croissants from the bakery. It’s an arrangement I’m pretty happy with.
I’m there now, in my room with Ellie. She’s going on about something important, I’m sure, and I’m posed in front of my mirror, trying out different hairstyles.
“Just…no. No to the bangs. You’d look like an anime character.”
I drop the hair I tucked under to mimic front bangs. I thought it looked good; Ellie clearly thinks differently.
“I want to change up my look.”
She shrugs. “So cut your hair.”
“No!”
I’m like Samson. If my hair goes, my power goes with it. It’s jet-black, halfway down my back, and the singular feature of mine I truly treasure. Combined with my light blue eyes, it packs quite a punch—or so I’ve been told. Throughout high school, my gangly legs and saucer eyes were out of place among a sea of short, perky blondes. The only guys who were into my Hot Topic look were emo vampires themselves, more interested in making me the subject of their tortured teenage fantasies than actually getting to know me. I wasn’t looking to be anyone’s grunge-pop princess.
