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River arrives twenty minutes later with Maverick and BJ. Bethany peeks her head out, and for half a second her eyes flare with excitement, until she realizes they’re not here to see her.
“Bethany, I’m sure you remember my cousin, BJ, and these are my brothers Maverick and River.”
Bethany rushes over to my bedroom door and frantically peels off the Post-it notes. “It was a joke,” she sputters lamely.
Maverick gives her one of his jovial smiles, but his tone doesn’t match his expression. “You’re blacklisted, sweetheart. I wouldn’t show your face at another party if I were you.”
It takes two trips to carry all my stuff down to the car.
So much for the full dorm experience. At least I tried.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out, Lav,” River says once we’re headed back to the house.
“No, you’re not,” I reply.
He sighs. “The dorms are full of assholes.”
“The world is full of assholes, River. You can’t protect me from all of them.” Especially the one living in our house.
“I know.” He reaches out and links our pinkies. “But I want to try. And I really am sorry I pushed you into feeling like you had to do this, and that you ended up with that chick as a roommate. We don’t want you to be miserable, and we don’t want you to hate living with us.”
I sigh. “I love you, and if that’s true, maybe we can do a few things differently.”Chapter Twenty-TwoI Thought I Was Over This
Kodiak
Age 19 Winter break
MY FIRST THOUGHT is that I shouldn’t be here. It’s too close for comfort. I’m on edge, and not even some of Mav’s grandfather’s edibles are going to help calm me down.
There are also way too many fucking people here. I can deal with a packed arena because there’s a plexiglass barrier separating us. There is no barrier between me and anyone here. I don’t like it—too many unknowns and variables I can’t control. Not to mention, almost everyone is drunk off their asses. I can barely tolerate people when they’re sober, let alone intoxicated and talking nonsense.
But it’s the first day of winter break, and Maverick insisted we throw a party at his parents’ place out on Lake Geneva, since they’re away.
It’s freaking freezing outside, but the hot tub is cranked and packed to the tits—quite literally—with a lot of girls, and there are at least a dozen people out here smoking weed.
Since Mav and I are both on the college hockey team and there are random drug tests, we generally don’t partake. But we have two weeks off, so he’s all over getting fucked up.
Our parents took a spur-of-the-moment, four-day trip to Mexico for some pre-holiday sunshine, which means we have the run of the house with zero in the way of supervision for an entire weekend. Maverick is supposed to be keeping an eye on River and Lavender, who stayed here so they could hang out with their cousins. Instead of ensuring they stay out of trouble, though, Maverick has invited over every person he’s ever met in the area between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. He figures what his parents don’t know won’t hurt them.
I’m already worried about things getting broken, what it’s going to cost to have the place cleaned, and someone posting pictures on the sly and tagging us.
I move out of the way as two girls in bikinis run by, shrieking at a decibel that’s likely to alert every dog in the neighborhood. They cram themselves into the hot tub with the rest of the girls, who keep asking us when we’re joining them.
Hot tubs are a petri dish of bacteria and regrets. Also, Maverick was in the hot tub earlier making out with his girlfriend, so there’s a high probability that his jizz is floating around in there.
“Do you even know half of these people?” I ask.
Maverick shrugs. “Nope. But if it gets out of hand, I’ll just call the police.”
“Some of them are underage,” I remind him.
“Everyone here is legal to drive and legal to vote. The fact that the drinking age doesn’t match those two things doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”
“Doesn’t actually change the fact that it’s a law, and we’re breaking it dozens of times over.” Not that I particularly care. It’s more that I don’t want Maverick to get himself in trouble over this party. He’s social, and I’m . . . really not. People require energy, and I prefer to put mine into one of two things: hockey and school.
Despite that, here I am. And not because Maverick is my best friend and pretty much forced me.
His younger brother, River, appears out of nowhere. He’s tall, lanky, and hates the entire world—apart from his twin, anyway. And football. He takes a deep haul from a joint.
