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Ross Rivers. Responsible for her first crush. Ross Rivers, the one guy who’d never look at her as anything other than a kid. A kid sister. For him to think about her in any other way was obviously as disgusting as incest to him. He’d once told her he’d rather punch himself in the dick, twelve times over, than ever think about kissing her. He was seventeen. She was thirteen. She was probably obnoxious. Still. She might have been able to suck that back if she hadn’t been so blatantly gross over the years. It had been obvious to everyone that she was half in love with him. Or at least, fully in lust. He had known that alright.
Even when she was old enough that she wasn’t straight jailbait… he’d treated her like absolute garbage.
He screwed every girl that moved. He flaunted them in front of her. He made zero secret of the fact that he was an epic man-whore. Worst of all, he was always around. She couldn’t escape him. He was always hanging out with Chance. They were always in trouble together. Doing boy shit. Being gross teenagers. Dating girls. Talking about girls. Having parties. Going to parties. Inviting half the school over for pool parties that she wasn’t invited to, even though it was her own freaking house.
They included her as little as possible.
Her parents wanted her to stay home and go to a college close to San Jose. She chose to go as far north as possible.
“Can you blame me?” Alix snapped. “I stayed away because this place is batshit crazy. Everyone still hangs out like it’s high school. Mom and Dad still work too much. You still live at home. Your friends all still come over. Your room is still a pig sty. And. He’s. Still. Here.”
“Relax. Ross’s different now. He’s a shade or two classier now that he’s a billionaire.”
“His family was always rich. That’s part of what I hated about him. How he liked to lord it over us. He’s likely worse now that he took their money and made a bunch of shitty stock market investments and they paid off and now he thinks he’s a rock star.”
“He never lorded it over us. He didn’t give a shit about money growing up.”
“Obviously he still doesn’t, or he wouldn’t have invested a million of his parents’ dollars in a stock market tip off.”
“It was foolproof.”
“I think what you should be calling it is insider trading. Don’t you know that’s a crime?”
Chance slammed back the rest of the beer, belched again in her face, always the obnoxious older brother who reeked slightly of unwashed socks, sweaty closed-snin room, and stale beer.
“Gross!” Alix waved her hand in the beer scented air. “You’re disgusting. You were always disgusting. You’re still disgusting. Four years hasn’t changed you at all.”
“And you still have a stick up your ass.”
“How cliché of you to say so.” Alix grabbed one of the sweaty, cold beers, but just gripped it in her hand. She liked the way the cold spread from her palm, right to the center of her chest, where that stupid tearing aching feeling burned and chaffed.
“It wasn’t insider trading. He actually did study the market. He knew that the stock was going to pay out. That money was his inheritance, if you want to know. He didn’t gamble anything but his own money.”
“How terrible to be able to get your inheritance before your family dies. And only a million? How paltry of his parents. Or should I say his grandparents?”
“We both know it’s not the money that you hate about Ross. It’s the fact that he never screwed your bony ass, no matter how badly you wanted him to.”
That. Was. It. Alix had just gone through weeks of stressful exams, her last in a long line of four years of hard shit she didn’t even fully understand half the time or want to be doing. She’d never wanted to go into business. As a kid, she’d actually wanted to be a fashion designer. Stupid. Yeah. Her parents never took her seriously. They straight up said they wouldn’t help her with college if she was going to throw her money away like that or a job that would never get her anywhere other than flipping burgers to pay the bills. Clothes were for fun. They were for stressful days, parties, and necessity. They weren’t for providing a living.
Not that she thought there was anything wrong with flipping burgers. She would happily have worked at any fast food restaurant if it meant she could have done what she wanted to do and not been forced into getting a stupid Business Degree. So what if she could now do accounting? She still hated it. How was she supposed to build a future on that when she couldn’t even stand it?
