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“Thanks, sous chef,” Alexa teased. She set the sauce down on the counter and sighed dramatically. Her big blue eyes widened as she slapped her hand against her forehead. “I had the worst day,” she added.
I frowned, knowing a story was coming. “Oh, yeah? Tell me about it,” I replied. Moving my bag from the chair to the floor, I slid down in the chair, making sure to keep one eye on the stove. Alexa’s dramatics were nothing new, and I knew from experience that it was a good idea to keep track of time. Knowing my best friend as well as I did, I knew her story could take hours.
“Well, I ran into Jared,” Alexa said. She paused for dramatic effect.
“And?” I rolled my eyes. “What happened?”
“Only the worst thing ever.” Alexa pranced from one end of the kitchen to the other, swinging her graceful arms through the air like she was practicing dance.
I giggled. “He ignored you?”
Alexa’s nostrils flared. “Worse,” she complained. “He made this huge thing about how we hadn’t talked in forever! And he tried to hug me!”
I snickered. “Heaven forfend, a man try to touch you.”
Alexa smirked. “Well, I could tell he missed me.” Irritation spread over her features and she flopped down into another kitchen chair. “But that’s not the point.”
I stood up and walked over to the stove, poking at the pasta with a wooden spoon. It was still a touch too stiff for my liking, so I set a lid down on the pot and watched the cloudy water swirling around. Cooking had always been soothing for me, even though I hadn’t done much of it growing up. We’d always had a maid, and a cook, and usually a sommelier…although my stepdad, Mitchell, had been talking for years about how he wanted to learn more about wine himself.
Even though it sounds like I grew up really rich, the truth is a little more complicated than that. When I was twelve, my mother Anne married Mitchell Rhodes – real estate mogul and consulting pro. He’d made billions from New York City real estate over the past few decades, and he lived like a king. Before Mom met Mitchell, our life was pretty boring. We’d lived in Buffalo, in a little apartment with bad insulation and no heat in the long winters. Mom had fallen for Mitchell when she’d met him in New York, on a trip with her girlfriends. He’d swept her off her feet, and they’d married within the year.
Mom had teased me when I was younger. I could still see her happy face now as she stroked my hair and pulled me into a tight hug. “I named you Belle because you were my little princess,” Mom had said. “But now you’re really going to be a princess!”
In reality, things had been a little murkier than that. Mitchell had always been kind to me, but it was clear that he didn’t have much interest in being a stepfather. And his son, Jackson, my stepbrother, was an asshole. There weren’t any other words I could use to describe him. He was a perfect, smug, gorgeous as
shole.
Just thinking about him made me want to shudder. I hadn’t spoken to him in years – Jackson is nine years my senior, and thankfully he left Mitchell’s house as soon as he turned eighteen so we never even lived under the same roof. The last time I’d seen him, when I was sixteen, he’d spent the whole afternoon flirting with me. I’d been so taken by his charms that I hadn’t even noticed that my period had started. But Jackson had, and he tricked me into exposing my bloodstained butt to a roomful of people…. everyone waiting to wish Mitchell a happy fiftieth birthday.
It had been the most embarrassing moment of my whole life.
“Belle?” Alexa snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Hello? What happened? You just like, totally faded on me!”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, blushing hotly. “I was just thinking about…well, never mind.”
Alexa crinkled up her nose and giggled. I guessed she was used to it – I’d always been kind of spacey, after all.
“I was thinking about my family,” I confessed. “I really miss Mom, you know? I haven’t heard from her in weeks.”
Alexa nodded, but I could tell she didn’t understand. Unlike me, she’d never been close with her mother. Alexa had come from money, too, but she’d never been the outsider of the family like I had. To look at me now, you wouldn’t have been able to tell where I’d lived as a teenager. Most of my clothes came from Target, and I never wore makeup. I’d never been a real “girly girl” – Mom had told me that I’d probably grow into it, but I never had.
“Yeah, I bet,” Alexa replied. She grabbed the boiling pasta from the stove and gestured for me to help her. As I held the plastic strainer over the sink, I braced myself against the hot steam. Still, it felt good – winter in Alfred, New York, was almost as bad as winters in Buffalo had been as a kid. And even though Alexa and I lived in the nicest building of student housing, it was still student housing…right down to the painted concrete blocks of the walls.
“So,” I said casually. “You gonna date him again? Or not?”
Alexa bit her lip. She set the empty pan back down on the stove. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I mean, he’s super-hot.” She raised her eyebrows. “Hey, why don’t I get Jared to ask his roommate Steve if he’ll come out with us? Steve’s really hot, too,” she added kindly. “I bet he’d totally wanna date you.”
I swallowed. Just the mention of a date was enough to make my heart flutter.
“I don’t know,” I said shakily. “I don’t think he’d like me.”
Alexa put her hands on her slender hips and stared at me. “Belle, come on,” she said. “You know you’re gorgeous!”
I shook my head. “I’m not,” I protested. I glanced down at my body and sighed.
Alexa grabbed my hand and shook my arm through the air. “Yes, you are,” she insisted. “You just don’t see that about yourself for some reason.”
I sighed, knowing there was no use in arguing with Alexa. She’d always been like – bossy, insistent, and usually, one hundred percent correct. But this time, I knew she was wrong. There was no way I, Belle Harrington, was anything even close to beautiful. I had boring brown eyes, even more boring brown hair, and pale skin that would have been pretty on anyone else but somehow just made me look more washed out. When I was younger, Mom always told me that my eyes were “hazel” and my hair was “chestnut,” but I knew she was just trying to make my looks seem less boring than they really were.
