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“What are you doing busting into my bathroom at seven freaking thirty in the damn morning? I’m trying to get ready for class.” Even though I’m a sophomore, it’s my first day at a new school, and I’d like to start my second year of college on a positive note. Poking myself in the eye with my mascara wand is not very positive.
“Riv has to be at football practice, and I need to be at the arena in like, twenty. Have you seen my car keys?”
“Why would I know where your car keys are?” I drop my palm and glance at my reflection in the mirror. Awesome. Now it looks like I’m part raccoon with the mascara smeared around my eye.
“Mav, we gotta roll out or we’re gonna be late,” my twin brother, River, yells from somewhere in the house.
Maverick runs his hand through his hair. It falls back into place as though it’s made of perfectly obedient soldiers. “Where areyourkeys?”
“You can’t take my car.” I prop my fist on my hip. “Take River’s.”
“Some chick puked in the back seat last night, and it needs to be detailed.” Mav taps on the doorframe, impatient.
“And that’s my fault, how?” I do not want to know the how and why regarding the puking girl. River isn’t quite as bad as Maverick, but he still has a ridiculous number of girls fawning all over him at any given time—and that’s even with his less-than-glowing personality. Or possibly because of it.
Maverick glances to the right, just outside the bathroom door, and a sly smile turns up the corner of his mouth. He snatches my keys from my dresser and dangles them from his finger. “We’ll owe you one, sis.”
I jump up, trying to grab them back, but my brother is over six feet, and I’m five one and a quarter—that quarter is very important to me—so there is absolutely zero chance I can reach my keys when he’s holding them over his head. “You can’t leave me without my car!”
“You can walk in a straight line, Lav. You’ll be fine.” He strolls down the hall, and I scale his back in an attempt to reclaim my keys, but my contact lens is burning. It’s distracting and means I can only hold on to my brother with one arm while I press my palm against my watering eye. He hits the first flight of stairs and takes them at a jog, bumping me around on his back.
I somehow manage to jam my big toe into one of his belt loops, and it gets stuck there.
He drags me along like an awkward sloth he can’t shake. “My class is all the way across campus. It’s a half-hour walk, and it starts at eight thirty!”
“It’s not that far. You’ll be fine.”
The doorbell rings as we pass through the living room.
River stands in the kitchen, shoving half a bagel slathered in cream cheese into his mouth while texting. He frowns—this is his most common facial expression—and glances from the door to Maverick to me still hanging off his back. He crosses the room in two angry strides and throws the door open. He spins around, pinning our older brother with a disgusted look and thumbs over his shoulder. “This asshole has to sit in the back seat so I don’t have to look at his face.”
Standing in the doorway is Kodiak Bowman, more commonly referred to as Kody by everyone other than me. We all grew up together, basically, and probably know one another better than we should. Like the place he was conceived, Kodiak possesses a rare kind of arctic beauty. His hair is almost black, his eyes a pale green that doesn’t look quite natural, and his features hover between severe and exotic. But when he smiles, there’s a dimple in his left cheek that makes him look boyish and melts the panties of anyone with double X chromosomes. And a lot of XYs as well.
He’s not paying attention to my twin, because he’s too busy staring at his phone. Probably arranging a lunchtime blowjob.
Both he and Maverick are here at school on hockey scholarships. Not only is Kodiak an incredibly talented player like his dad, he’s also a genius, like his mother. But unlike his mother, who is a saint, Kodiak is an asshole.
My twin harbors a particularly severe disdain toward him.
Because of me.
Something happened involving Kodiak two years ago, which was so devastatingly embarrassing for me that I wish I could scrub the memory from my brain. River received the stripped-down version of events, and I made him promise to never, ever speak of it. He never asked any more about it, and I never offered any further details. However, now River can’t stand Kodiak, and he wasn’t his biggest fan in the first place.
Kodiak ignores River. “We gotta roll, Mav, or we’re gonna be late.”
Maverick peels my fingers from his shoulder. “Can you get the fuck off me, please?”
My toe is still caught in his belt loop, so I fall back, and because I have no coordination or balance—thank you so much for that, Mom—I smack my head on the floor. I also shriek because my toe is bent at a very unpleasant angle. Maverick stumbles back a couple of steps, trying to figure out how I’m still attached to him.
“My toe is caught! Oh my God! You’re going to break it!” I scream at the top of my lungs.
It’s ironic, because when I was a kid, I didn’t talk much. River used to do a lot of the talking for me because I was shy and got all tongue-tied around people I didn’t know. He was trying to be a good brother. Unfortunately, it made me reliant on him for a lot of things for a lot of years.
I’ve also been highly insulated by my family. It’s like living inside a bubble, viewing the world from behind a screen and never fully participating in it. For someone raised in a highly stable, incredibly supportive, loving—albeit weird—family, I’m pretty damn messed up.
Maverick manages to get me untangled from his belt loop without breaking my toe. I jump to my feet, and because my embarrassment hasn’t hit epic levels yet this morning, my boob pops out of my tank.
“For the love of God, Lav! Put your tit away!” Maverick yells.
