Page 92 of Mad Boys


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As soon as the door closed, Aubrey hopped over the sofa and joined me in the kitchen as I ground the coffee. “Who is he and what did he do with the douchebag?”

To be fair, she wasn’t wrong to question it. The last few months had been kind of a revelation, if a hard-earned one, considering the fire. If we hadn’t ended up being roommates, I didn’t think we’d be anywhere near this comfortable with each other.

At all.

Still, I laughed. “He’s working on it.” Tamping the grounds took a minute, and I waited to until the shots were brewing before I reached for the milk in the fridge. “I think we’re really becoming friends.”

Aubrey stared at me as I filled the little silver pitcher.

“What?”

“You’re becoming friends… with one of your stepbrothers?”

I shrugged. “He’s my stepbrother ‘cause his mom happens to be married to Dad. It’s not like we knew each other before the school or anything.”

“Still your stepbrother,” she pointed out. “He still lied to you.”

They all had. “I know,” I reminded her. “I have not forgotten any of it. Not the hate or the way they treated me…” The paint. The kisses. The degrading speech. Irritation scraped under my skin. “But Jonas and I…we’ve been talking and we’re working on the friendship thing.”

“Doesn’t change what he did.”

No. It didn’t. “I can’t hang on to hate forever. And I didn’t hate them…or I didn’t before I figured out what they were hiding.” The steamed milk was next. “He asked if we could be friends. He’s been a huge help, and he offered me this place, plus he’s been kind. For the most part.”

“Okay, you work on being friends with him, and I’ll watch them like a hawk. I still want to stab them all with spoons and make them pay.” The ferociousness in her tone made me smile.

“That’s ‘cause you love me best,” I said, bumping her hip as I poured the foamy cap into place on her coffee.

“Yes, I do,” she said, lifting the coffee cup. “I don’t like fuckboys who go out of their way to hurt others, especially not my best friend. They’re just lucky Yvette isn’t here. They’d never sleep again…”

We made faces at each other and then burst out laughing. Yvette would go for more than pranks. She could be downright cruel when provoked. Then, she had lots of practice from dealing with all the people from her parents' world.

Just, pissing off Yvette was a mistake.

I finished with my coffee when Jonas emerged with a couple of notebooks, sticky notes in six different shades, and a stack of pens.

Wiping the coffee machine down, I tracked Jonas’ progress over to the living room. He set his stack on the coffee table before he reached for a crate and lifted it to sit next to the notebooks and sticky notes.

“Do you have a system?” Jonas asked, looking at us.

“Usually, we just each take a crate and start working. Some just want signed pictures. Some want actual notes. We kind of read them all to see what they need and then we answer them.”

“All of them?” His eyebrows climbed.

Shrugging, I claimed my coffee to walk over to where he studied the crate. “All of them.”

“We like responding to the fans that took the time to do this. Emailing or tagging on social media is super easy and fast. We appreciate them, too,” Aubrey said. “But the kids that take the time to write these? They deserve an answer. The creepy dudes deserve paper cuts on their nostrils.”

The corners of Jonas’ mouth dipped at the mention of creepy dudes.

“You take the good with the bad. Management also went through a lot of these before they sent them over.” The envelopes were all slitted, having been opened, read, and then sent on.

Our “Forever Fan” had triggered new protocols. Though I had to imagine the guy was just a creeper.

“And,” Aubrey said as she joined us and slid off her shoes before walking them over to set them inside the door to my room. “I think we should finally concede to the stock response for some of these. “

When I opened my mouth to respond, she held up a finger.

“I know you hate it. I know you prefer the handwritten responses. So do I. Being farmed out to assistants is never fun. However, I think we’re getting an ungodly amount of mail these days. We can still respond to some of them, but the generic requests can get generic responses…you know?”

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