AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Cameron,” she said, the dismissal clear in her tone.
My chin rose. “Ivy.”
She didn’t look at me again as she got back into the car and pushed those big dark glasses over her face.
Once she was out of sight, I scratched the back of my neck.
“You gonna help us or not, asshole?” Ian yelled.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m coming.”
Chapter 9
Ivy
When I was a freshman in high school, I was already enrolled in AP classes. In one of those, the teacher paired me with a senior athlete struggling to keep his place in the class.
He played basketball, if memory served.
And he was an idiot. No AP class in the world was the right place for that man because he had the intelligence of a fence post. Either way, we were working on a paper together in the kitchen at my house, and right as I was trying to explain what a dangling participle was, he tried to shove his hand up my skirt and his tongue down my throat.
“You’re so fucking hot,” he whispered right before he moved in for the sloppy, ill-advised attempt.
Despite my bully-punching background, I froze because it was my first kiss and it was terrible. I remember thinking two things—why is his tongue so wet (maybe he has a medical issue) and Oh gawd, this is what I’ll have to think about whenever I think about my first kiss?
The second thought was enough to snap me out of my frozen state, and I shoved my hands at his chest to push him back, but he didn’t go anywhere.
There was hardly enough time to feel the icy grip of panic because our housekeeper Ruth walked into the kitchen, yanked him by the back of the shirt, and told him to get his ass out of the house before she called the cops.
He failed his paper, leaving the AP class shortly after.
And me?
I walked into the school the next day and found myself the unwilling recipient of whispers and stares down every single hallway of that building. His athlete buddies snickered when I passed, someone making an under-their-breath comment about having a stick up my ass, and maybe someone needed to fuck it out of me.
It was the first time in my life that attention, en masse, made me feel sick to my stomach. I never told my father that he’d spread stories about me because it would have done nothing except give them more fuel.
So I did what my father taught me to do.
As I passed, I looked them right in the eye, put a firm, mental hand underneath my chin and pushed it up. Just a little bit.
I’d be damned if pencil-dick little boys like that would ever cause me to drop my gaze and scurry around the school like I didn’t deserve to be there.
Then I ignored it.
Ignored the eyes following me all day, and the day after that.
Hid it behind a barricade, something in my own mind that looked a lot like a giant steel wall.
They could say whatever they wanted, but I knew it wasn’t true.
Even at fifteen, I knew that his reaction said a lot more about his insecurities than it did about me as a person. If those idiots wanted to snicker to themselves that I was a prude and a bitch, then it meant they’d leave me alone.
Until I showed up in Sisters, I didn’t think about that time of my life much at all. It wasn’t like it planted some deep-seated hatred of men, other than a strict avoidance of the douchebags and Neanderthals who couldn’t think their way out of a paper sack.
My brain remembered, though, what it was like to have every single eye swivel to point in my direction.
I blame Amanda at the front desk, really. She told me the burgers at this place were “stupid good,” and when a second call to my dad’s cell phone, and then his office, went unanswered, I honestly just couldn’t sit in that quiet hotel room for another second.
