Total pages in book: 199
Estimated words: 200280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1001(@200wpm)___ 801(@250wpm)___ 668(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1001(@200wpm)___ 801(@250wpm)___ 668(@300wpm)
Like I have been doing. To his sister.
For the past week I mean.
Like I did.
A year ago.
When I saw her for the first time.
In my defense, I had no idea who she was.
She was sitting on the hood of a car, her legs dangling, watching people go by on the street. I don’t exactly know what made me look at her in the first place. Was it the fact that she had a pink cotton candy in her hand or that she matched it in her pink dress and sandals? Or maybe it was the fact that her dress was more like a bigger version of a fucking tube top, leaving her delicate shoulders and the tops of her milky thighs bare.
She actually looked like a bowl of cream and candies.
Or it could’ve been the fact that she was laughing at something while taking bites out of that pink sugary cloud. And as sappy as it makes me sound, her laughter had a tinkling quality. Like the wind chimes that my sister likes to hang on our windows all over the house and drive us all crazy with the annoying sound.
Only on her, it wasn’t as annoying.
On her it was… musical.
Or some shit.
Nonetheless, it pissed me off. I do remember that.
It pissed me off so much that it made me stop in my tracks.
Especially because I was exhausted after a long-as-fuck practice day. I wanted to go home and soak in ice water. I also wanted to eat whatever I could get my fucking hands on. My sister had been nagging me to get her cupcakes from her favorite store, Buttery Blossoms, for dessert, and since I’d lost a bet with one of my brothers, I had to be the one to go pick ’em up.
Which means I was busy and I had places to be.
I didn’t have the time to stand on the sidewalk, frozen and immobile with a cupcake box in my hand, and watch a Barbie lookalike eating something that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. I also didn’t have the time to intimidate the other people who stopped to watch her too. A group of guys, shooting the shit in front of the coffee shop next door, that had their eyes trained on her. That, in turn, scattered like cockroaches when I shot a low-whistle and a glare their way.
But what I remember the most is him.
Reed fucking Jackson.
The fact that he arrived at the scene only a few seconds after I’d sent those douchebags scurrying away. And the fact that as soon as she saw him, she jumped down from the hood, her entire petite but curvy body jiggling, and she threw herself into his arms, laughing like wind chimes in a fucking hurricane.
Which was when I noticed that the car she’d been sitting on was his.
Meaning she’d been waiting for him.
Meaning she was his. His flavor of the week. His piece of ass. His fucking groupie.
For a few seconds, as I watched them together — her grinning up at him, him chuckling; her chattering non-stop, him listening to her patiently; her reaching up to kiss his cheek, him smiling and ruffling her hair — my world was covered in a red film. My chest was burning. My gut was burning and the sounds of my own body were loud.
In the midst of all this, I watched him bend down and kiss her.
On her forehead.
Which, I will admit begrudgingly, was the only thing that had saved him that day.
Because why the fuck would he kiss her forehead when she had a mouth all sugared up and pink from cotton candy.
It almost looked… brotherly.
Something clicked in my brain then and I looked at them, really looked at them.
I noticed how she was watching him like he hung the moon, like he was her hero — something my own sister does with me and my brothers — and how he was looking at her, like she wasn’t a hot piece of ass but she was something precious, something to be cherished and protected at all costs — something that my brothers and I do with our sister.
And it hit me.
She was his sister.
The infamous little sister that Reed Jackson adored to pieces.
She went to a boarding school in New York and so no one had ever seen her.
People speculated though, about the sister, Reed Jackson’s only weakness.
Once the realization set in, my red haze cleared and I could breathe. But then it occurred to me that I’d been standing there, watching Reed Jackson’s little sister.
My enemy’s little sister.
Disgusted, I got out of there.
And honestly, I never expected to see her again.
Which was just as well because for the life of me, I couldn’t get her out of my head. In fact in the year since, I thought about her so often — something that I’d never admit out loud — that when I did see her again, at the game last week, I thought I was hallucinating.