“Do what you gotta do. We need to be at our best this year. I want to hand Red Oak their asses. Again. Four-year sweep.”
“Hell yeah. Fucking dicks. Paul is such a tool. That guy just fucking bugs me.”
“Agreed.”
I open the small silver case and pluck out a cigarette, tapping the filter against the surface. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” The call ends as I place it between my lips and search for my lighter. My fingers fan out over the desk, as I survey the area, tilting my head to peer in one of the nooks.
Quiet knocking on my door filters through the room, but I don’t look up as I call out, “Come in.”
The cigarette dangles, the paper stuck to the drying flesh of my bottom lip, and a strand of my black hair hits my forehead when I glance up.
Caroline pushes the heavy door open and pads over the dark brown wood floors to me. Her face drawn, shoulders in a slight slump, she stops at the edge of the desk and fidgets with her fingers.
When she gets like this, it’s hard to hate her. I think enemies understand each other better than any other, sometimes.
I motion my head, calling her over, pushing my chair out to give her the room she needs as she crawls into my lap. She tucks her knees in, on top of my legs, as I wrap an arm around her. Pulling her tight against my body, I hold her like you would a child.
I might be an asshole, but I’m not a monster. She’s my stepsister, and even though Caroline is fucked up, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel. Sometimes, I think she feels more than most.
“Kai left?”
“You should quit, Grey,” she complains quietly into my shoulder, extending her slender arm and moving the cigarette holder, revealing my lighter.
There are few times when Caroline shows her vulnerability, and she usually makes it easy to forget she has a heart since it’s buried under layers of contempt for the world. She’s a long-legged viper with perfect brunette waves and ice-blue eyes. She’s intimidating, as if she’s judged you and found you wanting.
The reality is that she has, and you probably are. But she’s also an eighteen-year-old girl whose mother has left her alone to fend for herself in a world that tries to beat her up and reduce her. A world that wants to make her feel insufficient in every way, something I’m sure she believes as fact.
I understand why she has baggage. It’s the only reason why I give her this comfort when she needs it. That, and I need to use the muscle called my heart so it doesn’t atrophy. There’s a dark part of me that worries that one day I won’t remember how to keep it beating.
Scared I’ll be doomed to become my father, just like Liam will become his and Caroline, her mother. We’re all broken. Each of us perverted with different cracks in our Waterford crystal, but with cracks, nonetheless.
I light my smoke and inhale the sweet death, blowing it out slowly. “You know, your problems would be solved if you dated someone you fucked.”
Caroline sits up in my lap and stares at me, her face serious with an expression of disgust. She grabs hold of my cheek roughly, making me clutch my cigarette between my teeth.
“Grey, don’t be so bourgeois.”
I bring a hand up, inhaling again, and pull it from my mouth, tilting my head up to exhale around her face as she continues.
“People like us shouldn’t ever love. Love makes us weak, and weakness has no place in building an empire.”
“Someone’s been taking impeccable notes from Evan McCallister.”
She grabs the Nat Sherman cigarette from my hand, placing it between her plump lips and taking a long drag. As she exhales a winding cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, her walls slip back into place, and just like that, she’s no longer a sad, lonely girl. The bitch is back.
Caroline hands my cigarette back over and stands from my lap, shooting me orders, pretending her rawness never happened.
“Speaking of Evan. You need to make more of an effort this year to toe the line for our father. I don’t want to hear the dean of schools bitching about you again. Shit rolls downhill, Grey. For instance, your uniform is back from the cleaners. Wear it. You can’t blow off the rules this whole year, Grey.”