Foolish Games: A Brothers Best Friend Fake Dating Romance

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#1 at the Box Office: Cop Land

Sebastian Swift

“Yo, what’s up, Ms. P?” I ask, dropping into the chair across from the guidance counselor. “You needed to see me? I know a scout’s not sniffing around here asking to see my transcript. Coach would have told me.”

“Actually, it is about your transcript,” she says, circling the desk on her high heels to close the door behind me. “But not a scout.”

I drop my head back and groan. “Please don’t tell me I have to take another hard class. It’s senior year, and I have football.”

“I am aware,” she says, smiling as she minces back around her desk to sit across from me. She opens a folder and picks up a sheet of paper. “Don’t worry, though. We’re not changing your schedule. Your coach just thought maybe you could use a little extra help in a few core classes, so I’ve signed you up for tutoring. You’ll meet in the library twice a week during your study hall, starting tomorrow.”

“But… I go to the gym during study hall,” I protest. “That’s when I get extra time on the weights.”

“And how’s that schedule worked out for you?”

“Great,” I say, cracking a smile. “Look at these guns.”

I curl my arm, pulling up the sleeve of my grey t-shirt so she can see my bicep swell when I flex.

“Very impressive,” she agrees. “Which tells me you can do anything you put your mind to. Remember when you came in here as a freshman, not a scrap of meat on your bones?”

“I don’t need tutoring,” I assure her, ignoring her comment. “I’ll study when I get home. Honest, I will.”

“Just give this a shot,” she says. “Nine weeks, and if it isn’t helping, you can quit. But I’m sure you’ll be as successful at this as you are on the field. And we need to make sure you stay on the field, don’t we? Can’t have Willow Heights whipping our tails again this year.”

She tries to soften the blow with a wink and a grin, but my stomach is churning.

“But tutoring is for…”

I don’t finish the sentence. I don’t have to.

Everyone already thinks I’m stupid. They already make fun of me. This will only make it a hundred times worse, and Ms. Peterson knows that. I can tell from the sympathy in her smile, the way she’s trying to make it seem like no big deal. But it is a big deal. The next step is remedial classes, and everyone treats those kids like garbage. I know because I’ve had to kick a few asses when I caught some dickwads making fun of my sister.

They’re the stupid ones. If they had any brains, they’d know better than to mess with Sebastian Swift’s family. Not to mention my sister isn’t dumb at all. She’s fucking brilliant. She’s just not wired for sitting in a desk and memorizing shit and spitting it back out like a robot. None of us are, but she’s just defiant enough to refuse to conform, and just apathetic enough to lack any motivation to please people who try to make her.

“It’s for students who need a little help focusing,” Ms. Peterson says gently. “Just like you focused on the weights to get those muscles. Now we need you to use that same focus for your grades. If they slip, Coach will be required to bench you, and we can’t have our star sitting out a game. Which is why we’re all here to give you as much support as we can, in whatever way we can.”

“Can’t I just sleep with his daughter and blackmail him?” I ask. “Or you? You could change my grade, right?”

“Sebastian,” she scolds. “You most certainly are not getting out of this by sleeping with anyone.”

“Come on,” I say, wiggling my brows. “I’ve never been with an older lady. I bet you could teach me a thing or two.”

Her sugary demeanor turns instantly icy as she glares at me across the desk. “I’m thirty.”

“And I’m eighteen, which makes you older than me,” I point out. “I didn’t say an old lady.”

She points one red-nailed finger at the door. “Go, Mr. Swift. And I expect to hear a glowing report from Vivienne on Friday.”

I’m already out the door when her last words float out to me.

Vivienne? Who the fuck is…?

Oh, hell no.

Not Robert Ambrose Delacroix’s sister, the one who thinks she’s too cool to acknowledge me even when I’m at their house. The snob from the nerd herd who thinks she’s all that, who just stood there and stared me down last week like she thought she was better than me. It should have been the other way around. I’m a football god, and she’s nothing. I wasn’t even talking to her. I was going to smack some sense into her little nerd boyfriend for talking shit to me, and she stepped in to defend the pussy, knowing I’d never lay a finger on a girl.

Plus, as my best friend’s sister, she’s got built-in immunity from my fuckery, and she damn well knows it.

The thought that I can’t have her piques some primitive interest in my brain, though. She’s off limits. And if there’s one way to make me take notice of something, it’s to tell me I can’t have it. I’ve been proving people wrong for years. When we moved to Arkansas, coaches told me I was too small to play football, so I hit the weights until I was big enough to change their minds. They told me I’d never play college ball, and I’ve got a dozen D1 universities vying for my commitment. And now they’re telling me I’m too dumb to even play this season, which means I’d better get my ass in that chair and prove that I’m not some dumb jock who’s all muscle with nothing going on upstairs.

I’m not going to get distracted by a piece of ass, even a hot one like Robert’s sister.

I picture the stubborn tilt of her little chin, the tightness of her pink lips when she glared up at me with that look in her eyes that was just asking for it. The sexy waves in her caramel-colored hair, her soft skin begging to be touched by my rough fingers. Fuck, I’d like to break her, show her that she’s no better than me just because she gets perfect scores on all her tests and lives in a gated community on the north side of town with her own swimming pool, gym, and basketball and tennis courts.

But I won’t.

She’s my friend’s sister, and more than that, she’s a stuck-up bitch. Not to mention that despite her looks, her money, her grades, and her brother playing varsity this year, she can’t figure out how to be popular. She’s still hanging out with a bunch of ugly dweebs who have permanent wedgies from the number of times guys like me have picked on them. If they’re so smart, shouldn’t they be able to defend themselves or figure out how to crack the code of popularity?

I hit the weights for the next hour before grabbing my bag and heading to my sister’s classroom in the basement of FHS. When I don’t find her, I make a beeline for the music room, where she’s sitting in the dark at the piano, teaching herself to play.

“Hey, Melody,” I say, standing in the door and waiting for her to come out of her music-induced trance. After a minute, she closes the piano and stands, snags her backpack off the floor, and fits her headphones on as she joins me, her CD Walkman in one hand.

I bump her shoulder with mine as we start home on foot. “What you listening to?”

She pulls her headphones down onto her neck. “What?”

I nod at her Walkman, where the CD is still spinning in the little window. “Jewel?” I guess.

She scowls up at me. “Yeah, so?”

“Nothing,” I say. “What do you want for dinner when we get home?”

“Macaroni and cheese?” she says, looking at me like I should know this by now.

I should, and I do, but I still groan. “We had that last night.”

And the night before, and the one before that. Mel is a creature of habit, though. This could last for a year. I might as well resign myself to it.

“So?” she asks.

“So, you have to make it if you want it,” I tell her. “I’m making meat.”

“You’re gross,” she says, wrinkling her nose and replacing her headphones.

I could tell her she’s gross for not washing her hair more often, but that seems too close to the shit people say at school. She knows her hair is greasy, and she doesn’t care. Saying it will only make her shut me out even more. So, I give up and let her get lost in her music while I walk in silence. Usually, having her there is comforting, even when she’d rather listen to her sad girl songs than talk to me. It’s better than being alone.

But sometimes it’s worse than being alone, because I want things to be the way they used to be, and they’re not. She’s not interested in my friendship the way she used to be when we were kids.

Everything changed the night Dad went out for a beer. He told me to look out for the family, that I was the man of the house while he was gone.

I did a fine fucking job of it, Dear Old Dad.

As if to spite him, I got wrapped up in football and friends and girls the minute we moved to Faulkner because Mom couldn’t afford our old house without Dad helping out. So wrapped up I didn’t think of anything to help when Melody started sinking beneath the surface of her musical obsession to the point where nothing else matters to her. I try to look at the positive, to tell myself it’s better than a lot of things she could be into.

And it’s not all my fault. We were both too busy looking at our own feet as we trudged through the next few years to notice the other wasn’t walking beside us anymore. That we’d reached some fork in the road without even knowing it, and we’d each veered down a different path.

Or maybe she’s just depressed, like Mom says. Since we can’t afford medication, I guess we’ll never know.

I tuck my hands into my pockets and scuff my tennis shoes against the cracked sidewalk.

That could happen to me too. Mom says it runs in families. That I could have it too. One day I might just stop caring about football and friends and grades, like she did. I’ll go from tutoring to pull-out classes in the basement. Maybe then we can be friends again.

Fuck all that.

I’m not going to let that happen. If I did, who would be there to eat macaroni and cheese in front of the TV with my sister? Who would mix in ground beef to gross her out? Who would watch the little kids while Mom’s at work?

My life is easy compared to the rest of my family. I have it good. Tutoring isn’t the end of the world. It’s only half a semester, just to get a couple grades up. I don’t even have to tell my friends.

Except Vivienne will probably tell Robert.

They’ll laugh about me, Rob’s dumb friend. And then my other friends will give me shit about being put in tutoring too.

But fuck them. I’ve learned to use my frustration, to aim it at my chosen targets. I have someone to take it out on every Friday night. This will give me more motivation to crush my opponents on the field. And if that little nerd tries to hold me back by not giving Coach a good report, she’ll learn what happens when someone stands in my way.