Chapter Fifteen
I’ve just gotten out of the shower and am pulling the large comforter from my bed when Mallory bursts through the door with her eyes narrowed at me. She stomps toward me and asks, “What are you even thinking?”
I blink in surprise, look down at the bed, which looks glorious right about now, and then look back at her with my eyebrows scrunched together. “Uh, taking a nap?”
“Long day, huh?” She mutters.
“I guess I just didn’t sleep well last night.” Does she know something? She’s still staring at me as if I ruined her favorite lipstick, and it has me fidgeting on my feet. “Everything okay?”
“Great,” she says with a fake smile plastered on her face. It’s the one where her teeth clench together unnaturally, and the corners of her mouth don’t reach toward her eyes like they normally do. “Have you checked Instagram lately, Jules?”
I roll my eyes at her and sigh while sinking onto the bed, relieved that this isn’t going the way I thought it would. “Mal, you know how I feel about social media.”
She’s the only reason I ever made an Instagram account. She thought every guy in the city would want to see my hot teacher look, which is what she called it. I never got into it, though. I made one post and another every few months when Mallory reminded me that I hadn’t posted in a while.
“There were some very interesting things on there,” she says sweetly as she sits at the edge of her bed and crosses her ankles. “People really love disrespecting one’s privacy, you know?”
“Mal,” I groan. “Get on with it already. What’s got you so mad?”
I’m nervous as she reaches for her phone, unlocking the screen with a quick swipe, and holds it out to me with that smile dropped from her face. “Oh, you know, just seeing my brother smacking lips with my best friend and all that.”
I choke on the air I’m inhaling and look down at her phone, the picture of us kissing shining brightly on the screen, and I shove back into her hand while coughing my lungs up. Once I’m done hacking up a lung, I wave my hand in the air with a frown and shake my head. “It’s not what you think, Mal.”
After I say that, I quickly pull my phone up and go to my practically nonexistent Instagram account. As soon as the app loads, I look at the bottom of my screen and note the one-hundred plus notifications I have on it. Each one is from eager or curious fans who want to know who I am and why Brent’s with me.
My mistake is clicking on one notification, which takes me to the entire comment section, and I glance over different ones that range from super sweet to unnecessarily disrespectful. They don’t even know me. How could they possibly talk like this about a stranger?
There’s a tag on the image, so I click it and find it’s a link to Brent’s Instagram account. My blood runs cold when I see that he shared the same photo, his caption stating that vacation is good with the right woman by his side.
“Isn’t it, though?” I snap my gaze from my phone and look up at Mallory, who’s got her head cocked to the side, before opening my mouth to respond. She holds a hand up to keep me from speaking and continues. “You looked pretty cozy together.”
“If you’d let me explain, you would know why.”
“Brent is not the type of guy you need to be going for, Jules,” she hisses. “That’s not you.”
Here we go again.
I chuckle and shake my head. “Seriously? That’s all you have to say to me? Maybe that is me, did you ever think of that?”
She blinks. “You’re confusing yourself, Jules. He’s changing you.”
“Maybe you’re the one who’s changing me,” I spit out. “Why can’t you ever just let me do my own thing instead of constantly having an opinion on it?”
Mallory’s eyes water, tears threatening to escape, but she throws her head back and they are gone when she stares at me again. It’s as though it was a figment of my imagination. “I wouldn’t need an opinion if you didn’t make stupid decisions like this.”
“Oh yeah? Well, Mal, it might be surprising to you, but this is the best decision I’ve made in a while.” I clear my throat and lean forward. “If you would let me explain, like I tried to do in the beginning, you would know that this thing we have going on means nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I nod. “Yep. It’s not real, and he’s… helping me, I guess you can say.”
“That makes no sense, Jules.” Mallory rubs her temples as if everything I’m saying is giving her a migraine.
“He saw me utterly fail with a guy when we got here, okay?” I run my fingers through my hair and chuckle. “It was a mess, honestly. I brought up serial killers or something like that, and your brother witnessed the entire thing.”
“God, that sounds awful,” Mallory says, snorting at my embarrassment. Honestly, now that I’ve spent all this time with Brent it makes me chuckle too. She takes a deep breath and frowns after a few minutes, then asks, “But, what does that have to do with anything?”
“He offered to help me, give me lessons on being with guys.” I wave my hand at her phone and shrug. “That’s what this is. Nothing more.” If only I believed that myself, but maybe if I say it enough times in this conversation it will be true.
“And you agreed?”
“I didn’t at first, thought it was ridiculous. You’re the reason I ended up changing my mind.”
“Why me?” She asks softly.
“I’m sick of you making jokes about me, Mal,” I tell her honestly. This is what I’ve needed to do for a long time, but I’ve been too much of a coward to do it until now. “You’re always saying something about the way I am, and I wanted to prove I could be more than a joke to you.”
She gasps and immediately reaches over, placing her hand on my bare thigh, and lets a tear fall down her cheek this time. “Jules, I didn’t know it was hurting you.”
I give her a small smile and shrug. “I know, probably should’ve said something sooner. That’s all this is, though,” I reiterate, as if she’s going to think it’s something more, and that causes her to wrinkle her nose at me curiously.
“That’s it?”
“What, you think I could actually fall in love with your brother? That’s crazy!” My voice reaches an octave higher than necessary, and that really has Mallory looking at me weird, but she nods as if she understands.
“Uh, yeah, okay. I just don’t want him to hurt you, we both know the kind of guy he is.”
I wave a hand at her and chuckle. “I’m a big girl, Mal. I’ve got it handled.”
If by handled, I mean I’m trying to keep my heart from falling further and further down the cliff before landing at Brent’s feet.
“On that note,” Mallory says, clearing her throat. “Why don’t we sit in tonight, maybe watch a marathon on TV or something?”
“What? Don’t have a fancy hot date to go be with?”
She shrugs. “I probably could.” That gains an eye roll from me, and she shoves my shoulder with a child-like giggle. “Hush,” she says, then sighs. “We haven’t been spending as much time on this trip as I would’ve liked, and we fought yesterday, so I believe that entails a girls” night tonight.”
I hum in response and dart my eyes to the TV, then back to her with a smirk. “Do I get to pick the marathon?”
“Fine,” she mutters, then points a finger at me accusingly. “But under no circumstances are we doing another one of your sci-fi marathons. I’ve had enough of those to last me a lifetime.”
“You’re just scared to admit how much you love Star Wars,” I say, earning a pillow to the face in response.
“Just find a damn movie to start watching, then we can talk more about this thing you got going on with my brother.”
“Is it weird?” I ask, trying to sound curious, but I’m worried she can sense the hope in my voice as well. My hope is that she’ll tell me it’s not weird, that way when she eventually falls asleep in the middle of the movie – like she always does – I’ll be able to sneak up to Brent’s room and get what I really want.
If he even wants it anymore now that Mallory found everything out.
As if reading my mind, my phone pings with a text and I catch sight of Brent’s name quickly before the phone is tugged away from me. Mallory glances at the message, then tosses the phone back at me while shivering and her head shaking frantically. “I did not need to read that.” She sighs. “It is a little weird, but maybe just keep any details away from me, and everything will be fine.”
“Really? You aren’t pissed off or anything going to demand I stop what we’re doing?”
She smiles. “According to you, I don’t let you do your own thing. Figured now is the best time to let you.”
This is exactly what I wanted, so why does my stomach sink at her answer?. Things are getting out of control for me with Brent, that’s why – at least I’d be able to put distance between us if she told me it was weird..
Is there a chance I’m not the only one things are getting out of control for, though?
My mind goes back to the text I got, but I shake my head and tell myself I’ll message him back later. Tonight is about Mallory and me. We need this girl on girl time after the small fight we got into yesterday. I owe her this after sneaking around with Brent and only coming clean about it after she saw a picture of us together.
When did anyone take a picture of us anyway?
My first thought is that Brent scheduled the entire thing and used me for a PR stunt, but is that something he would do? I’d like to think if it were, he would’ve warned me about it beforehand. Am I okay with him doing that, though?
While I think about the answer, I grab the large remote from the nightstand between our beds and go to Netflix.
She said she didn’t want to watch any of my sci-fi shit, but she never mentioned anything about romances, and her groan isn’t a shock to me at all. “Okay,” she says with a heavy sigh. “I get to pick the marathon next time.”
“Do we have any snacks here?” I ask in a clipped tone because the more I think about Brent using me, the more irritated I become. Is that all I’ve been to him, a way to fix his image?
I can’t complain much; I’m using him as well, but I’m also not the one who suggested doing this. He approached me and offered his services, and I accepted. My feelings are becoming much more, and to think that he sees me as some plaything rather than a woman is hurtful.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a snack machine down the hall, I can go grab something out of it if you want.” She’s staring at me awkwardly, but I ignore the question in her eyes.
I wave a hand at her, eager to keep myself busy, or else I’ll think more about Brent than necessary. “I’ll get something. You just relax.”
I’m standing at the snack machine minutes later, watching mine and Mallory’s snacks fall down, but just as I reach for them, a hand wraps around my waist and tugs me back. I scream, but a hand presses against my mouth and muffles it.
“It’s just me.”
“Brent?” He loosens his hold on me, giving me the ability to spin to smack his chest, which feels just as glorious under the t-shirt he’s wearing, and I glare at him. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t just walk up on people like that. Shit,” I mutter with a hand on my chest, my heart beating rapidly beneath it.
Brent frowns and leans against the wall next to us. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Sorry, but you weren’t texting me back. Did Mallory talk to you?”
“Yes,” I mumble. “Unfortunately. How the hell did a picture get out of the two of us anyway?”
He shrugs. “I got no clue, Julia, I swear.”
“Is this some kind of PR stunt for you, Brent? That’s not what you said we were doing,” I whisper, then glance at the machine behind me. “Maybe we should slow down before things get worse.”
“What?” he asks. “Do you really think I’d do that to you?”
I sigh. “I don’t know what you would do, Brent. It’s funny how, as soon as we step foot out of the resort, there’s someone there to take our picture. You shared it on your Instagram. What else am I supposed to think?”
The most pressing question for me, though, is – Am I the laughingstock of America now?
His mouth parts, the light dimming from his eyes, and my heart aches at the idea of him being hurt. He looks surprised by the news, and it almost has me stepping forward, wrapping my arms around him and letting him know it will all be okay. I can’t tell him that, though.
“I can’t do this right now, Brent.” My eyes are burning, so I swiftly grab the snacks from the machine and push past him without uttering another word. He says my name, pleading for me to turn back and give him a chance to say his peace, but I keep my back to him.
I swipe the tears from my cheek when I get in front of my suite, knowing what Mallory’s reaction will be if she sees them, and confidently step into the room even though I’m dying a little inside.