Ignition (The Driveverse)

1. Caleb

You’re doing it wrong, I thought as I watched the stranger living in my house load the dishwasher.

Forks clattered noisily as she tossed them into the utensil caddy prong side down, the unnecessary racket making it all the more difficult to pretend she didn’t exist—and entirely ruining the simple sandwich I’d thrown together for lunch.

Sure, it was the first time I’d seen the bottle-blonde, wannabe Real House Omegas of Miami, gold-digging beta lift a finger since she’d arrived, but Meredith, our housekeeper, was taking a well-deserved extended weekend, so it was about damn time she made a play at being a good little wife.

How else was she supposed to trick my father into thinking that she was here for anything other than the black AMEX and driver? Cosplaying basic domesticity was scraping the bottom of the barrel, right up with their nauseating pet names for each other, and still the old man was lapping it up.

She didn’t fucking fool me though, I saw right through the bitch.

As though he had a sixth sense for when the woman stopped online shopping long enough to actually do something useful, the front door swung open, my father’s booming voice following shortly after. “Family?”

The snap of the door and heavy, uneven footsteps—a holdover from a crash into the wall that ended my Dad’s F1 career—warned that I had few precious moments of peace left before I’d be subjected to another disgusting, teenager-like display of PDA.

“In here, babylove!” the stranger shouted back.

“Marco!” my father called playfully, and I had to physically restrain myself from gagging. This bit wasn’t funny the first time they did it, and it hadn’t grown on me since.

If anything, it aged like milk.

Fucking gross.

“Polo!” she trilled, turning to bang through the cabinets.

It was one thing that he’d brought his human mid-life crisis to live in our house, sleeping beside him on my mother’s side of the bed; even worse was that he just had to parade around his newfound affair, too.

Newsflash, old man. Bringing home some beta slut to pretend to be mom didn’t actually get things back to normal.

It just delayed the inevitable, with him realizing that it was his fault she left us in the first place. But that wasn’t how Dad saw things. It was so much easier to blame other people for his shortcomings.

Mom.

Leo.

Nick.

Me.

Dad loosened his tie, light blue with a subtle pattern of periwinkle squares, as he wandered in, pulling the stranger into his arms from behind with a kiss to her temple. She melted into him, and the rest of their conversation dulled into a low drone from the angry static in my ears.

I turned back to my sandwich, thumb scrolling through posts on my phone.

The entire display was… wrong.

Disgusting.

A leaden ball sat heavy in my gut as I attempted to ignore the sickening sounds of their kissing, focusing on the condensation from my glass pooling on the woven placemat protecting the wood of the breakfast nook’s round table.

How long was I expected to watch some fucking woman my dad met two months ago wrap herself around him like she knew anything about him?

About us.

As days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, I wondered if I should call someone to bring him in for a psych evaluation. But, like I’d told the boys, I’d save that for if he came home with a motorcycle.

There was no way that my overly careful old man would ever willingly get on one of those death traps, not when he’d spent the better part of a year having his face put back together piece by piece.

Man, losing your career and your strong Braye nose in the same go? That shit must’ve been brutal.

“Caleb,” Dad called, pulling me back to the conversation as my thumb hovered over a photo of Marissa—my sometimes girlfriend, when I managed to remember that she existed—draped in some alpha dickhead’s lap, his face cut off from the photo.

He’s ugly then, I thought with a vicious kind of smugness.

This whole soft launch bullshit was only for partners you were ashamed of. Why wouldn’t you want to shove your new alpha into your ex’s face?

Right, because the hottest thing about him was his (barely there) abs.

The photo didn’t make me jealous; it just made her look desperate.

I couldn’t lie, though; she looked good. Dressed in a tight blue wrap dress that hugged every curve, dark hair in waves down her back, and white teeth shining alongside a familiar plastic smile.

Maybe I should call her.

“Caleb!” Dad said again, more sharply when I didn’t respond.

It took me a moment to realize he’d left his bizarre, loved-up bubble to actually talk to me. I paid him the same amount of respect that he did me, not looking up from my phone as I double-tapped the photo, commenting ‘cute!’

Surely that would make her text me this time.

“What?” I asked, scrolling past to look through my friends’ vacation photos, sprawled out poolside or on beaches, snaps from clubs and house parties, and faux-inspirational yoga retreat bullshit.

I’d been invited, of course, but it didn’t feel right fucking off to Aruba without the boys, and I couldn’t exactly just call Nick up these days.

Especially not about vacation.

“I’m glad you’re home, actually. We have something that we need to talk to you about.”

Fuck me, when did the old man go from an I to a we?

And couldn’t any of these people take a hint?

I just wanted to eat my damn lunch and disappear somewhere into the house where I wouldn’t be bothered. A task that was easier said than done when all of my usual haunts—the pool, the games room, and even my own bedroom—were full of memories that made it impossible to ignore that I was alone.

Even Leo’s replacement, Torrin, had taken up spending time in the billiards room when he wasn’t carting the reality TV reject on luxury shopping trips and Botox appointments.

I was sick of it.

“Do ‘we?’” I asked with a roll of my eyes. “I didn’t realize you’d even noticed I was home. We talk about as much now as when I was at school.”

It was probably what pissed me off the most about this whole thing.

We’d barely said more than a couple of words to each other since I’d come back for the summer holidays.

But hey, I was an adult; it wasn’t like I needed to ask my Daddy’s permission to leave the house.

And I would’ve been home way more often if his talking fleshlight wasn’t haunting the place, trying to trap me into conversation at every turn like the world's least helpful therapist.

The dad I knew before I’d left for school would’ve noticed I was sitting here alone, that Nick hadn’t been around since I’d gotten home two weeks ago.

But this man?

He was as much of a fucking stranger as the just-shy-of-middle-aged fuck toy he was pretending meant anything to him.

“I’ll leave you boys to talk,” the stranger said, and I looked up from my phone just in time to watch her wrap her arms around my father’s neck. “I was just finishing up anyway.”

“Alright, sugarbear.”

They kissed, way too passionately for me to be sitting right-god-damn-fucking-there, and she tapped my father’s nose with her fingertip before she disappeared away through the house with a bounce of her chestnut bob.

I couldn’t help but notice that she didn’t actually finish up, several dishes haphazardly piled in the sink still awaiting their turn to find their way into the dishwasher.

An upper cabinet left hanging open like she’d been raised in a barn or some other backwoods Nowhereville that didn’t value order.

Finishing up my ass.

It shouldn’t have bothered me so much, but after a semester of living with a bunch of guys in a frat house, I’d been looking forward to coming back to the near-militant cleanliness of a home maintained by Meredith.

Just another thing that was clearly too much to ask for around here. Right beside my mom giving up her ridiculous fucking affair, and my dad remembering that I exist.

I dragged my finger along the glass of my phone, the next photo to fill the screen making my stomach twist.

A head of messy, curly brown hair that I’d recognize anywhere leaned back against the front of a car, irritation lining his brows as he looked at the camera.

Nick.

‘Fucking thing still won’t run,’ the caption read, and before I could get caught up on who’d liked or commented—or on the way the long cuts in the alpha’s tank top revealed his muscular torso—I closed the app, putting my phone face down on the table to focus on my meal.

My dad plunked down in front of me, and suddenly, the bubbles floating in my soda were the most interesting thing in the room.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked, a little too close to concerned for my taste. “It feels like we haven’t seen you in days.”

The ‘we’ in the question pissed me off before the conversation could even get going.

“Out,” I clipped, taking a vicious bite of my sandwich that I barely even tasted, wiping a bit of mustard from my lip with the back of my hand.

“Out where?”

“With my friends. And does it matter? I’m twenty-three, not thirteen.”

It was clear from the look in his eye that he didn’t appreciate my tone, but I didn’t give a fuck. What I did give a fuck about, though, was the way he tempered his reply.

Typical. This wasn’t a casual catch-up because he wanted to chat and see what I was up to after all. He wanted something.

He always fucking wanted something.

“Right, well…” Dad said, clearing his throat. “Since you haven’t been home, I don’t think you’ve gotten a chance to get to know Sadie much, right?”

“So? Do I really need to play fifty questions with your rebound?”

His jaw flexed, and the warning bells got louder when he didn’t rise to me for a second time.

“Because she’s family, Caleb,” he said sternly. “And we care about our family. All of it. Did you know she has a daughter? Ivy, she’s around your age, actually.”

No, I didn’t know that.

I knew nothing about her, because she was still a fucking stranger.

And that was exactly how I wanted it to stay.

He could take this family bullshit and shove it up his ass.