1. Caleb #2
“I fail to see what her ability to reproduce has to do with me,” I said blandly. “Unless you’re telling me that you’ve knocked her up. Aren’t you both a little old for that?”
The idea made me lose my appetite, and I tossed my sandwich onto the plate, pushing it away.
The last thing this trainwreck of a household needed was a fucking baby added to the mix.
My dad laughed, the sound forced. “No, no! Nothing like that… Ivy lives in LA, but she’s hit some hard times recently. Something about some alpha pack involved with a gang—anyway, she needs somewhere to stay.”
“Is that why you decided to move your girlfriend in? Because she can’t handle her own affairs?”
“Watch it,” Dad warned with a quiet growl that likely would’ve been more effective if he’d been an alpha.
“You’ll address Sadie with respect under my roof.
And Ivy. I’ve told them that she can live with us until she’s back on her feet.
I thought it’d be a good opportunity for you to get to know each other while you’re on break. ”
That was enough to drag my eyes away from the glass and into my father’s face.
It was a bit like having a glimpse into my future, though I hoped that the whisper of thinning hair around his temples would skip me.
We had the same pale skin, dark eyes and hair, though his was beginning to go gray.
Everyone said I had my mom’s nose, which was supposed to make someone’s face, but every time I looked in the mirror, it felt like I was looking at my dad.
I hated it.
“So you’re moving her in here?” I asked incredulously. “Just like that?”
He nodded. “She seems like a nice girl. Sadie said she’s really into cars too—”
“I wasn’t aware we were running a fucking halfway house,” I interrupted. “You’re really going to bring another stranger into our home? What will Mom think?”
“Your mother doesn’t make decisions around here anymore.
She doesn’t live here. The sooner that you get that through your head, the better.
Sadie’s not a stranger and neither is Ivy.
And, while we’re on the subject, I’m not asking permission.
So get with the program and get to know the girls. They’ll be around a long time, Caleb.”
“A couple of months isn’t a long time,” I shot back. “And certainly isn’t enough time to know someone.”
I’d known Mom, technically my step-mom, my entire fucking life—at least as much as I remembered of it—and still it was like I didn’t actually know her at all.
Cheating? What the fuck even was that?
“Son, I know you’ve never felt the way I do, but Sadie and I just… clicked. It’s hard to understand, but I hope you’ll get it someday. Sometimes people come into your life, and you know that they’re supposed to be there forever. Someday we’ll even stop being the Brayes and become the Braye-Kings.”
I rolled my eyes. He’d been feeding me this ‘love at first sight’ crap since the stranger came into the picture.
He felt so deeply like he’d found his scent match, his perfect pair, but I was pretty sure his wires were crossed, too fucked up from the sudden divorce to realize that he was making a huge mistake.
And now he wanted her daughter to live here, too?
No.
Fuuuuuck no.
I wouldn’t stand for it.
“She’s not fucking moving in here,” I said, shaking my head. “Send her somewhere else. A convent, maybe? Since you seem to think she’s a saint or some shit.”
“You don’t have a choice,” he said. “She’s got her ticket and will be here in a couple of weeks. And you will be on your best behavior.”
“Or what?” I asked. I sounded like a petulant child, but I was sick of never having a choice about the changes in my life. About not deciding who was in it. “Going to cut me off?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
I scoffed, glancing at my phone face down on the table.
Even now, after everything, there was only one person I wanted to talk to. And I wasn’t even sure he wanted to talk to me.
“This is fucking bullshit, and you know it,” I said, grabbing the device as I stood, shoving it into my pocket.
Fuck this. I wasn’t going to stay here and listen to him spouting this nonsense.
Not while the old man’s pussy psychosis was running the show.
At this rate, I should just get my own place before I was totally outnumbered by gold-digging betas with nothing better to do than scam sad, lonely divorcees.
I’d only bothered to stay because I didn’t want my dad to feel like I’d abandoned him, but now it seemed he was going to have a charming new family to keep him company, so why the fuck did he need me?
“Where are you going? We aren’t done talking.”
“You might not be, but I am.” Mostly to prove that someone in this house knew how to clean up after themselves, I tossed the rest of my drink into the sink and my leftovers in the trash before loading the dishwasher with my own plate as well as the stragglers.
Meredith deserved to come back to a semi-clean place after her vacation. “I’m going to Nick’s.”
My dad’s expression totally changed, the thin band of his patience clearly run through. “I don’t like you hanging out with him.”
“Don’t care,” I said, banging the forgotten cupboard door shut as punctuation. “Never had a problem with it before.”
Nick and I had been friends since we were kids. His dad was our driver, and since he was the only one around my age that lived in the neighborhood, it just made sense that we hung out. Sometimes, when we were feeling charitable, we’d even let his kid sister join us.
It wasn’t our fault Mom started screwing his dad and tore both our families apart.
But since the divorce and Nick’s dad got fired, there was no one left for my father to take his anger out on other than Nick. It was petty and childish. Nick was also left in the dust by this situation. But instead of commiserating, my dad turned him into public enemy number one.
“You should care,” he grumbled. “You should care about this family.”
I scoffed.
What family? There was nothing left but my dad, who I hardly knew these days, and the stranger parading around my home like she owned it.
Soon to be joined by her equally unappealing offspring, for fuck’s sake.
“I’ll be back when I’m back,” I said, ignoring his sentiment entirely, flinging my leather jacket over my shoulder from the back of the chair on the way out.
The garage was filled with cars, and I chose a set of keys at random from the hook. The lights flashed with a little beep on an electric blue sports car, and I climbed in, peeling out of the garage to take the familiar road to Nick’s.
It was nice to have the windows down, the breeze cool as it rippled through my hair, inviting some much-needed fresh air into the car.
I pressed a button and music from my playlist started at random, the sound pulsing through the car in an effort to drown out my thoughts about the woman in my house, her equally useless daughter on the way, and my father’s incredible misstep thinking that threatening me would buy them my kindness.
These people could be murderers for all we knew! Or master thieves planning to steal everything we owned. Or, more likely, run-of-the-mill gold diggers, looking to score big by stroking the ego of a man too up his own ass to notice.
At least that shit was obvious from the start.
Ivy.
Stupid, classless, faux-intellectual name.
I already fucking hated her. It was just a matter of time until she gave me more of a reason than just existing.