Page 5 of My Brother's Bad Best Friend

I grin at her. Where Ezra’s tall, blond, and muscular, Lizzie is thin, pale, and dark.

“Different dads,” I say. “Now be nice.”

“Got it.” She sucks in a breath. “Hell of a shiner.”

“Be nice,” I say again, walking away, back toward the office. Half Pipe is split into two halves: the front is a coffee shop, and the back is a weed distributor. My office is right in the middle, between the two halves. I push open the “Employees Only” door and shut it behind me, sighing as I sit down in my chair.

I pull my phone from my pocket and stare at it for a second. I know I need to call him, but something’s making me pause. Ezra’s been off lately, and I’m not so sure he has the ability to handle something like his broken little sister showing up at his weed place with a black eye. I’m afraid he’ll go fucking ballistic and risk losing everything we’ve built.

Ezra’s my partner. We went into business, fifty-fifty, on the day he left home. We sold weed for the most part, back before it was legal, but we also got into the skate scene. Ezra’s good, almost good enough to go pro, but mostly he just got every skater in the San Diego area to buy their pot from us. Business boomed for years, and we managed to stash a ton of cash away for a rainy day.

Then they legalized weed, and we decided to go legit. We took every single dollar we had, not even bothering to try and launder it, and opened up Half Pipe. That was six months ago, and so far we’re making more money than we could possibly deal with. That safe with fifty grand? Just one of five others like it, each packed with money.

The look Lizzie gave me outside as she snatched her duffel away comes back to me, angry and haunted. She’s fucking beautiful, not at all like all the tanned, boring, perfect surfer girls that plague every goddamn California city, but I can’t think with my fucking cock right now. The girl needs her brother. The last thing she needs is my dumb ass, fucking her up even more than she already is.

I dial his number and he answers on the third ring. “What up, man?”

“Ezra, it’s your sister.”

He hesitates. “Lizzie?”

“Yeah,” I grunt, wondering if he has another sister.

“What’s wrong?”

“She showed up with a packed bag and a black eye.”

He’s quiet for a second. He knows what that means, better than anyone else.

“I’ll be there soon,” he says finally. “I got some business, but I’ll be there soon.”

I don’t bother asking what he means by “business.” He’s been doing a lot of business lately without me, and I’ve been turning a blind eye to it. I got enough on my plate with running Half Pipe and trying to get Don signed. I don’t need whatever insane scheme Ezra’s cooked up now.

I remember the time when we were only seventeen and he found a box full of old dirty porn mags behind a dumpster. They were seventies rags, the sort of shit nobody was into anymore, big fat bushes and weird outfits, but he ripped all the good pictures out and tried selling them to local kids. He ended up getting caught and had to scuttle the whole damn box while running from a pissed off mom that threatened to tear his little pecker off.

He’s always doing shit like that. Sometimes it works out, like with Half Pipe. But mostly he just gets people threatening to rip off his dick.

“I’ll be there soon,” he repeats, and hangs up the phone.

I sigh and toss my phone onto a stack of papers. I lean back in my chair and squeeze my eyes shut, thinking about Lizzie in the other room. I try not to picture her the way she was two years ago, fucking fit and gorgeous and looking so goddamn bored. I wanted to fuck a smile onto her, and I know I could. She’s probably never felt dick like mine, not from the douchebags she went out with in high school. She was too damn hot not to have the frat boys all over her, and I guess she was into it, judging by the morons she was with that day.

But goddamn, she looked so out of place, somehow older and more refined. I wanted to pull her away and show her how to really have fun, but of course I didn’t. When Ezra was done with their conversation, we left, and I didn’t look back.

Now she’s here, in the flesh. She looks just as beautiful as she did that day, but with an edge, like she might scream if you brush against her shoulder.

I know she’s not my problem. Fuck, she doesn’t want me to be her problem. But she’s there in the other room and I keep thinking about that bored expression, and how fucking sexy it was.

Doesn’t matter. That girl’s gone, and the girl in my shop’s totally off limits, at least for now. Let Ezra deal with her. I’ll be good, get some damn paperwork done.

But as soon as I start trying to concentrate on budgets and shit, I get the distinct impression that this thing with Lizzie is very far from over.

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