Page 4 of Foolish Games

“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.

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