Page 12 of New Hope, Old Grudges

My breathing stuttered as his words penetrated.

“I’m not a bad guy, Willow,” he growled, keeping me pinned against the wall. “I’m not gonna take advantage of you here and now. Not a bad enough man to do that. But I will fuck you dirty like the bad girl you are when you’re in my bed where you can scream as loud as you want, and a bar full of assholes isn’t going to hear you.”

I blinked slowly. My body was still reeling with his presence, with the way I’d spoken to him and the way he’d spoken to me. My sexual life before this could easily be described as vanilla. There was no way I’d been in this position with a long-term boyfriend, let alone an old bully.

An old bully who was trying to masquerade as a reasonable man.

Finding my senses, I lifted my hand, placed it on his chest then shoved. Hard.

Now, I was tall, but I wasn’t strong. Brody was a large man and all muscle. If he didn’t want to move, he could’ve resisted my shove. Easily. But he didn’t. He let me push him back, push him away from me.

“Fuck you, Brody Adams,” I spat, unable to come up with anything more original.

And then I turned on my heel and stormed off, fighting tears of anger and shame.

I’d broken many promises to myself lately, but I’d never broken a promise to eighteen-year-old me until right then.

EIGHTEEN YEARS EARLIER

Although I was called a nerd on a regular basis— apparently, they couldn’t come up with a more original insult for a girl with glasses who wasn’t a complete idiot and took schoolwork seriously—I didn’t make a habit of staying late after school for any kind of extracurricular activities. I wasn’t an extracurricular kind of girl. Even though they looked great on college transcripts.

My grades were good enough to get me into a decent college. I didn’t have unrealistic expectations about the Ivy League which, in my opinion, was overpriced and useless for the future I wanted anyway. I didn’t really believe in college, but Dad wanted me to go, and it was the fastest way out of New Hope.

Hence me doing the one extracurricular that didn’t require me doing any kind of socializing: chess club. It was just me and the Columbian exchange student, Rico, and he joined by accident. Which meant that chess club no longer existed.

I was not unhappy about that fact. I told myself I had tried to make it work, but it wasn’t meant to be. I was applying to every college I could, casting my net wide. As long as I got out of that place, it didn’t matter where I went.

I was taking a detour through the football field in order to get to where I’d arranged for my mother to pick me up. Although everyone had left school at that point, I didn’t want to risk someone seeing her pick me up in her loud, obnoxious car and have her do something that would give people more ammo to tease me with. They had plenty of ammo as it was.

“You’re an embarrassment!” The loud and angry voice carried across the field. I had been underneath the bleachers, out of sight of the owner of the voice.

It sounded vaguely familiar. Though I wasn’t nosy, I found myself moving closer while still staying out of sight.

That was when I saw Dr. Adams and Brody. Brody looked nothing like the cocky a-hole who sauntered through the halls of New Hope High, arm slung around a cheerleader, smirk on his face like he owned the world.

No, he was sitting on the bleachers, curled over, his head between his knees.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you!” Dr. Adams demanded.

I was surprised. More than surprised. Dr Adams was my doctor. He was pretty much everyone’s doctor. It was a small town, and he was well respected. He was kind, easy to smile and didn’t make you feel small, stupid or embarrassed. Though my mother had really tried to test that theory at the last appointment we had… We’d gone, planning on talking about me going on the pill for my acne and heavy periods, and she ended up asking how it would interfere with my sexual desires.

My mother was against most modern medicine and violently against me ‘messing up my hormones’ with the pill. I was violently against being almost eighteen-years-old and still covered in pimples. It had taken me that long just to convince my mother to even let me go to the appointment; she’d spent years telling me I’d grow out of it, that it was natural, that I was still attractive.

She was wrong on all counts.

And I’d been eternally grateful to Dr. Adams for finding a way around all my mother’s questions and concerns in order to prescribe me something that he assured me would help.

I’d never seen his handsome face so red, so angry, especially not toward his son. Not that I’d been around them a whole lot. I didn’t attend football games for obvious reasons. But unfortunately, I lived in a small town and had the occasion to see them together from time to time, out for dinner with my parents, at the coffee shop with my mother.

Dr. Adams was always smiling, warm toward the son I didn’t believe deserved such a nice father, and I’d always thought such a kind man raising such a butthead was a firm plus in the ‘nature’ column of the nature versus nurture debate.

Brody’s head snapped up at his father’s words.

“You’re lazy,” Dr. Adams spat. “You spend too much time out there on the field, thinking your shit doesn’t stink, thinking you’re someone. But you’re not. Your grades are falling, and you’re nowhere near as good as you think you are on this football field. At this rate, you’ll end up some insurance salesman with a bald spot, a fat ex-cheerleader for a wife, and a disappointment to me and your mother’s memory.”

I blinked, unable to fathom the venom this man was spitting toward his own son. I forgot for a moment that I’d wished this kind of treatment and more against Brody Adams. Not that he was really the main instigator of the shit the football team called me—his buddy Sam Norton was—but he laughed just like the rest of them. He embodied everything that was wrong with this place. Maybe it burned a little more to have him join in on the taunts because I’d always had a little bit of a crush on Brody. That was until he and his buddies coined the term ‘Weirdo Watson.’

“Dad—”

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