“Neither did I,” Parrish adds dryly, giving me another look. “But he’s hardly ever in town. You’re not going to kick him out, are you?”
“Parrish Vanguard,” Tess snaps, and I fight my hardest to push back a sadistic grin. At the very least, if Tess is going to be a hard-ass, I enjoy seeing Parrish get his. I wasn’t sure he was ever punished for anything. “Parrish and Mia are grounded,” she explains to X, almost apologetically. Not a person in that garage misses the way I cringe when she says it.
Mia.
As Shakespeare once said, What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By Any Other Name would smell as sweet. I shouldn’t take it to heart. It truly is just a word, but it means so much more. It stands for so much more.
“I won’t stay long,” Maxx promises, tucking his battered hands into the pockets of his jeans. Even the way he does that, such a casual, normal move, makes my heart jump. I frown and Parrish notices. His eyes take me in from head to toe, absorbing the careful waves of my hair, the makeup on my face, the black leather sandals.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Tess says, putting on a smile. “Come on in.”
She pulls Maxx ahead with her to chat, but I don’t miss the way his gaze lingers on me, almost apologetically, like he wants to correct the Mia thing for me. But that would blow our cover, and I can’t have that. The last thing I need is Tess knowing that Maxx is dating my sister. She’d probably ban him from the premises, and I’d feel even more trapped in this icebox.
“Did you seriously sneak out to go on a date?” Parrish asks me, and I notice that his left hand is bleeding. There’s a fresh tattoo there, one that I can’t quite make out beneath all the blood. He notices me staring and then frowns even harder, glancing down at the design before swiping the blood across his pajama pants.
“No, actually,” I retort, feeling that strange sense of competitive spitefulness take over me. Why the hell am I letting this dick dig at me like this? Parrish isn’t the first asshole I’ve ever been around. I usually try to take a page from my favorite Twitch streamer’s—negaoryx is her online handle—book and educate trolls, assholes, and misogynists the best I can. “My sister just so happens to be dating your bestie. He gave me a ride so that I could see her.”
I decide it’s best to keep the Chasm bit to myself. Somehow, it feels like I might lose something precious by giving that up. Silly, I know, but there it is.
Parrish stares at me for a long moment, wiping the blood on his pants again. That can’t be good for the tattoo, can it? My eyes drop down to his hand before lifting up again to his face. For the briefest of seconds, it looks like he might say something meaningful. Because I’m an eternal optimist, I get a strange hope inside my chest that he might be considering an apology for the other day.
Then he blinks, and his mouth twists into this sharp frown that would take a team of specially trained psychiatrists to diagnose. They’d all need advanced degrees in filthy rich boys just to figure him out.
“I guess you’ll keep your mouth shut and help me escape this dungeon tonight, won't you?” he asks, but it’s not just a question, is it? No, it’s a threat.
My defense mechanisms slam into place, and that happy, floating feeling that Maxine left me with disappears in a puff of smoke. A fairy-tale is what that was. A fairy-tale where I’m still Dakota Banks instead of Mia Patterson with a stepbrother who hates me for reasons that are completely out of my control.
“I never asked to be kidnapped, you know?” I snap at him, feeling my hands curl into tight fists. The day of my kidnapping remains a mystery to me. I have no memory of it. How could I be expected to? “I was two freaking years old. I was stolen from daycare. It wasn't Tess’ fault, and it most certainly wasn’t mine either.”
Parrish looks taken aback for the briefest of moments, but his eyes narrow even further, as if the hooding of his lids can protect him from the reality of the situation. He’s decided to hate me because he’s jealous. Because he doesn’t like change. Because Tess was an overprotective parent for most of his life and he feels like he missed out on something. From what I can see, maybe he didn't miss out on enough?
“You're so spoiled,” I breathe, feeling my own eyes narrow. I should probably stop right there, but I can’t help myself. My tongue feels like a wild thing, a caged animal trapped inside the confines of a perpetually smiling mouth. That’s one thing I can say about Parrish Vanguard: he frees me from the shackles of my niceness, from my attempts to be pleasant, from thinking of other people so much that I sometimes forget to think about myself. Around him, I can just be selfish and cruel, unfiltered and angry. “How can you be so mad and so unhappy when you’re so goddamn spoiled?!”
“Oh, you just wait,” he hisses, a cruel smile taking over his lips. They’re very pretty lips, too, as if somehow the universe deigned to grant him this cruel and unusual means to lure in prey. “Until you see what you’ve gotten as a birthday present. Then we’ll see who the spoiled one truly is.”
He sweeps past me, our bare arms brushing.
A wild spark flares between us, enough so that Parrish actually stops and looks back at me. But instead of confusion or curiosity showing on his face, he looks almost … scared? That emotion fades in the blink of an eye and then he’s back to being pissed off again. His perpetual default.
He turns away, even as I open my mouth to speak. Whatever I was going to say is lost, and I swallow back the emotion like I always do.
Back inside the house, I find Kimber chatting happily in Maxx’s direction as Tess looks down at her phone with a slight crease in her brow. She pauses to glance up at me, this softening of her features reminding me of my sister when she was looking at Maxx. It might not be romantic love, but it’s love all the same. Tess is looking at me like she needs me, and I don’t know how to process that. I might’ve developed inside her belly, she might’ve changed my diapers and breastfed me and cared for me for two years, but … I don’t remember her at all. Except for the smell of her perfume, that is.
I look away, toward the pretentious white marble floor.
“We're ordering dinner in, Mi—” Tess pauses again, and I glance up to see both Parrish and Maxx staring at her. “Dakota,” she corrects, like the word is foreign and sticky in her mouth.
You can do this, Dakota, I tell myself, thinking of my grandmother’s anguished face, of my grandfather’s broken ankle, of my sister hugging me so tightly that I forgot how to breathe.
“Come look at the menu and pick something out.”
“Usually, you just click our saved order,” Kimber says, her voice more caustic and biting than Parrish’s even. Honestly, if I were forced to choose between them for an arena battle, I’d pick Parrish as my opponent. Kimber is harboring so much resentment for me, it makes Parrish’s feel like a drop in the ocean. “We order from there all the time; we have a saved family order.” She sounds furious about it.
“Well, we have a new family member to add to our order,” Tess says, her voice halfway between understanding and angry. “Besides, Maxx is here—”
“Maxx’s order is saved in your phone, too,” Kimber interjects, turning her matching raven eyes over to me. “You're the only person here who doesn't belong.”