At First Hate (Coastal Chronicles)

I checked my phone again. Still nothing from Derek. He’d now read the text at least.

With a yawn into my beer, I stepped into the next room over, and my feet stilled. Derek was at the head of the table, sitting with a half-dozen people that I knew all too well. A bunch of his douche friends from high school who had traumatized both me and Lila for years. I disliked every single one of them on sight.

Chuck Henderson was hot but a total bastard. I’d seen Derek throw him out of a party for touching Amelia. And now, he was here. With his two cronies, Michael and Joseph. Neither of them had ever had an original thought in their heads. Trask and Hooper sat nearest to where I’d walked in. They’d both played basketball with Derek in high school. He hadn’t mentioned that he was having friends in town just that he was going out with friends. Why hadn’t he specified?

Derek didn’t look up at my entrance, but Chuck did.

His smile widened to pure Cheshire, but he was drunk as hell. “Minivan!” he crowed.

My body seized at that word out of Chuck Henderson’s mouth. Derek sometimes still used it affectionately, like it was our little secret. But this was how he’d first used that word. To try to tear me down for my circumstances when they were all pretty little rich boys at the private Catholic school. They were above me. That was how that had been used. And how Chuck was using it right now.

Derek’s head jerked up. I could tell that he was beyond drunk. I’d seen him intoxicated but never like this. He could barely hold his head up. And when that word was uttered, all the other guys started laughing.

And to my horror, Derek followed along. He laughed. He actually fucking laughed at that word. Like it was funny and not humiliating.

It didn’t matter that I was a PhD student at Harvard. That I’d finally escaped the horror of being the poor girl at school who drove a fucking minivan. It didn’t matter that I was on my way to a breakthrough in my research. That I was dating Derek Ballentine of all people. That I was someone here.

Suddenly, I was back in high school. Just the nerdy girl to make fun of. Not anyone at all. Not good enough.

“Minivan!” Michael said, cracking up.

“Fuck, I’d forgotten that nickname,” Joseph said.

“How could you forget?” Chuck asked with another drunk laugh. “She drove a fucking minivan.”

I wanted to open my mouth. To tell them to all go fuck themselves. And yet I stood paralyzed. Stuck in a time loop of terror. Repeating old hurts that I’d thought I’d finally healed over. Instead, the wounds were being ripped open and revealed for everyone to see. Just another poor girl trying to be something she wasn’t.

“Derek?” I managed to croak.

“Come on over here, Minivan,” he said with another chuckle.

The word felt sour in my stomach. It had lost the edge of an inside joke when it was stolen and appropriated by the enemy.

I took a step back and shook my head. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“You’re going to let her talk to you like that, D-Man?” Chuck egged him on.

Derek stumbled to his feet. “Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“D-Man?” I said in exasperation. “Seriously?”

Derek laughed again at something one of the other guys had said, and I just shook my head. I was done. This was fucking ridiculous. I didn’t have to stay here and be ridiculed.

“Whatever.” I stormed away from the lot of them.

I heard laughter in my wake, and then suddenly, Derek was there. He grasped my elbow.

“Mars, hold up.”

“Oh, it’s Mars now?” I demanded, snatching my arm away.

He teetered forward drunkenly, reaching for the doorframe for support. “It was just a joke.”

“So, I’m a joke to you now?”

“Just lighten up,” he said with that smarmy smirk on his lips. “You’re overreacting.”

My spine straightened at that word. “Excuse me?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing to me, Derek. Or should I say, D-Man?” I snarled. “You didn’t even tell me your friends were in town.”

“Why should I?”

“I don’t know. I thought we were dating.”

“You hate my friends,” he said with a shrug. “I knew you wouldn’t want to hang out with them.”

“You mean, you knew that you didn’t want to introduce me as your girlfriend,” I snapped right back.

He glared down at me as he met my rising anger. “Like you with Lila. Tell me, Minivan, does your best friend know you’re dating me?”

“That’s different.”

“How? From my vantage point, it’s the same goddamn thing,” he said. “This isn’t real to you, Marley. You say you love me, but you won’t even tell Lila. And then you have the audacity to be mad at me. Rich. Real rich.”

I balked at the way he had thrown aside the fact that I loved him. As if it had never mattered. My spine was ramrod straight, and my hands balled into fists. “I should have told Lila. Fine. You’re right. Is that what you wanted to hear? You’re still a drunk asshole who let your friends make fun of me.”