When you coming home bro?
Party at Stew’s this weekend
Hey Clay I’m home if you want to chill
The last one made me raise an eyebrow. It was from Jen. She’d been my most regular fuck buddy since Junior year of high school. That was four years ago. Considering my spotty track record with women, she seemed to think that made us practically engaged.
Not.
It did mean that when she said ‘chill’ it meant getting my dick waxed.
I picked up my phone. Hell, why not? Jen was a cool girl. If she didn’t know I wasn’t looking for a relationship by now that was her own damn fault. She just liked my cock. And she was good at handling it.
Soon
I flipped through my texts again to the one with Nev’s name. The little hooker hadn’t bothered to write back, but it said clear as day that it had been read. I grinned.
I’d make her pay for that.
That could be fun.
It didn’t occur to me until later that Nev’s read receipt was the only thing that made me smile the whole damn day.
Chapter Four
Nevada
The bus jolted to a stop, making my stomach lurch. I’d barely eaten since yesterday and now I was getting car sick. The driver was a complete lunatic.
I hated buses. I always had. Which was ironic since it was more or less the only way I travelled.
I had been on a plane exactly once, when I was eight years old. And that was to go to a funeral. My grandfather’s funeral on my mother’s side.
Not that we even knew the relatives on my father’s side. Or if he had any.
Usually, we took the train home to the tiny midwestern town my mother had grown up in. I liked the train, with its gentle rocking motion and endless things to look at out the window. But after my dad left, it was bus city. We just couldn’t afford anything as nice as a train ride, let alone flying the friendly skies.
That’s until Mom got the job working for Mr. Westfield. She’d come on as head housekeeper but quickly became indispensable to the wealthy, powerful man. He owned many businesses but was primarily known for his wineries in Sonoma County. That’s where we lived now. On his mammoth estate in wine country.
It was beautiful of course. But boring. Especially if you didn’t have money coming out of your eardrums. I existed in a non-existent category somewhere between ‘the help’ and ‘old money.’
Still I tried not to complain.
How many poor girls got to live on an estate? Mr. Westfield had even paid for me to attend the Pembrook Academy, where his own son attended school. I grimaced, thinking of his impossibly perfect son. So handsome he should be on a magazine cover. So rich, he never had to think about money, other than how to spend it. So connected, he’d been turning down invitations before he was born.
Clayton. Also known as Clay.
He was excellent at sports, including tennis, golf, track, baseball and soccer. He was smart, acing his tests without much effort from what I could tell. I’d literally never seen him with a book. Even in the hallways at school.
Not surprisingly, he was arrogant as hell.
And wild.
My God, he was wild.
I knew because I’d been watching his antics for years now. He was just two years ahead of me in school so I’d had plenty of time to observe him.
He was the most popular guy in school and I was a nobody. A nobody who lived in his world. Directly, actually, physically in his world. He could have hated me, or looked down on me. But he didn’t do either. Not that he went out of his way to hang out with me or anything.
The funny thing was, he didn’t ignore me the way you might expect. He never made me feel like a hanger on. In fact, when I was little he’d been kind of sweet to me, even playing tennis with me a few times, even though I was hopeless.
But all that changed when he started noticing girls.
And they noticed him.
Did they ever.
With his athletic build, dark hair and impossibly blue eyes, Clay Westfield was a heartbreaker with a capital H. And I was definitely not immune to his charms.
He was the one I dreamed about at night. Even though I hated everything he stood for. Rich, spoiled, lazy. Loud. Entitled.
Nothing had ever been handed to me in my life. I’d worked hard to catch up with the kids at the Academy. I was smart, but I’d moved around so much that I was behind. The other kids knew I was different. Called me names.
Mouse was the one that had stuck.
Even Clay called me that.
But he never made fun of me in front of anyone. I knew I was beneath his notice for the most part. He did like teasing me on the rare occasions we spoke in high school and when we crossed paths on the estate. Sometimes it seemed like he went out of his way to bump into me.