Chapter One
TATE
My knocks intensified. No one was answering.
Jeremy my brother was supposed to be here.
I slumped down against the door, pushing my bag to the side. At least this apartment complex had nice, soft carpeting in the halls, because it seemed as if I was going to be sitting here for a while.
Pulling out my phone, I was quick to type out a text and send it my brother's way.
"Where are you? I'm in front of the door."
Sighing, I waited for a response. I wasn't expecting a quick one. If he had time to obsess over his phone, I doubted that he'd want his bratty little sister hanging around his apartment all the time.
"I'm hardly even there, Tate," he’d gone on, pitching it to me. "Someone may as well get use out of it. Right now, it's just Joel and Logan coming over and drinking my beer and using my fancy TV that I personally can never use."
A laugh. They were still so tight. Joel and Logan were twins, and basically my big brother's two best friends. Not only that, well, they were this girl's first crush. I wondered if they were still crush-able years later. I hadn't seen them in about four, ever since they moved away when Jeremy went to college. Apparently, their bromance continued, if Jeremy was casually letting them use his apartment when they didn’t even live there.
Turns out I wasn't going to have to wait long to meet them again.
"Joel and Logan will be coming over to let you in," Jeremy texted me.
I guess they had keys.
There was no rush on my end to respond immediately. I thought back to the twins and how, well, hot those guys were. They weren't completely identical or anything, but they were most definitely brothers. As a teenager, Joel was a big softer but still more muscular than most of the boys I ran into in high school.
Logan was most definitely more cut. Joel had this beautiful brown hair, while Logan’s was sort of a buzzed black. Many a night when I was alone, being anxious that my over-protective mother wouldn't let me do normal, teenage things, I'd sneak out, but what didn't help was that, since I lacked a father in my life, big bro decided to fill that role and also be an over-protective hard-ass where Mom couldn't be.
I knew he cared. I knew it was out of love. But it did leave me an eighteen-year-old virgin. All the same, though? I doubted he volunteered to let me stay at his place to continue his vigilance on my purity. If wasn’t even there, he couldn’t be my chastity belt in brother form, after all.
Yet instead of living in a dorm or a sorority or something else typical, I was living with my brother. I doubted that made me seem like a sexy, attractive adult. I sighed, and then heard footsteps.
I was prepared to face weird questions on why I was sitting cross-legged in the hallway. This was a pretty nice place, and they tend to be hostile to people doing weird things like I was.
Luckily, I didn't need to think of how to explain my predicament.
Instead, I was dealing with a sudden desire to swoon and faint in awe. Or whatever it was those dainty women did in old movies.
Joel and Logan. The twins.
Fuck, they got hot.
Hotter.
Whatever.
They'd always been older than me, and I’d always had a thing, but now they were damn near model quality. They’d filled out, taking cute, dumping it, and running full-on screaming into handsomeness.
I scrambled to my feet in front of them. I realized I had the stupidest look on my face. "Um, uh, yeah, hi," I managed to stumble over in the least cool fashion ever.
"Tate," Joel said. "My, my, hasn't little sister grown up?"
Blood rushed through my cheeks. "Um, maybe a little."
"There's nothing little about you," Logan added, his eyebrows waggling at me, and the direction of the eyes themselves told me it definitely wasn't a comment about my weight.
"Um... uh... yeah..." I couldn't make eye contact. They came in swinging, dropping lines like that on me. They always did this. It really riled Jeremy up for them to be hitting on me. Part of me knew it was a joke, but all the same, there was always that part that told me there was a kernel of truth in their teasing and that they liked what they saw.
Maybe it was all wishful thinking.
"So, my brother isn't here to let me in."
"The Jerm?" Logan said, walking up to the door, pulling out a key, and turning it. "Yeah, he told us he wanted us to be the welcoming party. Help you get settled in. He's kind of missed you."
"We've kind of missed you," Joel added in, a Cheshire cat-like grin taking over his face.
They led me into the apartment, and Jeremy definitely wasn't doing poorly for himself. This place was nice. He could have used the word penthouse or something to describe it. Huge windows with a beautiful view. A fully featured, huge kitchen. Carpets that made the hallway carpets feel like sandpaper in comparison. Jesus, the place was just huge.
I stumbled through it, just taking it all in awe.
"I bet this is a hell of a lot nicer than any dorm or sorority house you could stay in," Logan said. "Plus, you get to hang out with us. Can you really top that?"
"Aren't we full of ourselves?" I responded, heaving my bag around. Damn, this thing got heavier the more I carried it.
Hanging out with them seemed as if it would be more of a challenge in not jumping their bones than anything else. Four years was a big deal when you were both teenagers. When you got older, that gap seemed smaller and smaller.
An eighteen-year-old and a fourteen-year-old getting together was yuck. A twenty-two-year-old and an eighteen-year-old? Not so much. In the eyes of the law, we were all legally adults, free to make our own decisions, however stupid they might end up being.
It was silly. They were just fucking with me, and not in the way I dreamed about. That I could seduce one of them as a timid little virgin was crazy enough, but both of them? My imagination had a way of getting the best of me, I guessed.
"So, would you know what room is meant for me?"
"Yeah," Logan said. "It's my bedroom. It's not in this apartment, though."
Joel proceeded to shove an elbow right into his brother's gut. Logan just laughed it off. "It's the one to the left. The one with just a bed and a dresser. You should probably put your own touch to it so it looks less depressing."
I just shook my head in Logan's direction and gave Joel a nod. "Thanks."
Some time alone was exactly what I needed. Stop thinking about them. Maybe lock the door and look up something dirty to try to get my mind off them.
As I carried my bag down the hall, though, I glanced back. Getting my mind off them was a whole lot easier said than done.