Tick, tick, tick.
She says her boyfriend is a ticking time bomb. That she never knows how he is going to show up. Nice and charming, or drunk and violent. I tell her that that’s what you get for dating a junkie and a drug dealer. She doesn’t listen. Gwen never listens.
The thing about my older sister is that she can be my parent and a child at the very same time. Like right now, when I see her lying in a pool of her own puke in the apartment that she shares with her roommate, Shelly, all I want to do is throw her into the bathtub, find the idiot who gave her the drugs, and finish him off.
“What’s his name?” I take her by the arm and lead her to the bathroom. I wish I could take her home with me, but she’ll never come. I wish I could stage an intervention, but my parents don’t want anything to do with her anymore and they’ll never be there. Standing there by myself, pleading her to take care of herself, will only be a reminder to the fact that no one but me cares.
“He’s the best.” She smiles to herself as I turn on the faucet and peel her out of her reeking clothes. She complies. A brother should never see his sister naked. Not at this age, anyway. “He is really sweet, Pierce. He is.”
“Yeah? Somehow I doubt that. He sold you the drugs?”
She shakes her head. “Gave it to me for free. I’m sampling for him.”
“You’re sampling drugs for him?” I repeat her words, dumbfounded. The worst part is that she is a smart girl. Smart girls, I learned with time and experience, sometimes do very stupid things for men. Gwen ran away from California after she went to UCLA. She has a degree and speaks three languages. She could have been a very successful, very happy woman, if she wanted to be. But she doesn’t. Instead, she followed me to Las Vegas and let herself get caught up with the wrong people. The wrong lifestyle.
What she wants is to defy our parents. And what she fails to understand is that they’re not wired the same way as us. They cut all ties to her and moved on. They didn’t care enough to raise us. Why would they care enough to look after us when we’re grown?
“Rehab,” I say, throwing her clothes to the trash. There’s no point in washing them. I’ll just buy her new ones. They’re two times too big, anyway. Gwen has become rail thin and scarily bony the last couple of months. She’s fading, and it physically hurts to watch. “You need to go to rehab, or I’ll go back to California and cut all ties. I mean it, Gwen.”
“Sure.” She laughs. “Leave me. Just like them. It’s not like I raised you.”
“You did raise me,” I agree. “You raised me, and now it’s my turn to take care of you. Something that’s a little hard to do when you’re hell-bent on destroying yourself.”
She laughs more hysterically, bordering on maniacal. I throw her into the bath, and it’s ice-cold, and she deserves it.
“I hate you!” she screams, spitting in my face. I stare at her through leveled eyes.
“That’s fine. Give me his address,” I say. I’m ready to do something stupid, but I don’t even care anymore.
“No.” She crosses her arms over her chest, sitting in the full bath like a toddler.
“Gwen.”
“No!”
“Fuck!” I punch the tiles.
“You won’t take him from me!” she yells.
“Oh, we’ll see about that.”
Ryan Anderson.
I’m sitting in my car, staring at him from across the road as he works, bare-chested, on his motorcycle. I pulled Remington Stringer’s address from the contact list online, and I did just so I could see where he lives. It has nothing to do with Remington and her advances, though I know that, logically, at some point I will need to make sure she knows that she can’t pull that kind of stunt again.
It’s not about Remington—not in the way Remington wants it to be about Remington—and she needs to know that. But I have plenty of time to clarify that to her. Right now, I’m more interested in Anderson.
Taking into consideration the fact that my car is probably going to stand out in his neighborhood, I parked around the corner of his street, where he can’t see. But I can definitely see him and his inked chest glistening with sweat. The asshole doesn’t look bad, and for some reason, that bothers me. The images of him touching and doing things to Gwen morph into ones of him with Remington, and the thought stirs something in me that I never knew existed.
I want revenge. Justice.
But I don’t know the whole story, and it’s killing me.
Remington Stringer is not emancipated, but I sure as hell don’t know if her father or mother is around either. A Daniel Stringer signed every single school document for her. I assume that’s her father, but I don’t know how present he is. For all I know, Ryan is the only consistent person in her life.
That doesn’t deter me from hunting him down and bringing justice to my sister’s case, but for some reason, it gives me pause.
Beyond the tough exterior, Remington Stringer is a teenage girl who still needs to be taken care of, and I reluctantly recognize that.
I’m about to kick my vehicle into drive and leave. This was obviously a mistake. Stalking Ryan Anderson is not going to do me any good. If anything, it’s just going to make me angrier about my inability to act on my desire to throw him in a cell. I know where he is now. That’s what’s important.
My hand is on the console, and I twist my head to see that the road is clear when I hear her voice and still.
“Dinner’s ready, Ryan. Get your ass inside.”
She jumps the three steps down from her door to the yard, wearing an oversized shirt—and just the thought of it being his has me clenching my jaw—her bare, naked legs are long, and her brown, wavy hair is flying everywhere from the hot wind. I shouldn’t look. I don’t want to look. My gaze drifts to the house next door, but then she speaks again.
“Ryan, I need a favor, and I really need you not to be crappy about it.”
I can see her from my peripheral standing slightly above him, and he is peering down toward her shirt where her undergarments should be. I want to kill him and find my eyes following them again. It’s not the fact that he is looking down Miss Stringer’s shirt that bothers me. At least that’s what I tell myself. It’s the fact that he sees her as another victim. Just like Gwen.
“What do you need?” Anderson asks, his muscles flexing. Idiot. He is trying to seduce his stepsister, and for all I know, he might have already succeeded.
“Money for new shoes. I know you said you picked up some extra shifts at the shop…”
That actually makes me snort. If she really thinks that her stepbrother holds a legitimate job, she is dead wrong. I’ve been trying to find him everywhere in Vegas ever since Gwen died to no avail. And while it’s a fairly small city, it is what you call chaotic. Vegas is the perfect place to disappear. All the lights, parties, tourists, and temptation. He did a great job.
Until now.
“What’s wrong with your shoes?” Ryan puts his hands on his hips, scanning her legs. He stares at her in a way I can easily decode, even from across the street. I know this look because I sometimes give it to women, two seconds before I rip off their underwear with my teeth.
“They have a dress code at West Point.” She shrugs, moving her fingers through her hair. “Headmaster Charles has been bugging me about it. You know how they are. Stuck up and all.”
“Well, money is tight this month.”
“I thought you said you’re going to buy a new toy hauler to go spend the summer in California.” She clears her throat, and my heart breaks. It shouldn’t, but it does. This girl is a far cry from the brazen one in my class.
“You keeping tabs on me?” Anderson asks, pushing his chest toward her. It reminds me how she pushed her chest to me earlier today. I was a little taken aback at how bold she was, but I didn’t take into consideration the fact that it’s all she knows. She doesn’t know subtle. Wouldn’t know it even if it hit her on the head.
“Not keeping tabs, Ry. Just trying not to get into too much trouble at my new school.”
“Maybe you should get in trouble,” Ryan retorts. “That way you can stay here and quit eating up all those fantasies about leaving they’ve been feeding you there. I know your game, Rem. Know it well.”
Rem.
“Dinner’s getting cold,” she snaps, turning around and heading back into the shack they call home. I drive away, straight to the nearest mall.
Three, four, five pairs of smart, black-laced Oxford shoes in a few different sizes, just to be sure.
They’ll be waiting in her locker first thing in the morning.
Miss Stringer is not going to end up like my sister did. I will make sure of that.