Chapter TWO
Stick
When your name's Harden Greengross the Third, you have a tendency to be anointed with a more user-friendly nickname. The logical handle for me would have been 'Hard' and I kinda remember my mother calling me that once or twice. When she wanted to impart some important fact I had to remember, like not drinking milk from the container. Or when she tousled my hair in her palm and looked down on me with a ton of love filling her soft hazel eyes.
But then even she began using the name all the kids in the neighborhood starting calling me instead of Harden.
Stick.
Now I'm grown, the name brings a little bite of humiliation, because of the size of me. I'm a good bit larger than most guys and even when flaccid, the bastard looks rock hard. But back then we were mostly innocent. For a short while at least.
They called me Stick because I always had one in my hand. I carried it everywhere to throw for my bud. A big ol' black lab with droopy loving eyes called, wait for it, Stone.
They said Stick and Stone were as inseparable as bread and butter. And as often as I threw out the stick from my hand, Stone never failed to retrieve it and bring it right back, wearing a dog grin of 'job well done'.
As I walk up the steps onto the porch, I lose the thread of what the fuck I'm doing here. This is no longer my home. It stopped being a hearth for me soon after my father remarried.
“You have to give your mother a chance,” my father had insisted for the thousandth time.
“She isn't my mother,” I said. “I've given her a million chances, but I'll do it over if you just stop calling her that.”
“You need to clear that resentment out of you,” he replied.
It seemed to me that Lyndsey came to the house with war in mind. Her middle name was divisive and she determined to insert herself between my father and I in a way that could only cause problems for everyone.
But perhaps I was looking at it all wrong, with my selfish teenage eyes. Lyndsey and I got into a blow up about nothing and my Dad, thinking he had to support her, threw me out of the house. Not having my dad to talk to, about all the things I've seen in the years since I left, has been hard.
But the biggest loss was her.
Scherri.
Can you love a girl and not even know it? Can you be in love with a girl before you even know quite what love is?
Scherri and I were bonded in everything. We could talk about anything, shared our deepest fears and hopes, hiked through the woods to go swimming with Stone. We were teased about being best friends at first but our bond was too strong for even the stupid smears thrown at us. Soon enough the kids at school gave up and accepted that Scherri and I were always together.
If I harbored resentment it wasn't at Lyndsey moving in, but at Scherri moving away. People leave, I get that but she didn't have to. She could've made a different choice.
“I can't stay,” she told me, reaching for my hand.
I snatched it away from her small fingers. Feeling her skin on mine sent a rocket through me and I wasn't prepared for how much more of her I wanted. My cock was now, all of a sudden, constantly pounding at my pants with a burning insatiable need. And all that longing was only for Scherri. Having her touch even my hand was way too fucking much.
“You can. You choose not to,” I gritted out, mad at her for making me want her so fucking hard when I couldn't do a thing about it.
Maybe with time I could ease us out of the friend zone, but I had to take it slow. No way I'd lose my best friend over my burning desire to posses her. To own her completely. I had to be a thousand per cent certain she wanted that too. If she was leaving, just like that, she obviously didn't feel the same. I was all out of time.
“We'll still be friends.”
Friends.
“We'll keep in touch. Facebook will keep us friends forever.”
“Great. Yeah. FaceBook.”
I didn't want some stupid networking, I wanted her. And without me there she'd soon start dating other guys. Someone else would kiss those lips and slowly peel off her clothes to reveal her soft pink skin. Someone else would part her thighs and slide inside her tight wet channel. I couldn't take it.
I walked away from her. I turned my back and strode back up the porch steps and into the house, leaving her pleading my name.
That's all that fills my head as I walk up those same four steps now. How I treated her the last time I saw her. Allowing my disappointment to get the better of me for the first time in my life. The loss of her was the toughest thing I ever had to bear. But she didn't deserve my wrath.
For some stupid reason, lost in the past I guess, I tap on one of the glass panels in the front door instead of reaching for the bell. A figure immediately appears, as though they'd been passing through the living room right when I knocked. A woman – I fix my face, determined to put on a mask of politeness to Lyndsey. No way I wanna start this visit off with tension.
The door is thrown back and a rock lands in my stomach. A stunningly gorgeous girl, make that woman, with long dark hair flowing across her shoulders. So shiny she must be brushing it a thousand times a night. Her eyes are so blue I can see the sky reflected in them and the sun that fills them.
My eyes travel down her body without my permission, taking in the perfect swell of her uplifted breasts. Her curves and her long legs. I take in every last inch of her all the way down to her bare feet, the silver ring in the shape of a daisy on her middle toe.
“Stick?” her voice as melodious as ever, with a hint of rasp now.
Sexy as hell.
My eyes bat back up to her beautiful, so beautiful, face.
“My god, can it really be you?”
She flies into my arms. Well, she crashes into my chest while I stand there like Godzilla, my arms awkward at my side. Desperately wanting to crush her into me but terrified that she's going to feel the rock fucking solid bulge in my combats.
Her tits against my pecs are at the perfect height as she stands on the step on her tippy toes. Her arms around my neck are the only homecoming a guy ever needed. My arms want to come around her and pull her closer.
To hold her right there and never let her go. Ever.
“Harden? What are you doing here? Does your father know you're coming?”
Scherri unwinds herself from me at the sound of Lyndsey's – her mother's – voice. She flashes me a look and I know what she's trying to say. Nothing's changed between Scherri and her mom.
“Good lord, here you are,” Lyndsey says. “Get off him Scheherazade, let him come inside.”
Scherri grabs my arm and pulls me across the step. I'm so stunned by the sight of her I almost leave my backpack, everything I own in the world, sitting on the porch. I scoop it up as she pulls me, half drags me, across the threshold of my old home.