Page 6 of Stepbrothers with Benefits
“Well, just goes to show that maybe she was feeling a little crazy. Losing someone close to you will do that.”
“You weren’tthatbad,” she insisted, which was sweet of her, a total lie, but a sweet one all the same.
“It’s a miracle my dad didn’t have me locked up,” I snorted, turning as I heard Milo laugh, the note telling me he had made the poor doctor squirm again.
“Marcus wouldn’t lock you up,” she said with a snort.
Looking back, I wouldn’t have blamed my dad if he had. I was young when my mother died in a car crash, picking me up from preschool. I remembered next to nothing, just the world going into a spin, becoming noisy, and I remembered tasting snot as I cried hysterically. After that, I had apparently become a terror that had driven my already grieving father near hysterical as his once normally calm, if slightly mischievous, child screamed, hit, threw things, and bit. He had only just managed to get me to a reasonable level through a lot of hell and therapy when he met Marty and fell in love all over again.
Which brought a whole resurgence of horrible behavior on my part. I was still young, and I didn’t remember much other than that I was furious he was trying to replace my mom, and I didn’t want to have brothers or sisters. As an adult, I wouldn’t have blamed Matilda if she’d taken one look at my near-panicked father and his terror of a son and decided nope, that wasn’t for her; she had enough on her plate with her kids, a hotel to run, and grief of her own.
That wasn’t Marty’s style, though, and she had seen me for what I was, not a little terror waiting to grow into a monster, but a kid with too much pain and no way to put it anywhere productive. Her kindness had been the first thing I remembered clearly; her patience came a close second. But it hadn’t been her that got through to me, but the little blond kid who couldn’t sit still and always irritated the shit out of me. It was also the first clear memory I remembered having.
“Go away!” I shrieked, but there was no real heat to it. I was angry, but I didn’t know why. I was tired too, like I had been drained of everything but the anger.
The kid didn’t go away, though; he hung out in the doorway with a weird look. All he did was talk and talk and talk, and I just wanted him to shut up and go away—him and his whole family. My dad and I werefine;we didn’t need anyone else. I didn’t need a new mom, and I definitely didn’t need brothers or a sister.
“You’re crying,” he said finally, wrinkling his nose.
With a scream, I picked up a book and hurled it at him. It hit the wall three feet from him with a hard thunk, and dropped to the ground. He stared at it for a moment before picking it up, setting it down on the table, and sitting in the chair next to it.
“So,” he said, looking at me like he hadn’t met me before. Like I hadn’t hit him, screamed at him, and even once, bitten him. “Why are you sad?”
“I’m not!” I snarled, looking for something else to throw so he would go away. If I missed, I would just have to get up and hit him with something else.
“You look sad.”
“No!”
“You do.”
“Go away!”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not!”
“No...my mom says it’s okay to be sad sometimes,” he said, his eyes still wide as he looked at me curiously. “She says sometimes people don’t know how to be sad, so they get mad. And that it’s okay to be mad when you’re sad. But you shouldn’t hurt people who like you.”
“You don’t like me,” I snapped. It was what I wanted, of course, but that didn’t mean I didn’t hate it. “No one likes me.”
“I don’t know. You’re kinda mean,” he said thoughtfully, cocking his head. “But maybe it’s just ’cause you’re sad.”
“I don’t wanna be sad,” I said miserably, looking down at my hands and feeling my eyes sting. “Or mad.”
“Okay,” he said, and I looked up to see him shrug. “Wanna have fun instead?”
“I don’t like you,” I said, even though I didn’t have a reason not to like him. He never stopped talking and didn’t like to sit still, but...I just...didn’t want to like him.
“That’s okay,” he said brightly. “But it just rained.”
“So?” I asked belligerently.
“Sooooo, there’s this girl who works here, who hates frogs. Screams every time she sees them. If we can find one from the courtyard, I bet she’d scream and run,” he said, eyes getting bigger as he rattled on with his plan. “And then we can cannonball in the pool.”
“We can’t go in the pool,” I said with a frown.
He rolled his eyes. “We’re not allowed.”
