My Brother’s Best Friend Is My Nemesis

Chapter one

Wren

"Either get in or get out, Mason’s sister. You're letting the cold in."

That is the first thing Ace Calloway says to me with another girl's stomach under his mouth.

I am standing in the doorway of the back room at Reeves's house party because my i***t brother left his good jacket here last weekend and texted me four times to come get it before someone walked off with it. What I have walked into instead is Ace stretched out on the long leather couch with his head bent low, dragging the last of a thin white line off the soft skin under a girl's belly button like it is the most ordinary thing a person could be doing on a Friday night.

The girl is Sloane Marchetti, because of course it is. She is the kind of beautiful that makes other girls go quiet when she walks in, and she knows it, and she has never once let anybody forget it. She does not scramble when she sees me. She does not even sit up. She just tips her head back against the armrest, finds me upside down, and gives me a slow smile that says I am the least interesting thing that has ever interrupted her.

"You heard him," she says. "In or out."

Ace lifts his head and drags his thumb across his bottom lip, slow and unbothered, and looks at me with the same eyes that have talked half the girls in this school out of their good sense.

"Wren Cole." He says my name like he is testing the weight of it. "You're a long way from the library."

"Mason left his jacket. I'm getting it and I'm leaving."

"It's on the chair." He does not move a single muscle to make this easier. He drapes one arm along the back of the couch and watches me cross the room for it, and I can feel him doing it, the lazy drag of his attention from my shoes all the way back up to my face. "You should come to more of these, you know. You've got that look about you. The one girls get when nobody's touched them in a while."

Somebody behind me laughs. I had not even noticed the others, two guys sunk low into the armchairs and a girl on the floor, all of them watching their golden boy captain put on a show.

"You're disgusting," I tell him, and I grab the jacket off the chair.

"And yet here you are." He spreads his hands like he is offering me something. "Staring."

"I'm looking at you the exact way you'd look at something stuck to the bottom of your shoe."

That actually gets a reaction out of Sloane, a small huff of a laugh, but Ace only smiles wider, like I have handed him a gift he has been waiting for.

"Careful, Cole," he says. "You keep talking to me like that and I'm going to start thinking you mean something by it. Does your brother know his baby sister has a mouth on her like this, or do you save all of it just for me?"

I hate him. I have hated him since I was twelve years old.

And he looks like that anyway.

That is the part nobody warns you about. You can despise a person all the way down to the bone and still have a body that turns on you the second he stands too close

I leave before I say something that will keep me awake all night.

I do not slam the door, because slamming the door is exactly what he wants, and Ace Calloway has spent his entire life being handed exactly what he wants. I walk out through the noise and the bodies and the stink of cheap beer, down the front steps, into the cold air where I can finally breathe again.

And then I do the one thing that nobody in this school has ever had the spine to do.

I take out my phone, and I report him.

I email the athletic compliance office that same night with the date, the time, the room, and exactly what I watched him do, and I sign my real name at the bottom of it.

By Monday morning Ace gets pulled for a drug test, which he miraculously tested negative to.

"There she is."

I don't turn around.

I know that voice the way I know my own name, and I have spent four years teaching myself not to react to it. I keep my eyes on my locker. I grab my textbook. I zip my bag like the zipper is the most interesting thing that has happened to me all year.

"Wren."

"Busy, Ace."

"Yeah?" The voice lands right behind me. Too close. The same voice that used to shout my brother's name across our backyard when we were kids. "Busy doing what. Finding someone else's career to set on fire?"

So I turn around.

That is my first mistake of the day, and it is not even nine in the morning.

Because Ace Calloway up close is a problem I have never once figured out how to solve. Six foot two. Dark hair he never bothers to fix. A jaw built for the specific purpose of making me feel small. He is wearing his hockey jersey, and he is wearing it like the school got built around his shoulders.

I do not regret it. Not for one single second.

Two of his teammates hang back behind him with nothing better to do than watch.

"Walk away," I say.

"I would." He says it easy. Pleasant. "But you made that hard for me when you walked into Henderson's office and lit a match under everything I've worked for."

"I reported what I saw. I think it was right." I hold his stare and I do not let mine drop. "I know those two things don't mean the same thing to you."

The hallway has gone quiet. Nobody is moving. Nobody is even bothering to fake interest in their phones. They are all just watching, because Wren Cole talking back to Ace Calloway is the most interesting thing that will happen on this campus all week.

He takes one step closer.

I do not step back. I will never step back. That was the entire point of senior year. That was the whole reason I stopped being the girl who kept her head down.

"I lost two games," he says. Lower now. "A formal review. A mark on my record that could blow up my draft. Do you understand what you did to me?"

"You should have thought about that before you did the thing I reported."

"Say it." His voice does not rise. "Out loud. Tell the whole hallway exactly what you told Henderson."

My jaw locks.

"That's what I thought." His mouth curves. There is nothing warm in it.

"You don't scare me," I say.

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he leans in, just enough that the words land where only I can hear them.

"Keep telling yourself that, Wren."

He holds it one more second. Then he pulls back, rolls his shoulders like I am not worth the rest of his time, and walks off down the hallway. His boys fall in behind him. The crowd opens up to let him through, because that is what the world does for Ace Calloway.

I turn back to my locker and press my hand flat against the metal.

My hand is shaking.

I hate that my hand is shaking.

I have known Ace since I was twelve and he was thirteen, since the summer he started showing up at our house every single day because he and my brother became the kind of friends who are basically one person. For four years I was his punching bag. I was Mason’s little sister. The quiet one. The one who got picked apart in the cafeteria and learned fast that the safest thing a girl could be was invisible. And Ace, he was in the lost of my top 3 most despised assholes.

Then the summer I turned fifteen, I told him he was just an empty blockhead that would never amount to anything. I don't even remember why. I remember the way he looked at me after. Like he was writing it down somewhere he would never lose it.

He has been collecting reasons to ruin me ever since.

I make it to noon before the day gets worse.

I'm in the library with my earphones in, staring at notes I am not reading, when my brother's name lights up my phone. Mason does not call in the middle of the day. Mason barely calls at all unless something is on fire.

I step outside to answer.

"Hey, what's"

"Don't freak out." His voice is already tight. "I need you to hear all of it before you say a single word.”

"Mason, you are scaring me."

"My apartment caught fire last night."

I stop walking. "What?"

"It's gone. Total loss. I'm three states away and I can't get back for two weeks, and I need to know you're safe before I lose my mind out here."

"Are you okay?"

"I wasn't there. I'm fine. Listen to me. I already handled it. I made a call and it's done."

Something about the way he says handled. Something about the way he will not just say the name.

"Mason. Who did you call?"

Silence.

"Who did you call?"

"Okay, so before you"

"Who did you call, Mason."

"He has a secure building because of the crew. You'd be safer there than anywhere else I could put you. And I trust him more than anyone I know. I know you're going to lose it, but"

"Say the name."

"Ace said yes. You can stay in his spare room."

I laugh. Out loud, standing in front of the library with one hand shoved into my hair.

"Absolutely f*****g not."

"Wren."

"No. Mason. He f*****g hates me, I'd rather kiss a frog than live with that asshole. I'll sleep in my car. I'll sleep on Maya's floor. I'll figure it out, I always figure it out."

"He already said yes. It's done. I need you to do this one thing for me." His voice drops. "Please."

I stop.

Mason does not say please. In twenty years I can count the times my brother has said it and meant it, and I am running out of fingers on one hand.

I close my eyes.

"Fine," I say. It costs me something. "Fine. But when I end up in prison for killing him, that is on you."

He exhales like I just talked him down off a ledge. "Thank you. I love you. I'll call tonight."

Then a voice behind him on the line. Low and unbothered. The voice from the hallway.

"She say yes?"

Everything in me goes still.

He is there. Ace is also on the call with with us, how did I miss that.

Shit!

"She said yes," Mason tells him.

A pause. Then Ace, “Pack light, there's not enough room for your attitude Mason’s sister.”

And the line goes dead.

This man. This absolute menace of a human being.

I stand in the hallway and stare at the words printed on the door, and I already know two things for an absolute fact. The first is that I have nowhere else on this planet to go.

The second is that Ace Calloway did not say yes for my brother. He said yes because I am the one girl who ever made him bleed, and now he gets me under his roof, in his space, on his terms, for as long as it takes.

He is going to make me pay for that line in his file every single day that I live there.

And the truly humiliating part, the part I will deny with my dying breath, is that some sick corner of me cannot wait to make him regret it.