All Broke Down (Rusk University #2) (2 page)

Maybe all absentee moms have Google alerts on their sons. Or mine just has a canny sixth sense that tells her when I’m worth her attention.

The last time she reached out was my senior year in high school when recruiters came calling. My coach ran interference then. She’d been out of the picture for as long as he’d known me, so he had no problem making sure she stayed far away from the whole process. And considering I spent most of senior year living in guest rooms of friends or coaches, it wasn’t like she could just go home and find me.

Now, though, things are different. There is no one here to run interference because no one knows. Rusk is a private school. Expensive and privileged. People here tend to just assume that you come from a background like them, and I never bothered correcting their assumptions.

I make my way out onto the front porch to watch the festivities, and I fish the phone out of my pocket to see what she’s said this time.

Only this text isn’t from my mother.

It’s from Levi.

Fuck.

I’ve traded one person I don’t want to see for another. Another who shouldn’t even have access to a cell phone right now because he should be in prison.

I lean on the railing that surrounds our porch, paint peeling and wood sagging, and I read the text.

I’m out fucker. Come get wasted with me.

He’s
out
? I count back the months. He was caught selling pot, among other things, last fall, but it can’t have been more than six months since he was actually sentenced.

Six fucking months?

If it had been me, I’d be rotting away in there for a few more years at least. Then again, I grew up in a trailer park. Levi was raised in a house with bathrooms bigger than my old living room.

When you grow up like I did, no one has to tell you the world isn’t fair. You figure it out pretty fast on your own.

A body settles against the railing beside me, slim and petite, and I look over at Stella Santos. She says, “You look even broodier than normal.”

I look around expecting to see her best friend Dallas attached to her hip. She’s alone, though, which means either Dallas and Carson haven’t showed yet, or the coach’s daughter decided she didn’t want to talk to me and made herself scarce.

Probably the latter.

I guess when you try to bed a girl on a bet, you’re not going to be party buddies anytime soon.

“I thought girls liked broody.”

She flicks her short, black hair out of her eyes and sips something out of a red Solo cup. Her lips are painted nearly the same color, and she purses them before she answers, “Depends on the situation. There’s a fine line between broody and potential sociopath. Right now you’re walking the line.”

She tops that dig off with a sly smile, and I shove my phone deep in my pocket, ready to let her distract me from my mom, my ex–best friend, everything. She’d turned that same smile on me last year at a party, and I don’t remember doing much brooding after that. Granted, I don’t remember much of it, period, except that she was feisty, and she knew what she liked—two things I can always get on board for. I don’t usually go for seconds on my hookups, but Stella is different. She won’t try to make it into something it isn’t. I don’t know for sure because we didn’t talk about it, but I just get this feeling that we’re alike, that we both know a different side of the world than everyone else here.

My gaze dips down to take her in, and I nod my head at the Slip ’N Slide in the yard. “Where’s your bikini?”

She rolls her eyes. “Oh please. I believe in leaving
some
things to the imagination. I’m not that desperate.”

I smirk. “Who needs imagination when you’ve got memories?”

She shoves me. Or tries to anyway, and I laugh. The girl is so tiny she doesn’t have a hope of moving me.

She glares at me, but her full lips are tipped up at the corners.

I nod at the T-shirt and shorts she’s wearing and say, “You’re wearing one underneath there, aren’t you?”

She looks like she wants to shove me again, but she doesn’t. Instead she huffs and says, “Fine. Yes, I am. But I’m only mildly desperate. Like a tiny, tiny amount.”

“You do realize you could have half the guys at this party with very little effort, don’t you?”

“But the effort is the fun part!”

She says it with a smile, but I think she’s dead serious. When you live a hard life, you spend years wishing for the easy stuff, but then when you get it, it never feels right. You get used to having to fight and claw for the things you want, and when you don’t have to do that anymore, everything feels a little bit muted.

At least that’s how shit usually feels for me.

I ask, “That why you keep stringing the manager along?”

The glare she turns on me now is no longer playful. It’s harder. With an edge of something I can’t identify. “I am
not
stringing Ryan along. We’re friends.”

“Riiight.”

“Don’t
Right
me, mister. Like you know
anything
about relationships.”

That’s twice today I’ve had that tidbit waved in front of my face. I might be offended if it weren’t entirely right.

“I know fuck buddies when I see them.”

“We’re not,” she pauses, checking her volume, before adding under her breath, “We’re not
that.”

“Yet.”

“I’m going to actually kill you. I’m going to wrap my hands around your throat, and then claim I got tetanus and was incapable of relaxing my muscles.”

“I had no idea you were into erotic asphyxiation, Santos.”

She shoots back, “I had no idea you knew what
asphyxiation
meant.”

I turn, laughing, and lean my back against the railing. A slow smile spreads across my face. “Speaking of erotic . . . here comes your fuck buddy . . .”

A group of people streams out the front door, including Ryan Blake, the team manager and Stella’s not-quite-boyfriend.

Stella says, “We’re not . . .” then trails off, a blush forming on her cheeks as Ryan comes to stand beside her, bumping her shoulder with his. Behind him is McClain, his arm draped over Dallas’s shoulder as her eyes flick between me and Stella. I give her my most charming grin, but her eyes only narrow in response.

“You showed,” I say to McClain when he walks over.

“Yeah, well, someone has to keep an eye on you douchebags.”

Torres jogs past then, pulling his shirt off. He yells, “Keep an eye on this, McClain!” Then he dives onto the Slip ’N Slide right after a curvy brunette, and the two of them end up a tangled mess of slick skin at the other end.

Neither of them looks like they mind.

Dallas checks her watch and says, “Hey. Torres is improving. He was here a whole fifteen minutes before he took his shirt off. That’s got to be a new record.”

He must hear us laughing because he lets go of the brunette and says, “Moore! Get your ass out here!”

When I don’t move, Stella gives me a shove. “Go on. You heard the man.”

“You’re just trying to get me to take my clothes off, aren’t you?”

“Been there. Done that. So many girls have seen it, you probably
should
make a T-shirt.”

I shake my head and start toward the stairs. “The rest of you might as well go ahead and come. He’s going to want to play—”

I don’t finish my sentence before Torres yells at the top of his lungs, “SLIP CUP!!!”

“What the hell is slip cup?” McClain asks.

Begrudgingly, the whole group comes with me, and we crowd with the rest of the partygoers around Torres as he explains his Slip ’N Slide/flip cup relay game. Basically, you take off down the slide where you get wet and soapy, and then at the end, you have to chug a plastic cup of beer, and flip it over with one finger. When the cup lands perfectly facedown (not easy when you’re all soapy or all drunk), the next person on your team can take off down the slide.

By some miracle, Torres persuades our entire group (and about twenty other people) to play. I watch in amusement as Stella strips down to her swimsuit, locking eyes with Ryan as he does the same. I shake my head and pull off my shirt. I’m not wearing swim trunks, but the athletic shorts I have on will work just fine.

Torres splits us all into teams, and gets another punch to the arm from McClain when he lingers too long near a bikini-clad Dallas.

By the time the game starts, people are cheering, and there’s enough booze and boobs to make me completely forget that I’d ever been in a shitty mood. I’m waiting on the already tipsy girl in front of me to flip her cup before I can go. I start to lose patience somewhere between her seventh and eighth try, and I glance to the side just as a beat-up old town car pulls up next to the curb.

A girl climbs out of the driver’s side, and I don’t see her face, but she’s got white blonde hair falling down her back and tan skin, and some dude I don’t know behind me says, “
Damn.”

I’m so busy looking at her that I don’t even notice when drunk and ditzy manages to finally flip her cup.

The woman rounds the back of the car, and lifts a pair of dark sunglasses off her face. The guy behind me pushes at my back, telling me it’s my turn to run, but I can’t stop staring.

Not because she’s pretty or wearing skimpy clothes or smiling right at me.

But because she’s my mother.

Chapter 2

Silas

S
he wears ridiculously high heels that sink into the grass when she steps up on my lawn. She raises a hand and waves at me. And I’m not sure why, but that fucking wave is what does me in.

I ignore my team yelling at me as I stalk across the lawn. She looks just like I remember her. God, what has it been? Eight fucking years? She still dresses like someone half her age and wears too much makeup, but even so she’s pretty. Beautiful maybe. The kind of face that always drew attention. Her whole life always revolved around her looks, so my brother’s and mine did, too. When Mom looked good, when she had a guy, we had a place to sleep. If she didn’t,
we
didn’t.

But that shit is over. No part of my life revolves around her, and I’m not about to let her pull me back in.

“Get the fuck in your car and go,” I say when I’m standing in front of her.

She doesn’t reply. Just blinks her long lashes and studies my face for a few seconds that stretch into lifetimes. When I open my mouth to tell her to leave again, she reaches up and touches my face.

I grab her wrist and shove her hand away.

“Get in your fucking car.”

“Baby . . .” she says.

“I haven’t been your baby in a long time. And that’s not changing, so you can leave.”

Her lips pucker on a frown. “You’ll always be my baby.”

She tries to touch me again, and I step back.

“I was yours through all your shitty boyfriends. Through the first time you left, and the second. Hell, I was even yours for all those years you weren’t around, while Sean and I lived with Grams or whatever family would take us. But I stopped being yours sometime around the time Sean went to prison, and you didn’t even bother picking up a phone, let alone showing your face. So,
Megan,
I suggest you do what you do best. Get in your car and leave before I call the cops and make you.”

She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth, and gives me these big, innocent eyes, and God I want to hit something. My past and my present are supposed to remain separate. But now she’s set it all on a goddamn collision course, and that feeling of inevitability I’ve always felt? The pull of it is so heavy right now, it makes gravity feel like a joke.

When she doesn’t move fast enough, I pull out my cell phone, and she holds up her manicured hands. “Fine! Okay. I’m leaving.”

I don’t put my phone up, but I let it drop to my side. She steps back off the lawn into the street. She wavers for a second on her heels, and then she turns and saunters back to her car, like she doesn’t have a care in the world.

She opens the door and before she climbs inside she says with a smile, “Go back to your party, baby. We’ll talk another time.”

I squeeze my fist so hard, I’m surprised I don’t crush my phone. She ducks into her car, and it sputters to life, old and rusted and completely at odds with the image she works to project.

Then she’s gone, and it feels like everything I’ve built here is seconds away from crumbling around me. Like a house of cards destroyed by a simple breath. And all I can think is if things are gonna fall apart, I’m not going to stand here trying to catch the pieces.

I turn and most of the game is still going, but half a dozen people stand off to the side watching me. McClain. Stella. Brookes. Torres. A few more. I walk away from the curb, and Torres grins at me. “You been holding out on us, Moore? Who was that hot piece—”

“Say one more fucking word, and you lose your tongue.”

He holds his hands up in surrender, but he’s still smiling. They all are. Except Stella and Brookes. They’re both looking at me like they, too, are waiting for my sky to start falling. Like they’re the only ones who really understand what they just saw.

My phone buzzes in my hand again, and I’m ready to throw it until I see the text. It’s from Levi again.

Come on, man. I need to blow off some steam. Get your ass to Trent’s.

I stalk past the group, ignoring the looks I get, and pick up my shirt from where I’d tossed it on the grass. Then I run inside to grab my keys and switch out my athletic shorts for jeans. Because it just so happens I need to blow off some steam, too.

T
RENT’S IS A
dank, grungy, hole-in-the-wall place that most students pass over for the newer, popular bars in the campus bubble. The bell rings as I step in the door, and even though it’s late afternoon, it’s dark enough inside that I have to squint to find Levi.

He sits at the bar, a bottle lifted to his mouth and another sitting beside him that I assume is for me. The place is practically empty except for the bartender, and an old dude in a booth at the back.

For a moment, I hesitate. Something twists in my gut and my jaw clenches, and I don’t even really know why I came here. Part of me wants to say fuck it all, get smashed with Levi, and give in to the inevitability of this shitfest. Another part, a bigger part, wants to lay into my old friend and work off what I’m feeling with my fists.