“What a mess!”

“Oh, Ashleigh! What happened? Are your hurt?” I felt my mother's hand on my back, soothing and heavy. Oh God. Oh God. Oh, just make them go away.

The Pastor tutted some more in the ensuing silence, but for once my mother was playing her part. She continued to rub my back with one hand as I could hear her bending low over the destroyed lasagna, beginning to wipe up the glass shards and mozzarella with the bundled rags. “Accidents happen. We'll order in, is what we'll do.”

“I'm so sorry, Mom.”

“Hey! Don't fret,” my mother said, beginning to wipe at the mess on my legs. I must have been burned by the sauce splatter, but to this day I can't recall feeling any pain. “The whole point of today was just to introduce you to your new stepbrother, anyways.” Then Anya peeled the rag from my face, forcing my gaze up. He was still standing there, looking uncomfortable and freaked out in a white t-shirt and the same starched jeans his Dad wore. I noted a light gloss of grease in his hair. And the fact that he was so much more handsome than my memories had made him. Cartoonishly so.

Landon Sterling.

My new stepbrother.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Chapter Eight

Landon

July 12^th

“Now I know she didn't want me to tell anyone,” Ms. Bennett growled, through a mouth full of pizza. “But at midnight tonight, my baby turns eighteen.”

The old man nodded in a way that told me he already knew, then smiled a half-assed smile at...Ashleigh. It was frickin weird to say her name. She'd been Doll in my mind, and for so many weeks it was like she'd lived exclusively in my head. The whole freaky evening felt like having dinner with a dream.

Ash blushed fire-engine red, before dipping her fingers into her water glass and flicking them in the direction of her mother. Anya ducked and giggled like a child while her daughter's eyebrows met in the center of her forehead. Their dynamic was the exact opposite of me and my old man's—Anya was like the talkative, giddy teenager, and Ash was like the harried Mom. She'd been the one to order the pizzas. And she'd paid for them (despite very minimal protest from the Pastor) out of a little cloth cashier's bag I’d watched her pull from the freezer. While she hadn't said a word to me since the lasagna incident, I was enjoying watching the expressions moving across her face. I wondered if Doll was some kind of actress. I wondered a lot of things, on realizing that I didn't actually know anything about this girl except what her mouth tasted like, and how she operated in my Spank Bank.

Her hair was the same ebony rat's nest, except the streaks were a different color—a kind of acid blue, like cartoon rain. Twice, I caught her laughing. These were laughs directed at her Mom, but they came out kind—it was the sort of sweet laughter that lets you know the person is making fun of herself, too.

I watched her eyes lots, as they'd had been so hard to pin down color-wise during our one crazy night. In the living room light, they looked bluish grey. They matched her streaks. I thought I could sometimes glimpse in her eyes this well of sadness and smarts, a whole gamut of feelings a teenage girl wasn't supposed to have. They kind of scared me, her eyes. They made me think of me how complicated everything was about to get, between her, me, our parents.

...But she also looked fly as hell in this tube top that showed off her tits. Twice, she bent low over the coffee table to get another slice of cheese pizza, and both times I had to look away for fear of a stirring in my pants. And Lord knew that in those bounce-a-quarter jeans Pop insisted I wear for “company,” there would be no hiding a boner.

“Eight-friggin-teen. I can't believe my baby's a woman now,” Anya was saying, moving her glittering hands around the room. She directed all of her words to the Pastor, who smiled a little more than usual but said his typical amount of nothing. It was funny—for a Pastor, my Pop was a pretty anti-social guy. He basically only spoke to his congregation, God, and me—and the latter only when I did something wrong.

“I don't think people just turn into women the day they're eighteen, Anya,” Doll—I mean, Ash—grumbled back. She had this habit of flicking her hair behind her ears when she was annoyed. It was a gesture I recognized from the rooftop, and the memory's reappearance made me bite my lip to keep a stupid grin from cracking across my face.

“You're right, baby. It takes a village.” Anya nodded her head several times. I was shocked to see her concede to backtalk so quick. That kind of shit never flew in my house.

 “She means under the eyes of the law, young lady.” To my shock, this proclamation had been Pop's. He leaned forward in the armchair—just the way he did at home—and turned his flinty gaze on his girlfriend's daughter. He looked the way he did when he was about to deliver me a fable or a parable, whatever warning would precede a physical lesson—all thin lips and furrowed brow. I hated to see him echoing that shit in a stranger's house, even if Ash had mouthed off. I mean, she wasn't his daughter.

But then I remembered: she wasn't exactly a stranger, either. And she would sort of be his daughter, if he and Crazy had their way. And cue the chunks rising in my throat.

“Excuse me—umm, where is the bathroom?” The shitty pizza wasn't sitting well in my stomach. Well, the pizza and the images I kept failing to fend off—images like Ash, sitting in my childhood kitchen, doing her homework. Or Ash, in my childhood bathroom, in printed pajamas. Or Ash, in my childhood bed, in nothing at all...

“What'sa matter with you, boy? Your face is like death warmed over.”

“Nothing, sir. I just have to use the head.”

“We're in the middle of dinner. You sit tight.” Pop shot me a furious look. I thought I could sense Ash and her Mom exchanging glances over the Pastor's head, and dared to hope that his rudeness would make a lasting impression. Maybe, as soon as we left the house, Anya would turn to her daughter and say, “Phew. Looks like I dodged a bullet there. We'll call the wedding off, but you should keep in touch with that nice young man.”

But the smart part of my brain understood this was probably too good to be true. Instead of registering shock that her fiancé had lashed out at her daughter, Anya simply leaned over the couch and put a bejeweled hand on Pop's knee. I watched her squeeze his skinny leg, with the kneading gesture of an old, close friend. Pop immediately softened. The smiles returned. That's when it occurred to me: they could actually really love each other. In which case, I was truly doomed.

“Ash will show you the bathroom, sweetheart,” Anya said, while continuing to rub the Pastor (in an increasingly sexual manner). The hostess tipped her chin, and I let my gaze return to Doll, who stood, flicked her hair, and edged past me down a narrow, dark hallway. I tried not to watch her ass swish as I followed at her heels like a puppy.

The Bennett's condo, if tiny, had a labyrinth's lay-out—the first hallway t-boned into two branches. I assumed the bedrooms lay to the left, as Ash took us down a curving path to the right that seemed to lead to a single door. We weren't far from the living room. I could still hear Pop and Anya, speaking in dull, sweet tones.

She whirled on me before I could reach for the doorknob, forcing me to contend with the nubile body I'd been trying so hard not to size up all evening. Her eyes locked into mine, like keys in a door. Before I could even think what to say, I had my hands hovering over her waist.

“So. Eighteen, huh?”