“Landon!” Anya cried, as I bent low over the melting cheese. The meal didn't seem quite done, but I'd never minded a slightly gooey Stouffer. Carefully, using a handful of rags I kept handy for just this purpose, I began to remove dinner from the oven. “It's so wonderful to meet you properly! Welcome to our little home.”
“You've got a lovely place here, ma'am. And it's nice to meet you, too.”
My throat caught. I fumbled. And suddenly, the lasagna had slipped from my hands and clattered all over the floor. Hot, violent streaks of sauce popped against my legs, seeming to sizzle against my bare skin. I yelped.
“Jesus! Sweetheart?”
“Jesus what?” The Pastor gasped.
Anya caught herself. “Oh, Bill—forgive me…”
“Never mind. What was that banging?”
“That's my baby, Ash—honey?”
I scanned the kitchen frantically, like it might contain some hiding place I hadn't thought of. But of course it was too late. I could hear the whole trio approaching the swing door, the Pastor moving slowly with his cane. I reached for some of the rags scattered across the floor, but there was clearly no masking the mess. Or me. I braced myself.
He was the first one through the door. Landy. The nickname seemed strange—somehow at odds with the breezy, impulsive oddball I'd met on that roof.
Yet he looked the exact same, if not tanner and more... ripped. I wondered if it was the harsh aluminum light that was somehow enhancing his skin and contours. But then, that would be insane. His arms seemed to swell out of their linen t-shirt, his forearms were dark with hair. Then it occurred to me that I'd never seen him in the daylight before, in any case. I wasn't exactly equipped to catalogue how he'd changed.
“Hi,” he breathed. Then he frowned, and his jaw fell open with realization. I swallowed, before hiding my face in a handy rag. Toddler logic: the problem will just go away if you can't see it.
“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 12th
“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...