Our Sick Inheritance (editing)

Chapter 18 - Safer To Stay Home

Jake had been to Bryce's house a dozen times because he was two years older than him in school and they had mutual friends. He wasn't someone Jake was close to, and he most likely wouldn't get an invitation to Jake and Brittany's wedding when it happened. If it happens. If might be more of a possibility instead of when, Jake thought grimly.

A tightness pulled in Jake's throat. He stretched it quickly to release the tension. Stacy was singing the words to a song he wasn't listening to casting from his speakers. The thought that Brittany could think of being with anyone else made his heart drop and his stomach sick. Jake's tire hit a small patch of black ice and he slid to the left while slightly jerking the wheel to get back on track.

Jake sighed. He hated driving around Washington in the winter especially at night when it was more slippery. Worse, he hated going to a party he wasn't interested in being at. He would have rather stayed home to toast the New Year in with his parents than go to this party because he had to be witness to Bryce's affections towards his sister. Jake knew Bryce had a crush on Stacy, as well as a handful of other girls. Jake didn't trust Bryce, as he was a womanizer in school with a private side that considered date rape as a game. Rumors went around he was sexually aggressive when he drank alcohol, as he had hurt a few girls he was with. No charges were ever brought against him and the few reports were spread as rumors. If it weren't for the fact that Bryce was from a prominent family background, and was the most popular kid in school, he would have gotten in trouble. Other than his aggression, Bryce was all right to hang around with, just so long as he kept his pre-plastic surgical hands off his sister.

The street was full of cars, but Bryce had a private parking lot at the side of the house where people drove around in circles to park. They were the for the overnighters. Jake parked just inside the lot next to the entrance and walked with a babbling Stacy to Bryce's large door. Jake figured Bryce's house cost twice the amount of his family home. It was a gift from his family while he goes to college, so he didn't have to pay dorm expenses. Jake wished things were as easy for his parents who took on extra work, so he could go to school.

Bright Christmas and New Year's decorations marked the house and glittered from inside the windows. The skirt Stacy was wearing bothered Jake even more that he let her leave the house wearing it. He hated how his sister looked especially now her legs were red from the cold. Cover them up he wanted to scream but he stood behind her quietly as she rang the bell. Jake didn't feel fashion was worth suffering for.

Barely getting her finger off the button, the door was opened with loud addictive music, voices, and grunts pouring out from the echo throughout the house filled with close to two hundred people. However, there was plenty of room once inside to where nobody was bumping into anyone. It was more elaborate than a college student deserved, but that is what you get when you have a plastic surgeon as a father. It looked as if the staff was borrowed from his father's house to host his party as they held bowls with numbers on them filled with sets of keys. When you dropped your car keys in the bowl the attendant wrote the number of the bowl on your hand.

Jake and Stacy were greeted by people they knew as they walked through the house to the main gathering rooms. The rule was if you were drinking, you were staying the night or can leave if you blew under the limit in the machines provided. Though it was a college party, it was well managed by the staff of servers and Direction Hosts to the different game rooms like teachers would guide preschool children with short attention spans. One girl Stacy knew from school walked by as she pulled a guy a few years older by the hand behind her up the stairs.

"Hey Stacy, you better hurry the rooms are filling up." She giggled and obviously as drunk as the guy who switched roles and started pushing her up the stairs by her butt, as well as part of her short skirt exposing her panties. Jake raised an eyebrow at his sister as if to say 'I told you so'. She ignored him.