TEASE ( A Stepbrother Romance ) By Caitlin Daire

4

 

Chapter Four

Charlotte

My chest heaved as I watched the door close behind Cade, and I took several deep breaths before returning to the bed so I could lie down. My head was pounding from the hangover, and I closed my eyes, wondering how the hell I was going to handle being related to Cade.

I knew some people might think it was incredibly childish of me to react the way I had just then, and maybe it was, but I couldn’t help it. I really hated Cade Blackwell. What he’d done to me back in school wasn’t just silly playground teasing—he’d seriously made my life miserable, and even the thought of him and his so-called ‘pranks’ made my chest constrict with anxiety as awful memories came pouring back in.

It had started out pretty innocently, all the way back in the second grade. He’d done silly, harmless things like sticking toy rats or spiders on my desk to scare me, and on the playground he’d chased me and tried to pull my pigtails whenever he saw me. I didn’t resent him for those things; lots of kids did stuff like that, and it wasn’t exactly traumatizing. In fact, the prank rats and spiders were actually pretty funny and made me giggle a lot whenever I found them.

What I resented him for was how things escalated over the next few years to the point where I’d become a social outcast by the time I was thirteen. See, Cade came from a rich and powerful family, and even as a child everyone could tell he was going to grow up to be handsome as hell. As a result, he’d always been one of the confident popular kids, whereas I was always shy and quiet by nature. The other kids in school eventually noticed how he called me names and targeted me for his pranks all the time, and that was enough to get it into their heads that I was a nerdy loser—every school had one kid who was the butt of every joke, and in my school, it ended up being me.

Especially after Cade’s worst prank.

Really, up until that one, it hadn’t been so bad. I hadn’t been popular, but I’d still had friends, and I’d just had to deal with the occasional aforementioned silly prank or teasing, mostly from Cade. But everything changed one day in the seventh grade. Without me noticing,  Cade placed a little packet of corn syrup on my chair on a day I’d worn white shorts to school, and when I stood up to see why my backside was suddenly wet, everyone started shrieking with laughter. Some idiotic friend of Cade’s had then screamed out, ‘Ew, she has her period!’ as if having periods was something girls should be ashamed of—even though in this case, it was just dark red syrup—and after that I was known as ‘Period Girl’ around the school, which was way worse than ‘Charlotte the Harlot’, which was the previous nickname Cade had bestowed upon me.

By the end of that year, I was well and truly a social leper. I ate alone at lunch almost every day and spent as much time as I could hiding in the library to avoid being mocked and teased, and the other kids would avoid being seen with me in case my ‘loser’ reputation tainted their own reputations. As a result, my old friends dwindled away until I had none.

When I reached high school, my previous reputation followed me, seeing as most of the kids I went to elementary and middle school with went to the same high school as me. Cade and his family had moved away by that point, but it didn’t matter—the social damage was done, and I was still the one everyone chose to pick on. On top of that, high school kids were way nastier than younger kids, and the middle school bullying soon morphed into incredibly hurtful cyberbullying and horrible rumors being spread about me all the time. Even when I was still a virgin and had never been kissed, I was called ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ on a regular basis, and I was even accused of trying to seduce my English teacher.

At one point, some of the mean girls even tried to make a video of me go viral on YouTube—a video of me having a used tampon thrown at me. That was when I’d finally snapped and stood up for myself. I was done with being a victim, and it was about damn time I grew some stones.