The Bad Boy's Heart (Bad Boy Series #2)

Chapter Four: I'd Meant To Sweep You Off Your Feet Not Injure You

Chapter Four: I’d Meant To Sweep You Off Your Feet not Injure You

Somehow I surprise myself by surviving Sunday lunch with my dad. He’d bailed on me for our originally scheduled dinner on Friday and I could not have been more thankful for it. The last thing I need is for either of my parents to say those detested words, the one every parent is dying to say when reality slaps you in the face. “I told you so.”

Instead I put on my happy, well relatively happy face and we went for lunch, minus Travis to the fanciest restaurant in town. I tried to not play with my food and he tried to not to push any buttons that would make me explode. Perhaps dad convinced himself that I was going through PMS, hence he just ordered me a large ice-cream sundae and we went on with our lives. 

“So how’s everything at school?”

“Good?”

“Yeah? How’s that economics class you were telling me about? Still tough?” 

“Pretty much.”

“Well, you don’t seem too worried about it.”

“I’m not.”

The pattern continued for a painful five minutes before he gave up and let me hack at my ice-cream. I’m pretty sure that at this point if someone drew my blood, they would actually find huge chunks of cream floating around in my bloodstream. 

But oh well, possible risk of disease aside I did manage to survive the rest of the day until Travis drove me back to school. I’d learnt the important lesson of never leaving my own car behind and being at someone else's mercy because my brother took the opportunity to try and lecture me. I’d already beaten myself enough over how disastrously I’d handled things with Cole that hearing someone else talk about it just made me feel like throwing myself in front of a semi. 

Yes I’d been feeling pretty morbid and no I’m not suicidal, just really hurt. Megan and Beth had let me go quite reluctantly and it sucked knowing that I wouldn't get to see them until Thanksgiving break but the grown up thing to do in this situation is not to hide in my childhood bedroom. I even managed to ditch those cursed Scooby pyjamas that got me in trouble in the first place.

Yes it’s all their fault, maybe they had remnants of Nicole’s voodoo magic on them. 

By the time Travis drops me off in front of my dorms, I’m emotionally exhausted. My head hurts from thinking so much about what I’m supposed to do now and my body’s suffering from the lack of sleep. My brother looks at me with barely concealed pity in his eyes.
“Go talk to him Tess, I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.”

“I know…I know that if I go and apologise maybe things will be okay. But I don’t want them to be as they were before. I feel like we were both hurting each other unintentionally and it needed to come out in the open.”

He sighs, “Well it is now. Use the opportunity to talk about your problems, that’s the way relationships work. I look at you two sometimes and it seems like you’ve got everything figured out, that you’re so sure of each other but then…”

“We screw up just like any other high school couple?”

“Don’t do that, don’t undermine what you have. You guys are lucky to have found each other so soon, what you need to do now is work hard at keeping it.”

I wipe a stray tear off my face and kiss my brother’s cheek. “Hanging out with Beth seems to have made you really smart.”

“Yeah and I’m  telling you that you guys need to talk to each other, now go and do it.”