Page 11 of The Sweetest Cruelty: Hudson (A Sawyer Brothers Story #1)

“I haven’t seen her. So, she’s decent? That puts a different spin on things,” Reed mumbled as he devoured a meatball sub.

He had ketchup on his face, the dirty bastard.

If Ma saw such poor table manners, she’d tear him a new one.

He didn’t even raise his eyes from his tray.

Out of all my brothers, he was the biggest pig.

Reed would eat a bowl of LEGO if you put it in front of him.

I played with my over-processed, rubbery hot dog and leaned back with an arched eyebrow. I cleared my throat to get his attention. “Why?”

“Why what?” Reed said, glancing up.

“Why does her being hot change anything? I don’t care what she looks like.

She’s the principal’s spawn and therefore our enemy,” I reminded them, scanning their faces around the lunch table.

As soon as I’d heard Miller had a kid who was transferring to our school, I’d circulated a message that her welcome should be anything but warm.

Micah shot a goofy grin around our circle, his perfect teeth brilliant white against his flawless black skin, “You might change your mind. She’s got some nice titties.

” He used his hands to make the universal ‘rack’ motion against his chest. Micah could be such a juvenile prick but I loved him; fuck me, I loved all my brothers.

It didn’t matter that we didn’t share the same blood; we were tighter than tight.

Bound together by the dark shit we had survived during our questionable childhoods.

Reed rolled his eyes and opened his soda, “You’re such a perv, Micah.”

“Yep? And you’ve missed your fucking mouth, man,” Micah sniggered, pointing to his chin to illustrate where there was shit on Reed’s face. My brother finished the sub and then chased it down with a mouthful of Pepsi. As he wiped his jaw with a napkin, he shot Micah a cocky look.

“So, you planning on tapping Dickies kid? He won’t like that,” Reed drawled out, running his tongue over his teeth to ensure he didn’t have any shit in between them. He was such a fucking hog.

“Which is the perfect way to mess with him. Not sure she’d be able to take me, though, bro. She’s tiny, smaller than I expected.”

“So, she’s shorter than sex with your ex, then?” Storm roasted Micah. Melanie Marsden, Micah’s ex-girlfriend in our junior year, had started a rumour about how quickly he shot his load. He’d been nicknamed the Pop and Stop, until I’d shut that shit down.

I hid my smile. Storm could be funny when she put her mind to it.

“Anything else?” I questioned, flexing my shoulders.

We’d been waiting for the appearance of Miller’s kid for weeks.

Gossip said her mother had abandoned her and was no longer in the picture, and that her dear old Daddy had to take her in. Like a fucking stray.

Did I feel sorry for her? Not really. C'est la vie, it was part of life, and you just had to deal with it. Between me and my brothers, we’d lost more than our fair share of shit.

Our motto; if you don’t suck it up, it will kill you.

From what I had heard, she was an independent school kid and was joining as a junior in eleventh grade. I had no idea why Miller had enrolled her in our shithole of a school. That was a puzzle I had yet to solve. Maybe it was more convenient for school runs and crap like that?

I really couldn’t give a flying fuck. Irrespective of recent events, the Miller brat’s life had probably been a walk in the park compared to mine.

Scrunching my eyes, I refocused on the conversation before me.

“Tight body, nice ass,” Micah was blathering.

The guy was a walking-talking hard-on with a soft spot for anything with a pussy.

He wasn’t overly choosy either, so I took what he said about Miller’s daughter with a pinch of salt.

“Considering she’s a principal’s daughter, she fills out her uniform like a porn star. ”

I placed my elbows on the table and looked him directly in the eye, “What about her face?”

As I laid that question on the table, my mind was occupied with thoughts of Molly’s. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I had never seen anything so fucking sweet. I wanted to be close to her again and smell her scent: coconuts and strawberries, fresh and new.

Micah shrugged and plucked a fry from his plate. “I didn’t look at that part.”

“Reed’s right. You are a pervert, Micah,” I snickered.

His face scrunched as he chewed and leaned over to grab the ketchup bottle. “Bro, I’m not a pervert; I’m just honest. I shit you not. With a pair of ta-tas like that, keeping eye contact was nearly impossible.”

Storm huffed from my left as she continued to push salad around her plate, “You’re a little too honest, Micah. I don’t particularly want to discuss another female’s tits whilst I’m trying to eat my lunch.”

“But these aren’t just any tits. These are Mary-Ann Miller’s titties,” he chuckled, fully naming the principal's daughter. I’d had to bite my lip when I’d been given her name a few weeks ago. Mary -Ann. A proper goody-goody's name. The girl probably went to church too.

Storm lowered her fork and glanced between us. “She doesn’t like to be called Mary-Ann anyway.”

“How do you know?” Micah questioned with a curl of his lip.

“Because she told me so,” Storm informed us with a bored expression.

I exhaled noisily. The prissy little bitch probably expected people to call her Miss Miller.

Before I could comment, Micah jumped in again. “I’ll call her whatever she wants me to. It won’t matter when I’m balls deep inside her.”

A younger kid who had foolishly decided to sit at our table choked, and soda came down his nose. To be honest, I hadn’t even realized he was there.

Dragging her shocked gaze from the scrawny freshman and back to Micah, Storm spat, “Keep your comments about your balls to yourself. Do you want me to hurl?”

I shot my brother a whatever expression.

Storm rarely ate a thing; too worried about carbs, just like most of the airheads at school.

If I found out she was starving herself again, I’d be having words.

The bitch annoyed the living shit out of me but she was part of our friendship group and we all looked out for each other.

Like persistently farting in assembly, Micah didn’t know when to stop. “What would you throw up? Fresh fucking air. You’ve been pushing that rabbit food around your plate all lunch.”

Storm snorted, “At least I don’t inhale my food. ”

I wondered what she meant by that, but Micah cut off my train of thought.

“Nope—you just swallow it.”

Shaking her head, she fake-laughed. “You’re such a dick.”

Storm’s real aversion to the topic of the discussion was because it was about another girl and not her. Storm and her friend Tate were the most popular girls in school; if a topic wasn’t about them, they had zero interest. Period.

Reed made a good point “If you insist on sitting with the boys Storm, you’ll have to get on board with our guy shit.”

She huffed, “ Shit being the operative word.”

“Ooh, such a big word for such a little girl,” Reed smirked.

He loved putting Storm down and tormenting her about her brain and looks.

Although, in all truth, when it came to either of those things, Reed didn’t have any worthy ammunition.

Storm was smart and beautiful, she just preferred to hide how intelligent she was.

During a heart-to-heart one night, she’d said that boys didn’t like girls who were cleverer than they were.

I would have told her she was hanging around with the wrong boys, but since that was us, I’d shut my mouth.

Storm’s birthday was the same day as mine in October.

The seventeen-year-old cheerleader boasted long, black hair, grey eyes and a sweet face that didn’t match her true disposition.

She also had a cracking body. Storm was captain of the cheer squad and had one of those perfectly tanned, athletic forms of a dancer.

She was also a complete psycho bitch. I’d supposedly fucked her once, and that was enough.

Although that happened after a session of Never Have I Ever that went too far—a game that should never be played while drinking hard liquor.

So, as far as I was concerned, it didn’t count.

My memory of that night was vague, to say the least. I’d only had Storm's word that it ever even happened.

“Shit isn’t a big word?” Micah suddenly put in with a dumb grin.

“I meant operative, dickhead,” Reed replied with a roll of his eyes.

Storm Summers was one of those types who had never experienced a shred of desperation. Her father was the Mayor of Newport and her family was as rich as fuck. Everyone knows that money is the key to the world.

“Do you even know what it means, Reed? I can explain it in layman's terms if you want.”

“You swallowed a dictionary?” Reed added through a mouth full of food. He overdid the bad manners in Storm’s company as he knew how pissed off it made her .

“That’s not all she’s swallowed this week from what I’ve heard,” Micah belted with a bark of laughter.

We all laughed. How could you not?

“Fuck you, Mehari,” Storm scolded, second-naming my brother, and pulling her signature lemon- sucking face. No pun intended.

I didn’t correct her, as legally she was right.

But in our eyes and most of the student body, we were the Sawyer Brothers.

Four boys from broken or non-existent homes that had been brought together at different stages in our lives to live with Bethany (Ma) Sawyer.

The woman who had fostered our asses who we now called mother.

“It’s Sawyer now, actually,” Reed muttered, reading my mind.

Attempting to ignore their prattling. I glanced back around the lunchroom, wondering where my little English angel was. She probably wouldn’t eat lunch in this jungle, she was way too classy, fuck me she lifted out of this shithole by a fucking mile.