Page 3 of Troublemaker

The hope I’d felt started to slip away.

“Blake,” I said, my voice small as I tried not to cry.

Blake finally looked at me.

“I’m sorry, kid,” he said. “This is the best thing for you.”

As he turned to go, any bit of hope that still lingered inside me died.

That was the last I saw of him. Blake never bothered to see me, never wrote me back when I wrote him, never returned my calls. It was like he’d never existed.

That’s when I learned there wasn’t much to be in love with, after all.

Because love was for foolish little girls who thought a small gesture of kindness meant everything.

And I wasn’t a foolish little girl.

Not anymore.

SIX YEARS LATER

1

LUCY

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Lucy,

See me in my office at 9 a.m.

On the dot.

-Coach Samson

PS: I still can’t believe they let you change your goddamn email address.

Iseethed at the short, terse, scolding email from my cold and distant tyrant of a guardian. At the ripe young age of eighteen, and as a college freshman who often got into trouble—intentionally—Coach Blake Samson thought I was an immature dumbass. An immature dumbass who not only couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag but had fought her way in there in the first place. What he couldn’t seem to understand was that I’d been taking care of myself since I was twelve years old, when my parents died, and he completely abandoned me. I might beimmature, but I was the furthest thing from a dumbass, and I was getting?—

“—so fucking sick and so fucking tired of him trying to boss me around!” I ranted to my best friend, Leslie, as we stood at the counter in our dorm’s common bathroom, Leslie brushing her teeth as I added layer after layer of mascara. It was only 8:30 a.m., way too early for party girl makeup, but I knew it would piss Blake off…like being late would.

Next to me, Leslie paused in brushing her teeth to raise an eyebrow.

“So you say…” she hummed, mouth full of toothpaste.

“I mean it!” I argued, but I caught my faint blush in the mirror. Being blonde and pale really did me a disservice when it came to hiding my feelings, damn it.

“And if he bossed you around in the bedroom?” Leslie asked.

It sounded like, “An’ i’ e’ bosh you arou’ in the behroom,” because of said mouthful of toothpaste, and usually I’d tease her for talking with her mouth full…and add a joke about how her mouth was usually full of her fiancé Mason’s dick, but I was too annoyed to be on my usual game.

“Girl, I’m over that,” I declared. “Maybe once upon a time I wanted to know what it would be like to be forced over his lap while he taught me a lesson, but that ship sailed looooooong ago. Besides, being bossed around in bed is your thing, not mine,” I added.

Now it was Leslie’s turn to blush. “You’re such a liar,” she accused. “I might like Mason’s dominance, but you’re into that stuff, too.”

She was right. I might have been a virgin, but I had access to online porn and smutty romance books, same as the next person.AndI’d fooled around a bit with college boys over the past few months…but it was always a huge disappointment. Maybe it was because I never let them take my clothes off, butwhenever I got that far, whenever Itried,Blake’s pissed-off face appeared in my mind, and I couldn’t go through with it.