Page 78 of Blitz

“Nah, I don’t date,” my brother says with a drawl he picked up in South Carolina. “I fuck.”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you don’t want to be tied down. All girls want to do is trap you. I get it. You’ve been listening to Mom’s bullshit again.”

My mom is convinced that Micah’s conquests are secretly poking holes in the condoms to try to score a huge payday. First of all, my brother is still a broke college student. He doesn’t have a job. He lives in a gross student apartment and doesn’t clean his bathroom. He’s no shining star.

On top of that, if he somehow did manage to impregnate some poor woman, it’s not like he’s going to abandon his child. He’s the type to be an active, involved parent. I’ve seen him with our dad’s new kids: this guy loves babies, and babies love him.

Our parents got married when our mom was four months pregnant with us. They split up before we were two, though the divorce wasn’t finalized for another four years. She tried to trap him, and it backfired. So now she thinks all women are out to do the same thing.

Micah will be a good catch—a year from now, once he declares, gets drafted, and is playing in the NFL. He’s relatively charming, usually polite, and doesn’t have any STDs that he knows of, and I know he gets checked every week during the football season when they check for PEDs. Only one of his exes has ever slashed my tires or keyed my car, and she thought it was weird for brothers and sisters to hang out together in a group of friends, so clearly she was more twisted than either of us realized.

Tucker coughs. He reaches for his food, and all three of us take in the two giant peanut butter sandwiches on his plate beside his meal. We all know what that means.

“You okay, baby?” I stroke his thigh.

“I’m great,” he says around a mouthful of peanut butter.

Micah leans forward. “You can talk to us. What’s wrong?”

He stuffs more of his sandwich into his face. “Mm-hm.”

“We’ll be here when you need us,” I tell him quietly.

Chapter thirty-two

Tucker

The peanut butter turns to paste in my mouth and clogs my throat. It’s a delicious burn.

I can’t do this. I can’t sit across from him and pretend like nothing is wrong. He dumped me. He abandoned me. At a time when I desperately needed a friend, my best friend, he was nowhere to be found.

And now we’re supposed to party our faces off, which I’m guessing is code for “drink a shit ton of alcohol and act like idiots.”

Mason’s hand on my leg anchors me to this plane. Her fingers dig into my thigh as I finish my first sandwich.

It doesn’t help. I don’t feel better. But I don’t feel worse. I start in on my actual dinner, saving my second sandwich for when I’ll need it. Because between the two Prince siblings, I’m going to need it.

I clear my throat. “What do you have planned for the weekend?”

“Party tonight, obvs,” he says. “Go to sleep early. Track meet. Mason beats those stupid UNH idiots to a pulp. And then more partying. I get on a plane at four o’clock on Sunday. We have a lot of ground to cover.”

She turns to me. “We were going to go to a low-key track thing tonight and a Delta party tomorrow night.” She swallows, chewing her cheek. “Do you want to come with us?”

No. Not at all.

“Yeah, sure,” I tell her. She’s nearly as surprised as I am.

“You aren’t hanging out with the guys?”

“I’d much rather spend time with you.”

Not a lie. I would simply prefer that our time together wasn’t at a party.

She beams at me. “Great.”

We eat in quiet silence. The chicken curry is good. I prefer the Thai style curries to the Indian curries they have more frequently.

“This is awkward, right?” Micah says. “It’s not just me?”