Becca Ritchie - Hothouse Flower

“Not exactly,” he said. “We were trying to cover the fact that Loren wasn’t Sara’s child. She was only pregnant once. We couldn’t justify both of you without ruining my reputation.”

That was why my mom had to keep her mouth shut about the cheating, to protect Jonathan. And every day she had to help this soulless prick, it fucking ate her up again. But she did it for the money. I didn’t think any amount of cash was worth the fucking pain of these lies.

Everything was to save face.

“Why choose him?” I asked. “Why isn’t Loren the one being hidden?” You love him more.

His face remained blank, all the hard edges not revealing anything to me. He wore a dapper suit that made him look as expensive as he was. “It’s just how things worked out. It was easier for you to take your mother’s maiden name. Loren only had one option. And that was me.”

I ground my teeth. “You know, I just tell all my friends that my dad died. Sometimes, I even find clever ways to kill you off. Oh yeah, my dad, he drowned on a fucking boat accident; perished in his golden fucking yacht while he was shitting on the toilet.”

He became a ghost or demon I’d meet on Mondays. Nothing more.

He licked his lips and swished his scotch, not meeting my gaze. He almost laughed. He found that fucking funny. “Listen, Jonathan,” he said.

“It’s Ryke,” I shot back. “How many fucking times do I have to tell you that?” I didn’t want his name any more than I wanted his genes. I planned to use my middle name forever.

He rolled his eyes again and then sighed. “Loren isn’t like you. He’s not good at sports. I don’t think he’s ever aced a test in his life. He’s wasting his potential by going to parties. If you’d meet him, you could help—”

“No,” I forced. I put my forearms on the table and leaned close. “I don’t want anything to do with your son. So stop fucking asking.”

He took out his wallet and passed me a picture, one he’d shown me a couple times before. Loren was sitting on the stairs of our father’s mansion, where he grew up. I always looked for similarities in our features and felt sickened by them.

We had the same eye color, only his were more amber than my brown. My face was harder cut, but our builds were more alike, lean not bulky. He wore a navy blue tie and a white button-down, the Dalton Academy uniform. He wasn’t staring at the camera, but his jaw was so sharp, unlike anything I’d seen before. He looked like a fucking douchebag, like he’d much rather be popping open beers with his buddies than sitting there.

“He’s your brother—”

I slid the picture back to him. “He’s no one to me.”

Jonathan downed the second glass of scotch, pocketing the photo. And he grumbled under his breath about my “bitch” of a mother. She never wanted me to meet Loren, just the same way that she refused to come into contact with him. As far as I knew, Loren thought Sara was his mom like the rest of the world. Or maybe someone finally told him the truth. That he’s the fucking bastard.

I wouldn’t know.

And frankly, I didn’t fucking care.

What difference would it have made anyway?

NINE YEARS LATER

RYKE MEADOWS

I run. Not away from anything. I have a fucking destination: the end of a long suburban street lined with four colonial houses and acres of dewy grass. It’s as secluded as it can be. Six in the morning. The sky is barely light enough to see my feet pound the asphalt.

I fucking love early mornings.

I love watching the sun rise more than watching it set.

I keep running. My breathing steadies in a trained pattern. Thanks to a collegiate track scholarship, and thanks to climbing rocks—a sport that I sincerely fucking crave—I don’t have to think about inhaling and exhaling. I just do. I just focus on the end of the street, and I go after it. I don’t fucking slow down. I don’t stop. I see what I have to do, and I fucking make it happen.

I hear my brother’s shoes hit the cement behind me, his legs pumping as quickly as mine. He tries to keep up with my pace. He’s not running towards shit. My brother—he’s always running away. I listen to the heaviness of his soles, and I want to fucking grab his wrist and pull him ahead of me. I want him to be unburdened and light, to feel that runner’s high.

But he’s weighed down by too much to reach anything good. I don’t slow to let him catch me. I want him to push himself as far as he can go. I know he can get here.

He just has to fucking try.

One minute later, we reach the end of the street that we were shooting for, next to an oak tree. Lo breathes heavily, not in exhaustion, more like anger. His nose flares, and his cheekbones cut brutally sharp. I remember meeting him for the very first time.

It was about three years ago.

And he looked at me with those same pissed off amber-colored eyes, and that same, I fucking hate the world expression. He was twenty-one back then. Our relationship balances somewhere between rocky and stable, but it was never meant to be perfect.

“You can’t go easy on me just once?” Lo asks, pushing the longer strands of his light brown hair off his forehead. The sides are trimmed short.

“If I slowed down, we would have been walking.”

Lo rolls his eyes and scowls. He’s been in a bad place for a few months, and this run was supposed to release some of the tension. But it’s not helping.

I see the tightness in his chest, the way he can still barely fucking breathe.

He squats and rubs his eyes.

“What do you need?” I ask him seriously.

“A fucking glass of whiskey. One ice cube. Think you can do that for me, big bro?”

I glare. I hate the way he calls me bro. It’s with fucking scorn. I can count on my hand the amount of times he’s called me “brother” with affection or admiration. But he usually acts like I don’t deserve the title yet.

Maybe I don’t.

I knew about Loren Hale for practically all my life, and I didn’t even say hi. I think back often to when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and my father asked every fucking week: “Do you want to meet your brother?”

I rejected the offer every single time.

When I was in college, I came to terms with the fact that I would never know him. I thought I was at peace. I stopped hating Loren Hale for just existing. I stopped listening to my mother condemn a kid that had no say in being born. I slowly stopped talking to my father, losing contact because I didn’t need him.

The trust fund, I use. I figure it’s payment for all the lies I had to keep for that fucking asshole.

One day. That’s all it took to change my idealistic, head-in-the-fucking-sand, life. Outside at a college Halloween party, a fight started. I watched four guys on the track team—the one I was the captain of at Penn—go up against a lean-built guy. I recognized him from all those photos my father showed me.

He wasn’t how I’d imagined. He wasn’t surrounded by frat guys, crushing beers over their heads.

He was alone.

His girlfriend came into the fight later, to defend him, but it was too late. She missed the part where my teammate accused him of drinking expensive booze in a locked cabinet. She missed the part where Lo egged him on, just so the guy would swing.

He hit my brother. I stood and watched Lo get decked in the face.

It was in that fucking moment that I realized how wrong I had been. I didn’t see a prick with a hundred friends and cash up to his chin. Not a jock, not an athlete like me. I saw a guy wanting to be punched, asking to feel that pain. I saw someone so fucking hurt and broken and sick.

Four against one.

All that time, I wanted to live the life he had. I hated playing the bastard outcast when I was really the legitimate son. But if our roles were reversed, if I had lived with my alcoholic father, I would have been there.

That would have been me: tormented, drunk, weak and alone.

My father was trying to tell me that Lo wasn’t the popular kid I’d dreamed up. He was just as much of an outsider as I was. The difference: I had the strength to defend myself. I wasn’t beaten down by our father like Lo had been. I didn’t even contemplate the fucking horror of living with Jonathan twenty-four-seven, hearing the why are you such a pussy? comment every day. I had blinders on. I could only see what was wrong with me. I couldn’t fathom Loren getting a shitty bargain too.

That night at the Halloween party, I left the false peace I’d built for myself. It wasn’t a gut reaction. I stood there and watched Lo get beat on before I made a decision to intervene. And once I fucking made it, I never turned back.

“You want a glass of whiskey?” I give him a look. “Why don’t I just push you in front of a fucking freight train? It’s about the same.”

He stands up and lets out an agitated laugh. “Do you even know what this feels like?” He extends his arms, his eyes bloodshot. “I feel like I’m going out of my goddamn mind, Ryke. Tell me what I should do? Huh? Nothing takes this pain away, not running, not fucking the girl I love, not anything.”

I haven’t been where he is, not to this extent.

“You relapsed a few times,” I say. “But you can get back to where you were.”

He shakes his head.

“So what?” I narrow my eyes. “You’re going to drink a beer? You’re going to chug a bottle of whiskey? Then what? You’ll ruin your relationship with Lily. You’ll feel like shit in the morning. You’ll wish you were fucking dead—”

“What do you think I’m wishing now?!” he shouts, his face reddens in pain. And my lungs constrict. “I hate myself for breaking my sobriety. I hate that I’m at this place in my life again.”

“You were under a lot of scrutiny,” I back-peddle, realizing he doesn’t need me to be a hardass, something I revert to on instinct. I push people too much sometimes.

“You’re under the same scrutiny, and I didn’t see you breaking your sobriety.”

“It’s different.” I haven’t had a drink in nine years. “The media was saying some pretty awful shit, Lo. You coped the first way you knew how. No one blames you. We just want to fucking help you.” We’re all public spectacles, under constant gaze of cameras, because of the Calloway girls, the daughters of a soda mogul.

By proximity to the Calloways, we’ve been roped into the spotlight. It’s not fucking fun. I wear a baseball cap just to try to disguise myself, but thankfully cameramen have better things to do than film us this early in the morning.

But they’ll be out trying to get a picture of us at noon.

“You don’t believe them, do you?” Lo suddenly asks, his voice still edged.

“Who?” I ask.

“The news, all those reporters…you don’t think our dad actually did those things to me?”

I try to hold back a cringe. Someone told the press that Jonathan physically abuses Lo. The rumors just kept escalating after that. I don’t know if our dad could hit him…or molest him. I don’t want to believe it, but there’s a fucking sliver of doubt that says maybe. Maybe it could have happened.

“It’s not fucking true!” Lo shouts at me.

“Okay, okay.” I raise my hands to get him to calm down.

He’s been like this since the accusations, pissed and angry and looking for a way to fix things. Booze was his solution unfortunately.

Our father filed a defamation lawsuit, but no matter the outcome of the court case, it won’t change the way people look at both of them. Vilifying our father, pitying Loren. There’s no going back.

“You just have to move fucking forward,” I tell him. “Don’t worry about what people think.”

Loren inhales deeply and stares at the sky like he wants to murder a flock of birds. “You say shit, Ryke, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. Do you know how annoying that is?” He looks back down at me, his features all sharp, like a blade.

“I’ll keep saying it then, just to irritate the fuck out of you.” What else are big brothers for?

He sighs heavily.

I rub the back of his head playfully and then guide him towards his house. I drop my hand off his shoulder, and he stops in the middle of the road, his brows scrunching.

“About your trip to California…” He trails off. “I know I haven’t asked about it in months. I’ve been too self-absorbed—”