RICHARD (A BAD BOY ROMANCE) (14 page)

“Let’s go,” I whispered,
pushing against my stepbrother’s nearly frozen body. Slowly I felt him giving
against my efforts until finally he moved back a step and turned. Richard
didn’t say a single word, his jaw clenched shut the entire way out of the AEΩ
house and out onto the street.

The silence was almost
unnerving as I fell into step behind Richard, unsure exactly where either of us
were going at first.

“You’re
kinda
scaring me, Richard,” I said, swallowing hard around the still present lump in
my throat. “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?”

“My dorm,” he grunted,
though he never turned his gaze back toward me as he walked.

“Why there?” I asked, my
brow furrowing as I hurried to keep pace with him.

“We need to regroup and
come up with some kind of plan.”

_
SIXTEEN
_

Dick

“What now?” I groaned. “If we don’t get
those pictures then we’re going to have that bastard looming over our heads for
the rest of our time here. Those pictures are going to ruin us… especially if
mom and dad find out.”

“I know,” she sighed, her head in her hands.
“We are completely fucked.”

The two of us had gone back to my dorm
after the confrontation with Michael at the fraternity to figure out what our
next move would be. As it stood, Michael had the upper hand on us. The pictures
themselves didn’t technically exist outside of his phone, though with the way
things worked now, that meant that the pictures were also floating around in
the Cloud, able to be retrieved regardless of whether that bastard’s phone was
smashed. The only way to save ourselves was to find a way to delete those
pictures from existence and hope Michael hadn’t been smart enough to make
backups.

“There’s no way we can get those
pictures,” I said, running a hand through my hair in frustration. “Not unless
we suddenly learn how to hack into Michael’s phone. And I’m not sure if you
noticed, but none of us are
that
good
with computers.”

“I know that, Richard,” Jessica said,
frowning at how upset I was getting. If these pictures got out, it would be the
end of my football career, and I hardly believed that my dad would fund his
son’s college if he knew what his step-daughter and I had been up to while we
were away from home. “I probably know that just as well as you do.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, resting my face
against my hands. “I’m just worried, that’s all. I don’t like being threatened,
and I especially don’t like
you
being
threatened, either. I just wish I had a solution, something that I could
actually do to make all of this go away. But like I said, neither of us are that
good with computers.”

I looked up from my hands just in time
to see Jessica sit up suddenly, her eyebrows raised. It was like a light bulb
had gone off over her head.

“What about Greg?”

“Greg?” I asked, frowning. “This is all
Greg’s fault! Why would he help us?”

“I think we’re going to
make
him help us,” Jessica said, a smile
creeping onto her lips. “Greg is a Computer Science major, and from what Becky
kept saying about him, he’s like a Steve Wozniak-level genius. If we can
convince him to help us, then we’ll be one step closer to being in the clear.”

“But the question is whether he will or
not,” I pointed out again. “After what he’s already done? To us
and
to Becky? He’ll be lucky if I don’t
beat the shit out of him when I see him.”

“You’ll just have to curb your violent
nature,” Jess said as she pulled out her phone. “Becky ought to know what class
he’s in right now. Once we know that, we can head straight over and
persuade
him.”

According to Becky, Greg would be held
up in class for at least another hour, which gave us the time we needed to get
ready and head all the way across campus and stake out the entrance to the
building. It was late in the afternoon, the sun slowly sinking down toward the
horizon when the time came for students to start streaming out from the doors
to head off to who-knows-where.

I glanced down at Jessica’s phone to
get another look at Greg’s picture. He was a mousy guy from what I could tell,
with the typical nerdy look that I’d seen so many times back in high school. It
was surprising a guy like that even had the balls to do what he did to Jessica
and I. But that still left the matter of what had happened to Becky unattended.

“He should have been out here by now,”
I said, arms crossed as the two of us sat on a bench near the computer science
building’s double doors. “What if he didn’t go to class today?”

“We’ll stay for a little while longer, Richard,”
she said exasperatedly, “then we can go look for him at his dorm. Becky was
sure
that he’d be here today.”

My impatience was beginning to wear on
her, and I certainly didn’t blame her. I hated to wait on anything. I was the
kind of person who needed to be moving and doing something to feel like I was
making a difference, and sitting on a park bench sure as hell didn’t feel like
I was getting anything done.

“I can go in and look for him,” I said,
clenching and unclenching my fists anxiously. “Bring him outside and then we
can talk to him more privately.”

“No,” Jessica said, waving the idea
away, “we don’t want to start a scene in there. Let’s do this a little more
subtly. If campus security sees you hassling some
guy
then you can kiss playing in the game goodbye.”

“Fine,” I muttered, turning my gaze
back toward the entrance to the computer science building. “What if he runs?”

“Then we chase after him, obviously,”
She said, glancing over at me as she took a drink from a bottle of water she’d
stashed in her bag. “I don’t think that he’s going to put up much of a fight,
especially by the looks of him. Becky said she he was a bit of a wimp.”

I nodded, glancing down at Greg’s
picture again on the phone. Jessica was right, the guy barely looked like he
could support his own weight, much less throw a punch. But I wasn’t sure that
would stop me from making him regret drawing Becky into Michael’s clutches.

“I think that’s him,” Jessica said
suddenly, drawing me out of my thoughts.

I looked up, scanning a crowd of
students as they began flooding from the double doors. Class must have just let
out and with the evening drawing closer it looked like everyone was eager to
head back to their dorms. I almost didn’t see Greg at first among all of the
passing faces, but it wasn’t until Jessica pointed him out that I finally
locked my sights onto him. He had a dark red baseball cap on, pulled down over
one side of his face, almost like he was trying to not be recognized, but doing
a poor job of it.

“Let’s go,” I said, helping Jessica to
her feet as we made our way after Becky’s boyfriend.

Greg didn’t seem to know we were
following behind him at first, his pace casual as he headed in the direction of
the Student Union. I motioned for Jessica to get out in front of him while I
stayed behind, hoping to catch him between the two of us, corner him before he
got to someplace crowded.

Before long the crowd thinned and soon
Greg was meandering along on the sidewalk, the street lamps flickering to life
as he turned toward one of the on-campus dorms. This was going to be one of the
only chances we’d have to get him alone. Jessica glanced back at me from in
front of Greg, hoping for a signal—but only succeeded in drawing Greg’s
attention behind him.

He might not have recognized Jessica
from the back, but he certainly recognized me almost immediately. All at once
his face flashed with both recognition and panic, freezing in place like a deer
caught in headlights.

“Greg,” I called out, my hands out to
the sides in a gesture that I wasn’t going to hurt him—not right away, anyway.

“I—” he stammered, taking a step away
from me, his hands going up above his head. “I didn’t!”

“You didn’t what?” I began, but before
I knew it, he was taking off in the opposite direction heading right for
Jessica. I started to head after him, my footfalls slapping against the
concrete like drumbeats. I knew that I could catch him, in fact he’d hardly
gone ten feet before I was halfway to him. But just as I was about to take him
down I noticed he’d already started to topple over.

I stopped just in time to watch Greg
fall into the low bushes that lined the sidewalk, my stepsister standing over
him. She turned her gaze toward me, a smile half-cocked on her face as she gave
me a shrug.

“What’d you do?” I asked as I took
another few steps closer, closing the distance between the three of us while
Greg recovered himself from the tangling grasp of the shrubs.

“Me?” she asked, eyebrows raised and
her hands raised in a show of mock surrender. “I didn’t touch him. He just
turned around and saw me running toward him and panicked. I didn’t have to lay
a hand on him—he
sort
of just did it himself.”

“You startled me!” Greg said, trying to
defend himself as he got to his feet.

I shook my head before grabbing Greg by
the front of his witty T-shirt, pulling him up nice and close to my face. I
could practically smell the fear on him, his face dripping with sweat as I
stared right into his eyes, my jaw set. I even threw in a growl for good
measure.

“Why did you take the pictures for
Michael?” I asked, drawing myself up over him as much as I could, trying to
seem more intimidating. I’d been the bully during my last few years of middle
school the anger of my mother’s death finding its way out onto others before I
found football. I knew how to make guys like Greg wet themselves.

“I’m sorry!” he said, throwing his arms
over his face to save himself from whatever punishment he imagined that I would
give him. “They said they’d pay me to get the pictures. I’m barely able to
afford to go here as it is! I figured that it wouldn’t do much harm. Getting a
picture of some guy and his girlfriend doing it? I figured Michael was just
being a pervert.”

“He didn’t tell you why he needed
them?” I asked, almost lifting him off the ground. I hoped to god no one came
around the corner and saw this, or this whole thing would have been for
nothing.

“No!” he exclaimed, turning his face
away from me in fear.

He was just a stooge
, I thought, shoving him
away from me hard. Greg didn’t know what Michael wanted the pictures for or
even that Jessica and I were step-siblings. That, probably among other things,
meant that Greg had no clue how Michael was storing the pictures or where any
copies were.

“And what about Becky?” Jessica asked,
her voice quivering with anger. Before I could stop her, I heard the sound of
her hand meeting Greg’s face. “Did it
make
sense
when you threw her to those bastards? When you let her get
raped
in the bedroom at some
frat-house?”

Once again Greg was on the defensive,
his arms raised over his head as Jessica swung her bag at him. Her face was red
with anger as she forced him right back into the bushes. I’d never seen her so
mad in my life, all the fury of seeing what Michael and his friend had done to
Becky, of what Greg had let them do to her, it all poured out of her at once in
a violent torrent of rage.

“You let them violate my best friend!
You
son of a bitch!” she cried out, forcing Greg onto the
ground with another swing of her bag. “You lead her right to them, and they
chewed her up and spit her out like she was garbage!”

“I didn’t know what they were going to
do!” he whimpered, curling up into a ball on the concrete. “I swear to
God,
I didn’t know they were going to touch Becky!”

Jessica stopped, her chest rising and
falling rapidly, her face still red. It was taking everything that she had to
keep from swinging that bag again. I knew I’d have to step in if my stepsister
couldn’t control herself, but would I want to?

“They told me that they’d give me the
money at the party,” he continued after the assault had abated, lowering his
guard so that he could look up at Jessica. “When I handed Michael the pictures,
I noticed that something was wrong. Becky wasn’t acting right; she looked
drowsy and confused. And when I asked them for the money, they just laughed.

“Michael’s guys pulled Becky off the
couch and told me that they were going to show her a good time,” Greg’s eyes
started to well up with tears. “I tried so hard to get them to stop. I tried to
bring her back. I ended up getting my ass kicked and thrown out of the house.”

“Why didn’t you call the cops?” I
asked, my brow furrowed.

“I did!” he shouted, his own anger
rising in his voice. “And by the time they got there, the party was over. And
besides, half the cops on campus were
in
AEΩ. They’d never have done anything to their brothers.”

Jessica took a step back, her hands
covering her mouth as she dropped her bag to the ground. She turned her eyes
toward me and I watched them begin to fill with tears. I knew that look, that
hopeless frustration. She and I knew exactly what the other was thinking—if the
campus police were on Michael’s side, then we were going to need some damn hard
evidence if we even wanted to think about getting justice for Becky.