Damaged Like Us (Like Us Series Book 1) Read online

  Farrow studies me for an even longer moment, not saying anything. I fix the air conditioning. My muscles constricted, body hot. At least I didn’t sweat through my gray crew-neck. At least I didn’t get hard.

  He extends his arm towards me.

  My brows knot at him.

  Farrow leaves his arm on the back of my seat. “Do you need a second?”

  “For what?” I go absolutely rigid, but my gaze spends half its time on him and half its time on the road. I think he’s about to make a jerking motion with his hand.

  His lips slowly rise, and he scratches his brow where his barbell piercings lie. “You seem distracted,” is all he says.

  “I’m fine.” I grip the steering wheel ten times harder, and I keep licking my lips like I’m about to say something else. I have nothing to offer except fuck me.

  He’s your bodyguard. Yeah, well when I give him that title, it’s starting to make him more attractive. I didn’t think that’d be possible. But when he’s not following me around, I picture him with me. My brain refuses to detach my bodyguard for a single moment of Farrow-free peace.

  “Give it.” Farrow motions to my hand.

  My phone? “What?”

  “Since you won’t let me drive, I can do the bare minimum and type out your grocery list.”

  I should let go of this task, but I hesitate to pass it off to Farrow. I enjoy doing shit myself. “You’re not my assistant.”

  “I’m the guy trying to ensure you don’t run us both off the road. You obviously need two hands on the wheel, so…” He waves me to release the phone, and in my silence, he adds, “Or you can pull over and let me drive—”

  I drop my phone on his lap.

  “You really don’t want me to drive.” He puts his boot on his seat, elbow to his bent knee, and he cups my phone. “The day when I finally drive you around will just be much more gratifying.”

  “The day,” I say dryly. “You mean the day that’s never happening? That one?” I spot the roll of his eyes before I point at my phone. “Is it unlocked?”

  “I’m already in your notes.” He fixes the spelling errors made by the app.

  “Janie texted me stuff she needs.” I switch lanes. Two paparazzi vans trail me now, so I constantly check my rearview mirror. “Her text thread should be the top one.”

  He lets out a long whistle. “One hundred unread text messages.” I sense his surprise as he says, “You’re actually breaking your moral code.”

  I glare and then go for the phone.

  He retracts it out of my reach. “Thou shall not ignore thy family.”

  “You think you’re so damn smart.” I effortlessly weave between two pick-up trucks and bypass the paparazzi. “Those texts are just from today, Sherlock.” I flick off my blinker.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yep. I’m in twelve group chats with different family members.” I have eleven cousins alone. That’s not including my siblings and my parents. Or my aunts and uncles. We all talk. “If I can’t answer during the day, I go through my texts at night.”

  He scrolls through Jane’s thread. “If someone has an emergency, what do you do?”

  “I’ll glance at the texts in case someone’s freaking out, but most of the time, they’ll call if it’s serious.” I strangely have an easy time freeing these facts. Ones that I generally keep to myself.

  I trust him.

  It helps that he’s been a part of my world long before he was a bodyguard. It’s also the issue, but that’s another thing entirely.

  As quiet descends, he types on my notes app and says, “Jane is asking for chocolate turtles, pretzels, tampons, and lemonade packets.” He adjusts the air vents and points the ice-cold at me.

  I glance from him to the road. “You cold?” I can adjust the air for him.

  He types on my notepad app. “You looked hot.”

  How the fuck can he tell? “I’m not,” I refute and crank the air to a warmer temperature.

  Farrow scrolls through his phone, too. “I still have time to call the store. I can get someone to fill a cart with all the items on your list.” It’s a safe route.

  So shoppers won’t bombard me in aisles. Alpha is known to go one step further and shut down the grocery store. Giving my parents, aunts and uncles privacy and secure exits and entrances.

  “No,” I say firmly. “I’d rather just get the groceries myself.” It takes me two hours, but I don’t like the idea of being waited on and taking up someone else’s time.

  “Okay.” He sounds genuinely okay with that scenario.

  I was expecting a two-minute argument. My strained muscles ease a fraction. “Fair warning,” I tell him, “paparazzi will bum-rush me when I leave the store. They’ll get up close to take shots of my bags.”

  He listens carefully.

  “I don’t care if they can see what I bought, so don’t worry about pushing them back. I just need to be able to get out in a reasonable amount of time.”

  “I’ll get you out.” His staunch certainty heats my core. He raises my phone. “Anything else you need?”

  “Ground beef, chips, taco seasoning, everything-bagels, oatmeal, protein bars and shakes—” I need condoms. And more lube. Fuck.

  At my abrupt stop, I sense his confusion brewing, but he finishes typing those items.

  I shouldn’t be censoring myself around him.

  At some point, I’m going to have a one-night stand. He may hear me orgasm through the fucking door or wall. I’ve also tried not to make sex a taboo subject in my life. With people I trust, I try to speak about it as easily as the weather. My parents raised me to see sex in a positive light.

  That’s continuing. Until I’m a dead, lifeless corpse.

  “What else?” Farrow looks over at me.

  I change my grip on the steering wheel. “At least three boxes of condoms and water-based lube,” I say, my edged voice more like a serrated knife right now. Ready to butcher him. Calm down. I’m high-strung.

  I get that.

  Farrow drops his foot to the car mat. Sitting straighter. He types on my phone, the silence thickening. I can’t read his reaction. Not while I concentrate on the evening traffic and a van that almost touches my bumper.

  I’ve been trying to drive only fifteen over the limit. To show him it’s not a “speeding habit” but a choice that I can control. A choice I make.

  But it’s hard not revving to thirty-over when paparazzi latch this close.

  I speed.

  Just to pass a Mustang and switch lanes. Putting distance between me and the paparazzi. As I decelerate, Farrow drops his arm to the middle console.

  Done typing, he says, “Silicone-based lube feels better than water-based.”

  I glance at him. Just once. “I’ve never tried it.”

  He keeps his hand to his mouth. What does that mean?

  I start glancing to the road. To him, the road, him, and I realize—he’s smiling. When I catch his expression, he lets his hand fall, his lips stretched so wide, and he shifts in his seat and hunches forward as he types out something on my phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  He turns his head to me, and bleach-white strands of hair slip to his lashes. “Writing down my favorite lube for you, wolf scout.”

  I flex my abs to stop from hardening. Dear World, I hate you. Worst regards, a human being who’s trying not to bust a nut.

  “Cool,” I say as he passes me my phone. Yeah, so cool. Let my childhood-crush-also-turned-bodyguard pick out my lube for me. That will make not fantasizing about him so much easier.

  So smart of me.

  Genius.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have dropped out of Harvard.

  6

  MAXIMOFF HALE

  SIX MONTHS AGO, Jane Cobalt rushed into my room at midnight. Face covered in an avocado mask. Brunette hair twisted in a pink towel.

  “Moffy?” she whispered.

  I hadn’t fallen asleep yet. At the spike of her breezy voice, I
flipped on my lamp fast. And Janie saw the girl nestled beneath my covers. Buck-naked. Both of us.

  Jane winced. “Désolée. Ça n’a pas d’importance.” So sorry. It doesn’t matter. She started to leave.

  I whispered with urgency, “Attends.” Wait. I hurried out of bed and tugged on boxer-briefs. “Jane.” I sprinted to the door, and my one-night stand groggily said my name. I assured her, “I’ll be right back.”

  I left my door ajar so she’d be less inclined to take pictures of my bedroom.

  Jane waited for me in the middle of the staircase. At the top, Declan played a game on his cellphone—he’d been guarding my room that night. My bodyguard gave me a colossal amount of figurative space. Barely acknowledging me.

  “Jane?” I stopped one stair above hers.

  “Go back,” she emphasized. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I just had a sudden…” With two hands, she motioned to her body and outward. Jane was rarely lost for words.

  My brows knotted and I shook my head repeatedly. “You had a creature come loose through your small intestines?” Alright, I wasn’t used to Janie miming.

  Her tiny smile pulled at her avocado mask. “And you still question why you’re never picked first for charades.”

  Alright, that too.

  She inhaled. “I had a sudden…épiphanie.” Epiphany.

  “About what?” I stood like a stone statue. She’s moving out. My sudden guess stabbed my lungs.

  We’d been together since birth. Inseparable as kids and teenagers. In Philly, there weren’t laundry lists of actors and celebrities to shirk attention from ourselves. We weren’t in LA or New York. Our families were the only shiny toys in the window. The only animals in the zoo.

  Growing up in the public eye here, we related to very few people. So we naturally stuck together. As an adult, it always felt like we were supposed to move on somehow—but I never understood why that meant we had to move on from each other.

  I wanted Janie in my world. And she was the one who said those three months we separated at college—I went to Harvard, she went to Princeton—were the “darkest, most miserable days” of her life.

  After a quick glance at my cracked door, she murmured, “An epiphany about my future. Midnight life contemplations, you know those.”

  I did. When we were sixteen, we used to sneak into the Meadows girls’ treehouse at night and talk for hours about our identities. Our role in the world.

  Who we were. Inside. And out.

  Our attention drifted as two calico kittens skulked up the stairs. She picked up Walrus and let his brother Carpenter scamper away. Jane owned five cats: Walrus, Carpenter, Toodles, Ophelia, and Lady Macbeth. I never minded them or even the strays she sometimes housed.

  They made Janie happy.

  “I can’t do philanthropy for much longer,” she said after a short pause.

  That.

  Too many emotions hit me at once, so I knocked them aside. And a heavy nothingness weighed me down.

  Since she was eighteen, Jane had been the temporary CFO for H.M.C. Philanthropies. I tried to prepare myself for the day she’d leave, but I let the idea wither and die in my brain.

  She’d be by my side forever.

  Except forever always ends.

  “It’s almost been three years, Moffy.” She tried to kiss Walrus without avocado-ing his calico fur. Then he sprung out of her arms. “Charity work is just supposed to be my pit stop. It’s what you’re good at. It’s what you desperately love.” She said the word love from her core. “But me—”

  “You don’t have to convince me. I know it’s not your thing.” I wish it could’ve been, but I wouldn’t selfishly beg her to stay.

  Because out of loyalty, she would. And I wasn’t going to trap my best friend.

  Jane lowered her voice to another whisper. “We’re all incredibly privileged, and the thought of wasting a moment or any opportunity we’ve been given feels like eternal failure.”

  “No,” I snapped, concerned about where this was headed.

  “It’s true.” She tried hard not to scratch her face. But her mask must’ve itched because she kept crinkling her nose. She tilted her chin up and looked me right in the eye. “I can’t sit idly by and be the woman no one hoped I’d be.”

  My jaw tensed. “You put way too much fucking pressure on yourself.” All of the girls I was surrounded by did, and it had a lot, in part, to do with the media placing impossible ideals on them.

  Before they even hit puberty, they were supposed to be role models, advocates, successful, beautiful, fierce, strong, humble, and sweet—when all I ever wanted for each of them was to be happy.

  “Let me preface,” Jane said, “my epiphany has nothing to do with math.”

  “Good.”

  Jane loved math as a child. Even joined mathletes as a teenager, and people fantasized about Janie having a career in the field. But she never meant for it to be a lifelong passion. Still, people on Twitter, Tumblr, all social medias—they created an entire life for Jane off a favorite childhood school subject.

  It was a lot of pressure for a kid.

  Fear of disappointing your parents—that’s one tough thing. Fear of disappointing fans, the world—that’s a massive, indestructible wall that many people I love keep running into.

  I’ve even met that wall before.

  Jane took the largest breath. The crux was coming. “I realized tonight,” she said, “that I’ve spent nearly all four years of my ‘college experience’ ambitionless. Lackluster. I need drive.” She clenched her fist like she channeled Joan of Arc into her soul. “A challenge.” Her eyes lit with fire. “My parents live by ambition, and my tank is dry. Empty. Caput.”

  “You’re not ambitionless. You’re in Princeton.” In anyone else’s world, that would be considered a success. For the Cobalt family, attending an Ivy League was just expected.

  “Online courses,” she corrected. “And I only have three semesters left. I’m setting a goal. A challenge. I have to find a career path by the time I graduate. No floundering like a dead fish. I’m born from lions.”

  There it was.

  The biggest truth.

  Her parents had their shit figured out in the womb. Her mom created her own fashion company at fifteen. Her dad ran a multi-billion-dollar paint, magnet, and diamond business called Cobalt Inc. by twenty-four.

  In Jane’s mind, she wasn’t even the tortoise lagging behind. She hadn’t put herself in the fucking race yet.

  Ambition. She wanted it.

  I vowed to help her, and we’ve been doing random activities together ever since. Just to ignite a modicum of inspiration. Flight lessons, roller derby, and most recently, cake decorating.

  BELLS DING as Farrow holds a door open to a polished city bakery. I was a centimeter away from grabbing the knob first.

  “I’m just faster than you,” Farrow says, near-laughter as my scowl deepens.

  On land maybe. “And so much more humble too.” I know he only lets me enter the bakery before him because it’s empty. Bought-out for a couple hours by Jane.

  A few weeks ago, her bodyguard retired too, and Akara assigned a new face to Jane. Twenty-year-old Quinn Oliveira is the youngest bodyguard in the team, and he’s earning his stripes by starting on Jane’s detail.

  I don’t know him that well. Just that he’s a former pro-boxer, Brazilian-American, and his older brother is another bodyguard on SFO. Quinn’s inexperience doesn’t bother me. Everyone has to start somewhere, but I do find it strange that they’re letting Farrow train him. Christ, Farrow practically threw out my rules on day one. He’s not the ideal bodyguard role model.

  Quinn looms by the bakery’s sprinkle rack. Right near the store window for optimum entrance security.

  And where there’s a Quinn, there has to be a Jane.

  I leave Farrow at the bakery-front. Attempting my best to glance back only one time. Not half a million. Farrow rests his knee on a stubby wooden stool and quietly talks to Quinn.
My bodyguard motions towards the entrances and exits, probably giving him tips or something.

  I walk deeper into the bakery. And my smile forms the instant I spot my best friend.

  Hands perched on her wide hips, Jane surveys the artistic chalkboard menu as though this one decision will determine her whole future.

  Pale blue cat-eye sunglasses perch on long, frizzy brunette hair. Jane’s as unique as her style: mint-green pants, frilly Victorian sleeves beneath a Zebra-print sweater, mismatched sequined heels, and a watermelon-shaped purse—no one can duplicate or clone this girl.

  She’s patented one-of-a-kind, and I’m not letting go of her. Not anytime or day or year. I love her too damn much.

  Approaching fast, I steal her gaze and watch her own smile take shape.

  In seamless French, I say, “Bonsoir, ma moitié.” Good evening, my other half. I kiss both of her freckled cheeks.

  Her long lashes shade poised, blistering blue eyes. “It’s just you and me, old chap.”

  Nearly at the same time, her arms wrap around my waist and mine slide around her shoulders. I draw her into a warm hug.

  My muscles start to loosen like I’m home.

  You know Jane Eleanor Cobalt as the oldest Cobalt child out of seven. The twenty-two-year-old pastel-loving, cat-hoarding girl who invites you into her life like a friend. You’ve seen Instagram videos of her burning French toast, trying on a new pair of pants, and reading passages of old literature.

  You also pressure her to become a math professor and to advocate for women in STEM. And you pry about who she’s dating or not dating—but you’re not sure if it’s “serious” between them.

  I know her as Janie.

  My best friend, ma moitié. One month apart in age, but she’s a million light-years smarter. A girl who breathes loyalty like it’s a third lung. Who will sacrifice every day, minute, and second for the people she loves.

  Fair warning: I’ll break both of your kneecaps and stake your head on a pitchfork if you fuck with her. Glad we have that covered.