If You Dare (Dare #3) — Chapter no 21

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

DEMI

I PULL UP to Austin’s house and knock on the door. Rocking back and forth on my heels, I wait for someone to answer. There wasn’t a car in the driveway, but I’m sure her Range Rover is in the garage. The guys aren’t here. I only came over because they have practice. I haven’t even gone home. I came straight from school because I wanted to get this over with before they returned home.

Just when I’m about to give up and turn away, the door swings open.

Austin stands before me in a pair of dark jeans, a white T-shirt, and her hair up in a messy bun. And she doesn’t look very happy.

“I’m sorry,” I say immediately. I never meant to hurt her.

She lets out a long sigh and steps to the side, allowing me to enter. “It’s not your fault,” she says, shutting the door.

“I should have never read it. I should have told you …”

She waves me off and walks to the kitchen. I follow her. She goes straight to the fridge and pulls out a bottle of wine. “Do you drink?”

“Yes.”

She pops the cork on the bottle, then she pours two drinks. “I prefer Fireball, but since it’s not five yet, I’ll keep it to a glass of Merlot.” I take the offered glass, and she raises hers. Knocking them together, she says, “To the friends we lose, and the lessons we learn.” Then she takes a big gulp of hers.

I sip on mine. “Have you heard from her?”

She nods. “She’s called me. I’ve ignored them.”

I look down at my drink. “I hate that she hurt you, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“I’m not mad about the journal. I mean, I am, but it’s what she said to me.” She sets the glass down, and her eyes meet mine. “I’m not with him because—”

“I know.” I interrupt her. “You don’t have to defend yourself to me, Austin.”

My sister read her journal, and anyone who knows Cole and Austin knows that their love is real. Becky just wanted to hurt her and knew exactly what to say in order to accomplish that.

She gives another nod and throws back her wine.

I take another sip of mine.

“So enough about me and onto you,” she says, faking a smile.

I sigh. “There’s nothing about me to be said.”

She quirks a brow. “Deke Biggs,” she says, and this time when I lift the glass of wine to my lips, I take more than just a sip. “You love him.”

I choke on it. “Hell no.”

She tilts her head to the side. “Then why did you sleep with him?”

“Did you love Cole the first time you slept with him?” I counter. I know she didn’t. Their first time was in a bathroom at a party. Deke stood outside the door and recorded it. Then someone uploaded it to social media the next day. I hate to say that I tried to find it, but it must have been taken down because it’s nowhere to be found now. I’m sure Cole made it disappear once he realized he loved her.

“No, but he also wasn’t previously in love with my sister. And I wasn’t a virgin.” She eyes me skeptically. “You slept with him for a reason, Demi.

He may not know that, but I do.”

I fall onto the barstool and place my elbows on the marble island.

“Would revenge make it any better?”

“I told you I’m not going to judge you.” She shrugs. “Everyone does something for a reason. I’m just trying to figure out why you did what you did.” She refills her drink. “I know why he slept with you.”

“Because he wanted to make my sister mad.”

She shakes her head. “It had nothing to do with her and everything to do with you.” I frown. Taking another drink, she smiles at me over the rim of her glass. “So I’ll ask you again. Do you love him?”

DEKE

I stand at my locker with a towel at my bare feet and my jeans pulled up to my hips but still undone. My shirt lies on the bench behind me.

Cole walks up next to me, also fresh out of the shower, and all he’s wearing is a towel draped around his neck. He yanks his locker open and picks up his phone. “Bennett called me.”

“And?” I ask.

He throws his phone back into the locker. “And I missed it. He left me a voicemail. I’ll call him back on the way home.”

I sit down on the bench and put my socks and tennis shoes on as Cole throws his towel down to the floor. He’s still pissy. This morning, Austin wouldn’t even look at him. As I suspected, she woke up pissed when she realized he had broken into Lilly’s room and carried her up to theirs. If I didn’t know she loved him, I’d half expect his clothes to be on fire in the front yard when we get back to the house.

The guys walk around the locker room after swim practice. We’ve just finished our showers. I’m ready to get the hell home and go to bed. I’m tired. I can’t survive on no sleep like Cole does.

“What did you do last night?” a guy by the name of Peter asks his friend Braden.

Cole and I aren’t close to the guys on the swim team like we were back in Collins. We keep our distance. They don’t try to be our friends, and we don’t go out of our way to be theirs.

“Seth came over,” he answers, sitting down on the bench a few spots down from me. “He brought his hot little girlfriend with him.”

Cole looks over his shoulder at me. I ignore him and keep listening to the guys.

“Damn, the high school bitch he’s fucking?” the guy asks.

He nods.

“Fuck, I’d be all over that every chance I got.”

He laughs. “Yeah, it was weird, though. She just sat there and drank while playing video games. They didn’t even talk much.”

Cole throws his towel into his locker and steps into his jeans without even bothering with his boxers.

“You should have jumped on that. I bet he would have shared her with you. I hear they have an open relationship.”

My hands fist. Is that what you call it? Then why did he get so pissed when he heard she was sleeping with me? I’ve seen him in class since then, but he’s sat down on the front row. He’s the last to show up to class and the

first one to run out once the professor releases us. He thinks he can run from me, but he can’t.

“Maybe that’s what he was waiting on,” the guy jokes.

“I know I’d share if she was mine. I’ll take that sweet ass while you take her mouth.”

And I’ve heard all I need to know. What the fuck has Seth been telling his friends? She was a fucking virgin, so I know they haven’t done much.

Hell, he’s never even eaten her out. And I saw the way she looked at my cock. She’d never seen one before. What makes these guys think that he would share her?

I stand and turn to face him, but Cole grabs my upper arm. “Don’t.”

I look over at him and growl. “What if it was Austin?”

He lets go of my arm and nods. “I got your back.”

“Fuck that mouth, I want her pussy …”

I step forward, gripping the guy’s hair, and I rip him from where he sits on the bench and shove him headfirst into the lockers.

________________

“What the hell happened?” Coach snaps as we all gather in his office.

I only got a few punches in before he came running into the locker room and broke it up. The bastards got off lucky.

“They jumped us,” Peter barks.

I snort. Fucking rats. I place my bloody hands behind my back and step forward. “They were discussing in much detail how they planned to, for lack of a better word, fuck a girl. At the same time. A girl who I know, Coach. And I didn’t feel comfortable listening to their derogatory comments. Especially since she is underage.”

Coach’s face instantly goes red. Our fathers taught us to do our research so before I took the scholarship at the University of Texas, I did some on Coach here. He has three sons and once had a daughter. She was an all-star athlete. Head cheerleader, played soccer, softball and ran track. One Saturday morning, she left her parents’ house for a run. They called the police three hours later when she didn’t return. Two days later, they found her body twenty feet off the running path. She was completely naked. The man had sexually assaulted her and strangled her with a shoelace. He pulled it so tight that it was still embedded in her neck. She was only a junior in

high school. The report went on to say that her boyfriend told the police to look at Rodger Simmons, a swimmer at UT, because he had been calling and harassing her. I knew I wanted to come here when I read that he left town and never returned. Never to be heard from again. Of course, Coach was a suspect in his disappearance, but it’s all about what you can prove, not what you think. That’s why he’s here with us, and Rodger’s rotting

corpse was never found.

“Coach …” Braden begins.

“Shut the fuck up!” he orders, placing his fisted hands on his desk and leaning over. “If you want to keep your scholarships, you will not breathe a word of it to anyone. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Coach,” we all answer in unison.

“Get the hell out,” he snaps.

We all turn to exit, but he stops us. “Except for Mr. Reynolds and Mr.

Biggs.”

Cole and I turn back around, and he points at the two seats in front of his

desk. “Sit.”

We do as we’re told.

He walks behind his desk and picks up two manila envelopes. “I’ve read your files, boys. And I didn’t like what I saw.” He looks at Cole. “You were arrested back in Collins for shooting your girlfriend and killing her stepmother.”

I watch Cole’s body go rigid out of the corner of my eye, and he grips the armrest on his chair. He still only wears his jeans. He didn’t have time to put a shirt on when I started throwing punches, and he jumped in.

“I was taken in for questioning, Coach. And released after proof of my innocence was found.”

“Ah, yes. And the friend of yours who committed the crime has never been seen again.” If I’m not mistaken, I would say Coach looks at him with pride. It takes a lot of planning and patience these days to kill a man and not get caught. If only he knew we did it by the seat of our pants and within minutes after we found him with Austin’s body. Sometimes you just have to work with what you got. Then he looks at me. “I have no doubt you helped him.” He quirks a brow.

I just cross my arms over my chest, and he nods once as if he understands that my loyalty lies with Cole.

He goes on. “Your father shipped you off to boarding school at the age of ten.” My teeth grind. “Wanna tell me why they kicked you out after three months?”

“They said I was unteachable,” I answer honestly. “And they believed I was possessed.”

Cole chuckles, and I smile. It’s the truth. My father sent me to an all-boys boarding school in Switzerland. I found him in the kitchen with his hand around my mother’s throat, and I ran at him with a knife. After he beat the shit out of me, he shipped me away. The man was afraid I was going to kill him in his sleep. My mom begged me not to. It wasn’t until years later, once I was older, that I understood why she was with him and put up with his shit —money. Bitch loves money as much as he loves having his options of pussy.

They had it out for me the moment I arrived at the boarding school, so I had to live up to my reputation, of course. I played a few pranks here and there, which all landed me in deep water. But the final straw was when I beat the shit out of three boys at once in the boys’ bathroom. It didn’t matter that they jumped me, and I kicked their ass. They kicked my ass out. Even my father’s money couldn’t keep me there. They had a no tolerance rule and told him I was the spawn of Satan. If they only knew how true that was.

He gives us his back and looks out his floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooks the courtyard of the university. “Your accolades spoke higher than your behaviors.” He spins back around and stares at both of us. “Don’t make me regret giving you both this chance.”

“Yes, Coach,” we both say.

He nods and sits down in his chair. “Go home, boys, and come back tomorrow ready to swim until your muscles ache to the point you’ll have to crawl out of the pool.”