Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 120326 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 602(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120326 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 602(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Robert lets out a little snicker and shakes his head. He finishes off his sandwich and goes to rinse the plate in the sink. When he turns back, he's smiling at me with his white teeth all showing. Okay, I never realised how creepy his smile could be.
“What are you grinning at?” I ask, trying to ignore the goose pimples on my arms.
Sasha hands me my cup of coffee and looks between the two of us questioningly.
“I think I'm going to enjoy having you around, Lana,” he says, his voice low. This is weird. He never calls me Lana; he always calls me by one of the many derogatory nicknames he deigns to think up.
“Rob, you better not start any of your usual shit with Lana. She's here to relax before she starts her Ph.D. She doesn't need you playing your games.” Sasha points her finger at him. “Seriously, I will fucking end you if you begin acting like a brat.”
Robert glances at me and raises one dark eyebrow. “You're doing a Ph.D.?”
I glance away and then back at him. “Uh, yes, when I go back home.”
He laughs. “Well, who would have thought you'd turn out to have a brain inside that little head.” He claps his hands together. “Come on, sis, let's show Lana to her new room.”
“Get lost, Rob. We're having coffee, and then I'll show Lana to her room. You shouldn't even be here, so you can make yourself scarce.”
I take a sip of my coffee as the two siblings square off. A moment later Robert slides right up next to me and puts an arm around my shoulders. “Aw, come on, I haven't seen my good friend Lana here properly in years. I want to stick around and play catch-up.”
My lungs freeze a little. His warm, muscled arm is on me, and I don't know how to feel about it. What new trick is he hatching? He's being nice, which is a first, but I don't believe it to be genuine. He can't have changed that much in six years, can he? To be honest, I'm sort of intrigued by his unexpected behaviour. Don't get me wrong, I'm not falling for it, but I want to see where he's going with this.
Sasha seems exasperated by him. She glances at me. “You mind if he hangs out with us?”
I shrug and reply, “I'm easy.”
Robert squeezes my shoulders and peers down at me with an evil grin. “Are you, now?”
Sasha marches towards him and pulls him off me. “Don't start, Rob — that's your last warning.”
Robert raises his hands in the air in surrender. “Fine, fine, I'll behave,” he says, giving me a wink behind his sister's back. I narrow my gaze at him.
Sasha gestures for me to follow her, and we go upstairs to see my room, carrying our coffee cups with us. Robert trails behind. My room is at the very front of the house, and I smile in delight when I see that it's one of the rooms with the bay windows. In my head I'm visualising making a little nook where I can sit and read.
It also has an en-suite bathroom and a double bed. A moment later, Sasha's mobile phone begins ringing from where she left it down in the kitchen.
“Crap, that might be work. I'll be right back,” she says, and then dashes from the room.
I stand there, fiddling with the hem of my cardigan sleeve. Robert plops himself down on the bed. He leans back on his elbows with his legs spread wide, watching me with one end of his mouth tilted up. I turn away and walk over to the window to look out at the view of the other houses across the street.
“So, what do you think of the place?” he asks.
Turning my head to him, I reply honestly, “It's very...high end. A whole other world from back home.”
“You could certainly say that. My parents come from entirely different backgrounds. I don't know what Dad ever saw in Mum, to be perfectly honest.”
This is typical of the harsh things Robert is famous for coming out with (and sometimes I think he says them just to piss people off). His mother is one of the nicest people I know; her background shouldn’t even come into it.
“You really are an awful excuse for a human being, you know that? You're lucky to have a mother like Liz. She's a rock. Your dad might be rich, but he's flighty.”
Okay, maybe I shouldn't have said that, but it's true. Alan is what you would call a fair-weather father. He likes to be around his kids when it's fun and exciting, but if anything bad is happening you won't see hide nor hair of him.
“Flighty?” Robert repeats the word back to me like a question, testing out the sound of it on his tongue.
“You know he is, Rob. Remember when Sasha broke her leg that time during a game of basketball and had to have surgery? He never came to see her, didn't even send her a ‘get well soon’ card.”
“Well, now, you've certainly grown a pair of balls these past few years. Who knew you actually had the ability to express an opinion, Lana?”
When I was younger I would do my best to be as insulting to Robert as he was to me, but most of the time he hurt me so badly that I didn't have the strength to fight back. I'd end up getting what I like to call “crying eyes” and red cheeks, and then I'd run home before he had the chance to notice he was getting to me.
One such incident was when my mum got me a new bike for my thirteenth birthday. When I left it out in my front garden Robert stole it, slashed the tires, and threw it into the sea at the beach just beyond our houses. Liz grounded him for a month when she found out what he'd done, and he actually had the gall to blame me for telling on him.