Read Online Stepbrother Wow! (Bad Boy Frat #1) by Claire Adams - Free Book Online

snacks on the coffee table, trying to
find something he wanted to eat.
    “You haven’t been around at all, and I thought maybe
you’d come down with something. You missed a great game the other night—Notre
Dame versus Duke.” I thought about it. If Jeremy had thought that I was sick,
he clearly didn’t know the real reason I’d been staying away—which meant that
he probably didn’t know about what had happened between Jaxon and me.
    “I’m just burned out on midterms
studying, that’s all. I caught the game in my room.”
    “So come by tomorrow night—there’s a Preds -Maple Leafs game, we got Molson to celebrate.” I
laughed. If Jeremy didn’t know then maybe no one in the frat knew about
it—Jaxon had definitely been clear that he didn’t want to talk about it to me,
so he probably hadn’t talked to anyone else either. I thought about Jeremy’s
offer. I’d had more than enough of hanging out in the dorms; all of my laundry
was clean, all of my studying was up to date, I had nothing to do with myself
other than tool around on the Internet or watch the Predators game. I liked
hanging out with the guys; I had from the very beginning. If Jaxon wasn’t going
to make things weird, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t keep hanging out with my own
friends, even if they did belong to his frat.
    “I won’t miss it, man,” I said.
    When I got to the Phi Kappa house the next night,
I’d decided that I was just going to strictly hang out with my friends. I
wasn’t going to look for Jaxon, I wasn’t going to try and make him acknowledge
me in any way. Two could play the ignoring game, I thought to myself as I went
in behind Jeremy. Everyone hanging out in the living room cheered; one guy
proclaimed that the good luck charm was back, and he was sure to clear the
betting pool with me there. Someone made room for me on the couch and for a
little while it was exactly the way it had always been before things had gotten
complicated with Jaxon; the chatter flowed around me and I put in my own two
cents, dissing players, shouting at the refs, offering up my opinion on different
girls on campus that the guys wanted to get in bed.
    Jaxon came in after a while and I made myself not
look at him. If he wanted space, I would give it to him; I couldn’t help but
notice that while he tried to act normal, he didn’t talk to me even once, not
even when someone asked him outright to dispute something I’d said about the Preds . He was determined to ignore me—and it hurt a little
bit, but I told myself that if he was going to be petty, I wasn’t going to talk
to him either. I kept myself occupied watching the game, talking to the guys in
the frat who actually enjoyed my company, making sure that I didn’t seem like I
was there for Jaxon at all—I was there to hang out with guys I liked, with
people who were my friends. I would have been open to talking to Jaxon, at
least on the normal level we’d had before we’d had sex, but if he didn’t want
to I wasn’t going to force him. I would just enjoy myself, drink some beer,
kick some cash into the alcohol fund before I left, and move on with my life, just like he said. He couldn’t possibly take offense to
that, could he?
    It got easier for me after the first night, and
after a few weeks I stopped even trying to get Jaxon to notice me. I managed to
get through midterms without help from him on Biology; I returned to the Tau
Delta boys, who were more than happy to give me a hand and scraped by with a B
on the test. I would need to get another B on the next test and at least a C on
the final, but my grade would at least be good enough for my mom.
    I carried on as best as I could, going to classes
and hanging out at the frat house as much as I could. I felt awkward the first
few times I dropped by, thinking that soon everyone would know—that the truth
of the situation would come out and then everything would get weird. But no one
seemed to have any clue that anything had