Bad Girl Reputation by Elle Kennedy

Fed up, I throw sand in his face and climb to my feet, brushing myself off. I shrug in response to Mac’s looks of exasperation.

“He started it.”

She rolls her eyes.

“You’re up to something.” Shaking sand out of his hair, Cooper stands up and snarls at me like he’s ready for round two. “What is it?”

“Eat shit.”

“Quit it, will you?” Mac, ever the peacemaker, utterly fails to get through to him. “You’re both being ridiculous.”

I don’t particularly care that Coop’s suspicious or annoyed. It’s whatever. But he’s got this perpetual sense of entitlement to know and have an opinion on everything I do—and I’m so over it. Over him acting out his hang-ups on me. My twin brother playing a poor approximation of a father I never asked for.

“Can we move on?” Mac says in frustration, glancing between the two of us. “Please?”

But it’s too late now. I’m pissed, and the only thing that will make me feel better is rubbing it in his self-righteous face. “It’s Shelley.”

Cooper comes up short. His face is expressionless for a moment, as if he isn’t sure he heard me right. Then he smirks, shaking his head. “Right.”

I throw my phone at him.

He looks at the screen, then at me. All humor and disbelief has been replaced by cold, quiet rage. “Your brain fall out of your head?”

“She’s getting better.”

“Jesus Christ, Evan. You get how stupid you sound?”

Rather than answer, I glance at Mac. “This is why I didn’t tell him.”

When I turn back, Cooper’s up in my face, all but standing on my toes. “That woman was ready to run off with our life savings and you just, what, go crawling back to Mommy the first chance you get?”

I set my jaw and back away from him. “I didn’t ask you to like it. She’s my mother. And I’m not kidding—she’s making a real effort, man. She has a steady job, her own apartment. She enrolled in beauty school to get her hairdressing certificate. Hasn’t had so much as a sip of booze in months.”

“Months? You’ve been doing this behind my back for months? And you actually believe her crap?”

I swallow a tired sigh. “She’s trying, Coop.”

“You’re pathetic.” When he spits out the words, it’s like he’s had them sitting in his mouth for twenty years. “The time for getting over your mommy issues was when you stopped sleeping with a night-light.”

“Dude, I’m not the one flying off the handle at the mention of her.”

“Look at what you’re doing.” He advances on me, and I take another step back, only because I was just praising my self-restraint to Gen earlier. “One drunk, deadbeat woman walks out on you, so you go fall in love with another one. Man, you can’t hang on to either one of them, and you never will.”

My fist itches to put a dent in Cooper’s face. He can say what he wants about our mother. He’s earned his anger the honest way. But no one talks like that about Gen while I’m around.

“Because you’re my blood, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” I tell him, my voice tight with restraint. “But if you feel like you got too many teeth in your mouth, go ahead and try that shit again.”

“Hey, hey.” Mac wedges herself between us and manages to walk Coop back a couple paces, though his glare still says he’s thinking about my offer. “Both of you take it down a notch.” She puts both hands on Cooper’s chest until he drops his gaze to hers. A few breaths later, she’s got his attention. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but maybe give Evan the benefit of the doubt.”

“We tried that last time.” He flicks his gaze to me. “How’d that turn out?”

“Okay,” she says quietly. “But this is now. If Evan says Shelley’s making an effort, why not trust him? You could go have a look for yourself. If you’d be open to meeting her.”

He tears away from Mac. “Oh, fuck off. Both of you. This ganging up stuff isn’t cute most of the time, but about this?” Cooper levels Mac with a withering glare. “Mind your goddamn business.”

At that, he storms off, marching back up to the house.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time he’s lost his cool over Shelley, and it’s not likely to be the last. Mac has more experience with his tantrums than she should. Which is to say, she isn’t fazed.

“I’ll work on him,” she promises me with a sad smile before going after him.

Well. No one walked away bloody. We might call that a success, under the circumstances.

I don’t hold out much hope for Mac’s mission, though. Cooper’s been burned one too many times, so I can’t say his reaction is entirely unwarranted. In our family history, Shelley’s done more wrong than right, the worst of it practiced on Coop, as he was always the one trying to protect me from her latest betrayal. His self-imposed, older-by-three-minutes big brother complex insisted it was his job to shield me from the awful truth: that our mom was unreliable at best and downright malicious at worst.

So I get it. Because now it feels like I’ve betrayed him, thrown all the brothering back in his face to take her side. But the thing is, while he reached his tolerance for her a long time ago, I’ve still got some left. And I have to believe people can change. I need to believe it.