The Girl Next Door

  When it comes to love, go big or go home.

  Bend or Break, Book 3

  Charles “Cash” Carmichael traded his high-rise condo and family-firm career for a job coaching soccer for Chicago’s inner-city kids. He’s adjusting to living on minimum wage when his young cousin, newly out and running away from home, shows up on his less-than-luxurious doorstep.

  Angsty teens definitely aren’t Cash’s thing. He needs local backup, and there’s only one name he can think of: Stephany Tyler. Back in the day, the bisexual Steph was the perfect friend with benefits until she fell in love with a woman.

  To his relief, his former friend steps up to the plate. Soon, though, Cash finds himself feeling the familiar need to keep her in his bed, and in his life. But Steph, burned by the ex-girlfriend and by the absentee dad she’s been trying to connect with, won’t risk her heart again.

  Good thing Cash believes in leaving it all on the field. If he can just convince Steph to get in the game, there’s a chance they can both win.

  Warning: This book contains ex-friends with benefits crossing boundaries a second time, several steamy encounters on staircases, copious discussions about gay sex from a “straight” guy, a shout-out to magic buttons, and an especially memorable going away threesome.

  The Girl Next Door

  Amy Jo Cousins

  Dedication

  To Christa, for the brilliant editing, the never-ending patience during a tough family time, and for not minding that I totally stole that line of dialogue you tossed out as a general suggestion in an email. This is a better book because of you. Thank you.

  Chapter One

  Halfway up the skinny, splintered stairs that crawled up the back of his apartment building, Cash Carmichael took a handlebar to the temple when the front wheel of his bike bounced off the brick as he maneuvered around a tight corner.

  “Sonuva—” A solid year of working with under-tens had him biting off the curse word before it squeezed all the way out. He hitched the piece-of-crap bike higher on his shoulder and mentally cursed the motherfucking bike thief who had stolen his motherfucking Focus Culebro.

  Living in a fourth floor walk-up made him miss his thousand dollar, light-as-a-feather aluminum frame road bike like he’d missed the Celtics making the finals during their twenty-year losing streak.

  It sucked monkey balls.

  Fucking bike thieves.

  How the hell was he supposed to know that it wasn’t safe to lock up your bike on the street in Chicago? He’d been at Wrigley goddamn Field, for fuck’s sake. Thirty-five thousand people on the street and a Kryptonite lock should’ve been a deterrent for a would-be thief.

  He’d had a cheaper but decent bike for exactly six days before it too was shanked right off his back porch. Obviously bike locks in Chicago suffered from some kind of curse, or were made of wishful fucking thinking.

  Now he had a piece-of-shit bike that no thief in their right mind would look at twice and a cheap chain lock, just to prevent small children from walking off with it. And the fucker weighed five times what his precious Culebro had.

  Bike thieves.

  Assholes.

  Rounding the corner to the third floor, he banged the wheel off the brick on purpose out of frustration, and then cursed out loud as the handlebar whacked him in the head again.

  “Gah!” he muttered as he hit his miniscule back porch, barely big enough to hold a tiny Smokey Joe grill and still be able to open his back door. Not that he’d used the damn thing more than once, after the first time he’d watched flames shooting high next to his rickety wood railing and pictured the whole thing going up in smoke.

  He lowered the bike and locked it up, catching his hundred-and-forty-seventh splinter on the edge of his hand while wrapping the chain lock around a railing.

  “Frickin’ rack-a-fracking…” God, he had to spend more time around grown-ups. With all his pseudo-cursing out loud, he’d started sounding like a G-rated, cartoon version of himself.

  As ever, when a sarcastic comeback popped into his brain, it came in Steph Tyler’s voice.

  Started? Try again, Carmichael.

  Even an imaginary Steph made him grin, though. The suckiest part about graduating college was leaving behind so many friends.

  Not that he and Steph had been spending tons of time together that last year. Guess that’s what happens when fuck buddies stop fucking. The buddy thing gets shot to hell too.

  He hadn’t thought it would happen to the two of them.

  The screen door banged loudly against the railing as he unlocked the door. Text the maintenance dude. Text the maintenance dude. Didn’t matter how many times he repeated the reminder to himself to get the spring that was supposed to pull the door shut fixed. By the time he got inside, dropped his shit and turned on the window AC unit, he’d have forgotten about the back door that banged wide open in every hint of a breeze.

  The air inside was hot enough to bake bread. Too hot for the AC, actually. Until the temperature dropped a little, the motor would only grind and groan and crash into ineffective fan blowing anyway. The unit, propped up on bricks and duct taped to the window frame, was only useful within a certain window of temperatures. From eighty to about ninety-three, he’d figured out. Hotter than that and it was a spectacularly unpleasant noisemaker.

  The late summer heat was supposed to have broken today. No such luck. He unplugged the box fan from the outlet by his bed and carried it back across his tiny unit. Chicago windows were hella weird, strangely wide and tall, and they almost always came in pairs with a six-inch wide column in between the two windows in the all-wood frame. Thank God, because he needed that second window all the time, to vent the stuffy, oven-like air after a day of being shut up. He’d kill for some cross-ventilation, but this wasn’t college. He couldn’t just open his door to the hall and try to create a draft out the windows that overlooked the alley. Turned out people—neighbors, most of whom still didn’t look him in the eye in the hall—thought that was weird.

  Well, not weird, exactly. More like a sign there’d been either a break-in, a burglary or worse, inside.

  He would have sworn the older lady from next door who’d turtled her head in from the hall the week he’d moved in was surprised to find him alive and happy and watching porn on his iPad.

  Okay, the porn probably wasn’t a surprise to anyone, except in the holy shit! way he’d jackknifed up off the bed.

  He’d sort of forgotten the door was open. Not like he’d had a hand down his shorts for crying out loud. Although he might, maybe, possibly have had a palm draped suggestively across his crotch. And since it was so fucking hot, he hadn’t been wearing anything except those silky basketball shorts.

  Nothing on top, nothing underneath.

  And yes, maybe his dick had been a tiny bit noticeable pressing out against the slippery fabric. But she was old, right? She’d probably seen it all a thousand times before, he’d told himself that night, after hearing the gasp from the door, jumping up, and then watching a white-haired grandma vanish out of sight as if she’d been taken down by a cheetah.

  Sure was hot enough to pass for the Serengeti.

  So, no cross-ventilation. But a box fan blowing out an open window still helped suck the hot air out, so he set it up before stripping down to his underwear. Which was sweaty.

  Gross.

  Cold shower time.

  And wasn’t that just extra depressing? He remembered when cold showers meant being so horny over a girl he was worn out jacking off to fantasies of her and he opted for the second best way to calm his dick down.

  This summer he’d been too fucking hot to get horny much. Although he had seriously ended up going home with more than one girl from a bar when she mentioned
that she had central air.

  An embarrassing reason to fuck someone, but sex was sex—i.e. almost always better than not having sex—and the lure of not sweating through his sheets again was hella strong.

  Cash didn’t believe in wasting guilt on shit that simple.

  If God, or Buddha, or the universe, or whoever, didn’t want him to go home with girls for a cool place to sleep, then He shouldn’t have let Cash’s cheapass landlord lie in the listing about the unit having air conditioning.

  Fair’s fair.

  But seriously, there was nothing like drenching himself in some nice cold water, rinsing the funktastic accumulation of an outdoor day’s worth of sweat from his ass and soaping the hell out of his balls. Because holy chafing, Batman. It was too hot to run, unless he wanted to go at five a.m. before the sun came up—and that idea alone was worth a chuckle and an eye roll—but biking was still decent. Less effort, better breeze. The chafing was killing him, though. He’d always thought the guys at the bike shop were bullshitting when they’d sold him the expensive seat for the Culebro, but whichever ass moron had “designed” the junker he rode now had definitely not known how to keep a bike seat from rubbing the skin off his inner thighs.

  Ouch.

  He patted himself dry, gently, walked out of the tiny bathroom and flopped onto his unmade bed. He was cool. He was clean. It was glorious. Food was required, though it was too hot to cook anything. Eating frozen peas out of the bag sounded all right. Or maybe a smoothie. He tried to remember the last time he’d eaten a hot meal at night and couldn’t think of anything except the Happy Hour burger he’d had at Mickey Schmick’s right at the beginning of the heat wave. Five bucks for a McCormick & Schmick’s burger. Score.

  Less than two minutes later, he started sweating again.

  Not score.

  He thought about running his shower on cold and hanging out in the bathroom for a while, having learned from experience he could cool down the small space pretty impressively with the shower curtain open. But the guilt was a killer. Back in college, Steph had always been up his ass about recycling and reducing his humans-fuck-up-the-environment footprint. She and Reese had brainwashed Reese’s boyfriend Tom in a heartbeat—Cash always figured there’d been some kind of blowjob-withholding threat involved in that one, because he’d never known Tom to give a shit about the environment, at least not before Tom’s dad went to prison and Tom became, like, a totally nicer person by the time he returned to campus—but Cash had held out.

  True, he’d mostly held out because it was fun to watch Steph lose her shit at him. If she got really pissed, she’d had a tendency to tackle him physically to the ground, and being straddled on the floor by a fired-up Steph had never been a bad thing. But Cash had always been a sucker for a sob story, so mostly the Mama Earth guilt got to him.

  Couldn’t run a cold shower just to fake-AC his crappy studio. Couldn’t make himself throw batteries in the fucking trash anymore. Could barely stomach buying non-Fair Trade coffee, but that shit was expensive, man, so he’d gotten over that one quick once he’d taken the job of his dreams: the one that came with the paycheck barely above minimum wage.

  He rolled over onto his back and stretched his hands over his head, his junk flopping against his thigh. Fuck, it was hot. Listening to himself, it was clear the heat made him even dumber than usual. When the voices in his head started boring even him, it was time to find something else to do.

  If only he’d stopped to pick up empanadas or some tamales at the corner. But he’d just wanted to get home. He was still adjusting to school being back in session and by the end of the week, his ass was dragging. Plus, he was trying not to buy that ready-made stuff when he had food at home he should be eating. If he wanted to have more than two beers on Friday night—is tomorrow Friday? really? how did that happen?—then he had to watch his budget like a hawk. Wasting ten bucks on tamales when he had crap to eat at home was a killer.

  His year-two raise was supposed to show up in this first paycheck of the school year, but he’d figured out that, after taxes, he was going to see about thirty-six dollars more every two weeks. Hey, he wasn’t turning it down, but he wasn’t exactly rolling in the Benjamins either. Or the Washingtons, frankly, if that was who was on the ones. He was seriously considering hinting to the parents at the school where he coached that he was available for weekend babysitting.

  Except the families at the school where he coached were nothing like the people he grew up with, who hadn’t thought twice about dropping sixty bucks on the babysitter to enjoy dinner and a movie out. Most of the kids in his school lived with extended family members in the home, so even if mom and dad wanted to hit the town one night, their abeulas or tias or tios were probably on hand to watch them.

  God, he missed rich people with ready cash.

  But that’s why you’re in Chicago, not Boston, buddy. Suck it up.

  Still, his parents—

  He sat up like a marionette whose strings had been yanked.

  His parents.

  Money.

  “Hells yeah, baby!” He rolled off the bed and stalked to the door. “Happy early birthday to meeeee!”

  His mom had emailed him that morning to tell him she’d put a check in the mail to him for his birthday. Which kind of made him want to scream, because wasn’t that just like her, to write a check and put it in the mail? Who did that anymore? He was just happy his big move away from home, and quitting his job at the family firm, hadn’t meant getting cut off from the birthday money. Gifts were totally still appreciated, even if he wouldn’t let them buy anything else for him. When his birthday check hadn’t arrived two weeks early like it usually did, he’d started to worry.

  “Hello? You can QuickPay me in three seconds. There’s totally an app for that,” he muttered, before stopping himself with one hand on the doorknob.

  If he’d thought the neighbor lady had had white hair the last time she’d seen him…

  Right. Clothes. Or, at least, shorts. Of the non-slinky variety, preferably. And although he honestly didn’t see what the big deal was about walking down three flights of stairs to the lobby and back up without a shirt on, the glares he’d gotten last time he’d tried it had made it clear that was some kind of Latino faux pas. Or maybe he lived in a building with especially weird rules.

  Hard to say. His Spanish was coming along, but definitely not up to conversations about cultural issues like showing your nipples in semi-public scenarios. That was, like, next-level shit.

  He pulled on a clean but skanky sleeveless shirt he’d attacked with a pair of scissors on a previous, desperately hot occasion. Slipped on his flip-flops, so he didn’t get the stink-eye for that either. Then he yanked the door open and strode into the hall.

  “Holy shit!” He jumped over the body on the floor and slammed against the wall opposite his door, slapping his palms up just in time to keep from plowing his face into the plaster.

  Fuck, that hurt. He’d taken more than his usual number of miskicked balls to the face that day and blocking them all had left his forearms pretty battered. His spastic hurdle into the wall wasn’t helping.

  “What the hell?” Which was a lot of cursing. For him. Now. His friends from college would have laughed to hear that Cash was a demure, almost nonexistent curser these days. At least out loud.

  The kid who’d ambushed him by stretching out for a nap in his doorway scrambled to his feet, grabbing a stuffed backpack off the floor. They were eye-to-eye across the hall, the boy still at that late teen age where he’d hit six feet but hadn’t filled out yet, all bony elbows and knees in his khaki cargo shorts and a wrinkled, short-sleeved button down. Best guess was he’d slept in those clothes, and not just in the hallway.

  And a white kid. What’s he doing here? He’d already figured out the white kids who moved to Pilsen for the art scene lived in nicer buildings than his.

  Cash shook his head, cranky and confused and ignoring the growing feeling he knew this kid from somewhe
re. “Dude. What the fuck?”

  “Oh, hey. You’re home.” The kid looked perplexed, staring back and forth from the open apartment door to Cash as if wondering where Cash had materialized from. The boy’s blond hair hung in his face in that frigging Justin Bieber haircut every dude under the age of twenty seemed to go for these days. What the hell was wrong with kids today? And how could they see where they were going?

  That’s it. I am officially old. Vibrating like the lingering echo of a church bell rung hard, the feeling he knew this kid hummed just beyond the edge of thought. He ran his fingers through his own short hair and pulled hard, hoping the good yank would clear the confusion from his brain.

  Nope.

  Not that he wasn’t used to operating while having no idea what the fuck was going on.

  “Yeah, well, I live here. And unless there’s a new rent-a-carpet square scheme in the building, you don’t.” But the bells were ringing hard now. Clang! Clang! Clang!

  “It’s me, Cash. Denny.” The kid flipped his hair back, thank Christ, with a swing of his head. Wide mouth. What Cash had come to recognize as people-with-money straight teeth. Big blue eyes staring at Cash as the boy grabbed the back of his own neck with one hand and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  Denny?

  Cash had always wanted to be one of those people who were quick on the uptake, but he’d learned long ago to smile and fake it. Acting like you knew what the fuck was going on could get you through ninety percent of the time.

  This might be a ten percent encounter, though.

  The kid’s eyes were getting bigger, and he’d started biting his lip too. “I’m Uncle Billy and Aunt Caroline’s kid?” He said it as if he weren’t a hundred percent sure.

  The sound of the gears in Cash’s brain finally catching and clicking together might have been audible. “Ahhh! Got it. Um, hey.”

  They did the awkward, one-arm, dude-hug thing, more like a shoulder bump than anything else, because finding your cousin’s kid—Cash called them aunt and uncle, but they were really cousins once removed or something—on your doorstep a thousand miles from home was still fucking confusing. So his hostess skills took a minute to kick in.