Her Sexy Roommate

Dean.

Why does it feel like I’m being watched? Usually I wouldn’t care who checked me out, but today I stand naked in my bedroom. Who wouldn’t want a piece of six foot three inches of pure muscle? Still, I can’t help but feel a little self-conscious. Something doesn’t feel right. I’m facing the ocean. My tenth floor apartment is way too high for anyone on the beach to get a clear view of me. I draw the curtains closed anyway. I’m not a person that’s easily creeped out yet goosebumps dot my entire body. With the curtains shut, I relax a little. I prefer spending the morning naked. I wouldn’t mind a hot girl checking me out – but being creeped out takes things to a whole new level.

I’m about to doze off when my phone pings signaling someone has mentioned me somewhere on the internet. I’m tempted to ignore the alert but a series of pings follow. Who could possibly be mentioning me multiple times? I mean I know I have a history but I’ve worked hard since the infamous accident to rebuild my life and move on. I haven’t done anything else since the accident to draw any attention to myself so why the sudden online frenzy? I reach for my phone, dreading what I’m about to see. What if someone remembered the accident after all these years? Damn! Everything I’ve worked so hard for won’t matter. Only the accident and Dana’s death will matter.

It’s a little unfair.

I punch in the code on my phone and tap on the first alert notification which takes me to a blog.

California's Top Ten Spoiled Rich Brats.

I’m on top of that list. One Lace Higgins has compiled a list of “brats”. Does she think I’m two years old? Lord! I wish I could find this Lace right now and make her remove her offensive article. I check the comments and notice that more than a thousand comments have already been made within an hour of publication. The blog has probably been shared thousands of times, and I bet there are already copies of it elsewhere on the internet and the deep web. After all, everybody loves a scandal right?

All traces of sleep vanish. I wish I could take sleeping pills but I swore never to abuse prescription medication, take drugs, or drink alcohol since the night of the accident. I’ve been sober for eighteen months, and don’t plan on losing my sobriety chip.

Flashbacks to the night of the accident haunt me for a few minutes. I spent months in therapy just to be able to make it through the day because every time I thought of the accident I broke out in a cold sweat before collapsing. My mother had gone to great lengths to ensure that nobody spoke of the accident again but my parent’s money could not buy the silence of the world wide web.

I turn my phone on silent when it starts ringing. I don’t even care who’s calling. All I know is that I never want to speak of the accident again. The only choice I have is to do the one thing that’s kept me sane all these years. I need to get my ass to my business classes. It’s the one thing I can count on to help me forget all about the accident.

It’s also the one place where I can meet the only person I trust in this world, my best friend, Jason. I tried calling him but I guess he is still a little busy or sleeping because he didn’t pick up.

***

Lace.

What have I done? “No. No. No.” My voice echoes in the silence of my apartment. I should not have listened to Alison, my best friend, and published such a tabloid like piece on my blog. I normally prefer neutral pieces which get the odd comment or two. I check my phone. My blog has over ten thousand comments. Well, even if ten thousand people know Dean St James, I, Lace Higgins have never heard of him. I send a silent prayer to my guardian angels and ask them to keep Dean from reading my blog. I don’t want him to even know my blog exists. What if he confronts me about it, or worse, slap me with a lawsuit? How will I, a temporary teacher substitute, manage to pay him back. I glance at some of the comments. Apparently, Dean is heir to a billion-dollar fortune. Hmm. I bet young women throughout the country are fawning over him. I turn my phone off when it pings continuously. The sound is stuck in my head.

I glance at the clock on my living room wall. It’s almost seven a.m. I need to be at school by seven thirty a.m. Drat. I throw on a blouse that doesn’t need ironing, and a pair of pull on pants. Thankfully, I manage to get dressed at 7:15. The school I’m temping at is just a five-minute walk away from my apartment. I switch my phone on and mute all notifications. I really don’t want to know how well my blog is doing. Alison suggested I write something sensational to grow my followers before I self-publish my young adult paranormal romance in the next two months. Her suggestion seems to be working. So far, my followers have jumped from two hundred to around twelve thousand. That’s more than enough to get the word out when I do garner up the courage to self-publish ‘Beast Next Door’, the book I’m hoping will launch my career as a young adult bestseller. More followers meant more people would see my book promotions – if and when I published my book.

I must have zoned out while walking to work because before I know it, I’m outside the school. Screaming kids and honking cars pull me out of my thoughts and into reality. For now, my blog, Dean St James, and my future best-selling book don’t exist.

Dean Students snicker and stifle their laughter when they notice me. How immature. I have more respect for anyone that says whatever they want to my face than for someone that whispers crap about me thinking I am unaware of what’s going on. However, I have very little respect for bloggers at this time. Bloggers, especially Lace Higgins, suck. I search for Jason, my best friend since kindergarten. There’s no sign of him yet. I’m guessing he’s still on his way.

"I don’t believe this." I’m tempted to slam my fist into a wall but what good will that do? It won’t solve anything.

"You okay, Dean?" Jason sneaks up on me.

I have never been so relieved or grateful to see someone ever. Words threaten to spew incoherently from my mouth so I concentrate on taking deep, healing breaths for a few moments. "Yeah. I'm just pissed off because my damn life's going so God-damned perfectly!" Trust Jason to ask the obvious. I really don’t need that right now.

Jason winces at my choice of words. He's a real calm ass, even when his entire existence is threatened. I swear my best friend has balls made from the minerals of the Dead Sea. I can count on one hand the number of times Jason has lost his temper since I’ve known him.

"And who screwed up your perfect reality?" He adjusts his glasses and joins me on the steps leading to the Economics lecture hall at Sunford University. I chose to attend a less popular university to complete my studies to escape the unwanted attention, and constant reporters always keeping the memory of the one car accident that will haunt me for the rest of my life alive. Perhaps, it would have been better if I left the country altogether.

“Well? Who messed up your morning?” Jason asks.

I realize I never answered his initial question.

"A little cyber Miss Know-It-All who thinks she's a tabloid queen." I hold up my phone so Jason can get a better look at the nasty blog post one Lace Higgins uploaded this morning.

California's Top Ten Spoiled Rich Brats 1. Dean St. James The bratty son of supermodel turned humanitarian Shania St. James and software millionaire Elton St. James is a recovering alcoholic and has served a grand total of two weeks’ community service after being convicted of driving under the influence two years ago. Has it done him any good? Sources close to us suggest Dean St. James isn't such a saint...

Our number one super brat earns the super brat crown for screwing up his superstar genes before his twenty-first birthday.

My phone goes crazy as the comments blow up while Jason reads the blog post. My blood heats up until my head spins. The blogger’s dumb choice of words described me as a frivolous wild-child – yet I’ve worked hard in the last few years to turn my life around. She has no idea what it’s taken to shrug off the image the media painted of me just to get more people to read their stories. Some female bloggers these days will do anything to boost their popularity and they don’t care who they hurt while doing it.

"God knows what I'll do to her if I ever find her." I wish I could shake some sense into her, and perhaps force her to listen in painstaking detail to everything that I’ve had to endure while rebuilding my image in the last few years.

"It's just her opinion," Jason says. "There is no need to get so worked up about it."

"She thinks she knows me." The journalists who wouldn’t leave me alone were the first to assume they knew me. Then there were my so-called friends and family who made up stuff about me that never happened. I’d managed to distance myself from them all – until Lace Higgins went sniffing in my past.

"She and half this country," Jason reminds me, “unfortunately you’re something of a celebrity and there is nothing any of us can do to change that.”

I am forced to agree with Jason. The whole world expects me to live up to my parents' perfect standards. The media constantly compares me to my father. They list his success and then next to each of my father’s successes, they list my failures. Yeah freaking right. People give a rats’ ass about the way I want to live my life. I guess actually being Dean St. James doesn't count. I will only do right in the eyes of those watching me if I emulate everything my father has ever achieved in his successful career. I sometimes feel like people are waiting for my next car accident to happen. Technically, people expect me to be an intelligent humanitarian who saves the world by day and writes intricate software by night.

I have nothing against saving the world—I do my bit for charity whenever I'm afforded the opportunity, but writing software? Heck, I have a hard enough time as it is writing tests, and I have yet to figure out if business school is the right place for me.

Jason pats my shoulder. "You need a workout, Dean."

He hits the gym if anything minutely epic stresses him out. He could pass for a WWE superstar, except his thick glasses and shaggy, blond hair flopping over his forehead make him look like a nerd.

"Don't take it personally. You know how these journalist types are always looking for a story to sensationalize."

"She's a blogger," I correct. "Not a journalist. She probably wishes she was a journalist and couldn’t get accepted at a university! Besides I don't care what she calls herself. She thinks she knows it all about when she knows zilch." I plan on getting my father’s legal team to call the blogger and threaten her if she doesn’t unpublished her post with my name in it, and follow it up with an apology.

Besides her ridiculous blog post has probably given my mother enough reason to resume her Prozac diet. The thought of my mother on my drugs makes me sick to the pit of my stomach. As it is, she is a nightmare to deal with off drugs and sober. She’s even worse to deal with when she’s high or numbed with prescription drugs. Lace Higgins unleashed a lethal storm when she hit publish on her blog last night. She obviously didn’t think before she chose me as one of the topics for her blog.

Jason pats my shoulder. "You need to work your anger off. Keeping stuff inside isn't good for the soul."

I know Jason means well. He always has my best interests at heart. He doesn’t believe in holding on to anger or any other negative emotion or energy. "My reputation is far more important right now. If this story doesn’t die out soon, I’ll end up right where I started. The last thing I want is to start drinking again just for a few moments of numbing the pain, or letting the past drive me crazy. I'm going to find that two-bit cyber celebrity and teach her a lesson she'll never forget. I want to know if she ran out of topics to write on. Why did she have to pick me?