The Hookup Equation: A Loveless Brothers Novel Read online

  The Hookup Equation

  A Loveless Brothers Novel

  Roxie Noir

  Copyright © 2020 by Roxie Noir

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover: Coverlüv

  Editor: Honey Palomino

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Epilogue

  Never Enough

  Chapter One

  About Roxie

  For all the women brave enough to use the men’s room sometimes.

  Fuck the patriarchy.

  Chapter One

  Thalia

  I put my head down on my arms and groan.

  “Come on,” commands Victoria from across the table. “You got this. You can do it.”

  “We believe in you!” Harper adds, on my right. “Go, Thalia! Go! Go! Chug!”

  “Chug?” asks Margaret, cool, calm, and collected on my left.

  “Chug… knowledge?” Harper says. “Look, I’m just getting into the spirit of the thing.”

  “You know, chug knowledge,” Victoria deadpans. “The common phrase that people say all the time?”

  “See?” says Harper.

  I lift my head, rest my chin on my arms, and look at Margaret again. She’s holding six fingers up in front of her face, the answer sheet in front of her, and trying not to laugh at Harper.

  “Which ones do we have?” I ask.

  Margaret clears her throat and looks down at our answer sheet.

  “Chastity,” she starts. “The easy one.”

  “Is it?” asks Victoria, and Margaret just grins.

  “Charity,” she goes on. “Temperance.”

  Harper snorts.

  “Kindness, patience, and humility. Props to Victoria for coming up with that last one.”

  “Thank you.”

  Margaret and Victoria clink their glasses together, then each drink.

  “I don’t know,” I tell them, carefully resting my forehead against my fist. “Fortitude? Is that a virtue?”

  “It sounds like it could be,” Margaret says.

  “Filling up the gas tank in a borrowed car,” I say, still staring at the tabletop, willing my brain to work better. “Picking up litter that isn’t even yours? Making more coffee if you take the last cup? Remembering to wipe the stove down after you do the dishes.”

  “Pretty sure it’s gonna be one word,” Margaret says.

  “I like fortitude,” Harper says. “It sounds right.”

  “It’s not,” I say. “Arrrrrgh.”

  Victoria puts her elbows down on the table, silver bracelets clanking, then leans toward me, her red lipstick bright against her ebony skin, her hair bouncing gently with the motion.

  “Thalia,” she says, very, very seriously. “You attended twelve years of Catholic school.”

  “Thirteen,” I correct.

  “Thirteen years of Catholic school,” she says, not missing a beat. “Thirteen years of itchy wool skirts, ugly sweaters, and nuns. Thirteen years of getting your knuckles smacked by rulers. Thirteen years of no boys. And you know why?”

  Victoria pauses dramatically. She’s got a flair for this sort of thing.

  “Why?” I ask, totally drawn in.

  “For this moment,” she goes on. “I don’t believe in coincidences, Thalia. You went to Catholic school for a reason, and that reason is this very bar trivia question.”

  Victoria can sometimes get kind of intense after she’s had a few drinks, and that means she’s taking this bar trivia night really seriously.

  “You have it in you,” she goes on. “I know you’ve got that seventh virtue knocking around somewhere in that brain of yours. Come on, Catholic school. Come on.”

  “Come on, Catholic school!” Harper hoots, pumping one fist in the air.

  She’s had a few more drinks than the rest of us. She’s the birthday girl, after all.

  “Cath. Lick. School!” Harper says, slowly, pumping that fist. “Cath. Lick school! Come on!”

  “Oh God,” I mutter.

  “Ask for all the intercessions you want,” Victoria says, sitting back, spreading her hands wide. “Francis? Christopher? Mary, you up there? Help a girl out!”

  Right above us, the speaker crackles.

  “All right, you’ve got another sixty seconds to name as many of the seven virtues as you can for our free drink round!” the trivia host says. “Then it’s on to pop culture. Hope you’ve been paying attention to the movies this year!”

  “Cath-lick school!” Harper says again, motioning for Margaret and Victoria to join in. “Come on! CATH-LICK SCHOOL!”

  “CATH-LICK SCHOOL! CATH-LICK SCHOOL!”

  Now all three are chanting. Margaret’s banging the table. I squeeze my eyes shut, fingers pinching the bridge of my nose.

  Nothing.

  I know I know it, but I can’t think of the seventh virtue to save my life.

  Instead, I take a drink of my whiskey ginger.

  Still nothing. I take another sip.

  Maybe six is enough, I think. Do the other teams even know six virtues?

  Six virtues are plenty, right?

  I put my glass back down on the table.

  As I do, the name of the seventh virtue hits me so hard I practically fall out of my chair, and I grab Margaret’s arm dramatically.

  “DILIGENCE!” I whisper-shout, trying to keep the other trivia teams from overhearing me. “IT’S DILIGENCE. D-I-L-I—"

  She’s already written it, because a pre-med college senior with a 3.9 GPA knows how to spell diligence.

  Margaret jumps off her chair without another word, pen still in hand, waving our answer sheet as she makes her way toward the trivia night moderator.

  “Go!” Harper shouts, unnecessarily.

  “Is that it? You’re sure?” Victoria asks. “You’re totally sure?”

  “I’m totally super sure,” I say, and drain my whiskey ginger in excitement. “Once I wrote a paper for tenth grade English and somehow only spell-checked the first half, and Sister Agatha called
me in and lectured me about the virtue diligence, and God, she loved reminding me that a young lady could never have enough virtue —”

  “Of course you can,” Harper says. She’s blue-eyed, blonde, and looks like she’d be hard-pressed to understand a complicated traffic light.

  But looks can be deceiving, because she knows five languages, three of which are dead, and once spent an entire evening explaining the economics of the late Roman Empire to me.

  “I’ve got plenty of virtue,” she says. “Victoria’s got plenty. Margaret, I dunno. Thalia, God knows you’ve got more than enough and could probably stand to offload a little.”

  “What’s Thalia offloading?” Margaret asks, sitting again.

  “My virtue,” I say, maintaining a perfectly straight face. “I was thinking of dumping it in the river down by the old railroad bridge, since Harper thinks I’ve got too much.”

  Margaret laughs and takes another drink from her gin and tonic.

  “Well, I think you should dump your virtue whenever you want and into whatever receptacle, so long as everyone involved is an enthusiastically consenting adult,” she says. “And don’t forget to be safe.”

  The four of us have been friends since we were freshman and roommates since we were sophomores, so by now, the fact that I’m still a virgin is a running joke. It’s not like I have some strong attachment to my virginity, I just happen to still have it.

  “Allllll right, the scores are tallied up!” the trivia host says over the speaker.

  All four of us sit bolt upright, hanging onto every word, especially Harper. After all, this was her idea of a fun twenty-first birthday party — some people do twenty-one shots and get blitzed, she’s had considerably less than that and is determined to utterly destroy the trivia night competition.

  “Turns out you all aren’t up to snuff on your virtues,” the guy goes on. “Last week the drink round question was the seven deadly sins, and let me tell you, those teams…”

  “You’re running trivia night, you’re not a stand-up,” Harper mutters. “Get to the question.”

  “Down, girl,” Victoria says, patting her arm.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Anyway, there’s no coin toss tonight because only one team managed to name all seven heavenly virtues!”

  Harper punches me excitedly in the shoulder. Victoria bounces her palms on the table.

  “Tell us,” Margaret hisses.

  I’d say that my friends can be a little competitive and intense, but I’m also leaning over the table, both hands clenched into fists, waiting to see if we won even though I’m ninety percent sure we did.

  “And those are, of course, Patience, Charity, Chastity, Kindness, Humility, Diligence —"

  “Yessssss,” hisses Margaret.

  “—and a virtue that nobody here tonight is celebrating, Temperance!”

  That gets a mild laugh from the various tables around the bar.

  “Congrats to the winners of tonight’s drink round, Tequila Mockingbird! The bartender will be around with your shots in just a few minutes. The next round starts in ten.”

  “Shots?” I ask the table, frowning. “Can’t I just get another whiskey ginger? What’s it a shot of? What if I don’t want a shot, can I —”

  “You could go ask someone who knows,” Harper says. “Or you could have some fun and do a shot with us.”

  “No peer pressuring,” Margaret admonishes her.

  “Yeah, no peer pressuring,” I add, laughing.

  “I wasn’t peer pressuring,” Harper protests, picking up her own glass. I think it’s her third drink, but since it’s finally her twenty-first birthday — she skipped the third grade, so she’s a year younger than the rest of us — no judgement from me.

  “Are you kidding? That was a textbook example of peer pressure,” Victoria adds in.

  “No, a textbook example would be, like, hey kid, have some marijuana because all the cool kids are doing it and also your friends are doing marijuana, and you won’t be fun if you don’t do drugs,” Harper says. “I didn’t say that, I just said shots are fun.”

  The three of us all give her separate quizzical looks.

  “Is everything you know about drugs from D.A.R.E. in the fifth grade?” Margaret finally asks.

  Harper shrugs dramatically and finishes off her drink while Victoria catches Margaret’s eye and simply nods.

  “Right,” Margaret says. “Anyway, don’t — oh, wow.”

  I follow her gaze over Harper’s shoulder.

  Wow is right, because the curly-haired, no-nonsense, tattooed female bartender is standing there, holding a tray with four shots on it.

  They’re not regular-sized shots. They’re in those tall shot glasses.

  And they are bright blue.

  “Here you go,” she says, stepping forward and depositing the glasses on the table in front of us. Margaret moves our pencils and answer sheets out of the way. “Four Smurfs’ Vacations. Enjoy!”

  Just like that, she’s gone. Delicately, Victoria picks up a shot glass.

  “No!” Harper says, waving one hand. “We have to do it together!”

  “I’m just smelling it,” Victoria says, laughing at Harper. “I think it’s… coconut rum and blue curacao?”

  “It’s something blue for sure,” I say, picking up a shot glass as well and watching the liquid suspiciously, wondering if this is a good idea.

  On one hand, I don’t really do shots. I’m a total lightweight, and it only takes a couple of drinks before I’m that embarrassing girl who’s vomiting in someone’s bushes while sobbing that squirrels are too precious for this world.

  Just a random example of something that could, in theory, happen to a lightweight. It’s certainly not an actual incident from freshman year.

  On the other hand, I’ve only had two drinks so far, it’s Harper’s twenty-first birthday, and this is basically my last chance to party before diving headfirst into my senior year of college.

  “Is the idea that this is what Smurfs drink when they’re on vacation?” Victoria asks, looking deep into her shot glass. “Or is this made of Smurfs?”

  “This just got dark,” I say.

  “You’re overthinking this,” Harper tells her. “Stop it. It’s my birthday. No thinking. Cheers!”

  We clink our glasses together over the center of the table. We all shout, “Wooo!” We all drink.

  The Smurf’s Vacation isn’t as bad as it looks. True, it’s so sweet I feel like a sugar bomb went off in my mouth, and yes, fake coconut and fake banana are both horrible flavors, and yeah, there’s an unappealing and stringent aftertaste, but I’ve definitely had way worse.

  There are four distinct clonks as we each put our shot glasses back on the table, each of us making a noise of surprise at what we just put into our mouths.

  “Smurf jizz,” Harper says.

  “Stop it,” says Victoria.

  “At least you waited until after we drank to say that,” I tell them.

  “It was an experience,” says Victoria, taking a gulp of her Guinness.

  I glance down at the floor to my right as I feel the Smurf’s Vacation start to take effect. If I was tipsy before, I’m definitely headed toward kinda drunk now, and I’m trying to calculate the best course of action to get off this barstool with my dignity intact.

  Difficulty level: short-ish skirt and three-inch heeled boots.

  Good thing alcohol makes me brave. I swing my legs around and hop off, and I only wobble a little bit when I land.

  “Be right back,” I tell my friends, and then I head for the bathroom at the back of the bar, winding between other trivia teams and past pool tables.

  The Tipsy Cavalier is… sort of a dignified dive bar, if that makes sense. Even though Marysburg is a college town, it’s far enough from campus that it’s not frequented by undergrads. It’s quieter than an undergrad bar. It’s a little bit civilized, never mind that it’s in the basement of a former warehouse that’s probabl
y been standing since the mid-1800s.

  That’s one thing about Virginia I still haven’t quite gotten used to, even though my family moved to the state seven years ago now. How old everything can be. The walls in the back of the bar, where the hall with the bathrooms are, are made of raw stone and I swear they’ve got hundred-year-old graffiti on them.

  As soon as I turn the corner, I see the line.

  “Crap,” I mutter to myself, stopping short.

  Against the wall there are five — wait, no, six — women, all either chatting with each other or looking at their phones, all clearly waiting to use the single-stall women’s bathroom.

  I sigh and get in the line, hoping I don’t miss the beginning of the next round. The woman next to me is scrolling Instagram, and I wish I hadn’t left my phone in my purse back at the table as I wait.

  And wait.

  And wait.

  I wonder what on earth the woman in the bathroom is even doing. Is she pooping? Taking a bath? Looking at Facebook on her phone?

  Giving birth?

  Actually, I’d cut her some slack for that last one.

  Meanwhile, the men’s room? Ghost town. Every so often a guy will breeze in and then, thirty seconds later, breeze out. Like they haven’t a care in the world, which they probably haven’t, since they don’t have a bathroom line and aren’t standing in a hallway in heels with their legs crossed.