Authors: Tabatha Wenzel
Tags: #friendship, #love relationships, #love romance, #friendship family, #abuse child teen and adult, #friendship between women, #chick lit adult romance chick lit romance erotic romance contemporary romance womens fiction womens romance romance, #friendship humor, #friendship beautiful, #friendship and support
End Game
By Tabatha Wenzel
Copyright 2014 Tabatha Wenzel
Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
“Let’s go Hannah!” screamed my best friend and cousin
Rayanne. I was trying to tear myself away from the mirror, but I
just couldn’t. What I saw, staring back at me was someone I don’t
think I could ever get used to. Two years ago, the girl I was in
the mirror could eat the girl I am now. Losing half your body seems
like a dream come true, but trust me it can be confusing as hell.
So here I go to my first college party as the new me. I was scared
shitless.
“I’m coming bitch!” I yelled back. Those are
our terms of endearment to each other. Weird, I know, but us. I
have known Rayanne since birth. My mom and her mom are sisters and
ten years apart, so when my mom got pregnant with me at twenty-five
years old it kind of shocked everybody that her fifteen-year-old
sister was also. Therefore, we grew up side by side and did
everything together, but it doesn’t mean we don’t hate each other
some of the time. We are as close as real sisters, and tonight I am
torturing myself with a party because I love her.
The college party scene isn’t really what I
am into. I guess I don’t know if I really am, because this is my
first one. I never went to parties in high school. Even though
Rayanne was a party girl, she knew I was not comfortable about it
all. I was a bookworm, and at least one hundred pounds overweight,
so that was fun.
I came down the stairs to see Rayanne already
doing shots in my new kitchen. She was the coolest chick I knew,
and absolutely didn’t care what anyone thought about her. She had
the cutest, blonde pixie haircut that, on anyone else may look bad,
but on her it rocked! She was a short thing, like me, but recently
started finding joy in tattoos and had a beautiful cherry blossom
tree starting to take up her left shoulder. It was awesome, and I
sometimes wish I had the balls to do it, but I was scared shitless
of the needles and pain. We had just moved into my first apartment,
and I was officially away from home. My sad, pathetic mother, and
all her drama, was over one hundred miles away in Illinois, while I
am starting my sophomore year of college in Michigan.
My mother, Anne Finley, told me straight out
that I would never be going away to any school. She told me that,
as the little fucking mistake that took all her dreams away, it was
only fair that she took mine. Consequently, I did my first year of
school at the junior college, fifteen minutes from my house, that I
paid with jobs at Dairy Queen and after school tutoring. I was so
tired of letting the fear of her take control of me. I lived with
that my whole life until I realized it was she or I…and I finally
chose me. I had to beg and plead with my Aunt DeDe to help me with
school until I turned twenty-one, which is when get full access to
the trust fund my grandparents left me after they died, four years
ago. She, of course, had no problem helping me. To say my
grandparents had money would be an understatement. My trust fund
alone was worth over three million dollars, and Rayanne had the
same exact amount in hers. Growing up with money is why my mother
never had to actually work a day in her sad, pathetic life.
“How can you do that and not throw up all
over the place?” I questioned Rayanne.
“Because I have years of experience
lightweight,” she said back to me. Lightweight was her new favorite
nickname for me. When she came home for the summer, before I moved
here, she got me drunk and I don’t even think it took one whole
beer to do that. Rayanne went to college last year when I stayed
home. Her mom, also my aunt, is a much better mother than mine,
which surprises a lot of people considering she was fifteen when
she had her. Whenever I really needed help, Aunt DeDe was there for
me. She is the reason I finally left home. She is also the reason I
was able to finally lose all my extra baggage, which came in the
form of fat. I was definitely an emotional eater.
“Okay…you ready girl, because you look hot,”
Rayanne told me. She was always telling me how hot I look, even
when I was bigger, because she knew I didn’t have anyone telling me
that.
“Do you think anyone from high school will be
there?” I asked terrified she would say yes.
“I don’t know…probably. There are a bunch of
kids from our class that go here,” she said. “I have seen a few,
but that was last year,” she informed me.
“Oh, okay,” I shot back.
“Just ask me. What do you really want to
know, Hannah?” she asked me.
“What do you mean, Ray?” I questioned back. I
really knew what she meant, but I was going to play dumb as long as
I can.
“Come on girl! You want to know if I have
seen Zane,” she said. My heart dropped when she said his name. Zane
Edwards was my childhood crush and former best friend.
“Fine. Have you?” I asked.
She looked at me for a minute before she
answered. “Do you really want to know?” she asked me looking at me
funny.
“Yes, I do, unless you tell me that for some
strange reason you slept with him last year, and then I do not want
to know,” I answered. I held my breath waiting for her answer.
“Of course not you stupid bitch! You think I
would do that to you!” she yelled back at me. This time I knew she
was pissed at me.
“I am sorry Ray. You just had a weird look on
your face when I asked you,” I replied.
“I had that weird look on my face because I
didn’t want to tell you that the party,” she paused, “is at his
frat house tonight, and he will be there,” she said.
It felt like an hour before I could answer
her. “What the hell, Ray!” I screamed. “You know there is no way in
hell I want to see him!”
“Come on Hannah. He hasn’t seen you in
what…three years. He probably won’t even recognize you,” she said.
I knew that it was true, but I couldn’t really believe she said it
to me.
The truth is, I look nothing like the old me
that Zane remembers. When he last saw me I weighed two hundred and
thirty pounds, five feet two inches tall, with short, mousy brown
hair, glasses and, are you ready for this, braces. Yes, I was that
girl. I looked like a mess, because on top of those already
magnificent things, I had absolutely no clue how to dress. Rayanne
always tried to help, but as anyone who has been big or is big
would know, it is difficult to shop to look cute.
The girl I am now is one hundred pounds
thinner, which was done with no gimmicks or surgeries, but all by
myself. I have let my hair grow down to the middle of my back. I
don’t know why I always had it short. I think it stems from my mom
needing that control from as far back as I can remember. She always
made me wear it short, so I think it just stuck. I didn’t have a
lot of say growing up, and I discovered early on to just go with it
to avoid the drama. My hair is also not mousy brown anymore, but
blonde…and I mean blonde. I basically didn’t want to look like my
mom anymore. She was overweight and miserable, and I swore that I
would do whatever I could to not be her. I still wear glasses, as I
hate contacts, and my clothes have just gotten cuter recently,
because Rayanne says if we are living together I have to at least
try to dress like a twenty year old.
“I can’t believe you would say he wouldn’t
recognize me, Rayanne,” I lied. “I don’t look that different. It
isn’t like I was an ogre or had plastic surgery. I just lost
weight!” I yelled at her.
“No, you didn’t just lose weight Hannah, you
finally are trying to get your life together instead of being under
that psycho mother of yours. You finally have a light about you
that was so sucked away because of her. She controlled everything
that you did, said, and thought. You were lost Hannah, and you had
emptiness inside you because of her. I know she is my aunt and all,
but she was never meant to be a mom. My mom was fifteen when she
had me and she had way more skills as a mom,” she blurted out. I
knew she was right about it all, but she was still my mom. Hard to
let that go.
“So no, I don’t think Zane will recognize
you, because you have a light and joy about you that even if you
never lost the weight, it would make you unrecognizable to him and
anyone else that knew you then,” she said. I love this girl…she is
my sister no matter what.
“I still don’t know how I feel about seeing
him,” I finally said back to her. “He was my best friend, besides
you, since I was eight and he broke me in high school.”
Rayanne looked at me and said, “ I am sure it
feels that way, but I bet he has a good reason for doing what he
did.”
“A good reason! I asked him to prom, as
friends, because even though I loved him, I knew he never would
love me back. He said yes and didn’t even bother to show up. So
what did my pathetic ass do? I drove to the hotel to see if he was
there…and boy was he. I found him in a bathroom, getting a blowjob
from Nikki Schmitt. He never saw me, so I was hoping the next day
he would call and tell me some bullshit lie, but instead nothing.
Not a word, and I never saw him again. So yes, seeing him tonight
is a big fucking deal,” I cried out.
Rayanne looked at me like she might cry. I
never told her about going to the hotel and seeing him with Nikki,
on her knees, in front of him. “You never told me that Hannah. Why
didn’t you ever tell me that part?” she asked.
I looked at her, with tears in my eyes, and
told her the truth, “I was embarrassed at how weak I was. I never
even confronted him. He broke my heart by just leaving me there. Do
you know how many times he went out and still came by later that
night, just to talk? I would have let him get the stupid blowjob,
because a lot of those nights he would lay next to me and talk
about how he had come back from screwing some slut he met at a
party. I knew who he was and what he did. He was a little man
whore, but I didn’t care. He could have at least taken me to the
dance. I know that it was only my junior prom, and his senior, but
still…to just ignore me like that,” I said feeling like I had been
run over by a truck.
Rayanne looked at me and screamed, “Go change
now! This shit just got real!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You have waited three years to get this
asshole, and tonight is that night. I have the best outfit for you
to wear. I am so fucking excited that we wear the same size now!”
she screamed.
Before I knew it I was being squeezed into
the shortest black dress in the world. I was blessed, that when I
lost all my weight, I didn’t lose my boobs and butt. I had an
abundance of both, and I was happy and thankful for that. To say
the dress left little to the imagination was an understatement.
Next, Rayanne put me in the scariest, sexiest shoes I have ever
seen…bright pink stilettos. She was a firm believer that all
outfits needed color, and I have to be honest, I loved the shoes.
They looked like something straight out of the 80’s, and since I
was addicted to all John Hughes movies, they were perfect. When I
looked at myself this time, I was even more shocked than earlier. I
really didn’t look like me at all. Sometimes, when I look at
myself, I still see the Hannah who wore a size eighteen and not the
Hannah that is now in a size four. Looking at this girl in the
mirror was like looking at a different person. I turned to Rayanne
and asked her, “ So…what do I do tonight? Go in being me or
somebody else?” God, I wanted her to say someone else.