Vibration: An Accidental Roommates Romance eBook

Meet the Brady family. They're brilliant, brooding, and barreling into relationships they weren't expecting.

Irresponsible. Impulsive. Reckless. I've has heard it all from my family and I'm getting a little sick of it. I'm a smart guy, after all. In a family of brainy engineers, someone has to be the fun one, but the other Bradys don’t see it that way. To get a break from my family, I decide to move out and answer an online ad for a roommate.

What could go wrong?

For starters, my roommate turns out to be...not a dude. A smoking hot finance chick. But this is fine. We can be friends who live together. I just need to ignore the simmering lust that clouds my vision.

I shouldn’t be upset that my family is missing my birthday. But here I am. Pissed off.

I’m turning 31. I’m an adult. But as each of my brothers and my cousin text me in turn to say they’re out of town or have an essential work function they can’t miss, I wallow a little deeper into the sting. 

The final straw comes when my mom texts me to ask if we can move our standing weekly dinner date to the weekend. She’s presenting to a new client, and I get that that’s important. 

I feel like a brooding baby as I throw my phone across my office after reading my mom’s text, and then I decide I’m not doing anyone any favors being here at work anyway. I grab my phone, fish around for my keys, and walk out of Beltane Engineering without saying goodbye to any of my traitorous relatives.

The shitty part of working with my family is that when they do something like this—collectively put me as a last priority—I can’t really get away from them to cool down. This place is crawling with Bradys, all doing something more important than sitting down with me for one fucking evening to say they’re glad I’m on this earth. 

I realize this sounds ridiculous, and I’m working on it. That’s why I’m going somewhere else to clear my head.

Once I’m outside, I don’t know where to go next. I have no plan. What does a 30-something do alone on his birthday? I realize I don’t have too many friends outside of my family, and that pisses me off even more. 

Don’t get me wrong. My family is awesome. We’re Irish and there’s a bunch of us, especially now that my younger brother has a live-in girlfriend. Shit, I bet Nicole would be a blast on a birthday bender. She seems like someone who could drink me under the table. 

But it’s the middle of the day and I’m not about to call my brother’s girlfriend at work. She’d probably come kick me in the balls with her spike heels. 

I climb into my car and clench my teeth, hoping she starts. I drive a vintage Ford Bronco, bright red, and I’ve rebuilt her myself with some customizations. What’s the point of being a mechanical engineer if you’re not going to soup up your ride a little bit, right? It’s just that I’ve been having a ton of trouble with some of the substitute parts I’ve had to order for the engine. It’s getting harder and harder to find original components these days. 

Big Red roars to life, and I rev her engine a few times in the parking lot, hoping I disturb someone inside, and then feeling bad about it. This shit always seems to happen to me, though. My parents told us they were getting divorced on my birthday, years ago. Who does that? I was a toddler, but the whole thing scarred my brother so much that my birthday has always been clouded in this sense of unease. No wonder they all schedule trips and client shit for this week. 

For a long time, I thought I killed my parents’ marriage. My brother Liam and I are Irish twins, born less than a year apart. That can’t have been easy, but I know now that my parents are just really incompatible. Plus my dad couldn’t keep it in his pants. I’m a lot like him that way. I come by it honestly, I guess.

Pittsburgh’s streets are pretty quiet for a weekday. I crank the radio and roll down the window, feeling the sun on my elbow as I let it hang out the window. This is nice. I needed this thinking time.

I give myself a pep talk: my family aren’t being assholes on purpose. We’re all engineers and lots of projects really get cranking in spring because the weather turns decent. My family didn’t bail on me because they’ve been cursing my birth for thirty years. It’s more that they tend to supervise industrial job sites that can’t really excavate a mine shaft when the ground is frozen or saturated with early spring rains. It’s just shitty timing.

I head north along Route 28, stopping at the drive-through beer distributor. I buy a cube of cheap, shitty suds and make my way toward the marina along the river, where my dad docks his boat. Don’t mind if I do jump-start his precious watercraft and treat myself to an afternoon cruise. 

I get the Erin Go Braless going and head up the Allegheny River at full speed, even in the no wake zone, until I remember that the high school kids might be practicing crew or something and slow her down. See? I’m not totally irresponsible. I crack open a few beers and guzzle them down quickly before I decide to see if I can turn donuts in the narrow river. 

Indeed I can. 

Feeling listless now, increasingly bored, I continue on up river. I’m well outside the city now, approaching the junction with the Kiski River. I slow down for a minute and pound another beer, admiring the confluence where the two bodies of water collide. There’s a distinct line where the brown water of the fast-moving Allegheny meshes with the almost-turquoise water of the Kiski. 

I think about how they’re connected, two parts of the same body of water, like a family. But the Kiski is so different. Another color. Another direction. Another way of moving things. I start wondering if the Allegheny ever notices that the Kiski is struggling, if they fight as they try to cooperate, and then I chug another beer because it’s insane to be thinking of rivers as if they had feelings. 

I pull back on the lever and the boat catches a wave or runs over a log or something, jolting me so that I drop my beer. I take my eyes off the water just for a second as I stoop to pick it up, frantically feeling around until my fingers find purchase. But by the time I stand up, I know I’m well and truly screwed. The boat is hurtling toward a small island.

I try to slow down, I try to duck, but it’s too late. There’s a terrible crashing, crunching sound, a jolting crash, and the world fades to black. 

* * *

When I open my eyes, I can’t tell which way is up. Everything aches, but nothing as much as my head. I slowly realize I’m dangling upside down and the throb I feel is probably the blood rushing to my head. I try to get my bearings, see that I’m somehow caught in a bunch of tree branches. I grip a branch and tug and, feeling that it’s steady, I use it to get myself upright. 

“Holy shit,” I say, looking around me. I’m hanging off the side of my dad’s boat, which I’ve somehow managed to crash into the upper portion of a tree. I’m still half buzzed from all the beers, and I know there were a lot because I see all the silver cans glinting in the sun as the boat rocks in the tree branches. 

But I know I should get to the ground and away from this disaster. I pat my pockets and am shocked to feel my phone is still in my jeans. I shimmy out of the tree and try to back away as my sneakers sink into the wet ground. This isn’t an island so much as a piece of land that’s been flooded. The tree isn’t sticking very high out of the water, but only because the water comes up about a foot above the soggy sludge. 

I take a few careful steps back. My head is swimming with panic and alcohol, but even in this sorry state, I know I have no choice but to call someone for help. I pull up my contacts. All my recent calls are to girls whose last names I don’t know. Waitresses and bartenders, mostly. My bank teller. I’d really like to call my Uncle Kellen, mostly because he wouldn’t yell at me like my dad surely will. But Uncle Kel is out of state with my brother Liam for work. Hence my fucked up pity-party.

I sigh and blow out a long breath until my entire body feels deflated. There’s nothing to be done. I close my eyes and dial, and my dad picks up after the first ring. “This better be an emergency.”

“Dad.” I swallow. I can feel his impatience, and I know that’s only going to get worse. “I fucked up.”