RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) (5 page)

“Well done, mate,” some man said.

Dad smiled ear-to-ear at him. “She said yes!” he beamed, cheeks flushed with wine and happiness and love. “This woman is going to be my wife!”

Eli

Mom looked happier than I had ever seen her. Her face was ten years younger. She smiled widely at the crowd, and then looked down at the ring, holding it out before her. Mom wasn’t the diamond type, usually. I could tell she was ecstatic from that fact alone. She wasn’t the jewelry type, and yet she looked down at this ring like it was the most beautiful object she had ever laid eyes on. I walked through the crowd and stood before the happy couple.

“Eli!” Mom cried, waving tears away from her face. “Eli, you’re going to have a stepdad, and a stepsister!”

“I saw,” I said. I smiled and let her smooch my cheeks. In the corner of my eye I could see Andrew and Jessica having the same conversation. Jessica was smiling, but there was dread in her eyes, dread that her dad might’ve seen had he not been floating on a cloud of glee. “I’m happy for you, Mom.” I meant it. I
was
happy for her. But I was also confused. I had done something with this woman not twenty-four hours ago, something a stepbrother and stepsister should never do. I wore a smile, but behind the smile the urge to scream rose, the urge to laugh, the urge to cry.

“And guess what?” Mom went on, her voice high-pitched. “He’s buying a house here, in Bristol, and we’re moving in! Oh, please say you will, Eli. I’m selling our flat.”

The idea did not thrill me. Living in a house with Andrew and Mom and Jessica and all the mess that that would entail . . . No, it did not thrill me in the slightest. But Mom looked at me with such abject hope that I couldn’t think of refusing her. Her eyes were wet. Slowly, the crowd dissipated around us. “Of course I will,” I said, as the four of us made our way back to the table. I had fucked my stepsister. I had fucked my stepsister, and it had been the best sex I’d ever had. Of course, she wasn’t my stepsister yet.

But she would be soon. You could tell just by looking at Mom and Andrew that they would not have a long engagement. They were so deeply in love that it was a surprise they were able to function. An image came into my mind of Mom and Andrew walking hand in hand right over the edge of a cliff. With the image came the certainty that they would do it, if it meant being together. How I had missed this blossoming love I didn’t know. Perhaps it was university. I hadn’t been home much.

Mom and Andrew didn’t want to say goodbye. They stood outside of the restaurant for almost fifteen minutes, holding hands, always on the verge of tears. In the background of this scene, unheard, ignored, Jessica and I stood, waiting across the street by the car park. She didn’t say anything, just looked down at her feet. She fiddled with her dress, as she had done all throughout dinner. She reminded me of a frightened squirrel. I don’t mean that in a negative way. She was endearing, beautiful, intelligent, brilliant, but she looked around, or down, constantly with wide, alert eyes. She always looked startled, a little on-edge.

I found myself wanting to comfort her, to soothe her, to make things seem not so bad. I had been standing a few yards away. I crossed the distance in a couple of steps and stood close by her shoulder. She glanced up, and her top teeth bit her lower lip. Her right hand grasped the hem of her dress; her left hand opened and closed manically. Her feet vibrated up and down, as though she wanted to turn this Bristol street into a musical.

“I guess you dad told you,” I said.

She didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then she glanced up at me, her eyeballs rolling up in her face, which seemed unwilling to turn completely toward me, still half-locked on the ground. She really was the shyest woman I had ever met. I had never felt chivalrous with women before. But with Jessica, I did. I wanted to take my jacket off (it didn’t matter in my fantasy that I wasn’t wearing one) and throw it over her shoulders, I wanted to hold every door she would ever walk through open for her, I wanted to carry her over puddles so her feet didn’t get wet. But I could do none of those things, because this was not a movie and we had promised to keep things normal between us. That promise was more important now than ever, I sensed—now that we were going to be related.

“Yes,” she said finally. “He told me. We’re going to be roommates, I guess. At least for the summer.”

“At least for the summer,” I agreed.

It was just the beginning of June, exams had just ended, and summer seemed like a very long time. A soft, warm breeze whisked down the street from the bay, and men and women walked the street in shorts and tank tops, even at this late hour. The sky was clear and even the light pollution couldn’t obscure the glittering diamonds in the sky. All in all, it was a romantic setting. But I couldn’t do anything romantic.

“We can never talk about it,” she said, maybe sensing my uncertainty, my wild thoughts. Her chest, her small, pert breasts, rose and fell quicker and quicker. “Do you understand? We can never talk about it.”

The night must’ve made me feel literary. I don’t know exactly how one feels ‘literary,’ but I did just then. Perhaps it was the warm tightness in my chest: warm because my heart was full of things I wanted to say to this shy, attractive woman; tight because I couldn’t bring myself to say any of them.
“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
She looked at me, startled, and I shrugged.

“George Eliot,” she muttered.

“George Eliot,” I agreed.

“But—” She paused, biting her lip again. I wanted to pull her lip free, kiss it better from where her teeth had gnawed it.

“But what?” I urged.

“But I don’t believe you have nothing to say.”

I made to reply—though I had no clue what I would say—and then Mom and Andrew were with us, standing beside us, smiling in their love. Their love, right at that moment, was built for movie screens. They were so absorbed in each other that they hadn’t heard the tail-end of our conversation, though they would have if they’d listened for it.

“Are you ready to go?” Andrew asked, looking at Jessica.

“Yeah,” she said. She made to glance at me, but then stopped herself. “Let’s go.”

Mom and Andrew kissed, hugged, kissed again, and then parted. I climbed into the car beside Mom. When she gripped the steering wheel, she gazed for a few moments at her ring, her lips twisting again and again into a wide smile. “Wow!” she exclaimed as she started the car. “Just, wow! Right?” She turned to me.

“Right,” I agreed.

And it was ‘wow’ for me as well as her, but not for the reason she thought.

Jessica

He had quoted George Eliot. When he quoted it to me, I felt a sort of
jolting
of recognition. It was being shaken awake, and when I looked at him, he was not just the lion, the man who I had fucked one crazy night. He was a fellow literature student, somebody I could relate to, a man who was no longer a stranger. We were being thrust into each other’s lives whether we wanted it or not. There was no way I was going to ruin Dad’s happiness by trying to sabotage the relationship. That meant that Eli and I were going to be living together. There was no way around it.

The house was a five-bedroom on the outskirts of the city, with a gate that circled the large front and back gardens, and tall, well-maintained hedges which rose up around the gates. When we drove through those gates and crossed over to the property, I felt as though I were crossing from the outside world to a secret, private world. The hedges, when the sun was low, threw long shadows almost to the house itself, reaching across the stone pathways that connected the front and the back of the house. I had always known that Dad made a lot of money, but the way he bought this place, as though it cost nothing, still surprised me.

We didn’t have a lot of luggage. The usual things a person would take to move into a house—furniture, personal belongings, clothes—were back in Texas, in our two-bedroom house. We had our travel luggage; the rest Dad would buy. The door was framed with two white pillars, conjuring up images of ancient Greece. I stood outside the house, looking up at the wide pillars, the big red door, trying desperately to leave the bottom of my shorts alone. Soon, I knew (Dad wouldn’t stop talking about it) Annabelle and Eli would be here.

Dad walked up beside me. “What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s gorgeous,” I answered honestly. “It’s a real home.”

“It is!” he laughed. “A real home, for me and my
wife
! Can you believe it, Jess?”

“It is all happening very fast,” I muttered. His face dropped slightly. I quickly added: “But I’m glad you’ve found somebody.”

We moved the few things we had into the house. I chose the bedroom on the ground floor, the one at the back which overlooked the back garden. Somebody, the previous owners maybe, had planted roses and tulips along the back of the garden, where the hedges split off and a shaft of sunlight shone straight onto the lush green grass. It was the smallest bedroom, but I liked small bedrooms. They made me feel wrapped-up, like I was being hugged by the walls. I hated sleeping in big rooms, feeling like I could roll over and land on the floor and keep on rolling forever. No, I was a small-bedroom type of girl.

I was looking around the room, planning where to put the bed, the small desk, the bookshelves, when Dad knocked on the door. I opened it to see his wide-grinning face. He was grinning no more than I had seen him grin in years. “They’re here!” he cried, clapping his hands together like a young boy. It would’ve been annoying, grating, if I wasn’t happy for him. I swallowed, and wore my best smile. This was a happy moment, I reminded myself. This was a happy moment between two fiancés and their children. There had been no steamy night, no connection, no writhing in a hotel room while wearing masks.

I could’ve convinced myself of this, could’ve tricked myself into really believing it, if the memory of that night didn’t make my pussy ache so hard, didn’t make my clit yearn to be touched, didn’t make my nipples hard. Flesh, writhing, moaning, white-hot pleasure . . . all of them burnt in my mind like the trail of a comet, blazing through my consciousness, distracting when I wanted to focus, titillating when I wanted to calm. I remembered the feel of his rock-hard cock in my hand, and the way it had slid into me, hot and huge, stretching me.

I rubbed my eyes with my thumbs, rubbing away the images, blurring them. Dad had left the room, his footsteps receding on the hardwood floor. Now the footsteps returned. He poked his head around the edge of the doorframe. “You coming?” he said.

I nodded, perhaps a little overenthusiastically. “I’ll be there in a second,” I said.

Perhaps he would creep into my bedroom after we turned out the lights, perhaps he would lift my covers and climb in with me—

“Jess!” Dad called.

“Coming!” I called back, pacing from the room.

Eli

From my bed I had a clear view of the sky. My window opened out upon the wide-open night, and I laid there for around half an hour without even trying to sleep, just watching the stars. But I wasn’t just doing that at all. My eyes were watching the stars, but I wasn’t really
seeing
them. I was going over and over the last two days in my mind. It turned out that Andrew had strongly hinted to Mom that he was going to propose, and had intimated that he had bought a house for them. I learned about this from Mom, who woke me that morning with a smiling face.

“I knew he’d do it,” she’d said, before I even had a chance to rub sleep from my eyes. I’d risen in bed and watched as she paced up and down the room, excitement causing her to turn around every couple of seconds. “I just
knew
he would. I
knew
it. He’s
such
an amazing man. He told me on the web chat, pretty much. He basically
said
he was going to propose. And, do you know what? He’d already bought the house!”

I agreed that this was amazing. Her laughing, smiling face wouldn’t accept any less. Now, two days after I’d known daughter or father, I laid awake and pictured Jessica’s face. When we were moving furniture in earlier, positioning it after the delivers had brought it in, I thought I’d seen some freckles on her cheeks. They were light-colored, almost the color of her pale skin, but they were there. I thought about what it would be like to kiss those freckles. I hadn’t had that chance—before. Before, I hadn’t had the chance to kiss her at all. The masks hadn’t allowed for that.

I sighed and sat up in bed, my body aching from my workout earlier (nothing fancy, just some free weights I’d had since I was fifteen). The hardwood floor was cold, though it was a warm night. I padded across the room and opened the windows. Warm air filtered in, and the smell of fresh-cut grass made me think of Jessica, of that night.

I knew I wouldn’t get much sleep for a while. It was one am, and I was wide awake. I had gone past sleep, the way you do sometimes when you’re dog-tired one second and bright and ready for the morning the next. I walked back across the room and opened the bedroom door to the hallway. I had the upstairs bedroom two doors down from Mom’s and Andrew’s. I crept quietly, not knowing if anybody was awake, not in the mood to smile and laugh with Andrew and Mom, and padded down the stairs.