RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) (6 page)

I was about to turn on the kitchen light when a sound came from the corner. “Huh!” somebody cried.

I jumped back, my finger grazing the switch as I did so, and cool yellow light filled the room. Jessica sat near the window, where moonlight had shafted in before I’d extinguished it with the light. She wore shorts and a baggy tank top which showed the tops of her breasts. Her feet were tucked underneath her and in her hand she had held a book; now, pages splayed, it was on the kitchen floor.

“Sorry,” I breathed. “I didn’t see you there.”

Jessica giggled softly, more of an embarrassed giggle than anything else, I guessed. I laughed with her. “I didn’t expect anyone to be here,” she said, leaning down and scooping up the book, flashing me the tops of her breasts, and a glimpse of her nipples. I averted my eyes, feeling guilty and horny at the same time. My dick went hard right then at that quarter-second of nipple. It was pathetic. “I saw this place earlier,” she went on, the book safely back in her lap. “I reckoned the moonlight might come in this way. It’s strange, isn’t it, sitting here in the dark?” Her eyes were downcast, her fringe just over her eyes, her fingertips trailing up and down the edges of the pages.

I shrugged extravagantly, trying to make everything seem normal, as though I hadn’t just walked in on a very strange scene. “No, not at all,” I said. “I was just getting a glass of water.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” she muttered. She turned back to her book, eyes locked on the pages. I knew the look. It was the look of somebody for whom characters and words were more real than actual people: the look of somebody who didn’t like real life all that much, and much preferred to lose themselves in prose. I was an English literature student. I understood the urge.

She didn’t look at me once as I walked across the kitchen and took a glass (brand new, expensive—it seemed Andrew Wright was well off indeed) from the cupboard and poured myself a glass of water. I tried to think of something to say. Half a dozen times I opened my mouth and then was glad she wasn’t watching me. Words wouldn’t form. This was a normal stepbrother and stepsister situation, after all. I was getting a glass of water; she was reading. It didn’t have to be more than that. And yet, I found as I made to leave the room, I desperately wanted it to be more than that.

I stopped with my hand on the wall next to the door. I half-turned, turned back, and then turned fully, facing her, almost challenging her. Or maybe I was just challenging the cowardly part of me that told me to go back upstairs and ignore my other urges.

“Jessica,” I said.

She looked up, but not fully. She never looked fully up. It was always just far enough so that she could see you, and no more. “Hmm?” she said, and I knew right then that that was the only sound she was able to make. She was inexplicably anxious right now. Her bare feet wiggled against the chair (trapped her knees, her folded legs). Her fingertips moved up and down the edge of the pages so quickly I thought she might get a paper cut. I almost felt cruel—almost. But not cruel enough to stop.

“Have you thought about it?” I said, and was surprised to find I sounded nervous, too. I rubbed at the dagger tattoo with my other hand as I spoke, and felt for all the world like a twelve-year-old asking a girl to the movies. “That night, I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” she said quietly. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a quick breath—steeling herself, I sensed—and then all her fidgeting stopped, all at once. It was like she was an electrical device and somebody had switched the switch. That, and the look of determination on her face, told me that what she was about to say meant a lot to her. I didn’t know her, not really, but I was sure of this. She spoke the words slowly, forcefully.

“I have thought about it every second since it happened. I can’t
stop
thinking about it. Trust me, I’ve tried.” She still didn’t look straight at me, and her body was completely still. If it were not for her moving lips, she could have been a statue. “I’ve thought about it every single moment. It’s been in the back of my mind for—for
ever
, it feels like, even though it’s only been two days.”

Listening to this was uncanny. It was like she was explaining exactly how I felt. I took a step forward, hardly feeling like
I
was doing anything at all, but like there was a connection between us compelling me to act. I took another step, and another, and then laid the glass on the side. I was standing over her in a moment, without any concrete idea of how I’d gotten there. I looked down at her. Slowly, she looked (almost) up at me, her hair covering her eyes, her makeup faded and blue-black. “We can’t do anything,” she whispered. “Not—not now.”

I reached down, ignoring her words. I couldn’t fight how I felt, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t, not particularly. My hand seemed to move slowly, impossibly slowly, but eventually it was near her face. Her sigh brushed the back of my hand, caressed the dagger tattoo, sending warmth up my arm and to my chest. My fingertips reached outward and made contact with her skin: warm, soft, smooth. I moved my hand to her mouth, brushed my thumb along her lower lip. “We didn’t get a chance to kiss,” I said. “Shouldn’t we correct that?”

She sighed with tones of defeat, like somebody after a long argument, and then untucked her feet and stood up. She came to just below my shoulders. I’d taken my hand from her face. I reached around to her back and pulled her close to me, pressed our bodies close, the scent of her perfume and her hair thick and welcome and near-perfect.

“We could,” she whispered, still outwardly calm apart from a faint trembling of her arms. “Just once, though.”

“Just once,” I agreed.

Jessica

The heat of his body was powerful. I felt close to him, closer than I had ever felt to anybody. It was madness, I knew, because I didn’t know this man at all. I had read—oh, had I read!—about women who felt this way about men this soon before, but I had never truly thought it happened. A literary device, I’d assumed. It was a literary device like pathetic fallacy or foreshadowing and it had no bearing on my life. But then, how did I account for this feeling? It wasn’t only the sex; it couldn’t only be the sex.

A strange calm had descended over me when he asked me the direct question. For a blissful moment I had felt clear, directed. I had known what to say. The remnants of that calm were still with me—it was something in his presence—but my anxiety was returning. And something else—excitement. It was a piqued, sexual excitement like the night of the wolf and the lion. My body remembered his well. My nipples became hard and my chest rose and fell to the sound of a leaping heartbeat.

He had taken his hand from my face. Now, he reached down and wrapped it around my waist. He pulled us together, so that our bodies were pressed together. His hand was powerful, immovable. I felt powerless, and not in a bad way. All the anxiety, the worry, the stress . . . it didn’t fall away. Life is not that easy. But I sensed that with this man I could build the kind of partnership where it
could
fall away. If I did not feel certain, I felt close.

“We could,” I said, my voice a faint whisper. “Just once, though.” Did I know it was a lie? I’m not sure.

“Just once,” he confirmed.

He bent down and I turned my face up to him. There was heat all around us, from the warm summer night and the warm tingles running over my body and mostly from
his
body. When I turned my face up to him, it felt like on a sunny day when you turn it up to the sun. This is going to be my stepbrother, I thought. But right then, the thought seemed unimportant.

His lips touched mine. They seemed molded to them, like they had been shaped exactly for this purpose. I reached my hands up without thinking—as though I had kissed this man many times before—and placed them on his shoulders. He pressed his lips into mine so hard that I felt our teeth press together through the kiss. He moaned, and instantly I remembered the moans of the lion, of the way the lion had moaned for me, with me, when we had made love. And that was how I thought of it now, I realized—
making love
.

It was going further, and I didn’t try and stop it. His hands moved from my back around to my front, to my belly and then down toward my pussy. I reached down, down, toward his cock which I remembered so well. I was inches from it when the footsteps, like unwelcome guests in a dream, clapped into my mind, clapped into the middle of the moment. I placed my hands on his torso and shoved him away. “Don’t,” I whispered.

His forehead creased, in that gesture which I was coming to learn meant confusion. But when I pointed at the door, behind which was the staircase and the approaching footsteps, he understood. He nodded, and then walked back to the counter and took up his glass. The footsteps kept coming, almost at the bottom of the stairs now. I smoothed my clothes down, pulled my tank top over my breasts (I vowed to always wear a bra around the house from now on, no matter how quiet it was). Turning, I scooped up my book and returned to my chair near the window. Eli stopped for a moment, drink in hand, and made to turn to me. My nervousness, my perpetual anxiety, the feeling that had hounded me for my entire life—which made people label me as the
shy one
—had returned. I was once again the Jessica who knew the answer in English class but was too timid to say anything; once again the Jessica who said ‘you, too’ to a waitress when she said ‘enjoy your food,’ and then obsessed about it for days afterward; once again the Jessica who cashiers disliked because she had trouble looking them in the eye. Eli looked to me (and the footsteps were almost in the room, and growing louder).

I shook my head.
No, don’t make a scene. Go away. Don’t do anything silly
.

He seemed to get the point. He shook his head back, but it wasn’t a refusal. He was just sad that it had come to that. Fine, I thought. Let him be said. But at least Dad and Annabelle won’t know that their children just kissed and would have done more. Had time slowed? The footsteps were just outside the door, and then finally they entered the room. I forced a calm look over my face, but I couldn’t hide the way the pages trembled when I made to turn them.

Dad walked in. “Party in the kitchen!” he exclaimed, but he was smiling. “I just came down to get a glass of water. Should I have brought a
bottle
?” He smiled at me and then Eli like a stand-up comedian in the middle of a routine. Despite everything, I was still able to cringe. I remembered the way he would try and show off in front of my friends when I was a teenager.
He’s
so
embarrassing
, I would tell them.

Eli nodded and smiled and then left the room. Dad, eyes tired, but smiling half-madly (love had had quite the effect on him) walked to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. I pretended to read my book, but the words were black blurring shapes on the page and nothing more. Excitement and anxiety were a potent mix in my heart. The remains of excitement still clung from the kiss—the
kiss
, why had I let them happen?—but I had to mask this, like I had masked my face that fateful night, because Dad couldn’t know what I was feeling. Dad
mustn’t
know what I was feeling. Sooner or later, Eli and I would be brother and sister, and we would have to spend an entire summer living together. There was no way we could follow our desires. Sometimes, desires had to be ignored, a lot of the time, actually. And this was one of them.

“Are you okay, sweetie?” Dad asked, standing at the door.

“Fine,” I replied. I wonder if he’d really looked, if he’d stepped away from himself for a moment and really
looked,
if he would have sensed that something was different. But he was in the first throes of love and he was blinded by it. Don’t get me wrong. I was glad. The last thing I wanted was for him to
see
me when what there was to see would have been disastrous for him and Annabelle.

“Good!” he grinned. He lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “I should let you know that Annabelle and I have set a date for the wedding. It’s only going to be a small ceremony, you know. She has two or three friends she wants to invite. And I don’t really want to invite anyone, save you. Work friends? Ha! I think I’ll stick to family.”

“That sounds nice, Dad,” I said. “So, when is the wedding?”

When is the day which makes it official that I fucked my step-brother? When is the day when Eli and I can no longer, under any circumstances, touch, kiss, or be close, even? When is the day that makes us perverts for doing what we’ve done?
I tightened my grip on the book. The pages crunched quietly, crumpling.

“One week from now!” he laughed. “But don’t tell anyone.”

He zipped around the door and paced up the stairs. One week . . . I felt like I’d been pushed hard in the chest. And then a resolution grew in me. I couldn’t be like this with Eli anymore. We’d had a night, we’d been wearing masks, that was forgivable. But from now on, we had to be stepbrother and stepsister, and that was it.

I had to kill my desire for him, and he had to do the same.

Eli

The week leading up to the wedding was confusing and disheartening in the extreme. By the night before the wedding, I found myself awake at night, staring at the ceiling and going over and over that masked night and the moans and the grunts and the mutual, explosive pleasure. I found myself lost in it, as though lost in a dream. I would trace the passage of the moonlight across the ceiling, idly, and wait for inspiration to strike. How could I get her to want me again?
How?
But she had lost interest. Worse, she was pretending that she had never been interested in the first place. When she looked at me, sometimes I thought there was something there—some flicker of lust or affection—and then her too-smiley mask would take over.