Save Me: a Stepbrother Romance (5 page)

“You are ashamed, aren’t you?”  He barked a laugh.  “Ashamed to be related to me.  I fuck up your perfect little life.  You hate it.”

“I’m not perfect,” I rasped.

“Please.  So fucking perfect.  You’re a real fucking Miss Congeniality, aren’t you?  So smart, so pretty, so virginal.  You’ve never had a problem in your life.”

“Fuck off, Cal!” I exploded at him.  “Just do everyone a favor and fuck off!”

My mother’s voice shouted at me from the kitchen, and I could hear her light footsteps chasing after me.  I flew up the stairs before she could meet me.  Tears stung my eyes.

“Come on, Sis.”  His voice was acidic.  “Let’s spend some quality time together.”

“Nate’s right, you know,” I said, whirling on him when I reached the stop of the stairs.  “You’re a huge dick.”

“Bigger than he is?  I knew you liked it big.  You wouldn’t be able to resist me.”

“Fuck off, Gatlin,” I choked through the tears that burned my throat.  “I don’t know what you want, and I don’t care.”

“I want to spend time with my little sister,
Sis
.”

“Why?” I choked over the sound of Mom’s furious footsteps stomping after us.  Memories of the gossip surrounding Cal flooded back, and my lip curled.  “So you can beat me to death like you beat your mom?”

He froze in the hallway. 

“What the fuck did you just say?”

I whirled on him.  “I told you to fuck off!”

There was a blazing fire in his gaze as it fixed on me.  This wasn’t the usual Cal Gatlin against the world glare.  This was hatred.  Pure, raw hatred.  He wanted to burn me to the ground.

But it evaporated in an instant.

His gaze followed a tear as it dripped down my cheek.  His lips parted, and he took a step back.  The glare softened in shock.

“Are you… are you crying?”

His voice halted.  He was still growling, but there was something else there, a break that revealed… regret?  Pain? 

Maybe even sympathy? 

I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.  I turned again, marching to my room, hoping my feet came down hard enough to crack the hardwood floor. 

Cal didn’t follow.  He stood stone still at the foot of the stairs, watching as I hurled my bag into the room.  His broad shoulders leaned against the wall, his arms crossed, his irritating diamond stud gleaming in the dim light of the foyer. 

But his eyes had changed.  Instead of a hard glare, they had softened.

“I’m not as fucking perfect as you think,” I snarled. 

I slammed the door, leaving him frozen on the other side.

At eight, Mom’s fist pounded the door, ordering me to come down and eat something.  At nine, James came to bargain me out with the promise of a trip to the movies, as if that was worth seeing Cal again.  By ten, they both huffed and decided that I was a worthless drama queen.  As they left, Mom mumbled something to James about starving me out eventually. 

They were right. 

At midnight, my growling stomach overtook me with complaints about missing two dinners in a row and a breakfast on top of that.  I crept downstairs, grabbed a bag of dry cereal and a banana, and flew back to my room as fast as possible.  Surely I had made my getaway unseen, right?

Of course not.  Cal was leaning against my open bedroom door, his arms crossed, one eyebrow raised. 

“Hm,” he said, his voice subdued.  “I was starting to think you’re anorexic.”

“Fuck off, Gatlin,” I groaned. 

My voice was weak.  I couldn’t muster up the energy to bark it as an order anymore.  He was winning, and he knew it, which must be why that cocky glare was missing.

“You all right?”

“As if you care.”

I sidestepped him and slipped into my room, my body aching with the stress of the day.  My hands pushed against the door to shut it, but Gatlin walked in after me, elbowing it open with his much stronger, tattooed arm. 

Fine.  Fuck it.  He can stay. 

I was too tired to fight with him, and I didn’t have enough time to waste on him regardless.  My aching body collapsed into my desk chair.  I began devouring the cereal by the handful, my stomach groaning in relief.

“Damn, Pink.”  Gatlin sat at the edge of my bed, and I winced, sure he would get my flawlessly washed and softened comforter dirty.  “You eat like a trucker.”

“Look, Gatlin—” 

I turned around to tell him off, but the sheer weirdness of seeing him lying in my bed struck me.  His body glistened with water from the shower, his black hair slicked back behind his ears as little droplets traveled down his neck.  He wore nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants, giving me a view of the tattoos that laced his muscled body and the rock-hard abs that built his stomach.  Judging from the embarrassingly prominent bulge, he was also going commando. 

Jesus, the boy was hung like a horse.  No wonder he fixated on the word cock. 

“You gonna say something, or just keep staring?”

I turned around, glaring at my day planner. 

God damn him. 

In a flat voice, I answered: “If you’re going to make me cry again, you can just leave.”

A few moments of awkward silence.

He sighed and rubbed his neck.  “Look.  Natalie.”  It was the first time he said my real name.  My eyebrows raised.  I kept my eyes fixed on my desk, but my ears perked. 

“I… uh, I wanted to… talk about that,” he said.  There was something strange about his tone and the way his gaze landed on me, soft and cautious instead of hard and angry.  Was he regretting what he had said earlier?

Cal Gatlin showing remorse for something?  This must be a bad dream.  It had to be.

“Well, I don’t.  The door is that way.”

Cal frowned.  “I didn’t mean to… uh, hurt you.” 

I could hear his voice halting and wavering, like he was unsure of himself.  Cal Gatlin being anything other than a cocky motherfucker?  Impossible.  But there it was. 

“I wanted to…. Well, I wanted to apologize.  I guess you’re right—I don’t know what I was after.  But it wasn’t making you cry.  It was shitty.  I’m sorry.”  He winced at the word sorry, like it took every bit of will to say it.

The word apologize hung in the air. 

I was too in shock to respond.

“You still alive?”  He raised an eyebrow at my frozen form sitting at the desk.

“Yes.”

“So are we… uh, are we good?” 

I didn’t answer.  He sighed again and rolled his eyes.  But he didn’t leave.  Instead, he laced his fingers behind his head and laid back on my bed, resting like he was planning on sleeping there.  The sight of his form stretched out like a lazy cat did strange things to me. 

Wait, no.  Focus, Nat.  Like hell he was staying here for a second longer.  I cleared my throat.

“Yes.  We’re good.”  I gritted my teeth, wincing at the memory of what I had spat at him.  The shitty one liner about beating his mom.  “And, uh.  I’m sorry.  For what I said.”

He shrugged.  He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling, his expression bored and vacant.  I guess he heard that kind of thing all the time.  It didn’t mean much coming from me too.

“You can leave now,” I said.

Instead of leaving, he let his eyes wander around my room, his gaze flitting from one end to the other.  He inspected the perfectly organized desk, the boy band posters plastered on the ceiling, and the pink floral wallpaper.  His gaze crossed to the sticky note reminders and pictures of friends at parties and school that dotted my wall.  I stared at his face, trying to figure out why he was still here. 

But my gaze wandered down his body, starting at the diamond stud earring and down the thick muscles of his chest.  The tempting happy trail of hair led down his sculpted stomach to a bulge in his sweatpants.  I didn’t like it, but my mind kept drifting back to the memory of Cal saying
cock
. 

I swallowed.

“You really like pink, don’t you, Pink?” he asked.  I tore my gaze away to see him inspecting one of my embroidered pillows.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I hate pink.”

He paused, cocking an eyebrow.  “You colorblind, then?”

I snorted.  Cal?  Having a sense of humor outside ‘making my stepsister as embarrassingly wet as possible’? 

I guess miracles do happen.

“No,” I said, sitting down and opening my day planner.  I had five bi-weekly meetings to plan, a bake sale to organize, and college applications to prepare for submission.  I didn’t have time for Callum Gatlin and whatever panty raid level bullshit he was planning.  He needed to leave, and I needed to quit looking at his abs like that.

“You gonna explain this shit, then?”  He jumped up and stalked toward me.  I froze, watching his hand reach over my shoulder.  Oh God, he was going to choke the life out of me.  (And then Mom would regret marrying James, wouldn’t she?) 

Instead, he picked up a pink stack of stationary and glanced over the lacy doily print with distaste. 

I snatched it from him. 

“Because people like me are supposed to like pink.  So I like pink.”

“I thought you said you hated it.”

“I do hate it,” I answered.

He studied me as I worked, sitting on the edge of my desk, the heat of his body oddly inviting.  I attempted to focus on reading through the minutes of the last Student Council meeting, but his burning green gaze was too distracting.  I swallowed hard and closed my eyes, wishing more than anything my life could go back to like it was before.

“You got a problem, Sis?”

“Yeah.  You.  Is there a reason you’re here, other than to molest me?”

His lips curled into a frown.  “I never laid a finger on you.”

“You touched my knee.”

“Sorry, I didn’t know knee-touching counted as molesting.”  He paused, and a devilish grin flooded his face.  “Why, Sis?  You want me to?” 

“Oh, fuck off.”

Wait, I was smiling.  Why was I smiling at Cal Gatlin?  He was an asshole, and the fact that he had shown a moment of empathy for once in his life didn’t change that.