RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) (10 page)

Stepbrother or not, I couldn’t fight this lust. Today had proved that. I had tried white-knuckle sobriety, and I had failed. I placed my hands on his chest as I rode his cock, moving my hips, feeling more confident than I could believe.

“I think I love you,” I whispered, locking eyes with him.

What the hell! I knew that was a crazy girl thing to say . . . a crazy girl thing to
do
. . . and yet, I said it anyway. We kept fucking, and the only sign that anything had changed was a tiny pause in his thrusting. Then he reached up and touched my face. He pulled me down, thrusting into me the whole time, and whispered in my ear. “I
know
I love you.”

Eli

When I woke, I reached out immediately. My first concern was that Jessica was still in my bed. She was beautiful, intelligent, funny, unique—and she was also hard to predict. She was like one of those spin tops I’d played with as a kid. Sometimes, they’d spin in place. Other times, they’d suddenly veer off without warning. I think this was one of the reasons I loved her so much. Yes,
loved
her. I wouldn’t have been able to explain it to anybody at the time. It was mad, of course. We hadn’t known each other long enough. We were too young. There were all the usual reasons why it didn’t make sense. And yet, I
did
love her.

When I reached out, my hand found her shoulder. I moved into her, wrapped my arms around her, pushed my groin into her ass. We were both naked and aching from last night. I closed my eyes, and I must’ve slept, because when I opened them she was facing me, and sunlight filtered into the room.

I smiled at her. It was the nicest thing to wake up to. “Are you watching me sleep, you freak?” I laughed.

“No,” she said, with the cutest smile I ever saw. “Don’t be a weirdo. Why the hell would I want to watch
you
sleep?”

She looked so beautiful and cute as she laid beside me, her cheeks slightly red, her lips parted, her eyes seeing everything. I brushed her hair from her face and kissed her on the forehead. Then I pulled the blankets over us and made it so we could pretend that the outside world didn’t exist. Even in this perfect moment, traitor voices whispered. They whispered about how wrong this was, about how what we were doing would cause other people pain, about how we were evil.

You are related!
the voices whispered.
This is wrong! Stop it! Stop it now!

But they couldn’t convince me that waking up next to a beautiful woman whom I loved was wrong. They would never be able to convince me of that. “Let’s go somewhere today,” she said, sitting up.

“Where?” I asked.

I would’ve been happy to simply lie in bed with her all day, to hold her, maybe make love later, but if she wanted to go somewhere, I would gladly go with her, too.

“For a walk,” she said. “I saw some woods on the drive here. Let’s go there.”

She was right. The Leigh Woods were just outside Clifton, toward the city, near Brunel’s Clifton suspension bridge. I think I’d been there once, when I was young, but I couldn’t remember. “Okay, let’s do it.”

That morning it felt like we were boyfriend and girlfriend. It was in the simple act of getting ready to go out together. First, Jessica told me to take a shower, kissing me on the nose. After the shower, I found her in the kitchen, making a lunch for us, and then she asked me to get my backpack to carry it. It was a mundane conversation, and yet I couldn’t help but feel pleased at the whole thing. It felt like we were becoming a couple over the simple act of her making a few sandwiches and me agreeing to carry them.

We could’ve driven or caught the bus to the woods, but it was a sunny day, and we decided to walk. The walk there wasn’t exciting or picturesque in any way. Leigh Woods were city woods, the kind of woods that are surrounded on all sides by roads and motorways and buildings. We walked through an industrial estate and more houses than I cared to count on our way to the woods. It was a boring, plain walk. And yet, when Jessica reached down and took my hand, when she turned and smiled at me, I felt like the luckiest man alive to be the one taking this mundane walk today.

Maybe I’m cheesy. If so, I don’t care. When I looked at her I felt happy, happier than I’d thought it was possible to feel with a woman. We hadn’t said anything for half an hour, and that was the part of the magic. We didn’t
need
to say anything. We could just walk, in silence, and not feel compelled to fill the silence with random small talk. No, I was content to feel her hand in mine, and when we waited to cross the road, to feel her lips on my cheek.

Jessica

We entered the woods through Leigh Court at the east entrance (the entrance furthest away from the city and Clifton suspension bridge, as I understood it). There were a few people in the woods, I saw. Mostly they were couples, and when one older woman, holding her husband’s hand, smiled at me, I thought the world might not be so bad after all. All she saw was a young woman and her man, nothing more. And maybe, I thought, that was what today could be. Eli and I could just be a woman and man who had been struck by love, who had been tackled by it, who had been utterly captured by it without expecting to.

I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed mine.

We walked down a path called Old Carriage Drive, with trees bordering us on both sides, over a small creek, and then (the sign told me) toward Paradise Bottom. We walked hand in hand to Paradise Bottom, and then, without needing to discuss it, we turned off the stone pathway onto the dirt one that led deeper into the woods. We walked underneath thick layers of foliage and into a clearing at the side of which was a wooden bench. There were no people this far into the woods, in this clearing. Far away I could hear the sound of cars on the road, but closer were the sounds of the woods, of birds tweeting and hidden insects making their small background noises.

We still hadn’t said much as we sat on the bench. Eli laid his hand on my leg, and we sat in silence listening to the wood’s noises. And then Eli yawned and stretched his arms, turned, smiled at me. The smile was casual, the kind of smile a longtime lover gives to his girlfriend, and I couldn’t help but smile back. The woods, Eli, the atmosphere . . . all of it combined to make me calm. I hungered for calm, and here it was. For now, thoughts of the consequences were banished. I pushed Dad and Annabelle from my mind almost violently; they weren’t welcome here, not right now.

“I’ve realized something,” Eli said.

“Hmm?” I replied. I was watching a blue-colored bird hop from branch to branch.

“We’ve skipped the first date. It was that first night which did it. When we met, we already felt close to each other. We’d already tasted each other. I know that sounds odd, but do you know what I mean?”

“I do,” I said. I knew exactly what he meant. When I first saw him—the dagger-tattooed man—I had been immediately attracted to him. He was right. We’d skipped the first date entirely. “Do you regret it?” I asked, turning away from the bird to look at him.

“Not at all,” he said, smiling that contented smile. “It’s just—” He laughed, and then leaned forward and kissed my cheek, just under my eye. “Let’s
talk
. God, I sound like a cliché. But we should talk, don’t you think?”

I laughed. He
did
sound like a cliché. He also looked embarrassed. His cheeks bloomed red. But the smile didn’t leave his lips. “Okay, Eli,” I said. “Let’s
talk
.”

Anyone who has ever been asked to
talk
will know how difficult it is to magic a topic out of thin air. All the topics that would have come to you easily, only moments ago, are suddenly hard to find. This resulted in Eli and I gazing at the woods around us as we struggled to find a topic of conversation. Finally, Eli brushed the hair from my face.

“Why English literature?” he asked, with all the nervousness of a man of the first date. It was a strange contradiction. We had shared each other’s bodies, had been close, intimate—and yet a simple conversation turned us into nervous children.

“Books,” I said. “Good idea.”

He nodded. “I thought so. Are you going to answer my question, missy?”

He laid his hand casually on my knee. “I’ll answer,” I said. “But you first.”

“I hope you’re not going to steal my answer,” he said, squeezing my knee playfully.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. “Go on.”

“Have you heard of Darren Shan?” he asked.

I shook my head. My reading habits were mostly reserved for authors who had died over a hundred years ago. I realize how pretentious that sounds, but when it comes down to books, I’m a pretty pretentious person. I can’t make any apologies for that, when for the longest time (before I met Eli, before he cast this spell on me) books were the only place where I felt calm.

“He’s a children’s horror author,” Eli went on. He looked into the distance, and I knew what he was seeing as easily as a ten-year wife would know what her husband saw when he stared off into the distance like that. Our connection allowed me to see what he was seeing. He wasn’t looking at trees. He was looking
through
the trees, and into his own memory. He saw a young boy, hunched over a book, reading until his eyes ached. “I had a series of his when I was quite young. It was about vampires. And, man . . . From the age of ten until I was about fourteen they were the only books I read. There were twelve in the series, and I must have read all of them, from start to finish, about five times. I remember looking forward to bedtime, when I should have been wanting to stay up late, just so I could disappear into that world. It didn’t matter that I knew what was going to happen. It was just that—”

“Disappearing into the story was what mattered,” I finished for him. “It was like you were returning to old friends.”

“Exactly!” he exclaimed, as though he had never heard the idea before. He laughed, and touched my cheek softly. “Normally when I tell people about that, they ask me why I didn’t read any other books, or why—as a fourteen-year-old boy—I would want to spend my time at night reading.”

“That seems like a strange question, to me,” I said.

“It always has to me, too,” he said. “But it hasn’t stopped people from asking.”

I felt instantly closer to him when he told me about this. I saw myself in him, and that invariably makes people closer. But it was more than that. I found myself respecting this boy who had stayed up late to read the same book series he’d already completed. I always like people better when they tell me about their love of reading. I
loved
Eli better for it, as much as I would like a friend better for it. But he was more than a friend, after all. He was my lover, my—can I say it? yes!—my life partner.

“Now it’s your turn,” he said, nudging my shoulder. “What made
you
fall in love with literature?”

I had never properly discussed this, even with my favorite English literature teachers. I had always thought it sounded silly, or like I was trying to come across as poetic and profound. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t poetic or profound in the slightest; these were the sort of social fears that made my heart beat like crazy, and made me doubt every move I made when around people. I was the meek woman in class who never raised her hand, let alone shared something intimate about myself that people might laugh at. But I knew Eli wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t hurt me. Something I was starting to see (and it was never clearer than that day in the lush woods, with nature teeming around us, and civilization only evident in the distance sound of cars) was that Eli would never hurt me. Maybe I was overly optimistic, maybe I had unrealistic expectations, but that, I thought, only prove that I really loved him.

“My Dad used to read a lot,” I said. “Before he became super busy at work, he’d read everything, but mostly classics. I’ve actually thought about this question a few times, about why I love reading so much. For the longest time I thought it was just because Dad reads, and that was it. But now I think it’s something else. It might sound silly,” I warned him.

“It won’t,” he said.

“My earliest memory is of holding a book in my hand. I had no idea what it was at the time. All I remember thinking was that it smelled nice. I liked the smell. I don’t even know what the book was, but I held onto it like other kids hold onto their favorite toys. I remember, once, I was crying like crazy. I can’t even remember why. Maybe I’d fallen over or something. Dad reached into his pocket and brought out the book – my book – and gave it to me. I stopped crying. I held it to my face, felt the pages on my skin, smelled it, and stopped crying.”

It felt strange to be telling another person this, but not so strange that I wouldn’t tell him. It was a small thing, perhaps—this story—but it marked a drastic change in how much I was willing to tell someone. Eli had made me open up, and he couldn’t know how much it meant to me.

“That’s incredible,” he said, with no hint of sarcasm in his voice, as I had imagined the listener would respond when I’d thought about telling somebody this story. They would laugh, or call me weird. But Eli only smiled, looked at me with complete trust and openness, and then moved his fingers over my cheek, tickling my skin. “And then what? What happened when you were old enough to learn to read?”