Disarm

by Halle, Karina

  Suffice to say, after that everyone went off on their own. Dessert was over, but more booze was brought out to compensate. Big, expensive, rare bottles of single-malt Scotch that my father usually hoarded like a miser but decided were the only way to save this night.

  We each got a bottle. My aunt, Olivier, and Seraphine wandered off down the beach with one, Pascal and my father sat on the sand just a few feet from the mess that the servants were busily trying to clean up. Renaud went off for a walk by himself.

  Which left me to my own devices. I decided to head up to the house and get a new shirt since mine was covered in red wine and gooey flan.

  That’s when I came across my mother being consoled by my uncle.

  There’s nothing out of the ordinary about any of this. It’s always my uncle who is the first to console anybody. But still, I stay silent as I pass by them, pausing when I’m out of sight. I don’t think they even know I’m around the corner, hidden by a marble statue near the sitting area.

  “He knows,” my mother says between sobs. “Luddie, he knows.”

  “Everything is fine, Eloise,” he says to her reassuringly, but I swear there’s a hint of tremor in his voice—very unlike him.

  I peek around the corner of the statue and see him put his hand on my mother’s shoulder, but she swats him away. “No,” she says sharply, racked by another sob. “He knows and he’ll kill me. You know what he’s capable of.” She looks up at him with the wildest eyes I’ve ever seen. This might be one of the few times I’ve really seen fear on my mother’s face, and I don’t think I like it.

  “You need to calm down, please. This is your anniversary—”

  “It means nothing!” she yells.

  My uncle shushes her, and my mother looks around, expecting to be seen. I quickly duck back before she has a chance to spot me. Not that I understand what I’m eavesdropping on, but it sounds important. A little too important. Probably something I need to walk away from.

  So I do. I walk away just in time to hear my mother say softly, “We all know what he can do and will do. No one is safe. He holds grudges until he dies.”

  She’s slurring her words, though. She’s drunk and she’s crazy, becoming more and more unhinged as I get older. I have no doubt she’s talking about my father, but when it comes to my family, the less I know and the less I’m involved, the better off I am. I didn’t just spend the last few months in Brussels trying to get an education so I couldn’t step away from this family and this god-awful business.

  My mother obviously did something wrong. Maybe my uncle did, too, but that doesn’t seem likely. He’s too good for that. Perhaps it was a business deal gone south. Whatever it is, it’s not my concern. It can’t ever be.

  I head upstairs through the sprawling interior to the third floor, where my bedroom is, and take off my shirt. Then, as I’m pulling out a clean one from my carry-on suitcase, I realize that I don’t owe anyone anything. I don’t have to get dressed, I don’t have to go back down. I have the bottle of Scotch with me, and that’s all that I need. I can finish the bottle, drift off to sleep, and see if I can get a flight out tomorrow, a day earlier than the one I have scheduled.

  So I sit at the foot of the bed and proceed to drink straight from the bottle, wishing once again that I’d just stayed away. But the more I stay away, the more I have to ask myself, where am I staying? I’m twenty years old, and I have no fucking idea what I’m doing with my life. I just know what I’m trying to avoid.

  I drink and I think about this, and I’m not sure how much time has gone past, but then I look up and see a figure passing in front of my door, the door I’d left halfway open.

  It’s Seraphine.

  I’ve barely said two words to her since I arrived yesterday.

  There’s not much to say.

  Everything I want to say can’t be put into words, and if it could, it would be inappropriate.

  Just the sight of her makes something inside me unravel.

  I can’t let that happen.

  I have to stay intact. I have to avoid her.

  And yet I get to my feet and walk unsteadily over to the door, leaning out of it in time to see her silhouette disappear into her room.

  I quickly follow her, putting my arm out against her door just as she starts to close it.

  “Jesus,” she swears as she jumps. “You startled me.”

  “What are you doing?” I ask her.

  “I was about to go to bed,” she says, looking me up and down. I’m shirtless, and her eyes trace over my bare skin with more care than she’d like to show. “And it seems so were you.”

  “Have a drink with me,” I tell her, showing her the Scotch and pushing the door open even further. “Talk to me.”

  Her eyes go wide. “Talk to you?” She sweeps her long hair over her shoulder and puts her hands on her hips. “Since when do we ever talk, Blaise? The last time we even spoke, you punched my ex-boyfriend in the face.”

  “He deserved it. You know it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It was uncalled for. It made it all a bigger deal than it was. Had you not done that, no one outside the party would have known how humiliated I was. After you did that, all the tabloids reported on the story. Made you out to be a violent and crazy drunk, made me out to be some loser whose boyfriend cheated on her in front of everyone.”

  “Jamillah,” I say.

  “What?” Her brows knit together, eyes hard.

  “Your alter ego.”

  “She was my old self,” she clarifies. “And I regret ever telling you about her.”

  “What else do you regret? I mean, now that we’re laying everything out.”

  She takes a step toward me, her fingers curled around the edge of the door. “We’re not laying anything out. Don’t get it twisted. I think it’s time you go to your room.”

  But I don’t move away. I lean in and whisper, “Do you regret kissing me back?”

  “Get out.” Her voice trembles slightly.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her, moving forward until I’m pressed up against her. She tries to push back, but I keep going until I’m inside and clear of the doorway.

  I’m not sure what I’m doing, I just know we need to talk. Maybe not about everything, maybe there’s nothing to talk about on her end. But I hate this whole back-and-forth thing we have, the ignoring each other for months and months and then the forced conversation, the formalities we put up in front of everyone else when there is something so much more raging underneath. Perhaps all unbeknownst to her.

  This is what I need to find out.

  “What do you want?” she asks quietly. She doesn’t look scared, really, just wary.

  I reach over and brush her bangs out of her eyes so I can see them more clearly. Perhaps now she looks scared. The fact that I touched her.

  I then hold up the bottle, keeping it between us. “Just have a drink with me.”

  She eyes it. “That’s probably a bad idea.”

  “Not true. I only have good ideas.” I lift the bottle to my lips and take a swig. “Don’t tell me you don’t need it after tonight.”

  “I think I’ve had enough wine,” she says in a feeble protest. Then she takes the bottle from me and turns, walking over to the window. I watch as she takes a long swig, doesn’t flinch even once. For a seventeen-year-old, she can handle her liquor phenomenally well. Can’t say the same for my mother.

  “What a mess,” she whispers to herself.

  I come up beside her and look out the window with the clear view of the beach below. The table is set up again, everything in place from the dessert plates to the empty wineglasses. Renaud is back, and my father and brother are sitting around it, drinking from their bottles of Scotch, just as we are.

  “I bet you never thought you’d be adopted into such a dysfunctional family,” I tell her.

  She snorts lightly. “Speak for yourself. My family functions just fine. Your side is fucked up.”

  Then she sti
ffens and gives me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry. That was rude of me to say.”

  “I like it when you’re rude,” I say.

  I don’t add that it fucking turns me on. I think she’s barely tolerating me enough as it is.

  What a mess, indeed.

  “I figured that,” she says, and for the first time tonight, there’s just a hint of a smile.

  That hint means far more to me than she can possibly know.

  “So, if your family functions just fine, why aren’t you down there with them? Why are you up here alone?” I ask, reaching back for the bottle.

  She doesn’t let go. “Why are you here alone?”

  “I think you know why.”

  “Because you still hate everyone?”

  “Do you ever wonder why I’m never around?”

  “To wonder would mean I think about you. And I don’t.”

  Though she must mean her words to hurt, she looks away as she says it. I loosen my grip on the bottle and let her have another long sip. I probably shouldn’t let my younger cousin drink like this, but there are a lot of shouldn’ts tonight that I want to keep doing.

  “I think you’re lying.”

  She presses her lips together, swallowing the booze. “What do you want from me?”

  “I told you, I just want to talk.”

  She glances at me furtively. “About what?”

  I’m drunk and have only liquid courage and a smidgen of hope.

  “I want to know if you liked it when I kissed you. I want to know if you thought of it again.”

  Her cheeks flush, and she looks back out the window as if to escape the question, but there’s no relief for her out there on that black ocean and that dark night sky.

  “That was years ago,” she finally says.

  “Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  “No, but you acted like it didn’t happen,” she says sharply, eyes flying to mine. “You kissed me, and then we went back to the way we were before, like it was nothing.”

  Something rises in my chest, hot and burning. “And that bothered you. You cared.”

  Her nose scrunches up. “No. Yes. I don’t know.” She brings the bottle back to her lips, but I take it from her.

  “I think you should slow down.”

  “You’re the one who brought me that!”

  “And I want to hear things from you while you mean them.”

  “Oh, like you ever mean a single thing you say.”

  “I do,” I tell her, feeling defensive. “I always mean what I say.”

  “I can’t trust you,” she says. “I can’t trust any of you. You’re all . . .”

  “Terrible?” I fill in. “My side of the family is terrible. I know that. And I’m not standing here in your room pretending to be a good guy. I am not a good guy. I’m just a guy who knows what he wants.”

  A long, heavy pause fills the room, laden with tension. “And what is that?” she asks quietly.

  But she knows.

  I reach up and put my hand on her cheek. She flinches slightly as I press my fingertips into her skin, holding her, a war raging inside my chest. Torn between doing what I want and doing what is right, and I have never done what’s right.

  So I do what’s wrong.

  I lean in and kiss her.

  Hard.

  My hand slides back into her hair and makes a fist, and the bottle drops to the floor between our feet and rolls across the rug. Everything else slips away because all I care about, all I want, is her. I want her. I want to be inside of her. I want to kiss her until she’s hopeless, helpless, then I want to throw her on that bed and show her the way.

  But she’s fighting it. She’s trying to do things right, as she’s always done. She’s stiff in my hands, not pliable, not succumbing to the kiss. She’s trying to hold her ground.

  And yet she’s not pushing me away. She’s not telling me to stop.

  She has a war inside herself too.

  And I know who the victor is the moment her mouth opens to mine and I slide in my tongue, grazing the tip of hers, and she lets out a soft and breathy moan, which I feel reverberate in every cell in my body.

  Fuck.

  This is all I’ve wanted.

  Seraphine is kissing me back, and more than that, she’s enjoying it.

  Our kiss deepens, my hands sliding farther up into her hair and then down her back as her hands tentatively rest on my biceps, as if she’s not sure she can touch me. I’m sure the fact that my shirt is off is making things more complicated.

  My heart is a jackhammer in my chest. I’m not sure if I can have a heart attack on my feet, but there wouldn’t be a better way to go. Our lips are fire, the flames building between us, and with each long, hard pull, each tangle of our tongues, I feel like I might just explode.

  I’m harder than I’ve ever been in my life.

  I’ve slept with enough women at this point to know that I like sex, but kissing Seraphine has just erased every single fuck I’ve had. It’s created a new beginning, a clean slate, the basis to which everything will be measured against.

  I press against her, needing her to know how I feel.

  She gasps as my erection digs into her hip.

  “This is what you do to me, Seraphine,” I murmur as I pull my mouth away from hers, just an inch. “Does it scare you?”

  She swallows. “Yes,” she whispers, her eyes falling closed as my hand slips under her shirt and skims across the soft curves of her stomach.

  “Do I scare you?”

  She shakes her head slightly. “No.”

  But there was hesitation in her voice. “What are you afraid of?”

  She takes in a wavering breath and glances up at me through her long lashes, her eyes a mix of fear and yearning. She’s turned on too. When my hand travels up to her breast and over her thin bra, her nipple is as hard as a rock.

  She sucks in another breath and bites her lip.

  Dear God. I might come right now, just like this.

  “You know why I’m afraid,” she says.

  “You’re a virgin.”

  “You’re my cousin,” she says. “This is wrong.”

  “Is it?” I ask.

  “Are you kidding me? Yes. It’s wrong.”

  “We aren’t related.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter.” I slip my fingers underneath the underwire of her bra, finding her soft bare skin. “And yet nothing matters.”

  “Blaise,” she warns, but as I stroke her sensitive nipple, she lets out a fluttering sigh, her eyes closing, mouth opening.

  “Seraphine,” I say, my voice coming out rough with the lust that’s threatening to tear me apart. “I’ve wanted you from the moment I saw you.”

  “We were just kids,” she manages to say.

  I lean in and kiss the side of her mouth. “It didn’t matter. I saw you and I knew we were alike. I knew you were like me. Alone in this world. Unmoored. Looking for something. Family.”

  “You have family.”

  “But I don’t. I don’t have anything. You’re the closest thing to family that I have and yet you’re so much more than that.” My voice is starting to shake, a whirlwind of complicated emotions swirling inside me, competing with the hard sexual drive that’s wanting to take over. “I’m obsessed with you. And I’ll never stop wanting you. For the rest of my life, you’re the only thing I want.”

  I kiss her softly this time, our lips barely touching and somehow feeling more erotic than anything else.

  “You just want me out of your system,” she whispers against my mouth, breathing hard.

  “No,” I tell her hoarsely. “I want you in my system. You’ll never be out, not if I can help it.”

  “Where can this go? What happens next?”

  “What happens next is that I’m not going to let you go. I’m going to take you right here, possess you, keep you. You’re mine, you always have been, even if you didn’t know it. But I think you di
d know it. Didn’t you?”

  “We can’t . . .”

  “We can. And I’ll show you exactly how we can.”

  I grab her by the hair, by the waist, pulling her against me, kissing her so hard that our teeth knock against each other, and I feel my breath being stolen from me. I spin her around and throw her on the bed, climbing onto her, my hands roaming over her body, trying to pull her shirt over her head.

  She’s grabbing me with the same hunger and force, her fingers digging into the hard planes of my back, bucking herself up into me, gasping for air.

  I manage to get her bra unhooked before bringing her full breast out of the cup, my mouth sucking her nipple, drowning in the taste of her.

  “I need to come inside you,” I murmur against her hot skin. God, I had no fucking idea it would be like this. I dreamed about it, jacked off to it, but I had no idea.

  This is going to ruin me for the rest of my life.

  Because it’s at this moment that I realize I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to truly have her.

  As if she knows what I’m thinking, or perhaps because she’s put off by my crude words, she stops, pulling her head back and pushing her hands up against my chest.

  “No,” she says, her words so breathy and weightless they almost dissolve in the air. “We can’t. I can’t. I’m not . . . I don’t think . . .”

  Whether she’s a virgin or not is none of my business, but if she is, I’m not about to pressure her into anything, no matter how badly I want and need it. And if she’s not a virgin . . . I guess the same stands.

  “It’s fine,” I say, brushing her hair off her sweaty forehead. We’d barely gotten started and yet the heat between us is palpable. “We can slow down.”

  She stares up at me, her eyes searching my face. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Tonight or any night?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I just need to think.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell her, kissing the tip of her nose. “I promise you that. I won’t hurt you unless you want me to.”

  Her cheeks go a deeper red, and she gives me a shy smile. “I just . . . I don’t know if I can trust you still. I don’t know if you’re just using me. I don’t know that if I give you myself, you’ll toss me away because that’s what boys like you do.”