by T. N. King
“Oh right,” her nose scrunched, tip of her tongue poked just out of her mouth in disgust as she flopped down onto the couch next to him, carelessly flopping a whole half of her leg over the one Mason had curled in front of him in order to face her. “I mean, it would have been worth it without all the tests, obviously we didn’t think that one through.” As if she had time to have thought it through, on moment they were looking at the dinner Marie was preparing and the next thing that he knew Marie was going to get more flour from the pantry and Nicole was rushing around the kitchen like a madwoman.
“We,” he stressed the word, “did nothing of the sort, I had no part in the planning of that mess.” Nor did he want any kind of affiliation to it tied to his name. He had been allowed to eat Wendy's and made to stay in a hospital waiting room for close to twelve hours, other than that he hadn’t been involved at all, even as the lookout she had asked for. He only served as witness to the whole ordeal. Had he been asked, or helped at all, with the subterfuge she probably would have managed it without having the hospital stay attached as she had. Only she hadn’t asked… something he was sure that she was regretting, or possibly just plotting her revenge on his lack of help all of these years later with the way she was narrowly eying him.
“You know, you could have helped, even a little.” Ah, there it was, her face twisted into that righteous indignation as if she wasn’t at all aware with the fact that she was trying to morally shame him for not assisting in lying and sneaking behind her parents backs. “Or at least you could pretend to be sorry that you didn’t, you know, I would have helped you.” He wouldn’t have needed her help, something he was quite sure she was aware of, the lowering of his chin and slight lift of his brows obviously getting that point well enough across from the slap that resounded off of his bicep.
“You didn’t ask,” he reminded her instead, probably a bit too smug both to begin with and again when her hand lifted to have another go at his shoulder. Only he was expecting it, so he caught her wrist easily enough, lips twitching as she wriggled and twisted as if to loosen his hold. She was only half climbing in his lap, which didn’t serve either of their purposes really, but he wasn’t about to stop her, especially with the way that she was laughing while doing so. It was juvenile, but he had a free hand, and she was already laughing, which only encouraged him further to begin prodding at her exposed side. Which accomplished just what he had been seeking, those high-pitched breathy, half protests in the form of giggles, and the added benefit of her body moving even closer.
“Oh! I give! I give Mason! You win! Jeez!” Each word broken up by even more laughter, long drawn out petulance infused into it despite her words but he supposed it worked anyways, fingers stopping their twisting between her ribs and those on his other hand slowly releasing her wrist as if fearing retaliation. Which he didn’t, only he knew she was going to realize her positioning soon enough on her own without the distractions and move. Now having her there currently, he found he wasn’t in any hurry for her to do so. Short of ignoring her defeat though there wasn’t much that he could do about it, so instead he steeled himself for her movement, her torso near falling into his and her head hitting the back of the couch cushion behind them as she tried to regain her breath.
She really was something else entirely, her face flushed and her hair plastered over the plains of her face like that, she looked like she belonged in some fairy tale story book instead of here, lips still stretched into a grin and her hands half-heartedly slapping at his until he moved them back to his own person. “Really Nic, there’s no need for screaming here, we’re inside.” She was sitting too close, she was grinning too much, and she wasn’t pulling back like she ought to have, leaning against him with now both of her legs almost crossing over his. She was too close, he couldn’t think clearly with her that close and her face already as flushed as it was.
“Really Mason? Really? Maybe there’s no need for you.” It was lame, and obviously she knew it, the way that her lips were twitching still even after delivering it, trying desperately to squash that smile of hers so that she could continue trying to be irritated with him, but she still wasn’t pulling away. She wasn’t moving at all, except to stretch her legs just that much further over his, body leaning in instead of away and her one arm moving to push between his side and the couch cushion effectively holding her in the same place she was in. She was painfully oblivious, only the only one experiencing pain over it was him, the way that his body was responding to her proximity. He didn’t need that, certainly not with her thigh so far up on his as it was, all she would have to do was shift just enough and they’d both be equally aware of how much he enjoyed her touching him like she was.
Like a damned siren, the way that her recently moved palm turned inward, pushing against his side instead of the couch, her little fingers twisting the fabric of his shirt between them until the bottom half of her palm was against his skin. She was playing with fire, and he was fully under the impression that she was oblivious to it until he released that their conversation had lapsed… his fault, he hadn’t answered her, preoccupied as he was with the physicality of the situation. She wasn’t calling him on it though, and she was staring at him just as much as he was her, that laughter only just having slid off of her face and something that he wasn’t sure if it was curiosity or ...something else coloring her features instead.
He should have moved her, or reminded her of some other incident from their childhood, it would have been the smart thing to do, she was naive enough not to know what she was doing, but then again, she wasn’t a little girl any longer. She wasn’t a child, and she wasn’t nearly as unaware as he would have expected, her thigh flexing against his almost experimentally as she leant just that much closer, her lips parting in a soft line that his eyes couldn’t help tracing. She was enchanting- and he was going to go to hell, the way she moved just enough, her body more than half in his lap at that point and him with not nearly enough time to tampered his physical response. That exhale through his mouth too hard the minute it was she did move, her whole body stilling like it did the moment he knew that it registered, his eyes dragging up from her lips to the rest of her face waiting for it to set it, the shock and disgust, or maybe just the horror.
Waiting for her to actually jump back or start chastising him, or worse apologizing… only she didn’t. She wasn’t moving at all still, her expression hadn’t changed even a fraction and he knew there was no way that she had missed it, knew that she was resting directly over it because he could feel her weight pressing into him, Adam’s apple bobbing like some nervous teenager even as he moved his own hands. He should have been moving them with the intention to shift her off, or to the side, or even just far enough back…
Instead, his palm landed lightly on her calf, fingers closing slowly enough to give her the option of pulling back or stopping him, but she didn’t, her torso pushing just that much further forward until there was no space at all between them. He was going to hell, and now he wasn’t trying to prevent it, hand closing tightly enough to pull her further to him instead of pushing her away like he ought to have been. “Nicole,” her name was rough, ground up the back of his throat as if he’d only just woken up, and the dilation of her pupils in response was enough to have him tilting his own head. He wasn’t sure if he’d meant her name as warning or plea, didn’t know how to make sense of his own thoughts with her looking at him like that, chin angling and his head dropping to close that distance between the two of them.
“Nickie!” Only for her to finally jerk back with the addition of another voice, her whole body flying back off of his nearly instantly, panic encompassing her features, wide eyes turned to him with a mixture of emotions that flashed too quickly for him to pick out properly. He didn’t even recognize it right away, turning as the body that followed the voice turned the corner into the living room, pausing in that doorway and looking from him to Nicole and back again. He should have, the only person who ignored her preference
for not being called that nickname, but his brain was … having trouble firing as it should have. “Hey babe… what’ch’ya doing?” The suspicion was there, even if it was covered by a grin over Aaron’s features, leaning in that doorway for all of the world as if the last time he and Mason had been in the same place hadn’t resulted in him being taken to the hospital.
“We were just talking about the time I got food poisoning from one of mom’s new dishes,” He almost couldn’t turn to look at her, the way her body had morphed in such a short period of time. Leaning back against the couch now and grinning back at Aaron as if she had never been on his side of the couch at all, as if she were actually giddy to see him. The lie falling from her lips so much more easily than she had ever been able to do before. “What’re you doing here? I thought you were staying at your parents?” For all of the world as if it were a good surprise, Mason should have interjected. He should have said something, anything, but he was as frozen as his body was the hand that had instinctively curled into a fist shoved down into the couch cushion.
“Aw, babe I tried, I just can’t sleep without you anymore.” Like watching a bad sitcom, Mason’s gaze sliding back to Nicole with a carefully neutral expression, unable to look at Aaron while he spoke like that. While he lowered his voice and spoke to her as if his hands weren’t the very same hands that had marred her flesh in all of that blue and black bruising several weeks past. Honey over a steel trap, his whole face lighting up all the more at the ‘aw’ from Nicole beside him, as if she bought him. He couldn’t watch it, couldn’t not watch it, as she stood from the couch, crossing the room to wrap her arms around Aaron like she hadn’t been leaning into Mason only moments before. He couldn’t keep up with it, just only managing to turn his head before Aaron lowered his face to kiss her.
“I was just going to bed anyways.” No, she hadn’t been, not unless she was planning on taking Mason with her… which was a whole other set of thought processes he didn’t need to be going into with Aaron and Nicole both in the room with him, turning to him with their overly-pleased facial expressions, like just being around one another made them glow. “I’ll see you in the morning Mason?” No. She wouldn’t, because he was planning on being gone before they woke up so that he didn’t have to endure more of their simpering at one another. He only shrugged in response though, noncommittal noise covering the distaste filling his mouth.
“Yeah, tomorrow morning bro- night.” As he all but pulled her from the room, Mason’s face finally slipping the moment they made it around that corner. Bro, he wasn’t his bro, in any form that the word could be applied, he would only be too happy to demonstrate again just how far from his ‘bro’ that he was, nostrils flaring at the sound of their feet against the stairs, laughing the whole way up. He only waited long enough to hear her bedroom door opening for them when he stood, couch cushions falling back away from him from the force of it, the mess he left ignored as he made his way out, Marie would forgive him. Although even if she didn’t, in that moment, he didn’t particularly care.
He was only half aware of snatching his keys off of the hook, front door opened and left unlocked behind him as he started towards his car, mind a jumbled mass of emotion that he couldn’t begin to process. She had been the one to lean in. She had been the one to push her hand against his side like she had. She had been the one to climb further into his lap after realizing just how affected he was by her being there at all. She hadn’t moved back when he’d lowered his head, she hadn’t stopped him from pulling her further into him. She’d seemed just as interested in continuing as he had, and yet the minute Aaron arrived…
His body jerked to a stop at the front of the garage, near vibrating with the effort it took to remain still. Aaron. Aaron was in her bed, in the house alone with her currently. Aaron who had already proven what little regard he held for her person. He couldn’t leave, not even because of the implications it would give the rest of her family and Aaron, but for the fact that Marie and Paul were unlikely to arrive back home before late that night. Which meant that, should something happen, no one would be in the house to hear it.
His lips curled, whole torso spinning and his fist slamming into the brick pillar beside the garage with enough force behind it for the brick to chip, dust and small shards falling down about his feet even as the blood began to drip between his knuckles. The bone was broken, he could feel it, hazily as curled his arm up, disinterested gaze dropping to the mangled flesh and bits of brick falling out of the various cuts now decorating his skin. Turned inwards from the feel of it, his fingers probing at that bone and pushing until he could straighten it out, the resounding crack echoing through the quiet neighborhood with his flinch.
He couldn’t leave, and he needed to wrap that hand before anyone caught sight of it. Only, more than that even, he needed a cigarette from his car before he even attempted walking back inside of that house….
Chapter Eight
Her stomach felt hollow, and not from the dinner that they had hidden down the disposal, as she and Aaron tripped up those stairs, his fingers poking randomly into her sides and those squeals of laughter forced out of her lips as they moved. She didn’t feel like laughing, she didn’t feel like leaning back into the hands that were supporting her up that flight, but she was conditioned enough to know what would happen if she didn’t at this point. In that moment more than ever she felt like she owed it to him, her heart still racing for another reason entirely. She hadn’t known what she was doing, not really, although she wasn’t sure that was enough of an excuse, or honest enough, to excuse her behavior. They had just been playing, at least at first, the same as they had for years now, he had just been teasing her, and it had been funny.
Only it had stopped being funny so much faster than she had been aware could happen, and he had been looking at her as if he could see through her completely, like he could see into her head and into that curiosity and heat that had begun to build in her abdomen. Like he was caressing the inside of her head instead of just that one calf he’d put his hand on. He’d put his hand on her calf, her breath caught in her chest even remembering it, the way that his fingers had curled around the rounded muscle as if it belonged to him, pulling her bodily just that much closer.
She couldn’t even blame him, not really, not when he had kept that distance between them right up until she had moved her leg. Stupidly. She had stupidly moved her leg, she hadn’t known what she was going to find, not completely, but she had… not expected it, she realized, but been hoping. She had been hoping that he was looking at her in the way that she thought she had caught him, had been hoping that there was some physical manifestation to prove to her that he had been so that she could continue. Like some wanton whore, she’d all but thrown herself at him and over his lap, and he’d responded. He’d moved her closer, and she was sure with the way that he had been closing that distance that he was going to kiss her. There was nothing innocent or brotherly about the way that he had been holding her, there was nothing sisterly in her reaction to it, or her reaction to feeling even what little bit of him she had been able to feel through the jeans on the side of her leg.
Then again, she’d had no real proof, she’d had no more than what she thought that she felt, than what she’d thought that she’d seen. She could have imagined all of it, she could have just wanted it badly enough that she thought it was manifesting. Since when did she want that though? Since when did she look at Mason as anything other than her brother? No matter how many times he’d tried shirking the title growing up, no matter how often he’d told her that she wasn’t his sister, she’d always had a rebuttal for him, only … sister’s didn’t think about their brothers the way that Nicole was thinking about Mason then, the way she had been thinking about him on the couch. Sisters didn’t get lost in their own heads imagining their brothers closing that distance and flipping them over on the couch. Sisters didn’t feel that intense, gnawing guilt the moment their boyfriend walked in on them sitting with their
brother.
At least not any type of healthy, sane, rational sister. Which she obviously wasn’t. Obviously, she’d crossed some line, moved into some dangerous territory that she didn’t know how to process or escape from. She’d just almost kissed her adopted brother. More than that, she’d wanted to kiss him, she’d wanted him to continue, even after Aaron arrived. Even now, walking up the stairs and pretending to laugh while her boyfriend poked and prodded at her, all she could think about was Mason and the way that he had been looking at her. All she could think about was what would have happened if Aaron had never shown up, and how far she would have been willing to let it go.
What did it say about her that she didn’t even know if she had a limit there? She wanted to find out what it would have felt like for his hand to be on her calf without the obstruction of denim between their skin- and she felt guilty for even thinking about it at all when she was with her boyfriend. When she had a boyfriend. When Aaron had already done so much to help her just because he wanted to be with her, when he was working so hard to be a different person, when he was working through his issues just because he loved her. What kind of person did that make her? What kind of person did it make her that she kept forgetting the fact that Mason was her adopted brother? She’d grown up with him, she’d never… considered him in that light before, had she?
There was something wrong with her, no matter how hard she was trying to push those thoughts out of her head, no matter how she was trying to forget and ignore the way that Mason’s expression had shuttered the minute that Aaron walked into the room, the way he had shifted and the emotion just burning behind his eyes alone. She couldn’t get it out of her mind, she couldn’t stop flipping between the two things, the what ifs and the anger and hurt that had lingered there. She should have been focusing on her boyfriend pressing up behind her, hands running over her shoulders as she tried to open the door, passing through it and only stopping because of Aaron’s hand on her wrist as he shut and locked the door behind them.