by Hawk, Maya
James is silent, though I’m certain his little pea brain is working overtime to calculate his next move. I’m not sure why he’s still with me if he’s courting the heir to an oil baron’s fortune.
Unless he’s trying to pilfer as much as he can from both of us and move onto the next victim…
“I can trust you, right, James? You’d never hurt me.” I cock my head to the side, waiting for his reaction. He squirms, and I take great pleasure in watching him bake under my hot stare like a snail on a sidewalk.
“Never, babe.” His voice cracks, and his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.
I walk up to him, lowering my face to his and making him think for a split second I might be preparing to kiss him. Stopping short, I say, “Even if a pretty little, dark-haired beauty queen tried to sweep you off your feet? You’d still love me, right?”
His face flushes. The moment he realizes he has no control plays over his face in real time. “What are you talking about, Lauryn?”
“I’m talking about Colette DuBois.” I stand up slowly, placing my hands on the curve of my hips. “I’m talking about the girl you’ve been fucking behind my back. Need me to be more specific?”
He’s trying to speak, but he stammers. He’s lost his cool and collected demeanor. He’s fumbling over his words like a criminal who’s just been cornered. James eyes the door.
“That’s right,” I say, nodding to the door behind me. “Get out while you can. Get out before I call HR and tell them you’ve been charging your romantic dinners, weekend getaways, and luxury hotel rooms to your company credit card. I found the receipts in your email, James.”
“You wouldn’t do that.” He’s too sure of himself, and that only makes me want to turn his world upside down even more.
“Why would I do you any favors? You were about to ask me to marry you while you were fucking Miss USA behind my back. And did I read that one email right? Are you buying a house with her?”
“You’re crazy, Lauryn.” He rolls his eyes, heading to the door.
“Right. I’m the crazy one.” I laugh an admittedly maniacal laugh, but it makes me feel lighter. Or maybe it’s the fact that James is leaving. That makes me feel lighter. “I’d be more than happy to show you crazy, James. I really hope you weren’t counting on your fourth quarter bonus, because as soon as HR finds out about your con-artist ways, you’ll be losing that too.”
James says nothing, which is almost disappointing because I want to keep going. I want to take everything out on him, call him every name I can think of, and make him feel tiny and worthless and undesirable. Instead he leaves, slamming the door behind him.
It’s all dissatisfying and anticlimactic. I wanted a brawl. I wanted to spit my words into his face and slam my fist against his chest.
I back away from the door, my breath slowing back to a normal pace.
And then I smile.
I smile because I’m free.
I smile because I never even knew I was a prisoner in the first place.
Thank you, Colette. Thank you universe. You just saved me from the mistake of a lifetime.
SIXTEEN – SUTTON
“Dr. Cawthorn at five o’clock,” one of the nurses tells me as I finish charting at the nurse’s station. She stifles a grin, and I know exactly why. Dr. Cawthorn has wanted me since the day she met me, and she makes no bones about it. She looks at me with a fierce, almost terrifying determination.
Our schedules vary and contrast, but every once in a while she fills in for one of her partners or her rotation falls on a weekend, and we bump paths. I never should’ve fucked her years ago, but I was new in town and she was attractive and we’d had too many drinks after a long shift. It was a one-time mistake, and one that I’d been paying for ever since.
“Sutton,” she says, slinking up next to me. She smells like expensive perfume and her lips are coated in dark pink lipstick. She flips her coffee-brown hair over her shoulder, letting her gold bracelets clink as they fall down her wrist. She’s always dressed to the nines under her lab coat, at least when I see her. She’s the only doctor I know who delivers babies in scrubs and Gucci heels. They don’t call her “Dr. Chic” for nothing.
“Corinne,” I say, avoiding eye contact at all costs. I hand my paperwork to the nurse and turn to head down the hall. There’s a gentle padding of her heels against carpet as she chases after me.
“Wait up,” she calls out. I stop. “Are you hungry at all? You want to go downstairs and grab a bite in the cafeteria?”
She can’t get a real date with me, so she’s constantly trying to con me into having dinner with her on work time.
“I’ve got to get some sleep,” I say. I press on, heading to the on call room. She follows. I give her a polite half-smile before slipping in and shutting the door. I take a seat on one of the beds and pull my shoes off.
The door flies open, presenting Corinne with a devilish grin on her face. She spins around and locks the door before rushing over to me.
“Quick, we only have a few minutes,” she unbuttons her white coat, her breathing heavy. There’s a look in her eye that sends my cock into a shriveled state of NOPE. Dr. Corinne Cawthorn is beautiful by anyone’s standards, but she’s all kind of crazy, and she’s not anyone I’d remotely entertain being with. “Come on. Hurry up!”
She reaches down for my cock, but I block her hands.
“Hurry, my patient in twenty-five is about to deliver any minute,” she says.
“Corinne, what are you doing?!” I grab her gently by her narrow wrists, guiding her needy grasp away from my flaccid cock that wants nothing to do with the shit she’s peddling. “Don’t do this.”
“Don’t do what? I’m making this easy for you,” she says, licking her lips. Her eyes fall to my crotch. “God, that fucking piercing, Sutton. The way it rubs against my g-spot…”
She looks like she’s about to orgasm on the spot, simply from memory.
“I have to have it again,” she begs. She pulls her lab coat off her shoulders and begins unbuttoning her skirt and tugging it down her hips.
“Stop.” I stand up and head to the door. If she’s not going to leave, I will.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Sutton?” she calls after me. “You’re messed up in the head. You need a psych consult, you know that? You won’t date anyone. You won’t fuck anyone. You won’t let anyone in. Are you gay or something? Are you not into women?”
I don’t justify her accusations with a response. I bite my tongue and get the hell out of that tiny on call room and Crazy Corinne.
I finish my shift with zero sleep on the off-chance Corinne might try to sexually assault me with her heightened state of desperation once again. The nurses get it. They say nothing. They only keep the energy drinks and fresh cups of coffee coming as we work side-by-side delivering a handful of babies.
Despite the shift from hell, I can’t stop thinking about Lauryn. I need to know how she’s doing and if she’s crying over that asshole, James. If she has any smarts about her, she’ll be celebrating and thinking about the next time she’s going to see me.
I chuckle at that notion. It seems so far-fetched.
When my twenty-four hours are up, I clock out and head home, stopping in my tracks when I round the corner to my apartment and see Lauryn sitting on the floor, leaning against my door.
“I wasn’t sure what time you got off,” she says. Her eyes are clear, like she hasn’t been crying. That’s a good sign. She doesn’t seem upset, in fact, she seems unshakably calm. “I tried texting you and then my phone died. I couldn’t find my charger.”
“Uh, huh,” I tease. “It’s okay if you wanted to come see me. You don’t have to make up excuses.”
I slip my key into my lock and let us in, tossing my keys in a bowl on the console after kicking off my shoes.
“Make yourself at home.” I yawn. I’m exhausted, but seeing Lauryn has given me reason to fight that tooth and nail. “I’m going to shower.”
I take a seat next to her. She’s flipping through the back where there’s a picture of the two of us our sophomore year – before we stopped speaking to each other. We’re covered in face paint that matches our school colors and running down a football field hand-in-hand.
“I miss us.” She says it in one dreamy sigh. “The old us. I miss the people we were before life got shitty and complicated.” She runs her hand across the slick pages, as if she could possibly touch a memory. “Why didn’t you try to stop them?”
I lean back, running my hands across my thighs.
“When you found out about our parents, why didn’t you try to tell them not to do that? Why didn’t you threaten to tell or make them realize they were destroying lives?” She sounds like a broken little girl when she talks, and I realize her pain, though well over ten years old, is still as fresh as the day it all began.
“I did,” I say. “Your dad clocked me across the face.”
“That’s how you got that black eye?” she asks, her voice tapering off. “You said you got in a fight with Cody Preston at school.”
“Nope, that was DeVonn,” I say. “He socked me and told me I could never see you again if I breathed a word to anyone. Shit, Lauryn. I was embarrassed. I didn’t want you to think I was weak or that I couldn’t fix things for you.”
She leans against my shoulder. I take it as her way of apologizing for being wrong. I accept in silence.
“Look, I could take the beatings,” I say. “But I couldn’t take not being able to see you. And then that happened anyway, so…”
She nuzzles against me, breathing me in. “My mom never did remarry. She’s taken a vow of celibacy. For the last ten years, all she’s done is tell me that men are evil and that we’re all better off alone. She didn’t even like James, and let’s face it, at face value, James can be extremely likable.”
“Fucking James,” I say with a snicker. “You confront him yet?”
Lauryn nods. “It didn’t go the way I hoped it would. There were no bloody knuckles and broken noses, but I think he leaned a lesson. I’m going to let him squirm for a few days before I call HR and report him for abusing his company card. Bye-bye bonus…”
“That’s rather generous of you,” I say. “I’m sure you could do a lot more damage than that.”
“Oh, no, that’s where you’re wrong. Money is everything to James. I’m going to hit him where it hurts. He’s going to miss that bonus, believe me. And he’ll have to explain to his darling Colette that he’s officially jobless.”
“Remind me never to cross you,” I tease, slipping my hand around her back. I’m holding her, and my heart is racing. It feels good to hold her, to be close to her again. Seeing her smile is reassuring. I’d happily let her cry on my shoulder, but she doesn’t appear to be sad. She almost seems relieved about the whole thing. “You never wanted to marry him, did you?”
She slinks a single shoulder upward. “I don’t know. I thought I did? I-I don’t know.”
“It’s hard for you to admit the way you feel about things.” I want to reach for her hands but I don’t. We’re not quite there yet, and I don’t want to scare her away the moment she’s finally warming up to me. “Why is that?”
“It’s how I survived the last ten years,” she admits. “Never dealing with my emotions. Never dealing with reality.”
“Which was?”
“That I missed you. That I was hurting. That as much as I convinced myself that I hated you, I really still loved you.”
She trembles slightly, as if years of buried emotions are working their way from the deepest parts of her to the outermost parts. It’s difficult for her to be so honest.
“Loved me like a…stepbrother?” I test her.
She blows a breath between her lips. “I hated you as a stepbrother. Let’s set the record straight on that.”
“But you loved me as…”
“I loved you as…I don’t know.” She rubs her hands against her jeans, creating warm friction.
“You can say it.”
“I loved you as…I don’t know. I loved you. I was in love with you. There. I said it.” Lauryn’s face flushes, and her lips twitch. Her eyes snap to the yearbook in her lap, which she shuts in haste.
“You should’ve said something when you had the chance,” I say. “I had no idea.”
“Really?” She turns to me. “You had no idea? After that summer we shared? All the things we did? We were together every single day. Couldn’t keep our hands off each other. I gave my virginity to you.”
“And it was a fucking fantastic gift.”
She elbows me. “God, you really are dense.”
“Not as much as you think,” I say. “I’m not sure that I knew what love was back then, and I’m not sure that some seventeen, eighteen year old punk should go around saying those kinds of words. Look, all I knew was you were the only thing that mattered to me back then, Laur. And you still are. I know now that that was love.”
She bites her full bottom lip, her eyes half-open and falling toward my mouth. She’s right there, on the edge. I just have to give her a good push.
“I want to kiss you, Lauryn,” I say. “I’m going to kiss you.”
“No,” she says. She swallows, her lips parting. “I don’t know if I’ll want to stop once you start.”
“Then we’ll keep going,” I say. I lean into her, grazing my lips across hers. “I want it, Laur. I want you. Don’t you want me too?”
Her eyes squeeze shut, and she nods. “I want you, Sut.”
My hands cup her sweet face. I claim her mouth as mine, forcing her lips apart and sucking her tongue as our lips dance. Her breath heaves and she sinks back into the sofa. I take the opportunity to pin her under me, tearing off her top like the inconvenience that it is. Anything that stops me from taking Lauryn from here on out shall henceforth be demolished and ruined.
She’s mine.
Now and forever.
“But isn’t this weird?” she sighs, pulling away. “We’re stepbrother and stepsister. Technically.”
“No, it’s not fucking weird,” I groan. My hands are working the waistband of her leggings, slipping down between her thighs. My cock hardens, and the metal ball of my piercing rubs against my boxer briefs. I’m literally aching for her, and if she doesn’t give herself to me in the next five minutes, I’ll have a medically concerning case of blue balls.
“But, like, right now, you’re my stepbrother, and you’re about to fuck me,” she says with a teasing grin. She knows what she’s doing. She’s torturing me on purpose and loving every second of it.
“It’s kind of hot,” I say, pressing my lips into the hot flesh between her full breasts. They’re spilling out of the lace cups of her bra, the pinks of her nipples beginning to peek out. Her breasts are perfect: round, natural, and generous. I pull a cup down and take a nipple in my mouth, running it between my teeth enough to wake it up. She sighs in response, pressing her head against a throw pillow. “Besides, first you were like my bratty kid sister, and then you were my friend, and then you got boobs and got all hormonal, and then I thought you were hot so I fucked you like crazy, and then we became stepsiblings, and now I’m going to fuck you, like I did back in high school, only now we’re adults. That means we can do whatever the fuck we want.”
I unhook her bra, setting her free, and she slides her leggings and panties down, kicking them off. They fall in a heap on the floor, and her hands lunge for the button of my jeans. My boxer briefs hardly contain my erection, and she wastes no time unleashing me from my confines.
“Still pierced,” she says with a pleased smirk. Her tongue runs along the inside of her upper lip.
“All the better to please you.” I dip down, kissing her ho
t and wanting mouth and feeling her smile.
“You know that was a dare,” she said. “I never expected you to really get your cock pierced.”
“You should’ve known better than to dare me to do anything,” I whisper. “I dared you to get your nipples pierced and you chickened out.” My mouth trails down her neck, peppering soft kisses into her soft flesh and stopping above her heaving breasts. I take a nipple in my mouth and bite down just enough to elicit another heavy sigh. “But that’s okay because you shouldn’t fuck with perfection.”
“Dare me to do something else,” she begs through breathless sighs. “I’m not in a mood to care about consequences right now…”
“Let me fuck you up against that window,” I whisper. I gaze up over her head, where floor to ceiling windows lead out to my balcony. “I want the whole fucking world to know you’re mine.”
I climb off her, pulling her up and over to the window. I press her against it, her hands splayed out as she braces herself. My hand travels between her legs, spreading them until I find her slit. I stick a finger in, followed by another.
“So fucking wet,” I moan. “God, Lauryn.”
She bites her lip and presses a cheek against the glass. It’s still daylight out and her hot, naked body is pressed against the glass for the whole world to see – or at least my neighbors across the street.
“Fuck me, Sutton,” she pleads.
“Are you on the pill?” I ask. I’m a doctor. I need to know these things. “Are you clean?”
“Just had a check up the other day. I’m clean. I haven’t been with James in weeks,” she pants. “And I’m on the shot.”
Her eyes squeeze as she waits. My right hand grips the base of my cock, pumping it and angling it between her thighs. My free hand grips her taut low belly, guiding her onto my cock slowly, the way she liked it in high school. Her body is tense, and the second she sheaths me, her body melds against the glass.