RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)

by Mia Carson

  He had taken his hand from my face. Now, he reached down and wrapped it around my waist. He pulled us together, so that our bodies were pressed together. His hand was powerful, immovable. I felt powerless, and not in a bad way. All the anxiety, the worry, the stress . . . it didn’t fall away. Life is not that easy. But I sensed that with this man I could build the kind of partnership where it could fall away. If I did not feel certain, I felt close.

  “We could,” I said, my voice a faint whisper. “Just once, though.” Did I know it was a lie? I’m not sure.

  “Just once,” he confirmed.

  He bent down and I turned my face up to him. There was heat all around us, from the warm summer night and the warm tingles running over my body and mostly from his body. When I turned my face up to him, it felt like on a sunny day when you turn it up to the sun. This is going to be my stepbrother, I thought. But right then, the thought seemed unimportant.

  His lips touched mine. They seemed molded to them, like they had been shaped exactly for this purpose. I reached my hands up without thinking—as though I had kissed this man many times before—and placed them on his shoulders. He pressed his lips into mine so hard that I felt our teeth press together through the kiss. He moaned, and instantly I remembered the moans of the lion, of the way the lion had moaned for me, with me, when we had made love. And that was how I thought of it now, I realized—making love.

  It was going further, and I didn’t try and stop it. His hands moved from my back around to my front, to my belly and then down toward my pussy. I reached down, down, toward his cock which I remembered so well. I was inches from it when the footsteps, like unwelcome guests in a dream, clapped into my mind, clapped into the middle of the moment. I placed my hands on his torso and shoved him away. “Don’t,” I whispered.

  His forehead creased, in that gesture which I was coming to learn meant confusion. But when I pointed at the door, behind which was the staircase and the approaching footsteps, he understood. He nodded, and then walked back to the counter and took up his glass. The footsteps kept coming, almost at the bottom of the stairs now. I smoothed my clothes down, pulled my tank top over my breasts (I vowed to always wear a bra around the house from now on, no matter how quiet it was). Turning, I scooped up my book and returned to my chair near the window. Eli stopped for a moment, drink in hand, and made to turn to me. My nervousness, my perpetual anxiety, the feeling that had hounded me for my entire life—which made people label me as the shy one—had returned. I was once again the Jessica who knew the answer in English class but was too timid to say anything; once again the Jessica who said ‘you, too’ to a waitress when she said ‘enjoy your food,’ and then obsessed about it for days afterward; once again the Jessica who cashiers disliked because she had trouble looking them in the eye. Eli looked to me (and the footsteps were almost in the room, and growing louder).

  I shook my head. No, don’t make a scene. Go away. Don’t do anything silly.

  He seemed to get the point. He shook his head back, but it wasn’t a refusal. He was just sad that it had come to that. Fine, I thought. Let him be said. But at least Dad and Annabelle won’t know that their children just kissed and would have done more. Had time slowed? The footsteps were just outside the door, and then finally they entered the room. I forced a calm look over my face, but I couldn’t hide the way the pages trembled when I made to turn them.

  Dad walked in. “Party in the kitchen!” he exclaimed, but he was smiling. “I just came down to get a glass of water. Should I have brought a bottle?” He smiled at me and then Eli like a stand-up comedian in the middle of a routine. Despite everything, I was still able to cringe. I remembered the way he would try and show off in front of my friends when I was a teenager. He’s so embarrassing, I would tell them.

  Eli nodded and smiled and then left the room. Dad, eyes tired, but smiling half-madly (love had had quite the effect on him) walked to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. I pretended to read my book, but the words were black blurring shapes on the page and nothing more. Excitement and anxiety were a potent mix in my heart. The remains of excitement still clung from the kiss—the kiss, why had I let them happen?—but I had to mask this, like I had masked my face that fateful night, because Dad couldn’t know what I was feeling. Dad mustn’t know what I was feeling. Sooner or later, Eli and I would be brother and sister, and we would have to spend an entire summer living together. There was no way we could follow our desires. Sometimes, desires had to be ignored, a lot of the time, actually. And this was one of them.

  “Are you okay, sweetie?” Dad asked, standing at the door.

  “Fine,” I replied. I wonder if he’d really looked, if he’d stepped away from himself for a moment and really looked, if he would have sensed that something was different. But he was in the first throes of love and he was blinded by it. Don’t get me wrong. I was glad. The last thing I wanted was for him to see me when what there was to see would have been disastrous for him and Annabelle.

  “Good!” he grinned. He lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “I should let you know that Annabelle and I have set a date for the wedding. It’s only going to be a small ceremony, you know. She has two or three friends she wants to invite. And I don’t really want to invite anyone, save you. Work friends? Ha! I think I’ll stick to family.”

  “That sounds nice, Dad,” I said. “So, when is the wedding?”

  When is the day which makes it official that I fucked my step-brother? When is the day when Eli and I can no longer, under any circumstances, touch, kiss, or be close, even? When is the day that makes us perverts for doing what we’ve done? I tightened my grip on the book. The pages crunched quietly, crumpling.

  “One week from now!” he laughed. “But don’t tell anyone.”

  He zipped around the door and paced up the stairs. One week . . . I felt like I’d been pushed hard in the chest. And then a resolution grew in me. I couldn’t be like this with Eli anymore. We’d had a night, we’d been wearing masks, that was forgivable. But from now on, we had to be stepbrother and stepsister, and that was it.

  I had to kill my desire for him, and he had to do the same.

  Eli

  The week leading up to the wedding was confusing and disheartening in the extreme. By the night before the wedding, I found myself awake at night, staring at the ceiling and going over and over that masked night and the moans and the grunts and the mutual, explosive pleasure. I found myself lost in it, as though lost in a dream. I would trace the passage of the moonlight across the ceiling, idly, and wait for inspiration to strike. How could I get her to want me again? How? But she had lost interest. Worse, she was pretending that she had never been interested in the first place. When she looked at me, sometimes I thought there was something there—some flicker of lust or affection—and then her too-smiley mask would take over.

  Mom told me about the close wedding date the day after mine and Jessica’s kiss. She danced into my room in the morning (her flowing dress swirling around her like a tornado, her long hair flowing unbound to her back) and perched on the seat across the room. “Wake up, Eli!” she’d cried.

  I’d jolted awake, thinking in my haziness that Jessica had been with me, holding me, and then slapped me across the face. My cheek was sore from where this Dream Jessica had struck me, but really it was from where I’d had my face pressed up against the pillow so hard it made my cheek ache. The room became real in a few moments, and I sat up. “Mom? What is it?”

  And then she told me, squealing like a little girl on Christmas, no idea how this would affect me. I’d smiled and laughed with her, waited for her to go, and then dressed quickly before running downstairs to find Jessica. Mom and Andrew were going out that day for a walk in the surrounding countryside. I told them I didn’t want to go, and I think Mom was secretly glad. She wanted to be alone with her fiancé. Some alone time would be nice, she’d said, which meant Jessica would be home, too.

  I’d found her in the kitchen, expec
ting electric energy to buzz between us, our masked-night chemistry to pick up now that we were alone. But when she looked at me, it was with that fake-smile look, that PR-smile look. It was the smile of somebody who smiles for a living. There was no genuineness in it at all. I’ve never been sold a second-hand car, but I’m sure if I ever am, the salesman will wear that smile.

  “Hello, Eli,” she’d said, that strange smile fixed on her. She was standing at the counter, pouring a bowl of cereal. The bottle of milk trembled only slightly. “Do you want some cereal?” she’d asked calmly.

  It was not as obvious or blunt as telling me point-blank that she wanted to forget what had happened like we had agreed, even after the kiss, but it had the same effect. I wanted her badly, more than I had ever wanted anybody. I wanted her so badly that it made my whole body ache when I looked at her. But she wouldn’t drop that PR-smile.

  The rest of the week was the same. I’d wait for Mom and Andrew to go somewhere together, which they did a lot. They went into Bristol city center to the Hippodrome Theater, or they took drives together. Other times, Mom had to go into the city for her work, and Andrew had to do the same. Jessica and I were on summer break and so—nominally, at least—we were studying for next semester at university. But if she did any studying, I was too captivated with my obsession for her. That was what it was becoming: an obsession. But she never let me break through the wall she had constructed.

  Once, I knocked on her bedroom door. She answered it in long sweatpants and a hoodie. I’d heard her rushing around the room to change into it. It had taken her more than two minutes to answer the door. Maybe I was being paranoid, maybe she was cold, but it was June and the hottest day of the year so far, fans were blasting around the house, and when she opened her bedroom door her face was bright red. Really, I think she didn’t want me looking at her.

  “Can we talk?” I’d asked.

  “About what?” she’d replied innocently, tilting her head slightly as though she truly had no clue what I was implying, as though we hadn’t made love, as though we hadn’t kissed.

  “About us,” I said, and felt like the biggest cliché loser in the world. Where are we going? Who are we? What is this? I hated the pleading tone in my voice, but I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted her, badly. I wanted her more than I’ve ever wanted anybody.

  “Us?” She bit her lip, and for a tiny second I thought the mask might slip, but then it returned, and she smiled widely at me. “I’m busy at the moment. Sorry.”

  She shut the door before I had a chance to say anything. I sighed and returned to my bedroom.

  And on and on and on . . .

  Meeting her in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the garden, in the living room, and always the façade was up, always I felt a cold stab in my chest every time she pretended that we were nothing, until it was the night before the wedding, the night before we became stepbrother and stepsister.

  I fell asleep, as I had every night for a week now, thinking of Jessica, of her lightly-freckled cheeks and her smooth pale skin and her button nose and her sky-blue eyes and her petite body and her hot moans and her soft hands.

  When I woke, it was the Big Day. Music played from Mom and Andrew’s bedroom. Mom giggled. Andrew guffawed loudly. I heard Jessica’s voice . . . “Your hair is lovely, Annabelle,” she was saying. “Maybe we should try this . . .”

  Just my stepsister giving my mom advice on her hair, I thought, terror gripping my chest, making me want to sink into the bed and lose myself in dreams where Jessica and I kissed and held each other and didn’t have to play these games.

  Jessica

  I had to fix it, to make the situation livable, and I hate confrontation. Confrontation brings a person out in the open, brings them out so all their faults and insecurities can be scrutinized and attacked, and the idea of that didn’t thrill me at all. The night after the kiss, after we almost did something we might regret, I lay awake, heart pounding, thinking of how to fix it, how to make it better, how to make it livable. I knew that we couldn’t do what we wanted. That was a ludicrous idea. We could only do what we wanted in a perfect world, where Dad and Annabelle weren’t getting married, where pretty soon we weren’t going to be brother and sister. So I decided to pretend that everything was normal, to pretend that he and I had never kissed.

  It was hard. I had to force myself to smile when I wanted to open up to him. I had to make myself mutter platitudes and play the stepsister role with all my might. And beneath it all, always, there was another version of me trying to break free, a version which wanted Eli, wanted all he had to give, wanted to kiss him, touch him, be with him. Dozens of times I felt the urge to reach out and touch his face, to feel his skin in my hand, but I always held back. I knew it was wrong. I couldn’t do it, no matter how badly I wanted to.

  Dad and Annabelle were too happy, too in love, for their children to mess it up. So I stayed in my room as much as possible, hunched over an Eliot or a Hardy or an Austin or a Hemingway, losing myself in the words, my hands aching from gripping the pages for so long, my eyes burning from hours and hours of reading. It was all a way to escape—not him, but myself, my feelings. I could smile and pretend as much as I was able, but it didn’t stop me from waking in the middle of the night, reaching out for him in my sleep, still horny from a dream when he was naked (tattoos sun-bright in the dream) and fucking me hard. It didn’t change the way my skin pricked each time I thought of that night. It didn’t change the way my mind lurched in recognition each time I thought of the way he’d quoted George Eliot to me.

  I knew that if circumstances were different, we could be close. We could be lovers, maybe more than lovers.

  I joined Annabelle in her bedroom on the day of the wedding. She and Dad did not want anything outlandish, anything over-the-top. Annabelle had long hair, and I helped her style it so it wouldn’t get in the way of the back of her dress, which was low-cut almost to her tailbone. I braided it for her and set it—like an elaborate ornament—atop her head. And even here, doing this, I couldn’t dissociate the simple task of braiding hair with Eli. It was his mother I was helping, and it was her son I wanted, badly.

  “Thanks, Jess!” she beamed, looking at me in the mirror.

  I saw my own face, how tired my eyes looked, how my lip trembled for a moment. It was like looking at somebody else, somebody playing a role. And I was. I was playing the role of a woman who had no interest in her soon-to-be stepbrother. I was playing the role of a woman who didn’t dream every night of the muscles and sex and tattoos and endless orgasms.

  “No problem!” I beamed back, smiling widely.

  She did look beautiful with her hair and her dress. Her dress was a mixture of traditional and stylish. She had the long flowing bottom of a traditional wedding dress, but the low-cut back of more modern styles. I made to help her with her makeup, but she laid her hands atop mine. I felt a stab of guilt in my chest when I saw this happy bride with her hand on mine. She doesn’t know, I thought. She doesn’t know that I fucked her son. She doesn’t know I want to do it again, that we both want to do it again.

  “You’ve done enough,” she smiled. “I can handle this. Why don’t you go and get ready, sweet?”

  “Okay,” I mumbled, and left the room.

  I walked through the house, my heart beating race-horse fast for no outward reason (but all the time thinking of Eli, of that night, of the lion and the way he touched me, of the orgasms and his rock-hard cock), to my bedroom. I was about to walk into the room when I heard two things. The first was Annabelle squealing as Dad entered the bedroom: “Andrew, you’re not supposed to see the bride before the wedding!” The second was Eli, clearing his throat behind me.

  I turned and he stepped forward. I knew I had to keep up the façade, had to smile my fake smile and pretend that this was what it looked like, pretend that we were not connected. I forced my lips to twitch upward, but as I did so I found myself looking at his dagger-marked hand, at the hand which had touched my clit. An
image, burning, strong, thrust itself into my mind, of Eli moving forward and moving his hand up my thigh, lifting the hem of my dress and clamping his hand down on my clit. I felt the heat, my clit pulsing, hungry for it. But he didn’t do that. He just stood there for a few moments, watching me.

  His eyes trailed to the tops of my breasts, lingering there for a moment, and then moved down to my bare legs. I knew it was wrong, I knew that I was supposed to be the good sister, the nice girl, the girl who plays along in this elaborate play, but even so, I reached down and lifted the hem of my dress. That was the true me coming out, I think. I could hear Andrew and Annabelle at the other end of the house, laughing, and I knew I would hear them if they decided to come to this side of the house. I wanted to be desired by him. That was the truth. I lifted the hem of my dress and showed him my panties, which were pink and lacy. His beautiful earth-brown eyes widened when he saw them, and he took a step forward.

  I dropped the dress. The madness passed. Idiot, I thought. Why would you do that? Idiot! I’d worked so hard this past week at pushing him away, and here I’d done the one thing that was sure to bring him closer. “Don’t,” I whispered, the fake smile gone from my face. I was revealing my true self, the self that wanted nothing more than for him to ignore me and push me into the bedroom and suck my nipples, grab my ass, spank me, fuck me. “Don’t, Eli.”

  He ignored me and stepped close, looming over me. The sun entered from behind him, from a small window set into the wall opposite my bedroom, and when he stepped close to me his shadow fell upon me, making me feel small. But it was not small in a frightened, diminishing way. It was good to feel small near him because it reminded me of how big he was.