Neighbors (Twin Estates #1)

by Stylo Fantome

  “No one has ever been as good as this,” he started panting over her. “Only you. So goddamn good to me.”

  “You deserve it,” she moaned. He chuckled and bent forward, clamping his teeth around a nipple. She let out another cry.

  “You don't know what you're doing, Katya. You don't even know who you're dealing with,” he said when he backed away.

  “I know exactly who I'm dealing with.”

  He wasn't paying attention to her words, though. He grabbed her left leg and shoved it higher, letting it fall over his arm. The back of her thigh rested against his bicep, the two slipping and sliding against each other. His hand briefly smoothed over her ass, then moved onto her breasts, squeezing and pinching. Her breath started to hitch.

  “I want to see this every single night,” he said in a low voice, looking between their bodies so he could watch himself thrust in and out of her.

  “Yes, please, every night. Please,” she agreed, clinging to his shoulders as her whole body started to tremble.

  “I want to make you wet and make you come and know I'm the only one who is allowed to do that to you,” he continued.

  “Only you, I promise,” she assured him, her hips starting to move erratically against him. Something big was building in her core. Something explosive and dangerous. She would be obliterated by their time together, she was sure.

  “I want you to live with me,” he kept going. “I fucking hate it here. I want your presence everywhere, I want you to make it feel like home. I want you to be my home.”

  “Anything. I'll do anything you want.”

  His thrusts were brutal at that point, and she couldn't tell if she was feeling blinding pleasure, or stinging pain. Whatever it was, she wanted to feel it all the time. He was pushing with enough force that he was driving her across the mattress. Her head finally fell over the side.

  “I want you to love me,” he whispered.

  Too late.

  She couldn't say anything in response. She could only shriek as an orgasm ripped her straight down the middle, making her tremble and sob. She couldn't catch her breath, he wouldn't let her. He just pushed harder, and when she felt his hand moving between them, felt his fingers pinching sensitive wet flesh, she honestly thought she might die. The orgasm swelled again, becoming a tsunami. A force of destruction, threatening to wreck them both.

  It was Wulf's turn to be strong, to stand against the wave. He laid down flat, crushing her as he forced his tongue into her mouth. The action distracted her from impending death, and while she tried to remember what planet she was on, he thrust so hard, he broke every last boundary she could've possibly had – cleared a path straight to her soul. While he came inside her, his teeth bit into her bottom lip, most definitely leaving a mark.

  It took a while for both of them to calm down. Multiple orgasms were not only real, she'd just discovered, but they were at once the most awesome and most terrifying thing she'd ever experienced. She pressed a hand over her eyes, trying to stop the room from spinning.

  Wulf laid still, but continued to twitch inside of her for a while. Even as his body relaxed, his hips continued to very slightly pump against her, slowly and languorously.

  She wasn't sure how long they laid like that together, and even less sure of when she'd started crying. She could feel the tears under her fingertips and she tried to keep her breathing even, not wanting to scare him away from such a big moment.

  “Hey,” he said, finally lifting himself up. “Hey, stop it.”

  “No, it's not bad,” she assured him, her voice watery. “I'm not upset.”

  “No, I meant stop hiding from me.”

  He pulled her hand away from her face and stared down at her. She blinked up at him, her vision blurry.

  “I'm not hiding, I'm just ...” she started. He gave her a sad smile and traced a thumb under her eye, wiping away the tears that had collected there.

  “It's okay. I know.”

  “I'm happy.”

  24

  Katya had lied. Only a little, but still.

  She'd said she trusted Wulf, but she didn't fully – only about ninety-nine percent. The other one percent had her afraid to go to sleep. Afraid that when she woke up in the morning, the magic would be gone and the old-Wulf and the old-Katya would be back. Those two people wouldn't get along. They wouldn't be able to laugh and love each other and have mad passionate sex. She would hate for that to happen.

  I'm afraid none of it was real, that he didn't mean any of it.

  When she opened her eyes, it was to bright morning sunlight outside the windows. She blinked a couple times, half asleep yet still in awe of the view. Then she took a deep breath and glanced over her shoulder.

  The bed was empty.

  A huge digital clock on the wall read nine o'clock. Hadn't he mentioned having an early morning meeting? She curled up into a tighter ball, trying to hold herself together. He hadn't even woken her up to say goodbye. Maybe it hadn't been real, after all.

  Before she could work herself up into a proper fit, though, the bedroom door creaked open from behind her. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, trying to feign sleep and hoping the maid or whoever would just go away.

  When the mattress dipped down, though, Katya couldn't stay still. She sat up, clutching the sheet to her chest, wondering what the hell kind of cleaning lady tried to make a bed with a person in it. It wasn't a maid, it turned out. Wulfric was crawling up the mattress.

  “I made coffee,” he said in a low voice before rolling onto his back. He was wearing a loose pair of black pajama bottoms and nothing else. His hair was total bed-head, and he hadn't shaved. He clearly hadn't left the apartment at all.

  “I thought … you said you had a meeting. I thought you had to leave,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. She was still sitting up, so all she could see of him was from the waist down. But she felt him move and his hand came to rest on her bare back.

  “I don't have to go anywhere.”

  “But you said -”

  “This is more important, Tocci.”

  Katya laid back down, as well. She stared at the ceiling while Wulf folded his arms across his face, covering his eyes. They stayed silent for a really long time. Long enough that she felt like she might scream, just to fill the void.

  “Why do you call me that?” she burst out.

  “Call you what?”

  “Tocci. You mostly call me by my last name. I always wondered why.”

  There was a long pause, and when she glanced at him, she could see a sly little smile playing across his lips.

  “I came home during spring break,” he started, clearing his throat. “I was twenty-two? Twenty-three? I was in graduate school. My mom asked me to pick up Vieve at her soccer camp. You were there, and I'd never paid much attention to you, but I was waiting by the fence, and I kept hearing this guy screaming at you. 'Raise those knees, Tocci!', 'pass the ball, Tocci!', 'get your head out of your ass, Tocci!', over and over. And there you were, all gangly and awkward, running around in a jersey with TOCCI in big letters across the back. Then when I saw you again, in that bakery, 'go out with me, Tocci' was the first thing that came to my mind.”

  Katya started laughing.

  “That's actually kinda amazing.”

  “Yup. My neighbor, the shitty soccer player, Katya Tocci.”

  “I wasn't shitty – I was actually pretty good. I was probably just having a bad day.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Wulfric,” she sighed his name. His arms moved, and when he went to rest them at his sides, he covered her hand with his own. Squeezed her fingers.

  “My mother named me after a romance novel,” he said in a quiet voice. Katya glanced over at him, but he was staring up at the ceiling. “If you knew her, it would make sense. I think she was kinda … swept away by my dad. She thought she was in a romance story. Genevieve and Brighton, well, I think she was just trying to stick with the theme. It wasn't easy growing up. Do you hav
e any idea what it's like having a name that sounds like wolf?”

  “I think it suits you.”

  “You would.”

  “I like it. I always liked it.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “My mom told me that your parents' divorce, it wasn't a good one,” she said, still staring at him. He smirked at the ceiling.

  “Is any divorce a good one?”

  “Some people can end amicably. Not all of us want to end up screaming in a reception hall, flinging cake and insults.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Wulf whispered. She squeezed his fingers harder.

  “Sorry. I was trying to be funny.”

  “Try being the operative word. The things my dad did to my mom. The way he would talk to her. Did your mother tell you how it ended?”

  “No, not exactly. Just that it was messy.”

  “We came home one day, and he was just gone. Gone. Like he'd never been there. I mean, we'd never been close, he was always working, so I wasn't too bothered by it. But Vieve was only seven, and Brighton was five. They couldn't understand why Daddy left them, and I sure as shit didn't know, and my mom wasn't saying anything, because she was having a goddamn mental breakdown.

  “Then the phone calls started, her begging him to come back. It was pathetic – he'd left her for his personal trainer. Like fuck him, if he didn't want us, then we shouldn't have wanted him. But my mom wouldn't stop. She would show up at his work, at his new apartment, call him in the middle of the night. I listened in on one phone call. It was horrible. He called her stupid and fat, said she was worthless. Boring. So many things. I couldn't understand why she wanted him back. Why she just broke down and even shut out her kids, for this man who was fucking awful.”

  Wulf was almost growling by the end of his story, his hand crushing her fingers. She didn't try to break free, though. She wanted him to give some of his pain to her.

  He's probably never told any of this to anyone. God, how long has it been rotting inside him?

  “Sometimes it's hard to shut off love. Even when someone is awful and you should know better,” she offered.

  “Yeah, well, love shouldn't be exclusionary, either. What, he couldn't love us because he loved someone new? She couldn't love us unless my dad loved her? What a fucking fuck show. She'd never held a real job, she had no savings, he took it all – suddenly she's got three fucking kids, a huge goddamn house, and no way to pay for any of it, and what's she doing? Crying in a corner for a man who'd broken her. I will never understand that thought process, and I would never let that happen to me,” he stated.

  “Talk is easy. Sometimes you shock yourself with the things you allow people to do to you, if you convince yourself that you love them enough.”

  “What about when you allow it to affect other people in your life? I'm almost sixteen years old, and one day my biggest concern is rotating the tires on my 'vette, and the next, I'm fucking scouring the want ads, looking for anywhere that would hire a teenager at a decent wage. I eventually sold my car, sold her car, sold practically everything in that house. I knew I wouldn't be going to the Olympics. I only kept swimming because I knew a scholarship was the only way I'd get into college, so I swam my ass off. I dug in and I sacrificed and I worked, all so she could spend two years begging some asshole to come back to her.”

  He sounded so bitter. So angry. She remembered her thoughts from the night before, about realizing that even Wulfric Stone needed someone strong to lean on.

  “That's awful, and I'm sorry. I didn't know any of that growing up, Vieve never told me.”

  “She didn't know, I kept a lot of it from the girls. The girls. Y'know, they almost feel more like my daughters than my sisters. How fucked up is that?”

  Katya took a deep breath and rolled onto her side. She wrapped her arms around one of his, holding it tight to her chest. He finally looked down at her.

  “I'm going to say something, and I want you to listen. Don't react right away, just listen.”

  “Oh god.”

  “I'm just repeating what you've told me, okay? This is what I've heard,” she started. “Your dad was a workaholic, always too busy for his wife, never spent time with his kids. Then he just left one day, without a word. Without an explanation. And when your mother confronted him, he was mean to her. Said horrible, awful things to her. Tried to make it so she wouldn't want him anymore,” Katya's voice dwindled to a whisper as she spoke.

  “Oh my god.”

  “I don't think you're -” she tried to preemptively stop what she knew he was going to say, but he barreled right through her.

  “I'm just like him. I hate that motherfucker, I haven't talked to him in almost four years, and I'm just fucking like him. Do you know, I can't remember the last time I spoke to Brie? I didn't even go to Brie's graduation. I just said they felt more like daughters to me than sisters, and I fucking treat them the same way he did. I'm no better than he is,” Wulf was speaking faster and faster.

  “Stop it.”

  “And jesus, the things I've done to you, Katya. Fucking awful. I'm a horrible goddamn human being. Why are you here?” he asked, turning to look at her again.

  “Because I care about you,” she said. “Because I would never leave without a word, and I would never try to hurt you. Maybe you don't know how to fight for what you want, but I do. I would fight for you, Wulf. You're worth it.”

  He abruptly rolled onto his side as well, crashing into her. She didn't have time to process what was happening, just gasp into his mouth as he kissed her. One of his hands was on the back of her head, holding her close.

  No one had ever said that to him, she suddenly realized. That he was worth it. Worth more than a blank check. Worth more than strong shoulders. His father didn't care about him, his mother had emotionally abandoned him, and his sisters had been too young to understand the sacrifices he'd made for them. But Katya saw all those things about him, knew that it proved he wasn't a lost a cause. That he was most definitely worth fighting for.

  Definitely worth falling for …

  “I don't deserve you,” he whispered against her lips, shifting her onto her back.

  “Probably not,” she teased.

  “I don't, Katya. I really, really don't.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I want … I need this,” his voice stayed soft as he kissed along her jawline, behind her ear, then down her neck. “I don't want to be like him. I don't want to be that person. I want you. I want you to stay with me. I want you to fight for me. I need that, Katya. I really, really need that.”

  “I'm not going anywhere, so you don't have to worry.”

  “You make me want to be a better man,” his voice was barely a breath as he kissed between her breasts. Katya wrapped her arms around his head, hugging him to her.

  “Good,” she answered, her throat thick with unshed tears. “Because I want to be a better woman, too.”

  “You're already the best, Katya.”

  “Really?”

  “Better than anything I've ever experienced.”

  The tears couldn't be stopped, and she didn't want them to stop. She wanted to keep touching him and kissing him and falling further and further in love with him. She kissed his fingertips and his pulse points and his cupid's bow. Wanted to imprint herself on his skin. On his soul.

  You already are a better man, Wulfric Stone.

  *

  They stayed in bed for a long time. Wulf didn't so much as look at his cell phone, which made her feel giddy. When they'd dated, he'd been attached to the thing half the time. Now, it wasn't even in the room with them. She was his priority – he was making that very clear.

  Finally, when the sun was setting and their backs were starting to ache, they got out of bed. Katya took a shower, and Wulf joined her halfway through. After they got out, he gave her one of his old college sweaters – she didn't have any real clothing, and her dress was a wadded up mess in the bathroom. The sweater only hung to the tops of her th
ighs, but they didn't have any plans to leave, so she didn't care.

  She finally texted Tori, who was near frantic with worry in her messages. Katya asked her roommate not to say anything to Liam – that conversation needed to be had in person, in private. It wouldn't be pretty, and she could only pray that he understood. Just thinking about it caused her stomach to knot up, but then she looked up and watched Wulf as he pulled a shirt on, and just like that, she didn't feel bad anymore.

  They snuggled on the couch and watched old movies. Ordered Chinese food and ate it in his living room – something he'd never done before, she found out. He always ate in his kitchen. She fed him pieces of barbecue pork with chopsticks, then wiped up the mess on his chin with a napkin.

  They whispered to each other, about things they'd always wanted, but had never said to other people. Katya wanted to own a bakery, knew she had the talent and client list to make it a success, but she knew nothing about running a business. Handling that much money, having employees to worry about, it all terrified her. So she stayed where she was, getting a paycheck that she knew she was worth more than.

  Wulf confessed to having a massive fear of rejection. “Duh,” she'd replied, earning a tug on her hair. It extended to all parts of his life, and was something he played very close to the vest, he explained. Considering the business world he moved in, it was imperative that his competition never find out, obviously. He didn't keep close friends, didn't have long term relationships, couldn't even hold a conversation with his own sisters, because he was afraid they'd see what an asshole he was capable of being, and they'd turn their backs on him.

  “So I turn mine first.”

  Katya liked the asshole-Wulf, she admitted to him. She liked that he was brash and blunt and even sometimes rude. He wasn't afraid to do whatever it took to get a job done, to make sure he ultimately got whatever he wanted. He just needed to learn how to turn it on and off.