“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Cindy, I’m sure.” Blake to the rescue!
Back to making out they went.
This is so messed up.
When I felt like they weren’t worried about any noises they weren’t making themselves, I started to touch myself again.
This time, I rolled my breasts in my hands, groping them the way I imagined his hands would touch me, how they would explore my body. My nipples hardened into taught peaks. I really should have been embarrassed into going to sleep, but I wanted Blake too badly to stop. Soon my hand crept downward towards my folds, and I ran my finger through the slick juices there.
If he were to have me, would we make it to the bedroom, where he would spread me wide and leave me at his mercy with his tongue? Or would he take me against the wall, or on the kitchen table, unable to control his lust?
My fingers delved deeper, and I slipped one digit inside of my pussy, imagining Blake shoving me against the counter, thrusting into me.
The noises beyond the wall were louder now, more rhythmic. Stupid cabin.
But it was all okay. If I kept my eyes shut, this would work.
I played with myself, then bit back a moan as I moved my hand faster, circling my clit, flicking my finger over it before going back to teasing circles. My other hand pinched each of my nipples in succession, and I imagined it was Blake claiming them. The thrumming chord in my body turned into a full orchestral symphony as I spread my legs wider and massaged my clit over and over. I grabbed the edge of the blanket and shoved it into my mouth just in time as the orgasm hit me hard, my body shaking all over.
When I finally dropped out of bliss, I could still hear them going at it.
You don’t want to have to cuddle with someone in a cramped bunk bed anyway, Jenna. It’s the middle of the summer, and having another sweaty body radiating heat like a furnace on this size mattress would just keep you awake all night.
That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway.
3
The Next Spring.
I don’t actually know how to be in a normal relationship, Kendall. Even if I did, I’m not sure I would want to be in one with you.
Harsh words, I know. That’s why I couldn’t bring myself to say them.
Kendall was my sort-of boyfriend. He and I were lying in bed together, as was to be expected when one only has a studio apartment and the mattress has to double as a couch. Why I had agreed to let the futon go into the reclining position so often and for our clothes to end up on the floor was up for debate. Was it because I was a horny, sex-starved love goddess? A lonely twenty-something searching for meaning between the sheets, no matter who was between them with me? A borderline alcoholic?
I voted for D — all of the above.
“That’s it, baby,” Kendall panted as I rode him, working to reach that orgasm that he couldn’t seem to give me without help. He was close. I could feel him swelling in me. I slipped my hand between us, rising up and surging back down onto his cock, enjoying the lost in pleasure look on his face. I rubbed my clit furiously, trying to come before he was finished —
“That’s it, bitch, ride it like you mean it.”
— and there went any chance of coming on him. Dirty talk wasn’t bad in itself, but I just couldn’t come when he spoke to me like that. It sounded so weird, mainly because I expected it of assholes. Like a particularly bad one-night stand guy from last year who had picked it up in college after banging freshmen in his frat house.
I sighed and gave up on my clit, choosing instead to finish him off as quickly as possible by bouncing on him at a faster pace. I grabbed his hands and placed them on my breasts, clenching my muscles around his shaft over and over until he grabbed my hips and jerked his body upwards into mine.
Sitting there for a moment on top of him, trying to catch my breath, it seemed appropriate to wonder what would happen if he didn’t always use a condom. Did Kendall ever want kids? Was he good father material? Could I put up with mediocre sex to have the family I wanted someday? Was I even capable of reproducing, given my condition?
He didn’t give me time to ponder any of these things, or to cool down, for that matter, because he suddenly shot bolt upright. I spilled none too gracefully off of his lap, rolling off the edge of the futon and into a table against the wall, banging my thigh on the wood. “What’s wrong? What is it?” I cried.
“I completely forgot. The Nets are playing the Heat tonight!” he said, slapping his forehead. “Fuck! Where’s the remote?”
I gaped at him. “You just practically broke my leg because you’re late turning on the TV?”
“I’m serious, Jenna,” Kendall said. He was, as far as I could tell, completely oblivious to the fact that I had just performed an unchecked acrobatic move into a heavy piece of furniture.
He stood up and threw the sheet to the side of the mattress, then found the blanket in a ball near his feet and squeezed it methodically to see if the controller was hidden inside. He was still naked, the condom still on and completely forgotten in his frenzy to achieve sports nirvana. “Are you sitting on it or something?”
“No, I’m not sitting on it,” I snapped. Wincing as I grasped the metal edge of the bed for support, I rose and pushed the back of the futon into couch position.
It was probably hidden on the floor somewhere between the discarded food containers from his lunch and other older and more rancid meals. Given the amount of trash that piled up in his room when I wasn’t there to pick up for him, things like his keys and cell phone could easily disappear into the Bermuda Triangle that was the Great Kendall Horde if he didn’t set them aside near his door on a regular basis. He had single-handedly renewed my belief in the value of tchotchke key trays.
I nearly tripped on a two-day old cup of ramen. Ugh. Why had I ever thought walking barefoot in his place was a good idea? I needed to find my slippers before I contracted tetanus or MRSA or something. I spotted a blob of pastel color several feet away and headed for it like a woman on a mission.
“Help me find the remote, will you?” Kendall shouted.
He was digging through a mound of semi-dirty laundry near the lamp opposite me. Yes, apparently there were several gradations of dirty, and not just for jackets and dry-clean only clothes. Who knew it wasn’t just a Bill Murray line from Ghostbusters? Maybe the hygiene thing was the subconscious reason why most of the time I spent with Ken required him to be naked. And showered.
“It’s hard to find anything in all of this clutter,” I said, tiptoeing over to my slippers and putting them on. Better. “Maybe it fell behind the desk? You’re always leaving it on the keyboard drawer and then slamming the drawer shut.”
“Good call,” he said, leaping over the laundry to reach his desk.
I lifted up the mattress to check underneath it. I didn’t see anything, but I heard a clanging noise, followed by the sound of something remote-sized dropping into old, wet food.
At the other end of the futon was an open container of Chinese take-out. Upon closer inspection, it contained two things: the leftover sauce from a sweet and sour dish, and the controller for the TV.
“Found it!” I said, without making any move to retrieve the object.
Kendall poked his head out from under the desk. “Where?”
I pointed. “It fell.”
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t care about the food on the remote and picked it up, changing the channel to ESPN and reading the scores for a few seconds before it even registered that he was still wearing a love glove on his crotch and last night’s dinner on his hand.
“I’m going to get dressed and go. I have a lot of inventory to do at the store.”
“Uh huh.” Kendall pulled the condom off, wiped the controller down with a nearby towel, and turned the volume up.
It was my cue to leave.
In the bathroom, I cleaned up enough to put my underwear back on. The thought of taking a shower first briefly crossed my mind, but one look at it remin
ded me that I might end up dirtier after washing myself than before I had started.
Then a treacherous feeling wormed its way into my head.
He would never have to settle for someone like Kendall. Blake could have his pick of the most perfect women in the world, and fall in love with one of them and live happily ever after.
That thought I beat down with an imaginary hammer. Only bad things could come of dwelling on the ridiculous embodiment of good fortune that was my stepbrother. Or the proud asshole who wore it so well.
The proud, gorgeous asshole.
Stop it.
Once I had resolved only to think about the present-day bad influences in my life, I focused on Kendall again.
I had been hanging out at his place on the weekends for the last two months, and sometimes during the week as well, and he couldn’t be bothered to clean once during the entire time I had known him. In fact, I had cleaned up for him one time when his mother visited, and I don’t think he recognized the difference.
Staring at the science-experiment-gone-wrong that was his toilet and wondering if I could hold it until I was back home, it finally struck me: this was so not worth it.
He wasn’t going to change. Why should he have to when I just put up with his sports addiction and general lack of hygiene? I cleaned up after him, and he didn’t care, just like he didn’t care if I came during sex or hated watching several hours of sports a day in order to spend time with him. Maybe he would actually take me out on a real date someday, like our first semi-date excursion thing, when we had drunk-skated our way around an ice pond at the Christmas party where we met, two months before I had unexpectedly run into him at a bar with friends and started our whole friends-with-benefits thing. Maybe he would eventually remember that I hated mushrooms before ordering us portobello sandwiches from the deli.
Maybe. But I didn’t have to wait around to find out.
After getting dressed and scrounging up a couple of grocery bags without mystery substances in the bottom of them, I went through his kitchen and bathroom, systematically removing anything of mine I didn’t want to leave behind. The dresser was next. I pulled out my spare clothes from the bottom drawer. It was pretty easy to find everything, since most of his belongings often ended up on the floor.
“This isn’t going to work out, Kendall,” I said. “It’s been fun—” Not really, I thought, “—but I don’t think we’re right for each other long-term, and there’s no point in continuing a relationship that isn’t going anywhere. At least not for me.”
“Huh?” He didn’t even look at me. He was still naked, siting on the futon, watching the basketball game.
“Goodbye.”
“Oh. See ya.”
He wasn’t paying attention when I was around. Why did I expect when I was leaving to be any different?
I set the bags down in the outside hallway, looked at him once more, and closed the door.
“No, you won’t,” I said.
I picked up my stuff and headed out. It was a long train ride from Boston College back to Davis Square.
4
“I’ve told you before, I’m not going to ask them.”
“That was when you were sure the accounts would just barely even out. We’re 15 grand in the hole and counting.”
The lovely young Harvardian grad student sitting across from me while she told me that my business was failing? That was Mimi, my assistant at the new and used bookstore I ran. She was Dionne to my Cher, only with a lot less money and more brain cells. Also a tamer sense of fashion. Okay, so maybe the analogy didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Deal with it.
You would know Mimi was an Ivy League girl by the amount of stylish black clothing she wore, and Bostonians could tell she was from Harvard by the constant influx of Harvard Square desserts that made their way behind the checkout desk. I could trace my addiction to Finale’s cakes and Berryline fro-yo directly back to her.
The sweets I could forgive. It was the whole pesky insisting ‘your bookkeeping numbers don’t add up in this world we like to call reality’ that prevented us from being the perfect BFFs.
“15 grand.” I sat back and stirred my tea, then waved to the couple entering the store, my smile still plastered on my face as I gritted my teeth. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“You subtracted the revenue from the debt totals, not the net,” she said, pointing to a line of numbers that she had crossed out and corrected in the ledger.
“I knew that the sales numbers were to good to be true,” I said, sipping the tea.
“That’s the understatement of the year.”
Yes, sales had been down. Sales always went down when the city was blanketed in nine feet of snow for two months and the Green Line rail cars literally froze in place. “Come on, Mimi. How were people expected to shop for their old copies of Nancy Drew this winter, exactly? Travel by dirigible? Hire a dog sled team?”
“You shouldn’t joke about this.” Mimi’s tone was more alarmist than usual. “We used the mortgage money to pay for the boiler and the electrical, remember?”
This was starting to sound bad. Very bad. “Look,” I said, “that can’t have been 15k right there.”
“We were already running at a loss.”
Damn her and her infallible logic!
“Worse comes to worst, I will pool my savings together and pay it off myself.” That meant out of my emergency fund. And my emergency emergency fund, the one I wasn’t supposed to touch because it was supposed to pay for fertility treatments. People with endocrine issues have to plan ahead if they expect to have as much trouble as my mother did having me. But I didn’t tell Mimi that.
Mimi eyed me skeptically. “You have 15k stashed somewhere, just waiting for a rainy day?”
I bluffed. “Probably.”
“No, you don’t.”
Sigh. “No, not 15k. Maybe nine.” I could feel the headache coming on. My brain didn’t like math very much.
She looked at me, then back down at the books, then back up at me. “Fancy trying to sell the building and moving somewhere else?”
Some form of ibuprofen need to make an appearance in my life soon, or there would be trouble. “Mi, there’s nowhere else to go that won’t require more repairs than I can afford right now. I checked months ago. Anyone would might have a good location will be in the same spot I am right now, meaning they won’t actually have gone under yet and left us a vacant space. And I just sunk more cash into this money pit, remember?”
She out her pen down. “I think you should consider asking the family for help.”
“Out of the question.”
“But all of the Forsythes are loaded!”
“My father is not a Forsythe!” I snapped.
Shocked silence. I could literally feel the judgmental stares from the two lone patrons in the World History section burning holes in the back of my head. Great. I was now a lousy accountant and a jerk.
I rubbed my temples, willing the throbbing to go down. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you, Mimi. I know you’re only trying to help.”
“It’s okay, Jenna. It’ll be okay,” she said, moving around the counter to give me the biggest petite-person bear hug she could. “Just don’t cry. My mom always said there are plenty of better things to cry over than money.”
I groaned. “It seems like a perfectly good thing to cry over to me.”
“Yeah, well, tell that to patients in the psych ward. They could use some new ideas.”
“You are seriously in need of therapy,” I said.
Mimi handed me an Advil. “That’s what they all say.”
I swallowed the pill with my tea, wishing I didn’t have to even consider what I was about to consider. “My stepmother is not wealthy. It’s her parents and her son who are rich, and he earned most of his money on his own. The Forsythes are not like Bill Gates. They’re not even like Warren Buffett. They spend their money when and where they please on arbitrary things, like a dude ranch in Wyoming a
nd an animal shelter in the Philippines. Rhyme or reason hold no sway there.”
“But aren’t they hosting the big party for your grandparents’ 50th anniversary next weekend?”
She was right. They were paying for a really elaborate, swanky party at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel for my grandparents, as well as for the rest of us to spend half of the week in New York City. “Yeah, I don’t know how to explain that one either. Somehow, the four of them became good friends after Dad and Lana’s wedding.”
Which was more than could be said for their grandchildren.
“Maybe they’re going soft in their old age and you can take advantage of that,” Mimi suggested. “Or… you could always ask Blake for cash.”
“I’d rather drink bleach,” I said.
“Don’t be so dramatic.” Mimi checked out the customers who had unintentionally eavesdropped on us. Then we were alone again, provided that one weird dude who liked to unzip his pants in the World Religions row hadn’t broken in through the bathroom window.
“Look. I get that Blake was, shall we say, less than polite towards your Dad—”
“He called him a gold digger. To his face. Then he more or less accused me of being a leech who would suck the family dry.”
“—but that doesn’t mean they haven’t made amends since then, or they wouldn’t both be attending the party, right? Right?”
Mimi, ever the optimist.
“Here’s what I’m going to do, Mi,” I said, trying very hard not to just lose my temper at an innocent person and rant about dear stepbrother Blake for the next half an hour. “Tomorrow, I’m going to call every bank I can and see if they’ll give me a loan. Then I’ll double-check my finances to make sure I’m as broke as you think I am. Then, and only then, will I consider hitting up the step relatives for cash.”
She looked very pleased with her persuasive skills. I wished she could teach me them.
5
I found out pretty quickly that while banks had survived the Recession, that didn’t mean their willingness to lend to small business owners with short credit histories had made it out with them. I was turned down no less than seven times before I got the hint that the next seven were going to give the same answer.
My Stepbrother, the Billionaire, & the Bargain: Forbidden Romance (The Step Contract, Book 1) Page 3