“Maybe I should let you pick the music for the drive,” Jessi said with a wink, making Jay flush. “Your water-swilling, pony-riding, kitten-crusading queen.”
“Stop,” said Jay, making a face.
Cori waggled her fingers. “Have fun with the fam.”
Part of 'the fam' was waiting outside in the apartment hallway, leaning into the stairwell with his hands in his pockets. “What the hell was that?” she demanded. “Are you trying to embarrass me?”
“I don't think I had to try. Too bad you didn't go to Stanford. Red looks good on you.”
“You are such a bastard. I can't wait until you're off to Bastard University, you know that?”
Nick laughed and straightened up from the wall. When he walked over to her, the gesture struck her as oddly predatory. Like a lion, she thought nervously, stalking a gazelle. “You know, it's sad. Even your flaws make you more endearing—refusing to drink at parties and crying over pretty butterflies really isn't the social suicide you seem to think it is.”
“I know that,” she said irritably. “God, sometimes it seems like you want to humiliate me.”
“Jay,” he said. “If I wanted to humiliate you, I wouldn't tell cute little stories about you to your friends.” He absently adjusted the sleeves of her dress, which had gotten twisted beneath her robe. The rough pads of his fingers on her bare shoulders made her skin prickle in awareness of him. “I'd just destroy you.”
“W-what?” Jay let out a nervous laugh and stepped back. “Destroy me?”
“I'm just teasing, blue jay. You shouldn't be so serious. You always cared so much of what people thought of you.”
Jay tugged at her sleeves, hoping he couldn't see the goosebumps on her arms as clearly as she could. “Thanks, Nick,” she said flatly. “I missed you, too.”
“Nicholas.” When she looked at him, he added, “I prefer Nicholas. Nick's a boy's name.”
Even though it was sunny out, Jay felt a chill as they walked out to Damon's car.
I'd just destroy you.
He hadn't sounded like he was teasing.
▪▫▪▫▪▫▪
Things were dull while Jay was away. Her mother swanned around as if she were queen of the fucking castle while his father worked later and later hours with his secretary, Jeannie Fairbanks, a skinny little mouse of a woman who always looked as if she were on the verge of running away. Another Jay, he'd thought, glancing her over. Only not as pretty.
She'd actually come to the house once, looking for his father. Nick only knew her name because he'd wanted to make sure she wasn't a whore. His dad frequented strip clubs and singles' bars before meeting Danielle and now that the luster of the marriage had worn off, Nick figured he was probably doing it again. Honestly, he was surprised his father hadn't divorced the bitch and taken another, younger wife—not that he particularly wanted that outcome, either. He didn't care if his dad was seeing other women but he didn't want them coming to the house.
“I'm Jeannie,” the woman said. “Um. Jeannie Fairbanks?”
When he stared at her blankly, she flushed, and he saw that she was actually a little cute under those glasses. “Your dad wanted me to drop off some documents? They're for work.”
“He's not here right now.” And then, as if he could hear Jay's mental scolding, he added reluctantly, “Do you want to come in? I can get you a glass of water.”
“No,” she said, looking at him and then away. “Thanks, though.”
Weird, he thought.
Now that school was over, summer was his to kill until college started up in the fall. With Jay in Half Moon Bay, he spent most of his time going to parties, hanging out with Dave, who had dropped out of university to sell weed while working odd jobs, and Jake and Alonzo.
Nick wasn't sure what had happened to Ian, and he didn't really care. It seemed like he'd decided to hang out with some of the burn-outs who spent all their time doing drugs and listening to old 70s rock while hanging out in their parents' basements playing WoW and Halo.
“I can't believe that all of this is coming to an end,” said Alonzo, gesturing around at the designer-clad teens, the cheap beer, the loud hip-hop music. “End of a fucking era.”
“I can't wait,” said Jake. He was going to Chico. “I'm gonna rush so hard.”
“And then you're going to puke so hard,” said Nick. “You drink like Jay.”
“My parents said they'd pull tuition if I didn't swing at least a B-average,” said Alonzo.
“College is tough.” Dave paused to wave at a few people who had belaedly entered the house. Party-hoppers, from the look of it. Their eyes were too glazed to be sober. “It's not for everyone.”
“What about you, man?” Jake tilted his head up to look at Nick. “You gonna join a frat?”
“Probably not,” said Nick. “I'm not really much of a follower.”
“Whatever happened to your sister, anyway?” Dave asked, blowing out a cloud of smoke.
“She just graduated, come loud,” he added, purposefully mispronouncing the words to make his friends laugh. “She's in like two fucking honors societies, too.”
“Your dad must be proud, man.”
“Not really.” Once, it had seemed like Jay could do no wrong and his father was always giving her little gifts and pats on the head. Now his face hardened whenever her name was brought up. “I think she pissed him off,” he said, taking a sip of his beer. “God knows how. She's a little saint.”
“Whatever, man,” said Alonzo. “At least now you don't have to compete. My parents drive us like we're fucking sled dogs. My younger siblings live in permanent terror of the parental whip.”
“Kinky,” Nick said dryly. “Do you like it better when your mom whips you? Or your dad?”
“Screw you,” said Alonzo. “You can do whatever the fuck you want and your parents don't care.”
Whatever I want, he thought morosely, finishing the can. Not fucking likely.
Talk of school put them off their respective buzz. Dave smoked himself into a stupor, watching his party through shuttered eyes while Alonzo and Jake went off to go play Guitar Hero in the basement. Nick wandered around until he had a run-in with a girl in a bandage top and a really short skirt. She gave him an appreciative once-over.
“Do you want to dance?”
“Not really,” he said. “I'd rather play a game.”
She smiled at him, tugging at her top. “What kind of game?”
“A counting game.” Nicholas arched his eyebrows. “You play it on your knees.”
She went with him to the second floor and he locked the door behind them while she made herself comfortable on the bed. They made out for a while, and then he tugged down her top and kissed her there, too, until she was squirming and he was hard—it didn't take long: she wasn't wearing a bra and her breasts were nice and he liked the way she was pulling on his hair.
“I'm not going to touch you,” he told her, looking into her wide, hazel eyes. “But you can touch yourself all you want. Now get on your knees and fuck me with that pretty mouth.”
“You're kind of a bastard,” she said, which made his smile widen.
“Yeah,” he said, opening the fly of his jeans. “I am. And I bet you fucking love it.”
Her resolve lasted all of a minute. Nick leaned back against the bed as she slid to her knees and worked him over with her mouth. Every so often, he'd let out an encouraging groan, digging his fingers into his thighs. Yeah, she loves it.
Nick liked the power dynamics of a blowjob. If he couldn't get hard, it was their fault for not being good enough at sucking dick. If they didn't swallow, they were a prude. If they did, they were a whore. He let girls fuck around with him but he never fucked any of them with his cock and he didn't usually play back. The performative nature of it left him feeling a little cold.
Maybe this was weird but at least he wouldn't be getting anyone pregnant. And girls bragged about sleeping with him anyway, so it wasn't like anyone was the wiser
about his weird little kink. The way his fucking friends talked, going balls-deep just made you a slave to the pussy anyway.
God, he couldn't wait to leave this place. Palo Alto was the hub of everything, a constant rush of innovation and networking. At Stanford, people made friendships that lasted lifetimes—or so he'd been told. He couldn't believe Jay had turned it down.
His mind drifted to the recent photos she'd been tagged in on Facebook. Someone had gotten a picture of her kneeling on a rock, wearing shorts and a bikini top, with her hair streaming down her back. She'd obviously been swimming, because her hair had been wet and her skin had a dewy, glistening sheen.
He had printed out that photo, almost breathless with the wrongness of the act, and hidden it in one of his magazines. The one place no one in this house would look except him—and he looked. He looked at it at least once a day, imagining pulling those straps down her shoulders and tasting every inch of her hot, wet skin, tugging her shorts down and putting his mouth right over her—
“Ugh.” The girl at his feet looked up at him balefully. “You asshole! You didn't warn me!”
Nick made a noise of irritation and grabbed a box of tissues of the nightstand, dropping them in her lap. “What did you think was going to come out? Confetti?”
“You came on my face.” She wiped at her cheeks furiously. “You got it on my top—we never agreed that I would swallow,” she snapped. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“You could lick it off,” he suggested coolly. “I've been told it tastes pretty good.”
The girl made an outraged sound and threw the box of tissues at him, hard, before whirling out of the room and slamming the door shut behind her.
Someone's not graduating come loud.
The thought struck him as particularly funny for some reason and he threw back his head and laughed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
2008
▪▫▪▫▪▫▪
Jay came home from Half Moon Bay with a tan and a new wariness in her eyes that hadn't been there before Berkeley. “Hey,” she said, when she came home, looking over her shoulder like she thought she was being chased. “I'm back. Where is everyone? Have you been feeding Gypsum like I asked?”
“Every day for the past four-fucking-years. The thing eats and shits like a furry dump truck. Relax,” he said, when she pulled a face. “It's fine. Probably glad to see you. You might have visited. Then you could have seen for yourself that everything was all right.”
“Yeah,” she said, in a way that clearly meant no. “I know. Things kept coming up.”
Knowing she was coming home, he'd opted for a tight, white shirt and some loose sweatpants, and gone to a little trouble with his hair. That curl was falling into his eye in a way that he thought made him look rakish. The last girl he'd been with had always been putting her hands in his hair. “You think it's that shitty here, huh?”
Jay looked at him in a way that made him hold his breath. “I don't belong here,” she said. “Maybe you don't see that, because you do.”
“Maybe you're not giving yourself a chance to belong. You could, if you wanted to.” Nick studied her face intently. “You know most of the people in this town adored you. When was the last time you texted one of your friends?”
“I text my friends plenty,” she said. “Not that it's any of your business, but I talked to Quentin just last week. We're meeting for drinks.”
“Fucking adorable,” said Nick. “You two dating now?”
“No,” she said. “We're just friends.”
I bet that's not what he thinks. “Want to watch something? Dealer's choice.”
“Uh, maybe later,” said Jay. “I should go see to the cat.”
But there wasn't a later. In fact, she seemed to be making a concerted effort to avoid him, which he knew, because he was so determined to cross her path. There was no way she could elude him as much as she was without intent. It was a big house but not that big.
When he saw her reading out by the pool, he would go out there and start swimming. Sometimes, he would come up to the edge to chat with her while in the water and sometimes he would just swim. In either case, she would leave, staying just long enough to make it seem as if it might not be deliberate. He knew it was. She never looked at him,
When she was in the den, he would sit with her. She would give him one of those tense smiles and sit as stiffly as a virgin on her wedding night (was she a virgin? he didn't think so). He kept offering to put something on, and she would inevitably demur. There were always excuses.
Frustrated, Nick had taken to lounging around half-dressed in the mornings, because past experience had shown him that even if a girl didn't like what was coming out of his mouth, she usually didn't mind looking at his chest. The first time Jay had run into him, clad in his pajama bottoms and nothing else, she had gotten flustered. “Oh, sorry, I didn't realize anyone was in here,” she said nonsensically, looking quickly away, but not before he'd noticed how dark her eyes looked or how flushed her face had gotten as she left the kitchen still clutching an empty coffee cup.
“Did you lose all of your shirts, Nicholas?” His stepmother yapped like one of those little teacup chihuahuas all of the yoga bitches had down in the Valley. “I didn't think we were so strapped for cash that we couldn't afford to dress you properly.”
“That's funny, coming from you. Remind me, because I've forgotten. What exactly is your contribution around here? Putting the T&A into PTA? Feeling nostalgic at charity auctions because the sight of a man waving a hundred dollar bill makes you yearn for the good old days?”
“Nick,” said Jay, who was reading at the bar area. “Don't talk to my mother like that.”
“You're a foul-mouthed, disrespectful little boy,” Danielle breathed. “You know nothing.”
“Yeah?” said Nick. “I know you're a washed-up has-been with stretch-marked tits.”
“Nick,” Jay said again, slamming her book closed. “Stop it.”
Danielle scoffed. “I don't have to stand around and be spoken to like this. Maybe you'll be able to talk some sense into your Neanderthal of a brother, Justine. I have a meeting with the ladies of the Hollybrook Conservation Society.” She shot him a scathing look. “You might start by informing him that nobody wants to see his hairy underarms.”
Nick watched her storm off with her cold glass of juice. There was a cocky swing to her backside. He knew why that was. She'd started fucking the man who took care of their pool. A slim twenty-five-year-old, fresh out of college. The new tits were probably for him.
He'd snapped some interesting photographs of the two of them in flagrante delicto. He thought about slapping them down in front of his father but decided to hold on to the pictures instead. He knew exactly how angry his father would be about the cheating—but Danielle didn't. She was the kind of woman who was too arrogant to think she'd ever face the consequences. But everyone faced consequences—at least, they did, if they got caught. If she kept fucking around with him like this, she'd learn that the hard way.
Yes, he knew all about Danielle. He knew where she kept her weed and her sex toys, and that she had a cache of jewelry in the closet, as if she thought she might have to flee like a thief in the night. He knew what position she favored during sex, and that she and the pool cleaner liked to fuck in the shed where they kept the grill and the spare keys. If she'd kept a diary, he would have found that, too. He was as familiar with this house as the back of his hand.
“I really hate your fucking mother,” Nick said, leaning back against the fridge.
“Don't provoke her then,” Jay said. She was opening her book again, smoothing the pages out on the counter with careful fingers. “It's stupid. Fighting with her never solves anything.”
Jay, unlike her mother, had very little to hide. Some erotica novels hidden behind her fantasy books and a dusty vibrator were all that he had been able to find. She kept her diary exactly where a girl without any real secrets would try to hide it. Un
derneath her mattress.
So obviously, he'd read it. Multiple times.
“. . . sometimes I wish Angel was my big sister and she would adopt me and take me away. She calls me her 'little love' and I really wish I was, because I'd rather live with her than my mom.”
She'd been an avid writer when she was young. God, Young Jay had been so fucking cute. He wanted to go back and kidnap her. Even if she hadn't written about him all that much (“this kid steals liquor out of his dad's office”), and when she had, she had gotten him all wrong, he found himself enjoying the way she wrote about her transition into her new life, and the passages about her new school, her friends, and the cat (“I can't believe she's really mine, I love her so much—she knows her name now!”) just for the glimpse it gave him into her soul.
The entries got less frequent as she got older and busier, which was sad, because they were also more interesting and filled with what could be strikingly perceptive observations. “Nick seems so angry lately,” one of the entries from her junior year read. “Sometimes it seems like he's angry at me and I'm not sure why. It feels like I've disappointed him.”
During her senior year, she had written a bit about the party that had gotten her shit-faced for the first time in her little nerd life—“note to self: never drink again”—but there was no mention of him, which he found irritating, since he was the reason she'd gotten home in one piece. In fact, she barely wrote about him at all that year. She wrote about the Lacoste Mafia, her dates with Michael Valdez, prom, and all of her niggling insecurities (“Why do I feel like I'm never going to be enough?”), so he felt like he deserved a reference or two, even if it was just a footnote.
Instead, she seemed desperate, bitter. Whole passages complaining about feeling as if no one saw her, about the mean-spiritedness of her classmates, and a sharp resentment towards anyone who told her she was beautiful. “It's like they think that looking at me means that they own a piece of me,” she wrote, pressing so hard with the pencil that she had smeared graphite on the pages, “and this gives them the right to say whatever they want about me as long as they pay me upfront with empty compliments.”
Quid Pro Quo: A dark stepbrother romance Page 28