by S. Love
I’m on edge when a car pulls off the road, haphazardly coming to a stop on the verge, the tail end of Topher’s Mercedes protruding into the right lane. He hasn’t even switched off the headlights as he flings open the driver’s side door, Ray just as quick exiting the passenger side.
“Where are they?” Topher asks, taking rapid strides down to the house. I treble my pace to keep up with him, practically running to line up at his side.
“Upstairs. In one of the…”
We don’t make it to the front yard when Ozzie steps into the doorway of the house, flinging the woman on the porch ahead of him. Okay, maybe not flinging, but that’s how careless and rough with her he is.
Her wild, frantic gaze lands on Ray, and she crumples into the victim I believed her to be. Tears flood her amber eyes, and she lurches away from Ozzie, hurtling down the steps and diving into Ray’s arms. She smears her tear-streaked face across his white polo shirt, then grabs the material in two fists, screaming up into his face, “Where is she!”
By now, we’ve got the attention of everyone, and Ray turns the woman away from the house with a power hold on her shoulders, succeeding in steering her to the car where Ozzie orders me to “hurry up and get the hell in.”
Now doesn’t seem like the right time to tell him I didn’t come here with him, and I’ll leave when I’m good and ready, so I get in the car like a good girl, trying not to stress over my backpack that I left in Garrett’s truck.
There’s no room for three people in the backseat, and Ozzie grabs me by my waist and pulls me onto his lap. Topher’s riding in the back with us while Ray gets behind the wheel, one hand pinned on the woman’s thigh to keep her in her seat.
Five minutes along the dark coastal road and her loud complaints have found new meaning. Concern for her missing daughter shifts dramatically into breathy groans, her ass wriggling over the leather interior. It’s of no concern to her that Ray’s driving when she lifts her legs, leaning her back against the car door and parting her thighs. She’s wearing the bare minimum as it is, and my eyes expand to the size of quarters when she flips her skirt up around her hips, Ozzie and I treated to an eagle-eyed view of her recent wax job.
“Put your fucking skirt down, Tina,” Ray scolds. “My sons are in the back.” He takes one hand off the wheel to grab her cotton skirt and pin it to the seat between her open thighs, but Tina’s got other ideas, lowering her body into his hand, her groaning an intimate sound I never want to hear out of her mouth again.
“Christ, must have been a black-market type bake sale” Topher says to no one. Shamelessly, he’s peering around the side of Tina’s seat. Sadly for him, the gap isn’t wide enough to paint the full picture of what I’ve just had to suffer through.
Tina’s a horny mess, writhing in her seat like she can barely contain the oversexed war raging inside her body. She reaches down to touch herself, urgency reigning supreme over dignity. Ray’s ready with his own hand to block that from happening.
My stomach clenches, everything central swooping and shrinking in on itself. Ozzie’s arm grazes my side as his hand comes to rest on my abdomen, the tips of his fingers resting millimeters from the open waist of my cutoffs. The pressure on my stomach intensifies as I fidget on Ozzie’s lap, trying to escape my own skin and the fervent sensations working their way south.
“Ray, I need you. Make it go away… please,” Tina whimpers, the word please clinging to her lips like she’s dying in pain. She yanks at the loose tie on her wrap top, her full breasts falling out. I duck my head, shielding my eyes with my hand as I clamp my lips over my smile and meet Topher’s confused, annoyed gaze.
Fed up with missing the free show, Topher leans into me and finds out what’s going on for himself.
With Topher’s wide shoulders jammed between the two front seats, Ray slams his foot on the brake. If it wasn’t for Ozzie’s domineering hand fencing me against him, my nose cartilage would be splattered across the back of Ray’s seat.
“Whoa!” Topher grouses, one hand braced on the sloping ceiling as he’s jolted forward. “Yeah, I’m driving.”
“All of you get out,” Ray demands. When none of us move, caught off guard by the jarring order, Ray bellows, “Now!”
Unlatching the door and pushing it open, I amble out onto the unlit road, Ozzie ducking through the sleek, low frame right behind me. He slams the door closed, and Topher just about loses his shit. He kicks at the sandy gravel overspill as his Mercedes pulls away, and we’re left here stranded. I don’t even know where here is.
“When we get home”—Topher points a finger in Ozzie’s face—“I’m keying your Jeep. See how you fucking like it.”
Ozzie grunts in cynical laughter what he thinks of the threat. “The next piece of ass you trick into that whip’s probably getting pregnant from dad’s jizz, and you’re bitching over a slammed door?”
Topher sobers. “He wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking?” Ozzie steps onto his back foot and starts walking away.
“What?” I shout after him. “You’re going to pretend we don’t exist now?”
“Man, he’s going to pound her inside-out, isn’t he? All over my fucking custom interior seats. I’ve just had those cleaned.”
I don’t really care to find out who Topher’s mourning over his precious German baby to, and I let him get on with it, storming behind Ozzie’s moon-lit silhouette strolling into the growing distance.
“Hey, dumbass. I’m talking to you.”
He doesn’t turn around. “Don’t come at me because you’re more sexually frustrated than a dried-up nun,” he says as he walks.
I’m pounding asphalt, the thud of my own footsteps bouncing around my skull while Ozzie saunters four feet ahead like the road transitioned into his personal travellator. “Uh… what?”
He pockets his hands. The iron-gray sweatpants molded to his ass and thighs taunt me to pay his lower half more attention. And I do, but only because he can’t see me doing it.
“That clueless card you’re always playing’s getting a bit worn out. Might wanna try a new angle.”
Topher’s footfalls bring up the rear, and I glance over my shoulder. You never know who could be lurking out here scarier than the two ghouls I’m stuck with. If I could write a letter to God and receive an actual answer, I’d ask why he made the douchewaffles of this world so misleadingly attractive. Tempting on the outside, putrid on the inside.
“When do I act clueless?” I’m trailing after Ozzie like a scorned puppy. He’s frustrating like that, and I refuse to heel until I get the last word. That’s how petty this boy makes me.
“When do you not act clueless? This innocent lamb routine you’ve got going on’s anticlimactic. I could have had my hand under your swimsuit in a car full of people, and your only concern would’ve been how wide you could spread your legs and how many fingers.”
“Totally get where you’re coming from, L. My balls ache like hell.” Topher cups his junk over his shorts and fires me a lopsided smirk. “Feel this. Do it for long enough and I might even get off.”
I spare two seconds to roll out a dull look, already forgetting the basics of my argument with Ozzie.
“Nothing to be ashamed of if seeing some bare pussy gets you hot. There’s only us out here.” Spreading his arms wide, Topher looks up at the sky, then at the ocean on one side of us, and miles of sweeping fields on the other. “It’ll be our secret.”
My eyes are on Topher, and I walk straight into Ozzie’s chest, not realizing he’s stopped in the center of the road in front of me.
Stumbling backward, Ozzie reaches out to steady me by my elbow, the bite of his fingers on my skin too tight for comfort.
“Did you like it?” he asks. I can still make out the pink veining the whites of his overcast eyes. It’s hard to believe this is the same laidback boy from earlier, taming the waves with his board while it looked to everyone patiently watching like he owned the entire Atlanti
c Ocean.
Topher creeps in on my left, and with them both so damn close, it feels like there’s nowhere for me to go where they can’t or won’t corner and catch me.
The darkness yawns and distorts around us, the air feeding off our energy, electric sparks firing and stealing too much space in my lungs.
“No,” I say. It’s not the truth, but it also isn’t a lie. I’m not sure what I’m feeling. I chew on my lower lip, immediately chiding myself for the outward display of anxiety and freeing my lip from my teeth.
Ozzie’s eyes ignite with a smile born from sinful recklessness. The faintest whiff of my fear sustaining the malevolent creature leeching off the shrinking sliver of his not-so evil side. “What do you say we find out for ourselves, Toph? Because I think she’s lying.”
“What makes you think she’s lying?” An undercurrent of laughter trickles through Topher’s sardonic voice.
My eyes flicker to him for a beat, the curl of his mouth confirming I’m the source of their twisted joke and they’ve only just started playing.
Ozzie chips away at another morsel of space, hooking me by my elbow at the same time he steps toward me, putting us toe-to-toe. I slide into him like I’m his marionette.
“Her eyes, for one. Pupils dilated to the size of fucking saucers.” His half-lidded gaze rakes over my face to my chest. “Her breathing. Fast, erratic. Out of control, I’d say.” I steel my spine, inhaling through my nose. “Breasts look full and heavy. Nipples aimed at me like bullets.”
Conforming to my marionette role perfectly, my breathing accelerates. “I’m cold,” I say, aware now of my tight, puckered nipples.
Ozzie gives me an intrusive, seductive onceover. “It’s eighty degrees. You just need something between your legs to soothe the deeper pain. I can’t see through denim, but it wouldn’t take a genius to guess what’s going on down there.”
“I need no such thing.” I ignore everything after that.
“You mean Con gets a go but not us?” Ozzie throws Topher a wronged look. “Doesn’t seem fair. What if we just take it?”
My heart pumps in warning. A fight or flight response to being caged in. “You wouldn’t.”
“Says who?” Topher steps closer. Close enough I can smell the salty residue from the ocean on his skin. “Sure you want to push that theory?”
And to think I was starting to like him.
Ozzie snatches my arm before I can turn away. “You could scream, or shout for help. But no one’s going to hear you. I mean, we can hear you. But honestly, between the three of us? You begging with that provocative mouth of yours would be pure porn to me. Kinky foreplay.”
Inside, terror swirls like a tornado, whipping up every responding instinct into the chaos. But I’m calling Ozzie’s bluff now, or he’ll walk all over me until the laborious day my last check’s written.
“Do it,” I say, barely raising my voice. “Both of you. Pin me down right here in the middle of this road and fucking do it .”
A finger trails over my collarbone, lifting my hair as it journeys along the back of my neck. The answering shiver that grips my body is from the streak of air sneaking under my long hair, whispering over my skin.
Ozzie holds me captive in his poisonous gaze while his brother’s lips sweep across my pulse. I draw in a quiet gasp of air that curves into a short, soft sigh when Topher bites down, sucking on the skin, everything south of my waist jellifying.
Goddamn these tyrants.
Think about Garrett. Garrett’s lips, Garrett’s laugh. Garrett’s touch. Garrett’s silver eyes and cut cheekbones.
When has Garrett ever made you feel the need to strip out of your dry swimsuit and wring out the crotch?
Positioning himself behind me, I’m liquid fire in Topher’s hands. His palms skim my waist, fingers joining under my naval. He trails kisses behind my ear, and it feels so wrong, I stop myself from crying out for more than what he’s giving me. I’m not interested in Topher. I’m lost in the mind games, my body and my head on entirely different pages, but both enjoying the same deranged plot far too much.
I’ve almost forgotten about Ozzie. He crashes to my focal point when he sandwiches me between his chest and his brother’s. His jaw’s steeled to cut glass, a flare of wildness in his muddied jade eyes as a few passing seconds of consideration meet an early death and his mouth crashes over mine.
Topher maintains my balance, and my fingers spear into the short hair at the back of Ozzie’s scalp. Our tongues clash as he devours me, the raw urgency of his passion in an elect league of its own. My back arches, and Ozzie bends deeper into the kiss, his severe grip on my elbow slackening in favor to slip into the back of my shorts, the pressure of his lips on mine intensifying.
He pulls my hips into him in one swift tug on my cheek, his throaty growl resonating between my thighs in a flood of heat. My mind claws and fights for the bright light leading back to Garrett, but the rest of me is having none of it. Not interested in detaching from the here and now in the slightest.
From behind, the hem of my shorts is roughly tugged up on the left side. Two fingers push inside my swimsuit, greeted by how soaking wet I am when they breach the elasticated patch of polyester covering my vagina. What feels like all four fingers follows, stroking me in wide, jerky circles, restricted by the bunched-up denim. He literally has all of me in his hand, and my eyes fly open, my brain finally comprehending I’m being touched, and I don’t know who by.
My hands fall away from Ozzie’s hair, and I tear my lips from his, horrified with myself.
Ozzie sneers, withdrawing his hand from the waist of my shorts as he steps away from me like he’s just decided I’m filth he’s no longer in the mood to dirty himself with.
It’s Topher inside my swimsuit, and the absence of his fingers as he eases them from my electrified, throbbing skin shoots ice up my spine.
“Your damaged goods, Help.” The wicked playfulness in Ozzie’s eyes reduces to dying, singed embers. “Think I’ll pass for tonight. Con’s welcome to the leftovers.”
Chapter 21
My energy in the days following my tag-team fiasco is channeled into cleaning the Osbornes’ home like I’ve got something to prove. Scrubbing the bathrooms and floors while also cleansing myself. I work my muscles numb, not even pausing for my breaks. I go through the whole house, top-to-bottom, three times. Not including Ozzie’s room. That’s a no-go zone he can keep to himself, and one less room for me to slave over.
Friday rolls around, the house as clean as it can possibly get, and I face what I’ve been avoiding for the past five days. Sit down in a defeated slump at the dining table and accept I’m not the girl I thought I was. Not the sweet, innocent daughter my father raised or expected me to become.
More than anything, I’m disappointed. I’m changing. Could be this house, the spawn of Satan living here, or it could be coincidence, and this weird chapter in my life was always intended to be written.
I close my eyes thinking about my dad, and if he could see how I’ve been choosing to spend my time. Even though it’s just a vision, however deplorable, I wipe it from my mind as quickly as it entered. I’m so ashamed, enduring the memory curls my toes.
But I’m also not sorry, and that’s the part I’m finding the most difficult to grapple with. I liked kissing Ozzie. I didn’t hate Topher’s fingers slipping into places they should never have slipped. And that’s nothing to do with Topher and everything to do with my body’s response to him. I’d never been in that situation before, and honestly never thought I would be. I should have been running for the hills.
Does this mean I don’t love Garrett?
“Shut up, Lyla,” I say to myself. There’s no off button to power down my mind, though. And I’m meeting Garrett tonight. Finishing what we started, and I’m ready now to go the whole way with him before he knuckles down for the rest of the Men’s Qualifying Series. It’s the prefect goodbye, really, if not ironically bittersweet.
The merry-go-round of r
eflection comes grinding to a halt with the distinct sound of the front door slamming shut. Apart from Topher, I’ve been alone in the house since God knows when, so this could be any one of the family returning home.
It’s Ray who strolls into the kitchen. He places his keys on the island countertop and joins me at the table. The dried concrete and clay staining his black polo shirt means he’s come from one of his development sites, but the dull thud of his work boots on the marble I’ve just cleaned was my first clue.
It’s awkward before one of us has even said anything, and like a wrecking ball contained by a frayed piece of twine, Saturday night hangs precariously in the balance.
Leaning to one side, Ray plucks his wallet from the back pocket in his dark jeans. Counts out an insane number of bills and drops the enticing stack on the table in front of me.
Awkward just elevated to the next level.
I eye the money, reading the green like it can tell me why it’s there.
“My wife doesn’t need to know about what happened after your party,” Ray starts. All I pick up on is my party. It’s blame-pushing with the subtlety of a sharpened axe to the back of the head. “You keeping it to yourself deserves rewarding. I appreciate you not making more waves in this family when we’re quite clearly already drowning.” His calculating gaze lowers to the paper-form bribe. “Take it, Lyla. It’s yours.”
He stands, holding the back of the chair in his hand. “For the record, I never touched Tina.”
No, Tina got herself pregnant with your child. Silly me. Must have missed that in Biology.
I look into his eyes. Eyes so much like Ozzie’s, I wonder if that’s where the ‘not quite right’ stems from in his middle child. Like father like son. That’s what it seems like in their case. Ozzie does what he wants because there’s no repercussions to his actions. Because his parents do what they want, not even considering their children are in dire need of role models. It’s the blind leading the blind, only in the Osbornes’ case, there’s plenty in the family bank to cushion any potential falls.