Page 44 of My Fault
“I’m just pissed off at life in general, so leave me alone, okay?” I said, ready to walk past him and go to my room. He stood in my way and grabbed me around the waist with one arm. Before I knew what was happening, he pushed me into Will’s office, closed the door, and looked me in the eye. The room was dark except for the light of the moon coming in through the windows behind the desk and chairs.
I exhaled all the air I had in my lungs when he stepped forward and trapped me against the door. When I looked closely at him, I saw how drunk he was.
“Stop thinking about that asshole,” he said, pushing my hair back and kissing the skin of my shoulder.
It was as unexpected as it was intense. It reminded me of the kiss at the races. What had started as simple vengeance had turned into a pleasurable, exciting kiss…and now the same thing was happening again.
“What are you doing?” I asked when his lips started to slowly climb my neck, leaving a trail of little hot pecks until he reached my ear. I had to close my eyes when I felt his teeth digging into me.
“I’m showing you how good life can be,” he responded, his breathing accelerating as he reached a hand under my shirt and started stroking my back, softly at first and then pressing me into his firm body.
He couldn’t know what he was doing. Had he forgotten whom he was kissing? We hated each other, even more now that I had lost his favorite toy and his archenemy had fired a gun at his back. It was my fault…but if all that was true, why couldn’t I stop enjoying these hot, unexpected caresses?
“I’ve been holding back with you… Dammit, you’re stuck in my head, and I can’t stop thinking of you,” he said, picking me up easily and forcing me to wrap my legs around his back.
I didn’t even have time to assimilate his words because all at once, his lips were over mine, ardent, possessive, kissing me in a way no one ever had.
It was strange, feeling him this way, especially after how he’d acted just a few hours before, but my thoughts, my feelings, my problems, anything that had affected me in the past, all that was in the background now because—my God!—that boy knew exactly what he was doing.
His tongue jutted against mine passionately, and his breath was intoxicating. Without realizing it, I responded in kind. My hands wrapped around his neck and pulled him into me, as if he were my oxygen…a contradiction, since the way he was kissing me made it almost impossible to breathe.
I pulled his hair, making him lean his head back so I could catch my breath. He grunted from the pain when I had to pull harder because he refused to take his mouth away from mine.
We were panting, and his blue eyes looked straight into mine while I tried to control the waves of burning pleasure flowing through my body from head to toe. My legs were still around him, and he pulled me into him tightly as if he couldn’t bear for any space to exist between our two bodies.
“You’re rough,” I gasped, unable to contain myself. Not that I cared—we’d only been in there for five minutes, and he already had me in the palm of his hand.
“And you’re unbearable.”
I couldn’t say anything back—his lips were too quick to attack.
All that was too intense. I felt him all over. One of his hands started unbuttoning my top while the other gripped my thighs. He started walking to the right, probably intending to lay me out on the desk there, but I pulled him toward me, and my back struck the wall. I heard a click, and the lights came on, illuminating everything around us and ourselves with painful clarity.
It was as if someone had dumped cold water on our heads. Nicholas stopped, looked at me surprised, breathing hard like me, and reality imposed itself on the physical attraction of our bodies. Nicholas leaned his forehead into mine and closed his eyes for a few seconds that seemed interminable.
“Shit!” he exclaimed, dropping me. He turned around and walked out the door without looking back.
Reality hit me so hard that my legs gave out from under meand I fell to the floor, leaned back against the wall, and hugged my knees. Only then did I start to grasp what we’d done.
Hooking up with Nicholas wouldn’t solve anything. It wouldn’t undo Dan’s cheating on me, it wouldn’t fill up the solitude of living in that place without family or friends, and it certainly wouldn’t help the two of us get along any better. That episode with Nick could only mean one thing:problems.
16
Nick
Inside, I was burning. In every possible sense of the word. For days, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking of that kiss at the races, and it was ruining my mood. Seeing her in my own home, rubbing something I couldn’t have in my face, was more than I could bear. She looked incredible tonight; I couldn’t take my eyes off her body. Her legs, her breasts, her long, shimmering hair… I couldn’t take her dancing in front of me with my friends while every guy had his eye on her. I’d heard more than a few of them utter obscenities about her, and I was surprised by how much it affected me. I was usually the first one to say stuff like that when a hot chick was around, but people talking about Noah that way drove me mad.
When I’d seen her with my phone and realized what photos she was looking at, I’d felt pity for her and rage at the people hurting her, especially her ex-boyfriend, but that didn’t mean I’d planned to take her into my dad’s office and make out with her. Obviously, I’d had a few too many drinks and didn’t realize what I was doing until the lights came on and I saw it all clearly. Her cheeks were pink, her lips swollen from my kisses… Jesus, just thinking aboutit made me want to go back for more. But I couldn’t, not with her. She was my stepsister, dammit, the same stepsister who was screwing up my entire life and had made me lose my car.
I tried to clear my head by going outside. I wanted to stay away from her. I couldn’t sleep with someone who was living in my home, someone I’d see every day and who just happened to be the daughter of the woman who had taken my mother’s place, a place I’d learned to forget about a long time ago.
I stayed outside until everyone started to leave. The house was a wreck, with plastic cups all over the lawn, beer bottles everywhere—a complete disaster. Frustrated, I walked to the kitchen door, where I could see the last few stragglers, among them Jenna and Lion. She was sitting on his lap, and he was kissing her neck, making her giggle.
I almost threw up in my mouth. Who’d have ever thought those two would end up that way? Lion was the same as me; he liked women, parties, races, drugs…but now he’d turned into a little girl’s lapdog.
Women were only good for one thing. If you let it go past that, you’d have problems. I knew what I was talking about from experience.
“Hey, bro!” Lion shouted, and I turned around. “Tomorrow there’s a barbecue at Joe’s. See you there?”
