Page 73 of My Fault
I nodded, impressed at my stepbrother’s skill at lying. I grabbed a pastry from the table and walked out to the yard. He was lying on a deck chair in the shade, wearing sunglasses, a T-shirt, and a swimsuit. He looked asleep. I imagined he hadn’t slept any better than I had.
I crept up beside him.
“Happy birthday!” I shouted as loudly as I could, laughing as I saw how I’d startled him.
“Goddammit!” he shouted, taking off his glasses to reveal his eye, which was now an iridescent mix of green, purple, and blue.
I couldn’t help cracking up. He tried to act tough, but when he saw I couldn’t stop laughing, his anger dissolved into a smile.
“You think this is funny?” he asked, putting aside his glasses and standing up. I started walking backward. “I’m sorry!” I shouted, raising my hands, still unable to stifle my giggles.
“Oh, you’ll be sorry, all right,” he said, and charged afterme. I ran, but it was pointless. A second later, I had him behind me, and soon he’d lifted me up over his shoulder. He groaned; he must have been aching all over, but I could barely hear it over my laughter.
“No, Nick, please!” I shouted, shaking all over. He ignored me and jumped straight into the pool, both of us fully dressed.
I struggled away from him as soon as we plunged into the water. It was warm on that late-summer day. When I got to the surface, I splashed water in his face. He was dying laughing. My white dress was clinging to me. I was glad I’d put on black underwear. Otherwise, it could have been really embarrassing.
He shook his hair with a Justin Bieber–like movement and paddled over to me, trapping me in a corner of the pool.
“You can apologize now for nearly giving me a heart attack on my twenty-second birthday,” he said, wading over until our bodies were just inches apart.
I tried to push him away, but no luck.
“In your dreams,” I said, playing along. Adrenaline was rushing through my veins, and butterflies were flapping in my stomach. The feeling was like racing at two hundred miles an hour over the desert sands.
With a calculating look, he wrapped his hands around my waist.
“What are you doing?” I asked in a muffled voice when he was so close his chest was touching mine.
“Tell me what you feel right now,” he said in a hoarse voice. There was nothing funny about his expression now—it was 100 percent desire. I felt a wave of pleasure and fear all at once. What if they saw us?
I shook my head as his hands moved down to my thighs. His fingers pushed aside the wet fabric of the dress and slid between my legs. I opened them and wrapped them around his hips.
“I’m not going to stop until you tell me to,” he said, pushing me against the wall of the pool. The water reached up to his shoulders and my neck. I was practically at his mercy. I knew with a word I could get him to let me go—he’d said that, hadn’t he? But what was it I really wanted?
“They’re going to see us,” I mumbled. My cheeks were burning, my body burning; the water did nothing to quench them.
“I’ll worry about that,” he said, pushing my dress farther up and rolling it under my breasts. He looked down at me. His gaze and his fingers, which were stroking my back now, excited me. I could feel him throbbing against my hips, and all I could think about was our lips joining one more time.
“You want me to stop?” he asked, his mouth millimeters away from mine.
In his eyes, I could see every single shade of blue. I was drunk on him, on the way he looked at me, as if he wished to devour me.
I shook my head and came close so he would kiss me. My hands were already wrapped around his neck. I couldn’t even remember how they’d gotten there, and I pulled him toward me, but he resisted, moving in the opposite direction.
“Tell me what you feel and I’ll give you what you want,” he ordered me.
“What makes you think I want something you can give me?” I asked, burning with desire.
He grinned. “Because you’re shaking and you can’t stop looking at my lips.”
“I’m not going to tell you what I feel,” I said.
I heard a grunt come from the back of his throat.
“You’re impossible,” he said, and then he did press his lips into mine. The euphoria of winning that game soon turned to something more. I felt a million sensations, none of them ones I could speak aloud. His tongue slid into my mouth, and he kissedme ferociously. We were soaked, our bodies joined like two halves of a whole. I tugged at his hair, he bit my lower lip, and I thought I was going to die from pleasure.
I heard the sliding door open, jerked away, tugging my dress down, and grabbed the side of the pool to keep from sinking into the deep end.
