Page 2 of Pretend I'm Yours
“You can hardly keep your eyes open, sugar. I can find something else to watch if you want to save our show for tomorrow.”
“No, no, I, um…” I blink a few times, shaking off what must have been a lusty look that I really need to try harder to hide. “I’m wide awake.”
“Good,” he says, giving me that smile of his again. He squeezes my bare thigh and says, “Make room for me, would you?”
I bend my knees, sliding my feet toward my butt so he can drop down on the three-seater blue-gingham couch, smelling of his woodsy soap that I often sneak into his shower to steal when he’s not home. He’s so large, though, that he takes up nearly two cushions and practically sits on my feet. He jerks his hips up with a chuckle and quick apology, the impression of his bulge even larger now, so I can wriggle my feet out from under him. I can’t stop looking atit, wondering if he’s wearing boxers or briefs beneath his shorts…until he leans forward to pop the caps off of two beers and grabs the remote, breaking my stare.
“Cheers,” he says, passing one of the beers to me, slugging back half of his after we clink our bottles together. His satisfied sigh is what I imagine he would sound like when he lies in bed at night and strokes himself.
Ugh, why can’t I keep my filthy mind off of him when I know nothing will ever happen between us?
“I’d take this over some club any day of the week,” he says, sinking into the couch as he relaxes, spreading his knees wide.
“Me too.” I sip my beer throughout our show—an English true crime docu-series set in the 1980s that I’m not paying all that much attention to. I’m too distracted by Uncle Declan’s broad, golden chest, his right arm thrown over the back of the couch toward me.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table thirty minutes later, and I smile when I read the new text message.
Uncle Declan is grumpy when he finishes his second beer and reaches for a third. “Who’s texting you this late at night?”
“Uncle Kason.”My other biggest crushwith the prettiest denim-blue eyes.
I turn the phone around to show Uncle Declan the photo Uncle Kason sent. It’s a selfie of him grinning through a face pitched gray with grime and sweat, his white T-shirt and worn jeans streaked black. Despite his unkempt look, he’s as handsome as Uncle Declan, resembling him in many ways except for his dark brown hair, scruffy beard, and a more laid-back personality. Though he wasn’t joined at the hip like Uncle Declan and my dad were, having met later when they went to the same high school, I still grew up calling him “Uncle” as well.
Uncle Declan takes my phone, exiting the selfie I’d tapped to expand, reading through our last few messages. “I didn’t know you two were so close.”
At one time, we all were, but the distance strained our relationships when Uncle Kason took a job working the oil fields in West Texas when I was seventeen, leaving for months at a time.
I shrug. “I think he feels bad about being gone so much, especially since Dad passed.” Uncle Kason’s mama passed, too, three years ago, leaving us as his only family still left in Texas, the same as Uncle Declan and me.
When Uncle Declan starts scrolling through our older messages, I tell him with a slightly nervous laugh, “Hey, give that back.” I’m afraid he might get the wrong idea with all the pictures Uncle Kason and I send each other, even as innocent as they all are.
Well,Uncle Kason’spictures are innocent. If he knew I take twenty plus pictures of each pose at a time and obsess over which one looks the sexiest before sending any to him, he’d probably put up some hard boundaries between us.
Uncle Declan locks the screen and tosses my phone to his opposite side without giving me a chance to respond.
“Rude,” I say with an exaggerated pout.
“You can text him back in the morning.” He raises a brow, using his fake ‘stern uncle’ voice. “Tell him Uncle Declan says he shouldn’t be texting you so late.”
Since we’d missed a few minutes of our show and need to rewind it, Uncle Declan leans forward to grab the remote. He winces, though, and arches his back, then twists side to side to stretch.
“Need a little help?” I ask, crossing two fingers in hopes that he will take me up on my offer.Please, please, please say yes. Just because we can never be together doesn’t mean I won’t take every opportunity to touch him.
“You know I do. I was trying to figure out how to ask without sounding pathetic.” He takes a few more sips of his beer, then sets both of our bottles on the coffee table with another wince.
I stretch my legs out, laughing when he dang near nose dives on top of me, sliding his hands up and under my shoulders, resting his temple just below my breasts. Can he tell I’m not wearing a bra and that my nipples are hard? Can he hear my heart beat faster? Surely he has to be aware of what his proximity does to me, even if he doesn’t attribute it to anything untoward. Because why would he? I’m his niece, at least in his mind.
It’s taken the full year of living together to get to this point. We’d started with him sitting on the floor, leaning back against my knees, while I massaged his neck and shoulders after he pulled a muscle lifting a bale of hay. Then it turned into him sitting on the edge of the cushion between my legs so I could massage the middle of his back, forcing me to peek around him to see the TV. One night, he could hardly get up off the couch, and he had to lie on his stomach while I sat on the backs of his thighs to work his lower back. That’s when my growing crush turned into a full-blown obsession, straddling his half-nakedform, nearly riding him like a bucking bronco as he wiggled and stretched.
Then there was that one magical night two months ago when his side spasmed and he slumped over on top of me. My massages progressed to lightly scratching the nape of his neck and scalp after I’d worked out his knots and kinks, since I hadn’t wanted him to get up just yet. He’d fallen asleep, claiming it had been the most relaxing night he’d had in a long time. I, on the other hand, had hardly slept a wink, too turned on by his heavy body on top of mine.
I’m still all too aware of him now, how close his face is to my breasts, his head sometimes skimming the bottom of them when he turns just right while getting comfortable. I bet none of his dates would have been too happy if they could have seen us like this, which brings a smirk to my lips that falls when I think of how my dad would react if he were alive. In a heartbeat, it would have forever severed their friendship.
Sorry, Dad,I silently apologize when I roll my eyes up to the ceiling in case he’s watching from above.
* * *
Our one episode rolls into two, both of us content to remain where we are after I finish digging my thumbs into the last of the knots in Uncle Declan’s shoulders, his body lax and pliant as I move on to lightly scratching his spine.
