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 me and 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 about it 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?”
Barbecue at Joe’s. That could only mean one thing: a party till dawn, hot chicks, and good music…but I had plans for the next day, plans six hours away that excited and depressed me in equal measure.
“I’m going to Vegas tomorrow,” I told him, making an ambivalent face he instantly understood.
“All right, man. Have fun and say hi to Maddie,” he replied.
“I’ll see you both when I get back,” I said, and then crossed the house and walked upstairs to my room. There was a soft light coming from under Noah’s door, and I wondered if she was awake, but then I remembered she was afraid of the dark.
Someday when things calmed down, I’d ask her about that. But for now, I just wanted to sleep. The next day would be long.
* * *
My phone alarm went off at 6:30 in the morning. I groaned and turned it off, telling myself I’d need to get the lead out if I wanted to be in Vegas by noon. I hoped a long drive would help dispel the bad mood that was lingering from the night before. I got out of bed and took a quick shower before putting on jeans and a T-shirt, remembering the hellish heat in Nevada, which I’d hated since the first time I ever went there. Vegas was amazing as long as you stayed in the air-conditioned hotels, but outside, no one could stand more than an hour in that dry desert heat before it got to them.
As soon as I walked past Noah’s door again, the memory of the night before assailed me. As if I hadn’t had enough after dreaming of her all night long!
I walked downstairs to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Prett, our cook, wouldn’t get there until ten, so I had to figure out how to make a halfway decent breakfast on my own. At seven, I was in the car and ready to take off.
With the music distracting me, I tried to ignore the feeling that always overcame me when I had to see Madison. I still remembered the day I found out she was born. It horrified me to think that if it hadn’t been for a simple coincidence, my sister and I never would have met. My life had been pretty fucked-up at the time: I hadn’t lived with my father, Lion and I had been roommates, and we’d been getting into hella trouble. One weekend we’d gone with some friends to Vegas. I’d always hated Vegas because it was where my mother lived with her new husband, Robert Grason.
It had been painful to see my mother after seven years, especially with a baby in her arms. I had frozen—so had she—and we’d looked at each other for a few seconds as if seeing ghosts from our past. My mother had abandoned me when I was twelve. One day I’d come out of school, and she hadn’t been there to pick me up. Since then it had just been the two of us, me and Dad, no one else.
I’d always had a good relationship with my mom, and even if, when I’d grown up, Dad had hardly ever been home, it had been fine because she’d been enough. I could still remember the hole in my heart when I realized I’d never see her there again.
But that sorrow had soon turned to hatred toward my mother and women in general. The only person who was supposed to love me above all else had traded me for a millionaire hotel mogul in Vegas whose name my father had cleared after he’d been accused of fraud to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
Dad had told me the whole story when I was old enough. My mother had never been happy with him. She’d loved me, but with every day that had passed, she’d become more and more obsessed with money. It hadn’t been enough to be married to one of the most prestigious lawyers and businessmen in America—no, she’d wanted to get in the bed of that fraudster Grason. The man who’d forbidden her to see me or have any contact with my father. And when she’d agreed, that had been the end of any relationship between us.
That meant my father had gotten full custody and my mother had renounced all parental rights. When things had gotten weird was when we’d seen each other again. I had known that girl with the blond hair and blue eyes was my sister, and even if I’d wanted to pretend I didn’t care, at a certain point, I’d realized it meant something to me.