Chapter 49
Cole’s POV
I’m not a vulnerable person. Even when I was a kid and I watched havoc rain down on my life every single hour, I held myself together.
Letting someone else into my headspace when it’s like a wrecked fucking battlefield with debris and blood and horror, is not something I can do. Even when I was all for being with Allie, I couldn’t let her in. She still doesn’t know much about my past. Just the little tidbits I’ve shared when I was drunk and needed someone to talk to. There’s never been a reason to tell the people around me. Mom knows, and she’s the only person who needs to know. She witnessed most of it, after all.
She told Blaise’s dad, who most definitely told his son, maybe as a heads up on having a fucked–up stepbrother, going on the words he threw at me at the cabin. I need to lower my walls down and let people in.
Why? What good does that do to let others see my different shades of messy bullshit? For them to know everything my own piece- of–shit father did to me?
The thought alone has my leg itchy, making me shift uncomfortably in my seat while I drive us home from the airport in the middle of the night.
–
Blaise is the passenger for once he usually sits in the back – and Mia is asleep in the backseat, with a blanket wrapped around her that her ever–loving boyfriend threw over her. He cares about her, that much is obvious, and it fucking annoys me. And it annoys me
that it annoys me.
I want to break his hands when he touches her. When he kisses her, I’ll know it’s the same set of lips that softly brushed mine before I took too long to pull back and got the fuck away from him.
My fingers tighten on the wheel when he glances over his shoulder to check on her, then sighs and slouches in the seat. His eyes go to his phone screen, lighting up the contours of his face, and when he flicks his eyes to me, I quickly look away.
Sebastian Paul plays on the radio, filling the intense, awkward silence – but it isn’t drowning out the fucking thoughts in my head! The voices. The taunting. The fucking-
“Did Allie really steal your sweater?”
I glance at him. “Yeah,” I reply, rapidly tapping my forefinger on the wheel. “She sprayed her perfume all over my clothes too.7
He flattens his lips in an attempt to stop himself from laughing, and I shake my head, rolling my eyes as I give the road my
attention.
“Stop talking to me like we’re friends,” I say. “What goes on between me and Allie has nothing to do with you.”
“I asked if she stole your sweater. Calm the fuck down.”
Maybe if I crash, he’ll die, and I’ll be free of him.
I stare at the possibilities, all the trees I pass by, the signposts that tear the car in half if I smash into them fast enough.
A few minutes later, he talks again. “She’s kinda nuts, ain’t she?”
I feel my right eye twitch.
Another minute. “She must be nuts if she put up with you for two years.”
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Chapter 49
He laughs at my lack of a response, my eyes flicking to him, my gaze on his smiling mouth. He has a dimple, and it’s a deep one too. Why have I never noticed that before? He stops laughing, leans is, head back, closes his eyes with his throat elongated.
My mouth starts to water, and gulp and watch the road, speeding up a little as I increase the volume of the song.
The atmosphere feels like it’s shifting. I hate him, he hates me, but something is different. We had a truce, of sorts, but it was awkward for me to pretend. Sure, it was good to be normal for a day, but we aren’t normal.
Stepbrothers aren’t supposed to know what their cocks feel like in each other’s palms. It’s not normal for me to know how tight Blaise’s throat strangled my cock when he-
I shift position before Blaise notices me getting hard over a stupid memory of him kneeling before me.
It reminds me of the two times I wore my mask and could be the real me, the version I want to be, and I’m smashed with a bag of
who else has he been fucking around with? jealousy. Because he doesn’t know it was me –
After what’s happened between us on this trip, the obvious shift that’s confusing the shit out of me, unidentified man?
will he still engage with the
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