CHAPTER 14 - WRONG

He catches me after class on a Wednesday, which feels like the kind of detail that shouldn’t matter but does because Wednesdays used to be the most boring day of my week and now a man with grey eyes and clawed intentions is pulling me into a stairwell between the second and third floor of the humanities building while students flow past the door ten feet away.

His hand is on my wrist and he steers me through the fire door and into the concrete echo chamber of the back stairs and the door swings shut behind us and the hallway noise cuts to nothing and we are alone in a space that smells like old paint and industrial cleaner and the leather of his jacket.

“Knox, we can’t keep–”

“Keep what?”

“This.” I gesture between us with my free hand and the gesture encompasses approximately seventeen felonies and a moral catastrophe. “You’re my stepbrother. We live in the same apartment. My MOM is marrying your DAD and we are – this is–”

“Wrong?” He says it like he’s tasting the word, rolling it around in his mouth the way his father said my name in that office, and the similarity makes my stomach clench in a way I refuse to examine.

“Yes. Wrong. It’s wrong, Knox.”

He listens.

That’s the part that undoes me – he actually listens, leaning against the railing with his arms crossed and his head tilted and his grey eyes steady on my face while I lay out every rational argument for why this has to stop.

He doesn’t interrupt and he doesn’t smirk and he doesn’t dismiss a single word I say, and the respect he gives my objections somehow makes them feel less convincing rather than more because a man who listens to your reasons and still doesn’t move is more dangerous than a man who doesn’t let you speak at all.

I run out of words somewhere around “and she deserves better than–” and the silence that follows is the loudest silence I’ve ever stood inside.

He kisses me.

No warning, no transition, no slow approach. One second he’s leaning against the railing and the next his mouth is on mine and his hand is in my hair and my back hits the concrete wall and the impact pushes the air out of my lungs which he replaces with his tongue. He kisses me the way he does everything – like he’s already decided how this ends and is just walking me through the steps – and his mouth is hot and demanding and his teeth catch my bottom lip and pull and the sound I make echoes off the concrete walls of the stairwell loud enough that anyone on the landing above us would hear it.

I kiss him back before I decide to.

My hands are fisting in the front of his jacket and pulling him closer instead of pushing him away, and my mouth is opening under his and my tongue is meeting his and the taste of him – something warm and dark that I don’t have a comparison for – is making my brain go offline in sections, and each section that shuts down takes a piece of my resistance with it.

His hand tightens in my hair and angles my head back and the kiss deepens into something that feels less like a kiss and more like a claim being staked with teeth and pressure, and his other hand grips my hip and pulls me flush against him and I can feel every inch of his body pressed against mine through our clothes and the hardness of him against my lower stomach makes me gasp against his mouth because I’ve felt him through his jeans before but never at this angle, never pressed directly against me with his hips pinning mine to a wall, and the SIZE of him is – I knew he was big, I’ve had him in my mouth and my hands and I thought I understood the scale, but feeling the full rigid length of him grinding against my body through denim while his tongue is in my mouth recalibrates my understanding entirely.

He lifts me. His hands under my thighs, my legs wrapping around his waist because gravity and instinct demand it simultaneously, and the position changes the angle so that the hard line of him presses directly between my legs through both layers of fabric and the pressure against my clit makes my head fall back against the concrete and my hips roll forward to chase the friction.

He grinds into me slowly – one long roll of his hips that drags the thick ridge of him along the seam of my jeans and through the denim to the exact spot that makes my vision blur – and I grip his shoulders and my nails dig through the leather and a sound comes out of me that belongs in a bedroom and not a stairwell.

“That’s what you do to me,” he says against my throat, and his voice has dropped into that register that I feel in my pelvic floor. “Every time you walk into a room. Every time you bend over to pick up a cup at that coffee shop. Every time you sit in that lecture hall with your legs crossed and your pen between your teeth.” He grinds forward again and the friction makes my whole body clench around him through our clothes. “This is what happens, and I have to sit there and pretend I’m not thinking about bending you over the nearest surface and finding out how loud you get when I’m inside you.”

I’m about to cum. I can feel it building – the pressure from his body combined with the friction of the denim combined with his voice combined with the fact that his mouth is on my neck and his hands are gripping my thighs hard enough to bruise and I am wrapped around my stepbrother in a public stairwell and the wrongness of it is making it BETTER, and I’m right there, I’m right at the edge–

He stops.

He sets me down. Steps back. His hands leave my body and the absence of contact is so abrupt that I actually sway on my feet and have to grab the railing to keep from sliding down the wall, and he stands two feet away breathing hard with his jeans visibly strained and his eyes dark and his jaw tight with the effort of what he just did, which is walk away from a woman who was thirty seconds from cumming on his body in a stairwell.

“Knox, what the–”

“Tonight.”

One word. He says it like a promise wrapped in a threat, and then he turns and walks through the fire door and back into the hallway and the door swings shut behind him and I am standing alone in a stairwell with my hair wrecked and my jeans soaked and my lips swollen and my body screaming at me to follow him and finish what he started.

I don’t follow him. I stand there for four minutes breathing through my teeth and trying to make my legs work and hating him with a passion that is chemically indistinguishable from the other thing I feel for him, and then I walk to Dominic’s class on legs made of something less reliable than bone.

I’m seven minutes late. I slide into my seat in the third row and Dominic is mid-sentence and he doesn’t look up when the door opens but his nostrils flare – one quick expansion that he probably thinks is invisible but that I catch because I’ve been watching his face the way I watch his son’s face, which is obsessively and against my better judgment – and his pen stops moving across his notes for a half-second before resuming.

He can smell it. He can smell what Knox did to me in that stairwell – the arousal soaking through my jeans, the pheromones pouring off my skin, the invisible evidence of his son’s mouth on my neck and his hands on my thighs – and I watch Dominic’s hand tighten around his pen while he lectures about narrative control in Victorian fiction, and the pen snaps.

Clean in half. The crack is loud enough that the student in front of me flinches, and Dominic looks at the broken pieces in his hand with an expression so controlled it might as well be screaming, and he sets them on the desk and picks up another pen without missing a word and continues the lecture like nothing happened.

But something happened. The pen is evidence and we both know it, and I sit in my chair with Knox’s taste still on my lips and Dominic’s broken pen on the desk and the word “tonight” sitting in my chest like a lit fuse counting down to something I’m not ready for and can’t stop wanting.

I count the hours.

Four hundred and thirty-seven minutes until 1:47 AM.