Chapter five

Chapter Five

I'd told Tony I'd stay for one drink.

That had been an hour ago, and I was still there, leaning against a wall that smelled like spilled beer and somebody's expensive cologne, half-listening to a story about a poker game I didn't care about, when I saw her.

Lily.

Across a room full of strangers, in a green dress that did something to my brain I wasn't proud of, hair falling loose over one shoulder, laughing at something Samantha said with her head tipped back like she didn't have a single worry in the world. She looked like she belonged in a completely different kind of story than the one I'd been telling myself about her for two weeks. She looked like a goddess who'd wandered into the wrong crowd by mistake.

I hated it immediately. Not her — never her. I hated the way every guy within twenty feet turned to track her across the room the second she moved, the way some kid by the kitchen elbowed his friend and nodded in her direction, the way I felt something ugly and possessive coil in my chest that I had absolutely no right to feel.

She's your stepsister, I reminded myself. That thought had become something like a mantra over the last two weeks, repeated so often it had started to lose its meaning entirely, the way any word does if you say it enough times in a row.

I'd noticed her avoiding me before tonight. Of course I had. Two weeks of clipped good mornings tossed over her shoulder without waiting for a response, goodnights called down the hallway while she was already halfway into her room, her eyes sliding everywhere except toward me at breakfast. I told myself it didn't bother me. I told myself a lot of things that weren't true.

What I hadn't told myself — what I'd been very deliberately not thinking about — was the way I'd caught her looking at me sometimes when she thought I wasn't paying attention. A glance held half a second too long. Her eyes on my hands while I loaded the dishwasher, of all things, like there was something fascinating about that. I'd noticed. I noticed everything about her, which was exactly the problem.

I told myself I'd have that one drink and leave before I did something stupid.

Then she moved onto the dance floor, and every rational thought I had left the building.

She danced like she'd forgotten anyone was watching, hips moving to a beat that had nothing gentle about it, arms up, head back, lost completely in the music in a way that made my mouth go dry. I watched some guy drift closer to her, watched him get halfway to reaching for her waist, and I don't remember deciding to move. I just remember that by the time I caught up with my own body, I was already crossing the room.

I don't know what I planned to do. Tell him to back off, maybe. Remind myself she wasn't mine to be territorial over. Instead I found myself directly behind her instead of him, close enough to feel the heat coming off her skin, and some part of my brain that should have stopped me clearly wasn't in charge anymore.

I put my hands on her waist.

I felt her go still for half a second — surprise, maybe, or the split-second calculation everyone does when a stranger touches them at a party — and then, God help me, she leaned back into it instead of pulling away. Her body found the same rhythm as mine like it had been waiting for exactly that, and something low in my chest tightened so hard it actually hurt.

She had no idea it was me. That was supposed to make this easier — a stranger's hands, nothing that meant anything — but it made it so much worse instead, because I could feel exactly how she moved when she thought no one who mattered was watching, unguarded and easy and nothing like the careful, avoidant version of herself she'd been giving me for two weeks.

My hand slid up along her side without my permission, and she tipped her head back against my shoulder, and I lost whatever thread of self-control I'd been hanging onto.

I should have stepped back right then. I knew exactly who she was. I knew exactly what I was supposed to feel, and it wasn't this — this low, insistent pull in my chest that had nothing brotherly in it at all, that hadn't had anything brotherly in it since the night I turned around and found her standing in my doorway watching me change like she couldn't help herself either.

Instead I bent down, and my mouth found her ear, and the words came out before I'd fully decided to say them.

"Careful, little sis. Before I lose control."

I felt her freeze instantly, every muscle in her body locking up at once, and I knew — even before she turned around, even before the lights swept across her face — exactly what expression I was about to see.

She spun to face me so fast she nearly stumbled, and the strobing lights caught her expression in fragments: red across her wide eyes, blue across her parted lips, violet across the exact moment shock gave way to something else entirely. Recognition. Horror. And underneath both of those, something she couldn't quite hide fast enough — something that looked a lot like the same thing I was feeling.

"You," she said, and her voice came out breathless instead of angry, which undid something in me I hadn't known was still holding together.

"Me," I said. It wasn't an apology. I didn't have one to give her. It was just the truth, laid bare between us with nothing left to hide it behind.

Her chest was rising too fast. Mine probably was too. Around us the party kept moving, bodies and bass and colored light, completely oblivious to the fact that something had just cracked open between the two of us that I didn't know how to close back up.

I should have stepped back. I should have said something about the alcohol, made a joke, let her laugh it off and let us both pretend this had been nothing.

I didn't move. Neither did she.

And for one long, suspended second, standing in the middle of a stranger's party with my hands still close enough to reach for her again, I thought — with a kind of dread I couldn't shake — that I might not have it in me to be the one who stopped this a second time.