All Chapters of CRAVING MY FORBIDDEN STEPBROTHER: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

The pool bathroom is small and dark and the door clicks shut and the party disappears.He doesn’t reach for me immediately.That’s the first thing. In every version of this I have run in my head he reaches for me immediately, impatient, certain. Instead he stands in the dark and I can hear him breathing and neither of us moves and the not-moving is its own kind of overwhelming.“You heard all of it,” he says. “Everything I said to her.”“Yes.”A beat.“Good.” Rough. “I want you to have that. I want you to keep it.” His hand finds my jaw in the dark, tilting my face up. “Whatever happens after tonight. I want you to know that was real.”My chest does something I have no name for and don’t want one.His mouth finds mine and this time there is nothing held back in it, nothing performed, nothing managed. It is Cain Russo kissing me like he has been keeping this locked up and has finally stopped arguing with himself. I make a sound against him and his hands pull me closer and I go, I just



“Get your hands off her.”
They both turn. Jace’s face shifts from rage to something worse. Amusement.
“Well, well.” He doesn’t let go of Zara. “Come to save your pathetic friend?”
“I’m not going to say it again.” I’m close enough to touch them now. “Let her go.”
“Or what?” He’s smiling. Actually smiling. “You’ll run to a teacher? We both know how well that worked out for you last time.”
There’s a version of me from freshman year that would have flinched at that. That would have felt it land and taken a step back.
That version is gone.
“No.” I cross my arms. “I’ll tell Coach Anderson exactly what I just watched you do. What you’ve been doing.”
The smile falters.
“You didn’t see anything—”
“I saw you hit her. I heard you threaten her. I watched you put your hands on her.” I hold his eyes. “That’s enough.”
“It’s none of your business—”
“It became my business when you touched someone I care about.” One step closer. “So here’s what happens. You let her go. You walk away. You leave her alo

Layla 


The pasta has gone cold.
I’ve known for about three minutes but I keep moving my fork through it anyway, because it gives my hands something to do and my hands need something to do or they’re going to give me away.
His father is talking about the beach house. Spring break. Four days, the four of us, open water and a shared roof and no school corridors to disappear into. My mother is already nodding, her hand moving toward her phone before Marcus has even finished the sentence, checking availability probably, or looking up what to pack.
“Layla.” She turns to me. “What do you think? Are you in?”
Four days of Cain Russo across every table, in every room. Coffee in a kitchen with no exits. Dinner on a porch with nowhere to look that isn’t him, knowing what I know now about what his hands feel like and what his voice sounds like when there’s nobody left to perform for.
I have spent the last four days timing my exits.
“I’m not sure yet,” I say.
My mother’s face does something

One of Cain’s teammates grabs my arm in the corridor outside the gym. A year above me, his face carrying the look of someone who has seen something he can’t make sense of yet.
“They’re saying it wasn’t clean,” he says. “Someone in that ring was carrying something. It went for his arm on purpose.”
The words don’t land all at once. They come in pieces, each one worse than the last. Not an accident. His arm. On purpose. I pull free and push through the gym doors and don’t look back.
The noise inside is wrong, not a crowd watching a fight but the stunned quiet of people who have just witnessed something and haven’t found the language for it yet. I push through anyway, shoulder first, through the gaps, through the people who don’t move fast enough, not saying anything, just moving until I’m through the last of them and I can see the ring and the floor beside it.
He’s down.
Half sitting, head dropped forward, his coach crouched over him. Blood above his eye. His kit dark with sweat. Hi

Layla 
The waiting room smells like antiseptic and recycled air and everyone in it has decided not to look at anyone else.
I find a seat in the corner and put my bag on my lap and check the time.
1:47 PM.
Thirteen minutes.
I look at the wall across from me and try to think about nothing, which doesn’t work, because my brain has had exactly one destination all day and it isn’t this waiting room. It’s a living room. Tuesday night. Two words landing in my chest and staying there like something I can’t find the edge of.
It was just sex.
I press my thumbnail into my palm.
It wasn’t just anything. It was three years of cold hallways and a dark yard and him saying my name in a way he never said it anywhere else, and I stood there and let him make it nothing because I thought that was the only way to keep him in one piece. I thought keeping him safe from a distance was the same as keeping him.
It isn’t. I know it isn’t. I’ve known since about four seconds after I did it and I’ve been walk