Caught Kissing My Stepbrother. のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

Jace found out I couldn't actually swim the same way he finds out everything about me. By accident, loudly, and with maximum smugness."Wait." He stopped dead in the kitchen, spoon halfway to his mouth. "You can't swim?""I can swim. I know how to not drown. Those are different skill sets." I argued, tilting my head up."That's the saddest sentence I've ever heard a human being say out loud." He chuckled."I contain multitudes."He set the spoon down slowly and dramatically. "Okay. Well today is your lucky day, Izel. Tonight. I'm teaching you.""Absolutely not." I countered. “I'm still not over my near death experience from breaking into the school." "You're scared." He mocked."I'm not scared, I'm…I'm…taking precautions. Plus I'm busy.""You're scared," he said again, like I was a toddler who needed the word repeated, and against every single one of my better instincts I stomped upstairs and put on a swimsuit, because apparently my pride operates independently from my brain and answ

The phone hit the wall hard enough to crack the screen into a spiderweb, and the sound of it dropped straight into my stomach like a stone.I'd seen Jace lose races. I'd seen him lose his patience with referees, with reporters, with me. I had never once seen him lose his grip on his own face, and that scared me more than the crack in the drywall."Jace."He didn't answer. He was staring at the dent like it might apologize to him."Jace, look at me.""It's probably routine," he said, finally, to the wall and not to me. "They do random clearance checks before Nationals qualifiers sometimes. It's probably nothing.""You don't throw your phone at a wall over nothing."That got him to turn around. His jaw was doing a shaky thing. I guess he was a man narrowing his whole world down to one lane. Except this wasn't a lane. This was his heart."And if it's not nothing?" I asked. "What then?""Then I figure it out.""Figure out what, exactly? A way to fake a heartbeat?""I'll manage it.""You c

"Absolutely not," Jace said, watching me pull on my sneakers later, at midnight like I'd lost my mind."You have an appointment tomorrow that could end everything you've built. So tonight, you get one night off from being the swim captain, the golden boy, Richard Carter's son, and the guy with a secret nobody can know about. Tonight you're hanging out with me.""That's insane." He was shaking his head. “Going out by this time is not even your thing, Izel.”"Get your shoes." I insisted. I was determined to make him smile tonight.We snuck out the side door like a couple of raccoons, our parents were asleep upstairs, we were laughing under our breath the whole way down the driveway, and once we hit the city with absolutely no plan, something in both of us just loosened.We started at a diner that smelled like burnt coffee and better decisions than the ones we were making, then somehow ended up in an arcade at one in the morning, where I discovered the single most satisfying fact of my e

IZEL'S POVRichard drove home like a man mentally rescheduling his entire week, which, to be fair, he probably was. Coach calls…specialist referrals. Nobody said a single word about where Jace and I had actually been the night before, and that silence sat in the car with us like a fourth passenger who'd forgotten to buckle in.I caught Richard's eyes flick to the rearview mirror once. Just once. He hadn't forgotten. He was just triaging.Jace didn't say anything the whole ride. Not a joke, not a complaint about the radio, nothing. By the time we got home he'd already changed into gym clothes and vanished into the home gym like a man reporting for a shift he refused to admit he'd been fired from.I gave him twenty minutes before I went looking, because I am, unfortunately, an optimist.He was doing bicep curls with the kind of aggression usually reserved for people settling a blood feud."Hey," I said.He didn’t answer me, juts kept doing his reps."Jace...""I'm working out."I stepp

IZEL'S POVThe Carter-Brooks kitchen at seven in the morning was a study in differences.There was Richard with his coffee black and my mom's tea steeping in the ridiculous flamingo mug he'd bought her as a joke three weeks into dating and she'd refused to stop using since. Richard was gray at the temples in that distinguished, aging-well way. Jace had inherited none of the gray and all of the jaw with his sandy-black hair that always looked messy.They were two months married and they still hadn't fully merged their cabinets. Her spice rack was still boxed in the pantry. His grandmother's china still lived untouched behind glass, like he wasn't sure yet whether this was permanent enough to risk it.He reached over without looking and moved her tea two inches away from the edge of the counter, the way he always did before she knocked it off. She didn't even glance up from her phone. Just smiled into it.That was them lately. It was truly gross. Newlyweds doing dishes like a couple wh