Todos los capítulos de Wrong Girl, Right Bed: My Stepbrother’s obsession: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

My mother knocks like she is asking permission to be my mother. Two soft taps, and a pause just long enough for me to consider pretending I am not home. I have never once taken that option, mostly because I am a coward, but also because some tiny idiot part of me always hopes this time will be different."Come in," I said, sitting in my mirror, with half my hair still down, while I continue what I'm doing.She stepped in holding a wrapped box smaller than the one Roman had given me, wrapped in paper that shows it was from the store closer to us here, and she would never normally shop there which told me that it won't be different this time, even before she said a single word. My mother does not give gifts casually. Affection in our house has always been rationed like something she is afraid of running out of, most of it spent making sure Nathaniel Grimwood never regrets marrying her. I used to think that meant she loved him more than she loved me. It took me years to understand that m

The thing about the dark is that it makes everything louder. His breathing. The rustle of the sheets. My pulse hammering in my throat like it wanted to confess for me. I took one step, then another, until the backs of my knees met the edge of his bed, and his hand found my wrist before I could decide whether to run.“Vivian?”He said it like a question, uncertain in a way he had not been an hour ago, testing the name against the dark as though he needed to hear it confirmed before he let himself believe it. I could have answered with silence and let the question hang there unclaimed. I chose to be selfish instead. My voice was the one thing that could give me away, so I kept it locked behind my teeth and let touch do what words could not.I climbed onto the bed and over him. My knees on either side of his hips, and he pulled me down into a kiss that was nothing like the ones I had imagined. It was sloppy and starving. His tongue pushed into my mouth, tasting of champagne and something

I opened the door anyways, and—It was not Roman at the door. It was my mom, and somehow that might even be worse.I had built my whole face around surviving him. I had nothing left over for her.“You’re up early,” mom said, stepping past me into the room before I invited her in, which was a habit of hers I had stopped fighting. She had a folder tucked under one arm, the kind with a clean little tab on the side, the kind of folder that meant she had been planning something for longer than she was about to quickly admit.“Couldn’t sleep.” True, in the sense that most of my best lies start with something true and then wander off from there.She set the folder on my dresser and opened it like we were in a business meeting and not my bedroom at 7:00 AM in the morning the day after my graduation party. There were papers in it. did not immediately understand, addresses, a lease agreement with my name already typed in where a signature would eventually go, like the decision had been made som

Nobody warns you that the worst part of leaving a house is not the leaving, it’s the packing, the slow dig through every self you used to be that the walls had been quietly storing without your permission.I found the note tucked inside the old jewelry box, exactly where I had left it. The ink had gone soft at the folds from being read too many times. There was a photograph of Roman and me at fourteen and seventeen. We were both trying very hard not to smile for the camera, and we were both failing. I barely remember the reason we took the photo anymore, but I could remember those feelings. I put both of those into the same box, the one marked things, which was doing a lot of unspoken work for a single word written in marker.The movers Victoria had hired were loud and efficient in the way of men who had done this a thousand times, hauling furniture down the stairs with a briskness that felt almost offensive given what the furniture actually represented. I had asked them, politely, to

I found out whose event it was the same way I found out most things about this family now, by overhearing it from a hallway I was not supposed to be lingering in.Thursday arrived fast, the way bad days tend to when you have spent the days leading up to them hoping very hard they will not come at all.I had spent most of the week telling myself it was probably nothing, probably Dad, Nathaniel Grimwood, hosting one of the hundred business functions this family threw in a given quarter, and I had almost believed it right up until I walked into the Magnolia ballroom and saw what had been done to it overnight.White flowers in towers. A string quartet setting up in the corner. A banner nobody had hung yet, still rolled and leaning against the far wall. I did not need to see what it said to understand exactly what kind of night this was going to be.Ivy caught my elbow in the staff corridor before my shift properly started. “Heads up. You’re on service tonight, not front of house. Corporat