Stepbrother Forbidden (Stepbrother, Where Art Thou? Book 2) (2 page)

Ryan jumped backwards, shocked and in pain, his hands clasped protectively over his balls. For the first time he seemed to understand that Sophia wasn't kidding. She pulled herself up, enraged, and stormed to the door, yanked it roughly open and jabbed her finger out into the hallway.

“Get out, now!” she hissed.

Ryan didn't need another hint. Still clutching his injured crotch he limped past her and out the door, his expression a mixture of pain, shock and confusion.

Sophia slammed the door in his face, turned and pressed her back to it, sliding down until her ass hit the floor. She couldn't believe how far she'd gone in the space of just a few minutes, from blissfully losing her virginity, on the verge of the first orgasm that hadn't come from her own fingers or a plastic toy, to sitting in a heap, leaning against the door, head in hands and waiting for that inevitable first sob to escape her throat.

Oh God, what have I done?

*

Sophia sat low in her seat, hiding in the shadows in the corner booth of the bar, nursing a beer and trying to look as if she belonged there. The fake driver's license she'd ordered from the Internet a few months earlier had done the trick, much to her amazement, and as she stared at the fake name on the laminated card she couldn't help be wish she really
was
Anita Di Marco, the 21-year old with a New Jersey address. Whatever dramas this fictional Jersey girl had to deal with they surely couldn't be tougher than falling for her own stepbrother.

She'd been sitting alone in the booth for almost four hours, and around her had gathered an impressive collection of torn beer mats, twisted straws and more than a few empty bottles of Bud Light. A couple of guys had tried to chat her up - both of them already half cut and unsteady on their feet before 8PM, and both a little too pushy - but a panicked look over to the bartender from Sophia had brought him over to gently coax them away with the promise of a free shot.

She hadn't been sure if the barman was into her or if he was just good enough at his job that he could tell when a girl wanted to drink alone, but since her last drink had come with a wink and no charge she kinda guessed he might be hoping to get in her good books.

She wasn't even sure what she was doing at the bar. She'd never been to one before - not a dive like this, anyway, and never without her mother - and she'd never drunk more than a small glass of wine with dinner, but she'd
had
to get out of the house. She couldn't stand to feel trapped in her room any more, knowing that Ryan was right there on the other side of the wall. For hours she'd sat in silence, both hopeful and terrified to hear a knock on the door, and since her mind was too muddled and busy to concentrate on a movie she'd figured the best thing to do would be to dull it with alcohol.

That's what had drawn her to this dive bar, hidden away at the end of a narrow alleyway on a side street three blocks south of the house. She'd always assumed bars were pretty dingy places, but nothing could have prepared her for this place. She'd seen the name come up a couple of times in Ryan's messages to his friends, and it apparently had a reputation for hiring bartenders who didn't look too closely at ID cards. Now she'd seen it she understood why: no respectable adult would ever want to drink in such a hole.

The place was... well, it was
awful.
The tables were sticky. The lights were dim. The jukebox had been playing the same dozen or so songs on a loop since she'd arrived, and for some reason it seemed to be stocked with music from just two artists: Bruce Springsteen and Celine Dion.

It was also the kind of place that served beer in disposable plastic cups, and while Sophia's experience of bars extended only to what she'd seen in movies she guessed it wasn't a style choice. In fact, she was pretty sure it was because this was the kind of place where people got so wasted they couldn't hold onto a glass long enough to finish their drink, and the breakages had become too expensive.

Sophia tried to block out the grungy, sticky atmosphere and retreated back into her own world. She stared at the Facebook feed on her iPhone screen, searching for a confidante she might be able to talk to about all this shit, but no matter how much she screwed up her eyes and frowned at the pixels they still displayed the same 30 or so friends.

Not even friends, really. Sophia had read that the average college aged woman had around 650 Facebook friends. Surely they couldn't all be close - nobody can have
that
many real friends, surely - but it was probably safe to assume that, hidden away in those 650 faces, most young women knew at least a few people they could tell anything; a few who knew all of their embarrassing secrets, darkest desires and most hopeful aspirations.
Everyone
has that one friend who knows about the time they accidentally peed their pants in school, or had a weird sex dream about someone embarrassing.

Not Sophia. She'd never quite managed to crack that code... never figured out the trick to winning friends that every other girl seemed to just
know.
She'd never been able to make that leap from '
hey, is this seat taken?'
to '
hey, you wanna be best friends?'
that seemed to come so naturally to everyone else.

In fact, Sophia had only ever had one person in her life who made her feel completely
safe;
someone she knew she could trust with her secrets, safe in the knowledge that she'd never be judged: her mother. Since she was a little girl she'd known that whatever happened, whatever she felt, or thought, or had done, she could turn to her mom and tell her the truth without fear. In a complex, confusing and frightening world that woman had always been the one constant.

Until now.

Sophia
may
have been able to tell her mom about her feelings for Ryan. She could pour her heart out, and maybe she'd understand. Maybe she'd understand if she knew about what had happened in the bedroom. Maybe she'd understand if she saw the two years of messages, knew that these emotions had been simmering beneath the surface since long before Isabel had even met Ryan's dad, and that the pot had only boiled over when Sophia had been forced into the room beside his. Maybe she'd even give her blessing. Maybe she'd think it
wasn't
totally fucked up. Hell, maybe she'd be completely fine with Sophia dating her soon-to-be-husband's son. Maybe it was only a big deal in Sophia's head.

That was the problem. The
maybe
.

Sophia couldn't risk it. She couldn't risk destroying the relationship she'd built with her mom over the last 18 years. She wouldn't -
couldn't
- do anything to jeopardize that, and she wouldn't do anything that might steal the smile away from her mother's face, and the happiness from her eyes. Both had been all too rare over the course of her life, what with the abuse she'd suffered at the hands of Sophia's dad, and then having to raise her daughter without any help from anyone. Sophia refused to be the one to take her happiness away. She
wouldn't.

But she couldn't get Ryan out of her head. She'd tried -
God,
she'd tried - but in the hours since she'd pushed Ryan out the door there hadn't been a moment's respite. She could still smell him on her skin, and taste him in her mouth. Every time she closed her eyes she saw his face, and felt his body on hers. She'd tried masturbating, hoping that an orgasm might help flush him out of her system, but if anything it had only made her want him more.

She couldn't help but imagine the years she felt she'd missed, if only Ryan had worked up the courage to speak to her that first day she'd arrived at school, before she'd grown to hate him. If only he'd asked her out that first week... it could have been perfect. They would have been dating for two years now. They would have fallen in love the normal way, over time, getting to known each other's quirks and weird habits. Maybe her mom and his dad would still have gotten together, but at least Sophia and Ryan would have got there first. At least it wouldn't feel
wrong.

She needed to speak to someone about this shit. She'd spent the morning scrolling through the depressingly short list of Facebook friends in her iPad, and had even written a long, agonizing description of exactly what had happened to send to a girl who'd sat with her at lunch back at her old school - the closest thing to a friend she could think of - but before hitting the send button she realized how ridiculous it would be to send the message.

Why would this girl care about Sophia's love life, and what sort of advice could she possibly offer? They'd barely even spoken in a year, and the friendship had long ago devolved to the 'like' stage: Sophia clicked the 'like' button whenever the girl, Amanda, posted a cheerful status, and Amanda offered the same in return. That wasn't a friendship. It was barely even a friend canoe.

OK, Sophia, you're getting a little too drunk now,
she realized as she giggled out loud at the thought of a 'friend canoe'.
Man, this beer is strong!

She glanced at her watch and was surprised to see it was already almost 11. She'd walked out of the house just before 5, without a word to her mom, and she knew her absence would be noticed soon. She really didn't want to wait for the inevitable phone call, because she knew exactly what would follow: her mom would wait up until she came home, and she'd immediately notice that she was drunk.

After watching Sophia's dad drink himself into the grave her mom had no time for alcohol. She'd often warned Sophia that no good could come of drinking, and she'd already brought up the subject of Ryan's 'nighttime excursions', as she put it, to his dad at the dinner table. Sophia really didn't want to have to listen to a lecture about the demon drink, so she was hoping she could slip to bed unnoticed.

She took a final sip of her Bud, and she was just about to slide out of the booth when a familiar voice caught her ear. She turned in time to see that just behind her, through the cheap, colorful fake stained glass that fringed each booth, a group of three people had taken the empty seats directly behind her. She couldn't see him, but she'd recognize that voice anywhere: one of them was Ryan.

Oh Jesus,
she thought, sinking deeper into her seat.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine...

Of course she should have expected it. She'd found the name of the bar in his damned Facebook messages. She knew he was a regular here, and after the events of the morning she shouldn't have been surprised that he'd seek comfort at the bottom of a bottle. She just hadn't considered it. The only thing she'd thought about was her need to escape him and drown her sorrows, and she'd ended up in the very same place as him.

What was worse...
Oh no, this is bad...
She realized was trapped. Her booth was in the far back corner of the bar, close to the pool table, and between her seat and the door was nothing but a wide open space visible to everyone in Ryan's booth. She already knew from her trips to the rest room that there was no way out the back. The fire exit was blocked ceiling high by plastic crates full of empties - another reason this was a terrible bar - and even if she could get through the door she was pretty sure it only led to an internal courtyard, with no way back to the street unless she wanted to climb five flights of fire escape and clamber drunkenly over a roof.

So she was stuck, at least until Ryan went to the rest room. Maybe then, assuming he didn't notice her as he passed her booth, she could quickly slip out the door before he returned.

A voice reached her over the top of the booth. "Come on, buddy, just forget about her tonight. Hey, why not call Cassie? She really liked you, you know?"

Sophia tried not to eavesdrop, but Celine had stopped warbling from the jukebox for a moment, and in the sudden silence she could hear the words clear as day.

"Dude, Cassie was a pain in the ass." This was Ryan. "She spent the whole date going on and on about how Tegan and Sara are the feminist icons of our generation."

A girl's voice: "Hey, I thought you
liked
Tegan and Sara."

"Yeah, I do," replied Ryan, "but not enough to get a creepy tattoo of their faces on my shoulder. Cassie wouldn't shut up about them all night, and she kept breaking into song at the weirdest times, right in my face. I'm not gonna lie to you, it was kinda scary."

The second guy spoke again. "Come on, Ryan, are you sure you're not just doing your usual thing of finding fault in every girl who isn't Sophia, cause that's not healthy, dude."

"Josh, believe me, I'm not kidding. It was a whole thing with her. If I was either of those girls I'd be worried about my safety. Cassie's got a real stalker vibe goin' on."

Ah,
thought Sophia,
this much be Josh and Sara from Ryan's Facebook messages.

"OK, so not Cassie," Josh agreed. "How about someone else? There have to be fifty girls you could call at 11 on a Friday. She doesn't have to be marriage material, just someone you can have a little fun with. Y'know, take your mind off things."

Ryan replied impatiently. "Dude, I know you're just trying to help, but I'm really not in the mood for a hook up. Can we just talk about something else?"

The jukebox suddenly started back up, miraculously playing something other than Springsteen, and Ryan's conversation was silenced beneath a wave of...
Jesus, The Bee Gees. Who stocked this jukebox?