RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)(8)

“Relax,” Mom said, looking down at my hands, still clasping the edge of the table. “There’s no reason to be that nervous.”

Not that you know, I thought. No, from your point of view this is perfectly normal. If I had any doubts about the identity of this woman (which I didn’t), they were dispelled completely when the man and the woman arrived at the table. The woman’s perfume, rain water and fresh-cut grass, danced through the air and into my nostrils. Mom rose to her feet. Without realizing it, I had, too. She walked around the table and draped her arms around the man. “Andrew,” she said. She let go of him and pointed at me. “This is Eli, my son.”

I walked around the table and shook his hand quickly, because I did not want him to notice how much my hands had started to sweat. For a moment I felt an out-of-place urge to laugh, laugh raucously with my head thrown back, laugh at the impossibility, at the ludicrous chances of this situation. But I fought the urge back. I didn’t want to call any attention to my prior knowledge of the woman. I didn’t want Mom to know what we had done the night before. It was partly from embarrassment. That’s the last thing you want to talk to your mom about. And, also, I felt that it would diminish the experience if I talked about it. That night had been somehow—well—magical. This woman and I had transcended who we were and became just two pleasure-seekers, losing ourselves in each other’s body.

“Hello, Eli,” Andrew said, calling me back to reality. He pointed a hand at his daughter. Her eyes had been downcast. At the mention of her name she raised them. Her face was white like her legs. Two black-ringed sky-blue eyes looked out from above a button nose. Her small mouth was red with lipstick. She was sexy, even sexier than she had been with the mask on, that night. “This is Jessica, my daughter.”

Jessica held her hand out to Mom. Mom waved it aside and hippie-hugged her, kissing both her cheeks. “I’m so pleased to meet you!” she gushed. “It is such a pleasure! You’re an English literature student, aren’t you? And a dancer?”

“Yes,” Jessica agreed quietly.

“What a funny coincidence!” she laughed. “Eli’s an English student, and he has had dancing lessons, too.”

“She knows,” I felt like saying. “Of course she knows. We danced the Lindy Hop last night before we fucked.” But of course I didn’t.

Jessica was nodding along, and then Mom pointed at me. “This is my son, Eli.”

She held out her hand. I offered her mine. She looked down at the hand, and then her eyes widened, and she made to pull her hand away as though burnt. She thought better of it, and then shook my hand quickly. “Hello, Eli,” she said, her voice a croak.

“Hello, Jessica,” I replied, my voice no better.

I tried to look into her eyes, to communicate with her silently the way really close people can, but she was staring at the ground. I was sure I could communicate with her like that, though we had never truly met. I felt close to her in a way that was completely unreasonable. This was, after all, our first time meeting.

But that didn’t seem to matter. We had had the best sex of our lives. We had shared a magical night. We had danced the Lindy Hop together and we had learned each other’s bodies. Mom didn’t seem to notice me or Jessica after that initial introduction. Neither did Andrew. They were like two teenagers, cheeks flushed red, gazing at each other hungrily, falling deeper in love right there in the restaurant, oblivious that their two children were in a silent situation of their own.

We ordered starters, drinks, and then mains. I ate my starter silently, and so did Jessica, still looking down, unwilling to look up and meet my eye. But then, when the mains came, she did look up at me. Mom and Andrew were huddle close together, fingers interlocked, whispering closely. Jessica looked straight into my eyes, and I saw pleading there. Please don’t, that look said. Please don’t say anything.

I nodded. I won’t, I promised.

And she seemed to get the message.





Jessica



The tattoo! The dagger!

This morning I had thought the wolf and the lion were behind me. I had thought that it was something I would eventually look back on and laugh about. But there wasn’t anything funny about this as far as I could tell. I had been desperate to keep what I had done from anybody, especially Dad. And now I walk into the restaurant to meet his lover’s son and the lover’s son is the lion. When I had reached across to shake his hand, I had felt good, at ease. I had felt like, I suppose, any daughter feels when she has to attend events like this. I was mildly bored, but otherwise content. And then that dagger-painted hand had reached for me, and images had filled my head, and there he had been. He was wearing a t-shirt which showed his muscles, and I could not mistake him.

It was the lion.

I didn’t look up at him for a long time. I was nervous as hell. I kept one hand under the table and fidgeted with the hem of my dress, pinching between my fingernails and pulling loose strands out of the fabric. I ate my food at a steady pace, because if I didn’t Dad would know something was wrong, and the idea of it all coming out now, in public, in front of everybody, caused a lump like a golf ball to rise in my throat. If somebody had looked under my chair, they would’ve seen a small pile of dress fabric, torn away moment by moment.

I built myself up to it, like a bungee-jumper building herself up for the plunge. You can’t avoid looking at him forever, I told myself. You can’t look down forever. If Dad and Annabelle were as close as they seemed (which was about as close as two people could be, from my judgment) then I would see this man again. I reasoned this out over the course of the starter. I was glad Dad and Annabelle were so enthralled with each other. It meant that he wasn’t asking me if something was wrong, or that he and Annabelle were not forcing me and Eli to speak. Eli—not lion.