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She rolls her eyes. “Can you at leastpretendto be bearable?”
“Can you pretend to like me?” I shoot back.
She gasps. “Of courseI like you. Why else would I be with you?”
“I could think of thirty-three million reasons.” That is my net worthbeforemy impending inheritance.
“Christ, you’re crude. My mother was right about you.” She slams the glass door in my face.
I place the book on the table, redirecting my attention to the couple on the balcony. They’re still at it, making out without a care in the world. He wraps her hair around his fist, tugging, lifting her face, and kisses her hard. Their tongues swirl together erotically. She cups his cheeks and grins, grazing her top teeth over his bottom lip. My cock strains again. She is completely his, I can tell, and that blind conviction she belongs to him, how comfortable she is belonging to another human, makes me want to screw her brains out just to prove a point.
No one is yours, and you belong to no one. We’re all just fallen foes trying to survive this universe.
He drags his mouth down her neck, cupping her breasts, pushing the pebbled thing toward his lips. The edge of her pink nipple pokes from her dress. When his mouth reaches the valley between her tits, she remembers herself.
She pushes him away, panting. Maybe she knows they have an audience. If she’s waiting for me to be embarrassed, she better get comfortable, because that’s not about to happen. They’re the ones dry humping in plain sight. I’m just a man enjoying his pretentious glass of wine on a lazy summer day.
The glass door opens again, and Gracelynn Langston reemerges, this time in a black, sequined chiffon dress. An Akris piece I bought her the day after she crawled back into my bed for the thousandth time this decade.
This is Gracelynn’s—or as I call her, Grace’s—pattern. Fuck me. Dump me. Crawl back to me. It always surprises her to find herselfon my threshold, looking pensive, and sometimes drunk, andalwayshumiliated.
It never surprises me, though.
I’d come to accept what we are. A dysfunctional, screwed-up couple like our parents were. Minus the physical assault, maybe.
Over the years, I perfected the art of managing my stepsister. Using her explosive nature to my own advantage.
I am now able to detect the precise moment in which Grace is going to leave me. It’s always when our relationship starts to feel real and serious. When the salacious shine of fucking your stepbrother wears off, and she is left with the aftermath. With a man she despises. An aloof, taciturn monster. A social pariah, ousted from polite Wall Street society with a two-year supervisory ban for insider trading charges.
And so, like a Swiss clock, the minute she withdraws, I become distant, unavailable; I strategically notice women on the street. The kind of women she doesn’t approve of. The ones who wear too much makeup and their secondhand designer bags with all the pride of a hotel heiress.
It works like a charm. Grace always comes back. She cannot stand me. But she cannot stand it even more when I have another woman draped over my arm.
“Zip me up,” she demands now, swaying her hips as she saunters to me. She turns around, giving me her back. Each vertebra in her spine is pronounced. She’s managed to keep her ballerina body long after she gave up the dream.
I roll the zipper up her back. “How many people will be gracing us with their mediocracy tonight?”
“Too many, as per usual.” She speaks with bobby pins in her mouth as she tucks the last of her locks into an updo. “At least they’ve only invited the top twenty employees and their plus-ones. None of the airheaded PAs, thank God.”
Grace does not introduce me as her boyfriend. Rather, as her stepbrother, even though our parents have been divorced since we both went to college.
But she introduces me all the same, for I am well known in the stock business. Feared, respected, but rarely liked. She knows my leverage, my pull. I may be the black sheep of the hedge fund world, but I still know how to make money, and people on Wall Streetreallylike people who know how to do that. It is their favorite party trick.
My fingers linger when I see the scar on her upper back. The one that reminds me what happened to her. What happened tometwenty-four years ago. I run my finger pad over it. Her flesh prickles into goose bumps, and she pulls away like I hit her.
“Is it very visible?” She fusses over a perfectly secured bracelet, clearing her throat.
“No,” I lie, tugging the zipper up. I halt. Something comes over me. The need to brush my lips against her scar. Comfort her. I resist the instinct. Instead, I say, “There you go, Venus.”
“Venus?”
“The hottest planet on the solar system.” I wink, channeling my inner Christian Miller, my friend who somehow managed to perfect the art of enjoying his relationship, as opposed to making it a screwed-up grown-up game like I did.
I can almosthearGrace scrunching her nose in disdain. “ThankGawdyou’re a closeted geek. Could you imagine if other people found out about your astronomy quirk?” She huffs, pushing farther away from me. “Now all I need is a pair of earrings. What do you think, the rose gold diamond studs or the aquamarines?”
The first pair, I bought her for her twenty-eighth birthday, deliberately one-upping her then-boyfriend’s gift. She dumped him the same night, horrified with the prospect of ending up with a middle-class Realtor who could only afford to buy her last season’s Louboutins. She’d later on waited in my bed wearing nothing but said earrings. The latterpair was a present from me after I ended a three-month affair with Lucinda—yes, her childhood nemesis—when Grace took too long to get back to me after one of our many breakups.
Poor, poor Lucinda. She was in for an unpleasant surprise when she got back from her tour in Paris as a prima ballerina to find Grace scorching up my bed.
