AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The strangled breath he took stopped me. I waited in silence. Slowly, it dawned on me that I had never called him that. We had kept each other at arm’s length since day one. Eileen sometimes called him Ash, and I’d heard Phoenix use the nickname in passing, but I had never felt like we were close enough.
We certainly weren’t close enough for it tonight, but I hoped he saw it as a gesture of goodwill rather than me being presumptuous.
“It’s all good,” Asher said shortly.
When I looked at his face, I realized how tense he still was. His eyes were glassy and his cheeks pink. A few locks of his rich honey-brown hair were dark with sweat and sticking to his forehead. His jaw was clenched, his neck tense, and his shoulders stiff. As I looked down, I spotted that his shirt wasn’t correctly buttoned. That hadn’t been the case during dinner.
He’d dressed in a hurry.
After I had knocked.
Fuck. Me. Panic spiked in me. The embers that were never truly out roared to life inside of me. A million images of Asher, sweaty and in the middle of ecstasy, arching his back, working his fist up and down his length, crossed my mind. I couldn’t banish them from my head.
I cleared my throat and realized that my muscles were knotting with tension. “Anyway…that’s all I wanted to say…I mean…” I looked everywhere but at him. My mumbling, stumbling tongue betrayed me. “…I didn’t mean to…you know…” And then I said the worst thing possible. “Interrupt whatever you were…” Asher flung his head around to face me. Sparks were flying from his eyes, nostrils flaring. “Not that there’s anything to interrupt. But in case you wanted to, I dunno, sleep, maybe.”
The redness in his cheeks only intensified with each stupid word that left my lips. “Get out,” he said tightly.
“Right.” But I couldn’t get my legs to work. Panic sent my heart into overload. My palms were slick and I rubbed them against my knees. I resolutely did not let myself think about it, although the clues were everywhere. Hell, even the tissue box was on the nightstand. I spotted it and then looked in the opposite direction, but my mind kept swirling. The pillow in his lap. The hesitation when opening the door. The sweat on his brow. The musk in the air. I had chosen the worst possible time to apologize. “I should go. Yeah. Okay. Um, goodnight.”
“Goodnight.” The word ripped from him more in embarrassment than in anger. He flung it at me as I jumped up from the bed and all but ran from his room.
I slipped into my room before I knew where I was and then released a long breath of air. Of all the fucking times I could have done this, I just had to catch him pleasuring himself. Like the tension between us wasn’t palpable already, I just had to sit inches away from him while his pulse was still fast and his crotch on goddamn fire.
And now that I had an entire wall separating us, I let it all sink in. The exact instant when I realized what was up was like a road forking in two directions. One was a path to doom, and I’d had the most delicious urge, for one instant only, to take it. To leap in and put my hand on him. To offer to help with what I had interrupted. To take care of him in more ways than he could imagine. I could do such wonderful things to him; he would lose his mind. He would forget about this clusterfuck that we called family. He wouldn’t regret a single second of it.
But even as these things crossed my mind, I knew it was my dick talking. There were no assurances in this dangerous game. I played with fire. The only wise thing to do was to keep it in my pants. And to lock up my heart tighter than ever. It was the solitary confinement of the soul but for the greater good.
I did a good job not bringing him into my fantasies often. There had been times, especially when I had been with someone for a night, that Asher’s lithe and athletic body would show itself in my mind, almost like a trick, just as I would near my climax. And I had to admit, there had been times when I had brought him to the forefront of my mind intentionally, only to taste the bitter guilt for days. I wasn’t completely free of sin, but I rationed it.
I crossed my room and opened the balcony door, then stepped out. The air was cooler and fresher than I had expected. It was nothing like being stuck in the city at the height of summer. The forest surrounded our house and summers held the same kind of magic as they had when I was just a boy.
Inhaling deeply, I looked up at the big, full moon and leaned against the protective railing. My stepbrother’s room was dark again, but that was as far as I was willing to look.
The strenuous relationship I had with Asher didn’t reflect most of my feelings. In fact, Asher Sullivan and I had clashed on everything pretty much since the moment we had met, but that didn’t change the fact that I saw something beautiful in him. I saw him as someone who needed every ounce of protection I could offer.
It was just unlucky that whatever protection I attempted translated into a lecture in his view.
I didn’t know how to fix that. I didn’t know if I should.
The only thing I knew for sure was that going after him was the opposite of protecting him. Sadly, the biggest threat to Asher was the abundance of attraction and longing I carried for him. If I let that run unchecked, we would both be screwed.
I bit my lip. A nasty, vile sliver of jealousy was like an oily stain on my soul. Who are you thinking about? Who is in front of your eyes to make you so flustered and red? Who gets you to sweat and lose your breath, Ash?
I pushed myself back and turned on my heels before the devil dragged me over to Asher’s door. This balcony was a constant temptation.
Sleep eluded me. Even almost naked and with the AC pumping cold air into the room, I found myself tossing, turning, and sweating. It was like a fever that burned from deep within me.
I never should have come here alone with Asher. I’d underestimated how badly I would want him. This entire year, I’d managed to keep myself in check. Then again, there were a bunch of guys living with us and more than enough college students looking to hang out for a night. I could get my mind off Asher whenever I wanted back at Northwood. But to be alone with him so deep in the woods, that even God was blind to us, was a whole different level of danger.
The moment the night surrendered and the sun’s rays lit the eastern sky with its golden rays, I got up. The few hours of sleep I’d had were restless and filled with weird dreams. Not an image remained of them in my memory, but I carried a sense of guilt when I walked into the bathroom and washed the sweat of the night away.
I was quiet as I wiped myself dry and dressed, but waking Asher up wasn’t my biggest fear. Facing him was. I was no wiser this morning, so I tiptoed to the kitchen and made myself a fruit salad with the things Chuck had dropped off at Dad’s request. I added just a teaspoon of honey to sweeten my breakfast, then sat at the kitchen island and ate quietly.
Seeing him was inevitable, but I wanted to postpone it for as long as possible. I had interrupted something private. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I made a total fool out of us both by freaking out. I should have ignored the clues, but my heart had sped too much, and my face was about to combust in flames, so I stumbled through my words and made it abundantly clear that I knew exactly what he had been doing. And that it spooked me.
God dammit.
I left my empty bowl on the counter and walked around, waiting until a more decent hour to call my best friend. And when I calculated that it was alright to call him in his time zone since he was an hour ahead, I walked in front of the house for a breath of fresh air.
