“I’m sorry about earlier,” I said, referring to the almost kiss we had outside of the restaurant.
“Tayia, you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s my fault. I can’t seem to keep my shit together,” he said as he stared up at the ceiling.
“Blake, why would it be your fault?” I asked softly. When he only snorted in reply, I sat up and turned to him. He was lying with his arm thrown over his eyes as he clutched the blanket to his lower half. “Blake?” I straddled him and tried to pull his arms away. That’s when I felt the hard bulge in the front of his pants against my inner thigh. Before I could process what that meant, he quickly lifted me off him.
“Wait. Give me a minute, please?” he asked without looking at me.
“A minute to do what?”
He threw out a hand in an exaggerated gesture to his lower front area that had been hard against me. My cheeks flushed with embarrassment. I really was inexperienced when it came to things like that. I just wanted a hole to open in the floor and swallow me up.
“God, I’m such an idiot.” I flopped against the pillow beside him and covered my eyes. I had no idea how we would recover from this. I’d just given him a hard-on. “I’m sorry that happened, Blake. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“The problem, Tayia, is that we were just doing what came naturally.”
“Natural? How is it natural? You’re supposed to be my br—”
“Don’t. Don’t say it,” he cut me off as he sat up. “Our parents got married six years ago, but you’re no more my sister than the sky is green. It’s the circumstances we’ve been dealt, and I keep telling myself to not go there.”
“Wait? You keep telling yourself not to . . .” My mind was reeling with this revelation. Blake had feelings for me, too? Somehow, it was comforting to know that I wasn’t the only one feeling this, but at the same time, the knowledge of it made the ache even worse.
"“I know I shouldn’t feel like this, but I can’t help it.” His voice was so low that I could barely hear him.
“Me, too. I’ve tried hard to ignore it,” I admitted shyly.
“Tay?” There was confusion on his face mixed with something else I couldn’t quite identify. “Tayia, you . . .”
I nodded helplessly.
“We are so fucked.” He laughed humorously then fell back against the pillow again.
“Yeah,” I agreed and scooted a little closer to him. “But for the record, I’ve always felt this way. Even before our parents married.”
“I remember.”
The day our parents combined houses was when it all became real. My dad and I moved from our rented house and into the home Maggie owned. Knowing that Blake’s room was just down the hall from mine was unsettling. Sharing the same space with him had been torture. I was obsessed with making sure my bedroom door was always bolted shut, so much so that I had gotten good at lock picking after finding myself on the wrong side of my own carelessly locked door. With time, it got easier to accept my fate and that life wasn’t always fair. But sitting there next to Blake after all that was revealed, it was hard not to wonder whether it was fate that was keeping us apart or something else entirely.
“What are we going to do, Blake?” I clutched the blanket closer and stared blankly at the dancing flames.
“I don’t know, Tay.”
We lay there for a while, listening to the crackling of the fire. All I could think about was touching him, and I wondered if he would let me.
“Can we hold each other and pretend for a while?” I asked quietly, hoping like hell that he wouldn’t reject me.
He looked over at me, and I saw that his eyes were a bit cloudy, except I didn’t think it had anything to do with being stoned. Finally, he nodded and pulled me ag
ainst his side.
“Since we’re pretending, can I do this?” He pulled my leg back over his hip and I nodded. “What about this?” He buried his head into the side of my neck and my heart began beating rapidly, but I managed another nod. His fingers lightly grazed the small of my back just under the hem of my shirt, and I closed my eyes, allowing myself to feel the moment. I lifted my hand and began to thread my fingers through his hair, loving the way the silkiness felt against my hands. The bulge between his legs was back and I positioned my hips so that I could feel it against the place that was beginning to throb. His lips brushed the side of my neck until I felt the warm wetness of his tongue as he slid it along my skin. The sensation felt so good that I wanted him to do it again, so I told him so.
“More,” I begged.
Blake didn’t hesitate as he rolled us so that I was on my back with him resting between my legs. The slow licks of his tongue were gradually accompanied by light nips at the area around my pulse, which he pinched with his teeth. When I threw my head back, he lifted a hand to my head and increased the pressure of his bites, causing me to moan, and then he flicked his tongue over the spot he’d just bitten.
He worked his way up my jaw line until his lips hovered near mine in hesitation. The wild look in his eyes I was sure mirrored my own. Passion mixed with internal conflict. The right thing to do would be to stop this. To get up and go into my room and wait for our family to arrive. But at that moment, the only thing that felt right was being here with him.
There would be consequences, of that I had no doubt, except I was having a hard time caring about anything else but the way his eyes smoldered as he looked down at me and how his bottom lip looked so succulent. Unable to resist tasting it, I lifted my face and traced his mouth with the tip of my tongue. It was exactly what I wanted to do, and for the first time, I gave in to the impulses I had been fighting for so long. Blake responded by pulling my bottom lip into his mouth and sucking lightly while I arched into him and moaned.