“Think she’s trying to tell us something?”
“I don’t know, bro. Maybe they just fell off.”
I picked the first shoe, and he got the second. One the upper floor, there was a door open, the pink dress that Emma had been wearing not too long ago peeking out, on the floor. We went forward, both reached for it at the same time, and Abe pushed the door open wider.
Oh, fuck.
Emma was waiting inside, lying on the bed, flat on her back. She wasn’t naked, but she wasn’t just wearing a bra and panties, either. The sheer black material of her lingerie didn’t hide much. Not that she was even trying, her breasts pushing out of the top. And when she brought her knees up, widened her legs and planted her feet on the bed, I could see her, pink and glistening between her thighs. No panties.
Emma looked like a woman lying ready for action.
We both took a moment to appreciate the sight in front of us. She was just begging to be ravished, and I wouldn’t mind giving her exactly what she wanted. Who was going to go first this time, what positions were we going to take?
I turned to Abe with a considering look. Wordlessly, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. He held it up, and I nodded.
It should have been ridiculous, flipping a coin at a time like this, but neither of us cared.
“You guys don’t have to do that.”
We stopped, turned to Emma. She smiled, seductive, threw her arms over her head and arched her body deliciously. I might have whimpered a little.
“I can handle you both. All you have to do is share.”
Fuck. I was going to cream my pants before we got anywhere.
With that thought in mind, I started tearing at my clothes, Abe doing the same. We probably wrinkled the suits, but they were paid, not rented. It was way too much money to shell out, but we Dad had insisted since we could afford it. It wasn’t like we would ever need them again, anyway.
I started for the bed before I was finished, feeling more than excited.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Emma
In no time at all, we were all naked and on the bed.
Abe had mentioned something about me never giving him a blow job. It surprised me to realize it was true. So, I had him on his knees in front of me, while I sat down on Carl’s cock. I still had the lingerie on, they didn’t seem to care as long as their hands could get to the most important parts; on my breasts, and between my legs. I fucked myself on Carl’s cock, and Abe fucked my mouth.
That was how my mother caught us.
If any of us had been paying attention, we might have heard her feet coming up the stairs. But we were all too preoccupied, lost in each other as we usually were, to really be paying attention to anything else.
None of us missed the door, though, and there was some cursing, then a scramble for discarded clothes and sheets, but I’m pretty sure my mom got an eyeful. I had the sheet up, covering my front, and part of Carl, while Abe pulled had slid to the edge of the bed and was pulling on his pants.
Mom didn’t look at the other two, her eyes on me. I didn’t know if it was because she didn’t want to see the two naked young men, children of her husband, or she couldn’t pay attention to anyone else in the room.
I didn’t like being her target of focus. I just sat there awkwardly on my knees, my eyes skittering all over the room, anywhere but meeting her eyes, my face flushed more in embarrassment than lingering pleasure.
“Really, Emma.”
Her voice was low, and it was hard to judge exactly what she was feeling, but I still flinched at the amount of disappointment she managed to fit behind my name.
“I suspected something was going on, but I would never have expected this. Is this what you’re so proud of? What you want me to be proud of?”
I had never seen her so mad, she was practically red in the face and spitting the words out at me like barbs. They hit their mark, and they hurt like hell.
“How dare you do this kind of thing under my roof. This was a bedroom meant for a child, but you aren’t that anymore. The least you could have done was go to the hotel and pay for a room there.” She sneered, leaning closer, stance threatening, causing me to lean back. “You are nothing but a whore, Emma. I am ashamed that you still use your father’s last name. I want nothing more to do with you.”
She wiped at tears streaming down her face, while I still sat there, shell-shocked.
“I won’t throw you all out as you are, though I am really tempted to. But this is my wedding day and I don’t want you ruining it for me with a scandal. You will get your things, and you will get out of this house. I will not see you here again.”
It wasn’t anything I hadn’t expected, yet why did I feel surprised? I met her eyes, and I knew she meant it. She would throw me out of her life, and she wouldn’t regret it.
For a second, I was stumped. And then I felt a little angry. After all the hell she put me through, how the hell did she get off acting the injured party to me. I couldn’t blame her for everything, no, but she wasn’t exactly winning any Mother of the Year Awards either.
I could tell the boys were embarrassed, and I was feeling the shame. I somehow still found the space to be angry.
“I know you’re jealous,” I blurted without thinking, but once the words spilled out, I couldn’t stop. “You’ve made it clear from the time I went to medical school. I have tried everything to try and get you to love me, but all you ever see is a fault in everything I do. I worked my ass off to become a doctor, and you act like it’s something I did out of spite just to show you up. I have tried everything since I was a freaking teenager, and it never happened. I don’t know what it is you want from me, and frankly, I no longer care.”
I couldn’t keep the tears out of my voice, but I could stop them from falling. I couldn’t remember the last time I cried, sometime in high school, and I wasn’t about to do it just then, whether it would give her satisfaction to see she had finally broken me, or not.
But then I met her eyes, and I noticed they were wet, too, only she let her tears come freely instead of wiping them away as they fell.
“Every time I look at you, all I can think of is your dead father, Emma. You have no idea just how much you look like him. We have photos, but I never wanted you to see, so I hid them. I can’t love you because all you have ever done is remind me of what I had and lost. It’s like constantly seeing his ghost. And I have lived with that for the past twenty-six years, you selfish little brat.”
She stopped suddenly, eyes going wide, giving a gasp as her hand flew to her mouth like she couldn’t believe she’d said that. Then she turned and walked away, leaving me dumbstruck.
I would never have expected that. But I supposed it made a lot of crazy sense.
I couldn’t even blame her if it was that. The man was the love of her life, and she lost him and got stuck with me instead and then for me to grow up, and look like him… sometimes, I used to wonder whether having my dad be the one that survived would have been better. Clearly, Mom, in her own way, agreed with me. Only in her mind, I was the one that didn’t exist.
The whole situation was unfair. It was unfair, to my mother, to my late father, to myself. Most people took it for granted that their parents were people too that had people they loved before they even had kids. I couldn’t ask her to stop loving Dad so much just because he was dead, and it was unfortunate that she still couldn’t see beyond him, even at her wedding, just so she could look at me and see me, not a ghost. I didn’t even need her to be proud of me; I just needed her to give a damn about me.
Not that any of that even mattered, now. She wouldn’t want any more from me after this. Even though I’d decided not to visit her again not too long ago, and meant it and felt nothing, having her reject me so openly hurt a lot worse than I would have expected.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Abe
Fuck.
That had been a total disaster. Not for me and my brother, though. We�
�d both been caught in less than civil situations before, though Carl way more than me. We could live with getting caught naked in some woman’s bed.
But Emma… she just sat there after her mother left, looking shell-shocked, and I knew it had hurt her, a lot, to hear those things from the only living relative she had. In a way, it made Carl and me lucky. Dad never blamed us for our mother leaving, though he’d mentioned plenty of times that she left because she didn’t want to settle down with children.
After a while, Emma got up wordlessly, lingerie still barely hanging on her body and dripping with fluid from both of us, and took the dress we’d dropped on the floor. She didn’t put it on, wrapping the fabric around herself and turning to us, but she didn’t look up at us.
Carl and I shared a glance. We both knew what was going to happen. As much as I couldn’t blame her, it wasn’t the outcome either of us wanted from today.
I got up off the bed, my pants pulled up but the fly only was partly done up, and he followed behind me. But when I got closer, Emma took a few steps back, making me freeze. Something squeezed in my chest, and I didn’t like it.
“Emma?”
“I think…” she started, but her voice trailed off, sounding small and broken.
My hands fisted at my sides. Sharon was now my dad’s wife, and my stepmother, and I wasn’t a brash, violent type of guy—that was Carl—but I wanted to follow her and hit her for making Emma sound like that.
Emma ducked her face down so we couldn’t even see what expression was on her face, and sniffled, wiping at her eyes with her hand. The back of her hand didn’t come away wet, but she still wouldn’t look up.
“It’s best if we stop seeing each other.” Her voice, when it came, was louder, firm.
I knew it was coming, but it still hurt hearing the words. I stepped forward again, ignoring her when she moved back, holding her by the tops of her arms.
“No, Emma. I’m sorry that this happened. We should… have been more discreet, it’s just not easy when so many people have their eyes on you. I’m… we’re sorry.”
“No” she shook her head slowly. “It wasn’t just the two of you. I hadn’t decided to approach you guys, not until my mom said something that made me feel pathetic about myself again.” She cut off, gave a laugh, but it sounded more painful than anything. “She noticed I was watching you, though. I knew she was suspicious, and I did this anyway.”
“We don’t regret what happened.” Carl didn’t have anything on but the brace, but he didn’t seem to care about his state of nudity. Emma glanced at him and then looked away. “It wasn’t the best way, but your mother knows now. So, what? None of us are going to be staying in town once they go off on their honeymoon.”
“It doesn’t matter. You guys have a life to live, and I have mine, remember? My practice? I finished my exams, finished my internship a while ago. I am unemployed, in debt because of the student loans, and I’m pretty sure I don’t even have food at home.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, hunching her shoulders. Her eyes were wet, but she didn’t cry. Still, I could tell if we just left her alone, she probably would. She might have been having problems with her mom, but hearing those words from someone that raised you must have still been hard.
I also knew, that if we couldn’t convince her to stick it out with us, we would both lose her. Carl knew it too, when I turned to him, he was already looking at me. He nodded his head, and I wanted to cuff him again for leaving it all on my shoulders. Whatever ability he seemed to think I had, I wasn’t sure it would be enough.
I had never been so terrified of anything in my life, even more than the accident; it had happened too fast for me to get to that point.
I looked down, slid my arms from the tip of her arms, pulling them away from her chest, slowly. She did so reluctantly, but she let her arms drop, and I slid my hands down to hold hers. Instead of focusing just on words, I decided to let her hear my sincerity, willing her to trust me.
“Emma, you’re a doctor with no job. We want you in our lives, not just to have sex. We both love your company, and that is kind of amazing because we don’t agree on all that much. We don’t want to lose you, and I’m afraid that if I let go of you right now, you are going to disappear.”
“We want you to come with us,” Carl added, voice persuasive, “so we can be together all the time. We have a tour coming up, the first race is in a few weeks, and we’ll have several more lined up.”
She thought about it for about a split second. “I feel the same way about you, too. But I put all this effort into getting a degree. You guys are going to be on tour so you’ll be moving around a lot, won’t you? how am I supposed to get and keep a job in that kind of environment?”
I released one of her hands, keeping hold of the other, and touched her cheek. She didn’t move away, and I shifted my hand so I cupped her cheek, turning her face up so I could see her eyes. There was fear there, some lingering sadness, but I could also see hope, that raised my optimism a little.
“Well, yes. But in the state we’re both in, recovering from a car accident, we really could use you. The job may not be particularly lucrative, but I’ve been putting cash away in investments since senior year of high school, and saving it all up. Even made this idiot do the same. We can definitely afford to hire you.”
“And it would be super convenient having our own private doctor go with us. Accidents happen all the time, even when we’re not on our bikes. So, you wouldn’t just be wasting your degree coming with us on a joy ride.”
Carl must have gone for the sheet, he had it wrapped around him as he came up beside us, wrapping a hand around her waist so she was where we both wanted her, between the two of us and with nowhere to run.
“Just say yes, Emma. Please?”
She blinked at me for a moment. Then her face crumpled, and I thought for a second she was going to cry. But then she smiled, though it trembled around the edges.
“Okay.”
Epilogue
Emma
There were things that had to be taken care of first.
I still had my apartment, and some documents I needed to have with me. But when I voiced the concern, we just dressed up, left Libreville, and drove all the way to my place in the city. We all squeezed in my too small bed, and the next day, I packed away my life for the second time. I had about as much as I did when I left Libreville at eighteen, just a bag with clothes and my papers, only a little more added to each stack. I let Brandi take care of everything else for me, and we promised to keep in touch.
The boys and I went on tour, with me acting as their medical doctor. They weren’t kidding when they said they’d need me, so it wasn’t a waste of a good degree, at least. I was beginning to find it might have been the best decision of my life.
The only damper on the whole thing was my lingering feelings from how I left things with my mom.
It hadn’t seemed possible after the wedding, that we would have anything to do with each other ever again. It was still something of a shock, months after it happened.
I made up with my mother. We were, more or less, friends.
It was even more of a surprise when she was the one to call me, about a month after she got married. It was like something out of a fairytale for me. Mom saying she’d realized she was too hard on me, now that she was married and actively working on moving on. She cried through the entire conversation, and it was what made me truly believe her. My mom wasn’t the kind of woman that cried easily, that I’d ever seen, and when she did, it was always sincere.
Neither of us mentioned what she walked in on, but when she asked what I was doing with myself, I didn’t hide from her that the boys asked me to go with them on their tour, and I agreed. She took it amazingly well.
“That’s good, that they have you to look after them. Frank can sleep at night knowing they won’t die in some accident and he wouldn’t know it. Are you sure you would be happy with that life, though?”
&n
bsp; Before I could call her out on what exactly she meant, she went on, and I was stunned. “Won’t you get tired of never settling down in one place?”
“We’re happy just going from place-to-place. I never got around much, remember? Even when I left home, I took a straight route to what I thought I wanted. I’m getting a new sense of life from all the constant moving around, and I like it.”
Mom gave a wet laugh over the phone. “Well, Frank and I aren’t moving around, but I do get what you mean about getting a new sense of life. But what about when you have children, though,” she fretted. “Do you plan on having any?”
“None of us have talked that far.”
Although we probably should have. I wasn’t sure I wanted kids, but when I’d been at Central General, after witnessing a particularly gruesome scene, I’d walk by the children’s ward and see them sleeping like little, wrinkled angels, and I’d feel this longing to hold one.
“But I promise I will talk to them when it becomes an issue. It’s not necessary to stay in one place even then, but yeah, having a home to go back to when they don’t have work would be great.”
It was an issue a lot sooner than I would have realized, though.
It was bound to happen, so I wasn’t all that surprised. We’d had unprotected sex plenty of times. Carl and Abe told me they were clean, and I trusted them as much as they trusted me when I told them I was, too. Of course, I had the added advantage of having looked at their medical records when I was their acting doctor at the hospital; I had mine with me, anyway, although they didn’t want to see it even after I offered. Once I left with them, we’d conveniently keep ‘forgetting’ to use condoms, and I wasn’t on any other birth control.
Finding out I was pregnant was pretty much the highlight of my life. Even though I thought the guys would freak. They did, a little, when they came to find me on the floor and crying. But they were glad when I managed to explain it to them. I thought they even cried, just a little bit.
Forbidden Prescription 3: MFM Ménage Stepbrother Medical Romance (Forbidden Medicine) Page 24
