by L. L. Ash
“If it makes you feel any better, I wasn’t invited, either,” Dad said, only sounding the slightest bit salty.
“You two can always go do a massage together,” Penelope said, sounding totally serious.
Both men’s faces scrunched up with a look of ‘ew’.
“I’m sure you enjoyed it, Mom, but I’ve got no desire to be sword-fighting with my new step-dad.”
Penelope looked completely lost, but Dad and I both gagged.
“You.” Dad pointed a finger at Hunter, totally deadpan. “You are a disturbed young man.”
Hunter laughed deep from his belly while making his way to the kitchen.
“Besides,” Penelope went on, just brushing off the last minute of conversation, “if you’d have been here, maybe I would have taken you, too.”
“I love you, Mom, but I don’t wanna see you naked.”
I noticed very clearly that he didn’t mention me in the people-he-did-not-want-to-see-naked category.
His eyes flicked to me very briefly, but they told me that he hadn’t added me to his list on purpose.
“Pst,” Penelope scoffed, “they have different dressing rooms for men and women.”
Why hadn’t we used them then? I felt like a total moron. Penelope had seen my tits and ass, and I saw hers, when we didn’t have to?
Ugh.
Hunter shuffled some things around the fridge before coming up with a beer.
“What’s for lunch?” he asked his mom.
“We were just going to go for some food,” she said. “Come with us.”
Another glance my way made me wonder if he would try to avoid it, but then he nodded.
“Ok. Let me just clean up a little and put a shirt on.”
Penelope and Dad agreed, then went to sit on the couch.
“Actually, I’d like a shower, too,” Penelope said all of a sudden. “The smell of the oils is starting to give me a headache.”
“Ok,” Dad said, standing while Penelope did.
I would like to say that I didn’t see the lusty look that passed between the couple, or the way Dad’s eyes landed on her ass, but that would be a lie.
When he followed Penelope back to their room under the guise of ‘freshening up’, he sent me another wink that made me want to vom.
I grabbed a bottle of water to wash down the nasty bile flavor of nausea from the back of my mouth and downed a couple gulps before it hit me.
I had to pee.
There were two bathrooms in our suite, Dad and Penelope doing nobody-wants-to-know-what in one, while Hunter hogged up the other.
I squeezed my thighs together and waddled over to the bathroom we shared before knocking on the door.
“How long are you going to be in there, piggy?” I asked, going all the way back to third grade when we’d used to call people piggies when they’d hog the swings at recess.
He didn’t answer.
I stood there, starting to do a little pee dance while I waited, sure that he wouldn’t take too long.
I was fucking wrong.
Hunter Hayes took longer than a prepubescent girl in the shower.
Banging on the door, he didn’t answer again.
Getting to the point of major desperation, I started trying to hobble my way down to the lobby. When a little tiny bit of pee leaked out, threatening to burst the dam gates, I realized that I had only two options left. Pee in the kitchen sink, or just barge in and pee while Hunter was in the shower.
The shower was a frosted glass, so I wouldn’t see anything, and he wouldn’t see me other than vague shapes and colors, so I did the non-caveman thing and shoved the bathroom door open.
Thank God it wasn’t locked.
“Hey!” came his shout as I rushed to the toilet.
There was a slip, slip, thud sound that came from the shower, then his hand landed flat on the glass slider as he caught himself from landing on his ass while I put my ass on the toilet and let it go.
I couldn’t help the low moan that ripped from my lips as the pressure eased. Almost as good as an orgasm, to be honest.
“The fuck are you doing?” he demanded, still in the shower and not moving.
“I had to pee like a racehorse and someone was taking too long! I knocked twice!”
“I’m fucking busy! Use the master bathroom!”
“I can’t!” I groaned, feeling embarrassment flush my cheeks now that the emergency of finding a toilet was over.
“WHY?”
“They’re fucking in there!” I practically shrieked.
In that exact moment was when we heard another thud, but it wasn’t coming from Hunter.
No, the thud and preceding rhythmic squeak was coming from the shower next door.
“What the fuck?” Hunter asked even louder.
“They’re fucking,” I said louder myself, just in case he couldn’t hear me.
Even if he hadn’t, he obviously heard the series of thumps and then the high-pitched moan that echoed through the room.
“Of God!” Hunter cried, then the water shut off and he was stumbling out.
My eyes were hit with a wall of muscle and flesh while I was still ass-first on the toilet.
“I’m going to throw up,” he groaned, gripping the sink and heaving while that moan sounded through the room again.
I started laughing like an asshole.
He shot me a glare, his face furious while his body’s profile was pure angled perfection.
Oh, and a stiffy, to boot.
“Were you jacking off in there?” I asked, my eyes widening at the dark, angry purple of his mushroom head.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away. So sue me.
He gave me his back and quickly wrapped a towel around his hips.
“None of your fucking business,” he ground out while tearing the door open. “Bathroom’s all yours.”
When he left, I pulled up my underwear and leggings, then followed him.
“We share that shower, jerkface,” I told him in a growl. “I don’t want your jizz all over the place in there!”
“Get used to it, sis,” he said, pulling on a pair of jeans over what looked like dark green boxer briefs, from the glimpse I got when I walked in.
“So you’re cool just leaving your cum on the floor? That’s your DNA!”
He turned his head to me for just a second, to give me a long look of annoyance.
“Now I know why all my buddies hate their little sisters,” he mumbled.
Oh, he did not.
I took a step forward and shoved with all my might, my palms catching him on the shoulder blades. He went down hard.
An ‘Oooph’ escaped his lips before he turned and laughed.
Aw hell.
He had the best laugh.
“You’re the worst!” I told him, stomping my foot like a child.
He rolled onto his back and dropped his head onto the floor with the rumbling laugh.
“I think you just got more immature as you grew up,” I told him.
“I could say the same right back at ya,” he said, finally breathing again and smothering his laughter. “Plus, you’ve gotten violent.”
“Only when you act like an asshole!”
“Better than having a stick up my ass.”
I saw red.
Like, literal red.
Growling at him, I pulled my foot back and kicked him as hard as I could in his shin.
He howled in pain, then lashed out his feet to defend himself. He hit me just above the ankles and I dropped like a log.
“Jerk!” I said, crawling until I was sitting on his thighs and swatting my fists down onto his stupidly hard chest. “Twit, asshole, idiot, buttmunch, imbecile!”
Hunter was laughing again, his eyes tearing up and fat drops of mirth running down the sides of his face. It made me even madder.
Scrambling to my feet, I tried to just get up and leave, but there were bits of sand on the tile floor and my feet slipped out from underneath me.
I landed just to the side of him, my tailbone taking every last ounce of the fall while my legs tangled in Hunters.
I howled in pain and he immediately sat up and was hovering over me.
“You ok?” he asked, still half laughing at my idiocy. “You break your ass?”
I shoved at him, but didn’t have it in me to do any more than that because my butt was still throbbing.
“I hate you,” I added half-heartedly, shoving at him weakly.
“Where do you hurt?” he asked, like he had so many times before over the years.
“My head,” I admitted, then rolled onto my hip. “And my ass.”
He chuckled at my antics, but I just needed to get the pressure off my butt bones.
Hunter leaned down further and pressed a soft kiss to the back of my head, kissing away my boo-boos like he used to.
Suddenly the pain was dwindling as every space in my brain was registering that Hunter had just kissed me. Not out of spite, or out of lust, but out of care for me.
Out of love.
He moved down, and I felt his chest brush against my thighs as he leaned over and pressed one kiss to one side of my lower back, then the other.
Then he growled and bit a chunk out of my ass.
Maybe it wasn’t so much out of love.
I shoved him again, but I wasn’t mad anymore.
His eyes sparkled that pretty shade of fiery amber as he grinned down at me.
“You win,” I groaned, just trying to get him away so I could have space to breathe again.
Even when he was being a jerk, he still pulled me in like a moon in orbit.
Always there; always rotating at a distance, but never touching. Never together.
“Pull it together, Ivy,” he said, giving me a hand to help me up.
I took it, and he pulled me to my feet just as the door down the hallway opened and Dad’s laugh mixed with Penelope’s giggle echoed through.
Hunter shuddered, then reached into his bag for a shirt while I rubbed out what was definitely going to be a softball sized bruise on my ass in a few hours.
“Make sure you take a bath tonight,” he said. “It’ll help with the pain.”
I looked at him, wondering what his whole hot and cold thing was about.
“You can take a dip with my little swimmers,” he added with an exaggerated wink, then danced out of the room while I tried to grab him and knock him over again.
There was the Hunter I knew.
I mean, minus the innuendos. He normally just said nasty, mean things when he bothered to talk to me at all. Spending time together had made him more free with his filthy mouth, and I couldn’t decide if I hated it, or loved it.
Surprisingly, Hunter didn’t mention the whole sex in the shower thing that we’d been unfortunate enough to hear, so Dad and Penelope never lost their post-coital glow as we went out for lunch.
That afternoon, sitting across from Dad and my new step-mom, I realized for the first time, that this was what a happy family felt like. The soft, content grin on Hunter’s face told me that he was soaking it in, too.
- 14 -
Hunter
Eight Years Ago
The popsicle didn’t do much to ease the sting of my split lip.
Dad had come home while I was watching tv, and he’d just started flipping the fuck out and throwing things around.
Mom tried to stop him, while also attempting to wrangle me toward my room, but I was fucking thirteen. I could handle my sperm donor.
Turned out I couldn’t, because all it took was one backhand and I was thrown across the room. I had a split lip to show for it, and a bruise developing on my cheek where his knuckles had gotten me a little. And Mom? Mom had gotten the brunt of his anger. He was drunk, too, which meant he’d leave more marks than usual, and I hated myself for it.
“What’d he do now?” Ivy asked, settling on the rocks beside me.
“Why’d you follow me?” I countered, feeling sorry for myself.
All I wanted was to be alone, but Ivy never let that happen. She never abandoned me, no matter how ugly things got.
“Because I could see your busted lip from a mile away. What’d good ol’ dad do this time? He get a speeding ticket and take it out on you?”
I had no fucking clue.
“I’m going to get a stupid growth spurt and I’m going to kill him,” I said absently, as if that was a normal thing to say about a parent.
“He’d deserve it,” she agreed, tilting her head and resting it on my shoulder like she always did.
It hurt a little from where I’d hit the wall, but I didn’t care. She was pure and simple comfort, and selfishly, I wanted it all.
“I just wish he’d get put in jail already,” I told her. “Abuse is illegal, but nobody can prove it without Mom just finally going to the cops. She thinks she can change him; save him. That’s never going to happen.”
“People change,” Ivy hummed thoughtfully, “but not everybody will. Your dad will never change. He’s gotten away with it for way too long.”
I frowned.
“Why can’t you just go to the cops?”
“Because if I do, they’ll take me away from her,” I admitted. “If they believe me, they’ll take me into state custody to get me away from him, and I’ll lose her.”
I’d rather have every bone in my body broken a hundred times over than to leave Mom alone with him.
“Then, what?” she asked.
“I wait. I’ll bide my time until I’m finally big enough to take him on. Once I’m tall and strong enough, Dad’ll leave on his own.”
I shook my head. It felt like so far away, and hopelessness tore at my soul.
“You’re already the strongest person I know,” she whispered.
I turned and looked at her, giving up on my popsicle and letting the soft remains of it fall into the sand and stone of the beach beneath us.
The fence had gotten easier to climb as I got older, and I spent more time on that stretch of land, so Ivy always knew where to find me if I wasn’t home.
“You’re strong,” she said, looking into my eyes, “and you’re brave.”
Her fingers came up and wiped away some moisture that had slipped past my eyelashes.
Tears.
I was fucking crying.
Her eyes dropped to my lips and she wiped away a stinging tear from the split there.
Ivy’s own pouty lips parted in a slight gasp, and I gulped at how thick the air was getting between us.
I loved her.
I loved her with my whole heart, and I knew she loved me. I was just still too chickenshit to tell her, or to kiss her.
Ivy’s eyes flitted up to mine as she searched for something, then they dropped to my mouth again and she leaned forward.
I couldn’t breathe. Not one fucking breath as her full lips touched mine, right on top of my stinging cut.
“You’ll be ok,” she whispered, her breath sweet with strawberries when it brushed against my skin.
To hell with it all.
I sprang forward and shoved my mouth to hers, probably bruising her lips too as our teeth clinked together.
It was my first kiss, and hers, too, I thought. I didn’t know what to do with my lips or my tongue or my breathing, so I just held it there, afraid to let go and see that she was angry or grossed out.
But when we finally broke apart to look at each other, there was no disgust at all. Nope, she was totally into me, too.
So I kissed her again, digging my hands into her thick, wavy dark hair that was pulled back in an old, scratched up barrett.
She kissed me back, pushing her mouth against mine until it hurt. We separated just enough to gasp in a breath, but I took advantage and stuck my tongue in her mouth.
That was what the guys talked about, tonguing a girls mouth like sex or something like that. I wasn’t even close to ready for sex, but fuck, if I didn’t want to taste her.
Ivy didn’t hesitate to
flick her tongue against mine, and pretty soon we were drooling all over each other, slobbering and gasping as we tried to figure out the whole kissing thing. It became pretty easy, and without thinking, I was working my jaw like I was eating an ice cream cone and she was the sweet, delicious treat.
“Hey!” somebody yelled from across the beach.
Ivy and I jumped apart, like we’d been doing something bad.
“Get on home! Or I’ll take you home myself!” some older dude called at us.
That was our cue to leave.
Ivy scrambled behind me as we went back up to the fence as the older dude started heading our way. I laced my fingers together to give her a boost, which she didn’t hesitate to take. I practically threw her over the fence before climbing up behind her. Our feet hit the ground at about the same time, and as we ran back to our street, the dude’s yells dimmed to nothing.
We laughed and gasped in heavy breaths, feeling like we’d just gotten away with something.
Maybe we had.
My lips were swollen and probably all red like hers were, and my jaw ached like I’d just been gnawing on a tree branch, but all I wanted to do was kiss her again.
Ivy kept her space though, smiling at me, but not running into my arms like I wished she would.
My girl was a thinker, though, and I was a doer. I did stupid, spontaneous shit all the time, but Ivy thought things out and planned like some sort of adult. Like what her mom should have done her whole life.
Ivy was her own mom, just like I was my own dad. No matter how nice Richard Bell was when I saw him once in a great while, nothing could replace what I should have had. Same with Ivy. It made a kid grow up way faster than they should, and we were like grown ups in child bodies.
It felt that way, at least, especially with my boner aching against the zipper of my jeans.
“I gotta get home,” Ivy said, taking a step back.
“You mad at me?” I asked.
I couldn’t have her mad at me. I couldn’t stand when she gave me the cold shoulder or acted weird.
She just grinned at me and shook her head.
“You’re a good kisser, Hunt,” she whispered my way.
“Ditto,” I said like a moron.
She giggled at me, then turned and jogged all the way home.
