He rolled his eyes, slamming the door and striding into the kitchen. He lay down his briefcase, eyes wandering around the clean, empty space though that didn’t seem to satisfy him.
I sank back down on the couch, hastily muting the TV just as the referee announced Jaxon’s team with a touchdown, the fans’ wild cheers instantly shut off. I spared a single glance toward the screen, watching as Jaxon slapped the QB’s shoulder, ripping off his helmet with a huge grin on his face.
That smile washed over me like a wave, filling me with giddy excitement for my stepbrother. I wondered what it must feel like to stand in that touchdown zone with their fans screaming their names and waving posters. I wondered what it felt like to be so completely adored by anyone, much less an entire stadium full. Ralph gave a light whine as he slid toward the edge of the couch under Rick’s terse stare and I ruffled his ears. At least Ralph adored me. I suppose that should be all I need.
“What’s for dinner?” Rick asked curtly, drumming his irritated fingers on the counter. “I told you that I would be home by five, didn’t I? Why didn’t you bother to make anything?”
“I’m sorry, I lost track of time,” I laughed feebly and smiled at the man, hoping the take the edge of his grumpiness.
It didn’t seem to help, not even the faintest hint of a smile crossed his stern cheeks.
Rick was a gaunt man, tall and skinny. My jeans would probably even be loose on his slight hips. When he purses his lips like he’s doing now, his cheeks look hollow, like a skeleton.
I’d been thinking of making us simple spaghetti with roasted peppers and mushrooms, though that didn’t seem like such a great idea anymore now that I’d brought up the spaghetti sofa fiasco. He’d complained about that incident for six months though the stain was hardly visible at all.
“Soup and sandwiches?” I offer instead. “We just got that new fresh ham from the deli downtown, oh, and that cheese is heavenly!”
Moving toward the fridge to pull out the meat and cheese, he glanced back over his shoulder, one brow quirked upwards.
I smiled brightly at the small glance, hoping that perhaps he was just hangry and would cheer up once he had something in his stomach. We so rarely had any time together anymore, it’d be nice to settle down and watch the game. Rick worked so hard and for so long that he often didn’t come home until I was already almost asleep. It was unusual to have him home for dinner.
“You didn’t have too much of the cheese, did you?” he asked, gesturing toward me faintly. “You’re not twenty anymore, Em. You can’t just eat whatever you want. Those hips of yours hang on to ever fattening thing you eat now.”
My smile faded slowly, though he didn’t seem to notice. He rummaged in the fridge.
“How about you have a salad?” he muttered, “We’ve got some spinach in here somewhere… Just use lemon juice for a dressing. No oil.”
Self-consciously, I smoothed a hand over my stomach. While it certainly wasn’t as flat as it’d been when I was twenty, I did my best to take care of myself. It wasn’t as easy at thirty-three, but I hadn’t even had so much as a cookie in two and a half years. I knew the type of figure that Rick liked, and I knew how much I deviated from it. I was reminded every time I had a craving for chocolate or cake or anything remotely delicious. I kept careful track of what I ate and what I didn’t in the hopes of proving that I was trying to be what he wanted, but it never seemed to matter too much to picky Rick.
When I didn’t respond, he shrugged and slammed the fridge shut. “Make me that sandwich, will you?” he muttered, grabbing a beer out of the fridge and traipsing back over.
Ralph leapt down before Rick could push him off the couch, trudging back to the oversized bed I’d gotten for him with his long tail tucked between his legs. He lay down, sad eyes lingering on the comfortable couch that he so enjoyed sleeping on. I’d let him back on once Rick finished his drink and went to go take a hot shower in the bathroom.
My boyfriend was a man of routines.
He always did the same exact set of things when he returned home.
Get a beer, get some food, take a shower, bed – all with some time to berate me in the midst of it. I tried not to take it too personally, what with how hard he works all day. You’re bound to come a little crabby after long hours at the office.
I walked to the kitchen, realizing with a drop in my stomach that I had forgotten to put away some of the groceries I’d gotten earlier. The cheese I’d promised him sat at the bottom of the paper bag, where it had remained for at least six hours.
Chewing my lip, I glanced backwards at Rick and then opened the fridge. We had some old swiss in there, which would just have to do on his ham sandwich. I made it hastily for him, casting a lingering look into the contents of the fridge. I didn’t want a salad. Maybe I would just skip eating for now. I wasn’t hungry yet.
When I returned to the couch, I handed him the sandwich which I had garnished with a pickle and a handful of lightly dressed greens. He appraised it, and when he could find nothing distinctly wrong with it he shrugged and finally snatched the plate from my hand as I settled down onto the couch.
I turned slightly sideways, setting my socked feet in his lap and wiggling my toes playfully.
Rick sipped his beer, shaking his head as Jaxon’s team ran yet another touchdown.
“I can’t believe you still watch that garbage,” he muttered, grabbing the remote from my hand and flipping the channel to the news. “There’s literally no point in watching it. You don’t talk to your brother, you haven’t seen him since you were teenagers. Why torture yourself by watching his games?”
I shrug, letting him lift my ankles easily in his hand and push them off his lap and the couch. I straightened, tugging the blanket my mother had quilted so that it rested in my lap and tucked it all up against me. Shooting me a look from the corner of his eye, Rick leaned over, wrapping one arm around my shoulder and pulling me into his side. We settled together though my body was bent at an uncomfortable angle, my ribs pinching into my hip. I knew if I moved that he would lose interest in the awkward cuddling and push me to the other side of the couch. So I remained bent over in an attempt to savor this rare moment that we could spend together.
The newscaster droned blandly on about who had died this week, who would die next week, and why we were all dying today as Rick listened in rapt attention, occasionally tsking his tongue in pensive thought. I tried to pay attention, to soak up the words and the intelligence of the reporters so that I could have something to actually talk about with the man at my side, but it was all so overwhelmingly depressing and boring that I couldn’t bring myself to concentrate on the screen.
Moving as little as I could, I rest my head on his pecs, listening as his heart beat calmly behind the thin wall of skin. His chest was hard and bony against my cheek, making the skin feel as though it were bruised, but even still I didn’t move.
I’d listened to that rhythm for years now, though it somehow managed to sound foreign every time I heard it. We’d met in high school right after Jaxon ran away. I was heartbroken at the sudden departure of my stepbrother, and Rick was more than willing to help me heal. I’d been grateful to him then. Maybe that was why I agreed to date him. I’d never really dated anyone else before. I’d never met a man who made me want to be with them. When Rick asked, I just assumed that was the way it went.
“Why do you watch those games?” Rick asked abruptly, sipping long at his cold beer.
I’d have to get him more booze. He was almost out, I observed. The beer helped his nerves when he got home, sometimes he was even friendly when he drank enough of it. Other times he got mean, but he fell asleep soon after. He would always apologize the next day when he’d say something cruel, and then he would come home from work a little early with a little shiny trinket that he thought I would like. He’d somehow never learned that I wasn’t the type of girl who enjoyed jewelry. I much preferred fresh picked wildflowers. I had a jewelry box full of apology gifts that I had neve
r touched. They made me sad to look at them.
“I loved Jaxon. He was my best friend when we were younger,” I finally settle on saying. “Watching his games makes me feel like we’re connected even though we haven’t seen or spoken to each other in so long.”
While Jaxon had probably never considered me his best friend, as he’d always kept careful distance from me, I’d loved spending time with him. He was so funny and charming that I’d been happy living just on the shadow of his friendship. Our parents’ marriage had been more difficult for him then myself, so I’d tried to be as understanding about the distance he sought as I could.
“You only knew each other for a few years,” Rick responded skeptically, and I could tell he was rolling his dark eyes without even looking up at him. “I highly doubt you two were as close as you think you were.”
“Five, almost exactly,” I chuckle, “and that’s quite some time when you’re as young as we were.”
Our parents met when we thirteen, not two weeks after our birthdays. It’d been so funny to find that were born only three days apart. My biological father had vanished while out to get some cigarettes before I turned seven, and Jaxon’s mother had passed away during childbirth. I’d been hopeful that he and I could have bonded over losing our parents, but he was not the type to be open to bonding. Even still we did have things in common, including a love for football though I was not nearly talented enough to be part of the game, even when we were young and the games were coed. Jax, however, had always shown promise. His father tried to talk him into trying out for a quarterback position, but Jax was not the type to live in the limelight. He preferred a supporting role, a protector’s role, and he excelled at it.
The last time I’d seen Jaxon was when he stormed out of our parents’ house on his eighteenth birthday. It was the last time any of us had seen or talked to him. He didn’t show up to graduation which was only a month later.
The least I could do for my stepbrother was watch his games. It kind of felt like we still had a connection then, a connection that I so very much wish we could share again. Maybe, this time, we would actually get to be friends instead of strangers living two bedrooms down from one another.
“Need another beer?” I asked, glancing at his half full one and knowing that Rick never turned down a freshly cracked drink.
He gave an unenthusiastic nod, flicking through the channels with glazed eyes as the arm keeping me trapped against his chest slowly loosened. He’d sit like that for an hour, never settling on any one channel or program in particular, until the time on the football game had completely run its course. He’d never been into football, I’d known that from before he even asked me out, so it didn’t come as a surprise that he didn’t like to watch the games when he came home from a long day of work.
Climbing to my feet, I slid my phone carefully out of my pocket as I walked into the kitchen and leaned against the counter.
Ralph watched me curiously, low whine almost giving me away as I stood still between the small tiled space between our cabinets. When we’d rented the apartment, the one thing I’d been looking forward to having was a new kitchen space or a lager patio where I could paint while looking down at the tiny people walking by on busy sidewalks.
We hadn’t had room in our budget for either, according to Rick, who had a massive study that he’d never once used or bothered to even decorate.
Checking the score of Jaxon’s game, a smile crossed my lips. They were up by two touchdowns. My stepbrother had run one of them almost all the way down the field.
There was no one else like him in the world, I thought admirably. He was one of a kind and his team was lucky to have him. He was such a hard worker, diligently traveling wherever he had to so that his team could score points. I was sure that when his opponents were gazing down the field at him, they wouldn’t have been able to help being intimidated by Jax’s broad, unstoppable shoulders or those piercing blue sky eyes of his.
I scrolled down further, searching for Jax’s name amongst the slew of highlights form the game so far, when I suddenly had to bite my tongue to stop from letting out an excited cry.
“What the hell is wrong with this sandwich, Em?” Rick called from where he sat on the couch, his voice a grumble of disapproval. “This cheese is terrible. It tastes like the fridge. Where’s that beer you said you were getting?”
Jaxon’s next game was in our hometown, the stadium not fifteen minutes away.
“I’ll get it for you right away,” I murmured back, unable to keep my breathless voice from breaking with excitement.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. After so many years, it was finally going to happen.
Jaxon was coming home —and I was going to see him in person, no matter what.
Chapter 2
Jaxon
“Hey, Jax,” Cynthia’s pink glossed lips parted with a trademark smile, curling up into my lap and draping her slender arms around my shoulder. “Getting excited for your big game tomorrow?”
The woman lay her cheek on my shoulder, her fingers stroking against my jawline. I was too distracted to even really feel the light touch, my thoughts somewhere else entirely.
When she prodded me for an answer, I just grunted, eyes locked blankly out the tinted window of the limo.
The purple lights dotting the roof of the vehicle were dimmed to a hazy glow as perky pop music drowned out the soft sounds of the other players in the long vehicle making out with other girls vying to become an NFL player’s wife or girlfriend or anything they could snare with their perfectly manicured fingernails. They were constantly here, lingering like groupies desperate for a single night or a ring on their finger. They weren’t good for much other than company on a long, restless night. I’d never had a decent conversation with any of them that didn’t immediately turn to what I was looking for out of a woman. They never responded well when I told them I wasn’t looking for any type of woman at all. I wasn’t interested in making one of them a wife. I wasn’t interested in spending time with them outside my bed. That was all any of them of were to me.
“You get so broody when you’re thinking so hard,” Cynthia purred.
She slid a crystal glass of whiskey into my hands, a single ice cube clinking against the rim as her lips pressed against my ear, her long dyed red hair tumbling over my shoulder. She’d tried to convince me she was a natural redhead, but even I could tell that the color was from a bottle. I was fairly certain there was nothing about Cynthia that was natural anymore.
“Maybe I can help you relax?” she added with a too high-pitched giggle that made me wince, nuzzling her lips against my cheek.
I turned away, not in the mood to be her plaything. There was a time for that, and that time was on restless nights when my brain would not allow me to sleep.
Outside the rocking limo, the highway streetlamps passed by in a blur, making the glass in my hand look like it was a dancing flame. I observed the whiskey in my hand with more interest than I had ever shown the woman at my side, watching the beads of condensation slip under my fingers. The glass was cool to touch, and I wondered what would happen if it were to slip from my grasp and shatter on the limo floor.
Trees raced by, large and fading green, slowly dying and turning a beautiful shade of gold that would welcome fall and myself into the arms of the ever-nearing city.
I was going back home.
It was hard to believe.
I’d avoided this place for as long as I could, faking injuries or sicknesses and taking any penalty I could just to avoid ever taking a single step into the town again. I hadn’t told anyone that I was from there or that I had family who lived there.
I’d been trying too hard to forget for the last fifteen years to let anyone know about it. There’d be too many questions then, and I wasn’t prepared for that.
Forgetting was easier, though I could only pretend to forget the faces of those I’d run from. I’d worked for months to finish my high school classes early.
I’d gotten early acceptance at several colleges, each far from home, though I’d never so much as mentioned it to my father or my stepmother. I’d played it coy, instead, pretending not to be interested in universities. I told my family I had detention when I stayed late after school to work on projects and exams that would permit me to disappear before graduation. As soon as I was accepted onto one of the football teams out of state, I was on a bus to college. It was football that gave me solace from the torture of my mind, it’d always been like that, the one thing that I could devote myself to so that my mind would be temporarily clear.
Cynthia’s soft hand curled around my chin, tugging my face so that I looked at her.
With a playful smile, she pressed her lips to my forehead and settled down against my side, her long legs draped over my thighs.
She was a nice girl, and she was pretty, no one would argue that. But I didn’t care for Cynthia. Not really. She wasn’t different from any of the others just seeking a wealthy man to tie down. She’d told me plenty of times before that all she really wanted was to be comfortable. I knew what that meant. She wanted someone who would give her a stipend to be wed with them. She wanted two kids, no prenup, and to eventually leave me when I was forced to retire. Then she’d take the kids and my money and she’d have her happily ever after. It was the same story with all the women who clung to the players like flies on rotting meat.
Cynthia didn’t want love. She didn’t want joy. She wanted money, diamonds and luxuries that she wouldn’t be able to have without reeling in one of the players. If I didn’t give her what she wanted eventually, she would find someone else who would. I was replaceable to her, entirely so. That didn’t bother me. I was too ambivalent to care.
Just like she was using to me as a stepping stone to what she wanted, I used her, and all the rest of the girls, to forget about where I’d come from. I used them to forget the secrets that I held trapped inside my chest for so many long years. Those secrets churned inside me, swelling up like a fearful storm or a forceful geyser, threatening to burst open and send my entire soul spewing out for everyone to see and mock and use against me—and they would use it against me. The burdens I bore were dangerous ones. In a single drunken whisper, they would ruin my career, they would topple this foundation that I had worked so hard to build up.
Stepbrother The Hard Trainer: A Stepbrother Romance Book Collection Page 11
