by Holly Renee
I moved a hand between us and rolled my thumb over her clit. She cried out, and I slammed my mouth down on top of hers to swallow her cries.
"Shhhh," I whispered against her lips just before she buried her face into my neck.
She bit down on my shoulder as I picked up speed, and I knew that wouldn’t last much longer.
I pounded into her over and over as my thumb moved against her clit and her breathing rushed out against my neck. Her body was so tight in my arms, and I knew that she was feeling everything as much as I was. Every part of us was overwhelming.
"Just let go," I whispered in her ear before laying a gentle kiss on her earlobe and a harsh flick of my thumb on her clit. She bit down on my shoulder as she cried out, and I followed her over the edge, my cum spilling inside of her.
It was at that moment when it hit me that I hadn’t worn a condom. I had been too wrapped up in touching her, in feeling her again, that I hadn’t even thought.
I saw it in her eyes the moment she realized it too.
She pushed against my shoulders, forcing me to step back and away from her. I dropped her back onto her feet and quickly grabbed a towel from a small rack.
"Josie." I reached back out for her, but she was already storming past me.
"Don’t touch me." She jerked away from my hand and headed straight for my locker. She grabbed her backpack off the ground before rushing to close her jacket around her breasts.
She didn’t give me another moment to say anything or try to figure out what the hell to do.
She looked over at me with a look that told me she was completely honest earlier when she said she hated me, and that feeling was even stronger now.
We had just fucked and nothing else. Whether she felt anything else between us was irrelevant.
She stormed around the corner, so eager to get away from me that she didn’t care who was there.
"Lucas," she said his name as a curse passed my lips.
Her back was ramrod straight, and I rushed to my locker and threw on a pair of gym shorts.
"What the fuck are you doing in here?" Lucas’s voice boomed through the empty locker room, and any amount of peace I had just gained from touching her slipped through my fingers.
My pulse thundered through me as I left my locker open and made my way to her.
"I was looking for you." Her voice shook, but there was still so much anger hiding there.
"Who are you with?"
"It doesn’t matter." She didn’t say my name, and I knew that she didn’t want him to know it was me. Pain sliced through my chest, but I couldn’t blame her.
I stopped behind her, just out of his view unless he moved to this side of the locker room. I knew she knew I was there. It was in the way her body tensed, her hands balling to small fists at her sides.
"It does fucking matter." Lucas slammed his locker, and everything inside of me went on alert. If I didn’t fear her becoming even angrier with me, I would have stepped out then and let him know exactly who the fuck she was with. "You know how pissed Dad is already. The last thing he needs is to find out you’re in the boys’ locker room with anyone. You already look like a whore."
Every muscle in my body bunched together, and I couldn’t take another second of listening to him talk to her like that. It didn’t matter that she didn’t want him to know that it was me in here with her, that I had just done things to her body that neither he nor their father would approve of.
But her next words stopped me in my tracks.
"I’m not too sure that he should be worried about me at all after what I have heard about you."
My thundering pulse turned painful as if my heart might pump straight from my chest. Was she really going to confront him about Frankie with me right here?
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"This isn’t the right place to have this discussion." Her eyes glanced in my direction, but she didn’t meet my eyes. But every part of me wanted to hear it. I wanted to know whether Lucas would lie about what he had done or if he was brazen enough to admit it.
Did he and his friends laugh about what they had done and how they had gotten away with it?
"No. Let’s have it." Lucas’s voice sounded closer and filled with rage. "Tell me exactly what you’ve heard about me, Josie."
"Fine." She lifted her chin, but I could see the slight shake of her hands. "Is it true about what you did to Frankie?"
"Which part?" Lucas laughed. "The part that your little boyfriend believes or the truth?"
"Beck isn’t my boyfriend." I hated how hard her voice got as she made sure he knew I wasn’t hers and she sure as hell wasn’t mine. It shouldn’t have bothered me like it did. I knew where the two of us stood, but I couldn’t stand the thought of him thinking she wasn’t mine. "What’s the truth then, Lucas? Because you and Dad have told me nothing."
"The truth is." His locker slammed shut, and she jolted the tiniest bit at the sound. "Frankie Clermont has wanted me for years now. Everyone knows it."
I couldn’t control myself as my fists tightened and my chest heaved. I was going to kill him. I was going to bury him for everything he did and for everything he said.
"So, what?" Josie shifted on her feet. "She had a crush on you, so you thought you could do whatever you wanted?"
"I didn’t do what I wanted. We did what she wanted."
"What?"
"Frankie begged me to touch her. She begged me for what I gave her." I slammed my eyes shut and prayed that I didn’t lose my shit. I wanted nothing more than to move Josie out of my way and slam his head into those lockers. My body vibrated with that need.
"From what I hear, she was drunk. I heard she couldn’t even keep her eyes open when you were touching her."
"You do realize you’re a Vos, right?" Lucas was over being nice. His voice was laced with venom, and I knew that I wouldn’t let this conversation go on much longer. Josie had to live in the same house with him, she was forced to be his family, but I refused to allow this when I could prevent it.
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"All you do is believe what the fuck he says. You’ve already made up your mind about what happened before you even asked me."
"Beck isn’t the one who told me." Her spine straightened, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe past the anger that radiated through me. "Just be honest for once."
"Like you were with Dad?"
I knew how much Lucas looked up to Joseph Vos, but hearing the way he called him dad in front of Josie was almost shocking. There was an air to his voice that felt a lot like he was claiming him as his own. As if Josie had no right to the name.
"Do you know what that was like for him to hear you say that you wanted what Beck did to you? That you made a decision to let Beck touch you that way after Dad strictly forbid you to even be around him?"
I was shocked by his words. Not the part where her dad forbid it, that I expected, but to hear she admitted to wanting me. She admitting that what happened between us had been as much her fault as it was mine.
And I guess it was.
At least until I took that choice away from her and recorded something that had been special to her. It had been to me too, but I had been too foolish to see it. I had been too foolish to let it be perfect exactly the way it was.
"I don’t care what it was like for him." She took a step forward, and everything inside of me begged for me to reach out and stop her. I wanted to pull her back to me and never let her out of my sight. "It was the truth. Beck may have been a complete asshole for posting that video. For making me think we were ever anything more than what we were, but he didn’t force me."
"So, what?" Lucas’s low growl vibrated off the lockers. "You think he’s better than me? He posted a video that made you look like nothing but a whore and you think he’s better than me?"
Josie opened her mouth to answer, but I couldn’t take another second of it. I couldn’t listen to him talking to her like she di
dn’t even matter. Like her feelings were inconsequential.
I stepped around the corner and not even the shock of his face could make me smile. I was ready to murder him. Every part of me burning with my need to make him pay not only for what he did to Frankie but Josie too.
"What the fuck are you doing in here?" His gaze snapped from me back to Josie, and his eyes darkened so quickly that I knew he truly hadn’t thought that she’d been in here with anyone before.
He had believed her when she said she was just looking for him.
He would die to know what I had just been doing to her, that I could still taste her on my tongue.
"I’m getting dressed." I shrugged my shoulders like it was no big deal, but I couldn’t help noticing the way Josie winced at my words.
She may have been as desperate for me as I was for her, but she was still ashamed of what we had just done. She was ashamed and possibly even angry with herself, and I knew that I deserved that.
I deserved it, but it still hurt. It was irrational, but nothing felt rational when I was around her.
Nothing I did or said made any damn sense.
"Why are you here?"
He nodded toward his stepsister before turning his stern eyes back to me. "Can we have some privacy?"
"No." I stepped closer to her until I could feel the heat of her body against mine, and his eyes narrowed at the movement. He didn’t want me anywhere near her, and my feelings toward him were the same.
"Get the fuck away from her." His chest puffed out and there was a dare in his eyes. If he wanted to do this here and now, then we could. I didn’t fear him or the consequences I would face because of him.
The only thing that mattered to me was making sure that Frankie wasn’t hurt by those ramifications and now Josie. I couldn’t stand the thought of something happening to either of them because of a hotheaded decision that I made. I had already been there once, and I knew what that had cost my family. What it had cost Frankie.
"After what you did." Lucas ran his fingers through his hair. "You’re really going to sit here and act like you give a shit about her. We both know you were just using her to get back at me."
He was right. Of course, he was, but it was different now. Everything was different from the way things had begun, but that didn’t stop the hurt from filling Josie’s eyes or the way she took a step out of my reach.
"I’m not staying here for this." Josie’s hands tightened around her backpack straps until her knuckles turned white. "You two can have a whose dick is bigger than whose contest without me here."
She didn’t look back at me as she strode toward the door, and neither Lucas nor I tried to stop her. I wasn’t foolish enough to try to have any sort of conversation with her while he was here.
After what had just happened between us, I wanted to know where her head was. The sex between us was amazing. There was no question about that, but I had felt more. Everything about us felt like more, and I knew that she felt some of that too.
Even if she hated me, she still felt something, and I let the small bloom of hope take over at the idea that maybe she didn’t hate me as much as she thought she did. If she did, she would never let me touch her like she just had. She would never let me devour her and fuck her and need her like I did.
Lucas looked over at me as the door slammed behind her, and I knew that he was ready to kill me. He hated me every bit as much as I hated him.
He was the villain in my story and I in his.
It didn’t matter which one of us was right and which one was wrong. I would never see him as anything other than what he was to me, and he would do the same.
It felt so foreign to remember him as anything other than this, but we had been friends once. We had been so close that I had trusted him.
Fuck, I had really trusted him.
"Don’t go around her again." He backed away from me, and I let him have the parting shot. I didn’t need to prove anything to Lucas. Josie was mine whether he wanted her to be or not. She was mine, and the only person that could stop that was her.
And I would fight to prove to her that I was worth it. Even though I had fucked up beyond repair, I was willing to do whatever it took to convince her otherwise.
I was still the villain in her story too, but I would either fall or rise at her hand alone. She had the power to destroy me if she wanted. She held all the power, and I was completely at her mercy.
Chapter Seven
Josie
I needed to get out of here.
It had been over an hour since I walked out of that locker room, and I had been watching every tick of the clock until that final bell rang.
I wanted to get away from this place. Away from Lucas and Beck and the memory of what I had just done with him. I could still feel him between my legs. I could feel the low ache there and in my lower stomach, and even though I had loved it when it was happening, I regretted every minute of it now.
I regretted that I had let him get to me when I should have been shoving him away.
I felt insane. I knew that Beck wasn’t good for me, I knew exactly what he had done, and I still couldn’t just walk away.
What Cami told me didn’t change anything. Not really.
Not for me and Beck.
I knew his reasoning behind what he did, but that didn’t erase his actions. He still made his choice to fuck with my life, even if he did so out of his anger for Frankie.
Out of his care for her.
I wouldn’t lie and say a part of me hadn’t softened toward him when I heard the truth from Cami’s lips. Even if it had still hurt me.
I pushed past the heavy front doors and out toward the parking lot. There were a ton of students milling about, and I wanted to avoid them all. I had no interest in talking to any of these people.
I had to work tonight, and I just needed to get there and talk to Allie and have her talk me off my ledge.
She was the only one I had to talk to, the only one I truly trusted, and I knew that she wouldn’t judge me for what I had done. She never judged me.
I made my way to the far corner of the parking lot where my car was parked, and I finally felt like I could breathe as the sounds of everyone around me faded with the distance I put between us.
I felt like I had been suffocating under their constant stares and judgment.
I had almost made it to my car, my dad’s car, when I saw Frankie standing next to Beck’s SUV. She was messing with her phone, and I tried to quickly walk by without her noticing me.
I had barely ever spoken to the girl, not really, and I honestly didn’t know what I would say now. Now that I knew the truth.
I felt guilty that I hadn’t known before, that I hadn’t known and she had to face me like I wasn’t Lucas’s stepsister.
She looked up just as I passed his SUV, and her gaze hitting mine caused my steps to falter. I couldn’t just look her in the eyes and walk away like I knew nothing. I couldn’t just let this girl think I was somehow as cruel as my stepbrother.
"Hi." She blinked up at me, and I shifted on my feet in front of her. We were only a few feet from each other, but it felt like we were miles apart. She was Beck’s sister and I was Lucas’s stepsister.
She had never done anything wrong to me nor I to her, but somehow, I still felt like I was her enemy. We were on opposite sides, the line drawn in the sand by the men who surrounded us, and I hated that I felt like I couldn’t cross it.
"Hey." I felt so foolish standing in front of her not knowing what to say, but part of me realized that she probably felt the same way. Her brother hadn’t done to me what my stepbrother had done to her, but in a way he had. They had both taken advantage of our trust, and in doing so, hurt us irrevocably.
Neither one of us spoke for a couple of seconds, then we both try to talk at once. Our rushed words were mumbled over each other’s. We both laughed before I mustered up the courage to say what I needed to say.
"I’m sorry for what Lucas did to yo
u." She looked shocked by my words, and I could see the shame fill her eyes as soon as they passed my lips. She was still wholly affected by what he had done to her. It didn’t matter that it had happened in the past or that Lucas thought she had wanted what he did to her. Every part of me knew that she hadn’t simply by looking at her face.
And my stomach felt like it was in a constant flip as I saw it. That truth staring back at me.
Lucas had taken from her, and it was something I wasn’t sure she would ever get back. Some piece of her armor, her dignity, her heart. And I knew that even though it had felt like it just a moment ago, what had happened to us was nothing alike.
I was pissed at Beck for what he had done, but Lucas had truly hurt this girl. He had taken from Frankie, and I had wondered what she had been like before he had. Had her smile been different? Her laugh?
Had she always looked like there was a shadow clouding her eyes?
"And I’m sorry for what Beck did to you."
"Don’t." I held up my hand and tried to shut down her apology. I couldn’t stand to hear it.
Frankie owed me nothing.
Not an apology. Not her sympathy.
It made my chest ache just hearing it pass her lips.
"You don’t owe me any kind of apology." There is a sadness in her eyes that told me she knew what I meant. What Beck had done to me was wrong, but it wasn’t the same thing.
It wasn’t even comparable.
I could apologize to her for the rest of my life for what Lucas had done, and it wouldn’t be enough.
Nothing would ever be enough to erase what he had done.
"You don’t owe me an apology either. Neither of us can help the fact that our brothers were jackasses to two girls that loved them." Her words struck me in my chest, and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that however she had felt about Lucas was vastly different than how I felt about Beck. She may have loved Lucas, but I couldn’t say the same. I had thought I was falling for Beck, I may have even used that damn L-word before, but now it felt so stupid.
