Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 64929 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64929 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 216(@300wpm)
I kept telling myself it would be worth it when I could get a full-time job in just a few months, but some days it was hard to believe that. The future seemed too bleak and too fucked up to see a rosy future where money wasn’t an issue and I could buy anything we wanted at the grocery store.
I’d thought things couldn’t get harder, but somehow, I’d jinxed myself because it had. I just didn’t know how to fix it. Or fix myself. I hadn’t realized I was that broken. Now I was desperate to keep Owen from finding out, but I wasn’t sure that was possible either.
How was I supposed to hide it?
How was I supposed to fix it?
How was I supposed to handle being attracted to my brother?
I didn’t even know how it happened. One day he was ignoring me as usual, and the next he was talking to me about the things he’d done and was running his fingers through my hair like I mattered to him. The project was partly to blame.
Something had changed for me when he’d walked in and saw me on the floor that day but that couldn’t be the only thing. I’d done my best to apologize for the hurtful things I’d said, but that wouldn’t have made him nicer to me. If anything, that would have made him angrier.
Had he realized how broken I was inside? Was that why he’d been so nice to me? Had he felt sorry for the damaged guy who was drawn to things that were wrong? He said he’d experimented with BDSM, so he wouldn’t have thought the research was weird. It had to be the other part, the part that was warped and twisted.
But the guy I knew, the Owen I’d grown up with, wouldn’t have felt sorry for me like that. It would have been the best ammunition — too good to ignore. So what changed? Something in me, clearly.
The easiest thing to do would be to blame it on the class, but making me look at fetishes online wouldn’t give me one. It wasn’t like some kind of virus or plague that passed from one person to another.
He’d just been so nice. No one had ever made me feel like that. And it wasn’t just the sexual part. It had felt so good to just relax and let go. For those few seconds while he was touching me and feeding me the cookies, there was nothing else to think about and nothing to worry over. He’d been in charge and he’d wanted to feed his good boy… the puppy kneeling at his feet.
And then I’d run. The realization of how it felt and how wrong it was had just come crashing around me, and I’d panicked. I’d thought that after a few days of ignoring each other, things would have gone back to normal, but they hadn’t.
He hadn’t teased me about kneeling. He hadn’t made scornful remarks about how the “research” was going. He hadn’t commented about the need for locks on the doors or even made a joke about me needing to tie a scarf around the door to let him know when I was researching.
It was getting harder to hear his tight, angry voice in my head. It was softer since that night at dinner, warmer and calmer, and not like him at all. I wasn’t sure how to handle it. The gifts only made it more difficult as well.
They’d just been little things, but I couldn’t even remember the last time he’d even wished me a happy birthday, so the extra money for the bills and the leash had been… surprising. The wicked part of my brain that I hadn’t even realized was there kept pushing that it had to mean something.
But it didn’t. He’d never look at me— “No, you’re not going to even think about it.” That was a path I wasn’t going to follow again. I had more willpower than that. I wasn’t going to think about him that way. Not again. Just thinking about what I’d done the other night made my stomach twist.
I hadn’t been able to get the sight of him out of my brain. The thin towel, draped low around his hips, the tattoos on his arm and shoulders, the way he’d looked at me… He hadn’t meant anything by it, but my mind had twisted it into something dirty.
I’d woken up that night, drenched in sweat and I’d—
“No, remembering won’t help.”
I had to push it away, but the guilt and the… desire both kept trying to bring it back to the front of my mind. Two sides to the same coin, and neither would let me forget. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe my penance was going to be knowing there was something out there that I wanted more than anything and I could never have it.