Stepbrother Bestie (A Stepbrother Romance Novel) (32 page)

You
usually seal the deal before you allow a woman to get that close to your cock.
You know how much of an asshole you are when you get to that point…

I sighed, continuing to wonder why I
didn’t just keep my damn mouth shut. I couldn’t believe that I had given in so
quickly. There was something about that which just didn’t make sense. I was
usually a little smoother, even when I was being an asshole.

I shook my head as I gathered my own
clothes. Once I was dressed, at least partially, I ignored the gross sensation
of the wetness causing my clothes to stick to me as I lay back in the sand. I
stared up at the sky as my slightly buzzed eyes began to ogle in and out at the
spread of the stars. I might not have been hammered, but I could tell now that
I was definitely a little more buzzed than I had originally thought.

I gave no thought to the gross sensation I
was going to endure when I moved to sit up and had nothing but some gross
prickly sand sticking to everywhere on my body.

Usually, I came prepared with a towel and
other precautions, but tonight, I felt as though I had seriously misjudged
everything.

“Most women would kill to be in the
position that bitch was in tonight,” I muttered to myself as I continued to
stare up at the sky.

I tried to replay the events of the night
in my mind, to see where it was I had gone wrong, but realized that there was
nothing wrong. She was fine with it and I was doing great, but then her goddamn
conscious had to kick in and she was gone.

“What the hell were you thinkin’?” I asked
myself as I shook my head back and forth in the sand. If I wasn’t so buzzed, I
would have probably already begun to feel the itch of the sand, seeping into
the smallest crevices of my body while I lay there, trying to think about how
to fix my problem. But right now, I didn’t feel anything but a deep awareness
of anger and a terrible case of blue balls.

You
can’t just let her get the best of you. You need to show her that you’re the
boss. You have owned almost everyone else who has ever caught your eye, Tyler.
Why would you give up now?
Even though I thought about it, I
knew that I couldn’t throw in the towel, just because she didn’t fall into my
arms and allow me to take her to bed the first chance I had. “What kind of man
are you?” I demanded of myself and became renewed with the sense of challenge.

Sure,
tonight was shit, but there is always tomorrow,
I thought to myself and therefore, as I felt my confidence returning, I closed
my eyes and tried to think about how I was going to trick her back into my arms
and in those tight, extremely pretentious pants of hers, but when I did so,
something else happened.

Instead of hatching a brilliant plan, I
was reduced to thinking about our time on the beach, before tonight, when I was
actually able to make Ashley happy.

While I heard the waves crashing in the
distance, I began to think about what it felt like to see her smile and her
glowing, beautiful blue eyes as they both fell upon me. I saw her decadent
blond hair in the sunlight and heard her laugh as I chased her along the beach.

I felt my heart as it began to speed up in
a way that made me happy and I longed to be back there, with her, before I had
tried to make a move on her. I wanted back what I secretly feared I had
completely lost; not by trying to seduce her, but rather by my stupid response
to her rejection.

These sensations made me ridiculously
uncomfortable though and therefore, I just stopped and sat up. My eyes popped
opened and I felt my heart skip a beat.

“Dammit!” I exclaimed, pounding the sand
with my fists before standing up and tearing off down through the sand.

My body was used to this motion, for I ran
quite frequently. I needed to do it, in order to relieve stress and in this
case, keep myself from going absolutely crazy. I needed to figure out what I
was going to do and how I was going to get her back, because I certainly didn’t
want to have to face the failure of not being able to do what was needed to be
done.

Not getting her in bed with me, at least
once and having her come begging back for more, especially after all of the
time that I had spent cultivating this fucked up relationship would have been a
failure. Even if I was the only one who knew about it, it was still a failure
and thus, it was inexcusable.

For as far back as I could remember, I had
to rely on making myself happy, because my mother never gave a shit. So, I was
the pride that was associated with what I did and where I went. I was the only
one who was ever proud of me, for the majority of my life, and so I couldn’t
very well ignore that one constant in my life, could I?

If I had a father, letting myself down
would be like letting him down…but I wasn’t going to go there.

Instead, I was just going to run and see
where my feet took me. I continued until I began to feel a tightness forming in
my chest and a wheeze developing in my throat.

By that time, my muscles burned from the
exercise and my extremities all but begged me to stop.

I just kept going.

However, in the effort of making it back
to the beach house, I did turn around, so that if I did run until I passed out,
I would at least be close to the house when I woke up.

As punishment for my failure, my plan was
to run until I threw up; push myself beyond my limits so that I would be able
to repent for my failure and my weakness.

The only thing that ever made me stronger
was the realization that I not only survived, but went back for more; but this
time, I was going to win.

However, I made it back to the house
without passing out or throwing up and so, I continued down the beach in the
other direction.

At first, the night air had made the sand
feel cool to the touch on my bare feet, but with the heat that coursed through
my body as I struggled to keep the pace, it felt as though the grains were
hundreds of shifting needles under my foot every time I stepped down.

Still, I kept going, unable to stop until
my body gave out. I could no longer allow my brain to be weakened by giving in.
My stamina had to be better than my physical capabilities. If I let one slide,
then the other would inevitably follow. Yet, while they grew together, I had
found that my will to continue always had to outweigh my physical body, else I
would stop at some point, for fear of being unable to go on. Fear is weakness.

Fear is that little corner in the mind
that tells everyone that they can’t go through with their goals even though
nothing has given out yet. It is the inkling to stop, before the win. It is the
mentality of losers and since life had only allowed me to focus on making
myself happy and making my own pride swell, then having a mentality that was any
less than my actual capacity was never going to get me anywhere in life.

So, I continued to run.

I didn’t think very much as I moved,
focusing more on keeping my balance. After all, with this shifting sand, if I
made one wrong turn, I could slide and lose my balance. If I landed the wrong
way, there were countless different injuries I could sustain and then, my
summer would be as good as over, and it had only gotten started.

If I had to give up on my goal because I
couldn’t even keep my head on straight, I didn’t deserve anything at all. I
might as well just go run into the ocean and drown, because that would be all
that I would be good for. It would no longer matter. I would be starting from
square fucking one and I would be an invalid on top of it. That was just
something that I could not allow myself to become, not even temporarily and
therefore, I continued to focus on the world ahead of me.

Finally, I felt my body give out and I
rolled easily onto the ground. I knew that when I got up, I would have to think
about how to get home. I would likely be sore, but that was all right; I
deserved it.

When I realized that I was finally on the
ground, having sweat out a good portion of the alcohol in my system, I knew
that everything was going to be all right. I knew that I had to focus on
getting everything just right and I had to avenge my own failure; that would be
the only way to bring myself peace.

I didn’t know how I was going to do this
yet, but I figured once I woke up, I would be able to figure it out. I was sure
it wouldn’t take too long. After all, she was only a woman and if nothing else,
I was pretty good at judging what it was that women wanted. I didn’t even have
to like them to get them to go down on me and I was completely convinced that this
bitch was no different.

Yet, to my dismay, right before I passed
out, as I looked up at the sky, with those crazy stars seeming to burst right
in front of me, while my blood boiled heatedly and my head thumped with an
increasing ache, I noticed that it wasn’t my vengeance, or even my next move
that I was interested in thinking about.

Rather, in that moment, all I could think
about once again, was how much fun I had with Ashley. I wondered, after I
smoothed things over with her, if it might be possible to do something like
that again sometime soon.

Chapter
15

Ashley

I stayed in my bed well into the next day.
No one had come up to ask if I wanted breakfast and I hadn’t given any
indication that I was still even there.

The
family
had left me completely alone. Screwed up as it was, I
was happy that no one had come looking for me. I was tired of trying to keep
everyone together and if someone had come up and knocked on my door, with the
way I was feeling right now, I would have probably cursed them off, gotten into
my car and driven back to school, where I actually felt like I belonged.

The only reason that I didn’t do that
right now was because I didn’t want to get up. I knew that I couldn’t
concentrate enough to drive and didn’t want to have the responsibility of
anyone’s life being in my hands. I feared what choice I would make.

It wasn’t that I felt suicidal, or that I
hated my life. In short, I just wanted to go back to the life that I had built
for myself; but at the moment, I feared that I would not be able to keep myself
in control if I drove.

Plus, as the alcohol wore off, I became
more aggressive. I would have never passed a sobriety test, probably not even
into the next morning, which was yet another reason that I didn’t want to risk
driving.

I was underage and it was summer. If I was
caught, I would likely only be released to my father. I wouldn’t be able to go
back home, to my school and if that were to happen, he would have to listen. I
would be grounded and he would have a reason to be angry with me.

After
all these years of being a spineless, psychotic freak, I bet that would be just
the time where you would finally decide to stop screwing your wife and be a
good parent,
I thought with disdain.

However, it was still one of the main
reasons that I didn’t get up and leave that night, so I supposed the threat of
being caught had done its job.

As my head began to switch from its
slightly buzzed condition to that of having a major hangover, I groaned and
looked around the room. My face grew callous and my eyes were almost vengeful
as they took in everything that surrounded them.

I
can’t believe I used to like this stupid room,
I thought, but then quickly felt bad about it, considering that the reason I
had not changed it was because it reminded me of my mother, the only pure part
of my past that I had left. My mother was great. She was kind and
understanding. She would have known what to do.

But
she’s dead,
I thought as I whipped my head around and
groaned again as a sharp sting of pain trailed my slightly blurry vision.

For a moment, I felt as though I was going
to throw up, but I was able to quickly ease myself back into a state of calm,
at least enough so that I did not.

Still, to me, this house and now, everyone
in it was like a cruel and harrowing remake of the broken family that I once
belonged to.

What
is wrong with these people?
I thought, but realized rather
quickly that I didn’t even care to know. There really would be no point in
knowing, because after this summer, I was likely going to sever any strands of
family and commitment that I was still tethered to, if there were any left at
all, tell my father that he was going to have to lay in the bed he made, and
that I wanted no part of it.

I no longer cared about him and I had
never cared about my stepmother, but my stepbrother gave me a different feeling
entirely. Whenever I thought about him, I felt my hands clench around my pillow
and squeeze the life out of the middle, as though I was wringing that jacked-up
asshole’s neck.

However, the more I thought about him and
had this reaction, the more devastated I felt. I didn’t want to think this way
about him, mostly because I didn’t want to feel any connection to him.

If
you didn’t like him, you couldn’t possibly hate him,
I thought after getting angry that once again, my hands had flexed and reacted
in such a violent manner.