I need to push back, swing harder, fight dirtier.
I’m already fantasizing about ways to ruin his life when, much to my surprise, I hear the gate start to slide open. I don’t have a phone or a watch, but I’m guessing it’s only been a couple of minutes. The asshole was just trying to make me sweat.
Shoving up to my feet, I notice a shadow standing on the other side of the fence.
It’s Parrish.
“I’ve been watching you the whole time,” he says, which should be creepy but comes across in a different way somehow. Observant, really, like he expected less out of me, and I surprised him.
I move toward the gate, and he waits until I’m on the other side before pressing the button to slide it closed. As I follow him up the curving driveway toward the front door, I hear something over my shoulder and turn to look.
It sounded like there were footsteps there in the dark, but now that I’m looking, the moon is full and the darkness has been driven back to the shadows of foliage and the looming rectangles of houses. There’s nothing there, and the sound is gone.
I’m sure I imagined it.
When I squat down in front of my bedroom door, Parrish does the same. He's picking his lock, same as I am.
“Do you need a spare bobby pin perchance?” I whisper back, trying not to notice the nearness of his body. I should rightfully want to kill him for locking me out, but then, he did come back so I suppose that helps. He pauses briefly, his voice softer and quieter than I’ve ever heard it. And not just because we’re both whispering to avoid detection. More than that. Something else.
“No, thank you. This isn’t the first time I’ve done this.”
That’s when I realize it.
The reason we're having such problems, me and my new stepbrother.
I bite my lower lip and try to shove that knowledge back in the dark box of my mind where it belongs, right into the same place I’m keeping my natural attraction to my sister’s boyfriend, and the pain I feel every day I wake up here and not back home with the Banks.
The thing about doing that, about stuffing emotions away where you can’t see them, is that they fester and rot and morph into something so much worse. Monsters, that’s what they become. Fucking monsters.
I pause and exhale, knowing that I’m starting to run out of space in that box.
“Parrish,” I start, reaching up to put the bobby pin in the lock. But my door is no longer locked or … it never was? It swings open slightly, revealing the dark bedroom beyond it.
Huh.
“Yeah?” he asks, his voice strangely receptive. He’s probably still drunk. But still, it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. I decide that I must not have closed the door all the way and push the worry aside.
“Do we have a thing, maybe?” I ask, because I can’t forget the way he looked at me at the party, like something he shouldn’t want but did anyway. Of course, I could’ve just imagined it. It’s also possible that he was simply looking at Lumen. “Is that one of the reasons we hate each other so much?”
He says nothing, but I can hear his clothes rustling as he stands up behind me. I stand up, too, and turn. Almost too quickly, my green and black hair flying out and smacking him across the face. Oddly enough, he doesn’t seem to mind. Instead, his brown eyes are locked on me with an unnerving amount of focus and attention.
My breath quickens, my heart pounds, strange things happen in my lower belly.
I shift uneasily on my feet.
He doesn’t have to answer me: I can feel it.
The same sort of natural attraction I felt toward Maxx, I feel it toward Parrish. I feel it, and he feels it, and we’re as impossible as me and Maxx. More so, really. Because I know that, more than anything, Parrish loves Tess. She’s as much his real mother as she isn’t mine. And yet, she considers us both her children.
Also, I hate him. There’s that, too. Natural chemistry doesn’t make up for the fact that Parrish is an insufferable tool who’s chosen to make my life hell for no other reason than that he feels like it.
“There is nothing between us,” he says, but the way he’s looking at me says he’s a skilled and consummate liar. His eyes rake my body, from my mussy hair to my mismatched shoes, and he sucks in a sharp intake of breath. “I told you, Gamer Girl: I don’t do incest.”
“That kiss might prove otherwise,” I retort, but he pretends not to hear me.
Parrish turns on his heel and disappears into his room. At first, it feels like he might very well slam his door and give us both away. But at the last minute, he slows it and then very carefully pushes it shut. I hear the lock click into place, standing alone in the hallway and panting like I’ve just run a marathon.
