Wicked Stepbrother (Stepbrother Obsession #1)

Chapter 1

Kent

The sound of a deadbolt sliding home is a specific kind of finality. It’s the sound of a period at the end of a sentence you didn’t know you were finished speaking.

I stood there, staring at the white-painted wood of the door, rain already soaking through the shoulders of my hoodie. At my feet sat two garbage bags and a cardboard box that was rapidly losing its structural integrity.

“Brittany!” I hammered my fist against the door, ignoring the pain flaring in my wrist. “Open the damn door. This is ridiculous.”

Nothing. No movement behind the peephole. No muffled cursing. Just the silence of a woman who had finally and meticulously decided she was done with my shit.

“I paid for the rent this month!” I shouted, aiming for the neighbors to hear. If I was going down, I was taking her reputation with me. “You can’t just kick me out in the rain, you psycho!”

The lock didn’t budge.

I kicked the bottom of the door, a sharp, violent thud that sent a shockwave up my shin, but it was a hollow victory.

The door remained shut. The rain picked up, cold and biting, distinct to late September in Seattle.

It washed over the driveway, mixing with the oil stains on the concrete and swirling around my boots.

My toe started to throb where it had struck the door.

“Fine!” I yelled, grabbing the neck of the nearest garbage bag. “Keep the damn toaster! I didn’t want it, anyway!”

I hauled what was left of my life toward my truck.

The Silverado was parked at the curb, a massive, brooding beast of a vehicle that was currently the only thing in the world that didn’t hate me.

I tossed the bags into the bed uncovered, because of course I hadn’t put the tarp on.

I didn’t expect my girlfriend to kick me out of my apartment when I got home from work.

I yanked open the door next, shoving the soggy cardboard box into the cab.

I climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door, shutting out the sound of the rain. The silence inside the cab was deafening. It smelled like stale fast food and my gym bag that I’d forgotten to bring in for washing last week.

I gripped the steering wheel, squeezing until the leather creaked, my knuckles turning white.

She’s crazy, I told myself. She’s completely unhinged.

So I missed a dinner with her parents. So I didn’t text her back for six hours because I was at work and then the gym. That wasn’t a crime. It wasn’t grounds for eviction. She’d been looking for a fight for weeks, picking at me like a scab.

You’re emotionally stunted, Kent. You’re hollow. It’s like talking to a wall that sometimes tries to screw me. Why don’t I ever come first in your life? Fuck, why don’t I get to come at all? I’m tired of you taking and never giving back, Kent.

Whatever. I didn’t need her. I didn’t need the nagging, the constant demands for “connection,” whatever the hell that meant.

I was twenty-six years old, made good money in construction management, and I was in the prime of my life.

I didn’t need to be told how to feel by a barista with a liberal arts degree who had a jackhammer in the bedside table that I could never compete with.

I jammed the keys into the ignition, turning the engine over just to get the heater running. I needed a plan.

I pulled my phone out. The screen glowed harsh and bright in the dim cab. As I pulled up my contacts list, I scrolled to Brittany without hesitating. Blocked. Done.

When I got to Mark, I stopped, my thumb hovering. Mark was good for a beer, maybe a couch for a night. But Mark had a wife who looked at me like I was a contagion, and a six-month-old baby that cried if you breathed too loudly. I couldn’t deal with a crying baby tonight. I’d lose my mind.

I kept scrolling.

Jason. No. I owed Jason five hundred bucks from that poker game three months ago, and avoiding him had become a part-time job.

Dad and Stacey.

I stared at the entry. If I called my father and his wife, I’d have to explain why I was homeless on a Tuesday night.

I’d have to listen to my father’s disappointed sigh—the one that sounded like air leaking out of a tire—and my stepmother’s frantic, suffocating questions.

Did you lose your temper, Kent? Did you drink too much?

Why can’t you just settle down? You should be having kids by now, not going to the gym so much.

But I wasn’t desperate enough for the lecture. Not yet.

I scrolled further down, past old flings, past guys I worked with but didn’t actually like, past numbers I didn’t even recognize.

My social circle, I was realizing with a sinking feeling in my gut, was remarkably wide and terrifyingly shallow.

I knew a hundred people, and I couldn’t call a single one of them to say I have nowhere to go.

And then, my thumb stopped.

James.

I stared at the name. It sat there innocuously between Jack (Plumber) and Jerry (Gym).

James. My stepbrother.

We hadn’t spoken in… three years? Four? Not since the funeral for his aunt, and even that had been a grunt and a nod over the buffet table, nothing more.

The last time we’d really interacted, I was twenty.

I’d come home from college to work for the summer and make some cash.

I found him with bleached tips and an earring, looking like a walking stereotype straight out of Queer Eye.

And I’d been ruthless. I’d made his life hell for three months straight.

I’d called him names that would probably get me fired from my job today.

I’d knocked books out of his hands, shoved him into walls when the parents weren’t looking, made sure he knew exactly where he stood in the food chain for being a fag.

He was the sensitive, artistic, soft thing. I was masculine, a sharp edge to his ridiculousness.

But James… James was a doormat.

That was the thing about victims like him.

They were used to taking it. James was “nice.” He was pathologically kind.

He was the type of guy who rescued stray cats and apologized when you bumped into him.

He never stood up for himself, and he never told me no.

And I was almost certain he was still that same scared little boy I remembered.

He wouldn’t turn me away. He didn’t have the spine for it.

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, tasting blood. It was a low move. I knew it was a low move. Calling the kid I used to torment because I’d burned every other bridge in my life? It was pathetic, and I hated being pathetic.

But the rain was hammering against the roof of the truck now, sounding like hail. The windows were fogging up. I had forty-three percent battery and nowhere else to turn. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

“It’s just for a few days,” I muttered to the empty cab. My voice sounded rough and defensive. “Just until I find a new place. Besides, I’m doing him a favor. He’s probably lonely in that apartment. I can’t imagine he has the guts to go out and meet people or make friends. He’s such a loser.”

I hit the call button before I could talk myself out of it.

It rang.

Ring.

Ring.

Ring.

“Hello?”

The voice was hesitant. Soft. It annoyed me instantly.

“James,” I said, pitching my voice low, trying to sound authoritative, like this was a normal Tuesday chat. “It’s Kent.”

A pause. A long, heavy silence where I could practically hear him blinking.

“Kent?” he said, like he was testing the word to see if it was a trap. “Is… is everything okay? Did something happen to Mom?”

“Stacey is fine,” I snapped, then reeled it in. Be nice. You need the couch. “Everyone’s fine. Look, I’m in the city. I’m between places right now. Lease issue.”

A lie. A stupid, obvious lie.

“Oh,” James said.

“I need a place to crash,” I said, cutting to the chase. “Just for a night or two. Maybe a week. Until I get my stuff sorted.”

Another silence. This one was different. It wasn’t confusion like I’d expected. It was hesitation. He was thinking about saying no. I felt a spike of anger in my chest, hot and irrational. Don’t you dare say no to me you little shit.

“I don’t know, Kent,” James said slowly. “My place is… it’s small. And I’m working on a deadline right now, and—”

“I’m not asking for your bedroom or an entire suite at the Ritz, James. I just need a couch. Unless you’re too good for family now?”

I played the family card. It was cheap. It was dirty. It was guaranteed to work.

I heard him sigh, a soft exhale of resignation. “No. I’m not… no. It’s fine. You can stay with me.”

“Good,” I said, putting the truck in gear. “Text me the address. I’m ten minutes away.”

“Wait, Kent, I—”

I hung up before he could finish and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.

The leather squeaked as I gripped the steering wheel again.

My heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs, adrenaline and shame mixing into a toxic cocktail.

Relying on James made me feel gross, but I didn’t have the cash to go anywhere else.

Construction paid well, but I was bad at finances, another thing that Brittany always ragged on me about.

I pulled away from the curb, leaving my now ex-girlfriend and her locked door in the rearview mirror. I drove fast, aggressively cutting off a Prius as I merged onto the main road.

I was going to James’s. Queer little James. The punchline of the family.

I told myself I was just using him for a roof. I told myself I’d be gone in a week. I told myself that being around him wasn’t going to rub off on me.

But as I drove through the slick, dark streets of Seattle, toward the stepbrother I hadn’t seen in years, the knot in my stomach tightened. It wasn’t just dread. It was something else. Something restless and hungry that I didn’t dare look at too closely.

I turned up the radio to drown it out.

The GPS said twelve minutes. I made it in eight.

James’s apartment was in Capitol Hill, which figured.

The neighborhood was all rainbow flags and coffee shops.

I parked on the street, snagging a spot between a Subaru covered in political bumper stickers and a vintage Volkswagen bus that probably hadn’t moved in six months.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but the damage was done.

My clothes stuck to my skin, cold and clammy.

I grabbed the soggy box from the passenger seat and left the garbage bags in the truck bed.

I’d deal with them later, if someone didn’t steal them first. Not that there was anything worth stealing; mostly clothes and some toiletries, and a gaming headset Brittany had apparently deemed unworthy of keeping.

The building was one of those old brick walk-ups, the kind with a buzzer system that probably didn’t work. I checked my phone. James had texted the address and added “3B” with an ellipsis at the end. Even his texts were timid.

The front door was propped open with a rock, and I climbed the stairs two at a time.

The stairwell smelled like curry and cat piss, and someone had taped a passive-aggressive note to the wall about cleaning up after your pets.

The carpet was worn thin in the middle, a faded floral pattern that might have been blue once.

Third floor. 3B was at the end of the hall.

I stood in front of the door, the box growing heavier in my arms. Water dripped from the bottom, leaving dark spots on the hallway carpet. I could hear music coming from inside, something instrumental, piano maybe. Of course James listened to pretentious piano music. God, he was such a sissy.

I knocked. Three solid raps that echoed down the hallway.

The music stopped. Footsteps approached, light and hesitant. There was a pause—he was looking through the peephole, I knew it—and then the sound of locks turning. One. Two. Three locks on a third-floor apartment in a building with a broken front door. Paranoid little shit.

The door opened.

James stood in the doorway, backlit by warm yellow light from inside the apartment.

He looked different. Older, obviously, but different in ways I hadn’t expected.

He’d filled out some, lost the gangly teenage awkwardness.

His hair was cut short and styled well, pushed back from his face.

He wore a gray henley and jeans that showed me he’d been hitting the gym himself for some time.

His eyes—brown, almost amber in the light—were wary.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I replied, shifting the box in my arms. “You gonna let me in, or should I just stand here dripping all over your doorstep?”

He stepped aside without a word, opening the door wider.

I walked past him into the apartment, and the first thing that hit me was how small it was. I didn’t know he lived in a studio with the bed in one corner and a couch in the other. The place was hardly big enough for a rat, much less two full-grown men.

I let out a long sigh, dropping my wet box on the counter. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call my parents after all.