Chapter 1 #4
Fighting off my body's reaction to the riot of emotions coursing through me, I closed my eyes tightly before nodding.
I knew his threat was empty, but after that mind-blowing kiss, I just wanted to go back to my room and lick my wounds.
Phoenix was only eighteen to my sixteen, but he was all man, and much more grown up in every sense of that word.
I had little experience with sex; Nix made me feel like a silly schoolgirl.
He lowered his hand. Did I imagine it, or did he run his nose along my cheek and inhale as he drew his head back?
“What are you doing?” I whispered as his eyes latched onto mine again.
“Don’t you smell your food before you eat it?” Phoenix replied with a sexy smirk. He was toying with me; he had to be. My mouth dropped open and closed like a fish.
That twist to his lips spread into a full-on grin. He was laughing at me.
“Give me a minute and then I’m all yours, baby,” he shouted above my head through the door. Baby? Yuck.
Shooting him the sink eye, I kept my mouth shut.
Phoenix fixed his lips into his signature smirk before bending his knees, lowering himself to my level. “Good girl,” he replied, tapping me on the nose with one finger. His hand then slipped around my neck, his fingers squeezing.
“Ow, that hurts.”
“And?” he replied with an I couldn’t give a shit expression.
I grunted. He wasn’t really hurting me, and he knew it. “Count to ten, and then take your five-foot fuck-all ass back to your room.”
My mouth opened to respond, but no sound came out.
Phoenix then pushed me rudely to the side with one shove and tugged open the door.
The movement pinned me awkwardly against the side of his dresser, and all his perfectly placed shit there rattled. I tried to blank out the large box of condoms.
With a heavy heart, I watched him leave, hating the way he winked at me beforehand.
“My room’s a mess, baby. Micah said we can use his,” I heard him tell the waiting Courtney, the lying douchebag.
Her shrill-as-fuck giggle as they made their way to my other brother’s room was like nails down a chalkboard.
You’re welcome to him, the stubborn side of me stated.
When I heard that they were well out of earshot, I pushed Phoenix’s door closed and slid my back down the surface to sit on the floor. My head was a ramble of thoughts.
Drawing my knees up, I took a deep breath. How drunk was he that he thought I was her? Our builds were nothing alike. And taking her into his brother’s room, how gross was that?
Her reply to his suggestion of using Micha’s room replayed in my head, making my blood boil further.
“Whatever you want, Nixy.”
Fucking Nixy? I didn’t know whether I wanted to yank out Courtney’s hair extensions or kick Phoenix in the nuts.
The girl’s voice grated over my skin.
As I thought about the two of them together and in the room next to mine, a wave of sadness washed through me.
Phoenix and I had our daggers drawn on most days, and I was getting tired of it.
I needed to move the fuck on and accept that it wasn’t meant to be.
We shared a mother figure now and lived in the same house.
Surely, anything happening between us would be wrong on every level.
Plus, he’d let me down once; there was no doubt in my mind that he would do it again. It almost killed me the last time.
Don’t go there. Eventually, everyone will fail you. It’s human nature.
It hadn’t always been toxic, our relationship, if you could call it that. One time, Phoenix looked at me like I truly meant something to him. But it was all lies. As soon as I was out of sight, I was out of mind.
I glanced around Phoenix’s pristine bedroom with a shrewd eye, wondering whether to mess it up.
Out of all my foster brothers, he was the tidiest and hated mess.
If you made the kitchen cluttered after cooking, the boy tore you a new one.
If you put girly shit in the bathroom, he threw it out of the window.
I’d left my full set of Harry Potter books in the den once, and a day later, I found them in the trash.
When I yelled at him for touching my shit, I’d been chewed out for trying to nerd up the place, the den being a boy’s space. Anyways, you get the general idea.
After staring at his huge, perfectly made bed, I decided I couldn’t be bothered to deal with the fallout. All my non-blood-related brothers were temperamental, but Phoenix’s man-tantrums were the worst, especially when you provoked his OCD.
I returned to my room, feeling like an outcast, a square peg trying to squeeze herself into a round hole, yet again.
On the outside, I was a sassy teenager who didn’t take shit from anyone. But on the inside, I was slowly dying. And what made things worse was that Phoenix knew that and yet did nothing about it.
As was the usual cycle, I felt a burst of belonging being close to Phoenix, only to have that feeling snatched away seconds later. His leaving me there whilst he went off with someone else struck a chord in my chest.
It was like he was abandoning me all over again.