Chapter 4 – Leslie
Iwoke up from a sweaty, confusing dream that left my sheets wet and me with my heart in my throat.
Someone was in my room. Watching me.
I sensed him there, in a dark corner of my room, looming and threatening. And the threat was physical, but in ways I wasn’t ready to accept yet. The dream still clung to me, hot skin against hot skin, sepia tones and the feeling of a very wrong-rightness, not quite ready to release me to consciousness.
“You talk in your sleep,” the main character from my dream remarked in a low, husky voice.
Well, now I was wide awake.
I sat straight up in bed, feeling around wildly for some sort of weapon before remembering that I was anti-violence of all kinds.
Even against sexy evil stepbrothers.
“Why are you in my room, Mason?” I asked.
“What did you do with my skates?” he asked, and his quiet tone belied a terrifying menace. This was a man who would hurt me without regret.
Still, I had promised myself I wouldn’t back down without a fight.
“Donated them to a good cause. You’re welcome,” I said, shrugging a shoulder.
Unfortunately, it made my sleep shirt slip down over my shoulder. It was too dark to see Mason’s eyes, but I could feel the heat of his stare on my bare skin. The contrast between his attention and the slight chill of the AC made goosebumps break out everywhere, and I shivered.
“No thank you,” he spat. “Because not only did you donate all my skates?—”
“—Can’t you just buy new ones?” I countered, knowing differently.
“One of the pairs were my lucky skates.”
Got him.
As scared as I was, it didn’t cancel out my satisfaction.
“Well,” I said, flipping my hair over my shoulders and hiding my bare flesh from his gaze, “I doubt a man like you needs luck.”
He stood and walked a step, then two, toward the bed.
Oh god. Ohgodohgodohgod. My pulse picked up.
As he loomed over me, the dream fought its way back to the surface. He’d crawled on top of me in the dream, held me down, before he?—
“You might be right,” he acknowledged, approaching from the side and leaning down over me, so I could feel the warmth of his breath on my face. “But princess, I hope you know what you’ve done.”
“Nothing worse than mailing my underwear to my dance studio,” I said.
“Oh, Leslie, do you really think this is the worst I can do?” his teeth gleamed in the darkness, and I watched, transfixed, as one of his hands descended, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear.
Had I shivered before? If that had been a shiver, this was a quake—a seismic shift in my whole body, maybe even my soul.
“I’m not fragile, remember?” I said, my voice breathy, shaking.
“No,” he mused, his fingers trailing over my ear. I had to freeze my body to stone to keep from leaning into his touch.
Stepbrother, stepbrother, stepbrother, I chanted to myself silently. Evil, evil, evil.
“This means war, butterfly. I hope you’re ready.”
With that, he released my hair and prowled out the door, closing it quietly behind him.
I collapsed onto the bed, suddenly exhausted.
What had I done?
I got pulledover the next day by cops, who claimed they had a warrant to search my car for drugs—which they found. If it weren’t for Paul’s attorneys—and god, was that an embarrassing phone call—I would’ve spent the night in jail.
When Paul asked how it happened, I told him it was a silly prank from high school friends.
“Some kind of prank,” he remarked, his eyes seeing too much. “Leslie, if there’s anything you want to tell me?—”
But it wasn’t only about my mother’s happiness, not anymore. Tattling on Mason would be the same thing as forfeiting, and I refused to lose this war. Even though my stepbrother was trying to ruin my life.
Instead, I sent an anonymous email to Harvard saying that he had cheated on his AP exams. They didn’t kick him out—they wouldn’t, when Paul had made such an extravagant donation—but it was sure to put him on shaky footing when he started there.
I heard them arguing in Paul’s office, after. I heard the words “absolute disappointment” and “what would your mother think?”
After, Mason slammed out the door, catching me on the top of the stairs.
He shook his head at me, his face grim—and haunted in a way that almost made me regret what I was doing. But I couldn’t stop—and neither could he.
We continued to one up each other throughout the summer, as the tension between us tightened—right under our parents’ noses. I would be lying if I said that trying to bring him down didn’t take over my entire life. See, having a nemesis is like drinking a vat of coffee on a day you’ve had no sleep—you feel shaky and tingly all over, like you can conquer the world, but you also want to cry, and time passes by in a blur while you behave without any sense of reality or consequence.
And sometimes it makes you feel more alive than anything ever has.
I didn’t know this at the time, however. Or if I did, I denied it to myself. All I knew was that at some point, this had to stop.
I was in the kitchen one morning when I expressed this to him.
“We need to call a truce, Mason.”
“Why, butterfly?” he said, smirking. His eyes were turquoise with mockery. “We’re having so much fun.”
I glared. “If we continue this way, someone’s going to get killed. What’s your endgame here, anyway? To get me to leave? There’s only six more weeks left of summer before we both head off to school—I’d love it if I could have some peace.”
He shook his head.
“Not going to happen.”
Why did that fill me with a fizzy, buoyant feeling?
“Then I’m telling Paul everything.”
He glared, then sighed.
“Fine. Truce.”
I stared at him, untrusting.
“You mean that?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He shrugged, smiling. “You gave as good as you got, butterfly. I almost respect you for it.”
My heart slowed, relief—and something that felt disturbingly like disappointment—filling my chest.
“Truce.”
He held out his hand. “Shake on it?”
I put my hand in his, bemused by how his engulfed mine, and beyond freaked out by the tingles his touch sent through me. Was this the first time I’d ever touched him consensually? I tried to push the sense-memory of his fingers stroking my ear out of my mind.
If so, I was never touching him again. This must be what a heart attack felt like.
Unfortunately, he didn’t let my hand go, instead holding it captive and turning it to rub circles on my palm with his thumb.
“Mason, what are you doing?” God, my voice sounded breathy.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, finally releasing me. “But I recommend you stay away from me before things get even more out of hand.”
I should’ve listened to him.