Chapter 3
Nick
Jesus Christ, what was I thinking?
I guess I wasn’t really.
All my mind could focus on all day was getting shit faced and hopefully forgetting about my dad for a few hours, before I have to face the music tomorrow.
The man still manages to rile me up, even from behind bars.
But for right now I lean back on the armchair in my living room, tipping the rim of my ice cold beer bottle to my lips and gulping hard.
The house is full of people and I mean full .
There’s barely any room to move and that’s why I’ve deployed my usual tactic at parties like this, chose a spot to people watch and stay there until the crowd start to disperse.
Which should be soon, considering the fact it’s almost midnight and I know a lot of these so called ‘athletes’ have early practice tomorrow morning.
Half of them are only at Redwood because they got an easy ride here, a full scholarship or student loan from the bank of Mum and Dad.
I’d love to say I had the same privilege, but my life is lightyears away from a lot of these silver spoon kids.
My mum was alone for most of my childhood.
After Dad was convicted of grievous bodily harm for the second time when I was 13, she pretty much just resigned herself to being a single parent.
Having six of us made being a single mum even trickier and meant some of the fatherhood responsibility automatically fell onto my shoulders as the oldest.
I love my siblings, I really do but I can’t say living the way we did didn’t fuck me up slightly.
Knowing your dad is a criminal from a young age leaves scars in your mind.
It made me kind of cold and untrusting I guess, which I'm not proud of.
I’m ready to forget all of that shit though, for tonight at least.
So when the party finally starts to die down and people start trickling out of the house, I get up from my armchair.
My arse is almost numb from barely moving the whole night.
I like people watching, and by people I mean half naked women swishing their hips in my living room and making fuck me eyes at me.
I should have fucked one of them come to think of it.
Maybe Kylie or whatever the fuck her name was would have been up for a quick fuck upstairs before she left.
But it’s too late for that now, she’s gone and I'm a bit pissed off that I'm not more drunk.
The room is only slightly swaying which was not the goal of tonight, I wanted the room to be flipping upside down and taking me with it.
I follow Ky up the stairs as the last couple of people leave through the front door, letting it fall closed behind them.
“Hey!”
I yell after Ky as him and Molly stumble down the hall to his bedroom.
“Can you two keep the moaning down to a minimum tonight please? Some of us have to get up early.”
Kyle scoffs and Molly flicks me the bird.
“You don’t have to be up early, it’s Sunday.”
“I didn’t say that I was ‘some of us’ did I?”
I smirk and Molly cackles, dragging Kyle into his bedroom and closing the door with a click.
That feisty blonde certainly keeps Kyle on his toes, but she’s good for him.
I'd never say it out loud, but I love to see my friends happy, even if I do rip the piss out of them for it.
As soon as my shirt is peeled off and thrown in a heap on the ground I consider just dropping down onto my bed and letting sleep drown me.
But I know there’s a kitchen that resembles world war three downstairs and it needs sorting out before Sean comes home tomorrow.
He runs a tight ship around here since Callie moved in, giving us all a clip around the ear when we don’t keep things tidy enough.
After about five minutes of contemplation — or more like procrastination — I heave my tired body back down the stairs, running a hand over my bare, inked stomach and tensing the muscles there.
I don’t have much bare skin left between all of the tattoos, but the urge to get more images and words scrawled onto my body never wavers.
I swear I'm addicted to getting drawn on with a needle at this point.
The pain kind of soothes me in a messed up way, I guess it helps me to feel in control.
That’s what tattoos have always been about for me, they were first just a way to rebel against my mum, to show her I could do whatever the hell I wanted and that I was a real man.
I wasn’t of course.
I got my first tattoo the day I turned eighteen and the second the needle hit my skin I was an addict, needing to get more and more of my skin covered in different shades of ink over the next seven years.
A ruffling sound, followed by a mumbled, “Shit,”
hits my ears as I descend the stairs.
There’s probably some drunk college girl that’s been abandoned here by her friends.
Its likely she can hardly walk in a straight line and will need me to call her an Uber.
But instead when I get to the bottom of the stairs, I see Sean’s sister Lois, gathering empty paper cups and padding barefoot across the kitchen in search of a black bin bag.
She mutters another, “Shit,”
when more of the empty cups clatter to the laminate floor, missing the open bin bag she’s now holding.
She’s trying to scrape a slender arm across the island, aiming the rubbish for the open mouth of the black bag in her other hand.
But I get the sense she’s pretty drunk and is struggling to control her aim, which tickles my throat with a laugh that I quickly suppress.
She whips her head around, clearly having heard me plodding down the stairs.
I gesture to the mess on the counter.
“Don’t worry about that, I can clear it up.”
“Oh, it’s ok, I don’t mind.”
She squeaks like a mouse, so quiet and mild but also a little wobbly in her voice and on her feet.
She’s definitely had a drop too much to drink tonight, but her head is clearly still screwed on because she grabs another bin bag and hands it to me as I approach.
“Thanks,”
I say, rounding up the empty glass bottles of various types of alcohol from the kitchen side.
“How are you getting home?”
She clears her throat and says on a nervous whisper, “I was going to stay here if that’s ok, in Sean's room? Ky said it would be fine.”
Why does she seem so tense around me? The air around us is kind of heavy and thick but I have no idea why.
I look at her for a moment, taking in her features for the first time ever.
Her hair is loose and flowing, soft curls floating around her shoulders and curtaining her dimples.
Hazel eyes exactly like her brother’s glance back at me for a beat, a slightly brighter shade than Sean’s though and with something deeper and fiercer lurking beneath their swampy depths.
The dress she wears snakes down her hips, stopping midway down a pair of creamy thighs that I suddenly have the urge to sink my teeth into.
The dress is black and shimmers in the pale light of the living room, the only thing making her face visible being the one lamp that’s been left on in the corner of the room.
I watch her throat bob when she catches my eyes prowling up her body, since when was Sean's little sister so hot? I’ve known Sean for almost two years and yet, I don’t think I’ve ever actually looked at Lois, I mean really looked at her.
She’s pretty tiny, in height and stature which only makes my fingertips tingle even more, thinking about throwing her over my shoulder and doing whatever the hell she’ll let me do to her.
When I come back to earth and blink away that insane last thought from my mind, I see Lois is still clearing away the last bits of rubbish, but she keeps glancing over her shoulder at me.
There’s a wary look in her big eyes, green flecks drag me in and I'm stuck staring at her again.
Man, she must think I'm fucking mental.
“Sorry, I was just erm…lost in thought for a second. Yeah that’s fine if Sean says it is.”
She nods timidly, dumping the last full bag of cups into the bin.
“Well,”
she brushes her hands down her dress.
“I guess I’ll just,”
she points to the stairs, “goodnight.”
Her feet carry her to the bottom of the staircase and for some reason unknown to me or her, I reach out and take her elbow in my hand, stopping her. She jerks away from me instinctively, green orbs wide with uncertainty.
“Sorry,”
I murmur, dropping my hand.
“I was just going to say thanks for helping with the clean up, you didn’t have to.”
Her voice is a little wobble again, but this time it’s not the alcohol, rather the proximity of our faces. I can hear her heart thrumming hard in her chest as she scrambles for words.
“Yeah erm, that’s ok, I don’t mind.”
A wary smile appears on her lips, a glint of something I can’t decipher in her eye.
I dip my chin to look down at her dress again, this time it’s so close I have to stop myself from reaching out and running my finger down it.
“I like the dress, it’s hot, the sparkles are cool.”
I murmur, letting an accidental seductive roughness slip off my tongue. I’m not trying to seduce her…not really and anyway she’s definitely not into me, there’s no way tattooed, six-foot-four hockey guys are her type.
Her face lights up for a moment at my compliment and I can almost hear the cogs turning in her head, like she’s trying to decide whether she should say whatever is on the tip of her tongue.
Her eyes are still a little hazy from the alcohol when they turn slightly hooded and she whispers, “Do you wanna take it off?”
Fuck me, what the hell is happening? Maybe she is into me after all and I totally misread the signals…or maybe she’s just too drunk to think about what she’s doing right now.
I clear my throat, lips parting, head strumming.
“What?”
Her gaze lands on my mouth and her own tongue darts out to wet her perfect pout.
“What are you doing?”
I croak and when her bright, hazel eyes meet mine again a strange sensation rolls over me. It’s like I'm lying in the road, silence like a cloak covering me just as a truck comes along and flattens my body, pushing all the air out of my lungs. My skin is on fire and I take a step, closing her in, her back hitting the wall just below the staircase.
“What are you doing?”
She squeaks, her sweet breath dancing across my parted lips.
I swallow, deciding in that split second exactly what I'm going to do.
“I don’t know.”
I lie and dip my face to her’s before I can change my mind.
Our lips barely brush over each other at first, my senses tingling so much I'm almost numb from the rush of desire.
Her breath hitches and the tiniest moan tumbles off her bowed lips, sending a gush of blood directly between my legs.
That’s when I'm fully fucking done and I crash down onto her like a torpedo, my hands are gripping her waist so tightly her feet almost leave the laminate floor.
She tangles her fingers into my chestnut tresses, grasping at the short hairs that lay against the back of my neck.
The only way I can describe the sensation of our lips colliding repeatedly is animalistic desperation.
I don’t know if I can stop this…but I have to.
The devil on my shoulder is whispering into my ear, “Take her upstairs, Sean doesn’t need to know.”
Meanwhile the angel, although slightly wonky and dishevelled on my other shoulder, still knows the right thing to do and gives me the slap I need to pull away from Lois after two long minutes.
“Shit,”
I take a step back, that’s when it hits me like a fucking bulldozer in the chest.
“Shit!”
I whisper-shout, “What the fuck are we doing? We can’t do that, your Sean's sister, this is, it’s not…”
I groan, sinking my fingers deep into the roots of my hair and tugging with a frustrated huff.
“This can’t happen, I'm sorry I did that.”
Lois’ eyes have turned glassy, her bottom lip trembling with impending tears which I definitely cannot deal with, I have no clue how to handle crying women. She sniffs hard and swipes a smudge of mascara across her dimpled cheek.
“Sorry, it was my fault I should have—”
“No,”
I interrupt, instinctively laying a palm against the crook of her waist and then cursing myself for touching her again.
“It was my fault, let’s just forget about it and go to bed.”
Before she can say anything else, try to convince me that it was her fault or worse, tempt me in again with her slender figure and delicious honey smell.
I duck around her, careful not to even brush my skin against her’s and skate up the stairs as fast as my legs will let me.
“Nick!”
I hear Lois hiss after me as I bolt away from her. Her feet pad behind me up the stairs, but I don’t stop. I push open my bedroom door, ducking inside and sliding the lock across.
Fuck me, what the hell have I started?
A soft fist against the wood, jolts me back to reality again and I suck in a deep breath before opening my bedroom door a crack.
I don’t know why I'm running from her like this isn’t totally my fault in the first place.
I played with fire knowingly, actually I pretty much lit the fire myself and then danced in the flames, wondering why I came out looking like a burnt piece of toast.
This isn’t Lois’ fault and it’s not fair of me to just run from her.
So I poke my head out to see her standing, still barefoot on the landing carpet looking sheepish.
Her gaze doesn’t lift to mine when she speaks.
“I just wanted to say sorry, I didn’t mean for that to happen and Sean absolutely cannot know about it.”
I nod.
“Agreed, let’s just pretend it didn’t happen and go back to how everything was before tonight.”
“Like when you didn’t even know I existed.”
She whispers so quietly I can barely decipher the words, but by the time they crash into me at full force she's already turning to leave.
“Wait, what did you say?”
“Nothing,”
She huffs and steps into Sean's bedroom, pulling the door closed firmly behind her.