5
SEBASTIAN
There is nothing like a shower after a game. The sweat and dirt wash down the drain, and my sore muscles loosen perfectly under the stream of steaming hot water. My brothers always complain that I take too long, but they don't understand that this is part of my ritual. Some people have pregame rituals. The things they do to hold luck on their side. I have a post-game ritual that keeps my head in the right place. I use the time to think through what went well and what I'd change if I could fix my mistakes. By the time I get into the locker room, dressed only in a small white towel, my teammates have finished busting each other's balls. I can avoid hearing the negativity tossed around when everyone is pumped with testosterone.
As I stroll out of the showers and into the locker room, I catch sight of Colby and Micky, who are dressed, and sitting next to their gym bags, their dark hair still slick with water. Colby narrows his eyes at me. He hates waiting, but he's done with complaining because he knows it won't make a damned bit of difference.
"Hey, douchebags," I say, grabbing my bag from my locker and searching out my antiperspirant. "What's the rush!" Nothing like tossing out a taunt to wind them up.
"Don't start," Micky says, holding his hands out as though they can prevent me from prodding Colby and Colby from reacting. Micky has always been the buffer between us. The middle-born child. Is that a coincidence? It must be. There are only three minutes between each of us. Three minutes doesn't make Colby the serious, mature one or me the lighthearted joker. It doesn't make Micky the triplet who empathizes with everyone so much that it burdens his soul. I guess when the universe was handing out attributes, they handed out ours in a way that is just ridiculously cliched.
"Some of us have things to do," Colby grumbles.
"Oh yeah. And what's such an emergency?"
"He's got an assignment to prepare for," Micky says with a glint in his eye.
"Don't start," Colby says. "I always have assignments to prepare for."
"Yeah, but this one's with Ellie."
I lift my brows, scanning my brother's expression for any sign of how he's feeling. As usual, he's giving absolutely nothing away. But I don't need to see his reaction to know what he's thinking. Since our seven minutes with Ellie in the closet, Colby's been acting like a bear with a sore head, and he's even worse than usual. None of us knew it was going to be her, but we all wanted it to be.
Colby won't admit that to me, though. He holds his cards close to his chest, but I catch the lingering looks he gives her when she's fixing breakfast in her sleep shorts and crop top with messy hair and sleepy eyes. I catch the way he seems extra riled by her over the smallest things. He believes that by maintaining his frosty, aggravated persona, no one will guess he's been lusting over his stepsister for years, but he forgets I know him and Micky better than anyone.
Micky doesn't even try to disguise his lingering looks. He stares at Ellie's ass like it's the ark of the covenant dropped from heaven in front of his very eyes.
And me. Well, I do what I always do. I use my humor to cover the fact that Ellie is my dream girl made reality.
"Is she still mad as hell?" I ask.
"Yep," Colby grits his teeth, which makes his jaw tick.
"You talking about that fine stepsister of yours?" Elias asks, looking up from packing his bag.
"Easy," Colby warns. "Ellie's family."
"Interesting family you've got." Elias grins broadly despite Colby's withering stare and Micky's slightly panicked expression.
"You going somewhere with this?" I ask.
"I heard you went somewhere with her. Into the closet."
"You never heard of minding your own fucking business." Colby lumbers to his feet, making the most of his imposing size to draw a line under the conversation, but Elias is also huge and remains unphased.
"I'm just telling you what I heard."
"Yeah. Well, maybe people need to keep their mouths shut about things that don't concern them," Colby grunts, looking around the locker room to make it clear he means everyone there.
Elias shrugs. "When it was Blake's love life getting dissected last week, you were all over it."
"Blake was all over it," Micky says quickly. "None of us were getting involved in any business that he wasn't happy sharing."
"That's the thing, though, isn't it? You guys seem very happy to share," Elias winks, and I take a step forward, knowing Colby's temper is frayed to the point of being held together by a single thread. Coach would be pissed if there were any physical altercations in the locker room, and I need shit from Coach like I need a bullet in the brain.
"Okay, Elias," I say. "You've had your fun. Time to let it go."
He shakes his head, letting out a bubble of amused laughter. "I don't know why you guys are so fucking defensive about it. She's not your real sister. Half the porn on the internet is about stepsisters hooking up with their stepbrothers.
"Ellie is family," Micky says. "Colby's just being protective."
"If you think of her as family, then what happened at Dornan's party was fucked up," he says.
A voice clears behind me, and I turn to find Dornan with his bag held high on his shoulder. I wouldn't want to be the one talking shit about his best friend right now. "You better not be talking about my friend, Elias. You know how I get when people talk shit about the people I care about."
Elias grabs his bag from the bench and shrugs one huge shoulder. "I'm not talking shit about anyone. Just trying to get to the truth behind the gossip."
"Yeah, well, you tell whoever's gossiping about Ellie that they can come to talk to me," Dornan says.
Colby steps forward. "Better still, you tell them to keep her name off their lips. And anyway, who the fuck are you? Mother-fucking-hen? Why the fuck are you interested in gossip? Don't you have more important things to think about, like football, assignments, and your own fucking sex life? Or maybe that's the problem. Maybe if you had somewhere to put your own cock, you wouldn't be worried so much about mine."
A look passes between Colby and Dornan, and Elias shrugs. "I'll see you guys around."
He saunters off as though he doesn't give two shits about what any of us have said. Dornan drops his bag to the floor and rubs his hand through his wet blond hair. "I feel responsible," he says. "It was my stupid fucking idea to have that party. I dragged Ellie into playing the game. Now people are talking about her behind her back. This kind of gossip can stay with a person."
"If Elias has a head on his shoulders, he'll listen to the warning," Micky says.
"It's good to know that you're not adding fuel to the fire," Dornan says.
We all glance at each other, and I know my brothers are feeling aggravated at the insinuation. "That's not who we are, despite what Ellie might tell you." Colby inhales a deep breath and lets it out through his nostrils like a bull on the brink of charging. I rub my tattooed arm, feeling the chill but not wanting to interrupt the current flow of conversation by getting my dick out and pulling on my underwear.
"Again, good to know." Dornan glances around at the rest of our teammates, sending a warning to anyone else who might not be so protective of his friend.
I'll be honest in saying that we've talked shit about other girls in the past. Some cheerleaders put out so easily they might as well not wear panties, but Ellie's different. She didn't mean to end up the subject of speculation. She certainly didn't mean to end up with her sweet, tight nipple in my mouth.
Fuck. Just thinking about that night has my cock stirring. The sounds she made as Colby held her and Micky licked her have kept me awake at night since. I've tugged myself to orgasm more than once with just those breathy sounds buzzing around my head. The pictures I've had to conjure from my own imagination. It was too dark in the closet to see anything, and that's a fucking massive regret for me. If that's the only time I'm going to get my lips and hands on Ellie's breasts, I'd at least have liked to see them.
A few minutes later, as we're walking to my car, Colby makes a growling, angry sound in his throat. "That guy has a chip on his shoulder."
"Elias? Maybe. Or he could be fishing around for something to talk about. Not everyone has such interesting lives," I say.
"Interesting isn't a word I'd use."
"You don't think the situation with Ellie is interesting?"
"It's a powder keg ready to explode," Colby says. "She's mad as hell."
"Mad and horny," I laugh. "Maybe a little freaked out. I'll admit that when Dornan shouted her name through the door, and my mouth was in a very controversial place, my heart pounded a little harder than usual."
"Your mouth was in a controversial place?" Micky says, rolling his eyes. “Yours was practically PG-13 compared to mine."
"She tasted good?" I ask, my face twisting into a devilish grin.
"Don't answer that," Colby says.
"Why? Are you telling me you don't want to know?"
"I'm telling you that the more this is talked about, the deeper the shit gets for all of us."
"I'd say we're up to our tongues in it already," I laugh. "Not sure it could get any worse."
"We could admit that we like her," Micky says, taking a big bite out of an apple and chewing it like a horse. "I mean, we're brothers. More than that. We were supposed to be one person, for fuck's sake. And we're all still pretending like denial is a fucking safe house. We're as bad as Ellie."
I gawp at Micky, trying to produce a funny retort but finding absolutely no inspiration. Nothing. Nada. To be honest, my absence of inspiration freaks me out more than his admittance. Because there have been times when I've wondered if it was just me who was lusting over Ellie, and I've been reading more into my brothers' looks and body language than there actually is.
"Close your mouth," Micky says, winking as he takes another loud crunch of his fruit. "I know you do," he says. "Although, out of all of us, you're the least obvious about it. Colby, on the other hand…"
"What about me? You think you know what I'm feeling? You think you have an insight into my mind because we share the same DNA?"
"I have an insight into your mind because you wear your heart on your sleeve, Colby," Micky says. "You might not want to accept it with your gruff, angry-bear persona, but you do."
I stare at both my brothers with utter fascination. The vein on Colby's temple throbs through the thin skin, and he clenches his jaw so tightly I worry he will fracture his molars. Micky just seems smug, as though he's relishing this new role of getting us to admit the shit we've kept private until now.
"Doesn't matter what we want, though, does it?" Colby says eventually. “She's our sister, and we just have to find a way of putting everything that happened in that closet out of our minds."
"But she isn't, is she?" Micky says gently. "She's just a girl who's the daughter of someone our dad married. We're not blood. We don't share even a sprinkling of DNA. So apart from it being a little weird that all three of us have the hots for the same girl and the fact she lives under the same roof, there's nothing really stopping us, is there?"
"You're forgetting one very important thing," Colby says. "It doesn't matter because Ellie sure as hell doesn't feel the same. And now she's at the center of a huge scandal, there is no way she'll even consider doing anything that'll add fuel to the fire."