Chapter 6 Kieran #2
Shuddering out a ragged breath, my heart still pumping like crazy in my chest, I slid down onto the floor, squeezing my eyes closed.
My dick was still twitching, I’d come so hard.
But even with my eyes closed, the vision of his body was perfectly clear, like a photograph etched into my brain.
How could I ever look at him again without thinking about this?
Maybe I just needed to start looking into moving out right away.
Maybe waiting for him to go to college wasn’t fast enough.
I knew a solution to my problems wasn’t just going to fall out of the sky.
I was never lucky. I needed to talk to someone, but who would want to listen to something so fucked up? I was definitely on my own.
The sound of him moaning my name played in my head over and over until I thought I might go insane. I’d imagined that part, definitely. Maybe I really was going crazy. There was no way in hell he’d been thinking about me.
Turning the button on my doorknob to the locked position, just in case, I crawled into bed and buried myself in blankets.
The knock on my door was soft and subdued, but it was more startling than a gunshot in my current state of mind.
“Kieran?” Jordy’s muffled voice seeped through the barrier.
The slight rasp in it instantly made me remember the perfect pitch of his moans, and my dick gave an excited twitch.
Hell was too good for me. When my prolonged silence gave him the hint that I wasn’t answering, he knocked again.
“Kieran, can we please talk? I… I know you’re probably mad but I don’t think it’s fair for you to shut me out. ”
Mad? I’d spied on him, jerked off to his naked body without his consent, and he thought I was the one who’d be mad? How in the hell could he possibly think that? I knew that he knew I’d been watching him. I’d been too loud, and then I’d slammed my door right after.
My eyes widened and my breath caught in my throat as an insane idea suddenly occurred to me. Had he set me up for that? Left his door open on purpose to be sure that I would see him?
The way he’d clung to me at the party, looking up at me like I was his fucking knight in shining armor, like he’d wanted me to hitch his thighs up around my waist and fuck him against the wall.
And the way he’d been with me since then, so…
cute and playful and flirty. I’d kept telling myself I was imagining it, that being so close to him all the time was actually starting to make me delusional. But I hadn’t fucking imagined it.
My stepbrother was actually trying to fucking seduce me.
I knew I was fucked up and deserved some kind of divine punishment for the way I felt about him, but this was beyond any form of fair and just karma. Did he think it was funny, torturing me like this? Was this some kind of cruel payback for something I didn’t even know I’d done?
Pulling my blankets over my head, I drowned him out, hoping I would suffocate sometime during the night.
THE NEXT MORNING, I got up and showered before the sun was up.
I knew even Jordy wouldn’t be up that early.
Peering into the mirror as I brushed my teeth, it was obvious that I’d barely slept.
My eyes were ringed with dark circles and I didn’t have time to shave.
Whatever. The people coming in for tattoos weren’t going to care about my looks.
Slipping out of the bathroom as silently as I could, I passed by his open bedroom door. Even though I didn’t want to, I couldn’t help but glance in. He was definitely fast asleep, to my intense relief. On his side, burrowed in layers of blankets, he was facing me.
How the hell was my brain supposed to come to terms with the fact that this angelic looking person who I’d known for so long, who looked up to me and trusted that he was safe with me, was the same person who suddenly seemed to be desperate to get my dick inside him?
It was almost laughable, if it hadn’t been so fucking painful.
I couldn’t see it, but I knew he’d be clutching that stuffed fish he’d slept with for as long as I’d known him.
It was childish, too childish for someone like Jordy, but I happened to know the reason why he was so attached to it.
That was the other problem. We knew each other too well.
I knew too many of his embarrassing little secrets and he knew too many of mine.
I rushed out of the house, loading up into my truck and grabbing breakfast from a fast food place.
Parking in the lot of the tattoo shop, it was still barely light out.
We wouldn’t open for a few more hours. After wolfing down a sandwich and hashbrowns, I tilted the seat of my truck back so I could get into a comfortable laying position.
I’d barely shifted onto my side before my eyes were closed and I was snoring.
“Hey!”
The sound of knuckles rapping against the window next to my head jolted me awake, my elbow laying into the horn and blaring it out for a few seconds while my brain tried to comprehend where I was and what was going on.
“Did you sleep here last night?” Barbie asked me through my rolled up window, giving me an incredulous look.
“No,” I said. “I just got here early.”
“You know, we don’t have an employee of the month program,” she said, cocking an eyebrow. “You don’t get any brownie points for that.”
“Sorry. Just didn’t have anything else to do,” I responded, wrenching open the door and sliding out.
“You sure everything’s alright at home?” She asked, once we’d walked over to the building and she’d unlocked it.
“I’m sure.”
“You on drugs or something?”
“Are you serious?”
“Well, I don’t know what the kids are doing these days,” she sighed, giving me what I think was supposed to be a stern look. “So you’re not doing drugs?”
“No. I told you before, I’m fine.”
“You having omega troubles?”
“I-” I stopped, shaking my head. “I told you I’m not dating anyone, okay?”
“Well, maybe that’s your problem. You need some sugar or something?”
I grimaced, completely horrified by the thought of having that kind of conversation with her. And the fact that she’d used the word sugar hit just a little too close to the truth. “Please stop. I’m begging you.”
“Sooner or later I’m going to figure out what’s going on with you.”
I seriously, seriously doubted it. Mainly because she didn’t even know Jordy existed, or really anything about my home life except that I lived with my mom and stepdad and that they were pretty decent.
“You’re looking for something that isn’t there,” I called to her as I made my way to the back to start setting up early.
I had an appointment in the afternoon with a guy who I’d designed something for.
It was out there, a cartoonish alien rabbit thing with a gun and cowboy hat, but I didn’t ask questions.
Whatever people wanted permanently inked onto their body was their business.
I took a few walk-ins in the morning, and the day pretty much flew by.
It was an odd feeling, being more relaxed and comfortable at work than I was at home.
Anxiety was still nagging at my stomach about if Jordy would say anything about the night before, but I couldn’t go back in time and change it.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what my life had been like before my mom had married Chester and we’d moved in with him and Jordy.
We’d moved around so much that I could never really make friends at school, and I was always behind in class.
I remembered getting a poster with race cars on it when I was five, and crying because I didn’t have a bedroom to hang it up in.
I didn’t want to ruin everything, but I wasn’t a kid anymore.
I was responsible for my own destiny and my own quality of life, not some poor little bastard being dragged around by an abusive alcoholic and a woman too scared to leave him.
By the time my client signed in, I’d researched a bunch of cheaper apartments in the area, determining that I couldn’t reasonably move into any of them without a roommate.
I kind of hated the idea of a roommate, but nothing could be worse than my current living situation.
If I didn’t get out of there soon, I was going to maul my stepbrother like a starving bear fresh out of hibernation.
“Alex?” I asked, waving him back when he hopped up from the seat in the little waiting area up front. “I’m Kieran.”
“Nice to meet you, man,” he said, giving me a quick handshake. He was wearing a backwards cap and the popular expensive sneakers of the moment. I knew that because the ads kept showing up on my social feeds, even though I pretty much never wore sneakers.
Once we were in the back, I got him settled onto his stomach so I could put the stencil on the back of his calf.
While I was doing that, he yapped on and on about how he wasn’t from around here, he’d been travelling for awhile, he’d spontaneously wanted this tattoo and had researched local artists and how he’d really liked my portfolio.
“Thanks,” I answered. I knew it was better to match the energy of the client but I didn’t think I had a shot of matching this guy’s energy no matter what I did.
He had the vibes of someone who was used to performing for an audience.
“I appreciate you coming in,” I added, as I started in with the liner.
After about another hour of nonstop chatter, which included many personal anecdotes, he finally ended one story about some girl who’d been borderline stalking him with, “But that’s the job, you know?”
“What do you do for work?” I asked, squinting a bit as I stretched the skin on his calf tight with my thumb and forefinger to be sure I could draw in the tight details of the little gun.
He chuckled a bit at my question, for some reason. “You don’t know who I am?”
I glanced up at his face again after I’d finished shading a small piece to see if maybe I could recognize him from anywhere. “No, sorry.”
“That’s alright, don’t worry about it.”
The rest of the tattoo went smoothly, even though he still didn’t shut up for ten whole seconds the entire time.
When we were done and he was gazing at the back of his calf in the mirror, praising my talent, my phone buzzed in my pocket.
Reflexively, I pulled it out to check it.
When I saw the name on the screen, my fingers tightened on it so hard I thought the screen might crack.
Can we talk?