Daddy Dom's Too Big To Fit (Stepbrother Short Reads #5)

1. Selene

SELENE

"Come to the house, sweetheart. Richard has plenty of room, and you'll love the Hamptons in August. Besides, you need to finally meet your stepbrother."

Silas.

That was all I knew. That was all my mother ever said, her voice going soft and careful around his name, the way people talk about feral cats they've decided to feed.

"He's very private, dear. Very focused. You two will get along famously."

Famous last words.

The Honda's AC died somewhere past Riverhead. I've been breathing through my mouth for forty-three minutes, tasting exhaust and salt. My phone's dead. The radio's stuck between two Adele songs. My sundress is glued to my back, and my thighs peel off the seat with every bump.

I pull up at 3:34 PM—sixteen minutes late thanks to an accident on the LIE.

The house sits back from the road, half-hidden by massive oaks.

Cedar shingles, floor-to-ceiling windows, a wraparound porch with handmade railings.

A black Tesla is parked near the garage, and next to it, a Ford F-250 with Hayes Custom Homes stenciled on the door.

I sit in my car for forty-five seconds, engine ticking as it cools, gripping the steering wheel hard enough to leave crescent marks in my palms. My duffel bag sits in the passenger seat—army green, canvas, frayed at one strap, containing everything I own that matters.

I grab the duffel. I walk to the front door.

I don't knock.

I should turn around. I should find another sublet, sleep in my car, do anything but walk through that door. But I just graduated from NYU with an art history degree and a mountain of debt. The Bushwick studio fell through. My mother's house is the only option.

The door swings open before my fist reaches the wood, and I forget how to breathe.

He fills the frame. Not just fills—occupies it, dominates it, reduces the entire Hamptons afternoon to background noise.

Six-foot-six, maybe more. Broad shoulders that strain the seams of a black t-shirt, arms corded with muscle and ink, dark lines disappearing beneath the fabric at his biceps.

His hair is black, cropped short, military-neat.

His jaw is granite, shadowed with stubble that looks deliberate rather than neglected.

But it's his eyes that stop me—ice-blue, pale as winter sky, cutting through the humidity with a focus that makes me want to check my zipper, my teeth, my entire existence.

He doesn't offer to take my bag.

He stares at me. At my sundress, clinging to my stomach and thighs from the car ride.

At my bare legs, pale against the heat. At the sweat tracking down my throat, pooling in the hollow above my collarbone.

His gaze moves like he's cataloging damage, assessing a problem he's been assigned to solve and doesn't particularly want.

"You're late," he says.

His voice is all gravel and command, low enough that I feel it in my sternum before I process the words. His English is American, but something German lingers underneath—a cadence that makes each syllable land heavy, weighted.

"I—traffic on the LIE," I stammer, hating the sound of my own voice, high and defensive. "There was an accident near exit 70, a tractor-trailer jackknifed, and I tried to?—"

"You're late," he repeats, stepping aside.

But not enough. The doorway is wide enough for two people, but he leaves only a narrow channel, forcing me to brush past him.

My shoulder presses against his chest—hard, unyielding, radiating heat through the thin cotton of his shirt.

My hip grazes his thigh, and I feel the muscle there, coiled and massive beneath denim.

He smells like sawdust, bourbon, and something darker.

Something that makes my mouth dry and my knees uncertain.

I step into the foyer, marble cool under my sandals, and try to remember how to stand like a normal person.

The house is beautiful in a way that feels aggressive—exposed beams that look hand-hewn, industrial lighting fixtures that probably cost more than my car, furniture that appears selected by someone who understood cost-per-square-foot but not comfort.

Everything is hard edges and glass. Everything says money and control and Silas was here.

I notice the details that mark a builder's house: the crown molding mitered with surgical precision, the hardwood floors laid in a herringbone pattern that required custom cutting, the window casings trimmed exactly flush with the drywall.

"Your mother and Dad are in the city," he says, his voice coming from directly behind me. "They'll be back Thursday."

"Oh," I say, stupidly. "I thought?—"

"You thought wrong."

We reach the top of the stairs, and he gestures to a door at the end of the hall. "Your room."

I walk toward it, aware of him following, his boots heavy on the hardwood, each footfall landing with the certainty of a man who knows exactly how much weight he puts on the world.

The room is large, airy, decorated in whites and grays that feel like a boutique hotel suite designed by someone who has never actually slept in a hotel.

My duffel bag looks obscene on the pristine bedspread.

I move to the window, seeking air, and find it stuck open fifteen inches—wide enough to fit a body through, wide enough to let in the humidity and the distant sound of the ocean, but not wide enough to cool the room or let in anything resembling a breeze.

"Sticks," he says, and I turn to find him right behind me.

He reaches past me to try the window, his forearm brushing the side of my breast through my sundress, his chest pressed against my back.

I freeze. He's so close I can feel the heat radiating from him, can smell that sawdust-and-bourbon scent intensifying, can feel his breath stirring the hair near my ear.

His arm is massive, veined, the tattoo on his bicep—a geometric pattern I can't decipher—flexing as he grips the sash.

"I'll fix it tomorrow," he says, his mouth near my ear. But he doesn't move.

His thumb finds my hip, presses once—hard enough to bruise, hard enough to mark, hard enough that I feel the impression of his fingerprint through the cotton of my dress—then withdraws.

The touch lasts less than a second, but I feel it everywhere.

My spine goes liquid. My breath catches.

I stare at the window frame, at the chipped white paint, and try to remember that I'm angry, that I'm tired, that this man is my stepbrother and I just met him ninety seconds ago.

He steps back, hands in his pockets. "Don't touch yourself tonight. The walls are thin." He lets me stew for a second, then smirks. "I'm just saying—I'd know."

He walks away before I can respond, before I can summon the outrage that should be boiling in my chest. The door clicks shut behind him, and I'm alone in the room, my hip still burning from his thumb, my ears ringing with his voice, my body betraying me with a heat that has nothing to do with August.

I sit on the edge of the bed. My hands shake.

I tell myself it's the heat, the drive, the displacement of my entire independent life.

I tell myself he's an asshole—a controlling, domineering, arrogant asshole who thinks he can speak to me like that because he's fourteen years older, because this is his house, because my mother married his father and that makes him somehow entitled to comment on my body, my behavior, my private habits.

I tell myself these things for three hours, while I unpack my duffel bag into the empty dresser drawers—white oak, dovetail joints, probably hand-built by him—while I shower in the en-suite bathroom with the rainfall showerhead that feels like standing in warm monsoon, while I wrap myself in a towel and stare at my reflection in the fogged mirror.

My face is flushed. My nipples are hard against the rough cotton.

Between my legs, I'm throbbing with a pulse that feels like it belongs to someone else, someone hungrier, someone who doesn't care about boundaries or propriety or the fact that my mother believes we're all going to be "one happy family. "

I hate him. I hate him so much I can't think straight.

At 7 PM, I venture downstairs, starving, and find the kitchen empty.

There's a note on the counter in my mother's looping handwriting: Dinner in the fridge, heat at 350, back Thursday!

Love you! I eat cold pasta salad standing at the island, staring at the backyard through floor-to-ceiling windows, watching the light fade from gold to bruise-purple.

The house is silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant percussion of the ocean.

I don't see Silas. I tell myself I'm relieved.

I lie in bed at 11:17 PM, the sheets cool and foreign, the house creaking around me in rhythms I don't understand.

The walls are thin. I remember his voice saying it, the command disguised as warning, the implication that he would be listening, that my privacy here is conditional, that my body is somehow his business.

I think of his thumb on my hip, the pressure of it, the ownership in that single touch.

I think of his forearm against my breast, the way he didn't apologize, didn't acknowledge, just took the touch and moved on like it was his right.

I think of his mouth near my ear, the vibration of his voice against my skin, the German cadence that made every word sound like law.

My hand moves under the sheet before I decide to let it.

I'm furious. Humiliated. My body shouldn't respond to a man who spoke to me like I'm property, who looked at me like I'm a problem to be managed, who issued commands about my own private pleasure like he's issuing building permits.

But my fingers find myself wet—shamefully, embarrassingly wet, slick enough that I gasp into the darkness, pressing my face into the pillow to muffle the sound.