Gant
I slip into the buttery leather seat of the saloon and grip the steering wheel.
This is fine .
I drove the other night with Elle on my lap so I could drive us to my aunt’s estate in a few hours. I just need time to calibrate, for my mind and body to accept that I’m not in a Flying Spur, and I’m not flying sidelong into a lamppost. There’s no freshly leaked sex tape. No betrayal. I’m not running away from my father, who isn’t even in pursuit of me.
Yet.
It’s only a matter of time before Bart makes another appearance, and when he does, I need to feed him new information. And how am I going to get him any new information on my big brother, if I can’t even sit in a fucking car for longer than five minutes?
I strum my pale fingers on the wheel and turn to the passenger seat where I envision Elle’s red hair glowing in the sunlight streaming through the window.
Yes, she’ll be with me. Right by my side.
Phantom Elle smiles, and I try to smile back, but it’s only a wince that quickly presses into a flat line as I hold back the bile rising in my throat.
It’s fine. Everything is fine.
I squeeze my eyes shut and peel them open a second later to see that phantom Elle’s still here, her fingers creeping over mine that are gripping the gear shift for dear life. Slowly, my fingers relax beneath her featherlight touch.
We’re just going down the country lane on a sleepy Sunday afternoon when the sun’s weakening and so is the traffic. Once we exit off the highway, we may pass ten cars. Twelve tops. The likelihood of them crashing into us is ten, maybe twelve.
But not zero , a voice hisses.
I swipe the back of my neck to shoo the voice away and grip it, squeezing it rhythmically in hopes that I’ll return to reality.
Stay in the present.
I’m in the garage. At the penthouse. Parked.
Everything is fine.
But then a ripple in the dash captures my attention. It warps, crumbling like all those letters I’d balled in my palm. My mother’s letters. My mother.
The dashboard caves in toward my chest, and as I turn my head, she turns hers, and her face, her beautiful face, is suddenly covered in a layer of glass and blood that splatters me upon impact.
Hrssh... Hrssh... The death rattle in her chest grows fainter until I can’t hear it at all.
I scramble from the car, falling onto the rough concrete of the garage, before crawling toward the black, reinforced SUV parked beside the coupe. It’s far bigger. Maybe I could breathe inside of it.
Breathe. Breathe, because you still can.
Inhale.
Exhale.
I’m at the penthouse. I’m not leaving the dance studio.
I blink at the ugly fluorescent lights and watch supernova-coloured amoebas burst before my vision when I stare for too long. They still dance even when I squeeze my eyes shut, but now their backdrop is sheer darkness.
Don’t go into the darkness.
We drove two nights ago, the voice drawls.
That was to get Elle.
But we drove.
For Elle.
We’re going to the Parrish estate for Elle, too.
Because she wants answers as much as we do because she’s thinking along the same lines, that maybe we share a brother. I already told her it wouldn’t matter, but something tells me she wants more answers than that. She’s purposely dancing around Jarett’s reappearance. Why? Why isn’t she questioning me about our fathers? She already knows they’re involved in this convoluted web somehow. If she’s holding off on confronting me about Jarett and Bart, it’s for a good reason. But what?
With clammy fingers, I open the SUV’s door and drag myself inside. The roof isn’t brushing the tips of my hair. My knees aren’t practically in my ribs, like when I drove Aria’s tiny sports car. If the door crumbled, I’d still have room to escape…
I? Me?
I’m not driving alone. What about her?
My beautiful Elle’s still beside me. Her eyes shine like my mother’s favourite emeralds, which are still littered beside the fireplace. But then she smiles, and her teeth shatter as her left eye splits open as I’m slammed into the windscreen. Millions of glass fragments shower me, exploding every nerve fibre with agonising pain.
Mother. I can’t call to her because my mouth is overflowing with blood, my lungs seizing.
“ ? ”
A voice is crying out to me.
A voice never cries out.
“?”
She’s calling me, but how can she? She’s dead.
One moment my ass is on the cognac leather seat, the next I’m tumbling onto the cement floor. The cold radiates up my hip bone and spine, but it’s quickly replaced by warmth as Elle’s arms cage me in.
Elle.
A pretty plum pattern, draped over impossibly silky smooth legs, catches my attention first. I tug on Elle’s skirt hem and pull myself tighter into her embrace.
“? Are you okay?”
“You’re already dressed?” I ask, fiddling with the fabric to ground myself.
Had the physiotherapist already left? Hazel was sixty-eight, with supernatural healing techniques. She’d helped me and my mother through several ballet injuries, and now she’s helping Elle twice a day, in between her podiatrist follow-ups and right before her massage therapy. I’d learned the latter, to help with the swelling in the mornings.
“Houndstooth,” I say, rubbing the fabric faster.
“Hounds tooth?” She strokes my hair, giving me space to stall. Such a good little doll. “Is that what it’s called? I knew it wasn’t a chequered print, but that’s how I described it. Fuzzy, offset checkers.”
“It looks good on you.”
“It…it doesn’t look cheap, right? I mean it is, but it doesn’t look it, does it?”
She’d painstakingly agonised over the ‘right’ outfit for hours.
I pull back, just enough to look into her angelic face that’s etched with worry.
“Damn, it’s wrinkled now,” she pushes at my chest, but I put more of my weight on her, and force her legs wider to accommodate me. The motion makes her skirt roll over her thighs, where it pools around her hips.
“ Fuck me ,” I rasp, eyeing the matching, semi-sheer plum panties. It’s a pair I’d picked out before the break. One of the pairs she’d refused to wear because she didn’t think she deserved them.
I slide my fingers over the soft lace, and she grips my wrist, though it’s useless. I’m between her legs, and she can’t shut them.
“When since do you care about your clothes looking cheap?” I ask, stroking her slit and bringing her fingers along for the ride. “You never cared before when you insisted on dressing my pussy in rags.”
She swallows. “I don’t care…normally. It’s just…”
I flick her clit and she grips me tighter.
“Just what?” I ask, rolling her clit beneath my fingers as I take in her expression suspended between pleasure and… “Are you nervous about meeting my family?”
“Of course I am. We need answers,” she says, pushing me away, but I hook my fingers through the gusset and tug.
“I’ll break it,” I say, using my knuckle to continue my ministrations on her clit and she whimpers. “And that’d be a shame because I know you put a lot of effort into colour-coordinating everything. But why?”
“Because they’re your family, and I’m…”
“My girlfriend.” My heart flutters in beat to her quivering cunt as I slide my knuckle up and down her slit.
She doesn’t agree or disagree, which makes me attack her clit with my thumb. Her stomach contracts, her breath hitching. “I need to make a good first impression, and clothing is a major factor,” she pants, a pink blush creeping across her cheeks as she trembles against me.
She cares about my family accepting and liking her; no matter how much she pretends, it’s solely to get answers.
“You look stunning, Elle. Beautiful.”
“What — ” Her breath hitches as I sink my knuckle into her hot hole just a fraction. I promised I wouldn’t break her barriers. Yet. “What if my presence stops Delphine from opening up? It’s a delicate situation you’re approaching with her, and I’m a stranger.”
“So am I.”
“But you’re blood. I’m not anything to them —Mmm ,” she moans as her pussy smacks my fingers with little wet kisses as I stroke her.
I know how we could tie our blood and become a family, too.
I pinch, push, and flick her clit until I’m rewarded with that satisfying little gush of slick. The energy to create it drains my baby as she slumps backwards onto the coupe, her tits rising and falling rapidly, her eyelids drooping, the prettiest shade of pussy pink tinging her cheeks.
“You’re everything to me. If Delphine can’t see that from the moment she lays eyes on us, then my mother was right about her all along.” I’m about to caress her cheek with my sticky fingers, but she catches them with her lips and sucks.
“My makeup,” she says when she releases my pinky before using the back of my hand to wipe at her lips. The sight, the motion, the scent, harden my cock, painfully. “Don’t fuck it up.”
Yet.
“I wasn’t done,” I hiss as she kicks a leg over my head and scrambles to her feet before I can grab her ankle. In a second, she’s around the SUV, the hood between us.
“You are. We need to leave, but I don’t think we’re going in this car, are we?”
Car.
“No secrets, remember?” she says softly. “I know driving terrifies you.”
I eye the steering wheel through the tinted glass.
“I don’t want to be like this,” I say finally. “Trapped in a past loop.”
She says nothing, waiting for me to continue.
“I can’t stop seeing her. I can’t stop feeling the glass in every pore.” I finally look over at her. “Do you know what that’s like?”
Her eyes drop to her feet, and my heart slams into my throat because, of course, she does.
“Elle,” I say, coming around the car. “I’m so fucking sorry. It’s my fault that you know what that’s like. My fault you endured such pain.”
She just stares at me, and her bottom lip trembles as she says, “I didn’t think I’d ever hear you say that simple word again. You never liked hearing it. You always told me to swallow my sorries.”
“Because you never have to apologise to me. You’re my little dove, a streak of white light in my darkness. What would you have to be sorry for?”
She swallows hard as I wrap my arms around her.
“Anything you’ve done, anything you’ll do, I know it’s because I pushed you to it, not because it’s in your nature.”
She snorts, but it’s soft, disbelieving. “You really think I’m that sweet?”
“So sweet, it drips out of your pussy. It’s why you like drinking it so much.” I wave my fingers at her pointedly. “And because you’re so sweet, you need me to be your monster.”
“Monsters come in different forms. I could be a monster, too. One you least expect.”
What’s my little monster planning?
“ I’m terrified .”
“You should be,” she smirks before it falters as she peers around the garage. “We still need a ride. I can drive, but that’s not the only problem, is it? It’s the car itself.”
I can’t bring myself to admit it out loud.
“How do you get around when we’re not at Beaulieu?” she asks. “How did you come every night to visit me at the hospital?”
“I walked.”
“The hospital’s an hour away from here.”
“I still walked.”
There it is again, that lip tremble she tries to hide with a bite.
“The Parrish estate is along the countryside. It’d take us an hour to get there on foot — ”
“I’d never let you walk even if you could,” I cut her off.
Her shoulders deflate, then rise again as she rushes to the corner. “How about this?”
It’s my mother’s old bike. I sat on the handlebars as a kid.
“You wouldn’t mind if we biked there?” I ask slowly.
She looks genuinely perplexed. “Why would I?”
No one at Beaulieu would be caught dead riding a bike through the city. At their million-dollar beach houses for aesthetics, sure. My mother loved it, though, and I did too.
“My feet are still too delicate to ride for that long,” she frowns, peering at the other bikes propped in the corner.
“Sit on the handlebars. I want you in front of me, where I can see you at all times.”
“Do you think I’d jump off to escape?” she snorts. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to without damaging my feet even more.”
“I went nearly a week without seeing or touching you, except for a few stolen moments. Now, I’m not wasting a single chance.”
And again, that little lip tremble.
The bright sunshine as I pedal us out of the garage, past the skyscrapers of the inner city, and onto the country lanes is cathartic. So are Elle’s long red strands tickling my cheek and her melodic giggles as she takes in the wildlife.
This feeling, these gifts of sunshine, nature, and Elle, they’re all… happiness. They’re all free.
But they still come at a cost.