3. Just The Highlights, Please
JUST THE HIGHLIGHTS, PLEASE
Trevor
The night is black-glass quiet, the city a lizard’s tongue of blue out the penthouse window, and the only sound in the room is the soft combustion of the fireplace.
I have a thing about silence: I don’t trust it, never have, so I fill it with the clink of crystal and the rasp of a cigar, anything to keep my mind from doing what it does best.
I’m in the study. It’s not a “man cave”—that’s a term for suburban failures and hedge funders with something to prove.
No, this is a chamber for war councils and execution orders, a place where secrets get decided and lives are unmade.
The desk is mahogany, imported, the kind of antique you have to sign a prenup just to put your coffee cup on.
The chair is black leather, ergonomic and ugly, and worth more than most people’s cars.
I keep the lights low—just a single green-glass banker’s lamp and the slab of gold radiating from the hearth.
I lounge backwards. I like the cold against my skin. There’s a tumbler of Armagnac at my elbow, two fingers, no ice, and a Cuban between my teeth. Yes, it’s cliché, but the thing about clichés is that they work. Every inhale is sugar, pepper, the ghost of campfire.
From the bedroom, I can hear the girl snoring.
Cassie. It’s probably not her real name, but it’s the one she answers to.
God knows, she’s likely a farmer’s daughter and actually named Edna or Daisy or the like.
But right now, my date’s flat on her stomach, drooling into a thousand-thread-count sheet.
There’s a black smear of mascara on the pillowcase because heavy lashes are her thing.
But I remain motionless because I feel nothing for my date.
Not affection, not disgust. I know what Cassie is, and she knows what I am, and it works out.
She’ll stay until noon, eat my food, and Uber herself out, and I’ll Venmo her enough for a new dress if she asks.
Sometimes she leaves her panties behind, sometimes a bra, although she often goes without.
I never throw the lingerie away. They accumulate in a glass bowl in my closet, like lurid trophies.
But Cassie’s hopelessly idiotic. She likes to call me Nate after some character from a teen HBO show I’ve never watched called Euphoria.
Evidently, Nate is “Nate Jacobs, a high school quarterback with anger management issues and an Oedipus complex, who’s dating a beauty queen named Cassie.
” At first, I thought it was fucking lame.
Who the hell gets so invested in TV shows that they have to role-play?
But Cassie (the live one) eats it up—hell, she puts it on like armor.
She does her make-up like the fictional Cassie, and the first time we fucked, she asked me to wear a football jersey.
She brought one in a dry cleaning bag, size XL, and made me put it on before she’d let me touch her.
I did it, of course, because she sucked my cock through the mesh, running her tongue over the little holes.
“Go, Blackhawks,” she moaned, as I spurted down her throat.
So it’s not that I’m into her kink. Hell, I have no interest in teen TV shows whatsoever.
But it’s just easier, sometimes, to let the other person decide who you’re supposed to be.
Especially when you’re brutally fucking her in the ass and the pussy whenever you want.
Hell, Cassie can call me any name she wants.
God, Hulk Hogan, or Shrek. Whatever, as long as she lets me fuck her until her teeth chatter.
Of course, there’s always the issue of “appropriateness.” Tonight, for example.
The wedding was a haze of canapés, fake laughter, and speeches no one will remember.
Cassie showed up in a dress that could have started a riot in a convent.
Red, tight as a glove, split down the front to her navel and barely covering her ass.
Her nails matched. Her tits were in full display, the nipples practically popping out.
She giggled when she caught me staring. “You like?” she said, twisting a lock of her hair.
“Or is it too slutty for the family values crowd?”
“My family values are nonexistent,” I told her, and she put my hand on her ass right there in the elevator while giggling.
The wedding was boring, as all weddings are.
I found a corner and drank expensive champagne while the happy couple did their awkward shuffle called a first dance.
Cassie was a good date—she knew when to shut up and when to laugh.
Her talent is that she can make anyone in the room want her, but she only looks at me, like I’m the one giving her life meaning.
I know it’s an act, and that’s what makes it fun.
Not only that, but she wanted to fuck in some random room.
“I need it,” she’d whispered as the happy couple danced.
“My pussy’s so hungry, Nate.” I gave her what she wanted, bent her over and got her so loud I thought the books were going to fall from their shelves.
Afterward, she fixed her lipstick without breaking eye contact and then wiped my come off the back of her thigh with a saucy giggle.
Later, in the car, she asked me if I liked being the villain. I told her I didn’t give a shit about what people thought. That was only partly true. I fucking love being the villain. I love being the story people tell themselves to justify their own bad deeds.
But the truth is, Cassie’s nothing. She’s just the echo after the gunshot. What I can’t stop thinking about is the girl in the pink dress.
Kayleigh.
Kayleigh is Victoria’s daughter, aka my new stepsister, if you’re one of those people who thinks “step” means something.
When our parents married two years ago, the girl was just a mouse in the background, a college student with a forehead full of acne and the confidence of a wet paper bag.
Now, she’s twenty-one, grown into a woman, and there’s not a single part of her that isn’t weaponized.
Soft, blonde, and curvy in a way that would have gotten her burned as a witch in colonial times.
She’s goddamned gorgeous but doesn’t even know it, and tonight she was everywhere.
I saw her before she saw me. She was standing by the open bar, swirling champagne, pretending not to look for anyone.
Dressed in a pink outfit—dark, low at the neck, soft at the shoulders, showing off her big breasts and narrow waist. It fit her so well you knew she’d tried on a dozen before settling on this one.
Her hair was up, but not exactly. I don’t know how to describe it.
There were little blonde wisps falling out everywhere.
She looked like the kind of girl a guy like me would ruin, just because I could.
She looked at me once. Just once. Her eyes found mine, and her lips parted, and I fell. I didn’t smile, but the world dropped away and it was just the two of us for a split second. Kayleigh looked away first.
Cassie noticed. “Who is that?” she asked, not even bothering to lower her voice.
“My sister,” I growled.
The ditz giggled.
“She doesn’t seem like your sister,” Cassie said in a coy tone, “She looks like she wants to climb you like a tree.” I grunted, but I felt the truth in it.
I keep turning it over in my head, the look Kayleigh gave me. It wasn’t attraction, not really. It was hunger, wrapped in lust, dipped in caution. She wanted to avoid me, but she couldn’t. She wanted me to avoid her, but I didn’t want to. Fuck that. I do what I want, and pussy is my thing.
But the night took an expected turn because Kayleigh saw me and Cassie later that night.
I won’t lie. I was bored as fuck at the wedding, and decided to take my date’s offer on a quick fuck just for fun.
So we headed into the hallway and found some random room where I started railing Cassie’s pussy like a man possessed.
But Kayleigh found us. She was in the corridor, thinking herself invisible in the soft, bruised dark.
I replay it like a filmstrip, every detail sharp as a blade: the slight gasp of discovery, the huge blue pools of her eyes, the moment her hand braced against the wall as if she needed to steady herself before watching what she knew she’d find.
To be honest, you can tell a lot about a woman by how she observes.
Kayleigh is the kind who thinks she’s subtle, but her eyes are always two seconds ahead of her body.
I remember exactly how she stood: shoulders tight, pink pout parted just enough to taste the air.
The flush climbed her neck in slow motion, a red tide inching toward her cheekbones.
She watched Cassie first—the cartoon tits, the pornographic hair, the way she braced herself against the wall.
I saw Kayleigh’s pupils get huge, her slim throat ripple as she swallowed.
Fuck, horny little stepsis couldn’t look away.
And then—god—the moment she shifted focus.
The microsecond when she went from looking at the act to looking at me.
Our eyes didn’t meet, not really; I was busy, and she was too caught in the moment, but the line between us vibrated.
She saw the way my hand knotted in Cassie’s hair, the way I stretched her out, made her moan and whimper.
She saw the slick of sweat on my shoulder, the tendons flexing down my back as I fucked with total, brutal efficiency.
Kayleigh saw my cock too. Of course she did. She took in all ten inches of pure, veiny fuckpower, and I saw how her eyes grew wider, the color blooming on her chest.
Kayleigh’s hand was the tell. She thought she was being so covert, fingers curling against her ribs, just below the neckline of that pink dress.
But I caught the movement—a hitch, a tremor—her palm flattening against her breast, and then sliding down, pushing the fabric away.
Yes, my naughty little stepsister bared her tits in the darkness, the white orbs huge and creamy.
Then, she started touching herself, pinching and rubbing her nipples, her eyes glued to us.
Hell, her eyes were glued to my cock, let’s be honest. But Kayleigh’s a dirty little slut because as she watched, she lifted a big breast to her mouth and started sucking on her nipple, moaning deep in her throat.
Fuck! Was I really seeing this? But sure enough, when I fucked Cassie into orgasm, Kayleigh came too.
Her head fell back as she let out a silent scream, her knees quivering as she buckled against the wall.
I roared my release, imagining that the cunt in front of me belonged to my stepsister, but when I opened my eyes, Kayleigh was gone.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Even worse, it wasn’t Kayleigh’s cunt I was buried in.
It was another woman, altogether, like a hard crash into reality. What a fucking downer.
Afterward, my vapid date laughed. “That was fun,” she said, dabbing her ruined mascara with a tissue. “You always fuck like someone’s watching.”
I almost told her the truth. But what’s the point? People like Cassie live in the moment, as bright and disposable as a cigarette.
Kayleigh is different. She’s a collector. She’ll take this night and wrap it up in velvet, keep it next to her heart for the rest of her life. She’ll play it over and over, the way I do, until it’s something new and terrible, a pearl made out of grit and wanting.
I finish the last of the Armagnac and hold the glass to the fire, watching the shapes it makes on the ceiling.
I can hear Cassie stirring now, the creak of the mattress as she stretches out her legs.
I imagine her rolling over, cupping her own breasts, maybe even slipping a hand between her legs as she remembers the way I used her.
I could join her, finish what I started. But I don’t.
Instead, I let the memory run wild. I picture Kayleigh in the bedroom instead, lights out, her hands tracing the same line down her chest. I picture her squeezing her own tit, thumb worrying the nipple, the other hand working down the satin of her tummy, pressing through the damp cotton of her panties.
I picture her biting her lip so she won’t make a sound.
I do the math in my head. My stepsister graduated from Century College last year, which means she’s twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. Not that it matters. I stopped letting numbers dictate my appetites a long time ago.
But there’s a rule about sisters, even the ones who aren’t really sisters. But rules are just lines drawn by people who were too scared to cross them. Frankly, I’ve never met a line I didn’t want to erase.
I set the empty glass down on the desk, the thunk of crystal on wood loud in the hush. I lean back and let the leather creak, the old chair cradling me like a coffin. I close my eyes and see her, Kayleigh, blonde and trembling in the hallway, wanting something she can’t name.
The world is full of men who never go for what they want.
They swallow it down, die with it in their bellies, and get up the next morning to do it again.
Not me. I make things happen. If I want something, I take it.
If it costs me, I pay. The cost has never been too much. I’m a rich man. I can afford it.
The cigar is almost gone. I crush the butt in the ashtray, the ember snuffing out with a final hiss. There’s a heat in my gut that isn’t from the fire or the alcohol. I know it, and I know how to feed it.
Tomorrow, I’ll call Kayleigh. I’ll find an excuse, any excuse. Maybe a random hello. Maybe a message from my dad, or no message whatsoever. I’ll start small, let her think she’s got the upper hand. Let her think she’s safe.
But she’s not safe. Not from me, not from herself.
I grin, slow and arrogant.
Ready or not, Kayleigh.
Let’s see if you taste as good as you look.