Save Me: a Stepbrother Romance Read online

  “You do have a nice mouth.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I wonder what else you can do with it.”

  My face burned crimson, and I ducked. Yes, he was back to being good old Cal Gatlin, the boy who humiliated me in third grade. The boy who had it out for me for some strange reason.

  Why, God, why did Mom have to marry James? Couldn’t they act like the Baby Boomer hippies they were and decide marriage was just a piece of paper? Or choose to live separately? Or at least sell Cal to the zoo or something.

  “You can quit pretending you don’t want me,” he said, slinking along beside me. “I’ve seen your type before, Pink. Bad boys get you wet.”

  “Don’t talk to me.”

  “Is that why you fuck douchebags like Nate, hm?”

  “I haven’t fucked him,” I blurted.

  Oh God, that was the wrong choice. My heart sank as soon as Cal turned his head, his smirk gleaming in the setting sunlight.

  “So you really are a good girl, Pink? You’re a virgin?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Has nobody popped your cherry yet?”

  “Shut up.”

  “You need help with that?”

  I sped up. He fell into step with me again instantly. I’d never be fast enough evade him, not with my short little legs and his cocky determination. He stuck to me like a leech.

  “That’s all right, Sis. I like the view from behind better, anyway.”

  I whirled on him. “Seriously, Gatlin, can you just leave? I don’t know what you want from me, but you’re not getting it.”

  “Gatlin? We’re not on nickname basis anymore, Pink?”

  “I told you to leave.”

  “I’m walking home. To our home.”

  Ugh. It was our home, and there was nothing I could do about that.

  “You don’t have to be such an ass, Cal. I told you. I don’t get what you want, besides getting a rise out of me.”

  “It’s only fair, baby. You’ve definitely gotten a rise out of me.” The way he drew out the word rise made me shiver.

  He chuckled.

  “I saw that, Pink. I told you: girls like you always want bad boys. It’s in your blood. Anyway, you know exactly what I want.”

  “And what’s that?” I spat.

  “You.”

  “Then you’re sure as hell not getting it.”

  My footsteps sped up. Our house rose ahead of us as Cal babbled on, attempting to provoke a response out of me. I tuned it out, squeezing my eyes shut as I entered the house and peeled off my coat.

  Don’t be his new toy. Don’t encourage him.

  I ignored Mom’s calls from the kitchen to come to dinner, instead heading for my room. Cal trailed after me, his voice rising an octave as he realized that I was about to escape him.

  “Come on, Pink. You’ve got something to say. I can feel it. Just say it.”

  “Leave me alone, Gatlin. I’ve told you everything I need to say.”

  “That’s not true. Remember our conversation yesterday? You haven’t told me how big you like cock.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “Is that why you’re still a virgin? Pretty boy not big enough for you?”

  My patience broke, and I sprinted for the stairs. I couldn’t handle him anymore. I didn’t care if he listened to me at lunch, I didn’t care if he didn’t kill Nate, I didn’t care that for a moment he had seemed human.

  Today was a lesson. I couldn’t trust Cal Gatlin. No matter how “good” he seemed from one moment, he would be an absolute dick the next.

  I hated him, I hated him, I hated him.

  “Fuck off, Cal. I’m sick of you.”

  “Oh, please. You don’t care. You’re too busy being perfect.”

  I gritted my teeth and balled my fists.

  Don’t encourage him, Nat.

  “Natalie Harlow, the perfect little girl,” he sneered. “You know why I like fucking with you?” He leaned against the wall, glaring a hole into me. “Because you’re sick of me. Because you’re ashamed of me.”

  Don’t answer, don’t encourage him, don’t let yourself be his new toy.

  “You are ashamed, aren’t you?” He barked a laugh. “Ashamed to be related to me. I fuck up your perfect little life. You hate it.”

  “I’m not perfect,” I rasped.

  “Please. So fucking perfect. You’re a real fucking Miss Congeniality, aren’t you? So smart, so pretty, so virginal. You’ve never had a problem in your life.”

  “Fuck off, Cal!” I exploded at him. “Just do everyone a favor and fuck off!”

  My mother’s voice shouted at me from the kitchen, and I could hear her light footsteps chasing after me. I flew up the stairs before she could meet me. Tears stung my eyes.

  “Come on, Sis.” His voice was acidic. “Let’s spend some quality time together.”

  “Nate’s right, you know,” I said, whirling on him when I reached the stop of the stairs. “You’re a huge dick.”

  “Bigger than he is? I knew you liked it big. You wouldn’t be able to resist me.”

  “Fuck off, Gatlin,” I choked through the tears that burned my throat. “I don’t know what you want, and I don’t care.”

  “I want to spend time with my little sister, Sis.”

  “Why?” I choked over the sound of Mom’s furious footsteps stomping after us. Memories of the gossip surrounding Cal flooded back, and my lip curled. “So you can beat me to death like you beat your mom?”

  He froze in the hallway.

  “What the fuck did you just say?”

  I whirled on him. “I told you to fuck off!”

  There was a blazing fire in his gaze as it fixed on me. This wasn’t the usual Cal Gatlin against the world glare. This was hatred. Pure, raw hatred. He wanted to burn me to the ground.

  But it evaporated in an instant.

  His gaze followed a tear as it dripped down my cheek. His lips parted, and he took a step back. The glare softened in shock.

  “Are you… are you crying?”

  His voice halted. He was still growling, but there was something else there, a break that revealed… regret? Pain?

  Maybe even sympathy?

  I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I turned again, marching to my room, hoping my feet came down hard enough to crack the hardwood floor.

  Cal didn’t follow. He stood stone still at the foot of the stairs, watching as I hurled my bag into the room. His broad shoulders leaned against the wall, his arms crossed, his irritating diamond stud gleaming in the dim light of the foyer.

  But his eyes had changed. Instead of a hard glare, they had softened.

  “I’m not as fucking perfect as you think,” I snarled.

  I slammed the door, leaving him frozen on the other side.

  At eight, Mom’s fist pounded the door, ordering me to come down and eat something. At nine, James came to bargain me out with the promise of a trip to the movies, as if that was worth seeing Cal again. By ten, they both huffed and decided that I was a worthless drama queen. As they left, Mom mumbled something to James about starving me out eventually.

  They were right.

  At midnight, my growling stomach overtook me with complaints about missing two dinners in a row and a breakfast on top of that. I crept downstairs, grabbed a bag of dry cereal and a banana, and flew back to my room as fast as possible. Surely I had made my getaway unseen, right?

  Of course not. Cal was leaning against my open bedroom door, his arms crossed, one eyebrow raised.

  “Hm,” he said, his voice subdued. “I was starting to think you’re anorexic.”

  “Fuck off, Gatlin,” I groaned.

  My voice was weak. I couldn’t muster up the energy to bark it as an order anymore. He was winning, and he knew it, which must be why that cocky glare was missing.

  “You all right?”

  “As if you care.”

  I sidestepped him and slipped into my room, my body aching with the stress of the
day. My hands pushed against the door to shut it, but Gatlin walked in after me, elbowing it open with his much stronger, tattooed arm.

  Fine. Fuck it. He can stay.

  I was too tired to fight with him, and I didn’t have enough time to waste on him regardless. My aching body collapsed into my desk chair. I began devouring the cereal by the handful, my stomach groaning in relief.

  “Damn, Pink.” Gatlin sat at the edge of my bed, and I winced, sure he would get my flawlessly washed and softened comforter dirty. “You eat like a trucker.”

  “Look, Gatlin—”

  I turned around to tell him off, but the sheer weirdness of seeing him lying in my bed struck me. His body glistened with water from the shower, his black hair slicked back behind his ears as little droplets traveled down his neck. He wore nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants, giving me a view of the tattoos that laced his muscled body and the rock-hard abs that built his stomach. Judging from the embarrassingly prominent bulge, he was also going commando.

  Jesus, the boy was hung like a horse. No wonder he fixated on the word cock.

  “You gonna say something, or just keep staring?”

  I turned around, glaring at my day planner.

  God damn him.

  In a flat voice, I answered: “If you’re going to make me cry again, you can just leave.”

  A few moments of awkward silence.

  He sighed and rubbed his neck. “Look. Natalie.” It was the first time he said my real name. My eyebrows raised. I kept my eyes fixed on my desk, but my ears perked.

  “I… uh, I wanted to… talk about that,” he said. There was something strange about his tone and the way his gaze landed on me, soft and cautious instead of hard and angry. Was he regretting what he had said earlier?

  Cal Gatlin showing remorse for something? This must be a bad dream. It had to be.

  “Well, I don’t. The door is that way.”

  Cal frowned. “I didn’t mean to… uh, hurt you.”

  I could hear his voice halting and wavering, like he was unsure of himself. Cal Gatlin being anything other than a cocky motherfucker? Impossible. But there it was.

  “I wanted to…. Well, I wanted to apologize. I guess you’re right—I don’t know what I was after. But it wasn’t making you cry. It was shitty. I’m sorry.” He winced at the word sorry, like it took every bit of will to say it.

  The word apologize hung in the air.

  I was too in shock to respond.

  “You still alive?” He raised an eyebrow at my frozen form sitting at the desk.

  “Yes.”

  “So are we… uh, are we good?”

  I didn’t answer. He sighed again and rolled his eyes. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he laced his fingers behind his head and laid back on my bed, resting like he was planning on sleeping there. The sight of his form stretched out like a lazy cat did strange things to me.

  Wait, no. Focus, Nat. Like hell he was staying here for a second longer. I cleared my throat.

  “Yes. We’re good.” I gritted my teeth, wincing at the memory of what I had spat at him. The shitty one liner about beating his mom. “And, uh. I’m sorry. For what I said.”

  He shrugged. He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling, his expression bored and vacant. I guess he heard that kind of thing all the time. It didn’t mean much coming from me too.

  “You can leave now,” I said.

  Instead of leaving, he let his eyes wander around my room, his gaze flitting from one end to the other. He inspected the perfectly organized desk, the boy band posters plastered on the ceiling, and the pink floral wallpaper. His gaze crossed to the sticky note reminders and pictures of friends at parties and school that dotted my wall. I stared at his face, trying to figure out why he was still here.

  But my gaze wandered down his body, starting at the diamond stud earring and down the thick muscles of his chest. The tempting happy trail of hair led down his sculpted stomach to a bulge in his sweatpants. I didn’t like it, but my mind kept drifting back to the memory of Cal saying cock.

  I swallowed.

  “You really like pink, don’t you, Pink?” he asked. I tore my gaze away to see him inspecting one of my embroidered pillows.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I hate pink.”

  He paused, cocking an eyebrow. “You colorblind, then?”

  I snorted. Cal? Having a sense of humor outside ‘making my stepsister as embarrassingly wet as possible’?

  I guess miracles do happen.

  “No,” I said, sitting down and opening my day planner. I had five bi-weekly meetings to plan, a bake sale to organize, and college applications to prepare for submission. I didn’t have time for Callum Gatlin and whatever panty raid level bullshit he was planning. He needed to leave, and I needed to quit looking at his abs like that.

  “You gonna explain this shit, then?” He jumped up and stalked toward me. I froze, watching his hand reach over my shoulder. Oh God, he was going to choke the life out of me. (And then Mom would regret marrying James, wouldn’t she?)

  Instead, he picked up a pink stack of stationary and glanced over the lacy doily print with distaste.

  I snatched it from him.

  “Because people like me are supposed to like pink. So I like pink.”

  “I thought you said you hated it.”

  “I do hate it,” I answered.

  He studied me as I worked, sitting on the edge of my desk, the heat of his body oddly inviting. I attempted to focus on reading through the minutes of the last Student Council meeting, but his burning green gaze was too distracting. I swallowed hard and closed my eyes, wishing more than anything my life could go back to like it was before.

  “You got a problem, Sis?”

  “Yeah. You. Is there a reason you’re here, other than to molest me?”

  His lips curled into a frown. “I never laid a finger on you.”

  “You touched my knee.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t know knee-touching counted as molesting.” He paused, and a devilish grin flooded his face. “Why, Sis? You want me to?”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  Wait, I was smiling. Why was I smiling at Cal Gatlin? He was an asshole, and the fact that he had shown a moment of empathy for once in his life didn’t change that.

  I forced my mouth into a hard, thin line.

  “I’m proud of you, Sis. Don’t think I’ve ever heard a chick with a mouth like yours—at least when you’re not around Mommy.” He sat on the edge of my desk, and the warmth of his leg teased my hand. I folded my hands into my lap and swallowed again. “Funny how you drop the good girl act when you’re around me.”

  “Funny how you never drop the asshole act.”

  His mouth twitched. Now he was smiling at me. Cal Gatlin was sitting in my room, on my desk, smiling at me, and it wasn’t because he was trying to murder me. What was going on?

  “I meant it, Sis. I am an asshole, I won’t deny that. But I’m sorry for earlier.”

  “If you’re sorry, then don’t call me Sis.”

  “All right. Natalie.”

  I turned back to my papers, all of them now a vague blur. It was so bizarre, the way he said my name. His lips wrapped around it so easily, and it rolled out as smooth as warm butter. His voice was soft and kind. Soft and kind were the last things I would ever associate with Cal Gatlin.

  And most bizarre of all was the way it became more impossible to keep my eyes off of him the longer he sat next to me. I had never thought about Cal as anything other than my tormentor. So why was my heart fluttering?

  “Why do you hate me?” I asked, keeping my gaze fixed on my hands.

  Cal shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. “I don’t hate you.”

  “Please. You’ve tormented me since I was a kid.”

  “Yeah, well, like I said, I’m an asshole. It doesn’t mean I hate you.”

  “Then why? Why do you keep doing this? Why do you never leave me alone
?”

  He sighed and looked down, keeping his arms crossed. My gaze ran along the faded eagle tattoo that curled around his bicep. The muscles in his arm were mesmerizing, even beneath the haze of my anger at him.