Mom Handed Us One Lease, So I Handed My Stepbrother My Bed novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Masa

The tamalada at my mother's house had gone on for nine hours, and Erwin's masa was hopeless.

Nelda had told him so in front of eleven aunts, and he had laughed until he cried.

She had given me her old gray rebozo to carry home.

Now it was ten at night, and my bedroom door was open, as it always was.

I knelt on my twin bed in nothing at all, with my hands up over my head.

The rebozo ran through my wrists in a loose figure eight, and the ends were knotted to the iron rails of the headboard.

"Tighter?" Jakob said.

"Tighter."

He checked the knot with two fingers and pulled it snug.

The wool was soft and smelled of my mother's kitchen.

I had asked for this.

I had said it plainly in the truck on the drive home, with the rebozo in my lap.

I want to be tied, I had said, and he had missed a gear.

"Lights stay on," I said.

"Lights stay on."

"And the towel."

He held up the clean dish towel, cotton, striped blue, and folded it twice.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure," I said. "I want to feel it and not see it coming."

He laid the towel over my eyes and tied it at the back of my head, gently, under my braid.

The world went dim and warm and striped with light at the edges.

I could hear everything.

I heard the mattress dip as he moved around me.

I heard the small click of the nightstand drawer and the whisper of his shirt coming off.

My skin tightened all over.

"Where are you?" I whispered.

"Right here."

His breath was on my shoulder, and then his lips were.

He kissed the curve of it, slowly, and the line of my neck, and the place behind my ear.

His hands did not touch me.

I strained toward them and the knots held.

"Jakob."

"Patience," he said.

"I don't have any."

"I know," he said, warm. "That's why I'm doing it."

His mouth moved down my spine, one vertebra at a time, to the small of my back, and every inch of it lit.

When his palms finally closed on my ribs I cried out.

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