My Stepbrother Is My Secret novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Closet

Hidden in Mateo's closet, Cassandra hears Pilar order him to spy on her and hears him say no; she makes him prove it, and at dawn her father is waiting at the fountain.

Mateo set me down so fast my heels hit the tile.

He pointed at the closet.

I went.

The closet was narrow and smelled of starch.

His shirts hung in a row, white and blue and white again, pressed by a man who pressed everything.

I backed in between them and he slid the door almost shut.

A strip of light was left, the width of my finger.

I heard his bedroom door open.

"Mom. It's two in the morning."

"I heard you walking." Pilar came in without being asked. Through the gap I saw her cream silk robe, her bare feet, her perfect dark bob not out of place even now. "You don't sleep either. You're like Ruben."

"What do you want?"

She sat down on the end of his bed.

Exactly where I'd been about to land.

"She refused," Pilar said.

"I was there."

"She'll keep refusing. She's her grandfather's dog." She smoothed her robe over her knees. "But she likes you, mijo. I've seen how she looks at you at dinner."

My heart stopped.

Mateo didn't say anything.

"She trusts you more than she trusts me," Pilar said. "So keep her close. Be her friend at work. Find me what she's hiding."

"What makes you think she's hiding anything?"

"Everyone is hiding something. Hers will be ugly. A girl like that." Pilar's voice was light, almost fond. "Drugs, debts, some man from the job site. I don't care what. Bring me one thing I can show the family."

I pressed my hand over my mouth.

"No," Mateo said.

Just that.

Pilar laughed, a soft little sound.

"No?"

"I'm an engineer, Mom. I'm not your private investigator."

"You're a vice president as of seven hours from now." She stood. "Don't forget who got you that office."

She walked to his nightstand.

On it, beside his glasses and his phone, was my black hair tie.

I'd pulled it out of my hair the second I came in. I always did. He liked my hair down.

Pilar picked it up between two fingers.

"Since when do you wear these?"

"I don't," he said. "Housekeeper must have dropped it."

She turned it over once.

Then she put it back exactly where it had been.

"Go to sleep, mijo," she said, and kissed his cheek, and left.

The door clicked shut.

Neither of us moved for a long time.

Then he slid the closet open and stood there in the dark looking at me between his own shirts.

"Cass."

I stepped out.

"She sat on your bed," I said. "She sat right there and asked you to dig up dirt on me."

"I said no."

"I heard you."

"Then why are you looking at me like that?"

I didn't know how I was looking at him.

My whole body was shaking, and none of it was fear anymore.

"Because I'm the ugly thing," I said. "Some man from the job site. I'm the one thing she could show the family, and you're the man."

He came closer.

"You're not ugly."

"Prove it."

"Prove what?"

"That you're not hers." I put my hand flat on his bare chest, right over his heart. It was going as hard as mine. "Prove it's not her son in this room. Prove it's mine."

He looked at me for a second.

Then he said, very quietly, "Tell me what you want."

"You. Right now. Quiet."

"Yes," he said.

He went down easy, like he'd been waiting for me to push him.

His back hit the sheets where his mother had sat, and I followed him onto the bed without letting him get a word out.

I straddled his hips and yanked my T-shirt over my head and threw it at the closet.

Then I leaned down, braced my hands on his chest, and whispered into his mouth.

"You don't make a sound. Understand?"

He nodded.

Not even that.

He just watched me, his hands coming up to my waist, his thumbs pressing into the skin above my sleep shorts.

"Hands off," I said. "Until I tell you."

He put them back down at his sides.

His chest rose and fell under me.

I could feel him getting hard through the sweatpants, and I didn't move to help him yet.

I just stayed there, on top of him, letting him feel every bit of weight I had.

"You sat at that dinner table with your hand on my thigh," I whispered.

"Under my grandfather's tablecloth. And you didn't say a word."

"You told me not to."

"Now I'm telling you to keep your mouth shut for a different reason."

I sat up and slid back until my ass was on his thighs, and I looked at him.

God, he was pretty like this.

On his back, his dark hair a mess, his jaw dark with stubble.

His eyes were on me like I was the only thing in the room that made sense.

I hooked my fingers into the waistband of his sweatpants and pulled.

He lifted his hips for me.

I pulled them down past his cock, and it sprang up against his stomach, already wet at the tip.

I wrapped my hand around it.

He made a sound through his teeth.

"Quiet," I said.

"Cass."

"Shut up, Mateo."

I stroked him once, slow, and watched his hands fist in the sheets.

Good.

That was exactly what I wanted.

I leaned down and licked the head of his cock, just that, just once.

His whole body went tight under me.

Then I took him into my mouth, the way he liked it that first week in February.

The power had been out and the storm had been shaking the glass.

He'd put his hands in my hair and said my name like a prayer.

I went down on him until he was leaking on my tongue.

Then I stopped.

He made a strangled noise.

"Don't you come," I said. "You don't get to come until I say."

"You're going to kill me."

"That's the idea."

I sat up and shucked my sleep shorts down my legs and kicked them off the bed.

Then I crawled back over him and reached between us and took his cock in my hand again.

I held him at my entrance.

"I want you to watch," I said.

He watched.

I sank down onto him, inch by inch, and it was so much, so full, that I had to close my eyes.

"Look at me," he whispered.

I did.

And there it was, on his face.

The thing he never said out loud.

That this was the only place he wanted to be.

I started to move.

Slow at first, because I wanted to feel every bit of him dragging inside me.

I wanted him to feel how wet I was for him.

"You're mine," I said. "Say it."

"I'm yours."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I'm yours, Cass. I've been yours since the storm."

That broke something in my chest.

I rode him harder.

The bed creaked under us, and I had to slow down.

My father was asleep across the courtyard.

The thought should have stopped me.

It didn't.

Nothing was going to stop me.

I was the ugly thing, and he was the man I was doing it with, and I didn't care.

I leaned forward and put my mouth at his ear.

"Your mother was sitting right here," I whispered. "Asking you to find me out. And the whole time, my hair tie was on your nightstand."

"She held it."

"I know. I saw."

"She put it back."

"Because she's stupid." I bit his earlobe, just hard enough. "And you're a liar now. You lied to her."

"I'd lie to her again."

"Then fuck me like you would."

He made a sound.

Not a word.

A sound.

His hands came up, and this time I didn't stop him.

He grabbed my hips.

"My turn," he said.

He rolled us.

One second I was on top, and the next I was on my back with him over me.

He pulled my legs up around his waist and pushed back inside me in one stroke.

I gasped.

He covered my mouth with his hand, just for a second, just to remind me.

Then he moved it.

"Quiet," he said into my ear. "That was the deal."

"I hate you."

He pulled nearly all the way out.

Held.

"Still hate me?"

"Fuck you."

"That's not hate." He pushed back in, deep and slow. "That's please."

He did it again.

Slow, so slow, the drag of it making my back arch off the mattress, and I was trying so hard not to moan.

He found the angle.

He always found the angle.

My hands flew to his shoulders, and my nails dug in, and I bit down on the meat of his shoulder to keep from screaming.

He made a broken sound against my hair.

"Good girl," he whispered.

I bit harder.

He fucked me like that, slow and deep and relentless, and I was climbing, I was right there, but he wouldn't speed up.

"Mateo."

"Say please."

"Please."

"Please what?"

"You know what."

"I want to hear it." His hips rolled, filthy and precise. "Tell me what you need."

"I need you to fuck me harder."

"And what am I?"

"Mine."

That was what he wanted.

He gave it to me.

Harder, faster, the headboard knocking against the wall.

I grabbed the pillow and shoved it over my own face to muffle myself.

He pulled it off.

"No," he said. "I want to hear you try to be quiet."

"You're a bastard."

"Your bastard."

I laughed.

It came out half a sob, and he caught it with his mouth.

He kissed me while he fucked me, and it was too much.

I came apart.

My pussy clamped down around his cock.

I turned my face into his shoulder and bit down again, and rode it out with him buried deep inside me.

He came a few strokes later, his hips stuttering, his face in my hair, his groan trapped against my skin.

He said my name.

Just my name.

Then he collapsed on top of me.

For a long time, neither of us moved.

I could feel his heart slamming against mine.

His breathing was ragged in my ear.

"Mine," he said, so quiet I almost didn't catch it.

I didn't argue.

I reached past him, over to the nightstand, and picked up the hair tie his mother had held.

I held it up between us.

"Forty-one steps," I said.

"What?"

"From my door to yours. I count every time."

He lifted his head to look at me.

"Why?"

"Because I want to know how long I have to talk myself out of it."

"And you never do."

"No." I looked at the phone on the nightstand. The clock glowed. "I never do."

It said 5:20.

I slid off his bed at 5:21.

"Stay," he said into the pillow.

"Pilar walks at six."

"Stay anyway."

I pulled my T-shirt straight and tied my hair up with the hair tie his mother had held.

"Tomorrow you're my boss," I said.

"Tomorrow I'm your boss," he agreed.

"I'm going to make your life hell, Ibarra."

He smiled into the pillow with his eyes shut.

"I know, Varela."

I eased his door open.

The sky over the east wall was going gray. The bougainvillea was black. The courtyard was empty.

I tried to keep track of the flagstones.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

I was so tired I forgot.

My bare foot came down on the third flagstone past the fountain.

It rocked under me and clicked, loud as a dropped spoon.

"Couldn't sleep either, mija?" my father said.

He was sitting on the edge of the dry fountain in the dark, three feet from me.

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