Taken While I Slept by My Stepbrother and His Friends novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Pool House

I didn't touch the deed.

I looked at my own signature until the letters stopped meaning anything.

"I never signed this," I said.

"You did, sweetheart. July. You were so tired that week." Dwight tucked it back into the folder.

"Your mother has the right to live here her whole life. Somebody has to make sure she can afford to."

My mom wouldn't look at me.

She was pushing potato salad around her plate with her fork, smiling at nothing.

Gage picked up the hundred-dollar bill, folded it once, and put it in his father's wine glass.

Then he walked across the deck to the pool house and shut the door.

At ten, Dwight brought my tea to my room.

I took it with a yawn and a thank-you.

When his footsteps were gone, I poured it into the ficus, which was looking worse every day.

At ten forty I went out my window in a sundress and bare feet.

The pool lights were on, glowing blue under the water.

I didn't look at it.

I'd spent six years not looking at it.

The pool house door was unlocked.

Gage was on his knees on the floor between two cardboard boxes, packing his fire department gear.

He didn't stand up when I came in.

He just stopped, holding a folded navy T-shirt in both hands.

"You shouldn't be out here," he said. "He walks the yard at night sometimes."

"Torin's watching the yard."

"You shouldn't be out here," he said again, more quietly.

I sat down on the edge of his bed.

It was just a mattress on a frame, a kitchenette, a window unit rattling and his whole life in four boxes.

"You almost told him tonight," I said.

"I know."

"Why didn't you just tell me? A week ago. The first night."

He put the T-shirt in the box.

He took a long time doing it.

"Because the first night, I wasn't sure," he said. "The second night, I was mostly sure."

"By the fourth night, I knew, and I'd already waited three days."

"I didn't know how to walk into your kitchen and say, my dad's been in your room every night and I let him."

"So you let him some more."

"Yes."

He didn't flinch from it.

"I watched him walk into your room on Torin's phone every night that week and told myself I was building a case."

"I wasn't. I was scared that if I said it out loud, it would be true."

"That he's what he is. That I come from that." He looked up at me.

"It's the worst thing I've ever done. I'm not asking you to let it go."

I believed him.

That was the problem with Gage.

He never said anything he didn't mean.

"Do you remember my first Thanksgiving here?" I asked.

He went very still.

"Yes."

I was nineteen and furious that my mom had married a man I'd met twice.

Gage was twenty, back from his first year on the ambulance, quiet and huge in my mom's tiny kitchen.

We'd done the dishes together at midnight while everyone else watched football.

He'd been drying a wine glass and I'd turned around and he was right there.

Close enough that I could see a cut on his lip.

Neither of us moved.

Then Dwight had walked in for more ice, and Gage had stepped back and put the glass away and left the next morning before breakfast.

"You said four years," I said. "Through the wall."

"I said a lot of things through the wall."

"Did you mean that one?"

"Every day of it."

I stood up.

He stayed on his knees.

I walked to him and stood between his knees, with the boxes on either side of us, and put my fingers into his wet curls.

He closed his eyes.

"You told me nobody lies to you again," he said. "Here's the truth. I don't deserve this yet."

"Then earn it," I said. "Starting tonight."

He looked up at me.

His gray eyes were wet.

"I'm awake," I said. "I'm sober. I drank nothing tonight I didn't open myself. I'm choosing you. Say yes, Gage."

His hands came up and wrapped around the backs of my thighs under the sundress.

"Yes," he said.

I kept my fingers in his hair and watched his jaw set.

He was still on his knees, holding the backs of my thighs like I was the only solid thing in the room.

"Say it again," I said.

"Yes."

"Then stand up."

He did.

Slow.

His hands never left my legs, dragging the sundress up as he rose until his thumbs found bare skin above my knees.

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