Taken While I Slept by My Stepbrother and His Friends novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Through the Wall
Laine hears her stepbrother and his friends talk about her through the wall, catches the four locking themselves into her room at 3 a.m., turns on the lamp, and learns they came to catch her stepfather; then she plays asleep as he takes $40,000 with her thumb and whispers that her mother is next.
I could hear them through the wall.
My stepbrother Gage and his three friends were drinking in the spare room on the other side of my wall at two in the morning.
My dad built pools, not houses, and the walls in this one had always been paper.
Tonight they were talking about me.
"I'm serious, she got hot." That was Kipp, the swim coach with the smirk. "Did you see her at the pool today? That red bikini?"
"Dude, that's Gage's sister." Zane, the careful one. He climbed power poles for a living and still asked before he took the last slice.
"Stepsister," Gage said. "My dad married her mom when she was nineteen. I'd already moved out."
"Still weird."
"Is it?" Torin. The quiet one, who watched more than he talked. "She's twenty-three. We met her at a Thanksgiving."
"And now I live across the yard from her," Gage said.
He was drunker than I'd ever heard him.
"Sleep shorts. Yoga pants. That bikini nearly put me in my own ambulance."
They laughed.
I was lying in my childhood bed with the lights off and my cheek against the wall.
I should have banged on it and called them pigs.
Instead I slid my hand into my shorts.
"What would you do?" Kipp asked. "No consequences."
"Her mouth first," Gage said, low. "I've thought about that mouth for four years."
I stopped breathing.
"She eats those popsicles by the pool," Torin said. "I have to go inside."
"I'd take my time," Zane said, like he was confessing to a priest. "I'd want her to tell me exactly where."
My fingers were already slick.
"I just want to hear her," Gage said. "I want to hear her say my name."
I came with my teeth in the pillow and four grown men fifteen feet away.
Then I lay there shaking, wide awake for the first time all summer.
That was the strange part.
Since I came home in May, I'd slept ten, eleven hours a night.
I'd blamed nursing school.
Every night at ten, my stepfather Dwight brought me a mug of his chamomile blend.
"You haven't slept right since your dad," he'd say, and kiss the top of my head.
Tonight it tasted like pennies.
I'd poured it into the ficus.
At some point the boys went quiet, and I drifted off.
My door woke me.
The hinge creaked, the hall light slid across the carpet, and the door eased shut.
Click.
Someone had locked it from the inside.
My heart slammed.
I kept my eyes shut and my breathing slow.
I could smell beer and chlorine and somebody's cologne.
The mattress dipped beside my hip.
"She's out," Torin whispered.
"Told you," Gage said. "She slept through the smoke alarm test Tuesday. A palm tree came down in the storm and she never moved."
"So we just." Kipp stopped. "Is this okay? This feels bad, man."
"She won't know," Gage said. "Nobody's doing anything. I just need to check her."
Check me.
My whole body went hot.
Warm fingers found my wrist and slid slowly along the inside of it.
They stayed there.
"Her heart's flying," Gage whispered. "That's not sleep."
I reached out and turned on the lamp.
Four men froze in the yellow light.
Gage sat on my bed with two fingers on my pulse.
Kipp stood at the foot of it with his hands up.
Zane had his broad back against the door.
Torin was by the window holding his phone.
"If any of you wants to touch me," I said, "you do it while I'm awake."
Kipp made a noise.
"How long have you been up?" he asked.
"Since the red bikini."
He went pink to his bleached hair.
Zane covered his face with both hands. "Oh, no."
Torin didn't look away from me at all.
Gage didn't let go of my wrist.
"You heard all of it," he said.
"Every word." I looked at his mouth. "Say the part about four years again."
His thumb pressed into my pulse.
For one second I thought he would.
His eyes went to my lips and stayed there long enough to make my thighs press together.
Then he swallowed.
"Not like this, Laine."
"Then why are you in my room at three in the morning with the door locked?"
Gage looked at Torin.
Torin crossed the room and turned his phone toward me.
"I put the cameras in for your stepdad in May," he said quietly. "I kept the login."
It was the hallway outside my room.
The clock in the corner said 3:07 a.m., last night.
A man in a white robe walked to my door with my phone glowing in his hand.
Silver hair. Golf tan. Loafers, even at night.
Dwight.
He used a key, went in, and the door closed.
Torin scrubbed forward. The door opened again at 3:49.
"Eleven nights," Torin said. "Same time. Your phone every time."
My phone charged in the kitchen. Dwight's rule. No screens in bed.
"What was he doing in here?" I asked.
Nobody answered.
"That's what we came to find out," Gage said finally. "We were going to wait in the closet and film him."
"You didn't drink the tea," Zane said softly.
"It tasted like pennies."
Gage's jaw went tight. He was a paramedic. He knew what pennies meant.
"That's a pill," he said.
Out in the hall, a floorboard creaked.
Torin checked his screen. "He's early."
A key slid into my lock.
"Closet," I whispered. "All of you. I'm asleep."
"Laine, no," Gage said.
"Go."
Kipp, Zane and Torin folded into my closet among my scrubs.
Gage dropped flat to the floor on the far side of my bed, in the dark beyond the lamp.
I clicked it off and lay down on my back.
The lock turned.
Dwight came in humming.
He sat where Gage had sat and picked up my right hand.
He pressed my thumb to my phone.
Through my lashes I saw the screen light up his face.
My bank. My trust account. Numbers I'd never once looked at.
"Forty thousand," he murmured, and pressed my thumb again.
The phone chimed softly. Transfer approved.
On the floor beside the bed, I heard Gage stop breathing.
Dwight set my hand back on the blanket and smoothed it flat.
Then he leaned down and kissed my forehead, the way he did every morning at breakfast.
"Two more weeks, sweetheart," he whispered into my hair. "Then it's your mother's turn."
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