Total pages in book: 28
Estimated words: 31475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 157(@200wpm)___ 126(@250wpm)___ 105(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 31475 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 157(@200wpm)___ 126(@250wpm)___ 105(@300wpm)
“Bruce. Please, call me Bruce. I think we are past certain formalities, especially while you live here.”
“Thank you, Bruce.”
“You’re welcome. Feel free to make yourself at home. I’m out for the evening, and probably won’t see you in the morning. I’ll leave a note for my housekeeper, Lily, to help you out if you need anything. She’ll be here in the afternoon.”
She looks around her room again and then back at me. She nods her head and walks towards the bed, putting her bag down on it.
I grip the doorknob and then turn around abruptly. I’ve got to get out of this place. I stomp down the hall. When I get to the elevator where Holly is waiting, I grab her hand and pull her towards the elevator.
“Everything okay?” she asks, a concerned look on her face.
“I’ll explain later. We don’t want to be late for dinner.”
Honestly, though, I have no clue how to explain that I want to fuck my stepdaughter.
SOPHIE
Crack!
The lightning streaks across the window. I place my cheek against the cold glass so I can feel it against my skin. My new home sits tall enough that I can actually see where the storm begins and ends, but no rain falls in between.
I can relate.
I’m the girl who can cry reading a silly romance novel, but remains dry eyed when her mother dies. It was weeks after the funeral took place that I was told she was gone. What’s worse was that I wasn’t even worried that I’d never heard from her.
Watching the lightning flash across the sky, I close my eyes this time to feel the thunder. It’s a stupid idea, but I’m hoping if I feel the thunder, maybe it can shake the dam loose. I’m being childish, I know, but at least if I cried I would feel something. I should feel something, anything.
I don’t know why I feel more alone now, because it’s not like I even knew her. Between nannies and boarding schools, I hardly ever saw her. Then when I was fourteen, she sent me off to school in France, where I stayed. She said she would visit at some point, but I guess she never got around to it. Not one time in my three years at school there had my mother come to see me, nor did she ask me to come home.
A part of me had been hoping that maybe when I finished school I could come home and try to form a relationship with her. I even applied to a few colleges for pre-law and got in, but with her gone I have no desire to pursue that idea. I was only doing it to try to please her, and now I see how stupid that was. My mother was always going a mile a minute and had time for no one and nothing. Aside from work. That’s not a life I wanted for myself. What I do want is to feel connected to another person, to have someone tell me they love me. I think that’s what I was hoping for when I applied to law school. I could’ve gotten her attention; we’d have had things in common to talk about. I could’ve called her late at night and bitched about courses, and she’d tell me how great I was doing.
How could I long for her attention so badly, but not miss her now that’s she’s really gone? I actually felt a small weight lift off my shoulders when I thought about not having to go to law school.
Pushing myself away from the window, I feel my stomach growl. I’ve been hiding in my room since I got here last night. The idea of going out and seeing Bruce, my step-dad, wasn't one that appealed to me. I should’ve known any man who chose to marry my mother would be as cold as she was. Hell, I didn't even know she was married until I was told that I was being shipped back home to him.
“Step-dad,” I say, rolling the words across my tongue. He was nothing like I expected him to be. When I thought of a step-dad, I thought of a man with greyish hair, wrinkles around his eyes. I thought of someone who was at least my mother's age or who looked like some of the fathers who came to visit the other girls in my dorm. No, it looks like my mom liked them young. Bruce looks like he is in his early thirties if I had to guess. He also looks like he stepped out of a magazine, and so did the woman hanging on to him last night.
I thought it was strange he was already hooking up with another woman weeks after my mother’s death, but nothing about their marriage seemed normal. I wonder if part of the reason she was too busy to see me was because of him. Maybe she started another family, one that apparently didn’t include me.
When he finally untangled himself from the other woman, he showed me around the apartment. First he showed me where my mom’s room used to be, and then he showed me his room, and finally my own. They didn’t share rooms? This was all getting weirder by the minute, but one thing was clear, Bruce didn’t like me.
It showed from the moment the elevator doors slid open and his green eyes landed on mine. As soon as we locked eyes, the playful smile he was giving the woman in his arms dropped away. What made it worse is I felt my whole face warm from blushing. I’m sure it turned my fair skin cherry red with embarrassment. Public displays of affection are not common to me outside of a book, and I’m pretty sure I just caught them about to have sex, if the bulge in his pants was any indication.
Instantly I hated the woman. Her perfectly shiny hair, bronzed skin, and a body I would die for made me so angry, and I’m still not a hundred percent sure why. Was it because he just lost my mom and here he was fucking another woman? Maybe he was always fucking her. Or was it the fact that a sliver of jealousy ran through me at the sight of her wrapped around him? I’d hoped that maybe that man wasn’t my step-dad, but maybe his son or a coworker. That hope crashed and burned moments later, leaving me with an uneasy feeling.