Chapter Fourteen
Nicole couldn’t breathe, her whole body felt like it was trapped in some kind of warm, vibrating limbo, Mason’s hands sending aftershocks of pleasure pushing through her system. She couldn’t stop pushing her hips back down into his, trying to spread her knees out further on that couch and force herself in any way closer to him. She couldn’t stop, she couldn’t pause, the moans wrested out of her mouth forcing her breath more and more ragged. She’d just been trying to talk to him, had just been trying to get out of her sweater, and then he was shoving her into the entryway closet like he was, lips moving against hers in a way that she had only fantasized about before then. Only it was better, heat of his body pushing between her thighs and forcing them even wider. Stretching the muscle and tendon there in a way that made her eyes nearly roll into the back of her head.
He was everywhere, all at once, his thumb moving so slow against her underwear she thought she was going to cry, hips swiveling back down into both it and his hips in an attempt to speed it up, force it further, her shoulders nearly shaking from the effort it took to keep from being any louder. From being any more insistent. “Mason please,” half moaned- half breathed out the one side of her mouth, her fingers digging into his shoulders and rolling her hips back into his again. Please. They were moving, fast, and yet it didn’t feel like they were moving nearly fast enough, the pit of her stomach all twisted up and heat resonating throughout her very core. “Pl-l-l” voice stuttering off into nothing as his hand moved to free her of that shirt she was wearing. It was exactly what she wanted, her back arching into his mouth, added bonus of her hips being driven further down into his not discouraging her even a little bit.
She wanted him. She wanted him more than she had ever wanted any other one, singular thing in her entire life, her very bones aching with the need to force herself closer to him, force her body over the top of his. She didn’t feel like she could breathe, she didn’t feel like she could function, his lips pushing against her torso and his hand closing over her boob sending shocks through her nipple. She wanted that off too, that bra, that shirt, she wanted her skin against his, only sweat separating the two of their bodies. She wanted… everything, moan stoppered up in her throat when his thumb pushed into the side of her underwear, pushing up into her folds and forcing her body to still.
She wanted him, but that threshold had been crossed, his thumb not completely stilling, but her eyes were open, widened and staring at the way that he was looking up at her, half slowed as if he were waiting for her to react—and she couldn’t not, even if all she wanted was to push her hips back down into his and his thumb. All she wanted- but she could see his face, and all she could think about was Aaron, and how she was betraying him. All she could think about was how she was hurting Mason, forcing herself over the top of him while she was with another man- “Oh god.” The words were the same but the sentiment was different, scrambling back off of him entirely, or at least trying to, trying to pull away from his hands and the pull of his lips calling her back to them. “Oh god, Mason, fuck-” trying to pull her skirt back down, force the two pieces of her shirt back together, but she had buttons missing, buttons off of her shirt that she didn’t even understand how they could have happened, didn’t remember it happening even…
“I’m sorry, oh my god I’m so sorry Mason.” He wasn’t letting her move, wasn’t releasing his hands off of her, even if he had shifted them, his hands closing around her hips instead, not saying anything at all while she tried to cover herself. “I’m so fucking awful. I didn’t mean- oh god. I’m sorry. Oh… I cheated… on Aaron- with, I mean with you.” Of all people, not that she should have been a cheater either way, but- “not that I didn’t want to cheat with you- god Mason, what the hell are we doing? You’re my brother- adopted brother,” tacked onto the end of it with a harried explanation. Aaron…. She was an awful person, the worst person, after all of the assuring she’d done that there was nothing there, after everything she’d said and done…
Mason’s hands hadn’t shifted, but his thumbs were slowly starting to, small circles rubbing into either side of her hips and his face lifted up to hers with a frown. “You’re not a cheater,” slow, the same way his hands were moving against her and it was distracting, not enough to cloud his words, but enough to almost make her forget why she was protesting him moving his hands lower again in the first place. “Aaron is an abusive asshole, you aren’t doing shit to him, and more than that he’s fucking cheating on you Nic-” Cutting off with that last word so fast it was obvious he hadn’t meant to say so much.
Her eyebrows lifting on her forehead, not so much for the start of his rant but the ending- she was a cheater, no matter what he said, and he wasn’t an abusive asshole… at least… well that was so much more complicated than the rest. His cheating though? Was something she knew nothing about, staring at Mason as if she could pull the story out of him, and from the way his eyes dropped she’d have to say that she was at least halfway to doing so.
How would he even know? What would make him say something like that without evidence? Her breath wasn’t slowing down near as much as she would have wanted it to, as she was too focused on Mason’s hands. On where and how much she wanted them to return back to what they’d been working her body into earlier. But she couldn’t allow that, she couldn’t allow herself to fall again into that pit of physicality that would distract her from all else. She was engaged. To Aaron. She was engaged to Aaron and no matter what he was saying… she was the one being unfaithful, the one who’d been unfaithful more than once now in their relationship, even if this was the first time that it had really crossed that physical barrier, she’d still thought about it before, she had still wanted it before. She was going to want it again, and that made her some special level of horrible. Especially, considering the object of her affection and who he was to her…
“I did come down last weekend.”
His admittance nearly forced her to flinch, the surprise clear on her features, and shocking enough to almost make her forget about his thumbs still rubbing those sweeping arcs along her hip bones, slowly working their way back inside the fabric of her opened shirt.
“After we got off the phone, I thought maybe if you came home to a clean apartment then you would feel better or… something, I wanted to do something for you Nic. But when I got there the door was unlocked, and I’d only been in the apartment for a handful of minutes before I heard it… I thought it was you two at first, but the noise was off, and her voice was all wrong, and when I got to the bedroom to see her tied to the bed like she was I couldn’t even move at first. Aaron knows I saw, he saw me before I left, it’s why he’s been texting me, it’s why he texted me tonight … thanking me for not outing him to you.”
It wasn’t just the sincerity of his voice that got her, but those facts he knew about Aaron’s preferences that he couldn’t possibly have otherwise known… lips opening only for no sound to be released from them at all, her tongue pressing into the roof of her mouth and closing her mouth again.
That shouldn’t have made her feel relieved, the knowledge that her fiancé had been with someone else, at least even just that one time, but it did. It made her feel…freed, in a way that the news should have never done. The final nail in the coffin of what had been a tumultuous relationship, and Mason… right there…. She didn’t mind him being the one to break the news, didn’t mind having his hands to lean into as it all processed with such rapid clarity in her mind. It all made sense, the late night study sessions… his insistence on knowing her schedule, down to the minute it was changed… all of his questions concerning Mason he had passed off as him gaining actual interest in knowing him as a person. He was smart, he knew how to make her okay with all of those questions, and she… was numb, her mind cycling through all of the reasons that she should have ended her relationship with Aaron. Well before when she did, and far more interested in Mason’s hand slowly creeping down lower along her hip bone, thumb pressing into the flesh as if testing her resolve and she had none.
She had no reason in that moment not to encourage his hand, thighs widening alongside his hips as if to encourage that hand’s trek downwards, sharp intake of breath even as she leant back into him, eyes closing and that smile filling out the edges of her lips at the thought of being able to do this … all the time. Without needing to run around behind anyone’s back, she could have him here- here on this couch where she’d first realized how broad his shoulders had begun to get… here on this couch where he’d almost kissed her that first time. Her lips had hovered just that scant inch over his own while a series of flashes were playing through her head from over the years that only seemed to make that building, spiraling need more present… until she connected that it had been over these years, she’d been watching the two of them grow up in her head. Drawing desire off of that, until she connected the one piece that with or without Aaron, there were still other reasons she should have been pausing her hips instead of grinding them down into his.
“Fuck!” The one word was harsh, broken up into multiple syllables as she pushed herself, this time, successfully, and entirely off of Mason. Stumbling back to her feet and taking a succession of wobbling steps backwards, the back of her knees hitting the coffee table and her hand lifting to cover her mouth. Her fingers pushing into the damp, swollen skin of her lips, pulling at her skin as if she could remove the evidence that his mouth had been there at all. “Oh God, Mason, no.” It was wrong, she didn’t want it to be, she wanted to stave off that logical thought for just a few moments longer, she wanted to climb back up into his laps and let his hands resume playing about her body as if they had access to the deepest, most sensual recesses of her brain and the store of fantasies she kept there. She wanted to have ignored all of that which had suddenly occurred to her, but she couldn’t…
Like her brain was only just then catching up to what all had occurred in the last few minutes, like she was only just registering all of the implications and consequences, her breath coming all the faster just not from desire this time. She couldn’t stopper those tears any more than she could stop her rapid retreat away from him, as if putting distance between them would keep her from committing the same sin again. “It’s wrong,” she choked out finally, her sobs nearly congesting her words to the point of being unintelligible. “We can’t be together,” and she didn’t even know if this was what Mason wanted, or if he had been considering any of it beyond just crawling into bed with her. She didn’t know where he was coming from on any of this or if she’d somehow influenced it by unknowingly coming onto him or sending out signals, she hadn’t been aware of sending. She didn’t know anything, but she did know she couldn’t… entertain it, couldn’t allow it to go further or else there wouldn’t be any salvaging what there was left for them in any other sense.
“Even if that was what you wanted-” she finally choked out, trying to make her shirt work back around her, trying to overcome those missing buttons and failing miserably. “It’s wrong, you’re my brother, even if I left Aaron…” Which she was going to do, but she couldn’t- she couldn’t breathe at all, like between the sobs and the pain lancing through her chest, air just wouldn’t fit. “We couldn’t,” she finished lamely, her back hitting the corner of that wall and watching him stand with widened eyes from where she’d trapped herself. She couldn’t do this, she couldn’t stay and listen to him offer some sort of explanation, or worse, apology of his own. She couldn’t hear him say anything that might weaken her resolve or make her want to take back what she just said when she knew it had to be said. She couldn’t… stay here, one last frantic shake of her head in his direction before turning, none to gracefully, and sprinting out of the room entirely, the front door only a stumbled obstacle on her way out of the house and down the driveway to her car.
She couldn’t stay, she couldn’t allow herself, but leaving felt like she was tearing her own heart out with dull shears, those sobs only getting worse as she peeled out of the driveway and down that familiar road. Trying to ignore his body in her rearview mirror and what felt like an ever increasing need to turn around and go back to him. She couldn’t. She just wished that she could….