The more I drink, the looser I feel. My life is as stressful as it is comfortable. Letting loose occasionally, especially somewhere I won’t be photographed, has been a long time coming. Far Bar in Los Angeles is full, and we are surrounded by friends. Mason stands next to me, sipping his beer and leaning his arm on the bar. The other guys are all hunting for girls in the crowd that they can take home.

I’m only interested in one of them.

I glance across the room. Dana is with her friends a little further down the bar. They’re smiling and talking about the talent available. It isn’t hard to see who’s thirsty around here. The girls are all dressed to kill, and they’ll all land their prey before the night is out.

My eyes are on Dana. We’re close, but she’s that one girl that I just can’t have. She’s my stepsister, the ultimate “one who got away.”

She wasn’t always my stepsister, of course. There was a time when she was the pretty girl at school that I crushed on. The one I wanted to ask to the seventh grade dance. She was the one who’s mom had run into my dad at an unfortunate parent evening and decided to get engaged, just before I got around to telling her how I felt.

And now she’s my sister.

Go figure.

She looks like sex on a stick. I watched her grow from a girl to a woman at the same time my own hormones developed. There’s nothing as awesome as having your jerk-off material live in the room next to yours. I never had to look very far to find fuel for my imagination.

It just grates the hell out of me that I will never be able to fuck her the way I always do in my fantasies.

We are siblings. Sort of. Stupid fucking taboo.

“Hello,” Mason calls in a sing-song voice, bringing my attention back to him. “Are you even listening to what I’m saying, or are you too busy bird watching?”

“Sorry,” I say, grinning at him. “What were you saying?”

“I’m saying Sociable’s infrastructure needs a serious upgrade if we want to move forward with the influx of users.”

I shake my head and sip my beer. I haven’t had enough alcohol yet. I’m still aching for Dana. Too drunk to stop myself from wanting her, too sober to stop thinking about it. “Can we not talk about work tonight?”

Mason shrugs. “I can’t help it, man. It’s because of you I have this job at all.”

“You know what?” I say, nodding. “You’re right, and you know what you’re talking about. I wouldn’t have suggested you as a candidate for the IT department interviews if I didn’t think you were worth it. But I’m sick of hearing about Sociable.”

Mason shakes his head, chuckling into the beer bottle he lifts to his lips, taking a sip.

“Well, it’s going to be hard getting away from it, since you created it.”

I shrug and take another sip of my drink. I created a new social media platform, and it blew up. I am almost as big as Facebook and Twitter, and I landed my ass in butter almost overnight. I didn’t expect it to take off like that. I worked on a concept, and the right people saw the idea.

My friends refer to me as the Master because where they’re all scrambling, I have it made. If I had Dana, I would consider that the truth.

Sociable is a big company, now, with different divisions, a turnover that’s growing exponentially as the rest of the world is getting on board, and I have an IT team that works feverishly to stay ahead of the technological curve.

Mason’s on that team.

I glance over at Dana again. Something about her is different tonight. She arrived after I had a few drinks down, and she blew me away. She’s wearing a low-cut top that shows off just enough cleavage without looking slutty, and her eyes are made up with smoky eyeshadow that makes her blue irises pop. She’s wearing a skirt. Easy access. I like that.

Her hair. That’s what is different. Her brown hair is cut in a shoulder-length bob, now. Before, it hung over her shoulders. The new cut frames her face and brings out her freckles. Freckles that she never covered with makeup. It was what I fell for when I’d seen her in the fifth grade. Besides her curves and her breasts that’ll make a man sit up and beg, her freckles are one of my favorite features.

She glances at me. Our eyes meet, and she smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. I smile back. I wonder what’s wrong. I’ll ask her. We’ve always been close, just not in the way I want to be. We’re only a year apart, and we shared friends our whole life. I wish it was just the two of us, though. I want to be alone with her.

I imagine leading her to the restrooms, locking the door behind us and pinning her against the wall. I would hike up her one leg, move her panties aside, and push my dick into her, making her scream my name. Hearing my name on her lips would push me over the edge in a second. I want to fuck her. I’ve always wanted to fuck her.

I shift, rearranging my cock in my pants. It would be poor form to stand in the bar with a visible hard-on.

It’s so fucking unfair that I can’t have her. The only girl I want. Forbidden fruit and all that shit.

“So, who will it be tonight?” Mason asks.

“What?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Mason says. He nods toward the girls. “I can see you ogling. Which one do you want to take home tonight?”

Dana. But I can’t say that. Instead, I shrug. “I don’t know, man. I don’t think I’m going to make a move tonight. I just want to relax.”

“Sure,” Mason says, not believing me. I sigh but he keeps pushing. “You should go and talk to them. You know Dana’s friends all have the hots for you, now that you’re famous and shit. And you’ve been single for far too long. It will be easy to get into any of their pants.”

He’s right. It would be. But it’s not their pants I want to get into. And I don’t like him referring to my ex, Lisa. We dated for three years in college, and she damn near ripped my heart to pieces in the process.

“You better make a move fast,” Mason says. “It looks like someone else is moving in for the kill.”

I look at the girls again. Mason is right. A guy with black hair and an attitude walks up to them. He’s smiling ear to ear, and he’s got the Latino thing going for him, with a shirt that’s unbuttoned way too low. The chest that’s showing is smooth.

“What a prick,” I say.

“A prick that’s getting what he wants,” Masons says.

I watch him introduce himself to the girls, and they’re practically swooning.

“What do you wanna bet he has an accent?” Mason asks.

I don’t respond. Mr. Perfect is smiling at Dana, his teeth too white to be natural. She’s smiling back at him in a way that shows her dimples. She only smiles like that when she’s flirting.

I’m jealous right away. He’s not the right guy for her. None of them are. I want her, and if I can’t have her, fuck everyone else.

I’m being an asshole. I know that. But I’ve had too much to drink, and I don’t want anyone close to her. The other girls? Sure, he can have them. But Dana? She’s mine.

I watch while he flirts with her. He turns his back on the others, leans on the bar, and shows off his chiseled chest. Just because he’s showing it off doesn’t mean there aren’t other people here with better bodies. Like me. I can show Dana what a real man looks like.

And I have fucking chest hair. I’m not a naked mole rat.

I’m being unfair. I don’t care.

Dana is smiling and laughing when he speaks. He can’t be that funny. Not unless she’s laughing at him because he’s failing. Judging by the dimples in her cheeks, that’s not the case.

She reaches into her purse and pulls out a business card, and I down the last of my drink. My head spins a little with the rush of alcohol, and the gas bubbles in my chest. I want to do something violent. Instead, I watch him walk away with the business card.

“Someone should take him into a dark alley and strip him of that business card,” I say.

Mason raises his eyebrows at me. “A little too protective, aren’t you?”

I shrug. Dana’s face has fallen. The dimples are gone, and she’s not even smiling, now. She’s nodding at what one of the others are saying but she looks bummed out.

“I’ll be right back,” I say and walk over to her. When I get closer to her, I swallow.

“Are you okay?” I ask, putting my hand on her shoulder.

She looks up at me, and her eyes are brilliant. “I’m fine,” she says, flashing me a smile that seems forced.

“What’s wrong?” I ask anyway.

She shakes her head. “Nothing, Keagan. Really. It’s fine.”

I look at her for long enough that she gets irritated. She shakes her head at me and shrugs my hand off her shoulder.

“Really, go back to your friends.”

Right. She doesn’t want me to crowd her.

“I’m just asking,” I say. “You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

She rolls her eyes, irritated. When she gets upset, she does this thing with her bottom lip that looks like a pissed off pout. It makes me want to kiss her. It makes me want to do dirty things to her. Every time. I force myself to turn around and walk back to Mason, instead.

He’s watching me with a lopsided grin on his face. “Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”

“What?” I ask, waving at the bartender for another beer.

“You being jealous when someone hits on Dana? I saw that.”

I shake my head and put money on the bar when the bottle arrives. I suck down a couple of gulps before I come up for air. I want to get wasted. If I can’t get her in bed, I don’t want to remember the rest of my night.

“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s my sister.”

“Stepsister. Which doesn’t count. And she’s fucking hot.”

I glare at Mason, but I say nothing.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. Doing her? A piece like that, right under your nose?”

“Shut up, Mason,” I say.

Mason laughs. “I knew it, you dirty bastard. You have a thing for her, don’t you?”

I shake my head, but I know he’s onto me. I become transparent when I drink, and Mason has known me since college.

“So, what are you going to do about it?” he asks.

“What I always do about it. Jack off to the idea of her body and leave it at that. Come on, man. What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

Mason shrugs. “How about you do her? You can, you know. You’re not kids anymore, and it’s not like you’re related, technically. It’s just in theory.”

“Fuck off with your theory. It’s not like she wants me, anyway. She doesn’t see me like that.”

“Have you asked her?”

Of course, I haven’t. I don’t know how I’m supposed to broach that topic with her.

“Just leave it, okay?” I say and down more of my beer.

Mason laughs, shaking his head. “You’re old enough and established enough to do whatever the fuck you want. You’re twenty-nine. You’re both consenting adults, and there’s no law against.”

I keep shaking my head until he stops talking. The thought of her naked against the bathroom wall is pinned to my frontal lobe again, and I don’t think I’ll be able to shake it. Not when Mason keeps going on about it.

“Drop it, okay?” I say.

Mason shrugs. “I’m just saying,” he says.

But he does drop it, and I’m relieved. It’s bad enough that my fantasies are the only things that make my lust for Dana bearable. I don’t need someone like Mason egging me on to do something I might never be able to do. I don’t need his voice in my ear. I already have a little devil on my shoulder, urging me to misbehave.