Page 24 of Brother in Law with Benefits

“Sophie.” He adjusts his angle and does the thing with his fingers at the same time and I understand that I was wrong. I am apparently going to come again, stretched wide around the thick, relentless slide of him. “Trust me.”

“I hate you,” I say, which is the most specific lie I’ve ever told.

“I know.” He kisses my neck, thrusts harder, the old headboard knocking softly against the wall. “Come on my cock anyway.”

And because my body has fully defected to his side of the argument, I do. It rolls through me differently this time—deeper, longer, starting from the place where his cock is splitting me open and moving outward, dragging a sound out of me I don’t recognize as my own voice. I clench down hard around him, pulsing, and I hear myself cry out his name and I don’t care.

He follows a few strokes later with a broken groan, burying himself to the hilt and going still as his cock throbs deep inside me, thick hot pulses spilling into me while my body keeps milking every drop. His whole body draws tight over mine and then, slowly, releases, and we hold on to each other while everything settles, breathing hard into the quiet of a room that used to belong to a teenage boy and now, apparently, belongs to this.

We lie in his childhood bedroom in the afternoon light, both breathing like we just ran something, his cock still buried inside me, softening only slightly, the wet evidence of what we just did soaking into sheets that have no business knowing any of it.

Grant's on his back. I'm on his chest. His hand traces slow patterns on my spine.

This is the dangerous part.

Not the sex. Any idiot can have sex. It's the lying here afterward, his hand on my back, the easy quiet of two people who fit together in a room, that's going to wreck me.

I know it's going to wreck me. I'm doing it anyway.

"Can I ask you something?" Grant says.

"Sure."

"Why'd you stay? After the divorce. You could've started over somewhere else."

I trace a line on his chest. "Patty. Mostly. She was the only family I had left that actually felt like it. My parents are—" I shrug. "Distant. Chris moved to Denver and became a stranger. But Patty kept showing up. After the divorce. During it. Shebrought me soup the week I signed the papers. Showed up without calling. Just showed up."

There's a whole list I could give him — thestayscolumn and theleavescolumn, the tidy little ledger I made myself at four in the afternoon a few weeks ago — but I don't, because saying it out loud to the man currently in mystayscolumn, however temporarily, feels like tempting something I'd rather not name yet.

"She's good at that."

"The best." I shift on his chest. "What about you? Why'd you stay away so long?"

His hand pauses. Then resumes. "Lots of reasons. Work. The fact that I was never good at staying in one place." He's quiet for a moment. "And maybe because it was easier than dealing with everything here."

"Your dad?"

"Among other things." He stares at the ceiling. "I wasn't what he wanted me to be. Not interested in insurance, in settling down, in doing the small-town thing. So I left. And I kept leaving. Every contract that took me farther away, I said yes."

"You came back, though."

"For Mom." His hand stills again. "Not sure I would've otherwise."

The honesty lands a little sideways. He's here temporarily. For Patty. Not for me.

He's been everywhere and built things and left and I'm twenty-eight and I've been right here, and this is temporary, and I know all of this.

"What's next?" I ask. "After the three months."

"Contract in South America. Brazil, probably." His hand resumes moving. "Water infrastructure. Big scope."

"Sounds exciting."

"It's work."

"Do you like it? The traveling."

He considers. "I used to. Now I'm not sure."