“Later.” I lick the side of her neck slowly. “I want you needy. I want this in the back of your mind for the rest of the night.” I slide each of my thumbs across my tongue before running them over her nipples. I rub them slowly before rolling them between my fingers, leaving them erect and wet. “Tonight,” I whisper low in her ear. “I know it’s been a while since we’ve been back in North Carolina, but it’s different.Weare different. And I’m not going to let anyone tell us we can’t be together. Do youunderstand?” She swallows, but she doesn’t respond, so I pinch her nipples a little harder. “Say it.”
“I understand,” she whispers.
“Now, we should finish getting ready so we aren’t late,” I say with a final kiss to her neck before I get off the bed.
She turns around and glares at me. I know she’s wound up and was hoping that little exchange would have led to an orgasm. Getting up, she moves to her suitcase and pulls out a pair of underwear before sliding them up her legs. “I didn’t realize that Mike had a son. Have you met him?” she asks, and I shake my head.
“No. He lives somewhere out West. Maybe Colorado? I actually couldn’t tell you. He’s a free spirit, according to Mom, so he hasn’t really been around.” I shrug because I don’t know much about Mike’s son other than the fact that he’s around my age. I think my mother has only met him twice, and both times were brief, when he was passing through town.
“I wonder if that’s a free spirit, like he travels a lot and has plans to climb Mount Everest? Or a free spirit like he isn’t good at holding down a job and mostly couch surfs?” She chuckles before she grabs her dress from the closet and slides it up her frame. It’s black and silky with an open back, and I already know it’s going to take a lot of fucking restraint not to drag my fingers across it while I’m talking to her or even walking by her. I can almost feel the spark that comes when I touch her lower back to guide her somewhere. There’s a hint of cleavage, but the sexiest part of the dress is the slit up the side that stops just above her knee. A flash of sliding my hand up her leg to grab her thigh and grind her against my dick comes into my mind. “Wild?” she says, and I realize that I’ve just been staring at her.
“Sorry, baby.”
“You’re staring.”
“You’re stunning.” A flirty smile pulls at her lips, and I can tell she’s fighting for it to break out into a full-on grin. “But I’ve been staring at you for years. This is nothing new.”
“Well, try to remember how not to openly ogle me. We’re going to be in a room filled with a lot of people.”
“Yeah, because I’ve always been great at that.”
Halle: 17 years old
Sebastian: 18 years old
I am ready to fucking go,are my only thoughts as my grandparents continuously go on about how proud they are of me. How excited they are about my college plans and that I’m going to do great things. We are three hours into my high school graduation party, and all I wanted to do was go somewhere to have a very private party with Saint. And of course, just the floating thought of her has me searching through the party for jade green immediately. I swear she’d given me about twenty different dresses to choose from, wanting me to pick out the dress she wore tonight. Of course, all of them looked great on her, but something about this particular shade of green against her brown skin and the cut of the dress—mid-length and straps that tied behind her neck—made this one my favorite. She’d pulled her dark hair up into a loose updo, giving her a sexy, sophisticated look that I could barely pull my eyes away from.
Look away.Saint has implored me with her eyes at least ten times tonight.
I can’t help it. You look so fucking beautiful,I tried to tell her back.
I find her again talking to a group of our friends with a few guys standing a little too close to her for my liking. It’s long since become the running joke that “no one is good enough for Sebastian’s sister,” so most guys have stopped even trying, but some of them flirt just to piss me off. I have very much kept guys from sniffing around her by leaning into the “protective older brother role.”
The sick feeling in the pit of my stomach starts to fester as I think about being away from Saint next year when I’m at college. I’m not worried that she’ll find someone else, but I am concerned about what will happen if I’m not here to protect her. I’ve seen her every day for the past thirteen years, and the thought of going weeks, maybe even a month, without seeing her makes me not even want to go. The idea of taking a year off and waiting for her so we could start college together next year floats through my head again. I brush it off because I know not only will my mother definitely not go for it, but Saint won't either. I haven’t even brought the idea up to her because I know she’d be against it, even if the thought of me being around a bunch of college girls makes her uneasy.
I shift my gaze like I’m just scanning the room, but I manage to stop my eyes on Saint every time I pass over her.
How am I supposed to be away from her? I can barely stay away from her for longer than a few minutes at a time.
I am trying to figure out how to break away and go over to where she is, when luckily, my mom comes over to talk to her parents, effectively ending our conversation. I move toward them, entering the circle next to her, forcing the guy beside her to take a step to the left. A few of the girls in the circle cheer as soon as I show up.
“Seb, great party! We’re thinking Noah’s for the after-party?” our friend Joshua says, nodding to one of our friends that I’d just moved away from Saint.
“Yeah, my parents went to Atlanta to help move my sister out for the summer, so I have the place to myself till tomorrow,” Noah explains as he takes a sip of something that I’m sure they spiked themselves.
I hesitate before agreeing because I hated committing to plans that I wasn’t sure if Saint wanted to do, and as far as I knew, our only plans for tonight were to find some alone time to fuck each other’s brains out. “Yeah… I should be able to swing by. It just depends on whether my mom wants me to spend some time with my grandparents.”
I turn my head nonchalantly toward Saint even though all I’ve wanted to do since I got over here was talk to her, “You going?”
“Of course, she is,” Greer, Saint’s closest friend, chimes in. I liked her okay. She seemed to actually like Saint and wasn’t one of the girls who tried to use her to have sleepovers at our house to get closer to me. Not only was it never going to happen, but it used to piss me off even more because the nights Saint had sleepovers were nights I couldn’t sneak into her room. I hated that she was sometimes forced to spend time with people who didn’t care about her when she could have been with me.
“Unless Sara says I should hang out,” Saint says softly, and I already know what she means by those few words.
We can use that as an excuse and show up late.
“You’re both coming. No excuses,” another girl, Piper, who has been known to try to get with me, especially after a few drinks, chimes in.
“Relax, Saint and I will be there.” I chuckle before turning my back to her and away from the circle. I make brief eye contact with Saint before leaving the area where the party is being held and entering the hallway. My mom had rented out a space in a large hall used for big events like weddings and birthday parties, so there was definitely a place where I could have a few momentsalone. Even though I gave her the look that I know she can read, meaning,I want to be alone with you,I text her anyway to make sure.
