This was about giving her what she’d clearly been starving for. I could let her feel something she’d only ever read about in her romance books. I could be the one man to give her the thing she thought she could never ask for.
And… ohfuck,I wanted to be that man for her.
The truth was, my desire for Hallie burned even deeper than my need to take control.
My attraction for her was born the evening Brooke Rutherford, the oldest sister, got married, and Hallie was home for the summer from college. Her dusty blue bridesmaid dress with the open back hugged her curves just enough to make it painfully clear she’d crossed into womanhood when I wasn’t looking.
And we’d danced that night. I couldn’t remember if it was my idea or hers, but somehow, my hands found her hips during a slow song, and she spent the next four minutes whispering about her bridezilla sister in my ear.
We laughed, I twirled her once, and then we parted. The hollow ache in my stomach when her body left my side caught me by surprise that night. I wasn’t sure if it meant anything to her, but for me, that was the night everything changed.
She became my obsession.
That was the first night I went home and thought of Hallie with my dick in my fist, shuddering as I whispered her name.
I’d kept my lust to myself all this time. She was Adrian’s little sister, for fuck’s sake. I never crossed any kind of line with her. Never even flirted. I’d trained myself not to look at her for too long, and tried not to notice the way her ass filled out the leggings she often wore around the Rutherford house when she visited home.
And then my fantasies about her became… dark. I caught myself wondering what kind of sexual experiences she had with her boyfriends–was she satisfied? Did they choke her and hold her down? Did she want them to?
Would she think I was a disgusted, perverted, psychopath for thinking about that? The shame burrowed deep inside me, making it difficult to walk into the Rutherfords’ house sometimes. I was still invited to every barbecue and holiday gathering, though, and I was too polite to keep away from the rest of them. I had no excuse.
I started measuring my life in moments Hallie was in the room and moments she wasn’t, and somehow, the space she occupied in my mind only kept getting bigger. My obsession grew.
I made observations.
I noticed patterns and memorized routines.
Even when she moved up to Milwaukee, she didn’t really disappear. Her careless social media presence made it easy enough to keep tabs on her–tooeasy–even from a distance. I ran background checks on the men who drifted in and out of her life, keeping tabs on some of them just as much as her.
Brody’s record was squeaky clean, with not even a seatbelt infraction to his name. But something about the guy always rubbed me the wrong way. It wasn’t just that he was a cocky, self-indulgent fitness bro and not nearly good enough for someone like Hallie. There was something else there. It took a few months to work out his Reddit username, but once I had that, he was finished.
I didn’t have to do much.
I let his own misogynistic, red-pill, disgusting comments speak for him in the form of printed screenshots, which Hallie found slipped beneath her apartment door one morning.
For a while, I worried my interference and her break-up with Brody was the catalyst that rerouted her entire life. She quit her job at the marketing firm and moved back here, lying to everyone in her life about her job. The Rutherfords thought she was still working remotely, but she’d been secretly picking up DoorDash shifts in other neighborhoods ever since she came home. She was too proud to admit Milwaukee didn't work out, just like the rest of the Rutherford family had warned.
Hallie was at rock bottom, and it was at least partially my fault. I could have just let her be blissfully ignorant, and some nights the guilt ate at my insides for disrupting her happiness.
I told myself she’d be okay. She was home again, surrounded by people who loved her, and she was resilient enough to rebuild without my involvement. I stayed close but careful, hovering at the edges of her life without touching it, watching without interfering.
A quiet observer.
Even when she stepped out in a black bikini, sneaking glances at me all night at the pool party, I kept myself in check. I focused on Adrian. I helped their dad grill. I joked around with their mom. I wore the version of myself that everyone liked and trusted.
But then Hallie had to go and throw out the words “consensual non-consent,” and suddenly every line I’d drawn for myself dissipated into thin fucking air. She had no idea, of course, what those words would do to me when she uttered them the first time. What they'd unlock.
Well, she knewnow.
It was up to her to decide if she wanted to do anything about our mutual wicked interest or not. Only time would tell.
My phone buzzed on my bedside table, snapping me out of whatever trance I’d sunk into. Adrian. His name lit up the screen witha paragraph asking about our travel plans for the WWE thing that night. I had the night off, but I’d gotten us both tickets just to have something to do. I didn’t really follow wrestling, but Adrian had been into WWE since we were in middle school.
What followed his text was a five-minute back-and-forth about taking the Metro and loose follow-up plans. We laid everything out like we were cosplaying as responsible adults.
And as I rubbed my eyes and walked toward the bathroom door to take a shower, my phone buzzed once more over on the nightstand. I groaned, prepared to send him a thumbs-up emoji to indicate the conversation was over.
But it wasn’t Adrian.
