Page 8 of Pretend I'm Yours
“Yeah, yeah,” she says, gulping, and she gives him an awkward wave. “Came by to say hey and drop off the cake I made for…for….”
“For yourUncleKason,” he stresses, finally closing the door.
Though Arjun and I are roommates more out of convenience than anything else, since he goes out of town as often for work as I do, we’ve at least met each other’s families when they’ve dropped by to visit. And Corinne? She’s family, and I’m not so certain Arjun is aware that she isn’tbloodfamily. At this point, though, for as long as I’ve known her, does it even matter? Probably not to him. No wonder Arjun is trying so hard to rationalize what he saw and the man he thinks I am, else I’m a sicko.
“Mmhmm.” Corinne lifts her arm, as if checking an invisible wristwatch. “My, my, look at the time. Best get going.” She hurries to stuff her feet into her boots while I sit like a lump on the couch as my cock finally starts to shrink. She has her carkeys and phone in hand, turning the doorknob by the time I can finally stand without my dick tenting my pants.
“Let me walk you out,” I say, swerving around Arjun, whose lips are pinched together. In the parking lot of my small, twelve-unit apartment complex, I open the driver’s side door of Boyd’s 90’s Ford Ranger that now belongs to Corrine, but I crowd her before she can hop inside. “Listen, I, uh…what happened back there…” I hike my thumb over my shoulder toward my apartment on the second floor, unsure how to finish my sentence without lying.
“Just fun and games, I know that,” she says, laughing it off nervously. “But, um.” She fiddles with her keys. “Maybe we shouldn’t tell Uncle Declan.”
On that, we can agree. My stomach sinks when I think of what my best friend would do to me if he found out I’d touched our niece so inappropriately, and I step back. “It’ll be our secret.” I mime zippering my mouth shut.
She seems to perk up at that, ducking her head slightly as if shy. “Our little secret.” She lightly rests a hand on my chest and rolls up onto her tiptoes to kiss my cheek. “Goodnight, Uncle Kason. See you tomorrow.”
I’ll be seeing her much sooner when I jerk myself off to a video I took last summer on our week-long vacation at the lake. It’s one I couldn’t share with her or Declan, since I had zoomed in on Corinne’s breasts swaying side to side in her neon coral bikini as she was running away from Declan, who eventually caught her and carried her deeper into the water, both of them howling with laughter.
It’ll have to do.
How depressing.
Chapter 3
Declan
It’s been six whole weeks without sweet, confusing, and all too tempting Corinne’s soft hands on my back, her nails trailing across my scalp in the kind of way that, if I were a dog, I’d be kicking my leg over and over again. Scratch that, pun intended, I am a dog. A dirty, nasty kind gone sniffing after what he can never have. The worst kind.
As much as I hated to see Kason go, like so many times beforehand, it’s good that he went back to work a week ago, so I don’t have to spend as much time in such close proximity to Corinne like I did when we hung out with him. He’d have sensed something was wrong and pestered me to death until I spilled my secret—one of many.
I’m sorry, Boyd. I did my best to ignore your gorgeous daughter, and my best wasn’t good enough.I knew I’d failed the moment I started strutting around my dead buddy’s house without my shirt. Then, without my boxers. And then, after a time, without my thick sweatpants, swapping them out for the thinnest shorts I own, keeping one eye on Corinne at all times to see if she noticed…all the same as I’d confusingly done when I lived with Kason.
“Hello, anyone home?” Angie or Angela or Angola huffs, snapping her long manicured fingers in the smoky, busy bar, the floor disturbingly sticky. “Are you even listening, or am I talking to a brick wall?”
I bob my head at the woman who’s the complete opposite of Corrine—a short-stack with a mane of strawberry blonde curls—before signaling to a passing waitress in the kind of tight denim short-shorts I’d love to see Corinne wearing.
“What can I get you, sugar?” the waitress asks, pulling her notepad from her apron pocket that’s stained with what I hope is ketchup and not blood. It could be either in this place. Who knows?
“First off, drop the ‘sugar’,” I say. “Second, another shot.”
Great, now I have another pissed off woman glaring at me, clenching her teeth before adopting a somewhat strained and contemptuous customer service smile. “What kind?”
“Don’t care,” I answer with a burp that I’m a second too late to cover.
“You’re disgusting.” Ang, I decide on calling her, pushes back her chair and slings her purse—are those cartoon anchovies sewn onto it?—over her shoulder. “Word of advice, asshole, take your next unlucky date to a place that isn’t as rotten as your personality.”
I salute her off with a pang for wasting her time and being such a lousy date. I snort when I get a look at her expensive sneakers as she walks away, her ass not nearly as alluring as my sweet niece’s backside. It was never going to work out between Ang and me, anyway, not with my obsession over Corinne spiraling out of control.
The waitress—might as well call her Ang, too—doesn’t bat an eye at my date’s insult of this fine establishment or hasty exit, probably used to it. She silently counts my five empty shotglasses littering the also sticky tabletop. “I don’t think so, su—sir.”
“Fine, then. A pint of whatever you have on tap,” I say, glaring right back at Second-Ang. I could have already downed another shot in the time it’s taken for her to judge me and find me lacking, my hair sweaty beneath my cowboy hat in the stifling heat of the bar.
“Sure,” she says with a scowl. Except she brings me a tall glass of water that I suspect was dunked in a toilet instead of filled from the tap behind the bar. She also slaps down my bill, having closed out my tab.
“What’s this?” I ask, tapping the automatic tip she’s tacked onto the total with the—dammit, what is it with this place?—sticky pen. “Thirty percent?”
“That’s called the Asshole Gratuity,” she says with a smirk. “Now, sign it.”
Fuck it. I scrawl my name. I’ve stayed away from the house long enough that Corinne should already be asleep, and I’m ready to get home. I shouldn’t, since I’m only going to torture myself by refusing to masturbate to the memory of my niece’s soft skin and budding nipples, daydreaming of what else I could have done to her the last time I let her massage my back if she really were my wife. The answer iseverything, which is why I have to stay far away from her now.
