SWOLLEN: A Secret Baby Sports Romance (34 page)

“
Can’t.”

I mouth the word slowly, unable to stop smiling myself.

Tilly has to concentrate hard not to begin to laugh.

“
Ass-hole”, she mouths back. “Fucking ass-hole.”

We stay like that for a while, me sat down, Tilly leaned against the wall, both of us trying to catch our breath while laughter fights to take it away from us. When we’ve settled down enough and the time seems right, we make our way over to the bed.

Tilly doesn’t even bother pulling her mattress out, instead she just folds down on top of it, making the bed her own.

It’s an invitation too good to refuse.

I slide in alongside her, pull her towards me and pull the duvet up over us.

“
We’ll sort out the logistics in the morning.”

“
Fucking A to that.”

Five.

Tilly

I’ve experienced this moment before. It’s a moment where you wake up and for a millisecond you don’t know where you are but it doesn’t matter. You’re in a bed and you’ve been sleeping, and you feel great, you know all that, but you don’t know where you are, until it hits you, BAM! right in the face. You’re in your stepbrother’s bed, you’re naked, and those things that you remember doing the night before, that wasn’t just a particularly vivid dream, that actually happened for real.

Fuck.

A really good fuck.

A fuck better than any other.

Rain pelts so hard against the window I feel like it’s going to break through and bring the whole house down. I’m surprised it hasn’t woken me earlier, but then I wasn’t exactly ready to get up either.

“
There she is, miss sleepy head.”

Landon is already at the breakfast table, halfway through his toast. He smiles at me when I sit down, a gaze of conspiratorial delight shared between us both, a guilty secret I hope isn’t evident on either of us. What if I smell of him still? What if Mom really did hear us last night when she chose the most inopportune moment of any to get up and relieve herself? What if this healthy glow that feels like warm water coursing through my veins is so obvious it can mean only one thing?

“
We thought you were going to sleep on through until the afternoon. You must have been really exhausted.”

Does she know? Is that why she’s looking at me like that, a broad smile carved across her face, a glint of recognition in her eye. Has Landon told her? Are they all waiting for me to confess my sins?

“
She was out like a light.”

Landon winks at me when he says that, but he does it when Mom’s back is turned, when Marvin has returned his attention to one of his magazines and the coast is clear enough to risk it. The glare I give him back is the best I can do to warn him. We are lucky we didn’t get caught. Screwing your stepsister up against the wall is bad enough, but doing it in the same tiny space that your parents are living in as well? That’s like cooking on a campfire while wearing an apron soaked in gas.

I decide to change the subject. The rain hasn’t failed to catch my attention and if it continues, which it looks likely to, it completely fucks up our plans for today. Bad weather means a day inside with the family playing board games and chatting instead of a day outside with Landon swimming naked in a clear blue pool, and I don’t know whether I can cope with that and then another night of noiseless fucking to relieve ourselves of the tension, as incredible as it was. Holding in a multiple orgasm, when all you want to do is scream to let it all out, is like trying to hold down a thousand hiccups. I am so surprised we managed it, and I have no idea whether we’ll be able to do it again. I guess, if this continues, we’ll have to. It isn’t ideal, but it’s clearly better than not doing it at all, and both of us now know that’s not even an option. I can barely resist him, and he knows that now. I managed for the rest of the evening yesterday, but it would have been much shorter than that if Marvin hadn’t made a miraculous recovery and turned up to ruin things.  

“
It’s raining.”

“
It’s been raining all night, Tilly. You must have slept through it.”

I can barely see the bottom of the garden, and the decking is completely soaked through. Where the football smashed through the glass, the carton we used to fix it has gone soggy, leaving a leaked pool of water on the ground underneath it. Marvin’s put a bucket down but it’s not really doing anything. This is shit.  

“
It doesn’t look like it’s going to stop.”

I can barely hide the genuine disappointment in my voice. I don’t want to feed Landon’s ego any more than I already have, but I was looking forward to today. I was looking forward to getting to know him more, without Mom and Marvin hanging around like gatecrashers at a private party. It’s good to spend time as a family, but there is stuff I want to talk to Landon about that I can’t do with these two around. We haven’t even talked about what happened last night, aside from a few whispers of agreement about how much we enjoyed it, and I kind of want to give it the attention that it deserves, principally because I want to relive it again, every single perfect moment of it.

After that, when all the talking’s done, and I’m satisfied we are on the same page, or at least I’m satisfied that Landon understands that I’m not giving in to him too easily, that he has to work for what we are sharing and that every single connection like the one last night has special importance to me, we can fuck each other’s brains out, and I can scream into the air when I’m done.

“
Looks like you might have to leave the lake trip for another day.”

“
We could go anyway.”

“
In this weather? Don’t be silly, Tilly. How are you going to sunbathe and swim with the rain pelting down around you?”

“
We could just go for a drive.”

And fuck in the car.

“
Wait for a while and see if it clears up. I’m sure Landon doesn’t want to drive through this mess.”

“
It is coming down pretty hard, Tilly. I mean if we went out in this, it would be really hard to see where we were going. It’s a big difference to the weather we had yesterday. A huge difference.”

I don’t even need to tell you which words Landon was emphasizing then, his gaze never once dropping from mine.

Mom nods, completely clueless as to what he’s referring to. “There you go, listen to your stepbrother. It ought to change later on.”

I’m reminded again of the label that has been thrust upon us, and I find myself wondering whether it makes any difference at all. Last night was better than anything I could have ever expected, perhaps as a combination of the situation we found ourselves in, but largely, and most importantly, because I experienced a side of Landon I never thought existed.

I don’t overestimate when I talk about how he made me feel, how he makes me feel in general, both physically and emotionally. That orgasm, all of those orgasms, from both of the times we have fucked have just deepened and deepened in intensity. When I look at him now, across the table when we eat, sideways when I’m stuffed into the sofa next to him, so close our noses are touching, I don’t want to look away, and I don’t want to think about anything else. And what I see in Landon, and I hope for my own sake that I’m not misunderstanding him, is the same thing coming right back at me.

We both talk a good game, Landon especially, and we’ve both been masking true meaning with cleverly constructed sub text, both when alone and with Mom and Marvin, but I feel like we are both intelligent enough to understand what it is we really mean and want from each other, even if we are only saying it indirectly, or not even saying it at all.

The real test will come when the vacation is over, Landon gets into his car and Mom, Marvin and I get into ours, and we all leave here and return to our normal lives, which is why getting as much time alone with Landon while I can is important. I have a feeling he thinks I want to dig my claws into him and never let go, but it’s not like that, I just want to entertain that as a possibility, while making it clear to him that if he wants us to fuck, he does so with the same open minded attitude. I’m not here as some kind of sexual tension reliever, even if the sex is so good it might even justify it, and i’m not going to allow him to treat me as such, which is why I probably should have tried a little bit harder to resist him last night.

I’m only human though, I was extremely horny, and this is Landon Maddox, my secret guilty crush, even though I would never tell him I thought it.

The morning passes and the rain continues, showing no signs of any intention to stop. I spend large parts of it looking forlornly out of the window at mist rising off the sodden earth or tree tops swaying in the accompanying wind. Mom busies herself in a way that she has perfected, while Marvin, never one to say much anyway, plods slowly through a nature magazine, or dozes lightly, head tilted back, mouth open.

I want to encourage Landon to join me in the bedroom, just so we can be alone together, but every time I think i’ve found out a way to do it without sounding like we are doing something suspicious, I can’t seem to convince myself it’ll work and end up not saying anything at all.

It doesn’t seem right, anyway. Landon and I in the bedroom together with the door closed. What would we be doing? I suppose we could watch one of the films I’ve brought, but why not watch it out here? We could play a board game, but again, why would we need to do it privately? Even if we did manage to sneak off behind a closed door, we still wouldn’t be able to talk openly.

Each time I look at him, I feel my insides dancing about with nervous excitement. Any more butterflies and I’d have to open a conservatory. Just with a quick glance, I can’t help but tell him I need him, and he knows it too. I can’t seem to concentrate on anything else. I can’t seem to go five minutes without looking over, as though I have to keep checking I haven’t somehow missed my chance with him, that he’s still thinking the same or he hasn’t just disappeared entirely.

Just after lunch, when we are all sat in the living room and I’ve read the same paragraph in my book about a hundred times because I just can’t think about anything else but Landon, and the rain, if anything, is coming down even harder than it was this morning, which is souring my mood even further, he gets up to go to the bathroom.

“
Where I you going?” I say, accusingly, without even thinking about how inappropriate it is, and that asshole comes back with,

“
The bathroom, is that alright, Tilly? I mean, you can join me if you want.”

That’s embarrassing. I have to laugh it off, even though I know I’m going red, but it’s a mistake I’d love to have a chance at rectifying, not because it reveals to Mom and Marvin anything about what Landon and I have been up to, but simply because it confirms to Landon, if there were any doubt remaining, exactly what he’s been accusing me of being unable to admit. That I can’t resist him, no matter what I say, I can’t hold myself back.

“
It’s not going to stop just because you’re staring at it.”

“
It might.”

“
Why don’t you find something useful to do?”

“
Like what?”

“
You could art?”

“
That’s not a verb, Landon. You don’t just art.”

“
Sculpt then, whatever. You look like you need to do something with your hands.”

“
I haven’t got my materials with me, and I’m not in the right mood anyway. I wish the decking had a veranda, at least we could go out then. It’s not good to be cooped up inside.”

“
Plenty of board games.”

“
We could play twister.”

Trust Landon to think of the game with the highest chance of physical contact.

“
I’m not sure if they’ve got twister, but you could take a look.”

Trust Mom to see the innocence in that suggestion. Twister has only ever been played to get closer to someone you like, she can’t be that naive not to realize it.

“
Isn’t anyone else bored?”

“
Yep.”

Landon puts his hand up.

“
Me too.”

I flop down on the couch next to him, unable to keep myself away from him any longer. I know there’s another seat available, and I barely fit into this one, but I’m going to sit here anyway, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?

“
I’m so bored my muscles are seizing up.”

“
I bet it’s not raining at the lake.”

“
You’re that desperate to go, huh?”

Landon wouldn’t be able to wipe that smug grin off his face even if it were raining inside the house.

“
No.”

“
Doesn’t sound like it to me.”

“
We could check.”

Does that sound desperate? Wanting to go to the lake doesn’t mean I automatically want to fuck him. I mean, he doesn’t know that at least.