LUST (A STEPBROTHER ROMANCE)

I watched the shadows playing across his face. He suddenly looked older and farther away, not the twenty-something playboy with a smart mouth and no responsibilities. This was a facet I’d never seen before. It was like looking up at the dark side of the moon.

“But… I don’t know… When you broke things off with me things changed. I started to spend more time at the office. I started to like it. People looked up to me, Sandra. They wanted my advice. My ‘wisdom.’ I never wanted to be some big shot CEO, but once I was in the chair, I didn’t want to give it up… In a way, you gave me that,” Nathan trailed off, staring down at his fork. I kept silent, and he continued.

“When the head of our logistics division coordinated a meeting with Peter Wallace, I agreed, knowing full well who he was. He was offering us an obscene amount of money to transport those shipping containers. When he said it wasn’t anything illegal, I believed him, not because I actually thought he was telling the truth, but because I didn’t care if he was or not. I’d hired people to worry about that kind of thing, and they were all in agreement that the contract was on the level. Mr. Wallace has never been convicted of a crime—you know that. And he does plenty of legal shipping. I didn’t even consider that my advisors might be lying to me. I had no idea it’d be…”

He hesitated, lips parting as he struggled with the word.

“People. Women. Children…”

“But you knew?” I asked him, horror knotting in my stomach. “You knew what he was bringing into the city was illegal, and you let him do it?”

Nathan nodded slowly. “I suspected. Maybe… But everyone on the board wanted to take the contract. A substantial part of my inheritance is tied to maintaining my company. They could’ve voted me out if I didn’t do something, and once I lost the reigns, there was nothing stopping them from carving the whole damn company up for themselves. That would mean…”

“No more fancy title, no more office?” I finished for him. “You would’ve had nothing except for your things, your fancy home, your garage full of expensive cars, and the hundreds of millions of dollars you probably have stashed away in the Cayman Islands. Wasn’t that enough? You’re telling me you secured a job title on the backs of those young women and girls.”

“I didn’t know,” he insisted.

“Because you didn’t want to know!” I replied, gripping the edge of the table so hard my knuckles turned white. I could feel the smoke of anger swirling in my lungs, tightening my chest as it rose into my throat and spilled out of my mouth. “You just wanted the money! You wanted the power! If you’d bothered to look, you would’ve seen their faces. But you couldn’t have that, could you? You couldn’t have that kind of guilt on your head!”

Nathan sat back, folding his arms and looking away from me. “You’re wrong. I never, not for one second, considered there might be people in that container. Look, my family, my whole company has a history of looking the other way. My father didn’t build a huge mansion in Miami on the back of Chinese imports—he built the foundation of this company on cocaine smuggling. Sure, he went ‘legit’ by the Nineties, but that was on paper, Sandra. There were people putting pressure on me to keep quiet and maintain business as usual. Maybe I wanted to make everything legal, but it was easier to let other people deal with the dirty parts of the business. I chose to look the other way and play stupid. That’s on me.”

“We’re talking about lives here, Nathan,” I whispered. “Not drugs. Not guns. People.”

“If I had known… I would have done the right thing. That’s why I came to the police. Because when I heard what he’d been doing… When I heard about that container they shoved off into the ocean… I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d had something to do with it. If I had, and I let that asshole walk free, I couldn’t have lived with myself.”

I shook my head, and he blinked back tears. “Christ, Sandra… Haven’t you ever made a mistake in your life? One that you could’ve avoided if only you hadn’t looked the other way?”

The question hit me like a kick to the chest. My words dried up in my throat and I looked away from him, staring at the dingy table and my fingernails pressing into it. I closed my eyes, letting the whirlwind inside me die down.

Haven’t you ever made a mistake?

“Yeah,” I said finally, nearly choking on the word. “A long time ago, before I knew better. Before I… became a cop. I didn’t see what was happening around me because I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe in a pretty little lie, and it cost my sister her life.” My stomach turned. “I guess that makes me just as bad as you.”

Nathan’s expression softened. “What happened?”

It wasn’t a story I told often—or ever, if I could avoid it. But there was no backing out of this conversation now, not with the tidal wave of my shame brimming in my eyes and on my lips. I had to tell him.

“I got emancipated when I was seventeen,” I said at last, dropping my hands into my lap to keep from breaking my nails on the wooden table. “I took custody of my sister, Jenny. Our mother was a junkie, in and out of prison all the time, and after our aunt died… Well, it was just the two of us. I thought I had my shit together. I thought that I was the best thing for her. I thought that she’d see me working hard and playing by the rules and she’d want that for herself, too. I refused to believe that the fifteen years she’d spent watching our mom shoot up and smoke meth would tempt her to do the same thing. She’s a good girl, I told myself. She’d never do that shit.”

Nathan had put his fork down, just listening intently.

“So when Jenny started going to parties and not coming back for a few days, I told myself she was just troubled and going through some hard times. When I saw track marks in her arm, I told myself that there had to be some other kind of explanation, though I never even bothered to come up with one. When she lost so much weight that she was sometimes too weak to walk, I tried to ignore it all.”

“That’s not your fault,” Nathan offered, but I continued despite his petty attempt to stem the flow of words.

“And when she ODed in her room while I was cooking dinner? You’re trying to tell me that wasn’t my fault? That was when I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. That was when I finally had to look at her and see what she really was, what she had been for damn near a year. I finally had to see her bruises, the punctures in her arm and between her toes, the way her body had so obviously been used by the men supplying her with the shit that took her life. But by then it was too late, wasn’t it? I’d already put her in the ground with all the lies I told myself. I may as well have been holding the needle.”

I went quiet for a moment, the memories drifting through my head, taking a little piece of myself with them. “Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault.”

A silence fell between us, uncomfortable and heavy.

“So, yeah,” I whispered, my voice hoarse and quavering. “Yeah, I get it. Sometimes we don’t want to see the truth, because it would mean we’re the monsters. And that’s not an easy thing to look in the mirror and accept.”

“But we can’t change the past,” Nathan said, his voice warm and tender. “We can’t go back in time and undo the damage we caused with our willful ignorance. The only thing we can do is…”

“Change the future,” I finished for him. “Yeah. I know. But it doesn’t make it better.”

“Not if you don’t let it,” he said. “Sandra… what I did… what I didn’t do… that’s going to take a long time for me to forgive. And I’ll work through it, someday. But what happened to you and your sister? That was a lifetime ago. That’s something you’ve paid for time and time again. I can see it in your eyes. Haven’t you punished yourself enough? What would Jenny say?”

“Jenny’s dead,” I said. Even though it had been years, tears sprang to my eyes like I’d lost her just yesterday. “She can’t say anything.”

“But you can,” he insisted, standing up from the table and walking to my side. He knelt down on the ground and too

k both my hands in his, and I gasped audibly. “You can tell yourself you’re forgiven. You can stop telling yourself that you’re worthless and to blame. You can tell yourself it’s time to move on and that you’ll never make the same mistakes again. And you can tell yourself that you’ll always be there for young people like Jenny who got lost along the way, and that you’ll use your position in the police department to offer them a way out.”

I looked down at our hands, my vision blurred by my sorrow. This was the first time since I’d known him that Nathaniel Hale took the time to ask me about my past. It was the first time I genuinely believed he was listening to me. Staring at our entwined fingers I just wanted to cry. It was beautiful.

“Doesn’t that seem a hell of a lot more fair to you than spending your whole life as a prisoner of your own guilt? And doesn’t that seem more fair to the lives you could save by doing so?”

I stared into his eyes, into those gold-green gems glittering in the candlelight. I was looking for the lie, for the thing that would tell me he wasn’t sincere. I didn’t believe anybody could know what I did and tell me to forgive myself. I didn’t believe anyone could look at me the way he was looking at me right now and really mean it.

But I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find anything but honesty and acceptance. This was a man I’d known only as a sexual fling and a childish asshole, but now, looking into his eyes, I felt like we were one and the same. We were both looking for redemption. What if we’d found it in each other?

“You deserve better than this,” he said to me, and I couldn’t help it; I threw my arms around his neck, and without giving myself even a millisecond to reconsider, I kissed him as hard as I could.

Our lips crashed together, but somehow fit as perfectly as they always did. I felt fireworks go off in my chest and stars burst behind my closed eyelids. I felt the heat of his body pressed against mine, the scorching ferocity of his mouth blending with my own, his arms moving around my waist to cradle me, comfort me, make me whole again.

As his strong fingers clutched at my back, I pulled away, trembling violently. I looked again into his hazy, lust-filled eyes. His jaw was clenched as he searched my face, looking very much like a man doing his best to hold his desires back.