Claim Me, Alpha StepBrothers

Stay Away From My Man

~Olive~

“Hi! Sorry..am I interrupting?” She’s still in Crew’s shirt, but she’s holding the pale-pink dress that was hanging on my closet…no, wait, a different one, a garment bag, her dress for the wedding, and a little makeup case, and she’s looking at me with this open, hopeful, friendly expression that I have absolutely no defense against. “Crew said you’d be getting ready up here and the other guest rooms are all full of his dad’s people, and I didn’t want to barge in but I have no one to get ready with and I thought — I don’t know, this is so forward, I’m sorry — I thought maybe we could get ready together? Since we’re gonna be, like, sort of family?”

I stare at her.

I stare at this beautiful, friendly, completely innocent girl standing in my doorway in my almost-stepbrother’s shirt, holding a garment bag, asking if we can do our makeup together like we’re at a sleepover, like we’re going to be friends, like she has not — without knowing it, without meaning to, without a single drop of malice in her big pretty eyes — just walked into the one room in this entire house where I was trying to convince myself I don’t care about her boyfriend.

And the absolute worst part?

She seems nice.

She seems genuinely, actually nice, and I cannot even hate her properly, and that, somehow, is the cruelest thing that has happened to me all day.

“…Sure,” I hear myself say. “Yeah. Come in.”

She lights up like I just gave her a present.

Olive, says the small voice at the back of my head as Vanessa bounces into the room and starts unzipping her garment bag and chattering about the garden and the flowers and how nervous she is to meet Crew’s dad properly, Olive, what are you doing.

I have no idea.

I have absolutely no idea.

But I’m about to spend the next ninety minutes doing my makeup next to my stepbrother’s girlfriend, and the string in my chest is humming, and somewhere down the hall Crew Hayes is getting dressed for his father’s wedding, and I am going to smile through every second of it.

“So how long have you and Crew been together?” I ask.

Casual. So casual. The most casual a human has ever been. Oscar-worthy casual.

“Oh my god, it’s complicated.” She laughs, dabbing something under her eyes. “On and off, like, two years? His family’s intense about who he, like, officially dates, so it’s been a whole thing, but “ she lowers her voice, conspiratorial, delighted, “— I think he’s finally serious. He invited me to the wedding, you know? Like, the family wedding. That’s huge for him.”

On and off two years.

That’s huge for him.

“You okay?” Vanessa’s watching me in the mirror.

“Totally.” I stand up. “Just..I should change.”

I take the pink dress into the bathroom because there is no force on earth that will make me undress in front of this girl, and I shimmy out of the sweatshirt and the shorts and into the soft blush silk, and I come back out fighting with the zipper at the back, twisting like a dog chasing its tail, and Vanessa goes “oh, here, let me,” and crosses the room and zips me up with quick, practiced fingers.

And then she steps back.

And she looks at me in the mirror.

And her face does this thing — sweet, still sweet, the smile never drops — but her eyes go down my body once, slow, head to toe, the way a woman measures another woman, and when they come back up there’s something underneath the sweet now, something cooler, and she tilts her head and says, light as anything:

“God, you’re so thick. Like in a good way! I’d kill for that.”

“…Thanks?”

“No, seriously.” She fluffs my hair, friendly, helpful, her hands in my curls like we’re best friends, her eyes on mine in the glass. “You should be careful with that dress, though. The little slit, the..”she gestures vaguely at all of me, “the everything. You know how guys are. You don’t want to be giving Crew the wrong idea your first week here.” A little laugh. A little squeeze of my shoulder. “I’m just looking out for you, babe. Trust me. You don’t wear short stuff around my man. He’s very visual.”

And there it is.

There’s the knife.

It’s so soft. It’s so well-wrapped. I’m just looking out for you. My man. You don’t wear short stuff around my man. She said it smiling. She said it while doing my hair. If you played the security footage with the sound off you’d think she was being kind.

But I heard it.

Stay away from him. I saw you for half a second in a kitchen and I clocked it too. He’s mine. Cover yourself up around mine.

And the funniest part — the genuinely funniest part, the part that almost makes me laugh out loud right there at the vanity is that twelve hours ago, in this exact house, her man had his mouth on my ear telling me he’d slide into my bedroom one of these nights and make me beg, while she was God-knows-where in his bed.

So.

You don’t wear short stuff around your man, Vanessa?

Sweetheart.

Your man told me to have wet dreams about him.

I don’t say it. Obviously I don’t say it.

“That’s so thoughtful of you, Vanessa. Honestly. You’re so sweet to warn me.” I hold her eyes in the mirror, my voice all sugar, my mother’s smile pinned to my face. “But don’t forget — he’s my stepbrother. Like, as of about four hours from now, legally. So.” I tilt my head, matching hers. “Trust me. The last thing on my mind is your man.”

It lands exactly the way I want it to.

Because here’s the thing about playing the stepsister card — it’s airtight. It’s unimpeachable. What is she going to do, accuse me of wanting my own stepbrother? At my mother’s wedding? She’d look insane. She’d look jealous and unhinged and like the kind of girlfriend who picks fights with little sisters in bathrooms, and Vanessa is far too smart and far too sweet to want to look like that.

So she has to take it.

She has to smile, and nod, and pretend that’s not exactly what she was warning me off of, and I watch her do the math behind her pretty eyes — she’s right, I can’t push this, she’s family now, I look crazy if I push this — and her smile gets just a little tighter at the corners, just a hair, just enough that I know I won that round.

“Oh my god, you’re so right.” She laughs, light, recovering fast, I’ll give her that. “Listen to me. Stepbrother. I’m being ridiculous. It’s just the wedding nerves, you know? Meeting his whole family, his dad” she shudders theatrically, “Richard terrifies me. I think I’m just, like, projecting all my crazy onto you. I’m so sorry, babe.”

“Don’t even worry about it.”

“You’re the best.”

She turns back to her lashes, satisfied, soothed, certain she’s smoothed it over. And maybe she has. Maybe Vanessa walks out of this room thinking we’re going to be friends, thinking she handled the new stepsister with grace, thinking the little flicker of something she saw in the kitchen this morning was nothing, just her imagination, just nerves.

And me?

I sit back down at the edge of the bed and I pick up my sad little tube of drugstore mascara and I look at myself in the mirror — pink dress, white flowers in my hair, my father’s eyes in my mother’s face and I think about the fact that I just stood here and let a girl warn me off a man who, twelve hours ago, told me to dream about him.

And I think: he didn’t tell her. Of course he didn’t tell her.

That’s the game, then.

Okay.

Okay, Crew.

I uncap the mascara. I lean toward the mirror. I do my lashes, slow and careful, while Vanessa hums beside me, and somewhere under my ribs the string is still humming too and I make myself a promise that has nothing to do with the bond and nothing to do with my plan and everything to do with the fact that I am Olive Marchetti and nobody, nobody, gets to make me feel small in a bedroom and call it kindness.

I am going to walk into that garden in this pink dress.

I am going to be the most gracious, most beautiful, most perfectly-behaved stepdaughter anyone has ever seen.

And Crew Hayes is going to spend his girlfriend’s favorite day of the year not able to take his eyes off me.

I’m not going to do a single thing to make it happen.

I’m just going to exist, and let the bond do the rest, and watch him lose his mind about it across a garden full of two hundred and forty people while the girl in the emerald dress holds his arm and has no idea.

Is it petty? Well duh.

It’s so petty.

Am I going to do it anyway? I’m absolutely going to do it anyway.

“Ready?” Vanessa stands, smoothing her dress.

I stand too. I smooth the blush-pink silk. I check myself one last time in the mirror, soft, sweet, innocent, a lie in a pretty dress and I smile at her, warm as sunshine.

“Ready.”