Claim Me, Alpha StepBrothers

Welcome Home Sis

~Olive~

I’m still standing there in Eric’s bathroom like a naked f*****g zombie, phone dead in my sweaty palm, when the door creaks open behind me.

“Babe?” Eric’s voice is thick, confused, and still dripping with that post-nut haze.

His pathetic little d**k is swinging half-hard between his legs as he steps in, all sweaty and hopeful. “What happened? Who was that? But that can wait tho. We’re not f*****g done. Come back to bed. I wanna eat your pussy.”

Eat my p***y.

I almost lose it right there. His version of eating p***y is him slobbering around like a thirsty golden retriever who missed the bowl, then giving up after thirty seconds to ask if I came. Newsflash: I never f*****g do.

“Not tonight, Eric,” I mutter, shoving past him to snatch my clothes off the floor. My tank top goes on first—no bra, n*****s still sore from his clumsy sucking. The shorts follow, clinging to skin that feels gross from his sweat and my total lack of wetness.

He follows me into the bedroom like a lost puppy, hands reaching. “Babe, seriously. Let me make you feel better. I’ll go down on you so good, I swear. You always love that shit.”

Love it? I want to scream. I’ve been faking orgasms for eleven goddamn months while he thinks he’s God’s gift to clits.

“Eric. My mom is marrying the man who got my dad killed. I’m not in the mood for your tongue right now. Or anything else.”

He stops dead, blinking like a confused Labrador. “Wait… Richard Hayes? That rich asshole your dad was always talking s**t about? For real?”

“Yeah. That one.” My hands won’t stop shaking as I grab my charger, keys, phone. Everything feels too loud, too bright, too much. “Wedding’s in three days. I’m leaving tomorrow morning. I have to pack. I have to… f**k, I don’t even know.”

“Tomorrow?” His voice cracks. He steps closer, that dopey smile trying to come back like he can fix this with d**k. “But we had the whole week planned. Babe, at least let me finish you off real quick. I’ll make it good this time, I promise..”

I whirl around so fast I almost knock him over. “Finish me? Eric, you’ve never even started. Your d**k is four inches of overconfident disappointment. I’ve been lying there counting ceiling tiles while you think you’re rearranging my guts. I’m done. I’m f*****g done tonight.”

“f**k you, b***h,” he spits, voice cracking with hurt and anger. “Your p***y was not all that good anyway.”

I laugh right in his face like Dad used to when the world f****d him over one too many times. “Go f**k your mama, Eric.”

The drive home was nothing but blurry streetlights, my own barking laughter turning into ugly, choking sobs that shake my whole chest.

***^

Three days later, I am in the back of a black town car with my mother and we are pulling through a wrought-iron gate that says HAYES in letters as tall as my whole goddamn body.

The driveway is half a mile long.

I am wearing red. Of course I am wearing red. I have been wearing red since I was sixteen and figured out it makes men look stupid and women look dangerous and I am about to be in a house full of both.

My mother is in cream. My mother is glowing. My mother has spent the last three days floating around our small yellow house like a girl, like a girl, like a woman with twelve years of widow grief finally cracking open, and every time she looks at me I have to swallow what I know and smile back.

I will tell her.

I will not tell her tonight.

I will not tell her until I have looked Richard Hayes in the eye and decided whether he knows who I am.

The car stops.

The driver opens the door.

The mansion in front of us is — okay. Okay, fine. Fine. It is a castle. It is a Gothic Revival nightmare with three wings and a fountain and ivy and twelve chimneys and somewhere in the back, I assume, a graveyard for the women who marry into this family.

The front door is bigger than my entire bedroom in Connecticut. There are gargoyles. There are actual gargoyles on this house. I want to laugh.

“Mom.”

“Yes, baby?”

“You look beautiful.”

She looks at me. Her eyes go wet.

“Olive.”

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, baby.”

We walk up the stone steps.

The front door opens before we reach it.

Richard Hayes is standing in the foyer. He is handsome. God help me, he is handsome, he is silver-haired and broad-shouldered and he has my mother’s smile pinned to his face like a brooch and when he sees her he does something with his mouth that I have not seen a man do at my mother in twelve years and I almost — almost — believe he loves her.

Almost.

“Diane.” He takes both her hands. He kisses her knuckles. “My God.

“Richard.” My mother’s voice is air. My mother’s voice is a girl’s voice. My mother is gone on this man and I am going to have to take this house apart with my bare hands without her ever knowing I did it.

Richard turns to me.

His eyes go to mine.

“Olive. At last.”

I take his hand. His skin is dry and warm. There is a heavy gold ring on his pinky and I know I do not know how I know but I know that the ring belonged to a man my father interviewed in 2007 and that man has been missing since 2008.

“Mr. Hayes.”

“Richard, please.

“Richard.”

“My boys are upstairs. They’re..”he glances at the staircase, and there is something in his voice, a small private amusement, like he is about to enjoy a joke I haven’t heard yet. “They’re very much looking forward to meeting you.”

I smile.

I smile with my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes and a very small knife somewhere underneath my tongue.

“I’m sure we’ll get along like a house on fire, Richard.”

Behind me, on the staircase, footsteps.

Two sets.

Coming down in unison.

My mother turns toward the sound, beaming. Richard turns. I am the last to turn because I am eighteen years old and I have rehearsed this exact moment for three nights and I have promised myself I will not flinch and I will not blink and I will not give them the satisfaction.

I turn.

Halfway down the staircase, in matching black shirts, two boys are stopped mid-step. Tall. Dark-haired. Identical jaws. Identical mouths. Not identical eyes — one set is winter-grey and locked on my face like he is watching a bomb go off in slow motion, and the other set is summer-green and crinkling at the corners because the boy they belong to is starting to smile.

Cassius Hayes has gone the color of milk.

Crew Hayes is grinning like Christmas just came early.

“Boys,” Richard says behind me, warm as a fireplace. “Come down. Meet your new sister.”

The grin on Crew Hayes’s face widens.

He takes the next stair.

“Hi, sis.”

Two words.

Two words and I am, for the first time in eighteen years on planet Earth, considering committing a homicide on a marble staircase in front of my own mother.

Let me explain something to you about Crew Hayes. You don’t know him yet. You will. By the end of this story you are going to know him so well you will dream about him and hate yourself in the morning.

But right now, this second, on this staircase, in this foyer, what you need to understand about Crew Hayes is this:

He says things the way other people touch things.

Hi, sis is not a greeting. Hi, sis is a hand on the back of my neck. Hi, sis is a thumb pressed under my jaw. Hi, sis is a man twice my size leaning down to my ear in a crowded room and saying something that makes every muscle in my body lock up while everyone around me thinks he just asked me to pass the salt.

I have known him for four seconds.

I already know this about him.

That is the kind of boy Crew Hayes is.

“Crew.”

“Don’t tease. Come down properly.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

He is not sorry. He takes the rest of the staircase two stairs at a time, easy, loose-jointed, the way boys move when they know every room they walk into is going to make space for them.

Black shirt. Black jeans. A gold chain at his throat that I bet — I bet — has a saint medallion on the end of it because boys like Crew Hayes always have saint medallions on the end of their chains, and the irony of that has never once occurred to them.

He stops three feet in front of me.

He is okay. Okay, Olive. Breathe. He is six-foot-three of problem.

“Olive.” He says my name like he’s tasting it.

“Welcome to Hayes House.”