Hybrid Marked by Her Stepbrother

Party Escape: Part 4

We stand there. Breathing. Coming down. The muted thump of bass from the main room feels miles away.

She turns to face me. Her hair is a wreck, curls sticking to her damp neck and temples. Her lipstick is mostly gone, her eyes bright and slightly unfocused. A satisfied smile plays on her lips, small and private and entirely genuine.

“That was...” She pauses, like she’s searching for a word big enough. “...amazing.”

I smirk. It’s the easiest expression I’ve managed all night. I wipe my hand on my jeans—a gesture that’s half practicality, half performance—and meet her eyes.

“Yeah. You weren’t bad yourself.”

The casual exchange is armour. We both know it. What happened in this hallway was nowhere near the territory of “not bad,” but acknowledging that would mean acknowledging something else—something neither of us signed up for when we locked eyes across a crowded living room an hour ago.

So we put the armour on. She straightens her skirt. I buckle my belt. We become, again, the people we were before—the cocky athlete, the head cheerleader—and the hallway becomes just a hallway, and the night goes on.

We fix ourselves like people assembling costumes. She smooths her skirt, tucks her hair behind her ears, reapplies a layer of lipstick from a compact she produces from somewhere miraculous. I straighten my t-shirt, run a hand through my hair, and try not to look like a guy who just had his brains f****d out against a hallway wall. We exchange a look that contains approximately zero percent of the intensity we just shared, and it’s perfect. Exactly the distance we both need.

Then we slip back into the main room, and the noise hits us like a warm wave.

The music has shifted to something slower, heavier on the bass, and the crowd has condensed into a swaying mass near the center of the floor. Bodies everywhere, heat rising, the particular smell of a party that’s been going long enough to develop its own ecosystem. We separate without discussion—she rejoins her circle of friends near the kitchen, and I drift toward the keg, where the red cups are still flowing and the conversation has devolved into the comfortable nonsense of drunk guys who have run out of things to say.

I catch Jace’s eye across the room. He’s leaning against the door frame, cup in hand, watching the dance floor with the calculated disinterest of someone who’s already decided which girl he’s taking home. When he sees me, his eyebrow lifts—a question—and I give him a single nod. Nothing more. Nothing needed.

He raises his cup in a silent toast. I return it with my own, and whatever message passes between us is encoded in the particular language of male friendship: approval, acknowledgment, the unspoken understanding that we’ve both had the kind of night we came for.

The alcohol is still flowing. The night is still young, or young enough. The memory of what just happened in that hallway buzzes through my veins like something sweet and dangerous, a drug with no comedown. Every time I move, I feel the slight ache in my thighs, the ghost of her nails on my shoulders, the particular satisfaction of a body that has been thoroughly used and is better for it.

The weight lifts. Not all the way—nothing lifts all the way—but enough that I can breathe without feeling the press of it against my ribs. The stepmother. The stepsister. The empty spaces in my father’s life that are about to be filled by strangers. All of it recedes, pushed to the edges of my consciousness by the raw, animal fact of what I just did and who I just did it with.

For now, I am just a guy at a party. A cocky athlete with grass stains on his sneakers and a smirk that comes easy. A guy who just got laid by the head cheerleader in a hallway while fifty people danced twenty feet away and nobody noticed. A guy whose problems, for approximately the next several hours, do not exist.

I intend to enjoy every second of it.

I wake up with my face buried in my pillow and the distinct sensation that someone has replaced my brain with hot sand.

My head pounds. Not the gentle throb of mild dehydration but the full, orchestral headache of a night that involved at least one red cup too many. My mouth is so dry my tongue feels like it’s been vacuum-sealed. My shirt is twisted around my torso, half-off, one sleeve still somehow attached to my arm while the rest bunches under my armpit like a sad accordion. I don’t remember taking it off. I don’t remember much of anything after the second bottle made its appearance, which means the walk home is a blank space in my mental calendar, and blank spaces after parties are never good news.

I reach for my phone without opening my eyes. The screen light burns through my eyelids like a solar flare, and when I force myself to look, the numbers glare back: 11:05.

AM.

I sit up so fast the room tilts. Training starts at six. Breakfast at seven. First period at eight-fifteen. I have missed all of them, in that order, with a thoroughness that suggests I wasn’t just late—I was absent. Entirely. Completely. The kind of absence that gets noted, reported, and eventually delivered to my father’s desk in the form of a phone call from the school secretary, who has his number memorised because this is not the first time.

Dad is going to kill me. Not metaphorically. Actually murder me, hide the body somewhere the pack won’t find it, and tell everyone I ran away to join a circus.

I groan, dragging myself to the edge of the bed. My temples pulse with each heartbeat, and I press the heels of my hands against them like I’m trying to hold my skull together. The room smells like sweat and stale alcohol and the particular funk of a teenager who fell into bed without showering. I should stand up. I should find aspirin. I should brush my teeth and drink water and maybe consider the possibility that I am, in fact, a colossal i***t.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

The sound cracks through my bedroom door like gunfire. My head snaps up, and the motion sends a fresh bolt of pain through my temples that makes me see stars.

“Aidan.” The voice on the other side is sharp, irritated, and unmistakably Rubik’s. “Your father wants you at the front door. To greet the new Luna and her daughter.”

The words land in the centre of my chest and sit there, heavy and cold.

New Luna. Her daughter.

They’re here. Now. This morning, while I was busy not existing, they arrived. They walked through the front door of my house, and my father greeted them, and I was nowhere to be seen because I was passed out in my bed with a hangover and the taste of someone else’s p***y still on my tongue.

Perfect. Just perfect.

I close my eyes. The darkness behind my lids offers no solutions, no reprieve, just the same three facts repeating in a loop I can’t turn off: I am not ready. I am not sober. I am not calm.

But I am out of time.