Forbidden Mate: My Brother's Obsession

Chapter Four: Forced Proximity

The chemistry lab was quiet except for the low hum of the ventilation system and the occasional scratch of pen against paper, but to Lily, sitting on a stool beside Ethan with an entire semester's worth of assigned lab work stretching out ahead of her, the silence felt deafening.

"This is a joke," she muttered, mostly to herself, staring down at the syllabus Mr. Alden had handed out.

"I heard that," Ethan said, without looking up from the beaker he was measuring water into.

"Good. I wanted you to."

A faint, almost imperceptible curve tugged at the corner of his mouth before he smoothed it away. It was the first real reaction she'd gotten out of him in days not annoyance, not cold dismissal, just the barest flicker of something that looked, for half a second, like amusement.

"You could ask to switch partners," he said.

"I already tried. Mr. Alden said the pairings were final." She shot him a look. "Did you do that on purpose? Pull some kind of favor to end up stuck with me?"

Ethan actually laughed at that, short and surprised, like he hadn't expected her to accuse him of something so specific and, apparently, so far off base. "Trust me. If I wanted to avoid you, I wouldn't need to bribe a teacher to do it."

"Comforting," Lily said dryly, but some of the tension in her shoulders eased despite herself.

For the next twenty minutes, they worked in something almost resembling harmony, measuring, mixing, recording data and Lily found herself sneaking glances at him when his attention was on the experiment, trying to reconcile the boy quietly explaining molarity calculations with the one who'd pinned her against a locker and growled that she was his.

"Can I ask you something?" she said finally, keeping her voice low so the students at the next table wouldn't overhear.

Ethan's hands stilled over the beaker. "Depends what it is."

"Last week. In the hallway." She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. "You said I was yours. What did you mean by that?"

His jaw tightened, the easy warmth from a few minutes ago draining out of his expression like someone had flipped a switch. "I told you. I wasn't feeling well."

"You keep saying that, but I don't believe you."

"Then that's your problem, not mine."

The sharpness in his voice stung more than it should have, and Lily set down her pen, done trying to pry answers out of someone determined not to give them. "Fine. Forget it."

They finished the rest of the lab in silence, and Lily told herself she was relieved when the bell finally rang, freeing her from the suffocating tension of sitting beside him for another forty minutes. She gathered her things quickly, eager to escape, but as she reached for her bag, her fingers brushed against his where he'd set it down beside hers by mistake.

The contact lasted less than a second. It was enough.

Heat flooded up her arm exactly like it had in the hallway, sharp and electric, and this time Ethan didn't manage to hide his reaction at all. He froze completely, breath catching audibly, eyes snapping to hers with an intensity that made every other student in the room disappear from her awareness entirely.

"Ethan," she whispered, part warning, part question.

"Don't," he said, voice rough, low enough that only she could hear. "Don't say my name like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you don't know what it does to me."

The lab had mostly emptied by then, students filing out toward their next classes, leaving the two of them standing close together at the back table, the air between them charged with something Lily had no name for but felt in every nerve ending she possessed.

"I don't understand what's happening," she admitted, quieter now, some of her earlier anger giving way to something closer to fear. "One second you're pushing me away, and the next you're looking at me like...."

"Like what?" His voice had dropped even lower, and he'd moved closer without her quite noticing, close enough that she had to tilt her head back to keep looking at him.

"Like you want to eat me alive," she said, only half joking.

Something dark and hungry flashed behind his eyes. "That's closer to the truth than you'd like."

Her heart slammed against her ribs. "Ethan...."

"You need to walk away right now," he said, and his voice had gone strained, like every word cost him something. "Because if you don't, I'm not sure I'll be able to let you."

She should have listened. She knew that, even as her feet stayed rooted to the floor, even as her body leaned toward him instead of away, drawn by something instinctive and undeniable that had nothing to do with logic or self preservation.

The classroom door swung open behind them.

"Oh sorry, am I interrupting something?"

Lily jerked back so fast she nearly knocked over a stand of test tubes, spinning toward the voice to find Vivian standing in the doorway, arms crossed, eyes narrowed into thin, calculating slits as they moved between Lily and Ethan with an expression that made Lily's stomach drop straight through the floor.

"Nothing's going on," Lily said quickly, too quickly, hating how guilty her own voice sounded.

Vivian's mouth curved into a slow, dangerous smile, the kind of smile that promised nothing good was coming. "Interesting. Because from where I'm standing, it looked like you two were awfully close for step siblings."

Ethan's expression had gone carefully blank, but Lily could see the tension radiating off him, the way his hands had curled into fists at his sides.

"Vivian..." he started.

"Save it," Vivian said sweetly, already turning to leave, phone already lifting toward her ear as if she couldn't wait to make a call. "I think everyone at Ridgemont is going to find this very, very interesting."