Chapter 2: Help Me Stepbro

Back in the bedroom, I dug through a drawer for something to wear that Mik’s memories or my bad decisions wouldn’t taint. I settled on booty shorts, the soft, tight, revealing kind I normally only wore when I intended to stay home, and the only possible witness to my ass and camel toe would be Amber. A worn, comfy top that dipped off one shoulder completed the look; I was not just going for comfort, but I also wanted to keep sharing my best features with the man who had so taken over my life. I pulled them on while he watched from the edge of the stripped-down disaster of my bed, towel slung low, looking entirely too satisfied with himself.

“No cat pajama pants,” he observed.

I snorted. “I save those for men I respect.”

“Brutal.”

“You ate dessert off my stomach. You can survive a textile slight.”

He caught me around the waist when I passed him and pulled me between his knees. We kissed, slower now, smiling into it, the kind of kiss that had no urgent destination and therefore felt more dangerous than the ones that did. His hands settled on the backs of my thighs just under the hem of the shorts.

“These are a problem,” he said.

“Everything I own is a problem according to you.”

“Correct.”

I rested my forehead against his and let myself laugh, the leftover giddiness from dinner rising back up through the sex-haze. The lasagna, the wine, the way he had not just heard me, but actually listened to what I said when I talked, the way I had listened back, the easy volley of our conversation had felt nothing like the Tyler I had spent three years rolling my eyes at across crowded rooms. That version of him, the one who remembered all the details, who asked follow-up questions, who looked at me over a glass like I was the point of the evening instead of a conquest with a pulse, kept sitting in my chest like a question I did not want to answer.

Where had that man been hiding for three years?

And what, exactly, was I supposed to do with what I had found?

“You’re thinking,” he said against my mouth.

“Occupational hazard. I have a brain. It’s annoying. I keep meaning to return it.”

He smiled and kissed the corner of my lips. “Keep it. I like it.”

That should not have landed as hard as it did.

We changed the sheets together because leaving the chocolate massacre for morning felt like an invitation to a crime-scene unit. He shook out a clean set while I stripped the stained ones into a pile, wrinkling my nose at a large wet patch where a clump of chocolate, my juices, and a dollop of his semen had joined together in a congealed mess as evidence of our earlier activities.

“I am never serving tiramisu again.”

“Liar.”

“Fine. I am never serving it on myself again.”

He glanced at me, eyes warm. “Also a liar.”

I threw a pillowcase at his head. He caught it. We got the bed roughly respectable. He offered to start on the dining room and kitchen while I got the sheets into the wash before they set into a permanent monument to my poor impulse control.

The laundry room was off the kitchen, small, slightly too warm, smelling like detergent and the faint ghost of whatever scented dryer sheets Amber was using this week. I shoved the chocolate-smeared sheets and pillowcases into the washer, added soap, started the cycle, and then, because my brain, as established, is a bit of a menace, I opened the dryer door and bent forward until the upper half of me was inside the empty drum.

“Can you come help me?” I called, voice echoing weirdly off the metal. “I need a man’s assistance with something.”

Footsteps. A pause.

“Beth.”

“Please help me, stepbro. I am stuck in the dryer.”

There was a beat of silence. Then Tyler burst out laughing, a real, startled sound that set me off too, my own laugh bouncing around inside the drum until I had to brace my hands on the sides. I started to pull myself out, still giggling, and backed directly into his legs. He was solid, warm. I felt his hands on my hips, guiding me so I would not crack my head on the door.