Crossing the Line: My Archrival's Brother

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I slept with my archrival's little brother.

Her precious, off-limits, just-turned-eighteen little brother. The one she has guarded like a national treasure since the day he was born.

Turns out the sky really can fall. It happens the second you open your eyes.

He was still asleep beside me, one arm thrown over his face, looking exactly like the sweet, harmless boy the whole campus thinks he is. My stomach went over a cliff.

I was already easing the sheet back, one foot hunting for the floor, when an arm hooked around my waist and reeled me into a very warm, very solid chest.

His breath moved across my ear, slow.

"Not even going to take responsibility for me?" he murmured.

"Be my birthday present. I did just turn legal."

Chapter 1

I reached for my phone. My hand landed on warm, bare skin instead.

For one merciful second my brain offered no explanation. Then last night arrived all at once, like a dropped tray.

I sat up so fast the room tilted.

There was a boy in my bed. Broad shoulders. The sheet riding low and doing me no favors. One arm slung over his eyes like he had nowhere to be for a year.

I knew that face. I had watched that face grow up.

I slept with Margot's little brother.

Every word in that sentence was its own small disaster. I picked them up one at a time, set them down, and each one landed worse than the last.

Fine. Up. Out. Clothes, door, gone, never speak of it again.

I swung my legs off the mattress and immediately regretted being alive. Everything below the waist filed a formal complaint.

I hissed through my teeth. What did they feed this kid.

The floor was a crime scene of clothing, a trail of it from the door to the bed like we'd been racing. I bent down and fished out my bra.

Two of the clasps had popped clean off.

I had bought that bra eleven days ago.

I was still glaring at the evidence, ranking this somewhere near the top of my all-time worst decisions, when an arm slid around my waist and tucked me back against a bare chest.

"Morning." His voice came rough with sleep and far too pleased with itself.

I drove an elbow back. He caught my hand out of the air and laced his fingers through mine like we'd been doing it for years.

My throat refused to produce a single word.

His chin dropped into the curve of my neck. He spotted the wrecked bra still hanging from my other hand, and I felt him smile against my skin.

"Not going to take responsibility for me?" A beat. "Be my birthday present."

That voice again. It went all the way down, and I hated that it did.

I came back online, flattened both palms on his chest, and shoved.

He let me. Rocked back onto his hands, shook the hair out of his eyes, and looked up at me through it. Slow. Dark. Not one ounce of sweet in it.

"Wren." He said my name like he was tasting it.

I needed that gone. All of it.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about sleeping with your archrival's brother. There is no version of the morning after that counts as a win.

Margot and I had been trying to end each other since we were kids. Top scores, all-nighters to steal them back, races into the deep end neither of us could swim. I liked a guy once. She decided she liked him too, won him, and told me later he was "fine."

And now I had gone and slept with the one person on the planet she would actually bury me for.

The reckless little thrill of that landed somewhere low and warm. No point lying about it. But it came stapled to Callum, which meant it came with a headache, and the headache had a name, and the name was Margot.

I got dressed with the brisk competence of a girl who did this all the time. I did not do this. Not once. Not with anyone.

"Let's just pretend it didn't happen," I said.

Shrink it down, move on. We were both adults. And let's be honest: I wasn't the one walking away owing anybody anything.

The sweet, harmless thing he did with his face was gone.

Something cooler had moved in behind his eyes. Something that had very clearly not agreed to be forgotten.

He frowned. The sweet kid the whole campus swears by sat up, slow, and whatever was coming next, it wasn't going to be a request.

Chapter 2

When it rains, it finds the one hole in your roof.

I had my hand on the door when I heard her voice on the other side of it.

"He drank a lot last night. I brought him something for the hangover."

Margot.

The lock beeped. The handle dropped.

I didn't think. I threw my whole body against the door and slammed it shut in my own archrival's face.

A pause. Then, muffled and baffled. "...Callum?"

My heart was trying to leave through my ribs.

I kept one shoulder jammed against the door and spun toward the boy still in the bed, mouthing the words as hard as a face can mouth anything. Hurry. Up. It's Margot.

He tilted his head. Looked at me like I was a mildly interesting painting.

"What was that?" he said. Out loud. At full volume.

I died. Quietly, internally, against a hotel door.

"Callum? What's going on in there?" Margot, sharper now.

I waved both hands at him in a frenzy, every muscle in my face screaming come here.

He got up. He pulled on a pair of pants. Then he crossed the room at the pace of a man with absolutely nowhere to be, like he was taking in a museum.

I could have killed him. I reached out and pinched him hard in the side.

"Ow." He didn't even flinch properly. He just leaned in and boxed me against the door with one arm.

"Tell her not to come in," I hissed.

He caught my hand. My very sweaty, very panicked hand.

"Sis," he called out, pleasant as anything. "I'm not dressed."

"Mom told me to drop off the hangover stuff," Margot said. "You okay?"

I tried to pull my hand back. He wouldn't let me. He lifted it to his mouth instead and pressed a slow kiss to my knuckles.

My knees actually buffered.

"I'm fine," he said, easy, like a boy who had never done a single bad thing in his life. "Gonna sleep a little more."

I was one wrong breath from a cardiac event. He sounded like he was ordering room service.

It took everything Margot had, apparently, to give up and go. The second her footsteps faded, I rounded on him.

"You did that on purpose."

He raised his brows and pulled a face like I'd wounded him. "How could you think that. I genuinely can't read lips."

Sure. And I genuinely couldn't read the smirk he wasn't bothering to hide.

I ground my back teeth and decided he wasn't worth the energy.

"Last night didn't happen," I said. "We go back to normal. You're off-limits."

I went to push past him.

He caught me around the waist and pulled me flush against his bare chest. Heat rolled off him in a steady current. My breath broke against his skin.

He dropped his head, and the smile was right there in his voice.

"Is there a setting past 'no distance'? Because I'm pretty sure this is it."

I clenched my jaw. "Don't push your luck."

He frowned. Those cool, dark eyes went soft at the edges, almost wounded.

"I just want to be something to you," he said. "A name for it. Anything."

Excuse me?

Let's get one thing straight. I was the one who got slept with here.

His arm loosened a fraction. He looked at me, steady. "You started it last night. I even stopped to ask if you'd regret it."

His lashes lowered. "Do you? Regret it?"

I dragged in a breath and shoved him back a step.

"It was one night. We're both adults. Forget it."

I said it cold and flat, the voice of a girl who'd left a trail of wreckage across three states.

I had never done this before in my life.

I pulled the door open and walked out without looking back, one hand pressed to the small of my aching back.

The soreness rolled back in with a vengeance.

Honestly. Where does a teenager get that kind of stamina.

"Wren?"

Someone said my name at the hotel entrance.

I turned, still holding my back.

I'm so dead.

Margot.

Chapter 3

Maybe it was the guilt of having just slept with her brother, but I couldn't find my usual fighting stance.

Margot clocked the silence and came over, puzzled. She took one look at how I was standing and opened her mouth to mock me. Then she froze. Her eyes snagged on my neck.

"Wren. Which random guy did you go home with?"

I said nothing.

Funny story. The random guy is your precious baby brother.

I let the opening to ruin her day slide right past me. The last thing I needed was anyone knowing I'd slept with Callum.

I dredged up a fake smile. "Guess."

She rolled her eyes. Before she could land a jab, Callum walked out behind her.

"Margot." Flat. Cool. Nothing like the voice from the bed.

He stood there looking immaculate and untouchable, and my traitor brain replayed the version of him from a few hours ago. The heat of his mouth at my throat. The slow drag of it lower. I shut it down.

I dragged a flat smile across my face. No idea who he thinks he's fooling.

He stepped closer, all polite concern. "Wren. What's wrong with your back?"

He reached out like he was going to steady me.

I dodged his hand. "Pulled something."

He frowned. "Is it bad?"

Is it bad. As if he didn't know precisely how bad.

Margot tugged his sleeve. "Leave it. Don't you have an afternoon class?" Then she turned to me with a smile so fake it could've been laminated. "Hope your back isn't broken. Want a ride?"

The schadenfreude was doing laps in her voice.

Any other day I'd have fired back something twice as nasty.

Today: "Sure," I said.

Margot looked at me like I'd sprouted a second head. "Wow. Don't hold back."

I rolled my eyes.

Your brother wrecked my back. The least the family can do is drive.

She dropped us at the campus gate and pulled off. It landed a beat too late.

"Was she just drunk-driving?"

The air went strange and still for a second.

"It's the next afternoon," Callum said.

I hadn't checked the time. It was already afternoon? Of the next day?

I took two steps toward the dining hall. Then a thought detonated.

I spun back, got close, lifted a hand to block us from the people walking past, and dropped my voice.

"Did you... did you use anything last night?"

He raised a brow and tipped his head down. The smile was sitting right there in his throat.

"Use what?"

There it was again. I was now fully aware the sweet-little-brother thing had been a total fabrication. There was a wolf under there, and there always had been.

I glared. Set my jaw. Mumbled it. "Protection."

He'd better have. If he'd earned me a pharmacy run, I'd skin him alive.

Understanding dawned on his face.

"Ahh." He stretched it out, openly entertained. "Six."

My voice died in my throat. My face went up like a struck match.

I put a foot of air between us and looked anywhere but at him.

"That's not what I asked."

I grabbed food and went back to my dorm to lie facedown and decompose. Everything ached, worse than the timed mile during finals.

Then again. Six. Maybe it tracked.

Wait.

What am I thinking.

Chapter 4

I shook my head and tried to delete last night from my memory entirely.

Okay. Deletion failed.

The night was quiet, moonlight spilling across the floor. I reached out and closed my hand around nothing, and the memory came anyway. The same broken, swimming moonlight. Heavy breathing in the dark. My fingers dug into his shoulder for something to hold. When my grip slipped, his hand closed hard over my wrist and laced tight. Nothing in that room but the pale light and his eyes, dark and gone with want.

I surfaced with my heartbeat in my ears.

Help.

Why am I still thinking about this.

I'm a nice, normal college girl.

So much for that.

To kill the habit of replaying it at two in the morning, I buried myself in every activity and lab I could find. Booked solid. It worked. I hit the pillow and dropped like a stone