My Fault (Culpable Book 1)

It was a mistake, coming here tonight with Nicholas. Yeah, he was attractive, and, yeah, I couldn’t even think straight when he touched me or kissed me, but I didn’t like who he was. Nicholas Leister moved in a circle I had avoided my whole life: fights, out-of-control parties, drugs, alcohol… Those were all things I didn’t want to be a part of. I was still trying to get used to my life here. I’d only left home two weeks ago, and literally everything had changed. I was still messed up over Dan, and starting a relationship with Nicholas made matters worse because I was perfectly aware of what a guy like him would want from a girl like me. Maybe I was old-fashioned or weird or whatever, but I liked to do things the traditional way. I wanted a guy to want to be with me and show me that every day. I liked sweet words, kind gestures, and that just wasn’t Nick. I wasn’t ready for my heart to be broken again before it had begun to heal. I wasn’t even sure I had a heart anymore, just thousands of little pieces I kept trying to glue back together.

I told myself I would have to try to have a normal relationship with Nick. We couldn’t be together, but that didn’t mean we had to hate each other. The fights with him, the push and pull since we’d met, all that was exhausting. We lived together, so we should try to be friends, if it even was possible to be friends with someone who stirred you up in that way.

I stayed by the door waiting for Lion’s fight to be over. I couldn’t watch. I hated physical confrontation. It was upsetting that people could enjoy it; they were even making money betting against the fighters. It was gross and humiliating.

Nicholas had walked past me to go stand with Jenna and their friends. There must have been two hundred people in the crowd. Lion won his fight after fifteen minutes, but unlike Nick, he had bruises from blows to the chest and an ugly cut under his left eye. Jenna threw herself in his arms when she saw him and kissed him while everyone cheered. Was that what Nick had wanted? For me to throw myself at him just because he’d left some guy laid out on the ground? Ridiculous.

Nick came over to me, took my hand, and walked me out. It was strange to feel his fingers intertwined with mine but somehow distant, as if this were just something practical—a way to keep me from getting lost—and there was no affection in it. Something had changed since our last conversation. He seemed mad at me, as if he didn’t even want me there. It hurt, but what could I expect?

I looked at his wounded knuckles. There was dried blood on them where he’d struck his opponent. I felt nauseated, and I needed air. What the hell was I doing here?

When we were close to his car, he left me to talk to his group of friends. Jenna was gone, and I felt lonely and scared. I decided to get an Uber and started to pull up the app. But Nicholas hurried over and tore it out of my hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting an Uber.”

“Are you crazy? This is illegal. You can’t give away our location. We could get arrested.”

I didn’t care. This place felt dangerous, and I wanted to avoid trouble. However good he looked, he wasn’t worth it.

“I need to leave,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like your world, Nicholas.”

He didn’t seem offended. If anything, he seemed indifferent.

“You’re not built for this. I shouldn’t have brought you.”

I wasn’t built for this? His response didn’t bother me per se; it was the tone he said it in.

“I’m the one who decided to come here. And now I’m the one who’s deciding to go.”

He laughed.

“I don’t know what I expected, but this definitely wasn’t it. I thought you were tougher, Freckles. You didn’t flinch when you and Ronnie got into it. I sure didn’t think a couple of guys punching each other would do this to you.”

What he couldn’t see, as we stood there looking at each other, was the cold sweat coating my body, the soft tremors in my hands…

“I guess my bravery comes and goes,” I said, opening my palm so he’d hand me back my phone. But he kept toying with it, and his mind seemed elsewhere.

“I wanted to ask you. Where’d you learn to race like that?”

“Beginner’s luck. Phone, please.”

He grinned.

“You’ve got more secrets than I would have imagined, Freckles.” He stepped toward me, and I stepped away until my back touched the door of his car.

“We’ve all got secrets,” I said, quieter now.

“I should warn you, I’m a pretty good detective,” he said, leaning in for a kiss. I stopped him as best I could.

I woke from the spell he cast on me. My pulse started racing.

“Stay away from me, Nicholas,” I said, more serious than ever.

Discovering my past—that was the last thing I wanted. The mere thought of it made me panic. I’d always kept my demons in check—no one knew anything—but with just a wall between him and me, there were things that I wasn’t going to be able to hide. I hardly knew him, and already, he was unearthing things I never let anyone see.

“You want me to stay away from you? That’s not what your body seems to be saying…”

Damn him. Nobody had ever gotten to me like this before. Seeing him there before me, so big, so masculine, I felt like a cornered animal someone was getting ready to slaughter at any minute. And I didn’t like that, that sensation of feeling so small and vulnerable.

He placed a hand on either side of my head, almost like a cage.

“What are you so scared of?” he asked, his mouth close to mine, his breath heating up my face. His eyes were so blue, with bits of aquamarine in the pupils.

“I’m scared of you,” I whispered.

Nick grinned. Maybe he liked my answer. It was as if someone had tossed a jar of ice water over my head. I shoved him and got away from his grasp.

“Asshole,” I said. I couldn’t believe I’d been sincere with him.

“Why? Because I think it’s funny that you’re scared? That’s normal, Freckles. If you weren’t, it would have worried me.”

“I’m scared you’ll get me into trouble,” I lied, hoping he’d forget what I’d just said. I didn’t want him having that much power over me.

“I’ve got a talent for wriggling out of it. You don’t need to worry there.”

“That’s exactly it. I don’t want to worry. Now give me my phone so I can get out of here.”

Nicholas sighed, but his expression didn’t change.

“It’s too bad you’re so stiff. I thought you and I could have fun together.”

“There is no you and I… and there never will be.”

Twenty minutes later, Jenna had dropped me at home. I was breathing easy again, and I promised myself I wouldn’t fall into any more traps. Nicholas and I needed to keep our distance from each other.

I spent the next day washing my car. Nicholas stayed inside doing God knows what, and we barely crossed paths. My Beetle had been on the sales lot for a long time, so no one had taken care of it, and it was covered in dirt and grime. It was funny to me that all my new neighbors with their Chanel clothes and their stuck-up attitudes were gawking at me as I washed my own car in shorts and a T-shirt with some company’s logo on it and with my hair pulled back in a bun. I looked like hell, but why should I care what my bleach-blond neighbor and her husband who ran some TV network or another thought of me?

As I blew a strand of hair out of my face and leaned over the hood with a sponge, trying to get out a particularly stubborn spot, I heard the last voice I would have expected to hear at that moment.

“I see you still hate the drive-through car wash.” I froze. It couldn’t be true.

I turned around and looked at him. He was standing next to Nicholas’s car looking no different from when we’d said our goodbyes three weeks ago. His blond hair was disheveled, his chocolate eyes projected a self-assurance I’d always admired, and he had the build of a hockey player. I had to catch my breath.

Dan, who’d cheated on me with my best friend, was now standing in front of me.

I stopped what I was doing, holding on to the dripping sponge and letting my other hand flop to my side. I couldn’t move. Just having him in front of me hurt, and all the memories I’d shared with him flooded into my mind like a slideshow: when we’d met; after I’d gone to one of his games and he’d won and he’d come over to tell me he couldn’t concentrate once he’d seen me in the stands; our first date, when he’d taken me to an Indian restaurant where the food was so spicy we had been sick for three days; our first kiss, so soft and special that until recently, it had been on the list of my most treasured memories; the first time he’d ever called me his girlfriend…

Then I remembered the image of him and Beth hooking up, and everything else vanished.

I struggled to find a voice that wouldn’t let him know how much his being there affected me.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked, dropping the sponge in the bucket. Water droplets splashed my bare feet.

“I miss you,” he said.

I laughed mirthlessly.

“You don’t miss me. You’ve had company, haven’t you?” I replied, turning around.

“Noah…I’m sorry,” he told me in that same velvety voice that had told me so many times he loved me above all else.

I shook my head, wishing this wasn’t happening. I wasn’t ready to confront Dan. There was a part of me that still wished everything was as it had been before, that wanted to turn around and let him hug me, kiss me, tell me how much he loved and missed me. I desperately wanted to be with someone from my previous life. Even for just a few seconds, I wanted to be the Noah Morgan I had been before getting into a car and heading off to a new city to live a life I didn’t want.

“Noah…I love you,” he said, coming up behind me.

My heart had already broken into a million pieces. Was he going to stomp on them now, crush them into dust?

“Don’t tell me that,” I said. But then I turned, and I saw him there, so close…saw those spots of gold in his brown eyes, the scar on his cheek where he’d been hit with a hockey stick—I was there when he’d gotten the stitches, I had been hysterical because I couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Everything about Dan brought back so many memories—memories that now stung unbearably.

He looked nervous. I knew him well enough to know this was harder for him than it was for me.

“I’m saying it because it’s the truth, Noah.” He took my face in his hands and stroked my cheeks with his fingers. “Please forgive me. When you left, my whole world fell apart. I didn’t know what to do, where to turn. You have to forgive me. Noah, please, say you forgive me.”

His hands slid down to my shoulders. There was desperation in his voice. I closed my eyes. This shouldn’t be happening. Why? And why was his presence making me so sad? I should have gotten over him already. He shouldn’t have come here, asking forgiveness, but still…seeing him again, having that piece of my old life back, was comforting somehow.

Just then, I felt his lips on mine. It was unexpected but at the same time felt normal. That had been something I was used to, something pleasant, even necessary, something I’d wanted from the moment I got into that car to leave and never come back.

He cupped the back of my neck and pulled me toward him. I was so shocked, so overwhelmed by the thousands of contradictory feelings I was having that all I could do was hold still.

“Noah, kiss me, please, don’t be like that.” He tried to press himself into me and managed to get me to open my mouth, looking for my tongue with his just as he had the first time we’d done it. There was a kind of warmth there but also something different. Something had changed. My body seemed to be expecting something more powerful. I didn’t want warmth; I wanted fire.

I heard someone make a noise, trying to get our attention. I stepped back, and Dan looked at me with joy on his face. Then we turned to see who had interrupted us.

My mother and William had just appeared. I’d been so wrapped up in my thoughts and feelings that I hadn’t even heard them pull up in their car. She looked at us with a big smile on her lips and turned to William, who had a bright-eyed, satisfied expression on his face.

“You like our present?” he asked.

I didn’t understand.

“Your mother sent me a ticket to surprise you,” Dan said with a shrug, but I could see a look of guilt on his face, too. Now I got it. My mother thought she was giving me the best gift ever, bringing my boyfriend for a visit. She’d just missed one tiny detail: he was no longer my boyfriend.

“You were just so sad, Noah,” Mom said, coming over and giving me a hug. “I knew Dan was the one person who could make you smile, so what was the harm in inviting him to spend a few days with us?”

Oh, Mom. You’ve screwed up now.

I forced myself to smile, hard as it was, while William shook Dan’s hand firmly. My mother gave him a hug in turn, and they both stood back to look at us.

“We’ll give you all a little privacy. You must want some time alone,” Mom said. “Dan, I’m having them prepare the guest room. Anything you need, don’t hesitate to ask.”

Dan nodded politely, and my mother and William vanished through the front door.

When they were gone, I looked at Dan, enraged.

“I can’t believe you had the balls to come here,” I shouted, picking up the bucket and soap I’d brought out for my car. I wouldn’t be able to finish now. I had much more important things to do.

This was wrong. Dan couldn’t stay in my home. I didn’t want him there, and I sure as hell didn’t want him kissing me again.

“It was the perfect opportunity to say I’m sorry in person.”

“You can’t stay here, Dan.”

“I know you’re still mad, and I know you’ll need lots of time before you can forgive me, but just let me be with you these days, Noah. Whatever the problem is, we’ll solve it together, please. You’re mine and I’m yours, remember?”

That phrase struck home.

“I stopped being yours the moment you hooked up with my best friend.” I said that knowing that having to break up with him definitively in the coming days would leave me feeling worse than I already did. “You can stay here because I’m not going to upset William or my mother, and I don’t want them to have to know what you did to me. But when that time’s up, I never want to hear from you again.”

“I know I hurt you, Noah. But I love you, I have always loved you, and without you, my life’s a disaster. Since I saw you just now, everything makes sense again. When you told me you were leaving, I tried to make a plan in my head to be able to deal with it, but it didn’t work. Noah, the thing with Beth meant nothing to me. I just leaned on her because she reminded me of you. You two were always together. You were so much alike. I know I’ve been an asshole, but I can’t let what we have end this way.”

I looked down, trying to suppress the tears that wanted out. I wasn’t going to cry. I didn’t cry anymore. I wouldn’t cry.

“So this is where we are now,” he said. “You can’t even look me in the eyes.”

He grabbed my face again.

“Please, just tell me you forgive me,” he whispered, his lips nearly pressed to mine.

I don’t even know what I said, but he kissed me again, hard, with feeling, and I let him do it, again. I couldn’t control it. It was something I needed. But I knew it wasn’t right. I had a strange feeling as I went along with him; I felt guilty, guilty because I was deceiving someone very important: myself.

At last, I managed to get out the words “I need some space.” And it was true; I needed to think, needed to not have him in front of me.

“Fine,” he agreed. “Can I at least leave my things in the guest room?”

I agreed and led him up there. I couldn’t spend another minute with him, so I walked off to my room, thinking I would just climb into bed and sleep until the next day. I didn’t care how early it was. I needed to think and get my feelings in perspective, but then my body made me stop at a room that wasn’t mine, and before I could stop myself, I was knocking at Nicholas’s door.

I don’t know whether he answered. All I know was I heard a noise and went inside.

He was sitting in front of his laptop at a desk in the corner. When he saw me come in, he closed it. He spun his chair around to look at me, and I observed every inch of his anatomy as if it were a work of art. He was shirtless in gray sweatpants. I could tell he wasn’t expecting a visitor, especially not me. It was the first time I’d ever knocked at his door since I’d lived there, but something in me told me my stepbrother would be able to console me, even as I was trying to grasp why I’d chosen to torture myself by being in his presence.

He must have seen something in my face because he immediately asked what was going on and approached me cautiously, not sure what to do. Just as with every other time we’d been alone together, an irresistible attraction crackled in the air. In a way, I was happy to realize Dan couldn’t make me react that way—happy but at the same time confused.

Those eyes of Nick’s only promised darkness. But without thinking twice, I grabbed the back of his neck, pulled him close, and kissed him desperately.

At first, he didn’t react. He was surprised, I guessed, but his body clearly knew what it wanted. He grabbed my waist, and his mouth and tongue took over. He made me forget why I’d even come there, forget everything but him. I had to pull away a second to catch my breath. When I did, he asked me what I was doing, and then his teeth bit into my earlobe before his mouth traveled down to my cheek, my neck… Any notion of pain, loss, or nostalgia vanished from my mind. But then he pushed me away.

“What happened?” he asked.

Why did he have to ask that? Why couldn’t he just kiss me and let me enjoy his undoubted abilities? Since when had Nick cared why someone wanted to hook up with him?

Now I found myself thinking about Dan again. That wound of being betrayed by someone I had loved so much—and I had loved them both, him and Beth—reopened again. That, and the wound of knowing I’d lost them both forever because I would never be able to forgive them because they didn’t deserve it. And the worst thing was the fear—the fear that I wasn’t strong enough to keep away from him.

I rested my head on Nick’s bare shoulder, and he held me. This was the first time we’d ever shared a moment like this. His smell was entrancing—it must have been one of those fancy colognes models advertised on TV—and his chest was warm and comforting, and even though I felt frozen, somewhere deep inside me, a small fire had started to burn.

“It’s not like I don’t love holding you, Freckles, but if you don’t tell me what happened, I might draw the wrong conclusions, and I’ll wind up pounding the shit out of the wrong guy.”

Despite my mood, those words got a smile out of me.

I started to pull away, but he walked me backward and sat down at his desk with me in his lap.

“Please God tell me you didn’t fuck my other car up, too, and now you’ve come to me because you feel bad about it because I swear, all the kisses in the world won’t help that…”

I didn’t know this side of the normally cold and standoffish Nicholas Leister—the side that cracked jokes, that tried to get people to laugh—and I admitted that I liked it. A lot.

So I decided to tell him why I’d come to his room. Because, believe it or not, I hadn’t planned to hook up with him or anything like that.

“Dan’s here,” I said. He took a second to absorb what I’d said. Then his body tensed.

“That motherfucker who cheated on you is here? Where, in Los Angeles?”

“Uh…he’s here. In this house.” I knew as I said it how pathetic and ridiculous the situation was. Nick seemed to be waiting for the punch line. I tried to explain.

“My mother invited him. She doesn’t know anything about what he did, has no idea we’ve broken up…but he’s here, Nicholas, and I feel like I’m completely losing it…”

I got up and started pacing around the room. I had no idea why I was telling my stepbrother this, but Nick was good at getting you to think about other things.

He took a cigarette from his desk and put it in his mouth. I didn’t know if he was angry or disappointed.

“Why are you telling me this?” he said, taking a curt drag. That old coldness in his eyes was back, the one I’d seen many times before, the same one that made us hate and insult each other. Trying to put aside my feelings for him, things that I myself didn’t understand, and I told him what I really needed.

“As soon as he sees you, Dan will know who you are,” I said, trying to hide behind that armor I always used to defend myself, even if it seemed to have disappeared since Dan arrived. “He’ll recognize you from the photo of us, from when we…kissed.”

Who’d have thought a simple photo would bring me so many headaches? If I’d known that kissing Nick would mean that the desire to do it again would invade my body and mind, I would have avoided it from the beginning.

Nicholas laid his cigarette in an ashtray and looked at me with contempt.

“What do you want, Noah?”

“I just want him to be gone and to never have to see him again.” It was true; that was what I wanted, no matter how much it hurt. I didn’t want to be around someone who had deceived me.

That seemed to relax Nicholas, and I continued:

“But I don’t know how to make it happen.” I wiped my forehead with my hand. “He came here for the sole purpose of getting me to forgive him…and there’s a part of me that wants to, but I know I can’t, I shouldn’t…”

“So this is where I come in?” he asked.

I nodded.

“It’s just a couple of days. If he sees that I’ve moved on, that I’m not interested in him, maybe he’ll leave me alone.”

He nodded, picking his cigarette back up. I didn’t like people smoking, but when Nicholas did it, it was sexy.

“So we’ve got to make out in front of him,” Nicholas concluded.

I was ashamed of what I was asking for, but he had already offered to do the same thing, basically, when he took that photo of us kissing. What made it strange was that we’d now hooked up a couple of times recently for very different reasons.

“You want him to think we’re together.” He got up out of his chair. “Wouldn’t it be easier if I just broke his face and got it over with?” There was anger in his eyes, and something else, something dark, that I couldn’t quite place.

“My mother can’t know,” I murmured. I felt trapped by the hand he’d suddenly reached out to grab my chin. One of his fingers softly stroked my lower lip.

“You owe me big-time,” he said, and even though his voice was sour, he kissed me. His kiss was powerful, not sweet, and I couldn’t help comparing him with Dan. My ex-boyfriend was delicate and caring—even if deep down, he was a jerk—whereas Nicholas was cold and dominating. I never knew what he was thinking. His hands weren’t even touching me then. Just his lips.

“I hope you’re not stupid enough to let that asshole put his hands on you.”

He turned around, grabbed a T-shirt and the car keys on his desk, and left me there, trying to figure out if I would pull myself together.