Owned By My Brother’s Bestfriend

“Aurora..”

The way Noah said my name made my stomach sink before he had even finished the sentence

I stood in front of him in my bedroom, fingers clenched so tightly around the hem of my satin camisole that my knuckled ached. Downstairs, the bass from my brother’s party vibrated through the floorboards as laughter drifted up the staircase with someone shouting over a drinking game

But none of it…none of it reached me, not really. Not when the only person I had wanted to be with, wanted here more than amything or anyone, was looking at like I had confessed to a crime.

“I can’t,” the words barely registered as I stared at him, my thoughts stalled.

“What…do you..”

He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck, “Aurora, don’t make this harder than it already is.”

Harder?

Harder?

My lips parted, but nothing came out. I had spent weeks rehearsing this, months, years if I was being honest. Ever since I was fourteen and Noah Hayes had smiled at me after teaching me how to ride a bike, ever since he started ruffling my hair and calling me Rory, ever since I had convined myself that I was finally old enough…

He would see me, really see me more than just a friend. More than someone he had grown up with, more than just Aurora Lancaster.

Tonight was suppose to be that night, instead, here I was standing, feeling like a fool.

“I don’t…” my voice cracked as I gulped hard, “I don’t understand.”

His gaze softened, and it made it a thousand times worse than it already was. “You’ve always been sweet.”

Sweet

This was clearly being added to part of the words I hated now, because the last thing I wanted was for him to think I was sweet, just the thought of it left a tumbling on my stomach.

“We’ve been friends for as long as I can remember, and you’ve truly grown into an incredible woman.”

Then why?

“You deserve someone who’ll…”

“No,” I shook my head, “don’t do that.” He frowned, and I let out a shaky humorless laugh, “don’t softens it, just tell me.”

My words were met with silence, a painful long silence, and I directed myself to hold his gaze even when my eyes burned.

“I asked you here because…” I inhaled sharply, “because I trust you.”

He nodded once, “I know.”

“I asked you to be my first, Noah,” the confession hung between us, heavy and humiliating. “I wanted it to be you,” my voice was barely above a whisper now, “I’ve wanted it to you for years.”

“Aurora,” his jaw tightened.

“I thought maybe,” I laughed again, though tears blurred my vision. “Maybe you felt it too.”

His gaze drifted from me and that hurt more than if he had laughed. “I don’t.” two simple words and some how they shattered fifteen years of hope.

I stared at him. “So that’s it.”

“That’s it,” he answers, shaking his head as the room suddenly felt too warm, too small, almost as if the walls were closing in around me.

“I’ve never looked at you like that,” something inside of me splintered.

Never, not once, not even a little.

“I care about you,” he continues carefully, “God, of course I do.” My throat tightened. “But not the way you want.”

My heart pounded against my ribs so hard that it almost hurt. “So…”I whispered, “all those years.”

He gave me a small sad smile, “I thought you knew.”

I didn’t, I didn’t know. Because every birthday text, every hug, smile, every single moment I had replayed over and over in my head…every moment…apparently, I had imagined all of it.

“I thought,” I swallowed the lump in my throat, “I thought if I waited till we were done with school, and older and..”

“You’ll always be my best friend, Aurora.”

There it was, the sentence I had never wanted to hear. I wasn’t Aurora or a woman he could want, I was simple just his childhood best friend.

I looked down before he could see the first tear slip free, how pathetic. I had invited the man I had longed for most of my life into my bedroom during my brother’s party, I had confessed, offfered him something I had guarded because I wanted him and only him to have it.

And he had rejected me, and even with how desperate he was trying to be gentle with his words, it did nothing to quench the hurt that tore into my skin.

“I’m sorry, Aurora,” I laughed bitterly.

“I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

“Aurora.”

“No,” I wipped at my cheeks with the heel of my hand, “it’s okay.”

It wasn’t, it would never be okay, but I couldn’t let him see how completely he had just broken me.

“I’ll get over it,” the lie tasted like ash.

He hesistated, “I think we should just forget tonight ever happened.”

Forget? As if I could erase years of loving him because he was the only one I could picture a future with, as if tomorrow I would wake up and my heart wouldn’t remember.

“I…” my voice trembled, “yeah.”

He studied me for another second, “I don’t want things to be awkward between us.”

Too late

“It won’t be, Noah.”

Another lie

“Take care of yourself, Rory.”

Rory

For years that nickname had made my heart flutter, now it felt like a knife sliding between my ribs. He reached for the doorknob and for one desperate, humiliating second, I wanted to stop him, to tell him I would take anything.

A chance, date , kiss, even false hope

Instead I stood there, frozen while he opened the door, the music from downstairs poured into my room, voices laughter, life moving on without me

He glanced back one last time. “I’m sorry,”then walked out.

The soft click of my bedroom door echoed louder than the music downstairs, and I stared at it long after he was gone, waiting, hoping he would come back.

That he would burst through the door laughing and tell me he had been scared, and that he would kiss me and tell me he had loved me all along.

The door never opened, it remained shut, just like every possibility I had spent half my life dreaming about. My knees gave out as I slowly slid to the floor beside my bed, pressing a trembling hand againt my mouth to smother the sob threatening to escape, my heart broken into different pieces.

Eventually the tears began to fall even with how hard I tried to keep them in, and now it was hard to stop. No matter how many times I wiped them, more followed.

At this very moment, I felt pathetic, hating the fact that I was here on my bedroom floor bawling my eyes out.

I dragged the back of my hand across my face, forcing myself to my feet, my legs unsteady like they belonged to someone else. I needed water, fresh air, anything.

Reaching for my bedroom door, I pulled it open. “God, that was painful to listen to,” a voice stopped me cold, and my head snapped toward the end of the hallway.

Christian Beaumont stood at the opposite end of the hallway, one shoulder against the wall as though he had been there long enough to get comfortable. His sleeves were rolled to his forearms,, one hand rested inside the pocket of his tailored trouser while the other held a glass of whiskey.

His expression was blank, there was no sympathy or amusement, simple..disappointment.

Heat flooded my face. “You ..”

His eyes swept over me, mascara streaked beneath my eyes, trembling lips and tears I had failed to wipe away. “You look exactly how I expected, I guess that’s what fifteen years of delusion looks like.”

My stomach twisted. “You were listening.”

“Heard enough, I mean, it was hard not to, you weren’t so subtle with your tone.” He shrugs his shoulders, while giving me the look of someone inspecting a damage car after an accident.

His words echoed in my heard, knowing he had heard enough to hear me offer myself to another man, getting rejected and hearing every pathetic word I had spoken.

My humiliation doubled. “You could have simply walked away.”

“I did consider it,” his voice remained calm, “then the curiosity won, right after you asked him to be your first,” his words felt like a slap on the cheek. “And then him rejecting you, damn, That must have hurt like a bitch.”

I winced, but his gaze doesn’t soften, not even a tiny little bit. My throat tightened. “You have no right…”

“No right?” a humorless laugh escaped him, “does Lucas know you dragged a man into your bedroom, confessed you have been fantasizing about him for years, then offered him your virginity as if that would make him love you.”

My breath ceased as he layed out what the last ten minutes had been in my life, and him involving my brother. The last thing I wanted was Lucas to know about this, or his best friend going to tattle about it to him, especially when that said friend was Christian.

“Can..you just stop.”

“Why,” his seethed quietly, something that scared me even more, the sheer malice in his tone causing me to stumble a bit. “Because hearing it sounds uglier than living it?”

My eyes burned. “I said stop.”

His jaw flexed, then he moved, one slow step. And instinctively, I took one back, then another, retreating again. He never hurried, never broke eye contact and kept making his way towards me, forcing me back with nothing more than his presence.

My shoulders stiffened as my back collided with the wall, there was nowhere else to go. Christian stopped only inches away, close enough for me to catch the faint scent of whiskey and expensive cologne, enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his eyes.

He rested one hand against the wall beside my head, not touching me or trapping me, making it painfully obviously how easily he could. His gaze dropped breifly to the tear clinging to my cheeks before returning to my eyes.

“You were practically begging him,” his tone never rose, “ready to hand him every ounce of your dignity.” The words hit somewhere deep inside me.

Then his head tilted ever so slightly, a predaror’s smile spreading across his face as though he had found something worth hunting, making my stomach knot. “But then again, if you are so desperate to loose your virginity to anyone who so much as show you a little bit of affection, why don’t you be a little whore and give it to me.”

Without thinking about my hand shot up, striking his face as hard as I could muster, the sting of the impact reverberated through my palm as the force of the slap knock his head to the side. The sharp crack was swallowed almost instantly by the pounding music from downstairs.

My eyes widened

Oh God

What had I just done?

My pulse thundered in my ears as I stared at Christian, waiting for the explosion, the anger and for him to grab me. Anything.

Instead…

He was perfectly still, and then slowly, almost lazily, his tongue swept across the inside of his cheek where I had struck him, his jaw flexed once before he turned his head back toward me.

When his eyes met mine, my stomach dropped, there wasn’t an ounce of fury in them, only a dark glint and amusment. A slow, unnerving smile crept across his lips as though I had just done something that entertained him far more than it offended him.

The sight sent a chill crawling down my spine

Who smiles after being slapped.

Christian Beaumont, obviously.

I gulped hard, unshaken to tear my eyes away from him. How had Lucas been friends with someone like this for so many years, they couldn’t have been more different.

My brother wore his heart on his sleeve, laughed too loudly and forgave too easily, always seeing the good in people. While Christian…he was like a wolf surrounding its wounded prey.

There was something deeply and irrevocably wrong with him, which was why the fact the wasn’t angry scared me far more than if he had been.

Without a word, he closed the little distance between us. My breath hitched as his hand rose, long fingers settling around my throat, but there was no pressure or pain as they simply rested there, anything but warm and impossibly steady, as though he already knew I wouldn’t dare move.

Every instinct screamed at me to step back, but I couldn’t, not when his thumb began drifting upward, brushing across my lower lips with agonizing slowness, the featherlike touch sent a violent shiver racing the length of my spine.

He leaned in until I could feel the warmth of his breath ghosting across my face, my chest rose and fell in uneven breaths. My eyes slipped shut as my pulse hammered against the hand resting at my throat as I waited for..something. Anything.

Seconds stretches into an eternity, then just as suddenly, his hand fell away, the crushing weight of his presence disappearing, and my eyes flew open.

Christian had already taken a step back, as though nothing had happened, as he lifted his glass of whiskey, taking an unhurried sip, never once breaking eye contact with me.

A slow, sinister smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth

He finished the drink in one gulp before dragging the same thumb that had brushed my lips across his own, wiping away the last drop of amber liquor.

His eyes gleamed with something dark, something I was certain I never wanted to understand

Without another word, he turned and walked away, only then did I realise I had been holding my breath. It escaped in a shaky rush as I pressed a trembling hand against my chest, willing my racing heart to slow.

Damn you Christian Beaumont