Rock Hard: A Stepbrother Romance Page 0,4

kindness was important in those first months, and she was one of the few kids that actually smiled and said hello to me.

Life got better though. I hit my growth spurt, got into climbing, and made some friends. For a long time, I felt lost, like there was nothing in the world for me. People were outgoing and happy and seemed to actually enjoy life, but it wasn’t like that with me. Sometimes it was a struggle getting out of bed.

That changed when I started rock climbing. It was small stuff at first, just little faces and some indoor walls. But it exploded from there.

I could still remember the day everything changed. I was fifteen and out climbing with a friend, some guy I could barely even remember anymore. But we climbed together up the cliff face, and he was teaching me how to properly use the ropes and pulleys when I leaned back and looked out across the landscape.

We were barely above the trees, but I could see all the way to the horizon. Everything was spread out in front of me, and I couldn’t hear what my friend was saying anymore. There was only me and the sun and the sky and the wind moving through my hair. I was free and it felt right.

Everything clicked together that day. I understood what everyone else was doing. The world just made sense when I was climbing.

And quickly that extended to hiking through the thick woods surrounding Ridgewood. I loved being out alone in the deep forest between our town and Canada with nobody else for miles. I could walk all day long out there doing nothing but climbing trees and identifying plants.

High school was fine after that. I guess girls liked me, because I never had trouble finding a new girlfriend. They probably liked the rock climbing or some shit like that, thought I was rugged. But I was never interested in fame. All I wanted was to climb and to climb fast.

Throughout all that, Becca was always around. I kept seeing her in the halls and in class, and I always wondered what she was like. Even though I was getting popular, I still felt intimidated around her. Everyone knew she was the smartest person in school, hands down, and although most people just thought she was some dorky loser girl, I saw a lot more in her.

I noticed the way she twirled her hair when she was nervous. I noticed how she chewed on the ends of her glasses when she was concentrating. She liked orange juice in the morning, and sometimes brought a little plastic bottle of it to school.

But I was intimidated by her in some weird way. I was no genius, but there she was, intelligent and serious and sexy as fuck. I had plenty of other girls to keep me busy, but Becca was always floating on the edge of my awareness, flickering in and out of my sight.

My career took off when I was seventeen. I won a local competition and realized that I could be pretty good if I wanted to be. I trained almost every day, climbing as often as I could, and something just shifted in me. Suddenly, the local competitions were too easy, so I started entering the regionals. I broke a few records, won a bunch of money, and my star took off.

That’s the funny thing about small towns, though. No matter how famous you get, you’re still only small-town famous. And all it takes is one thing to shift, one thing to change everything.

For me, it was two things.

The first thing was Becca. I never saw her coming, not really. Even though I had a thing for her, some little crush, I never understood what it was or what it meant until it was too late. Two days after the night I finally figured it out, our parents announced that they had eloped over the weekend.

Rebecca Foster, the girl from that night, that one sweaty night, was my fucking stepsister.

It was like a crime. The second I had something, it was snatched away, just like that.

The second thing that changed my life was my mom’s cancer. That was worse than wanting to fuck my stepsister. Becca went to college and was gone for most of it, so she didn’t see the struggle we went through. She didn’t see how her dad looked at me when I started bringing home money to help with the medical bills.