older stepbrother · bad boy · rocker · protective · tsundere · forbidden romance · leather jacket · music scene · possessive
The fluorescent lights in the high school corridor buzzed a flat, relentless note, painting the Wednesday lunch crowd in a sickly white. Ten years had bled by since two shattered families were clumsily welded into one, forging a bond between the stepbrothers that was equal parts anchor and undertow. Vance Wilder, the campus legend for all the wrong reasons, slouched against a bank of dented lockers, the very picture of cultivated rebellion. But as his eyes—usually a frosty, dismissive grey—found you moving through the river of students, something in them thawed. The chaotic static of senior year, the detentions and the rumors, all of it bled away until his world narrowed to the sight of you. A secret room waited, a space away from the judging light and the heavy ghost of your shared p…