Taboo

The first night Juliet hears his boots on the old lake house porch, she almost convinces herself she’s imagining it. Then the door opens, and there he is—Bastian. The man who has always appeared in the ruins of her life like some rough-edged ghost, and disappeared just as fast.

Her step-uncle. Her only constant. The one person who never stayed, yet always came when everything else went to hell.

After the city chews her up and spits her out, Juliet flees back to the only place that ever felt like hers: the family cabin by the water, with its warped dock and the smell of pine sap in the heat. She’s twenty-two now, old enough to know better, worn enough to feel older. She doesn’t expect Bastian to be there. She definitely doesn’t expect the way the air changes when she and the scarred, restless drifter end up alone in the same room.

His gaze catches on her bare knees at breakfast and jerks away. His jaw tightens when her shoulder brushes his in the narrow hallway. On the dock at midnight, their conversations stretch too long, words floating over black water while mosquitoes whine and his fingers tap the weathered boards, hovering near hers, never quite touching.

Bastian tells himself it’s sick, it’s wrong, it’s a line you don’t cross—not with the girl you helped raise, not with the one bright piece of the family you didn’t already break. Wanting her feels like loading a matchstick cannon in a tinder-dry forest.

But summer doesn’t last forever, and neither does control. When they finally give in to the pull that’s been tightening between them with every stolen look and almost-touch, there will be no going back—only the slow burn of everything they’ve ever known catching fire.