My Brother's Girl

by Sienna Blake

“A delicious gift,” Noah amended before plopping some icing on Aubrey’s nose.

  “I’d have married her if Noah hadn’t beat me to it,” Eoin added behind me with a chuckle.

  Aubrey paused with her finger in her mouth and raised an eyebrow. “You know I would never have said ‘yes’, right?”

  While Eoin stuck out his tongue at Aubrey, Ma O’Sullivan directed my attention to a slick-looking man in a pink apron.

  “The one with his nose buried in his work phone despite being told several times not to bring it to lunch is Michael,” she explained.

  Michael lifted his blue eyes momentarily and muttered a quick “hello”.

  “That means he likes you,” Eoin whispered over my shoulder, following like a directionless puppy. His excitement over me meeting his family was infectious; I wanted to meet his chaotic, wonderful, loving family, too. Hell, I even wanted to be a part of it.

  Of course, all that changed when Ma turned me around in the crammed kitchen and I came face-to-face with him.

  “This is Darren.”

  I wasn’t sure how I didn’t notice it before. His kind of coldness surely should have formed icicles on the condensation-streaked bathroom mirror. The churning storm in his grey-blue eyes should have brought with them gusts of brutal wind that turned my naked skin blue despite the swirling steam. How could I not have noticed the chill of his gaze that threatened to turn the tiles beneath my feet to ice.

  “I’ve got to wash my hands,” was all he said by way of introduction.

  He turned, and even though Michael shouted after him that he could use the sink now, Darren disappeared around the corner. I winced at each pounding step up the stairs.

  “Don’t mind him,” Eoin said, his arm again feeling like a stack of bricks slung over my shoulders. “He doesn’t like anything. Or anyone.”

  “Come, come,” Ma said, and I realised I already liked calling her Ma in my mind far too much. “Let’s get the table set to eat.”

  Setting the table as a child with my own family meant laying out three plates in an icy dining room, even though we all knew only two would be needed. Shivering across from one another, my mother and I would stare down at the congealing gravy on our slices of dry turkey as the whistle of a referee from the television in the dark living room cut through the tense silence. My fingertips were always blue by the time my mother shifted uncomfortably in her chair, swallowed nervously, and had to clear her throat twice to squeak out, “Lunch is on the table, dear.”

  “Don’t nag me,” my father would bark from his lounge chair positioned next to the only heater in the house before cursing at either the rugby match or my mother. “I heard you the first time. Just bring my plate out here.”

  If my mother made noise pushing out her chair, she would get yelled at, so she moved slowly, carefully, robotically. Sometimes I would watch her tiptoe to the microwave to reheat the food she’d spent two and half hours preparing. I would continue to stare at the greyish-brown film spreading across my cooling gravy, because I feared I’d scream if I saw my mother wince one more time at the noise each button made before the whirl of the microwave started.

  “Are you coming or what?” my father would holler angrily from the living room.

  If my mother made it to him before we heard the creak of springs, we were safe. If we heard the creak of springs, no one was eating Sunday lunch—my father would storm off to the pub for “some goddamn food”, my mother would clean the mess off the floor, and I would climb the stairs to my room so at least she didn’t have to hear the hungry growls of my stomach.

  In the bustle of the O’Sullivan’s kitchen, Ma noticed me delicately placing each plate to avoid making unnecessary noise. She grabbed my shoulders to whisper in my ear, “Darling, we’ll never eat at this rate.”

  She grabbed the next plate from my hands and tossed it haphazardly onto the table. Clanging about the whole time, the plate wobbled as it lurched this way and that and got dangerously close to toppling right over the edge.

  “I just don’t want to break anything,” I said with a wince.

  She squeezed my shoulders. “Break all of them, it doesn’t matter, love,” she said before adding with a wink, “I suspect my boys wouldn’t mind at all stuffing their mouths straight from the pot like the little piggies they are anyway.”

  I smiled and nodded. “Alright.”

  Ma patted my back. “Good woman.”

  I had been hesitant about agreeing to come here in the first place, but as we all sat down to Sunday lunch, I found myself falling. But it wasn’t Eoin that I toppled helplessly head over heels for—it was his family.

  The cacophony of mismatched wooden chairs graffitied with crayon scuffing against the well-worn hardwood floors as we bellied up to a table about to buckle beneath the weight of a cornucopia of food sent tingles down my spine. My heart fluttered as unabashed laughter and clattering knives and forks and playful teasing and the clink of glasses filled the room warmed not by the oven, but by the overwhelming sense of love. The buttered roll Noah lobbed to Michael over the steaming roast and the already half-empty decanter of mulled wine might as well have been a shooting star in my hazy, happy vision. If the question “Kayleigh, can you pass the potatoes?” was a proposal, my answer was “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”

  The only dark cloud in my sky was Darren.

  Seated as far as possible from me, he did not even glance in my direction. In fact, he didn’t even look up from his plate as he pushed around his Brussels sprouts and carved rivers of gravy through his mashed potatoes. He did not engage in the lively conversation that bounced around the table. He did not laugh at Noah’s jokes, smile at Aubrey’s “Drunk of the Week” story from The Jar, a Dublin bar they ran together, or even groan with the rest of his family when Eoin burped a table-rattling burp.

  So when Darren abruptly shoved back his chair and stood, everyone glanced up at him in surprise. Noah paused mid-sentence to stare at Darren with the rest of us.

  “We need pie,” he announced.

  Eoin laughed, leaning back to balance on the back two legs of his chair. “Pie?” he shook his head. “We’ve got enough cookies to feed all of Santa’s elves.”

  “I baked a chocolate cake,” Aubrey added.

  “And Ma just put a rum raisin pudding in the oven,” Noah nodded toward the kitchen and its merry pile of dirty dishes stacked high near the sink.

  Darren, still staring down at his plate, straightened his unused knife. “I want pie,” he said. “So I’m going to go get pie.”

  Ma laid a gentle hand on Darren’s. “Alright, dear,” she smiled. “After lunch, I’ll go wi—”

  “We need pie now,” he interrupted. “And I think Kayleigh should go with me.”

  Darren

  Reason #16 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott: she laughed far too loud.

  Even with Michael on one side of me arguing with Noah all the way across the kitchen table about that year’s taxes for The Jar, Aubrey on the other side smacking her lips after every bite of Ma’s Sunday roast, and Eoin’s rugby match blaring behind me, I could still hear her laughter over all of it. It was far too loud, far too happy, far too bell-like and sweet for my liking. I glared at my potatoes as Eoin said something to make her giggle over her glass of mulled wine.

  Reason #31 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott: her giggle was even worse.

  I hadn’t touched a bite of my lunch because I’d been too busy drafting my list in my mind. I clung to each reason not to like her, not to get swept up in her smile, not to drown in the waves of her fiery red hair as if each one was a foothold on a sheer cliff face.

  Because I couldn’t fall.

  I couldn’t.

  When all I could come up with for Reason #19 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott was “green eyes too green”, I knew I was in trouble. Unable to hold myself back any longer, I shoved back my chair, declared we were in desperate need of pie, and said, without explanation, that Kayleigh was
the one who needed to come on this urgent errand with me.

  When I finally looked over at her across the table, I found her eyes wide and staring at me, and I realised again why I’d tried to avoid them during all of Sunday lunch. Reason #4 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott: because tearing my gaze away from her eyes was like dragging myself out of a pit of quicksand with my arms tied behind my back and my ankles weighed down with a car tyre.

  I watched Kayleigh glance around the table before holding a delicate hand up to her chest with an eyebrow raised at me. “Me?” she asked, incredulous.

  I crossed my arms indignantly over my chest. “You don’t like pie?”

  She shook her head. “No, of course I do, but—”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Damn, I thought as I turned without another word and walked toward Ma’s front door. That would have been the best reason I could think of so far to actually not like the girl.

  Behind me I heard Eoin tell Kayleigh to get cherry, cherry, cherry. She then asked what flavour he wanted because she didn’t get it the first ten times, and I bit back a grin as oblivious Eoin sighed and answered again, “Cherry.”

  Reason #45 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott: not funny.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Michael grumbled back in the kitchen. “It’s pumpkin or nothing at all.”

  “Just don’t let him get pecan!” Noah shouted after her as padded footsteps hurried down the hallway behind me. “That would be nuts!”

  Aubrey’s groan quickly followed. I imagined her playfully smacking his chest as she always did, and a pang of envy for that kind of closeness with someone tugged at my heart. I comforted myself the way I always did: I reminded myself I didn’t deserve it.

  I was pulling on my coat when Kayleigh ran up beside me.

  “Do you really need me just to go grab a pie?” she asked.

  I slung my scarf over my shoulder and fished my keys out of my pocket. “I’ll be in the car,” I said, opening the door and stepping out into the blast of icy air.

  I welcomed the biting wind that stung my cheeks as I sucked in a deep, steadying breath of fresh air. It was as close as I could come to a splash of cold water in my face, and I drank it in till it burned my lungs and made my eyes water.

  In the driver’s seat, I waited as the engine idled without even glancing at the heater. My eyes were focused on the windshield lined with frost, and I was determined to keep it that way as the passenger door opened and Kayleigh hopped in.

  “Brrr,” she said, shivering next to me. “Should I turn on the heater?”

  Reason #43 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott: very high maintenance.

  Reason #18 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott: not environmentally conscious at all.

  “No,” I grumbled as I shifted the car into gear. “I’m not cold.”

  Ice crunched beneath the wheels as I pulled out of the sleepy little neighbourhood of puffing chimneys and sparkling Christmas lights and onto the busy highway, and still there wasn’t a peep next to me.

  Daring a glance over at her, I found her face half buried in her lavender wool scarf. Her white beanie with a fluffy ball on top was pulled down to her eyebrows and she had her mittened hands tucked under her armpits. Her cheeks glowed a cheery pink. I immediately wished I hadn’t looked.

  “You’re not cold either then?” I asked, trying not to let my teeth chatter as my own fingers developed hypothermia while gripping the frozen wheel.

  She turned to me, green eyes bright and sparkling, and shook her head. “Nope,” she smiled. “I’m all nice and toasty over here myself.”

  Reason #21 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott: only thinks of herself. It was quite inconsiderate to ignore the red of my nose, just because she was “all nice and toasty” over there.

  “Do you want to listen to some music?” she asked after a quiet moment between us.

  “I prefer silence.”

  “Yeah,” Kayleigh nodded. “Me, too. Fuck Christmas carols.”

  Reason #3 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott: doesn’t like Christmas carols.

  My little brother was dating a monster.

  I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot of the local supermarket, got out, stuffed my freezing hands into my coat pockets, and stalked toward the glass sliding doors without making sure that Kayleigh was following. I only knew she was by her little puffs of condensed breath beside me as she slipped on the icy footpath while trying to keep up in her beat-up Converse with a piece of duct tape over the left toe.

  “So what do you do for a living?” she asked as a blast of warm air hit us along with the smell of fresh baked bread.

  Reason #23 To Really, Really Dislike Kayleigh Scott: nosy.

  “I think we should just focus on getting the pie,” I said just before turning onto the first aisle.

  Kayleigh’s sneakers squeaked on the linoleum floor as she hurried after me through the dead store.

  “Why did you bring me along if you didn’t want to talk to me?” she pressed, practically jogging to keep up with my long stride.

  Add tiny legs to the list.

  We passed a row of brightly coloured cereal boxes, and as we rounded the corner onto the condiment aisle, I answered simply, “To hold the pie.”

  In response to this, Kayleigh reached out, grabbed my arm, and stopped us smack dab in front of the mustards. “You really don’t like me, do you?” Her green eyes seemed even bigger than before with half her face hidden behind her bundle of winter clothes.

  I stared down at her, waited for a moment, and then replied, “No.”

  My arm slipped easily enough from her mittened hand, and I continued down the aisle and onto the next, leaving Kayleigh where she stood.

  “You aren’t going to tell me why you don’t like me?” she called from behind the pickle jars.

  I paused next to the tiny onions and bit my lips. Because you make me nervous when you’re around. Because I feel like I’m not in control when you’re looking into my eyes. Because there’s a promise I haven’t broken in ten years, and it only took you a morning to make me want to shatter it.

  “Because you’re using my brother for his money or his fame,” I shouted over the top shelf stocked with pickle jars. “Or both.”

  I didn’t believe it, not really, but it was better than the truth.

  I continued down to the end of the aisle only to find Kayleigh waiting for me in the next one. She stood buried under her scarf with her arms folded over her peacoat. “I don’t like you either, you know,” she said with an aggravated huff.

  Shrugging with a nonchalant smile, all I replied with was a causal “Okay” before slipping by her. Meandering down the next empty aisle alone, I managed to make it past the bags of ground coffee, past the boxes of teas—chamomile, peppermint, chai, blackberry, green and black and white—past the energy drinks and juices and hot chocolate concentrates. I only managed to make it halfway past the rainbow of Gatorades before giving in.

  “Why?” I asked in the general direction of where Kayleigh had been last.

  At first there was only silence and then an announcement for a deal on Swiss and then silence again. I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then I heard her voice from the soda aisle one over.

  “Because you make snap judgements about people that aren’t true at all and then base your whole opinion of them on that to justify treating them poorly when really you just want a reason to be moody all the time for heaven knows why.”

  This took me by such surprise that I found myself liking her grit and honesty and spunk before realising that was the opposite of what I was supposed to be doing.

  “Well, bollocks,” I shouted over to her as I moved over two aisles to the canned vegetables. “You could have just said that you didn’t like my hair.”

  Kayleigh laughed. “Oh, that too.”

  I tried to listen for her squeaky footsteps, but couldn’t figure out where in the grocery store she was as
I ran my fingertips over the row of canned green beans.

  “I don’t like you because you look at someone like you know them,” I said. “Like you can see straight through into them.”

  I didn’t see Kayleigh in the pasta and sauce aisle, but I heard her. “I don’t like you because you regard basic human empathy and compassion as an invasion.”

  That wasn’t true, I reassured myself as I passed the capellini and then the farfalle. That wasn’t true at all.

  I cupped my hands over my mouth to make sure she could hear me as my pulse quickened in irritation. “Well…well…I don’t like you because you don’t even know how to lock a bathroom door so people don’t walk in on you naked!”

  I rounded the corner and came face-to-face with an elderly woman with a frozen pizza in her pink gloves.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” I quickly said, squeezing her shoulders, narrow even under her navy puffer coat.

  Avoiding her disapproving frown, I hurried around the corner to the frozen foods to find Kayleigh at the other end, hands on her hips, cheeks red.

  “Don’t even get me started on how much I don’t like you because you aren’t even polite enough to knock!” She took an angry step toward me.

  I took an angry step toward her and before we knew it, we were storming toward each other from each end of the aisle.

  “You just stood there!” I shouted.

  “No, you just stood there!” she shouted right back.

  My hands were balled into fists at my side as I stormed past the fridge full of ice cream. “You could have covered up.”

  Kayleigh shoved up her white beanie, which was falling over her eyes, and then pointed her mitten at me as we drew nearer and nearer to one another. “You could have turned around.”

  Neapolitan.

  “You could have closed the door.”

  “You could have closed your eyes.”

  Cherry Garcia. Vanilla Bean. Salted Caramel Brownie.

  “You could have done something,” I growled, not three feet away from her.

  “You could have done anything,” she snapped.

  At the exact damn time, we stopped in front of one another, chests heaving, eyes flashing with what I hoped was anger and what I feared was arousal and said, “But you didn’t.”