I’m too busy adjusting my scarf to escape my mother’s grasp before it’s too late. When I look up, Jai is turning around, rearranging his face into a pleasant expression, holding his hand out. The second he sees me, the looks falters, but only for a second.
“Hello,” he says.
Beside me, Mom grins. “Emma, I’d like you to meet your new stepbrother, Jai. Isn’t he adorable?”
My face is probably five different shades of red. I open my mouth to say something, anything, but nothing comes out. I start to stutter but then just clamp my lips together. Jai reaches out, shakes my hand, and then takes a step closer, covertly brushing his lips against my cheek.
“Love the scarf, darling,” he whispers, before pulling away.
This is not happening. This is not fucking happening. I am dreaming. I’m still hung over and asleep in my bed, in my apartment, and when I wake up, I’m going to realize that it’s really late, maybe the next day even and I’ve missed this dinner completely, but who cares because that would mean none of this is actually happening.
My mother is saying something, but I can’t for the life of me understand anything that anyone is saying. And the dress suddenly feels a thousand times tighter, because I can’t seem to draw in a breath, can barely even stand straight. All I’m aware of is Jai, standing there with a smirk on his face. Did he know? Did he somehow know about all of this before we’d even gone out? Was Megan in on this? Were they all? What kind of sick fucking joke was this?
“I’ve got to use the bathroom,” I manage to gasp out. I pull away before my mother or Jai can say anything, and hurry off. I cannot get away from there fast enough.
In the bathroom, I splash cold water on my face. The dress is so tight it actually hurts to lean over the sink, but the water feels good against my hot face. Still, I can’t seem to catch my breath, cannot seem to wake up from this nightmare.
I look at myself in the mirror.
“Get a grip,” I say. “Get through this evening. Go back out there, completely ignore him. Or . . . no, don’t make it obvious, but be cordial, and that’s it. Get through the wedding, and then never see him again.”
Except—we’d be stepsiblings. I’m sure there’d be some sort of holiday or family gathering that we’d have to be within each other’s vicinity.
The bathroom door opens, and I pretend that I’m still washing my hands.
“Emma?”
I let out a breath and turn. “Hey.”
Jessica comes over and stands next to me, our reflections looking back out at us from the mirror.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I just feel . . . a little overwhelmed, I guess.”
“It is a lot,” Jess says. “It’s so weird to think that Mom’s getting married again. But good, too. She’s so happy. I can’t remember seeing her this happy. I mean, who knows if it will actually last or not, but . . .” She leans toward me. “And I have a confession: Our new stepbrother is super hot.” She giggles. “I know that’s probably totally wrong of me to say on like so many levels, but he’s gorgeous. I’m like actually a little psyched we get to spend two weeks at the lake house with him.”
I feel like gagging.
“You don’t think so?” Jess waves me off. “Well, you’ve always had higher standards than me.”
I snort. “Yeah, sure. I’m not the one with a fiancé, or a career.”
“You’re in school. There’s plenty of time for you to get a fiancée and career. And sometimes, a career and a fiancé isn’t as awesome as you think it’s going to be. There are days when I really wish that I was still in school. Enjoy those days. I’m gonna go pee and then we should go back out there, okay? And if you don’t want to spend the night checking out our new stepbrother, then I will!” She laughs and goes into one of the empty stalls.
While she’s in there, I grip the side of the sink and give myself another pep talk—this time silently—in the mirror.
Just go out there and act normally. No one has to know about this. You can get through this. I take a deep breath—or as deep a breath as I can in this dress—and walk out of the bathroom.
Back in the restaurant, people are lining up at the buffet, helping themselves to filet mignon, veal medallions, saffron risotto, bacon wrapped shrimp with pesto, oysters on the half shell, arugula and endive salad. I get a plate and take some salad and a few of the oysters. That’s probably about all I’m going to be able to eat if I still want to fit in this dress.
I’m reaching for a napkin when I see that Jai is on the other side of the table, helping himself to a generous portion of the oysters.
“You know what they say about oysters,” he says. I pretend I didn’t hear him, but when I look over, he’s staring right at me.
“What?” I hiss. “You think you’re being clever? You think you’re going to impress me with that totally unoriginal line, like I’ve never heard that oysters are an aphrodisiac? That’s not why I took some—I happen to like how they taste very much and as a poor college student, I can’t afford to eat like this!”
He’s still staring. At my chest. Then the smirk returns. “Might want to pull up that dress, Janet Jackson.”
“What?” I look down. My left breast has completely popped out of the top of the dress, my nipple there on full display for anyone who happens to be looking. “Shit!” I try to stuff myself back in the dress, dropping the plate of salad and oysters in the process. “Fuck!”
“You know, they’ve got things you can paste on in these sorts of situations.” He reaches over and picks up the wayward oysters and puts them back on my plate.
“I’m not eating those,” I say. “I need to talk to you.”
I wriggle my shoulders and try to get myself as secure in the dress as I can before I hurry around to the other side of the buffet table. “I need to talk to you over here.” We go to the back of the restaurant, near the hallway to the bathroom, and I strategically place myself behind one of the columns that keeps us partially obscured from the rest of the restaurant.
“Imagine meeting you here,” Jai says, a slow grin spreading across his face. “I really had no idea. No idea at all. I knew I was going to be getting some stepsisters out of this blessed union, but I really had no clue—”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You expect me to believe that? You’re a fucking dog. A total fucking asshole.”
“I really do like the scarf. And the dress, too. You should’ve left the tit out. You’ve got great tits, you know.”
“I do NOT want to talk about my tits!”
“That’s certainly not the tune you were singing last night.”
“Do you realize how not funny this is? What a complete disaster this is? OUR PARENTS ARE GETTING MARRIED. That means we’re going to be brother and sister.”
“Step brother and sister. There’s a difference, darling.”
“That incest! It’s so wrong on so many levels!”
He shrugs, looks completely nonplussed. “Not really. We’re not related by blood. Were we to have children, chances are, they’d be totally normal, and actually, quite gorgeous. And . . . we’re not technically stepsiblings yet anyway. They haven’t gotten married. We’ve got two whole weeks to fuck each other’s brains out without an ounce of guilt because we’re stepsiblings. I’m the sort of person who likes to think of the glass as half full. And that means, instead of freaking out because of this bizarre coincidence that the universe has thrown our way, I am going to be glad because I’ve met someone that I can have mind blowing sex with. That’s pretty fucking great, I think. Wouldn’t you agree?”
I roll my eyes. “Oh yeah. Oh yeah, that’s totally great when that person happens to be someone in your family. Do you just not care? You don’t think there’s anything wrong with what we did?”
“Wrong? Absolutely not. It was phenomenal. Well, until the very end, that is. Wait—did you know? Is that why you turned into a raging bitch right before you left?”
“What? N
o I didn’t know! Do you honestly think I’d know something like that and then go and have sex with you? I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that you didn’t really know this from the beginning. Was Megan in on this? Am I getting punked or something?”
Jai holds his hands up. “I swear, Emma, I am as surprised about this as you are. Yeah, my dad mentioned that I’d be getting two stepsisters in this deal, but it never crossed my mind that you’d be one of them. I mean—why would it? It’s not like we really talked about any of this stuff last night. You know, being so busy doing other things.”
He brings his hand up and starts to touch my hip but I slap his arm away.
“Don’t touch me!”
He looks at me intensely. “You know you want me to.” His voice is low, a cross between a whisper and a growl. “You know you’d like nothing more than for me to take you right here, rip that tiny fucking dress off of you, and fuck you senseless. You know you want that. And so do I.”
Something stirs in me, a warm tingling through my lower belly, and everything he’s just said is totally true, but I’d never let him know that. Because it’s so wrong! “It must be nice to be so goddamned sure of yourself. To be so certain that you know everything, all the time.” I take a step back, trying to put some distance between us. I’m afraid if I don’t, I’m going to jump on him. “All I wanted to say is that we just need to get through the next two weeks. We just need to act normally, okay? No one else needs to know about this.”
“I really don’t give a toss if people know, or not. They’re not going to care. And if they did care, it would be for about two seconds, and then they’d forget it and go back to worrying about their own problems. People can only be scandalized for so long before they move on to something else. I, for one, am actually quite thrilled that I get to see you again. Which is saying a lot, considering how much of a bitch you were right before you left. And if it wasn’t because you knew that our parents were getting hitched—then what? But really, I think we can move past all that. We can play nice at the lake house. It’s like we’ll be on a very lovely vacation together. It’s a pretty great place.”
I peek out from behind the column, just in time to see my mother craning her head around, presumably looking for me, since my chair next to her has been empty for some time now.
“We have to go back out there,” I say. “We can sit at the same table, we can maybe even have a cordial conversation, but under no circumstances are you allowed to bring up ANYTHING that is going to suggest we . . . we . . .”
“Fucked?”
“That we knew each other before we met tonight. Because that’s what my mother thinks, I’m sure that’s what your father thinks. And we’re going to just let them keep thinking that, all right?”
“Whatever you say, darling,” he says.
“Just behave yourself.”
I turn and walk back to my seat before he has a chance to respond. I feel like it’s written all over my face, like anyone who even glances my way is going to know exactly what happened between Jai and me, and—worst of all—are going to know how attracted I still feel toward him.
It’s a truly awful juxtaposition, feeling this intense attraction that is also causing an intense feeling of repulsion. But the repulsion is mostly with myself, not Jai, and the fact that despite knowing we’re about to become stepsiblings, and despite the fact that he’s married—I scan the room for a possible wife, but don’t see her—I still find him so fucking hot.
“Where’s your food?” my mother asks. “Please don’t tell me you’re on one of those diets where all you drink is flavored water. I know someone who did that, she lasted about a week and lost almost ten pounds, but then she fainted and ended up chipping her front tooth when she hit the corner of the counter. Not worth it.” She eyes me. “If it’s because you feel like you’re not fitting into your dress, well, that’s because that dress is about five sizes too small. Don’t be ashamed to buy clothing in your own size, Emma. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. In fact—”
I feel someone touch my shoulder. I look, and Jai is there, and he’s got a plate of food and a wine glass, which he places in front of me.
“You forgot your plate,” he says. As he straightens back up, he pauses by my ear and whispers, “And don’t worry—I didn’t roofie the drink. But I can if you’d like.”
“Oh, Jai, that’s so kind of you,” Mom gushes. “Emma, isn’t your stepbrother just the sweetest? Such a gentleman. They really do raise them differently over in England. You’re such a doll, Jai, thank you.” Mom beams at him, completely oblivious to what he just whispered.
“You’re too kind, Stephanie,” he says. He rests his hand on my shoulder for a second, giving it the lightest squeeze, before walking away. Mom is gazing after him.
“Isn’t he great?” she says. “God, if I wasn’t but a decade younger . . .” She laughs. “What am I saying . . . Zack’s incredible. He really is. We’re so happy together. I hope that you eventually find someone that understands you the way Zack understands me. It’s so important, Emma. I was talking to your sister about this a little bit, and I know she’s in a good relationship right now, and I think it’ll last, but it’s so important that you find someone who understands you. Not just the good parts, but everything. Your father and I had some good times, but we just really brought out the worst in each other. Not the sort of partnership you want to be in for the rest of your life. With Zack, it’s different.”
I might not totally approve or understand my mother’s relationship with Zack, but it’s clear that she’s happy, and who knows? Maybe it will work out. Who am I to say, anyway, I clearly know nothing. Jai is sitting a few seats down from me, on the other side of his father. I try not to look his direction, but the pull feels inexorable, as though there’s this invisible filament connecting us. I focus on my plate, the food he brought me.
Oysters. All oysters.
Normally I’d be thrilled for the chance to dine on one of my favorite foods, but I just can’t shake the feeling that Jai is a mere seven feet away from me. Mom is saying something to him, Jessica is laughing, and Zack is leaning forward, looking at me.
“So you’re studying architecture,” he says.
I nod. “Yes.”
“I imagine that’s quite a rigorous course load you have. I had a cousin that studied architecture.”
“It is a lot of work,” I say, trying to look at Zack without looking at Jai, which is a bit impossible considering Jai is right next to him. Jai leans forward a little, catches my eye. I look away. “I am glad that it’s summer and I’ll have a little bit of a break from it.”
“I’ve always found the study of architecture quite fascinating,” he says. “Please don’t take offense to this, but you actually strike me as more of an . . . artistic person. Not to say that architecture isn’t art in it’s own right.”
“Wow,” Jessica says. “You hit that nail right on the head. Emma would never tell anyone this herself, because she’s actually quite a wonderful painter.”
“Well isn’t that something,” Zack says. “You’ll have to show me some of your work some time.”
My face feels like it’s on fire. It’s all I can do to keep from shooting Jai a serious death stare.
“I . . . I really just do it as more of a hobby,” I say. “I’m pretty busy with school and everything.”
“It’s important to follow your passions,” Jai says.
Mom raises her glass. “Here, here.”
“That is true,” I say. “Jai, what are some of your passions? You seem like someone who . . . who has a lot of joie de vivre,” I finish lamely. Obviously, coming up with some sort of witty quip to put him on the spot isn’t going to happen. My face still feels like it’s smoldering.
“Oh, I have many passions,” he says, and even though I’m not looking at him, I can hear the amusement in his voice. I take a sip of my wine and glance over; he’s looking right at me, a coy half-smile on his face. “I’d say I’m a
very passionate person, as a matter of fact. The type of person who enjoys the finer things in life. Oh, and surprises. I absolutely love surprises, of all kinds.”
“Who doesn’t love a good surprise,” Mom says. “I know it was certainly a wonderful surprise when I met Zack and we hit it off.”
The people nearest us raise their glasses; a few of them clap. I barely hear any of it though; all I’m aware of is Jai—it’s like it’s just the two of us here. He’s the only presence that’s really registering, but I don’t want to look at him, I don’t want him to know that I’m even thinking about him at all.
The rest of the meal is excruciating, though I have a feeling it’s mostly in my head. One of Zack’s friends, an actor that I remember seeing in a big summer blockbuster back when I was in high school, stands up and makes a toast to my mom and Zack. I assume he’s saying some funny things, because everyone is laughing, but I don’t really hear anything at all. It’s like, I know he’s speaking but the words are completely nonsensical.
To keep myself from looking over at Jai, I eat the oysters, slowly and methodically. They’re delicious, but I register that as secondary, because I’m more focused on the actual act of eating them, of giving myself something to do. I’m like one of those sheep dogs that needs a task to do or it will go crazy. Except in my case, going crazy means letting Jai know how much his presence is affecting me.
People linger after the meal is over, and Mom is a little tipsy, I can tell.
“Let’s go get ice cream!” she says. “I want ice cream. And there’s a great place, just a few blocks from here. Near the pier. They’ve got salted caramel, lavender honey . . . a whole bunch of others I can’t even remember. And as the bride-to-be, I should be able to indulge myself a bit: I want ice cream!” She bangs her fist on the table in a very un-ladylike sort of way.
Most of the people that are still here decline the offer, but a few of them take my mother up on it, and I find myself getting jostled out of the restaurant, following Zack, my mother, a few of their friends, Jessica, and . . . Jai.
I manage to stick close to my sister as we walk down there, the smell of the salt smell of the ocean getting more noticeable the closer we get to the pier. Jai is behind us, or off to the side, I’m not quite sure, though I’m trying to discreetly look while my sister fills me in about life in Oregon.
Side Swiped By My Step Brother Page 6
