by Mia Carson
The idea did not thrill me. Living in a house with Andrew and Mom and Jessica and all the mess that that would entail . . . No, it did not thrill me in the slightest. But Mom looked at me with such abject hope that I couldn’t think of refusing her. Her eyes were wet. Slowly, the crowd dissipated around us. “Of course I will,” I said, as the four of us made our way back to the table. I had fucked my stepsister. I had fucked my stepsister, and it had been the best sex I’d ever had. Of course, she wasn’t my stepsister yet.
But she would be soon. You could tell just by looking at Mom and Andrew that they would not have a long engagement. They were so deeply in love that it was a surprise they were able to function. An image came into my mind of Mom and Andrew walking hand in hand right over the edge of a cliff. With the image came the certainty that they would do it, if it meant being together. How I had missed this blossoming love I didn’t know. Perhaps it was university. I hadn’t been home much.
Mom and Andrew didn’t want to say goodbye. They stood outside of the restaurant for almost fifteen minutes, holding hands, always on the verge of tears. In the background of this scene, unheard, ignored, Jessica and I stood, waiting across the street by the car park. She didn’t say anything, just looked down at her feet. She fiddled with her dress, as she had done all throughout dinner. She reminded me of a frightened squirrel. I don’t mean that in a negative way. She was endearing, beautiful, intelligent, brilliant, but she looked around, or down, constantly with wide, alert eyes. She always looked startled, a little on-edge.
I found myself wanting to comfort her, to soothe her, to make things seem not so bad. I had been standing a few yards away. I crossed the distance in a couple of steps and stood close by her shoulder. She glanced up, and her top teeth bit her lower lip. Her right hand grasped the hem of her dress; her left hand opened and closed manically. Her feet vibrated up and down, as though she wanted to turn this Bristol street into a musical.
“I guess you dad told you,” I said.
She didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then she glanced up at me, her eyeballs rolling up in her face, which seemed unwilling to turn completely toward me, still half-locked on the ground. She really was the shyest woman I had ever met. I had never felt chivalrous with women before. But with Jessica, I did. I wanted to take my jacket off (it didn’t matter in my fantasy that I wasn’t wearing one) and throw it over her shoulders, I wanted to hold every door she would ever walk through open for her, I wanted to carry her over puddles so her feet didn’t get wet. But I could do none of those things, because this was not a movie and we had promised to keep things normal between us. That promise was more important now than ever, I sensed—now that we were going to be related.
“Yes,” she said finally. “He told me. We’re going to be roommates, I guess. At least for the summer.”
“At least for the summer,” I agreed.
It was just the beginning of June, exams had just ended, and summer seemed like a very long time. A soft, warm breeze whisked down the street from the bay, and men and women walked the street in shorts and tank tops, even at this late hour. The sky was clear and even the light pollution couldn’t obscure the glittering diamonds in the sky. All in all, it was a romantic setting. But I couldn’t do anything romantic.
“We can never talk about it,” she said, maybe sensing my uncertainty, my wild thoughts. Her chest, her small, pert breasts, rose and fell quicker and quicker. “Do you understand? We can never talk about it.”
The night must’ve made me feel literary. I don’t know exactly how one feels ‘literary,’ but I did just then. Perhaps it was the warm tightness in my chest: warm because my heart was full of things I wanted to say to this shy, attractive woman; tight because I couldn’t bring myself to say any of them. “Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.” She looked at me, startled, and I shrugged.
“George Eliot,” she muttered.
“George Eliot,” I agreed.
“But—” She paused, biting her lip again. I wanted to pull her lip free, kiss it better from where her teeth had gnawed it.
“But what?” I urged.
“But I don’t believe you have nothing to say.”
I made to reply—though I had no clue what I would say—and then Mom and Andrew were with us, standing beside us, smiling in their love. Their love, right at that moment, was built for movie screens. They were so absorbed in each other that they hadn’t heard the tail-end of our conversation, though they would have if they’d listened for it.
“Are you ready to go?” Andrew asked, looking at Jessica.
“Yeah,” she said. She made to glance at me, but then stopped herself. “Let’s go.”
Mom and Andrew kissed, hugged, kissed again, and then parted. I climbed into the car beside Mom. When she gripped the steering wheel, she gazed for a few moments at her ring, her lips twisting again and again into a wide smile. “Wow!” she exclaimed as she started the car. “Just, wow! Right?” She turned to me.
“Right,” I agreed.
And it was ‘wow’ for me as well as her, but not for the reason she thought.
Jessica
He had quoted George Eliot. When he quoted it to me, I felt a sort of jolting of recognition. It was being shaken awake, and when I looked at him, he was not just the lion, the man who I had fucked one crazy night. He was a fellow literature student, somebody I could relate to, a man who was no longer a stranger. We were being thrust into each other’s lives whether we wanted it or not. There was no way I was going to ruin Dad’s happiness by trying to sabotage the relationship. That meant that Eli and I were going to be living together. There was no way around it.
The house was a five-bedroom on the outskirts of the city, with a gate that circled the large front and back gardens, and tall, well-maintained hedges which rose up around the gates. When we drove through those gates and crossed over to the property, I felt as though I were crossing from the outside world to a secret, private world. The hedges, when the sun was low, threw long shadows almost to the house itself, reaching across the stone pathways that connected the front and the back of the house. I had always known that Dad made a lot of money, but the way he bought this place, as though it cost nothing, still surprised me.
We didn’t have a lot of luggage. The usual things a person would take to move into a house—furniture, personal belongings, clothes—were back in Texas, in our two-bedroom house. We had our travel luggage; the rest Dad would buy. The door was framed with two white pillars, conjuring up images of ancient Greece. I stood outside the house, looking up at the wide pillars, the big red door, trying desperately to leave the bottom of my shorts alone. Soon, I knew (Dad wouldn’t stop talking about it) Annabelle and Eli would be here.
Dad walked up beside me. “What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s gorgeous,” I answered honestly. “It’s a real home.”
“It is!” he laughed. “A real home, for me and my wife! Can you believe it, Jess?”
“It is all happening very fast,” I muttered. His face dropped slightly. I quickly added: “But I’m glad you’ve found somebody.”
We moved the few things we had into the house. I chose the bedroom on the ground floor, the one at the back which overlooked the back garden. Somebody, the previous owners maybe, had planted roses and tulips along the back of the garden, where the hedges split off and a shaft of sunlight shone straight onto the lush green grass. It was the smallest bedroom, but I liked small bedrooms. They made me feel wrapped-up, like I was being hugged by the walls. I hated sleeping in big rooms, feeling like I could roll over and land on the floor and keep on rolling forever. No, I was a small-bedroom type of girl.
I was looking around the room, planning where to put the bed, the small desk, the bookshelves, when Dad knocked on the door. I opened it to see his wide-grinning face. He was grinning no more than I had seen him grin in years. “They’re here!” he cried, clapping his hands together li
ke a young boy. It would’ve been annoying, grating, if I wasn’t happy for him. I swallowed, and wore my best smile. This was a happy moment, I reminded myself. This was a happy moment between two fiancés and their children. There had been no steamy night, no connection, no writhing in a hotel room while wearing masks.
I could’ve convinced myself of this, could’ve tricked myself into really believing it, if the memory of that night didn’t make my pussy ache so hard, didn’t make my clit yearn to be touched, didn’t make my nipples hard. Flesh, writhing, moaning, white-hot pleasure . . . all of them burnt in my mind like the trail of a comet, blazing through my consciousness, distracting when I wanted to focus, titillating when I wanted to calm. I remembered the feel of his rock-hard cock in my hand, and the way it had slid into me, hot and huge, stretching me.
I rubbed my eyes with my thumbs, rubbing away the images, blurring them. Dad had left the room, his footsteps receding on the hardwood floor. Now the footsteps returned. He poked his head around the edge of the doorframe. “You coming?” he said.
I nodded, perhaps a little overenthusiastically. “I’ll be there in a second,” I said.
Perhaps he would creep into my bedroom after we turned out the lights, perhaps he would lift my covers and climb in with me—
“Jess!” Dad called.
“Coming!” I called back, pacing from the room.
Eli
From my bed I had a clear view of the sky. My window opened out upon the wide-open night, and I laid there for around half an hour without even trying to sleep, just watching the stars. But I wasn’t just doing that at all. My eyes were watching the stars, but I wasn’t really seeing them. I was going over and over the last two days in my mind. It turned out that Andrew had strongly hinted to Mom that he was going to propose, and had intimated that he had bought a house for them. I learned about this from Mom, who woke me that morning with a smiling face.
“I knew he’d do it,” she’d said, before I even had a chance to rub sleep from my eyes. I’d risen in bed and watched as she paced up and down the room, excitement causing her to turn around every couple of seconds. “I just knew he would. I knew it. He’s such an amazing man. He told me on the web chat, pretty much. He basically said he was going to propose. And, do you know what? He’d already bought the house!”
I agreed that this was amazing. Her laughing, smiling face wouldn’t accept any less. Now, two days after I’d known daughter or father, I laid awake and pictured Jessica’s face. When we were moving furniture in earlier, positioning it after the delivers had brought it in, I thought I’d seen some freckles on her cheeks. They were light-colored, almost the color of her pale skin, but they were there. I thought about what it would be like to kiss those freckles. I hadn’t had that chance—before. Before, I hadn’t had the chance to kiss her at all. The masks hadn’t allowed for that.
I sighed and sat up in bed, my body aching from my workout earlier (nothing fancy, just some free weights I’d had since I was fifteen). The hardwood floor was cold, though it was a warm night. I padded across the room and opened the windows. Warm air filtered in, and the smell of fresh-cut grass made me think of Jessica, of that night.
I knew I wouldn’t get much sleep for a while. It was one am, and I was wide awake. I had gone past sleep, the way you do sometimes when you’re dog-tired one second and bright and ready for the morning the next. I walked back across the room and opened the bedroom door to the hallway. I had the upstairs bedroom two doors down from Mom’s and Andrew’s. I crept quietly, not knowing if anybody was awake, not in the mood to smile and laugh with Andrew and Mom, and padded down the stairs.
I was about to turn on the kitchen light when a sound came from the corner. “Huh!” somebody cried.
I jumped back, my finger grazing the switch as I did so, and cool yellow light filled the room. Jessica sat near the window, where moonlight had shafted in before I’d extinguished it with the light. She wore shorts and a baggy tank top which showed the tops of her breasts. Her feet were tucked underneath her and in her hand she had held a book; now, pages splayed, it was on the kitchen floor.
“Sorry,” I breathed. “I didn’t see you there.”
Jessica giggled softly, more of an embarrassed giggle than anything else, I guessed. I laughed with her. “I didn’t expect anyone to be here,” she said, leaning down and scooping up the book, flashing me the tops of her breasts, and a glimpse of her nipples. I averted my eyes, feeling guilty and horny at the same time. My dick went hard right then at that quarter-second of nipple. It was pathetic. “I saw this place earlier,” she went on, the book safely back in her lap. “I reckoned the moonlight might come in this way. It’s strange, isn’t it, sitting here in the dark?” Her eyes were downcast, her fringe just over her eyes, her fingertips trailing up and down the edges of the pages.
I shrugged extravagantly, trying to make everything seem normal, as though I hadn’t just walked in on a very strange scene. “No, not at all,” I said. “I was just getting a glass of water.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” she muttered. She turned back to her book, eyes locked on the pages. I knew the look. It was the look of somebody for whom characters and words were more real than actual people: the look of somebody who didn’t like real life all that much, and much preferred to lose themselves in prose. I was an English literature student. I understood the urge.
She didn’t look at me once as I walked across the kitchen and took a glass (brand new, expensive—it seemed Andrew Wright was well off indeed) from the cupboard and poured myself a glass of water. I tried to think of something to say. Half a dozen times I opened my mouth and then was glad she wasn’t watching me. Words wouldn’t form. This was a normal stepbrother and stepsister situation, after all. I was getting a glass of water; she was reading. It didn’t have to be more than that. And yet, I found as I made to leave the room, I desperately wanted it to be more than that.
I stopped with my hand on the wall next to the door. I half-turned, turned back, and then turned fully, facing her, almost challenging her. Or maybe I was just challenging the cowardly part of me that told me to go back upstairs and ignore my other urges.
“Jessica,” I said.
She looked up, but not fully. She never looked fully up. It was always just far enough so that she could see you, and no more. “Hmm?” she said, and I knew right then that that was the only sound she was able to make. She was inexplicably anxious right now. Her bare feet wiggled against the chair (trapped her knees, her folded legs). Her fingertips moved up and down the edge of the pages so quickly I thought she might get a paper cut. I almost felt cruel—almost. But not cruel enough to stop.
“Have you thought about it?” I said, and was surprised to find I sounded nervous, too. I rubbed at the dagger tattoo with my other hand as I spoke, and felt for all the world like a twelve-year-old asking a girl to the movies. “That night, I mean?”
“I know what you mean,” she said quietly. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a quick breath—steeling herself, I sensed—and then all her fidgeting stopped, all at once. It was like she was an electrical device and somebody had switched the switch. That, and the look of determination on her face, told me that what she was about to say meant a lot to her. I didn’t know her, not really, but I was sure of this. She spoke the words slowly, forcefully.
“I have thought about it every second since it happened. I can’t stop thinking about it. Trust me, I’ve tried.” She still didn’t look straight at me, and her body was completely still. If it were not for her moving lips, she could have been a statue. “I’ve thought about it every single moment. It’s been in the back of my mind for—forever, it feels like, even though it’s only been two days.”
Listening to this was uncanny. It was like she was explaining exactly how I felt. I took a step forward, hardly feeling like I was doing anything at all, but like there was a connection between us compelling me to act. I took another step, and another, and then laid the glass on the side. I
was standing over her in a moment, without any concrete idea of how I’d gotten there. I looked down at her. Slowly, she looked (almost) up at me, her hair covering her eyes, her makeup faded and blue-black. “We can’t do anything,” she whispered. “Not—not now.”
I reached down, ignoring her words. I couldn’t fight how I felt, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t, not particularly. My hand seemed to move slowly, impossibly slowly, but eventually it was near her face. Her sigh brushed the back of my hand, caressed the dagger tattoo, sending warmth up my arm and to my chest. My fingertips reached outward and made contact with her skin: warm, soft, smooth. I moved my hand to her mouth, brushed my thumb along her lower lip. “We didn’t get a chance to kiss,” I said. “Shouldn’t we correct that?”
She sighed with tones of defeat, like somebody after a long argument, and then untucked her feet and stood up. She came to just below my shoulders. I’d taken my hand from her face. I reached around to her back and pulled her close to me, pressed our bodies close, the scent of her perfume and her hair thick and welcome and near-perfect.
“We could,” she whispered, still outwardly calm apart from a faint trembling of her arms. “Just once, though.”
“Just once,” I agreed.
Jessica
The heat of his body was powerful. I felt close to him, closer than I had ever felt to anybody. It was madness, I knew, because I didn’t know this man at all. I had read—oh, had I read!—about women who felt this way about men this soon before, but I had never truly thought it happened. A literary device, I’d assumed. It was a literary device like pathetic fallacy or foreshadowing and it had no bearing on my life. But then, how did I account for this feeling? It wasn’t only the sex; it couldn’t only be the sex.
A strange calm had descended over me when he asked me the direct question. For a blissful moment I had felt clear, directed. I had known what to say. The remnants of that calm were still with me—it was something in his presence—but my anxiety was returning. And something else—excitement. It was a piqued, sexual excitement like the night of the wolf and the lion. My body remembered his well. My nipples became hard and my chest rose and fell to the sound of a leaping heartbeat.
