by Amy Faye
"Come in, come in," his mother said, seemingly oblivious to him standing at the top of the stairs. "Make yourself at home. I'll get Brett."
She turned, and finally saw him. The guy stepped inside, but Amy stayed on the steps. Her dad did what anyone would do, and tried to coax her, while Mom made her announcement that Brett was, in fact, here.
He moved to continue down the steps, and Amy's trance seemed to break. She forced on a smile and stepped inside. Mom closed the door, and then it was handshakes and introductions. The guy's name was Jerry, which was perfectly typical, wasn't it? Brett showed him exactly enough positivity that it wouldn't turn into a fist fight, and no more.
Mom spoke first. "I was telling you, right, Jerry had a daughter about your age?"
"Yeah," he said, absently. She'd told him she was dating again, and that was about as far as he had actually listened. So he didn't really know any of the details of the relationship, because she might have told him, but he'd ignored it.
Which, now, was proving to be a problem, because apparently at some point, someone had told him that Amy was supposed to be off-limits, maybe not in so many words, and he was supposed to know it.
Forget Jerry–he stood there, waiting to make his small talk. It would have been good to know about Amy in advance.
7
Amy
Present Day
Thirteen years ago, Amy Harmon had spent almost three years thinking about boys. Not all boys; one specific boy had captured her attention, in particular. When she'd left, it broke her.
That was what she'd expected from the beginning. It was why she never went after boys in the past—because they'd just break her heart eventually. Brett had been different, though. The wound hadn't closed up, she'd just forgotten about it. The past days had been a whirlwind, and suddenly she was fourteen again, picking fights and standing off and doing everything she could not to flirt with her first and biggest boy problem.
Now, instead, she was so close that she could smell the alcohol on his breath. He looked at her with an expression that would melt a popsicle, and she shouldn't have done it but she knew she wasn't going to stop here. Her body leaned in a little closer, and suddenly it wasn't just close.
He'd been avoiding her for two days now—she expected him to lean away, to tell her clearly that he wasn't going for it. To do something to stop her. When he didn't, she wasn't going to complain. And then his arms, still as strong as they'd ever been, wrapped around her shoulders and pulled her in for a kiss, and the thin veneer of toughness she'd fought to keep in place melted away.
He pulled gently and she rolled over to straddle his hips. They fit together strangely well, like he was the missing half of a puzzle she'd been struggling to put together all these years. Her hips pressed down into something she felt stirring against her ass, and she was rewarded by his cock twitching against her and his kiss growing deeper.
She ground against him again, feeling him hardening to the point where it must have been uncomfortable. He wrenched away from her, his head pulling back against his couch.
"Jesus fuck, Amy. You're going to ruin me."
"Who says that's not what I wanted?"
He pulled her in tight. She couldn't help but feel good, in a position like this. Any woman would, wouldn't she? The feeling of really being a woman, of being taken even as she willingly gave herself over to the man she'd spent ten years forgetting as best she could?
Brett took a deep breath beneath her. He closed his eyes. And then his arms slacked.
"I can't do this, Amy. I—not tonight. It's not right tonight."
She gave an experimental roll of her hips. It sent a little shiver of pleasure through her as her mound rolled just right along his hard shaft, and she could feel his reaction as well.
"I understand," she said, deciding to take a risk. She kept moving her hips, strong circular motions, grinding out whatever pleasure she could in the time she had left. "If that's really what you want."
"This is a bad idea." The resistance in his voice lacked the conviction it had before. Amy found his hands moving onto her hips, but he made no effort to stop her, or even to slow her movements down. Meanwhile, each movement built up a little bit inside her, her pleasure growing with every forward thrust of her hips.
"I know. It was a bad idea for me to stay here. It was always going to go sideways, but—" she hit just the spot, and let out a low moan— "I couldn't say no, and you insisted. Did you want this to happen, big brother?"
She felt him tense up at the last part. She hadn't realized how much she would enjoy it, the reaction that she could get out of him. His arms wrapped around her waist, pulled her against him. She could feel the need in him, need that he couldn't deny and was quickly becoming unable to refuse himself.
She ground against him again, hard. She wanted every bit of that need, if she could get it. All he had to give. He let out a gasp that almost sounded pained, his entire body tense with need.
She dipped her head, her lips pressing into the nook of his neck. He tried to hide the sound of his sharp release of breath, but it was impossible, at that distance. His fingers dug into her leg, and she enjoyed the sound of the little 'hmm' he gave himself, trying to regain whatever control he could from her. But it wasn't going to happen. She was in the driver's seat now, and she was going to take what she'd wanted all these years.
He let out another breath, right there in her ear, and a shiver shot down her spine. Her hips rolled forward again, sending the shiver back up. His hands on her hips pushed and rolled her off. Amy's body laid back on the couch, her breasts pooling on her chest, her body flush and warm with arousal.
"We shouldn't. Not tonight. Any other time. Not tonight, okay?"
And then he stood up, stooping only enough to take his bottle of scotch by the neck, and then walked away, the bottle swinging in his hands. Amy's entire body felt like curling up on itself. Instead, she laid herself out flat and tried to catch her breath.
What was that? What had happened? Was it something wrong with her? Was it something she did? She shut her eyes. Whatever it was, he'd made it sound very much like he wasn't opposed to giving it another shot later. That was some sort of consolation, even if it wasn't near enough.
Her chest rose and fell with every breath. What the fuck was wrong with her? They'd spent the entire day at a funeral. A funeral for his mother. There was nothing sexy about the day's events. What the fuck was wrong with her?
Learn to read the mood, Amy, she chastised herself.
Now if only she hadn't blown her one shot on a non-starter.
2003
Amy sat in her science room, and made believe that she was writing notes. Maybe she'd remember everything without them. It wasn't likely, though—she wasn't listening, either. Her skin crawled, and she felt like she needed to do anything possible to get clean. But no matter what she did, she couldn't wash the feeling off.
Like she'd been humiliated. It was a wonder that she managed to show her face at school at all, after finding out that her "that boy she liked" was Dad's new girlfriend's son. Particularly since they'd only introduced the families now that it was 'serious.' How serious was serious, anyway?
Amy pressed her face into the cool, black plastic table top. It felt good against her skin. There were other things that might, once upon a time, have felt good against her skin. Things that belonged to her possibly-maybe-future brother, things that brothers and sisters generally didn't share.
She let out a long breath and forced herself back up, forced herself to look up at the board, and starting from the left she started copying towards the right. She made it about two lines in before the end of period bell sounded, and sent her, along with every other student, shuffling their things into a bag.
She headed for her locker, stopped only long enough to drop her bag in and grab her sketchpad from the top cubby, and then she moved on. Until she realized where she was going, and who was there. He'd want to talk, almost certainly. He'd have th
oughts on their parents dating, and he'd want to know what she thought, and she wasn't ready to do any of that yet.
She turned and headed back the way she'd come. The halls made several loops around, and she'd been there long enough that the usual routes she took from one class to another were familiar. Going off the beaten track, though, meant that she would spend a hundred feet or so walking in strange territory before she met back up again with someplace she knew.
And now, heading for the bathroom, she wasn't sure what the fastest route would be. There was a women's bathroom at the end of the hall, she thought, if she turned right. Several clocks posted on the walls, high above student's heads and pointed down the hall for students' benefits, showed that she had maybe a minute or two left before the next bell would ring.
Amy didn't hurry. She didn't need to, after all. If she was hoping to get to class on time, then she'd be practically running down the halls, moving to press other students out of the way. But she had just enough time to do what she really wanted to do: get into the bathroom.
Once she was in the bathroom, and the bell went off, she could wait a few short minutes; a left, an immediate right, and then it was less than a hundred yards to the library, where she could claim to have gotten a pass and show something ridiculously fake, and nobody would care one bit.
There was nothing in the library for her. Reading wasn't something she'd done for a long time, not seriously. But looking at it from the perspective of what her alternatives were, she could find something to pass the time in the library. It was better than talking to Brett about one of the most embarrassing mix-ups of her life so far.
She got the heavy bathroom door open and stepped inside with thirty seconds left. And, sure enough, not long after she stepped inside the stall and closed the door, the bell rang. She waited a few minutes. Maybe if she smoked, this would be a good time to do that, but she didn't. Every movie from the eighties seemed to suggest this was the place to do it.
Amy looked up. Smoke detector. Smart. But she didn't smoke in the first place, so it wasn't discouraging her at all. She waited, and waited, and finally, looking down at her watch, she decided that enough time had probably passed. People wouldn't be patrolling the halls looking for the kids who had decided to roam.
Amy pulled out her little planner, flipped it to the back and signed herself a pass. It didn't look much like her handwriting, when she wrote quickly. Maybe nobody would notice, and that was only if they checked. She smiled.
There were things she could do, after all. Maybe she couldn't pick boys to save her life. Maybe she couldn't talk to them, once she'd found out how much of an idiot she'd been. Maybe she couldn't deal with having to sit next to them.
But she could at least put together a plan to cut class, and that was something. She stepped out into the hall, and sure enough—no monitors. Right turn. She walked around the corner confidently. If she was going to get caught, it was going to be getting caught because she was too suspicious. If they saw her walking, confident, planner already out in her hand and ready to show—they wouldn't stop her in the first place.
The library air seemed almost pressurized as she stepped through the doors. A student librarian sat behind the desk. The girl didn't look up when she stepped up, signing her name down on the paper. She'd come here, with a pass, from A7. Easy.
Her entire routine was complete. Nothing to do now but find a way to kill an hour. She could do that easy. She could practically do it in her sleep, if need be. Sleep—that could be a good idea. Nothing else came readily to mind. She slipped off to a corner of the room, into one of the cubbies of comfortable chairs, ringed by waist-high bookshelves.
She was rounding around one of the half-walls when she saw him, and there was no way he didn't see her. Brett didn't say anything. He just dropped his head into his hands and looked away. Amy left before he had the chance to do, or say, anything else.
8
Brett
Present Day
Brett settled into his seat and closed his eyes. Today was going to be a long day. At the end of it, he was going to go home, see Amy, and almost certainly, after his massive fuck-up the night before, he wasn't going to get a second chance at screwing her brains out.
That would be too lucky. That would be too convenient. If there was one thing that Brett had learned over the years, it was that if there was going to be a 'luck' element, then he ought not to count on it. He had to remove the effects of luck, and then he had a chance.
Bad luck was, in essence, a punishment for people who weren't sufficiently cautious. He had been that type, for a while. It wasn't immediately obvious when it had started, but looking back, it must have been meeting Amy. Well—not quite. Meeting her was great.
It was finding out that their parents had quite a head-start on them. That was the first thing that he had found out that proved to be nothing but bad luck. Then everything had gone to shit. His peroneal tendon tore itself in half. He didn't have the limp any more, except when it was going to rain, and that was thankful.
Two problems, in two years, and he'd already realized that things didn't go well. They went bad whenever they could, which meant hedging bets. It meant making safe choices and not opening himself up to that kind of risk. Now he was years deep in trying to protect himself from whatever was going to head his way, and if there was going to be a reckoning then it was going to be hellacious. In between, he'd get the little unluckiness.
There were a thousand problems that he could lay at the feet of his bad luck, things that could have gone so much better if only he'd thought to assume the worst case scenario. But there were some things he could see coming, like a train bearing down on him from a mile away. All he had to do if he wanted to avoid it was step off the tracks.
One of them was, for some reason, still on his speed-dial, in spite of the fact that they were on a break that was always supposed to have been permanent. That was, of course, until she had a few drinks and he decided to let her have her little booty-call. He held down the '3' on his phone until it started to ring.
"What? You decide you were lonely?"
His jaw clicked softly as he pushed it to the side in annoyance. "Yeah, Rach. I'm lonely, as you keep making sure to remind me."
"It's why you can't resist my charms, after all," she teased. Brett's jaw clicked again as he jutted it off the other way.
"Yeah, whatever you say. Look, I'm just calling—"
"How is she?"
"What the fuck are you talking about, Rachel?"
"I know you fucked her. It was obvious, the minute she came to stay. Your sister."
Brett closed his eyes and took a breath, imagining that it would calm him down. It did nothing of the sort. "I told you, she's not my sister, and I didn't fuck her."
"Sure. What are you calling for?"
"It's over, Rachel. I'm not taking any more of your 3 AM. booty calls any more."
"Sure," she said. She had a haughty way of talking, one that made him want nothing more than to go by and teach her the proper way to speak to him, preferably with the flat of his belt. But he knew exactly how that would go. He'd seen it play out in front of his eyes more than once, and it never changed a thing.
"I'm serious."
"I know you are. Serious about getting in that taboo pussy."
"I'm not going to wait around for you to finish your comedy routine. I've got places to be."
"Wait, I've got three more."
His thumb tapped at the side of his leg, his breath going out slow, but unsteady as he tried to think of what it was going to take to get himself calmed down after this brush with the bitch.
"Rachel, I'm done. Goodbye. It's been fun."
"Tell your sister I said hi."
"I'm not going to do that," Brett answered. He pulled the phone away from his ear before she could continue the conversation could continue and clicked the red button in the corner.
Maybe he was fooling himself, that he could repeat last night's performance
again. Maybe he wouldn't get a chance. He wouldn't push it, not with her staying under his roof. But if the opportunity arose, now he could go for it without feeling like something was going to come down on his head after.
It had been a long time coming. Every time that they broke up, he said it was the last time, and every time he meant it. He ought to have meant it more than he did, and he ought to have put his foot down sooner. He could have met a hundred girls prettier, smarter, and just as ready to indulge in his late-night thirst.
But she knew him. There was a history, even if it was a history of sarcastic blow-offs and conversations only slightly more indulgent than a whore who had already gotten paid for the hour.
And he couldn't quite bring himself, in spite of knowing exactly what their relationship was—and what it wasn't—to turn her down. She thought she was doing him a big favor, or at least that was how she painted it with him. She was slumming so she could hang out with an architect who drove a car as expensive as her shitty little trailer.
He thought of her almost the same way. It was an interesting sort of transactional relationship, because both thought that they were being paid in sex for services rendered, and both of them were probably right, too.
The price, he thought, had always been too damn high.
2003
Brett watched her leave out of half-lidded eyes, pretending to sleep in his seat. Amy walked between the two butted-up rows of computers and headed toward the door. He let the day pass like that. He'd been here for three and a half years, and with Jennifer on librarian duty, he wasn't going to be questioned.
That was the good part of being popular, at least as popular as he was. There wasn't really anyone looking to start anything. With Amy leaving, he was free to cat-nap the day away and try to fool himself into thinking that he might not have to deal with it eventually. At the very least, he could avoid dealing with it all today.
