It is two a.m. before we know it, and we have barely moved, barely spoken a word. And now, finally, I feel Caleb’s broad chest move as he takes a deep breath, then another.
And he touches my hair again, pulls me close to him once more, and then he begins to talk.
He begins to talk to me.
To me.
16
“What do you really know about me, Allie?” he says, and he says it like it is not really a question, like it is a statement, like he knows I don’t know that much about him.
I shrug as I lie there in his strong arms, the clean smell of his body strong in my senses, the sound of his heartbeat lulling me into a trance.
“I don’t know,” I say softly. “Not much. But enough. It feels like I know enough. Like I know more than I think I know, if you know what I mean.”
He touches my head again, sending a tingle through me, but I feel his chest move again as he sighs, and I know he is thinking about whether he should go on, whether he should say what’s playing on his mind.
But he doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and I speak instead, shrugging in his arms as I look up at his handsome, troubled face.
“Well,” I say. “I know what everyone knows. Athlete, musician, genius-boy. School valedictorian. Football team. Basketball team. Baseball team. Scholarship to college. Fellowship after college. Handsome. Ten-percent body fat. Likes to tie women up and spank them as he jerks off in his little sister’s bed.”
Now Caleb BURSTS out laughing, and suddenly I am laughing too, and I feel so close to him, so fucking close, and I am sure this is what love must feel like. I am certain of it.
We giggle in each other’s arms for a few minutes, and I know both of us are at some level thinking about the simple truth that we are in fact stepbrother and stepsister, siblings in the same family, cuddled in bed together right now, in a soundproof room with the door locked. It should feel twisted and wrong, and maybe at some level it does. But it feels like our arms were made for each other, to hold each other, to comfort each other. Trust your body, Allie, I hear myself saying. Trust yourself. Don’t worry about what people might say. Don’t worry about what Dad might say, what your stepmom might feel, what the neighbors will think. This is about you and him, Allie. Fuck the rest of the world.
My thoughts are interrupted by Caleb’s voice, and he is serious now, melancholy almost, a thick emotional undercurrent to his voice. I sense that what he is trying to say is hard for him, that maybe he hasn’t told anyone else this yet, that maybe I really don’t know his secret, at least not all of it. So I stay quiet and listen.
“Yeah,” Caleb says, sighing again. “Athlete-musician-genius. But I wasn’t always that guy, you know. Until I was fifteen, I was kind of a loner. Kind of a weirdo. Didn’t have a lot of friends. Didn’t really play sports. Didn’t even do that well in school. I played guitar, but I sucked, and I could never summon up the courage to play in front of anyone else.”
Now I blink and look up at him, frowning as I try to figure out whether he’s just fucking with me, making another joke. In my mind Caleb was always this guy, this fucking superhero overachiever guy.
But he’s serious, I can tell, almost embarrassed, and now I rest my head on his hard chest once again and nod. “So what happened when you were fifteen?” I ask.
He sighs again. “Well, I was going through kind of a rough time, personally. Feeling alone, depressed, like I was a loser or something, like I wouldn’t amount to shit. And then I started reading some of those books on spirituality, self-realization, about how you can use your willpower and life-force to achieve anything you want, to BE anything you want.”
I just nod. I’ve read some of those kinds of books too, although I never took them very seriously. Still, I kinda know what he means.
Caleb goes on. “And so I started to focus on transforming myself, on becoming what I thought was a perfect person, good at everything, liked by everyone. I would meditate on what I wanted to achieve—whether it was making the football team or getting an A in Calculus or hitting that perfect note when I was playing music.” He is talking faster now, like something inside him is opening up, letting out thoughts and emotions that have been bottled up for a long time. “And the crazy thing is that it actually seemed to work. I would choose a goal, focus on it, and then put all my energy into achieving it. And it would happen. I mean, yeah, some of it is just hard work and dedication, but I always felt it was deeper than that. That I somehow could control my fate, my destiny. That I could achieve everything I wanted, pursue anything that made me happy.”
“And you were happy?” I ask now, softly, as I move my head on his chest.
“Oh, hell yeah,” he says. “It was like I was awake for the first time. I felt in control, powerful, like nothing bad could ever happen to me. And nothing bad ever did. I got everything I wanted.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I say. “Especially the girls, right?”
Caleb laughs again, and I can feel him shaking his head. “No, little Allie. That’s the thing. When I started reading about this spirituality stuff, I came across a book that talked about sex, about sexual energy, about how it’s so powerful, so wonderful.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, my eyes half-closed, my voice thick and dreamy as I listen to him speak. “Yeah.”
“And I read that having sex with someone you love is one of the greatest boosts you can give to your life force, because of the positive energy it generates. But at the same time, if you don’t use your sexual energy in the right way, if you just give it away, use it with people that you don’t feel a deep connection to, then it can actually suck that vital life-force out of you. It can hurt you, stop you from achieving your goals, your dreams, even happiness.”
I just listen to Caleb now, not sure where he’s going with this. “Okay,” I say. “I’m not sure I understand.”
Caleb snorts once with laughter. “Yeah, well, I don’t know if I understand it anymore. I mean, I was fifteen when I read that shit. It was almost nine years ago. But anyway, long story short, back then I decided that I wouldn’t have sex with someone I didn’t love. I just wouldn’t. No matter what my friends were doing, I would hold out until it felt right.” He sighs now. “And I was so busy focusing on all these other goals, that it was easy. It felt great. It gave me a sense of freedom, of total control over my life. I was achieving all these great things, and I felt like I was king of the world. And I figured that sex would come soon enough, at the right time, with the right woman.” He sighs again. “I had it all planned out, you know. I would focus all my energy in high school to achieve all these things, get a full scholarship to a top college, and then, freshman year, I was confident I would find my woman, find the one, the first one, the only one. It was so clear in my head. So fucking planned out. Another one of my goals that I was confident I could achieve.”
I nod now, my head still against his chest. I have now seen Caleb with maybe ten different women. It doesn’t bother me in the least to hear about his sexual history, his first time. “And did the right woman come along?”
Caleb takes a breath. “Yeah. Well, I thought so, at least.”
Now my breath catches in my throat, and I blink hard as I stare down at Caleb’s lean body intertwined with mine. But before I can think too much, he goes on.
“I met her my freshman year, and she was great. She was the one, I thought. Sweet, beautiful, and the crazy thing is that she was a virgin too. How wild is that?”
“That is wild,” I say softly, feeling strange when I wonder if Caleb knows that I am a virgin too, that I’ve never had a man inside me, never even pushed my own fingers all the way inside me. Still, he’s obviously not still a virgin, and I don’t want to interrupt his flow now. Or perhaps I feel embarrassed in some way, embarrassed to remind him, to remind myself, that I am a child in many ways, a little untouched girl.
He goes on. “Yeah, so we started dating in November of our freshman year, when we were both eighteen. And we too
k it slow, you know. We thought it was fate that had brought the two of us together, two people who had never had sex. It seemed so romantic and old-fashioned.”
“Yeah,” I say again, feeling small and insignificant suddenly as I wish I was the one, Caleb’s first one. I’ve never thought of myself as a hopeless romantic, but something about what Caleb is saying touches me deeply, makes me think about sexual energy, the connection between two people, two bodies that were made for each other. “It’s sweet.”
“Oh, yeah. But anyway,” Caleb says, talking faster again, and I can hear his heart beat in his chest, and I listen carefully. “So we had our first time all planned out. It was going to be Valentine’s Day. February 14. Yeah, we had it all planned out.” He sighs now, hesitating, and his heart is pounding furiously inside him now, and I can feel his body tense up slightly, and I wonder what’s going on in my stepbrother’s mind.
Caleb takes a deep breath, and I can sense this is difficult for him. “So I don’t know if you know this,” he says, “but my mom’s birthday is February 13.”
I blink now, listening to this story unfold. “No,” I say, whispering into his chest, running my hand along the side of his lean, hard body, feeling a tingle go through me again. I feel so secure in Caleb’s arms right now, like we have known each other for years. For some reason it feels completely natural the way Caleb is opening up to me right now, and somehow I get the sense that we will have many nights like this, perhaps many years like this, perhaps even the rest of our lives like this, telling each other our deepest secrets, our innermost thoughts, trusting each other, holding each other.
But Caleb is absorbed in his own story, and he goes on. “Yeah, so her birthday is February 13, which is no big deal. I mean, I was planning to send her a card and call her and all that. But then, a week before, my dad calls me up and says he’s bought me a plane ticket for that weekend. Both my grandparents had died earlier that year, and my mom had been kinda depressed, so my dad wanted to have a surprise birthday party for her. He kind of figured it out at the last minute and bought me the plane ticket without even asking me if I had plans for that weekend. He just assumed I’d drop everything and fly back.”
I am quiet now as I feel the emotion rise up in Caleb, sense it in the way he is breathing, the way his heart is beating. I hold him tighter, and I feel the tension in his body, and I just stay quiet and listen.
“So I was pissed,” Caleb says. “And I said I couldn’t make it back, that I had plans for the weekend. And my dad was cool with it. I mean, he was disappointed, but he said it’s cool, I can maybe Skype in and say Happy Birthday or Surprise or whatever.”
“That’s cool of him,” I say softly. “Your dad sounds very understanding.”
Caleb is quiet for a moment. “He is,” he says now. “I mean he was.”
Now we are both quiet for some time, and I know Caleb is thinking about his dad. It is almost four in the morning now, but I feel wide awake and I couldn’t give a shit about how sleepy I’m going to feel in school today. I just nuzzle into Caleb as he pulls me closer, squeezes me tight, sighs again as if he is searching for the strength to keep talking.
And he does keep talking. “But of course I felt guilty. I knew my mom had been feeling low after my grandparents died. And now the house probably felt empty after I took off for college. And so I changed my mind and told my dad I would come back home for the party.”
I nod, still quiet.
“But then when I explained it to my girlfriend, she just fucking LOST it! She went off at me for choosing my mother over her, or some shit like that. She was really insulted that I was going to cancel our plans of making love for the first time to fly home for my mom’s birthday.” Caleb pauses for a moment. “I mean, honestly, I don’t blame her. We had that weekend planned for a month. And I was looking forward to it too. Trust me, I was REALLY looking forward to it.”
I giggle now, surprised at myself at how comfortable I am listening to Caleb talk about his early sexual exploits. Caleb laughs a little too, but not for long.
“Anyway,” he says. “So we fought about it for a couple of days. I told her she should fly home with me and we could have our private Valentine’s Day up here in my soundproof studio. We could even go to a hotel in town. My parents wouldn’t care—I mean, we’re both adults. But she just refused, wouldn’t even hear of it. At first I couldn’t understand why she was being so stubborn, refusing to compromise. I mean, sure, she had a right to be pissed. But I guess I also expected her to understand that this was important to me, and so I was confused that she wouldn’t come home with me when I promised we’d be alone together on Valentine’s Day anyway, just in a different town.”
“Yeah, that’s weird,” I offer, even though I sort of understand. Maybe she was just insecure. Who knows.
“I thought it was weird too, even stupid at first,” Caleb says. “Until I realized that our fight was about something deeper, more complex. It was about control. Her desire to control me, my desire to control her.” He takes a deep breath. “Maybe more my desire for control. My desire to control EVERYTHING, I guess.” Now he laughs, but not because anything is funny. “And when I realized that, I decided that maybe all those years of controlling everything about my life was the problem. I decided that maybe I need to give up a little bit of control, give it up to this woman I thought I loved.” He snorts now. “Of course, I was a fucking eighteen-year-old virgin back then. I wouldn’t have known what love was if it had bitten me in the ass.”
I laugh now, but it is a hollow laugh. I can’t help but think that hey, I’M an eighteen-year-old virgin, and up until now I thought I didn’t know what love was either. I too was worried that I wouldn’t know love if it slapped me in the face. But I was wrong. Because now, as I lie here in Caleb’s arms, I know that when it happens, there’s no doubt. Which means that if you have to ask the question, it’s probably not love.
But Caleb is still talking and my internal monologue is interrupted. “Yeah, so I decided to just give up control that once. Give in to my girlfriend, as a sign of love, a sign that I am ready to let someone else have a hold on me.” He snorts again. “Of course, I won’t deny that I was horny as fuck too. So who knows why I made the decision—it was probably some combination of both those things. But I made the decision.”
I nod. “So you called your dad back and canceled,” I say.
Now I feel a shiver go through Caleb, and the vibration shakes my entire body as I lie pressed up against him, and I hold my breath as he goes on.
“Yes,” he says. “But all this fighting and decision-making took all week, and in fact I was literally boarding the plane when I decided to turn back, to give in to my girlfriend, to give in to my primal need to fuck her that weekend. So I turned back at the last minute and only called my dad when I got out of the airport.”
“Wow,” I say. “So he was disappointed.”
Caleb doesn’t reply. I don’t even know if he heard me. He is trembling now, breathing hard, almost shivering with emotion. “The flight is only forty minutes long, and since we live pretty far from the airport, my dad had already left home to pick me up,” Caleb says, and his voice is low now, quivering. “And so when I called him, he said no problem, that he understood. So he turned back.”
“Okay,” I say, my voice low now too as I feel Caleb tremble and go silent.
Finally he speaks, his voice low, strained, almost painful to listen to. “And two hours later I got the call from my mom. She told me Dad had taken an exit off the highway and he was rammed head-on by a semi-truck going the wrong way on the ramp. He died instantly, crushed as the car crumpled in on him with the force of impact. Just fucking crushed to death!” Now Caleb is starting to shake, and I pull him close. “He was on the road when I called him, Allie. He took that exit right after I called him. He was turning back. He died because of my phone call. Because I made that last-minute decision to give up control, to follow my fucking primal needs, to follow my goddamn cock
.”
I am hugging him tight as he quietly shudders, but suddenly he stops, and now his voice is cold, hard, deadpan, and the change is so sudden that it sends a chill through me. “I never told anyone about that phone call I made,” he says. “Never told anyone. In all the chaos of that night, my mom never put it all together, that I was flying home, that he was picking me up, that he was on that exit ramp because of me. Because of ME!” He takes a deep breath now, a tremor going through his tensed-up body. “And that secret has twisted me, torn me up inside, burned a hole in my psyche. It’s the reason I swore that I would never give up control again, especially when it comes to sex, to women, to the needs of my body. Never. I would never give up control again.”
17
The room is still now, the soft sounds of our breathing the only thing I can hear. My mind is racing, my heart is pounding, and my body is tensed up along with Caleb’s. It all makes sense to me now—this strange, almost schizo behavior of my stepbrother, the way he treats women, the way he obsessively controls their bodies, controls his own body, deciding when they have an orgasm even as he controls his own desire, his own arousal. The one time he gave up control to a woman, to the needs of his body, the results were tragic. Of course, it’s nobody’s fault, but given Caleb’s obsession with control, it makes sense that he blames himself, carries this with him like a heavy load.
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