by Hawke, Jessa
What I didn’t know about Luan then was that he was the type of guy who likes to take matters into his own hands. And he kind of has a problem overstepping his pride. So the entire time that I was waiting for him to go running to his mom, complaining about me and getting those two out of our house forever, Luan was hatching a plan. What he didn’t count on, however, was me catching him red-handed.
Andy had asked me to be her maid of honor, and despite the fact that she was this stranger who was moving into my house, I was pretty touched. I didn’t like my body too much in those days—I was still fighting off some childhood pudge—so I was heavy into shape wear. Besides that, I had the kind of low-swinging breasts that require a good supportive bra if I wanted to look halfway decent in any dress. And if I was being perfectly honest with myself, I did want to look nice at the rehearsal dinner. My dad, no doubt starting to feel the first pangs of guilt at the realization that he had not given me any advance warning about any of this, had let me buy my first sexy black dress. My mom had always thought I was too young for black, but she was gone now, and I heard Andy whispering to my dad that I should just be happy, to let me have whatever I wanted. So I had the dress, and it was the night before the rehearsal dinner that I decided to try it on again just to make sure that it still looked good.
I opened the door to my room to find Luan at my underwear drawer, brandishing a pair of scissors. The hinges were pretty well-oiled, so he didn’t hear the door swing open. The shock of seeing silent Luan in my room was enough to stun me just enough to seal my lips shut for a moment. Which was long enough to see this ordinarily passive guy rummaging through my bras and cut off all their straps. To my deep embarrassment, he had also managed to find my control-top underwear and was slashing holes in it and snipping away all the magic elastic.
I saw red. My dreams of looking sexy in my new black dress were over.
When my dad and Andy found us, I had Luan in a chokehold and he was turning beat red. For all his muscles, he had a higher center of gravity than I did and I had had the element of surprise.
“What the hell is going on here?” my dad roared, as he rushed into the room to tear us apart. When he finally managed to, we still kicked out at each other, trying to get a last few hits in.
“She’s been sneaking shit into my room for weeks!” yelled Luan, his color beginning to normalize.
“Wha-what shit?” my dad asked, trying to restrain him.
“Pins in my bed, pink girly shit glued to my laptop!”
Andy looked over from where she had wrapped her arms around me in an effort to keep me from demolishing her son further. “Is this true?” she asked me.
“He cut up all my bras!” I cried, real tears running down my face. “He ripped up all my underwear! I have nothing to wear to the rehearsal dinner tomorrow!” And I collapsed into Andy’s skinny little arms, sobbing.
“Oh, who cares?” Luan asked brutally, sneering at me from across the room. “It’s not like anybody’s going to be looking at the kids anyway.”
“Shut your mouth, you lousy freak! Nobody wanted you guys to come here anyway!” I screamed back at him. Suddenly, I felt Andy’s arms give away a little bit.
“You didn’t want us here?” she asked me, her soft brown eyes looking at me with so much hurt that I almost wanted to take back what I said. But instead, it all came tumbling out, about my own mom and dad, and how my dad had sprung the whole thing on me. Putting together Luan’s room, and he didn’t even like it. At the end of it, Andy squeezed me tight and apologized. Luan and I were relegated to our rooms.
Forty-five minutes later, I heard shouting coming from my dad’s room. I crept softly along the carpeted halls until I was about a foot away from the door. It was Andy’s voice, and she did not sound happy.
“Why didn’t you tell me she had no idea we were coming? You said you told her the minute we started getting serious!”
I reeled back in shock. I listened for a few minutes more, my dad apologizing and muttering some excuse or another, and a mixture of shame, regret, and uncertainty washed over me. Without thinking too much about it, I did the only thing that felt right.
Luan’s room was not locked shut, like I had expected. When I knocked on the door and opened it, he was not wired into his computer as usual. I walked over and sat down on the edge of his bed. He said nothing, but closed his laptop shut. I could see deep scratch marks on it from where he had had to violently rip the pink bows off.
“I’m sorry about that” was the first thing that came out of my mouth. A deep silence feel between us, and I had no idea how to fill it, had no clue whether or not Luan would accept my apology. But what he said next surprised me, because it got straight to heart of the issue.
“So us coming here, you didn’t know anything about that?” His voice was just starting to turn deep, and it was fairly melodic when he wasn’t shouting at me.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, bouncing on the bed, excited as a puppy. “I had no idea my dad was even seeing someone! Did you know Andy was?”
He shook his head. “I knew something was up, because she’d go off late at night and come back in the morning, and was bopping along all happy all the time. Finally, I was like, ‘Ma, what, you got a boyfriend?’ and she told me all about it. I mean, my dad cut out on us years ago, so I guess I was pretty happy for her that she had someone, you know?” He looked up at me, and there was something vulnerable in his eyes. “But I had no idea we were moving here until about a week before it happened. I asked her why she didn’t tell me about it sooner, but she said that she didn’t want to put too much on me.”
“Put too much on you? Shit, not telling you was putting too much on you!” I cried, and the feeling of camaraderie I was having with Luan in that moment was a foreshadowing of the next decade or so. He nodded, slowly, and broke out into a small smile, the kind you get when you feel like someone finally understands you. We sat together in the quiet for several long minutes, drinking in each other’s presences for the first time since Luan and Andy had arrived in the house.
“I like the room. It’s just like the one I had back home,” he said, finally breaking the silence. I nodded and smiled at him, not afraid to beam now that we had broken the tension between us. If only I knew the tension that was to come.
“And I’m sorry about your underwear,” he continued. I blushed, the full embarrassment of a guy having found my special underpants finally flooding me. I got up from his bed, unable to stay that close to him one minute longer. But at the doorway, I heard him call my name and I turned around.
“I don’t think you need that kind of stuff, either way,” he told me. Was it my imagination, or did his eyes travel over my body lingeringly? I nodded, turned, and fled. But I never wore control-top anything from that day forward.
Not that I needed to. As my early teen years passed, my baby fat just kind of melted away. Now and again, I would find men’s eyes clinging to my breasts or thighs, and the odd prickly feeling I would get in my chest whenever I caught them would make me run all the way home, clutching my books to my chest. I would slam the door shut behind me and slide all the way down to the floor, a puddle of burgeoning body parts, excitement, and shame.
I could hear Luan in the kitchen, chortling aloud with somebody. I picked myself up from my floor puddle and went into the kitchen to see what it was about. Over the years, Luan and I became close friends. We’d tell each other secrets and make fun of our parent’s failings, over and over, even though we both knew that at the end of the day, we loved them both. My favorite times were when we would roughhouse together, starting out with slapping and mock punches, ending with tumbling over Luan’s or my bed, legs flying overhead. We’d wrestle into the sheets, our bodies assuming such acrobatic positions that we almost knocked his dresser over many times. The excitement I felt during these times felt slightly disturbing to me, but Luan never said anything, and neither did I. Instead, I relished the feel of his warm, solid torso on mine, the way the
sunlight would make his warm brown eyes glow and burnish his tan skin with the hue of gold. The ropes of muscles in his arms were firm underneath my hands as he pinned me, and I held on to those biceps for all I was worth. There was a lingering tension in the air, something between us I knew that we both felt, and it was such a carefully cultivated moment, something so delicate that anything could shatter it, but if I held my breath and was very careful, we could hold this moment inches, seconds, eternities, every unit of measurement into forever.
And then Luan’d laugh and the spell would be broken, and he’d overturn me until I begged for mercy. I knew that I had to, even if I didn’t want to, because I liked the press of his body on me. I could feel him pressing into the crack of my ass and it took everything in me not to buck up against him too obviously. Mercy, I’d cry, mercy, mercy, mercy, take me.
I tried hard not to think about how I felt during those times, just tried to savor them before we got too old. Would we ever get too old for that sort of thing? I sincerely hoped not. He was my best friend; he would not be going anywhere any time soon.
The laughter from the kitchen drew me in. Luan was sitting there, chugging down orange juice with Andy’s oatmeal raisin cookies with some other guy. He had reddish hair and these dark blue eyes, and orange juice dribbling down his chin. As I came in, he wiped it off with his sleeve. Savage. That was the first time I ever met Jim.
He looked me up and down with interest as I walked into the kitchen and gave Luan a hug, wrapping myself to the elbows in his teenage boy smell. I looked at the other guy with suspicion in my heart from my vantage point of being wrapped around my stepbrother’s neck.
“This is my friend, Jim.”
Friends? I knew that Luan had lacrosse buddies, but nobody special enough to bring into the house where we tumbled around together. Luan didn’t have other friends. The house was our place, the one where we told each other secrets sitting by his bed. My head was reeling. What did Luan need other friends than me for?
At first, I thought it was a fluke. Jim had a certain type of appeal, I supposed, but other than milky skin and muscles to match Luan’s, I did not find him overly exciting. Luan seemed to, however. As the weeks turned into months, Jim became a permanent fixture in our household, drawing my Luan farther and farther away from me. They’d lock themselves in Luan’s blue bedroom and I’d press my ear against the door to hear them chuckling and exploding things on their video games for hours on end. Luan began to spend less and less time with me, and our “Say Uncle” games disappeared altogether. I tried to tell myself we were too old for that stuff, anyway—after all, we were eighteen—but the truth was was that I didn’t feel too old for them. I will never feel too old to want to grab my stepbrother’s hips and press my mouth stealthily against his neck.
And then there was the way Jim stared at me. Every time I would walk into a room, he’d perk up and start asking me about my day. The only times where the three of us would spend time together was when Jim would unceremoniously invite me to do whatever with them. These hangout were always strange and tense, with Jim looking into my face like I was a chocolate doughnut that he wanted to glaze. Literally, in the most teenage boy sense of that phrase. Whenever I’d say something, he’d look at my mouth as if I was just moving my lips and not talking at all. Luan would look at him during these times with an exasperation I agreed with, but neither one of us said anything to or about Jim for a good long while.
Of course I knew that Jim had a thing for me. Not only from the way he tried to talk while flexing his not-insubstantial muscles whenever I was around. There was that time, the last time that Luan and I had our special moment. I had stolen the last cookie that Andy had made, and Luan had chased me down the hall, finally pinning me to the ground with his arms and legs, so that our mouths were positioned directly across from each other, even if a foot of space separated them. I could feel the warmth of Luan’s breath, and in a gesture of mock dominance had wrapped my legs around his hips so that he was pressing directly into my crotch. That was when Luan’s laughter had stopped; it couldn’t be just me, it couldn’t, savoring the feel of him between my legs.
“Jim likes you,” said Luan, and with that, abruptly, things changed between us. Before, when the words had not been said, we could almost pretend it wasn’t real, but now, the fact that my stepbrother’s new best friend had feelings for me hung in the air between us instead of that special bond we had shared.
“Too bad,” I finally said, and pushed my stepbrother off me, the space between my thighs that had been filled with his heat now cold.
Eventually, we all went off to college together. We lived in a small town, and our options were fairly limited. Besides, Luan had received, to my family’s surprise, a business scholarship, while I just couldn’t stand to be away from him. “But honey,” Andy said the day he announced it, “I thought lacrosse was your thing.”
“I can have lots of interests, mom,” Luan said pointedly. My Luan. I was so proud of him. Andy and my dad were also surprised that I decided to go to the same college.
“Are you gonna miss your brother?” Andy cooed. Was I ever. She had no idea how right she was.
Luan, of course, succeeded in college, and surprisingly, so did Jim. It wasn’t long before the two guys, former lacrosse players and all-around jocks began a startup company that catered first to our local college population, then to neighboring schools. Then, it went statewide, and before we knew it, Luan had his name in the papers and was naming Jim as his lawful partner in business.
But that was just gravy. College years were a strange time, mostly because Jim, Luan, and I were spending so much time together. It still annoyed me that Jim was around so much, but I supposed it was inevitable given that they were in the same business together. I got to know Jim a bit more, and he wasn’t too bad, except for the fact that he stared at me even more now, especially when I finished filling in. Luan seemed to like having him around, so I could not really say anything. Until that fateful day.
Luan did not break the news to me himself, of course. I say of course like I understand why, but all I have left to this day is speculation. Why did he not tell me that the company was going national? That it would be moving five states and sixteen hours away, and that seeing him was about as likely as catching a shooting star with my bare hands. No, instead, it was Jim, and it came up so casually that I almost did not catch it, except for when I finally caught on to what was happening, it was as if someone had bottomed out my stomach and had removed all my insides at the speed of light.
I received a text message from Jim asking me if I wanted to join them for a boy’s night out on the town. Maybe for Luan it would have been a guy’s night out, but I knew that Jim was hoping for an extra chance to subtly grope my ass and pretend it was an accident, just like every other time. Still, I classed it up in my favorite black dress and headed out to the bar to meet them. It was crowded and full of techie guys in plaid shirts, brown belts, and jeans. It was definitely apt to call it a boy’s night, because it was an absolute sausage fest in there. Jim was certainly not the only one who gave me a once-over when I entered.
“What are we drinking to, boys?” I asked, and signaled to the waiter for a house cocktail.
Jim was grinning broadly. “Congratulate us, babe, we’ve hit the big charts!”
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, taking a sip from my glass and licking my lips. “What are the big charts, exactly?”
“We got that grant from the company I told you about,” Luan said to me, his dark blue shirt molding to his fit body so perfectly it almost took my breath away. “We’re opening up in Raleigh, then four other towns.”
“Raleigh? Who’s gonna run it for you there?” I asked.
The guys exchanged a look. Neither of them met my eyes. It was a long minute of me looking from Jim to Luan and back, until finally, Jim said, “Well, we’re kinda moving down there.”
Agony closed up my throat and I cleared it and forced the re
st of my drink down my gullet. Luan was leaving? Was that a joke? When my brain finally unscrambled itself, I forced myself not to let panic seep into my voice. “When?” I asked Jim, but was unable to tear my eyes away from Luan.
“Three months.”
Can I say that the plan hatched itself right then and there? I honestly couldn’t tell you. All I can say is that my brain started making those crazy human leaps, where you start thinking of the wildest things as if they are normal. I’ll tell him right now, I thought. I’ll tell Luan I’m in love with him, and he’ll be so overjoyed that he’ll never move away to anywhere. Then I realized how ridiculous this would be. Not only would Luan of course have to move with his company—it was a huge opportunity for him, after all—but he had only ever seen me as his sister. It did not matter that we were never related by blood. One of the reasons I loved him so much—aside from the fact that he was almost unbearably hot—was how protected he always made me feel. And the main reason he felt the urge to protect me was because he considered me his sister. Nothing more, nothing less. So telling him that it was his eyes I drowned in, that in all my fantasies, it was my head laying on his chest would lead to nothing but heartache.
So then I wondered how I could justify going to Raleigh with him. I had no job offers there, and I didn’t even have a boyfriend to justify making the move, if I could even convince him to do that. Or did I?
It was certainly then that I looked at Jim with new eyes. He was actively eyeing my cleavage, and generally acted like a puppy dog around me. How much would it take, really, before he was mine? And he was moving to Raleigh to run the business with Luan. Suddenly, the second half of my insane thoughts didn’t seem quite so crazy anymore. Would someone else have called me completely wild and out of my mind? Quite possibly. But what choice did I have? If it were you, could you honestly say you would not have done the same thing?
