Meeting her in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the garden, in the living room, and always the fa?ade was up, always I felt a cold stab in my chest every time she pretended that we were nothing, until it was the night before the wedding, the night before we became stepbrother and stepsister.
I fell asleep, as I had every night for a week now, thinking of Jessica, of her lightly-freckled cheeks and her smooth pale skin and her button nose and her sky-blue eyes and her petite body and her hot moans and her soft hands.
When I woke, it was the Big Day. Music played from Mom and Andrew’s bedroom. Mom giggled. Andrew guffawed loudly. I heard Jessica’s voice . . . “Your hair is lovely, Annabelle,” she was saying. “Maybe we should try this . . .”
Just my stepsister giving my mom advice on her hair, I thought, terror gripping my chest, making me want to sink into the bed and lose myself in dreams where Jessica and I kissed and held each other and didn’t have to play these games.
Jessica
I had to fix it, to make the situation livable, and I hate confrontation. Confrontation brings a person out in the open, brings them out so all their faults and insecurities can be scrutinized and attacked, and the idea of that didn’t thrill me at all. The night after the kiss, after we almost did something we might regret, I lay awake, heart pounding, thinking of how to fix it, how to make it better, how to make it livable. I knew that we couldn’t do what we wanted. That was a ludicrous idea. We could only do what we wanted in a perfect world, where Dad and Annabelle weren’t getting married, where pretty soon we weren’t going to be brother and sister. So I decided to pretend that everything was normal, to pretend that he and I had never kissed.
It was hard. I had to force myself to smile when I wanted to open up to him. I had to make myself mutter platitudes and play the stepsister role with all my might. And beneath it all, always, there was another version of me trying to break free, a version which wanted Eli, wanted all he had to give, wanted to kiss him, touch him, be with him. Dozens of times I felt the urge to reach out and touch his face, to feel his skin in my hand, but I always held back. I knew it was wrong. I couldn’t do it, no matter how badly I wanted to.
Dad and Annabelle were too happy, too in love, for their children to mess it up. So I stayed in my room as much as possible, hunched over an Eliot or a Hardy or an Austin or a Hemingway, losing myself in the words, my hands aching from gripping the pages for so long, my eyes burning from hours and hours of reading. It was all a way to escape—not him, but myself, my feelings. I could smile and pretend as much as I was able, but it didn’t stop me from waking in the middle of the night, reaching out for him in my sleep, still horny from a dream when he was naked (tattoos sun-bright in the dream) and fucking me hard. It didn’t change the way my skin pricked each time I thought of that night. It didn’t change the way my mind lurched in recognition each time I thought of the way he’d quoted George Eliot to me.
I knew that if circumstances were different, we could be close. We could be lovers, maybe more than lovers.
I joined Annabelle in her bedroom on the day of the wedding. She and Dad did not want anything outlandish, anything over-the-top. Annabelle had long hair, and I helped her style it so it wouldn’t get in the way of the back of her dress, which was low-cut almost to her tailbone. I braided it for her and set it—like an elaborate ornament—atop her head. And even here, doing this, I couldn’t dissociate the simple task of braiding hair with Eli. It was his mother I was helping, and it was her son I wanted, badly.
“Thanks, Jess!” she beamed, looking at me in the mirror.
I saw my own face, how tired my eyes looked, how my lip trembled for a moment. It was like looking at somebody else, somebody playing a role. And I was. I was playing the role of a woman who had no interest in her soon-to-be stepbrother. I was playing the role of a woman who didn’t dream every night of the muscles and sex and tattoos and endless orgasms.
“No problem!” I beamed back, smiling widely.
She did look beautiful with her hair and her dress. Her dress was a mixture of traditional and stylish. She had the long flowing bottom of a traditional wedding dress, but the low-cut back of more modern styles. I made to help her with her makeup, but she laid her hands atop mine. I felt a stab of guilt in my chest when I saw this happy bride with her hand on mine. She doesn’t know, I thought. She doesn’t know that I fucked her son. She doesn’t know I want to do it again, that we both want to do it again.
“You’ve done enough,” she smiled. “I can handle this. Why don’t you go and get ready, sweet?”