“I—”
She stopped there, and that gave me hope, at least. Maybe she didn’t regret it. Maybe she wanted to regret it and, the fact that she didn’t bothered her. Or maybe she loved me. Or maybe I was wrong to think I could read her and it was something I hadn’t considered. I didn’t have all the answers when it came to Jessica. I think she was too beautifully complex for that. All I could do was try.
“We can talk about it,” I said, “if you let me in. I know you’re upset, confused, but we can talk about it. If you open the door, we can—” I stopped, realizing I was repeating myself. But what else could I say? “You’re going through something right now, I get that, but I can’t help you if you don’t let me in.”
“I can’t see you right now,” she said. “If I do, I’ll—” She paused, and then went on in a voice more like her true voice. “If I do, I’ll want you again. Please, Eli, just for a little while, leave me alone.”
I would be lying if I said part of me wasn’t stung by her words. I cared for her, a lot, but it was because I cared for her that I left her, walked down the hallway, to the stairs, and to my bedroom. I had no clue what she was feeling in there, I realized with an ache in my chest. We hadn’t known each other for that long. I could make good guesses, but I couldn’t actually know unless she talked to me.
All I could do was hope that she would.
I ignored the voice in my head that whispered that she would never talk to me again.
Jessica
I knew that if I let him in, I would fall into his arms without thinking about it. It was a strange problem, one I had never encountered. I wanted to talk to him about the problem, even though he was the problem. I wanted to tell him about how anxious and scared I was, even though it was our connection that was making me anxious and scared. My emotions vacillated second by second, it seemed. The strength of last night was gone; the foreboding I had felt was vindicated. I sat perched on the edge of the bed, my book forgotten on the floor, my fists clenched atop my knees.
I wanted so badly to leave the bedroom and go to him, wanted desperately to feel him against me again, but he was my stepbrother. One second, it excited me, and the thought of sneaking out there and fucking my stepbrother until we both came, hard, made my nipples erect and my clit tingle. And the next, I saw the judgmental faces of hundreds of strangers, shaking their heads, spitting at us—and Dad and Annabelle, crying loudly and forcefully (and of course they would be judging us, spitting at us, too). I made to touch myself, thinking of last night, and then was angry with myself for the impulse. I made to cry, but then realized that there was nothing to cry about . . . We just want each other! There’s nothing wrong with that! So why did I feel the tears on my cheeks?
“Dammit!” I muttered, clenching my fists harder. The fidgeting was back, like a thousand creatures trying to wriggle out of my body. “Dammit.”
I thought about the masked ball, about the lion, about the lovemaking, and wondered if I would rather have never met him. Even now, as my body fought to drive me into a panic attack, I knew that I would not. Then irony was that the man who caused the anxiety was the only one who could alleviate it. Eli held the poison and the antidote. His power over me was startling; I wanted to run toward and away from him at the same time.
But I never wanted to run away from him because of something he had done. It was always when I imagined other people’s reaction that I felt a stab of guilt in my belly. Nobody else would understand. They wouldn’t care that we had met as lovers before we were brother and sister. All they would care about is that we were different, that we had done something which society agreed people did not do. Every time I thought of the hordes and hordes of sneering people, laughing, pointing—that was when I wanted to end things with Eli.
But when I only thought about him, in isolation, and didn’t allow other thoughts to color my feelings, I didn’t want to run from him at all. No, when I thought like that, my body ached for him, my nipples ached from wanting to be grabbed and my pussy ached from wanting to be fucked. There was a warm orb in my belly when I thought about his hands on me. The anxiety did not go—only being with him, in person, seemed to do that—but it lessened when I relived our sex.
I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting at the edge of the bed, pacing up and down, wringing my hands, staring out of the window, until there was another knock at my door. “I’m making some dinner,” Eli said. “Do you want some? Pizza.”