Sister.
I’m gonna be sick.
“You sent me those texts,” I say, making him repeat it without words.
He nods once. “I did what was required.”
There is a part of me that catalogues everything: the angle of his wrist, the weight distribution of the car, the way the headlamp throws light across the safety strip. The rest of me is simple. It makes a decision that’s been a long time coming and then carries it out.
I draw. He starts to lift his hand—appeasement, command, I don’t care. The shot is a flat, loud answer. The back of his skull hits the headrest and then slumps forward like a puppet cut from its strings. Blood is an ugly color on leather. I put the car in neutral and steer it with my forearm and his sleeve until the bumper kisses the rail. I open his door. The river is closer now. The night smells like salt, oil, old tide.
“I told you not to come for us,” I say, because I did, once, when my voice was a boy’s and he called it disobedience.
He’s heavy with money and age. I drag him out and over. The bridge is high enough. The splash is smaller than the noise in my head. The current takes the rest.
I wipe what I have to wipe, throw the gun as far out into the river as I can, and leave what I need to leave. This isn’t a disappearance. This is an end. The cops will find him, eventually, but I’ll figure all that out later.
I walk back to my car. I sit and let my pulse find something like normalcy. I text no one. I drive back to the Tybee house.
The gate opens, and the driveway curls out before me. Beyond, the house lights glow low. Inside, the world is the opposite of the bridge. It is warm and soft and smells like vanilla and coffee and the dog’s clean fur andher.
It’s everything I want, and everything that’s threatened now.
Her door is ajar, and she’s wearing my shirt. She’s on the bed, on her side, knees drawn up, hair shoved into a knot that lost the war. The hem rides high on her thigh, the collar slipped wide at the shoulder. She’s reading by lamplight with her mouth slightly open. She looks like the place I want to live the rest of my life.
“Hey,” she says, and smiles like there’s nothing wrong in the world. She doesn’t ask where I went. She doesn’t have to. She closes the book and puts it on my nightstand like it belongs there. “Come here.”
I stand in the doorway longer than I should and try to build a sentence that won’t break her. Nothing comes that isn’t a wrecking ball. So I do the thing I can do right. I go to her and don’t pretend this is anything but the last time I get to be this selfish.
“I missed you,” she says.
“I’m here,” I answer, because it’s not a promise, it’s a fact.
She sits up and swings her legs over the side of the bed. The shirt falls between her knees. My name is stitched over the pocket, a neat thread I’ve wanted to cut out since the day I got it. She sees me looking and rubs her thumb over it.
“Are you okay?” she asks. It’s like she can feel the knot in my chest.
“No,” I say. “But I will be. After.”
Her eyes flicker—heat and worry and something that lives between them. She scoots to the edge and hooks her fingers in my belt to pull me in. The kiss is slow on purpose. It’s a language we invented when we were too young to understand the penalties. I let my hands find her waist and then her face. Ikeep them there. I make the first minute about nothing but her mouth and the sound she makes when I breathe against it.
“Tell me what you want,” I say.
“You,” she answers simply. “Soft.”
It knocks something loose in me, the trust in that one word. I take my time, refusing to let need make me cruel. I peel the shirt over her head and let it fall on the bed beside us. I don’t look away when I see the fading marks that remind me how close I came to never getting this hour. I kiss them like a vow. I praise, because the world has taken too many things from her that didn’t praise her first. My hands map the same ground I’ve memorized a hundred times and act like it’s the first time because it deserves that.
“You’re perfect,” I tell her. “I’m never fucking letting you go, Princess.”
She shakes her head, eyes worried. “I’m never leaving.”
“Always mine.”
When I slide my mouth lower and fasten my lips around her clit, she threads her fingers in my hair and says my name like a prayer. I almost do something stupid like cry, but I don’t, burying my face in her heat and wetness instead.
I run a hand down her thigh and feel the tremor there and anchor her with the other hand under her knee. When she pulls me up, I go. When she says yes, I listen. When she asks for more, I give it without negotiating. When she asks me to stop, I will stop.
She doesn’t ask me to stop.
