Bushed? Hit the sack?
Oh Jesus. It’s catching.
He gets up and opens the fridge. Leaning over, he grabs a handful of berries and shovels them into his mouth.
“Didn’t youjusteat?”
“Yeah, but I gots to eat.”
I smile thinly. I can feel my filter slipping. “Pretty sure you’re not cool enough to pull offgots.”
“You’re probably right.” He laughs as if we’ve shared a joke. As if we’ve formed a connection.
I can’t have that, so I say, “Seriously, what’s with all the eating?”
He shrugs, “Guess I have a high metabolism or something. Work out a lot. Move a lot.” His eyes drop down and then flick back up, meeting mine and if I’m not imagining it, flaring ever so slightly. “Gots to eat, ‘cause I’mhungry.”
His lips move carefully around the last word. He draws it out, dropping his voice all the way down. I must be delirious from exhaustion because when he does it, I feel something only a certifiably crazy person would feel.
By the time I get into bed, I’m aching, my bones and my eyelids are heavy. My head sinks into the pillow and for a second I don’t care that it smells like someone else’s home, that someone else’s mom laundered the linen, or that she sprayed it with a calming lavender mist I don’t entirely hate.
I fall asleep and wake again not long after when Luke moves the chair in his room, scraping timber against timber. I drift off again, only to jerk awake from the sound of his footsteps in the hallway. So much for not disturbing me. He’s moving slowly, overly-cautiously, trying his best to be quiet, which seem to be making it worse. The floorboards groan as my damn fool stepbrother tiptoes to the kitchen with the grace of a fucking cartoon character.
I lie in the dark and wonder if there’s a word for the act of killing your stepbrother. I know there’spatricide, which covers killing your dad, and there’smatricide, which takes care of your mother. But is there a word specific to killing a step sibling?
I’d love it if there was.
When he gets back to his room, he gets into bed. Thank fuck. Let’s just hope he’s down for the night. Let’s hope Rachel was right and he’s going to sleep like the dead and not move until morning.
No such luck. He tosses and turns. His bed is pushed against the wall that separates our bedrooms. Mine is, too. I can hear everything he does. And I really do meaneverything. Seriously, at one point I’m pretty sure I hear him breathe in. I hear pages of a book turn and I hear the springs of his mattress compress and release when he moves.
I’m going to have to ask my dad if I can move into the main house. I can’t live like this. Maybe I can move into the spare room downstairs, so I can be far from him and Rachel, too. Maybe I can rip the Van Halen poster when I take it down. And maybe I can drop the stupid fucking New York snow-globe while I’m at it.
I think of glitter and glass all over the floor.
The thought brings me a mild flutter of joy.
My eyelids slide shut again. My eyes are still stinging but the deep ache in my bones starts to release.
A sudden sound jolts me back up. He’s put his book or something down loudly, on the desk or the floor beside his bed. I hear the sound of a drawer slide open. He fumbles around, looking for something.
I’m never going to sleep again, am I?
3
Luke
Can’tread.Tried,butI can’t focus. Can’t sleep either because it’s still so early. I’m in bed so I don’t disturb Jessie. I’ve been super quiet, so I’m sure he’s dead asleep by now. He looked beat earlier. Poor guy. His eyes were red, and I could tell he could hardly stay on his feet.
Maybe it wasn’t the best time to talk about what happened at the wedding, but I felt like we needed to clear the air. I must have misread the situation because I thought there was some tension between us. But then I’ve thought about what happened that night so much over the years, I’ve probably made it into something much bigger than I needed to. I thought I’d played out every possible scenario for how the conversation was going to go down. I’ve thought of good outcomes, bad outcomes, things being awkward as heck. You name it, I’ve thought about it. Still, in all that time, it never once occurred to me that he might not remember the whole thing. Never once. I was shocked. I didn’t know what to do with my face. Luckily I managed to cover it up so I’m sure he didn’t notice.
I roll over onto my side, trying to find my comfortable spot. I can’t. I’m too wired. I pick up my phone and scroll mindlessly for a bit, then I google nipple piercings and read up on that for a while. I was surprised when I saw them on him. I literally could not stop looking at them. I wonder why he got them. I read a bunch of forums and articles on the matter. Seems like it’s super painful to get them done. Seems like it takes three or four months to heal.Jeez. I scroll through a bunch of images of close-ups of pierced nipples. Some look swollen or crooked. Some look good. None of them look as good as Jessie’s do. None of them come close.
His nipples are dark, darker than you’d think they’d be, if you were the type of person who sat around thinking about Jessie’s nipples. The barbells look bright and shiny against his flesh. It looked like his nipples were hard out by the pool. They were hard the whole time he had his shirt off. I’m not sure if they werehard, hard, or if that’s just how they look because of the piercings. I read up some more. A few guys on the forum I’m checking out say their nipples became erotically charged after they had them pierced.
Ooof.
I think of Jessie in a tattoo parlor, or the kind of place that would do that type of piercing. I imagine him walking in and lying back on the table without a shirt on. He must have been scared, but I bet he didn’t show it. I bet he had that cool, menacing look on his face. The one where his top lip creeps up slightly to one side, just enough to show a hint of teeth, and his eyes look so stormy you can’t tell if they’re blue or they’re green. I wonder if they gave him something to hold onto. I wonder if his body tensed or if he clenched his teeth. I wonder if he cried out as the metal slid in.
