“No, well…” Why the fuck am I finding it hard to speak right now? I look behind me to make sure she isn’t standing there listening before I continue, “Robyn’s here.”
“Robyn?” he asks, confusion lacing his tone, and I let the name settle in with him for a few seconds. “Robyn, Robyn, Robyn…” He repeats her name trying to remember who I’m talking about, and then it hits him. “Wait, you mean the skeksi’s daughter?”
I bark out a laugh at the movie reference, and answer him. “Yep.” I accentuate the word by popping the P. The line goes so silent, and I think the call was dropped. But before I have a chance to even say the word hello, checking to see whether he is still on the other end, he bursts out laughing. “Please tell me you fucked her.”
“What? No!” I answer immediately. “Nothing happened,” I lie.
“Bullshit!” he barks. “You’re so bad at lying, Jack, I can practically hear the wrinkles in your forehead creasing because of it.”
“Fuck you.”
“Did she?”
“No.”
“So… how are you going to correct that?”
“Wait.” I slice my hand through the air as though he can see me. “You’d be okay with this if I did?”
“You’re forty-nine, Jack, you don’t need my permission to fuck your twenty-five-year-old stepdaughter.” He guffaws. “Besides, it’s not as though you raised her… I mean you’ve only met her three or four times more than I have. So,” he continues, chuckling dryly, “you haven’t fucked her, but youwantto don’t you? You dirty dog, you.”
“Ellis, I can’t.”
“Uh, why?”
“She’s my fucking stepdaughter.”
“So? Maybe she likes a little sugar with her daddy.”
“Ellis, stop.” I laugh through my words because he really does know how to lighten a stressful situation for me. “It’s… wrong.”
Ignoring me completely, he starts asking questions. “Have you kissed her?”
“No.”
“Eaten her out?”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Have you touched her sexually?” he asks, and I automatically freeze up. My silence is enough to confirm to him that I have… in fact… touched her. “You filthy motherfucker,” my brother sings before falling into full blown fits of laughter. “I’m going to call you Leonardo DiCreepio from now on.”
I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees and squeeze the bridge of my nose, before running my thumb and index finger along my closed eyes. “How are you finding this so funny?” Nothing about his reaction is helping, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from him.
“Because it is. Robyn’s practically an ovum.”
“She’s twenty-five.”
“Ahh, that makes it so much better. So, tell me what happened.”
“Fuck,” I groan. “She’s got such a smart fucking mouth, Ellis, it’s driving me insane, and she has an answer for everything too it seems. She showed up unannounced the other night, or her stupid mother forgot to fucking tell me… not sure which one, and well… we’re currently snowed in together.”
“She’s such a shit parent.”
“Tell me about it. I let her stay because it was late, and I was being… nice, and—”
“You? Nice? Shocking.”
“Again, fuck you. Anyway, I wake up yesterday morning, and what do you know… there’s a blizzard happening right outside my fucking door. And I’m talking three inches of snow and rising type snowfall. Anyway, she tries to leave, I drag her back in, my towel falls off, and—”
