A Promise to my Stepbrother

by Anne Burroughs

  “Katie, I’m going to make you another promise.” I smiled, thinking back to our virgin promise and the kiss promise before that. We had a good track record of keeping promises. “I will hold your hand and tell Mom and Dad that I not only love you, but that they have to accept that we’re a couple.”

  “And what if they can’t accept that?”

  “They’ll either deal with it or deal with the fact that we’ve abandoned them for our life on the West Coast.”

  Max’s voice was serious and calm. He was the careful one, the one who didn’t let his heart get in the way of his mind. In this instance he didn’t know how things would go, he just knew that he wanted to follow his heart.

  “So I have a promise for you.” He raised his eyebrow. “I promise that if you haven’t had sex by the end of the day, I’ll totally take care of that.”

  Max laughed. “How deep and romantic!”

  I shrugged. “Hey, we were friends before we were lovers. And, as your friend—your best friend—I just want to warn you that you may be in a bit over your head with me.”

  Max laughed even harder. “Do tell.”

  “Well, take all that swimming you did, day-after-day and year-after-year. You pretty much couldn’t escape it. Replace that with me and a different kind of work out, and I think you get the idea.”

  “Pretty sure I can handle that,” he replied, and I didn’t think I had ever seen him smile so widely in his life.

  “Oh, one more thing.” It was his turn to raise an eyebrow. “I love you so very very much.”

  He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it. We were brother and sister, best friends, and lovers, but none of that, however, mattered as much as this—we were together.

  34

  Max

  Katie was Katie, and I don’t think she saw what was coming. As we drove home, she talked about Mom and Dad as if they would embrace us with open arms.

  “They may be a bit upset, but they’ll be fine,” she said for perhaps the tenth time. I felt like she was repeating herself in an effort to make the sentiment real through pure force of will.

  “They may be a bit more than upset, Katie. We have to be prepared for one or both of them totally losing it. Remember, they see us as son and daughter. The idea of us sleeping together? It’s going to freak them out.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. But they’ll understand eventually.”

  My fear was that what Katie considered “eventually” was a lot shorter than what I considered “eventually.”

  And, of course, things didn’t go well.

  35

  Katie

  Mom and Dad were really upset. When we left they thought we were going to wander off and talk or walk around the neighborhood. They didn’t think we would be gone for a full twenty-four hours. We texted them but ignored their calls, so be the time we walked in the front door of the house, they were raging.

  That quieted down real fast when they saw us holding hands. I think they grasped that holding hands wasn’t the kind of thing that brothers and sisters who just graduated college do, and in that realization I think a stunned awareness was taking shape.

  We walked into the living room, and the remnants of the previous day’s party still littered the tables, chairs, and floor. Max and I sat down on the sofa, still holding hands, while Mom and Dad sat on separate chairs facing us. The look utterly dumbfounded, and I was positive they had finally figured out with certainty what was coming.

  Max spoke first. “Dad, Mom, this may not make sense to you, but all I ask is that you don’t say anything until I’m done talking.” They nodded their heads in an almost robotic daze. “Katie and I met when you two started dating. She quickly became my best friend, someone that I could share everything with and I trusted with my entire being.” I nodded and squeezed his hand. “By the time you two got married, Katie was already more than a best friend to me. At the time, it was easy to embrace that as meaning we were brother and sister. Being brother and sister—that’s what made our relationship special.”

  “That is what made it special,” Mom cut in.

  “That’s only part of it, Mom,” I replied. “It’s a different kind of special.” Mom appeared to be in total denial. I turned and looked at Max, and he continued with the story of how we had not just loved each other from day one but that we were in love. Becoming stepbrother and stepsister just muddied the waters and confused things.

  As Max told our story and the development of our relationship, I watched our parents. I felt a keen love for Max during that conversation. He explained everything in honest terms and even choked up a bit when talking about how we both tried to bury what was an obvious truth—we loved each other in the way that Mom and Dad loved each other.

  By the time, he got to the end of college and told the story of how we both independently came to the understanding that we belonged together, Mom was shaking her head. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell she was taking it poorly.

  “So we are in love. We’ve always been in love.” Max finished, and I braced for the worse.

  Mom pursed her lips. “I don’t know where to begin, but I will say this: Your feelings don’t matter. This is just not right. You are brother and sister.” Her voice increase in volume and strain. “This is wrong.”

  “Unfortunately, your opinion doesn’t matter,” I said succinctly.

  You could have heard a pin drop. All three eyes looked at me, with my Mom’s face a mixture of shock and anger. Then all hell broke loose.

  “Well, young lady, I think you’ll find that my opinion matters quite a bit. Do you think that I’m saying this out of spite? You have just decided to ruin your life—”

  “First of all, I don’t care,” I replied, my own voice rising. “And you, of all people, can’t speak to me about making mistakes with love.

  “What the hell does that mean?” My mom’s eyes narrowed.

  I was ready to get the blades out. If Mom was going to go after my love life, then boy did she open herself to some major criticism of her own. Pots. Kettles. That kind of thing.

  Dad broke in and said, “Calm down,” as he held up his hands. His voice was commanding, but I could tell he was confused and didn’t know what to say or do other than to have everyone get along more than we were currently.

  “Yeah, Katie, it’s not productive to talk about who has the worst relationship judgment.” Max put his hand on my arm.

  Of course, I wasn’t very happy with that comment. “Are you saying I have poor judgment?” I spun and glared at him.

  “Hello. Phil? That guy was a dick.”

  “Oh, you are going to go there are you?” I waved a finger. “How about miss bubble-headed blonde?” There was a smirk on Max’s face that both annoyed me and, for some reason, made me smile. It was almost as if we were arguing over Walking Dead and Peter Jackson all over again.

  “Erin was not bubble-headed. You were just jealous because she was pretty.”

  “Jealous? Of her? Are you kidding me? You kicked her to the curb almost as fast as your girlfriends in high school.” I was getting a good head of steam and, truth be told, I was enjoying myself. Max and I had a habit of arguing heatedly over everything, but in the end we always knew it was just for fun.

  Maybe the tension of the having just revealed our relationship to Mom and Dad made us retreat to our comfortable repartee. Maybe we had to truly get this old past behind us, and Mom and Dad were unwitting witnesses. Whatever the reason, Max and I had pretty focused on each other.

  “At least I had girlfriends in high school. May I remind you that we are discussing relationship mistakes here, and, ahem, you actually have to have relationships to make mistakes in them.”

  That was a good one, and I couldn’t resist a small smile. I glanced at Mom and Dad, and they looked like they didn’t know what hit them or what was going on. I loved the idea of keeping them off-balance. Maybe that was the only way we could get through this.

  “Relationships? You cal
l working your way through every pretty girl in high school counts as having relationships?”

  Max looked at me. “I didn’t work my through all the pretty girls, at least not the only one that mattered.”

  “Stop it. You both are embarrassing yourselves,” Mom said. Both Max and I looked at her, but before we could reply Dad started laughing. His laughter was deep and loud and just got louder. It was as if he couldn’t control himself.

  I glanced at Max, who shrugged. We both were smiling as our little exchange was amusing in the same way that it always had been since we met at the age of twelve. But it was also amusing in that it was so entirely random. We were having this intense conversation and Dad was lost in guffaws.

  “Bruce, what is so funny?” Mom asked. She looked annoyed.

  “Listen. Just listen, Lisa,” Dad replied, wiping tears from his eyes. “The two of them. This is no different than all those car rides up to the lake house. These two—” Dad started laughing again. “They have always been inseparable.”

  “I don’t see how that’s funny,” Mom replied.

  Dad stopped laughing and looked at Mom. “We missed it, Lisa. We missed it. All the arguments and compromises and pouting and making up we’ve witnessed through all the years. That’s not what brothers and sisters do. That’s what couples do.”

  Mom looked at Max and then me, and then back at Dad. “No. They are just close.”

  “Honey, that’s not true. In fact, do you know who they sound like?” I was rapt as I stared at the two of them discussing us as if we weren’t there.

  “No,” Mom said succinctly, although I could sense that there was a change in tone, as if she was slowly being dragged to a place she didn’t want to go and as she was moving it changed her perception.

  “They sound just like us.” Dad stood up and started pacing. “That’s what’s so funny about this. It was always right in front of our faces all this time. We tease. We argue. We laugh. We thought Max and Katie were always acting the family members should act because we acted that way. The reality is that they were acting like a couple, like us.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure Dad was right. I thought it was probably more accurate that we were acting like friends, and that he and Mom were best friends, too. But I appreciated him making the connection between us as friends or family and us as a couple.

  “Bruce—our friends. The rest of our family…” Mom was worried about what others would think. That was something I could understand but hoped she would join us in getting past.

  “Oh, it will royally suck, Lisa. I hate the whole idea of what we’re about to face.” Dad stopped in front of Mom and looked at her, his back to us. “This is going to be really difficult, and I don’t even know if I’ll be able to handle it that well. But I do know two things.”

  “What’s that?” Mom said.

  “Katie will never listen to anything we say, and once Max has made up his mind he’ll never change it.”

  Mom laughed at that and peeked out from behind Dad, who quickly moved out of the way.

  “Kids, I don’t know who I’ll be able to deal with this.”

  “That’s okay, Mom. I get it,” Max replied.

  “We’l make it work!” I added.

  “You two have to be understanding of what we’re going through. We understand what you two are saying, but that doesn’t mean it’s any easier for us,” Dad stated, while Mom nodded her head.

  “We’re not jerks, Dad,” Max said with a smile. “We’ll do what we can to make everyone understand and accept it.”

  “But no secrets,” I stated. “I’m not living a lie because we are afraid Aunt Hazel will not invite us to Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh, Aunt Hazel will most decidedly not be inviting us to Thanksgiving,” Mom replied. Her laugh sounded real, as if we were all conspiring together.

  Mom and Dad wouldn’t let us sleep in the same room in the house, which I thought was more funny than anything. So Max and I went out to dinner together and then slipped off to a hotel. As Max drove home, I leaned my head against his shoulder.

  “I want to make you a promise,” Max said. I lifted my head up and looked at him.

  “Oh. And that is?”

  “If we aren’t married to someone else by the time we’re twenty-five, we’ll get married to each other.”

  “My dear Max, is that a proposal?”

  He smirked. “No, it’s a promise for a proposal.”

  I laughed. “That sounds like a pretty safe promise to make.”

  “You say that now, but wait until after Thanksgiving and Aunt Hazel.”

  Max laughed as I punched him in the shoulder. Shortly after, we pulled into the driveway. Mom and Dad were both waiting up, like any parents whose kids had just gone out on a date that ended late.

  Max & Katie’s Story Continues…

  in

  A Stepbrother’s Marriage Promise

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