My Stepbrother, the Artist

by Sybil Ling

  Zach swallows. His breathing is heavy and deep.

  “I don’t know,” he finally says, his voice sounding cracked from the tears. “I don’t know what’s wrong, Diana. I don’t know why I’m crying.”

  “Oh, Zach,” Diana says, feeling her heart go out to him. She reaches her head up and kisses him again, closing her eyes and feeling him close his as well. He starts to move in her again, drawing that pleasure up once more from within. She can feel that tension, that intensity, still present in Zach as they connect together. The droplets keep coming, though; he keeps on crying as they make love.

  “Oh, Diana,” Zach says in between his kisses. “This is so … much. It’s so much that’s happening.”

  “Mm, Zach,” Diana moans out in return. She can feel what Zach is experiencing: his emotions seem to be seeping into her, transmitted throughout her body as though via osmosis. Diana can feel her chest ache, and her throat starting to tighten up as tears start to appear from behind her own closed eyelids. Zach makes a noise — a mix between a moan and a cry — and Diana repeats the sound almost exactly. He’s moving deeply inside of her, and that pleasure that she was feeling is being met with another, more intense sensation — one that goes beyond the description of words.

  The bittersweet pleasure is is rising inside of Diana, and the longer they continue the higher it becomes. She can feel her body flushing with excitement, her fingers and toes starting to go numb as she gets closer to that point of eternal bliss. The kisses between her and Zach start to become more powerful, their lips pushing together to the point of pain, as he continues to fill her, continues to provide to her that most exquisite of pleasures.

  She’s moving faster, and her body is pushing back towards her stepbrother’s. He goes deeper and it all starts to become too much. Diana knows that she can’t take it anymore, that she can’t continue much longer without all of it exploding out of her. She moans against Zach’s lips, and as he keeps going those moans turn steadily into cries. Suddenly she can’t kiss him anymore. Diana is gasping instead, letting out louder and louder yells as her body ignites into a teardrop of fire and she feels that final barrier being pushed down, firing her from this realm into that of ever-loving bliss and total, incredible ecstasy.

  Zach keeps going, keeps moving into his stepsister as she explodes outwards against his body. His tears continue to fall onto her, covering her face, her mind, her entire self, and then she hears him and feels him as he explodes inside of her. His cry is loud and powerful as he releases himself into her, their beings connected in that most powerful of ways, they two exploring the great unknown together, forever.

  Finally Diana slows down, and as she does Zach slows down as well. She can hear his hitching, deep breaths, hear that scared sound of his voice still, and as she opens her eyes and sees him looking down at her, his eyes are wide, like those of an animal trapped in a car’s headlights.

  The pleasure quickly falls away from Diana. This isn’t right. This isn’t right at all.

  “Zach?” Diana asks again, and as Zach only continues to stare it seems suddenly like she’s talking to somebody who isn’t entirely there — whose mind is somewhere else, or whose mind has run away, retreated from something that it simply couldn’t deal with.

  “Zach, say something,” Diana says, starting to feel scared again herself, the warmth that was just a moment ago filling her body now replaced by an icy coldness at the look that her stepbrother is giving her. “Zach, please,” she says, her voice trembling now, “please, tell me what’s going on.”

  But instead of speaking, Zach slowly shakes his head. She can feel him withering inside of her, and suddenly she wants him off of her. She puts her hands on his shoulders and pushes up, Zach’s upper frame lifting without any resistance. When he’s on his knees Diana shuffles herself backwards, bringing her knees up to her chest, pulling herself away from him. But Zach merely sits there, positioned on his knees, breathing steadily now and looking like a recent victim of the horrors of war.

  “Zach, please!” Diana says, her own tears now running down her cheeks, not tears of pleasure or intensity, but now those of fear. “Zach, say something!”

  “Too much,” Zach says softly, not even looking at Diana now, his eyes instead unfocused and looking at a place far beyond her. “I never … this was too much.”

  Diana swallows back her tears, forcing them to stop coming out.

  “Zach, whatever’s the matter I’m here for you,” she says, trying to comfort him. “It’s okay. We can be together now. Zach, I … I love you.”

  That makes his head snap in her direction, but he looks confused, like an amnesiac who has just woken up, staring at his family as though they were strangers. He slowly shakes his head again, and Diana hears a sob escape from her mouth.

  “No,” he says, and Diana feels her heart break inside of her chest. “I can’t … do this here. Not here. Not like this.”

  He stands up, pulling his shorts back up and fastening them. Diana watches this from the ground, tears streaming unabashedly down her cheeks. Zach is looking around, like he’s forgotten something, or has misplaced something, his eyes never resting on one spot for more than half a second.

  “I have to go,” he says to Diana, not looking at her. “I have to …” he takes a deep, steadying breath and lets it out, “… I have to go.”

  “Zach, please don’t,” Diana says, reaching her hands up to him. “Please, we can figure this out together.”

  But Zach is shaking his head again, more vigorously this time, still not looking at her.

  “Is it because you don’t love me?” Diana asks, her voice cracking. Zach’s head stops shaking and he stands, breathing deeply as Diana takes in her own, shuddering breaths. Then, finding voice to her own, final worry: “Is it because you don’t think I’m beautiful?”

  Now Zach’s eyes snap to her, and his expression becomes something kinder, something more familiar. Diana is almost certain that he’s back, that Zach has returned to her.

  “Oh, Diana …” he begins, and he takes a breath, about to speak something more … but then he lets the breath out, and whatever was there leaves his mouth along with it.

  “I have to go.”

  Diana opens her mouth, but it doesn’t matter. Zach turns quickly and steals out of the solarium, not looking behind him at his crying, half-naked stepsister, sitting alone on the ground; not hearing her cries as she finally lets herself go, allowing her broken feelings to take over her; not seeing her fall over sideways and onto the harsh gravel path where, just a moment before, she was finally experiencing the greatest feeling of happiness she’d ever known.

  Part 3

  Chapter 12

  The open curtains allow the early morning sunlight to come streaming in through the wide bedroom window. The light — at first a tiny sliver of a beam that thickens as the sun peeks over the horizon — finds itself on Diana’s bedroom wall, slowly creeping downwards as the glowing orb comes up higher and higher in the sky. The band of yellow becomes thicker, its ambient light filling the room and reflecting off all surfaces. Soon the sunbeam finds its way onto the covers of Diana’s queen-sized bed, where it creeps slowly down, towards the young woman’s wide-awake and unblinking face.

  Diana feels exhausted. The poor girl hasn’t been able to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time over the past five days. She takes in a sigh and lets it out, feeling the heat of the light tickle her skin, warming her arms and legs. She doesn’t move to get out of bed; she doesn’t want to get out of bed. For the past five days all she’s been doing is wandering around the house and the yards, trapped in a state of confused and deep depression. What she had experienced before she and Zach met in the solarium was bad; this is like hell.

  Diana rolls over onto her other side, facing the closed bedroom door instead. She remembers (was it a week ago, or a year?) Zach coming into her room to tease her after they’d been “caught” in his studio, naked after a night of making love. She’d f
elt humiliated, and even though she was mad as hell at Zach for pulling a stunt like that and dragging her into it, she still enjoyed his company in her room. She liked the fact that he came up to see her, even if it was just to tease her.

  Zach hasn’t come up to see her at all since he left so abruptly in the solarium. Diana hasn’t actually seen Zach either, although on her part it’s not for lack of trying.

  He’s been locked up in his studio, not having come out for the better part of a week. Diana, after being left in a painful loneliness in the solarium, eventually picked herself up, got her clothes back on, and went to go find Zach, to demand that he explain to her exactly what just happened.

  She searched all through the house. She eventually asked Eugene, the butler with whom Zach is so close (and the man who, Diana will never forget, was the one to actually contact the reporters and set up the impromptu photo shoot). Eugene told her that “Master Zachary” was in his studio, and he had given the strictest of orders not to be disturbed unless told otherwise.

  Well, Diana went straight to the studio’s front door and banged hard on it with her fist.

  “Zach! I know you’re in there, come out!” she shouted.

  But there was no response. She could hear something — something — going on inside, and she banged once more on the door. When Zach still didn’t answer she went around to the window on the side, but found the curtains drawn over it. Apparently the man actually does require some privacy every now and again.

  No matter what she did, she couldn’t get Zach to come out. She went back and asked Eugene if there was a key to the place, but to the best of the man’s knowledge there wasn’t.

  So, Diana waited. She went into the kitchen and she got a cup of yoghurt and a spoon and she sat down and waited. And as she waited her mind began to slowly go over the events in minute detail, and Diana began to pick apart minute details of Zach’s behaviour in an attempt to figure out what exactly was going on:

  1. Zach was acting strangely, that was for sure;

  2. When they actually started having sex, Zach was acting more … well, more passionately than before. So that was weird;

  3. Zach was crying.

  And here’s where Diana stopped, stunned at what she hadn’t really realized before: Zach was crying. Zach never cried, and she even remembers him holding back his tears until they were finally down on the ground. Her mind reeled.

  Diana remembered, when she was just 15 and Zach was 20, Zach going out with a girl at university, Rebecca Klein. They had been together for a few months, Zach and Rebecca, and he was pretty excited about the relationship. He talked to Diana about her, gushed about her, actually. He said that she was different from all the other girls, that he could actually talk to Rebecca, which Diana thought was kind of strange, having never been in a relationship herself before (because, really, how hard is it to actually talk to somebody?)

  Zach was really into Rebecca, and he was even thinking about asking her to marry him, even though they’d only been together a few months. Diana had overheard him talking to his father late one night about knowing when it’s the right time to propose, and his father had told him that “he would just know.” The next day, Zach went to the jeweller’s and bought a diamond ring.

  But as it turns out, Rebecca ended up turning down the marriage proposal, and in fact dumped Zach that same day, saying that he was too emotionally immature and distant for her to want to spend the rest of her life with him. When Zach told Diana about this she thought (having seen a fair number of romantic comedies in her time) that Zach would be heart-broken. But Zach seemed fine. He spoke about the whole thing as though he were recalling a TV show he’d recently seen, having only observed it and not having any emotional attachment at all. It was like this sort of thing happened to him all the time, and he was numb to it.

  And the thing that Diana remembers the most, something that she, herself, would never be a victim to, was that Zach wasn’t crying. She’s not sure what exactly was said between Zach and Rebecca during that crucial, permanent moment in her stepbrother’s life. Diana isn’t sure what exactly Zach went through in his mind during those moments, those long moments that Zach had probably played over and over a thousand times in his head. But she remembers that the day after, when Diana asked him how the proposal went and Zach sat down with her and told her the bad news, Zach’s face was completely blank, and his eyes were desert dry.

  And now that Diana thought about it, as she sat on the stool at the kitchen counter with her unopened plastic cup of yoghurt sitting and condensing droplets of water in front of her, Diana had never seen Zach cry before. She even remembers, only a week or so ago when she came back from New York City to find her mom and Hank looking desperately ill and completely non-responsive, that Zach was looking completely fine — in fact, he almost looked bored. He certainly wasn’t worried about his dad — or, at least, if he was then he wasn’t letting on about it. He wasn’t crying then, when it seemed likely that his dad might die. But he cried, and cried a lot, when they were in the solarium together.

  This has been the major thing that Diana has thought about over the past five days. Five long, uneventful days, where every day she goes to the studio’s front door and knocks or bangs or calls out for Zach to come out, answer her, please come and talk. Five long days where she avoids calls from Dean, avoids e-mails from fans, avoids agencies interested in signing her on since she hasn’t worked in a week and that must mean that she’s gone bonkers and now’s the time to really push her into the spotlight. Five long days where she’s been stuck wandering the house, wandering the front and back yards, wandering in to check on her mom and Hank who are, thank the Heavens, finally starting to show improvement.

  There is one other thing that has been occupying Diana’s thoughts, and this one stems from a conversation she had with her mother, three days after what happened in the solarium.

  Diana went to see her mom, to check on how she was doing, and to her surprise the older woman actually turned her head and smiled up at Diana. Doctor Thames commented that she had been showing great improvements over her responses from the past week. Diana sat down and proceeded to hear, in long, slow detail, about how her mom and Hank had been out camping in Arizona (one of their favourite spots) when they woke up one morning feeling a little under the weather. Thinking that it was just the dinner they had had the night before, they took some antacid tablets but their symptoms only worsened. They ended up practically paralyzed by the middle of the day, and it was only with whatever strength they had left that they called in for somebody to come and get them. And that’s all that she remembers — except for foggy bits and pieces from inside this house.

  “We’re still not sure what caused it,” Doctor Thames told her, standing over the conversation as her patient slowly spoke. “We’re thinking they were bitten by an insect, or possibly some ticks got on them, but we couldn’t find evidence of a bit and there are no signs of infection. In either case, they’re out of the woods now and we’re just glad that they’re getting better.”

  “Diana, sweety,” her mother said slowly as the doctor went to go check up on Hank, “I have a memory … you were sitting down in that chair and talking to me. It must have been a few days ago. You were telling me something about a boy — a boy you love, or loved — and you wanted to stay here at home, instead of going back to New York. Did that actually happen? Or was I just dreaming?”

  Diana opened her mouth as she looked into her mother’s eyes. Inside of her head a million thoughts fired at once. She remembers clearly the late-night confession to her mother, where she had told her that she felt bad about running away, and that she wanted to move back home, to be closer to her family.

  What she wouldn’t admit to herself at the time, but what she realizes now, is that the main reason she wanted to move back home was because Zach is there. Everything that Diana had said about New York and the mobs of people, it was all true: she didn’t want to go back to that; that part of
her life is done. Shallow feelings from complete strangers is not something that interests her anymore. Now she’s grown enough to realize that what she wants is actual, real, true-to-life love.

  But what about Zach, then? She had said all of this to her mother before what happened in the solarium. But it did happen, and Zach (despite still living on this property) had completely dropped off the face of the earth. So what now? What should she do? Except for her parents, whom she loved dearly, Diana had nothing tying her to this place, this house or even this state in particular. She could go anywhere, she realized at that moment, sitting in a chair beside her mother’s bed, and it wasn’t until her mother brought up the possibility of Diana staying that she realized that maybe she wanted to leave once again.

  Her mother smiled up at Diana, waiting patiently for Diana to respond. With a tightening of her heart, and knowing, deep-down, that she was a terrible person for what she was about to say, Diana replied:

  “I think that must have been a dream, mom.”

  Her mother’s kind smile faltered; Diana felt her heart tear in two as the older woman’s eyebrows furrowed themselves together in confusion.

  “But … that seemed so real,” her mother said slowly. “Are you sure, Diana?”

  Diana had to swallow back the lump in her throat.

  “Yes, mom. I’m sorry.”

  She suddenly pushed back her chair and stood up, unable to continue sitting any longer.

  “You should keep getting some rest, mom. I’ll come by later, or maybe tomorrow some time, okay?”

  She leaned down and kissed her mother’s forehead, spinning around and walking away before her mother could say anything else. She left the room and immediately came up to her bedroom, plagued now with a new consideration for her life: what to do once her parents completely recover.