Natural Love

by S. Celi

  “I wouldn’t let them change anything,” Avery said as we walked into the room. I threw my backpack onto the queen-size bed, and it landed with a thud. “They wanted to remodel it, but I stopped them.”

  “Maybe they should have.” An Omega Tau Epsilon fraternity paddle still hung on the wall next to my desk. I shivered.

  “What can I say?” Avery said. “I’m sentimental.”

  “I see Dad left marching orders.”

  A thick black binder sat on my desk, the only thing different since I’d left. I knew what it held, and I both dreaded and desired it. That binder held the next steps in my journey back into my father’s good graces. I didn’t really need it, but it’s not like he could be convinced of that. For years, I’d known more about Chadwick Properties and Construction than my dad thought I did. Maybe now I’d have the opportunity to convince him of that. Maybe now I’d get to show him what an asset I could be the company.

  “You really wouldn’t let them do anything to my room?” I said, bringing my attention back to Avery.

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Dad and Linda never told me they wanted to change it.” I scratched the side of my neck, right behind my ear as I surveyed the rest of the space. With a room like this, no wonder they still thought of me the same way. That had to change, and fast. I wasn’t the same. Not even close. More than that, I hadn’t come home to revert back to the role I’d had when I left this family. Oh, no. I wouldn’t let guilt get in the way of my future any more.

  I came home for one big thing, something I decided in South Africa after months of helping villages get clean water, like some goddamn social missionary. I came home in order to take my rightful place as heir to my father’s fortune and his multi-million dollar company. By the end of the summer, I’d join the staff, move out, and start over in Cincinnati with a new slate, a new future. And I’d be damned if anything, or anyone, got in the way of that.

  Not myself.

  Not Avery.

  And especially not the past.

  “They talked about redecorating your room a few times, but I wouldn’t let them go through with it.” Avery flopped onto her stomach next to my backpack and looked at me from the bed. She smiled at me and ran her hand across the flap of my bag. “So, did you bring me any presents?”

  “Presents?”

  I stood above her on the left-hand side of the bed, my hands shoved into the back pockets of my jeans as I watched her. I had predicted she would ask this; Avery always wanted gifts whenever anyone in the family went on vacation or took a trip that lasted longer than two days. As a kid, I’d indulged this, making her stupid bracelets and key chains at summer camp out of plastic lanyards. Now, she lay diagonally on the bed, legs bent, feet dangling in the air, and the side of her face resting on the shoulder of her extended right arm. The hem of her shirt pulled away from her shorts and exposed part of her back. I shook my head because I’d started staring at her again. That wouldn’t do.

  “I know you got me something,” she said.

  “Hmm. I don’t know if anyone in this room deserves presents.”

  “Oh, really?” She raised herself up on her arm and turned her body toward the bag. “I do. I definitely do. Especially after the way you ignored me for the last two years.”

  “Ignore. Such a strong word.”

  “A monthly email from you with five lines counts as ignoring me.”

  I gulped. Those emails had been excruciating to write, and I’d agonized over how to phrase each sentence. Most of the time, I wrote them with a glass of cheap beer in one hand, the kind that had just enough alcohol content to take the edge off, but not enough to get me drunk. Avery didn’t need to know about the drinking, though.

  Better to make a joke. Keep things light.

  I raised a finger to my lips as if deep in thought. “You know, I came home expecting a warm, sisterly welcome, but if this is going to be how I’m treated . . .”

  She laughed. Avery had one hell of a memorable laugh. It always filled the room and came from the deepest part of her stomach. When she laughed, the rest of the world laughed with her. “Sisterly welcome. What’s that?”

  “Not what you’re giving me.” I raised one eyebrow at her. “And by the way, just so you know, I have strict instructions to keep you in line until our parents get home.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Because, you know, I’m the one they trust.”

  She laughed again, I and knew she heard my sarcasm. “God, whatever. They’ve already been gone a week and everything is fine. Just ask Henry.”

  “I don’t know, Avery. You did throw that party over spring break.” I paused and gave her a half-smile. “And wasn’t there something about a $35,000 Rookwood vase that you used as a bong?”

  “Henry told you?”

  I nodded.

  Avery sighed and turned her body so that her back lay flush against the bed. “That wasn’t me. Mitchell smoked the pot.”

  “Well, yeah, but you let him do it on the terrace. You didn’t stop him.”

  She turned, craned her neck, and when her eyes met mine, she pouted. “If you knew Mitchell, you wouldn’t have stopped him, either.”

  “I wouldn’t have?”

  “No.” She flipped over and narrowed her eyes. “And you know, I think I’m still mad at you. You should have stayed in touch better while you were gone.”

  I closed my eyes and my jaw tightened as I fought to keep the memories from surfacing. “Do we have to keep on doing this? I stayed in touch.”

  She sighed. “It wasn’t the same. Facebook statuses and those vague emails sucked. I liked the Instagram pics, though.”

  “Africa’s a good place to take photos.”

  “You should have done better. We’re your family, for God’s sake.” She stared at me. “You’re my family.”

  “I know.”

  “I needed you.”

  “You have no idea how many times I wanted to call you.” I shook my head. “But it hurt too much. Besides, I was exiled.”

  “Exiled?”

  “Yep. Like the black sheep of this family. Exiled.”

  Exiled could be such a disgusting word. Such a loaded word. And yet, that’s just what my father did to me. He exiled me for my secrets, my attitude, and my mistakes. Chadwicks didn’t make mistakes, at least not public ones. Somewhere along the line, I’d become the family liability.

  But I wouldn’t go back to that role again. Ever.

  “You weren’t exiled.” Avery paused. “Well, maybe you were. I guess you could call it that.”

  “Sure felt like it,” I muttered. “And besides, I did call you a few times on top of those emails.”

  “Four times. Wasn’t the same.”

  “I know,” I said, feeling the start of a headache. “It was hard.”

  “That’s an understatement. And after everything that happened. Four times. Four.” She frowned at me. “Really? That was it?”

  “Calling you all the time would have sucked worse. Trust me.”

  “Life here sucked, too,” she said. “You have no idea.”

  “I know it did. I know it sucked. Really sucked.” I closed my eyes for a moment, then pushed the past away and opened them again. “But you look good. You do.”

  “I’m a survivor. That’s what survivors do. We move on, no matter what,” she said with finality, and then waved away whatever feelings still bothered her. Her hand returned to the zipper on my bag, and I knew she wanted to change the subject. “Now, about those presents you got me?”

  I laughed and reached over to the bag. When I did, my hand brushed hers and a tingle raced up my arm. “Let me look. I’m not sure there’s anything in here worth giving.”

  “So there is something in there.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I hope it’s good.”

  I winked at her. “Would I get you anything less?”

  “I don’t know. You are my stepbrother.”

  “Oh, I
see.” I unzipped the front pocket of the bag. “So now I’m just your stepbrother. Maybe this present isn’t for you.” My hand hovered over the pocket. “It’s for someone who appreciates me.”

  “I appreciate you.”

  “Do you?” My hand still hovered. “I’m not so sure.”

  “You know everything about me,” she said. “And you know that.”

  “Do I? Do I know everything about you?”

  “Everything,” Avery said as she held out her waiting hand. Her tone of voice told me she knew I was joking. “Now. Where is that present of mine?”

  “Well, you have to understand, AJ. I was in South Africa for two years. And I wasn’t near a big city.” My hand closed over a small square box. “They also paid me shit. So you have to temper your expectations.”

  “They’re tempered.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She laughed one more time. “I promise.”

  I pulled the black box out of the bag and handed it to her after another second passed. When I did, my hand touched hers again, and I had the urge to grab it and yank her closer. But I didn’t.

  Jesus Christ.

  Two years earlier, on the night before I left for the Peace Corps, she came into my room, slipped between the sheets of the bed, wrapped her arms around me, and begged me not to leave. Instead of listening, I tried to laugh it off, and she cried for a long time before she fell asleep around 4AM. When I woke at 7:15, she still slept beside me, and I had the worst hard-on I’d ever had. God, I’d never wanted to have sex with anyone so much, and I’d stared at her for what could have been forever thinking about Avery’s breasts, her body, and the way it would feel to be inside her.

  I never told anyone about that.

  Damn it. Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about it.

  “What do you think is in there?” I asked as Avery fingered the box.

  She grinned and pulled it open without answering me. Her eyes widened as she peered inside and then took a bracelet out of the box, a colorful mix of glass and wooden beads hung on a strand of wire. “Wow.”

  “It’s handmade,” I said. “One of a kind. The women in the village where I worked make these and sell them.”

  “I love it.” She slipped it around her wrist next to her watch, a silver link bracelet, and the pearls Linda gave her for her sixteenth birthday. “I’ve never had anything from Africa before.”

  “Well, there’s always a first time.” I reached out to finger the beads and my hand stopped short above her wrist. There, wedged between two freckles, lay a short, red line, a cut trying to heal into a scar. Next to it, I saw a diagonal one already at the scarring stage.

  I looked at Avery and her eyes met mine. “What’s this?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s not nothing. How’d you get that cut?”

  She shrugged and pulled her arm next to her body. “Last week, I was cutting a few carrots in the kitchen and the knife slipped.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Seriously. I wasn’t watching what I was doing.”

  “Avery,” I said. “That cut is too high up on your arm for the knife to slip.”

  Her gaze floated to my fraternity paddle. “It’s nothing, okay?”

  I would have replied, but Henry’s voice came on the intercom we had in every room of the house, a relic from the 1980s.

  Time for dinner.

  LIFE AS A Chadwick had three permanent rules.

  First, don’t embarrass the family.

  Second, don’t embarrass the family.

  Third, don’t embarrass the family.

  Whenever something came close to embarrassing the family, dad bolted the other way. He ran Chadwick Properties and Construction with the utmost precision, and he expected his family to operate that way, too. We could never, ever embarrass or shame the good name he’d spent years creating and a lifetime maintaining, especially since we were new money in a town that ran on the influence of old. The Chadwick family reputation meant more to my father than any bank account or acquisition.

  “You can do anything if you have a good name,” he always said.

  And most of the time, dad wasn’t wrong. It was one of the things I hated about him.

  “So when are you taking over the family business?” My longtime friend, Grant Kilgore, said asked from his lounge chair next to me. “Your old man gonna let you in the inner sanctum now that you’re back in civilization?”

  Grant and I met in first grade at Summit Country Day School and fell into a fast friendship my father approved of because Grant’s grandfather had once represented Ohio in Congress and Grant’s father sat on the board of the Cincinnati Reds. Grant never had to worry if his family had a good name. He oozed social status from his pores.

  “That’s the plan. Join the company. Dominate the business,” I said. “And South Africa is civilization, asshole.”

  Grant shook his head and drank more of his Heineken. “Not my kind of civilization.”

  “Dude, I’m telling you, it was a decent couple of years.” I kept my eyes on the meticulous in-ground pool in front of us. From high above, the sun beamed as we drank our third round of beers. “Cleared my head for a while.”

  “And your head needed clearing.” He laughed at his own joke. I just shrugged.

  “You know, you didn’t come home with a South African chick,” Grant said. “So I’m going to say it wasn’t as good as you thought it was.”

  Grant always claimed that the best memories included pussy. And lots of it. In fact, his current mission included having sex with all the single women in the new member class of the Cincinnati chapter of Junior League. That meant fourteen girls. So far, he’d managed to sleep with six of them, mostly by using his sister’s connections. She served as one of the Junior League’s many vice presidents and threw bimonthly cocktail parties people fought to attend. Grant had detailed all of this in his emails to me while I lived in South Africa.

  “Seriously,” he continued, “I would have thought you could at least pull a hot girl with an accent. South Africa is full of hot women; just look at all the models that come from there. And all the ass you got at Wharton should have set you up for it.”

  “Dude, I already told you. Not a lot of single chicks in the village where I worked.”

  “No hot nurses? Someone from the UN? One of those British chicks on a gap year?”

  “Nope.” I drank some more beer and tried to ignore the fact that ever since I saw Avery again, all I wanted to do was drink, even though I knew she’d get pissed at me for it. “Not one. Well, at least not one that was worth the trouble.”

  “You weren’t trying hard enough.”

  I shook my head. “You’ve gotta trust me here. There was nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “Jesus. That bad?” Grant shuddered. “You’ll have to make up for it. I know a couple of women would die to hook up with you. I promise.” Then he pulled up off the chair and straightened his sunglasses. “Speaking of hot women, is that Avery coming out here?”

  Avery had just stepped off the terrace that opened the back of Chadwick Gardens to the flat lawn, English rose garden, and pool. She walked toward us in a plunging green one-piece swimsuit that tied around her shoulders and accentuated her flat stomach. Her loose blonde hair bounced as she walked, and she carried a light blue towel. As I watched her stroll across the lawn, the light blue flip-flops she wore invited me to stare.

  Damn.

  “Yeah,” I said after a second. “That’s Avery.”

  “Whoa.”

  “She grew up.” I tried to sound like I didn’t think this was a big deal.

  “Grew up? That’s a total understatement.” He glanced over at me. “I haven’t seen her since Brenna Mason’s deb party last year, but I’ve heard people talk. They said she was hot, but this . . .”

  “She’s my stepsister, Grant.”

  “I know that.”

  “Emphasis on the word sister.”
r />   Who did I want to convince? Him or myself?

  Grant pulled his sunglasses off his face. “Oh, man. Just look at that. I really can’t fucking believe it.”

  “Believe what?” I said, growing annoyed with my friend. Avery had crossed the lawn, and would soon be at the pool entrance. We had less than five seconds before she’d hear every word we said.

  “She’s super hot,” Grand said, and didn’t hesitate to get clearer with what he meant. “I mean, she’s like, swimsuit-edition hot.”

  “No she’s not.”

  “Who is she dating right now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and clenched my hand around my beer. “She hasn’t talked to me about that.”

  “Man, I hope she’s single. I would love to screw—”

  I hit him in the chest with the back of my hand. “Seriously. Don’t talk about Avery like that, okay?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that.” I nodded at her. “Like she’s some piece of ass in a bar. She’s not. She’s my stepsister.”

  Stepsister. Stepsister. Stepsister.

  Grant glanced at me. “I’m just admiring her.”

  “Talk about whoever else you want to that way. But not her.”

  “Jesus, man.”

  “I mean it,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Alright. I won’t tell you anymore that I want to fuck Avery. Just know that I do. She’s really hot.” My red-headed best friend turned his green eyes to me and leaned his pale body closer to my seat. “How old is she now, again?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “I’m almost twenty-two,” Avery said as she unclasped the gate at the entrance to the pool deck. “And I can hear every word you’re saying, Grant.”

  “I was just saying you’ve matured a lot,” Grant said. “And that I hadn’t seen you since that deb party in Ault Park.”

  “No, you haven’t.” She walked over to the pool and dipped her big toe in the water at the deep end. “Oh, it’s cold.”

  “It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” Grant said, and I stared at him. That asshole hadn’t been in the water. How the hell would he know?