by Selena Scott
Raph swirled back around on the stool, not bothering to stop himself when he was facing them, just letting himself twirl and twirl. “I may have had a lot of sex, but I—like every other non-virgin on this planet—only lost my virginity once.”
“And as I recall,” Nat said, “there was very little planning or strategy involved. It just kind of happened.”
Raphael nodded back at her. “Same as you. Basement sex with a fellow classmate. Left her house and immediately called Nat to tell her about it. Which is exactly the same thing she did when she lost her virginity.”
“Well, I hate to tell you two that the opportunity for unexpected basement sex with a fellow high-schooler has passed for me. I’m twenty-three and starting to feel like a freak for never having done it.”
“Kaya, you have to date if you want to meet someone to have sex with.”
Kaya made a face at Nat, as if the idea of dating repulsed her.
“What a bunch of sad sacks we are,” Nat said, looking around at the two people in the world she was closest to. “All three of us are lonely losers who can’t figure out how to date to save our lives.”
“That may be true,” Raph said. “But two of us lonely losers have also jointly created a stunning visual masterpiece.”
He held out the newly altered canvas for the sisters to see and Nat burst out laughing. With a flawless, steady hand, Raphael had fully transformed the ‘mountain’ under the wolf into a three-tiered wedding cake. He’d also turned the bagel moon into an everything bagel moon, and added quite a bit of depth and detail to the cream cheese. Also, the wolf now had a goatee and an extremely uneven necktie.
Kaya laughed, but shook her head. “You two are such nerds. Sometimes I swear you have the same brain.” She stood, stretched, and headed toward her room. “I’m gonna read for a while and hit the sack. Love you.”
“Love you!” Nat and Raph chorused in unison.
Raphael came to sit next to Nat on the couch. “How bad was the break-up?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Honestly, not that bad. I’m just getting sick of it, is all. I can’t tell someone my secret unless I know them really well first, and they don’t stick around to get to know me once they sense I’m keeping a secret. It’s a catch-22.”
“A really lonely catch-22.”
“Yeah.”
Nat squeezed his elbow. They sat together in companionable silence for a little while.
“Maybe you should take a break from dating.”
He rolled his head to look at her in that lazy way of his that had become so familiar over the years. “Doesn’t that work against the goal of finding someone I could build a life with? Somebody I could love?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I think you’re right that women pull away from you when they realize that you’re keeping secrets. But friends don’t really break up with each other for that kind of thing, you know? Maybe you could become friends with a woman and really get to know her that way. And then by the time you start dating, you’ll probably know whether or not it’s safe for you to tell her… everything.”
Raph eyed Nat for a while. “That actually makes a lot of sense.” His brow furrowed. “A female friend. How the hell do I make a female friend?”
Nat laughed, kicking him lightly as she curled up on her side, getting more comfortable. “What would you call me, you doofus?”
He rolled his eyes. “You don’t count. We’ve been best friends since, like, second grade. I doubt I’m gonna be able to become friends with an adult woman because of a monkey bars incident.”
Nat and Raph had become best friends one day over twenty years ago. They were in the same grade but had never been in the same class. The two of them were both playing on the monkey bars one recess when Raph had swung too far, knocked into Nat and brought them both to the ground in a very painful pile. It had ended up being his wrist that had gotten broken.
Nat had stayed with him while other kids ran for help from the teachers. Barely a day had passed since that they hadn’t talked.
“I don’t know, aren’t there girls in your soccer league you could be friends with?”
Raph tipped his head to one side. “Friends? Sure. Friends-to-eventual-wife? Doubtful.”
“Well. Just something to consider, I guess.”
“Nat?”
“Yeah?”
“Think you’ll ever get tired of hearing about my problems?”
She laughed. “Think you’ll ever get tired of hearing about mine?”
He scoffed. “No.”
“There’s your answer.”
CHAPTER TWO
Three nights later and Raphael was still considering Nat’s idea. It had a lot of merit. You could learn a lot about a person by being their friend. His friendship with Nat was a great example of that. He figured there was barely anything about her that he didn’t know.
He could make friends with a woman he was interested in and take things from there. Hopefully, by the time things had evolved into romance, he would know whether or not she was someone he could trust with the family secret.
There was only one major flaw in the plan and as the days ticked by, it became glaringly apparent to Raphael.
“What do you do about sex?” Raphael asked his older brother, Jackson, as the two of them finished up some yard work in their mother’s backyard.
“Excuse me?” Jackson asked, pulling off one work glove and then the other, shoving them in the back pocket of his jeans.
Though Seth and Raph were identical twins, Elizabeth Durant had adopted all three of her sons. So, standing there in the bright October sunlight, Jackson and Raph didn’t look anything alike. Jackson was bearded, tall, and dark-haired, with dark eyes to match. He was muscular, but wiry, with a wingspan to write home about. Raph was a few inches shorter and a few inches wider.
But there was something similar about them as well.
It was in the way they moved, spoke. A casual onlooker would have identified them as family members even looking as different from one another as they did.
“I said, what do you do about se—”
“I heard you the first time.” Jackson scowled as he loaded tools into a wheelbarrow and started wheeling it toward the shed in the back corner of their mother’s yard.
“Then aren’t you going to answer me?”
“I don’t even understand the question, Raph. What could you possibly mean, ‘what do I do about sex?’”
“I mean when you’re super horny, what do you do?”
Jackson shot him an irritated look. “I have sex.”
“Oh.” Raph was surprised and never good at hiding his emotions, so Jackson read it all over his face.
“Why does everyone think I’m a monk?” Jackson asked the universe.
“Who thinks you’re a monk?”
“About a year ago, Seth asked me a similar question. He also assumed that I never get laid.”
“So…” Raph chased after Jackson as he walked back toward the house. “You do get laid, then?”
Jackson rolled his eyes. “I’m not answering such an asinine question.”
Deciding that that definitely wasn’t a real answer, Raph kept pushing. “What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sex?”
Jackson pursed his lips, unwound the hose from its wheel on the side of the house and promptly sprayed his brother in the face with the ice-cold water.
“Hey! Jesus! Warn a guy!” Raph sputtered as he jumped out of the spray. But after a second, he jumped back in, knowing that his mother wasn’t going to let him in the house dripping with mud the way he was.
Raphael figured he’d pushed the conversation too far, judging by the look on his brother’s face, so he was pretty surprised when, looking down at his hands as he sprayed them off, Jackson lobbed a question back at him. “What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sex?”
“Well. Seventeen years,” Raph answered truthfully.
“After you lost your virginity, dumbas
s.”
“Oh. Mmm. Ten days, maybe?”
Jackson’s scowl darkened menacingly as he muttered something to himself, spraying off his boots.
“But I’m thinking of taking a vow of celibacy. And I figured you might have some… advice for me about that.”
Jackson blinked. “Raph, if you’re going to take a break from sex for a while, you don’t have to take a vow of celibacy. That’s for, like, monks and priests and shit.”
“Oh.”
“And just what are you implying? That I’ve taken a vow of celibacy? Jesus. I get laid, okay? Just because I’m not out there faceplanting between any pair of legs I can find like you and Seth—”
“Seth doesn’t do that anymore. Not since Sarah.”
Jackson lifted an eyebrow. “I’m assuming Seth is doing that quite a lot with Sarah.”
“Oh. Right. I just meant the any-legs-he-can-find part. He found his pair of legs. For life.”
Jackson pinched his brow. “Raph, why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind and then we can end this mind-numbing conversation.”
“Nat mentioned that if I make friends with a girl first, then I can know whether or not she’s someone I could… be serious about before we even start dating. That way I won’t keep getting dumped for keeping our secret.”
Jackson’s expression darkened even further, as if there were a million things he found wrong with that statement, but he didn’t comment. “And you’re thinking that you’re gonna have to give up sex in the meantime?”
Raph nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I know I sleep with a lot of people, but I never sleep with anyone totally random, you know? Like, if I have feelings for whatever girl I’m making friends with, then I’m not gonna be starting something up with another girl. That wouldn’t be right.”
Jackson’s eyebrows rose. “As long as you have a code, I guess.”
Raph frowned as his brother strode away to the back of the house, lining up his boots to dry in the sun and scrubbing an old, familiar towel over his hands and hair. Drops of water flung away from Jackson’s rough treatment of himself, catching the sun like tiny prisms.
“I can tell I’m insulting you,” Raphael told him, “and I’m not sure how to stop.”
Jackson laughed and handed over the towel for Raph to use next. “Don’t worry, Raph, I never take anything you say too seriously.”
“I’m not trying to accuse you of being celibate or something. It’s just that… I thought you might have some advice for me since…”
Jackson frowned. Hard.
Raphael was viciously aware of the fact that he was currently treading on never-before-explored territory. He was about to indirectly address something that he’d never even insinuated before, but had long since suspected. And from the look of absolute death on Jackson’s face, Jackson knew it.
“Since…” Jackson prodded menacingly.
Raphael sighed. He was no good at pussyfooting around a topic. His aim had always been dead on. Literally. Without arrogance, Raphael knew he had the best aim of any person he knew. With a dart, with a gun, with a basketball, with a ping pong ball, with a wad of paper from across the kitchen even while his mother frowned at him over a newspaper. And the same held true in his emotional life as well. Raphael was drawn to bullseyes like they were magnets. He couldn’t miss. Which made talking to him sometimes very abrupt. Because he always dove straight for the heart of the matter. He didn’t know another way.
So, he took a deep breath and dove right into the deep end, hoping that both he and Jackson were good enough swimmers to resurface without drowning one another.
“Since you’re in love with Kaya, and have been for years, and refuse to acknowledge it. So, I’m kind of assuming you’ve worked out a system for how to handle horniness while you’re waiting for the girl you really want.”
Jackson had completely frozen. In fact, Raphael reflected, there was a distinct chance that even his heart was kind of stuck together. Like it had been compressed down for a beat and just never jumped outward again.
“Jacks?” Raphael asked gently, willing his brother to blink, or breathe, or show any outward sign of life.
All at once, Jackson animated. He turned on his heel and strode away from Raphael, out toward the woods that they’d grown up playing in. Raphael turned too, and practically sprinted toward his mother’s garage where he rummaged through the old icebox she kept out there and came up victoriously with two beers. He then sprinted after Jackson, who he found forty feet into the woods, sitting on a fallen log in a spot of sunlight, his head in his hands.
Jackson flinched when Raph cracked the beers, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge his presence.
Raph sat heavily on the log next to Jackson and shoved one of the beers into his brother’s inert hand.
Raph’s eyebrows rose high when Jackson, not normally a drinker, tipped his head back and downed the entire beer in about eight seconds. He crunched the can down and set it between his bare feet.
“Who else knows?” he said gruffly, his voice so shredded it didn’t even sound like a question.
Raphael shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never talked to anyone about it. But the way you two look at one another… it’s not the least obvious thing in the world.”
Jackson’s knuckles went white as he clenched his hand down. After a long time, he spoke. “I’m not waiting for her, Raph.”
Raphael’s stomach tightened. He’d been very afraid of that. Because of what they’d been born as, the Durant brothers were all experts at denying themselves the things in life they wanted most. It was a matter of necessity. But Jackson was by far the most skilled at it. “You’re saying that you’re never going to tell her how you feel?”
Jackson laughed without any humor. “Why in God’s name would I ever tell her?”
“So that you could have a relationship with her?”
Jackson scraped a hand over his face. “Raph, I know that you and Seth have rose-colored glasses on about this, and I wish Seth and Sarah the best, I truly do, from the bottom of my heart. I’ll spend my life defending what they have, honestly. It’s special. But that kind of love, that kind of relationship… it’s not in the cards for me.”
“Why?”
“Don’t be dense,” Jackson snapped. “You know exactly why.”
“Explain it to me, then.” Raphael was determined to make his brother say these things out loud.
“First of all, even in a world where I wasn’t— even then, I’d still be thirteen years older than she is. And that’s not that big of a deal if I was seventy-five and she was in her sixties, I get that. But right now? It’s a really big fucking deal. I’m thirty-six years old, Raph. And not getting any younger. Meanwhile, she’s still young enough to be in undergrad.”
“She graduated from undergrad two years ago,” Raphael pointed out.
“Regardless. She’s barely twenty-three years old.”
“Do you really think that matter—”
“She’s a virgin, Raph.”
“Yeah,” Raph sighed. “I know.”
“There’s a million and two ways that she’s too young for me, and maybe you think I’m being ridiculous, but she’s never had a relationship before. Not even a hookup. She’s a baby. And that really matters to me. I want her to have a good life, an easy life. With a peer. Someone on her level. Who doesn’t…”
Hate himself.
Those were the words that Jackson didn’t say but Raphael heard them as clearly as if he had.
“And that leads directly to the most compelling reason why I can’t fucking have her. Ever. I’m dangerous, Raph. Truly dangerous. Not like you and Seth. You and Seth… you’re different than I am. Gentler. Me? It’s barely been a year since I attacked Kaya and Sarah.”
“Almost attacked Kaya and Sarah.”
“We both know I would have attacked them if Seth hadn’t stopped me.”
“I don’t know that,” Raphael cut in. “We’ll never know, because Seth stopped
you. But I think it’s equally possible that you would have pulled up short, stopped yourself.”
There was a long quiet and Raphael hoped that Jackson was actually considering his words.
“That’s a risk I’ll never take again. No. I’m steering clear of her, Raph. It’s the only way. Loving her? It’s not a gift to her. It’s a fucking target on her back. I’ll never inflict myself on her like that. The only thing I can do is live my life away from her as best as I can.”
He stood up and was already a few steps away when Raphael dropped his forehead to his knees. “This sucks so bad.”
Jackson turned. “For me. Not for you.”
Raphael looked up. “Jacks, first of all, if something sucks for you, it sucks for me. We’re brothers and that’s how that works. Second of all, this doesn’t just suck for you. It sucks for Kaya, too. Third of all, if you think that you’re too dangerous for a mate, then what makes you think I’m not too dangerous for a mate? Because I happen to really want a mate. And your constant pessimism bums me out. Makes me feel like I’m never gonna find a mate.”
“Stop saying ‘mate!’” hissed Jackson, glancing around the lonely woods encircling them, as if a federal agent was going to pop out of nowhere to hear them discussing mates instead of wives.
“Oh my God,” Raphael dropped his head into his hands. “You can’t even use the word. You need therapy.”
“And who’s gonna be my therapist, Raph? We both know I’d either spend the whole time pretending I’m not what I am, or I’d tell the truth and get my ass dragged off by the government immediately.”
Jackson came and sat his ass back down on the log beside Raphael and the two brothers sat in silence for a long time.
“How does this suck for Kaya?” Jackson eventually asked, kicking at a pinecone with his bare foot. “Me staying away from her is good for her.”
Raphael didn’t even dignify that with a response. He just raised an eyebrow at his brother and finished his beer.
Jackson, so stalwartly strong in so many respects, apparently wasn’t quite strong enough to let this issue lie. As though he were immensely embarrassed of asking, he had to clear his throat a few times before he could get the words out. “You, uh, you said that she looks at me a certain way.”