by Mia Carson
I laughed. He did sound like a cliché. He also looked embarrassed. His cheeks bloomed red. But the smile didn’t leave his lips. “Okay, Eli,” I said. “Let’s talk.”
Anyone who has ever been asked to talk will know how difficult it is to magic a topic out of thin air. All the topics that would have come to you easily, only moments ago, are suddenly hard to find. This resulted in Eli and I gazing at the woods around us as we struggled to find a topic of conversation. Finally, Eli brushed the hair from my face.
“Why English literature?” he asked, with all the nervousness of a man of the first date. It was a strange contradiction. We had shared each other’s bodies, had been close, intimate—and yet a simple conversation turned us into nervous children.
“Books,” I said. “Good idea.”
He nodded. “I thought so. Are you going to answer my question, missy?”
He laid his hand casually on my knee. “I’ll answer,” I said. “But you first.”
“I hope you’re not going to steal my answer,” he said, squeezing my knee playfully.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. “Go on.”
“Have you heard of Darren Shan?” he asked.
I shook my head. My reading habits were mostly reserved for authors who had died over a hundred years ago. I realize how pretentious that sounds, but when it comes down to books, I’m a pretty pretentious person. I can’t make any apologies for that, when for the longest time (before I met Eli, before he cast this spell on me) books were the only place where I felt calm.
“He’s a children’s horror author,” Eli went on. He looked into the distance, and I knew what he was seeing as easily as a ten-year wife would know what her husband saw when he stared off into the distance like that. Our connection allowed me to see what he was seeing. He wasn’t looking at trees. He was looking through the trees, and into his own memory. He saw a young boy, hunched over a book, reading until his eyes ached. “I had a series of his when I was quite young. It was about vampires. And, man . . . From the age of ten until I was about fourteen they were the only books I read. There were twelve in the series, and I must have read all of them, from start to finish, about five times. I remember looking forward to bedtime, when I should have been wanting to stay up late, just so I could disappear into that world. It didn’t matter that I knew what was going to happen. It was just that—”
“Disappearing into the story was what mattered,” I finished for him. “It was like you were returning to old friends.”
“Exactly!” he exclaimed, as though he had never heard the idea before. He laughed, and touched my cheek softly. “Normally when I tell people about that, they ask me why I didn’t read any other books, or why—as a fourteen-year-old boy—I would want to spend my time at night reading.”
“That seems like a strange question, to me,” I said.
“It always has to me, too,” he said. “But it hasn’t stopped people from asking.”
I felt instantly closer to him when he told me about this. I saw myself in him, and that invariably makes people closer. But it was more than that. I found myself respecting this boy who had stayed up late to read the same book series he’d already completed. I always like people better when they tell me about their love of reading. I loved Eli better for it, as much as I would like a friend better for it. But he was more than a friend, after all. He was my lover, my—can I say it? yes!—my life partner.
“Now it’s your turn,” he said, nudging my shoulder. “What made you fall in love with literature?”
I had never properly discussed this, even with my favorite English literature teachers. I had always thought it sounded silly, or like I was trying to come across as poetic and profound. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t poetic or profound in the slightest; these were the sort of social fears that made my heart beat like crazy, and made me doubt every move I made when around people. I was the meek woman in class who never raised her hand, let alone shared something intimate about myself that people might laugh at. But I knew Eli wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t hurt me. Something I was starting to see (and it was never clearer than that day in the lush woods, with nature teeming around us, and civilization only evident in the distance sound of cars) was that Eli would never hurt me. Maybe I was overly optimistic, maybe I had unrealistic expectations, but that, I thought, only prove that I really loved him.
“My Dad used to read a lot,” I said. “Before he became super busy at work, he’d read everything, but mostly classics. I’ve actually thought about this question a few times, about why I love reading so much. For the longest time I thought it was just because Dad reads, and that was it. But now I think it’s something else. It might sound silly,” I warned him.
“It won’t,” he said.
“My earliest memory is of holding a book in my hand. I had no idea what it was at the time. All I remember thinking was that it smelled nice. I liked the smell. I don’t even know what the book was, but I held onto it like other kids hold onto their favorite toys. I remember, once, I was crying like crazy. I can’t even remember why. Maybe I’d fallen over or something. Dad reached into his pocket and brought out the book – my book – and gave it to me. I stopped crying. I held it to my face, felt the pages on my skin, smelled it, and stopped crying.”
It felt strange to be telling another person this, but not so strange that I wouldn’t tell him. It was a small thing, perhaps—this story—but it marked a drastic change in how much I was willing to tell someone. Eli had made me open up, and he couldn’t know how much it meant to me.
“That’s incredible,” he said, with no hint of sarcasm in his voice, as I had imagined the listener would respond when I’d thought about telling somebody this story. They would laugh, or call me weird. But Eli only smiled, looked at me with complete trust and openness, and then moved his fingers over my cheek, tickling my skin. “And then what? What happened when you were old enough to learn to read?”
“Oh, it was normal after that,” I said. “I walked into a library, and the smell of books was instantly familiar. I remember Dad kneeling down and telling me: ‘In each one of these is a whole world you can lose yourself in.’ I didn’t believe him at first. I couldn’t believe that in something as simple as paper there could be an entire world. But then I read my first book, and he was proved right. I demolished books on a weekly basis, dragging Dad to the library and then going alone when I was old enough.” I laughed ruefully. “I didn’t have many friends.” I could laugh about it now, but at the time it was horrible. I don’t know if I read so much because nobody liked me, or nobody liked me because I read so much. All I know is that reading made school tolerable.
“Thank God for college,” Eli said, “where reading that much is a bonus.”
“Yep,” I agreed. “That is one benefit of college. All my embarrassing traits became advantages.”
He laughed. It felt good to make him laugh. “What about the future?” he asked. “Do you think about it?”
He was prying into things I usually kept private. He was delving into my deepest desires and hopes, desires and hopes which I had previously been too embarrassed to share with anybody for fear that they would dismiss them as childish. I took a deep breath, preparing myself to share my innermost secrets. “I’d like to have two children,” I said, hardly believing I was saying the words. “A boy and a girl. I hadn’t met anybody who I’d want to have children with, until—” I stopped. I’d been about to say until I met you. But that was too much, too fast. It would scare him. Just because I wanted these things, it didn’t mean that he did, too.
For the first time since entering these woods, I felt the anxiety threaten to return. But it was only for a moment. When I looked into his eyes, I saw that they were light, happy, and not worried or judgmental at all. “Two children, that’s odd. I’d always wanted two children. A boy and a girl.”
We looked at each other for a long moment. I knew that if somebody had been hiding in the bushes, they would’ve looked
at us like young fools, talking of children when they hardly knew each other. But they wouldn’t have had access to our feelings, to the deep emotions that spurred on our words. It had started as sex, this was true. It had started as masked, hidden sex. And now it was moving forward into something else. When I looked at him I didn’t see the lion anymore. I saw the man with whom—if I were lucky—I would spend the rest of my life.
He leaned forward, and I leaned with him.
Our lips touched.
Eli
I was drunk on happiness as we sat together in the clearing. We kissed long and hard. I breathed her in, and when she moaned my cock went rock-hard. I could’ve fucked her right there, but I knew there were people on the path just up ahead, and I didn’t want to ruin the day by being caught fucking in a public place. But I probably would have tried, anyway (my body overriding my mind, as is so often the case) if Jessica hadn’t broke off the kiss.
“Let’s do the Lindy Hop!” she said, jumping to her feet before I could respond. She looked so alive, then, so vivacious. It was the most excited I had ever seen her. There was a healthy glow to her cheeks, what I recognized as a post-orgasm glow, which made her young and beautiful—or, rather, enhanced her youth and her beauty. “Come on!” she laughed, grabbing my hands and pulling. She wasn’t strong enough to pull me to my feet if I fought her, but after a moment I didn’t fight her.
She was too magnetic, too excited. It would be like pushing a loving puppy away to push her away in that moment. We still had the clearing to ourselves, I saw when I looked toward the path. I remembered the wolf, the damn hot wolf with her pale, thin legs and her soft moans. I remembered the way the wolf and I had danced that day, the way the wolf and I had fallen for each other with the Lindy Hop.
She moved around, and then I moved with her. She laughed loudly, throwing her head back, and soon I was laughing with her. I couldn’t help myself. We spun and jived around that clearing like we were putting on a show, our old feelings from that first night spinning and jiving with us. When she moved, I saw the wolf, and then I saw her, and then the two of them became one. I didn’t have to decide, I realized as we danced, between the wolf and Jessica, because they were the same person. Jessica had a range of emotions that I could only be in awe of, but I could reach it, yes, I could reach it if I gave myself wholly to her.
These feelings moved through me as we danced, as she laughed, and as I laughed with her.
Finally, the dance ended. She fell forward into my arms, giggling, and then looked up at me and kissed me on the lips.
This was my stepsister, but that seemed less and less important as the seconds ticked by. She was my stepsister, but more importantly, she was my lover. What we were doing was wrong, and yet it felt right. What we were doing was a disaster, but it felt like a miracle. It was the worst possible thing we could have done; it was the best possible thing we could have done.
A light breeze found its way through the trees and blew against my legs, the hair standing up, and the birds looked down on us, chirping, and the insects buzzed in the shrubbery everywhere. I held her close to me and kissed her on the forehead, over and over. “I love you,” I said, a little surprised at the conviction in my own voice. I had not planned on falling in love. I had not planned on falling in love with anybody, let alone my stepsister. But it had happened now, and there was nothing to do (I told myself, convinced myself) but embrace it.
And I would embrace it. We would embrace it. I looked down at her, into her bright, sparkling, sky-blue eyes, and saw that she felt the same. She wanted to embrace our lust, our love, just as much as I did. But we were not as free as we felt in our hearts, and we had to consider Mom and Andrew. Always, we had to consider them. We needed to know how they would react, if they would divorce, if it would ruin everything.
We both loved our parents, and wanted them to be happy. But did their happiness outweigh ours? Was it more important? If I had asked this question before I met Jessica—if somebody had given me all the facts and asked me to answer objectively—I would have said yes, of course. But love, I was discovering, wasn’t objective in the slightest. I knew one thing; I felt another. And what I felt above all was that, no matter what, I would never, ever, let Jessica slip away from me.
If I had to bring everything tumbling down, I wouldn’t lose Jessica.
Jessica
We walked through the woods down the main path once again, away from Paradise Bottom and along the ridge that overlooked River Avon toward Nightingale Valley. We didn’t say much, once again, because we didn’t need to. Something had happened in the woods, just after the Lindy Hop. We’d just looked at each other, and it was like whole conversations were being spoken with that simple exchange. I will never leave you, his expression seemed to say. You can be sure of that, Jessica. I will never leave you.
It might sound strange that I believed I could read exactly what he meant simply from his expression, but I really could. A closeness had developed between us that was completely at odds with common sense, and neither of us cared. If common sense was something that would keep us apart, common sense could go to hell. We walked through the sun, beside the trees and the flowers, until we came to Clifton suspension bridge and the entirety of Bristol, laid out beneath us.
We looked down at the city for a short while, and then moved away. I remember thinking that somewhere, down there, amidst the countless buildings, was the hotel where a wolf and a lion had met, and now here Eli and I were. But I couldn’t find the hotel. It must’ve been somewhere in the far distance, out of view.
Eli kissed me just behind the ear, sending warm tingles down my neck as we walked back down the lane which would eventually lead us home.
Jessica
We had been living in a dreamland right up until two days before Dad and Annabelle returned. We had thrown ourselves into each other with a force that basically told the entire world (or would have, if we ever left the house): We want each other, and we don’t care what anybody thinks! That was how we thought—what we whispered to each other in the dead of the night, sore and satisfied from sex—what we told each other when anxiety attacked. But as the days wore on, the topic of Dad and Annabelle became more and more relevant. They would be back in five days—in four—in three—in two—in two . . .
I paced up and down the bedroom, daylight waning outside, as though the sun itself wanted to speed the confrontation along. I had bitten my thumbnail down to a stub, and when I looked at the other nails of this hand, I saw that they were gone, too. I looked at my other hand; there were no possibilities there, either. I threw my hands up and continued to pace. I felt more than saw Eli come in.
He walked to where I was pacing and stopped me with his firm body. The dagger-marked hand rested on my shoulder, and I when I looked up I saw that he was staring intently into my eyes. I wished, not for the first time, that I could stare into those eyes forever. It would have been convenient to beat back the world—to fight off the impending firestorm of Dad and Annabelle—by staring into his eyes, by losing myself in them, by shunning time and just being happy for a while longer. But eventually he spoke, ruining the spell, and I remembered once again that soon something would have to be done.
“I’ve thought about it, Jessica,” he said, his voice way too calm for the circumstances. Didn’t he understand how serious this was? Didn’t he realize that this could ruin everything? The scenario played in my head over and over. I told Dad, and he was so angry, so upset, so disgusted, that he broke it off with Annabelle, he took us back to the States, and I never saw Eli again. Or, worse, he shunned me and not Annabelle, and decided to stay married to her, but told me to go back to the States. Or, or . . . They were endless, and never good.
“So have I,” I laughed cynically. I slumped down on the bed, but my legs kept fidgeting, as though they wanted to continue pacing. “I’ve thought about it a lot. And I can’t see a way where we come out of this without destroying our parents. These days have been nice—nice, that
doesn’t even come close, but you know what I mean—but we were idiots to think that they could last forever. Dad and Annabelle will be home soon, and we either have to stop doing what we’re doing, stop feeling how we’re feeling, or—” I stopped. The possibility was volatile, too unexpected. I felt about it as I would feel about priming a bomb. My hands weren’t steady enough for this task.
“Tell them,” Eli finished for me. He had knelt in front of me, and placed his hands on my knees, squeezing them, stopping them from shaking. “We have to tell them, Jessica.” I flinched, but he hurried on. “I know, it’s awful. But what is the alternative? We can’t pretend anymore. We can’t go on laughing and joking with them as though nothing’s wrong. Because they’re not just going to sense that something’s wrong. They’re newly married. They don’t know what’s happening outside their bubble right now. Newly married people never do. And they won’t know, unless we tell them.”
“So they won’t know!” I cried, pushing his hands away from me. If he kept touching me, I would want to fall into his arms. And that was the last thing I should do right now. I jumped up, walked past him, and stood at the door, ready to retreat if I needed to. But he didn’t try to hug me again. He just stood slowly and sighed.
“You know as well as I do that we can’t go on pretending that we’re just brother and sister,” he said calmly. “You know that, Jess. What about the hundreds of family events we’ll have to attend over the next few years? What about living here for the rest of the summer? Can you do all that and just see me as a friend?”
Part of me wanted to say yes. Part of me wanted to kill the love I had for him right there. I clenched my fists, digging my stubbed fingernails into my palm. I felt my lips quivering, and my eyes stinging, but I forced the tears to stay hidden. I breathed slowly, trying to think through the problem. But I knew the answer. I knew it without even having to think. “No,” I said. “I couldn’t.”