by Amy Faye
Whatever the solution was going to be, it wasn't going to involve Mom. Not this time. She'd figure out what she was going through, what she was feeling. She'd figure out how to ignore the fact that right next to her, less than twenty feet from her bed, was a guy she'd like nothing more than to have sleeping with her.
And it was going to be like that every night, from here on in. For the rest of her life, no matter what. Well, at least for the next several months. Once school started in the fall, she'd be in New York. She'd be safe from that sort of stuff.
Until then, though, it would be a whole lot of sexual tension that she had no interest—none at all—in dealing with. At least, none that she had any interest in leaving unresolved.
But there wasn't much choice in the matter. She wasn't going to fuck her brother. That was absurd. Completely, patently absurd, and never going to happen in a million years. A billion years.
It'd be hot if she did, though.
With that thought, she pushed herself up out of the corner. Okay. Thinking privileges revoked. She had to go back to the house. The old house, now. There was more to be done. Not much more. Not with the Hess wallet opening up to make everything easier.
But she did have to stop by at least to check the mail. Their change of address and forwarding stuff wouldn't take effect for a couple weeks, and there was some hope that she'd get word back from Julliard, if she was lucky.
So she climbed into the Chevy. It was the second time in two days that she'd driven it. If this was a sign of the future, well… no way. It wasn't. She'd get back into her routine, and she'd go back to what she'd done before.
The car would go back to rarely if ever being used, and she'd go back to having practice, and she'd get used to thinking of Jeff as someone who was entirely off-limits. Not as someone who's fucking sexy when he grinds his teeth together, someone whose body is built to fit around hers like a glove.
Not someone with a cock that scratched every itch that she'd ever felt since she knew that you could have that kind of 'itch.'
That would come eventually. She'd have to figure out how to get there, but it was only a matter of time. Until she was more sure of herself, until she was more sure of her new place in the new house, she'd just have to do what she had to do.
Check the mail, get changed for practice, and hop in the car. Katrina could be appraised of the whole situation before things got busy at the studio.
She was a terminal gossip anyways, so it wasn't as if she would complain about having to listen to the psychodrama that Cathy had gotten herself caught up in.
The Chevy protested as she eased it out of the driveway, but it eventually changed its tune and decided it wasn't worth fighting her. She eased it back out onto the street, headed down. Only a ten-minute drive to the old house. Not that far, really.
The new place is bigger. More than twice the size. Almost three times. And even though Jeff's only been in town a couple days, it's already furnished well. It already looks like a home.
Granted, like a home out of a magazine, but a home is a home. It will develop the lived-in quality that makes it feel 'like home' with time. Nothing changes that.
She has to wait a minute for one of the burly guys that Jeff's dad hired to pass by with a stack of chairs and a bag slung over his shoulder. That amount of stuff would have taken her four trips.
Then she leaned down to check the mailbox, tacked up on the side of the wooden stair. A bundle of crap was inside. As usual.
Not one but two separate offers for credit cards. Impressive.
A magazine that she didn't remember having signed up for, but they sent it every month. She set it aside with the other trash. A packet of coupons.
And, she saw, her heart starting to thump hard in her chest, a letter addressed to her. A letter with a blue logo that she knew well.
Julliard. Dance, drama, music.
She braced herself. It had been a long wait. Several weeks, but she felt as if she'd been waiting for this letter for her entire life.
She opened it. She was going to be denied application. That was okay. That was exactly what she'd expected. You don't always succeed on your first try. She'd have to figure out a way to convince them, but she would.
'Dear Cathy,' it began.
'Congratulations!'
There was more text, but she couldn't read it through the tears. She fell on her butt and held the letter in her lap until Mom came over and asked what happened.
Cathy handed her the letter and forced herself back to her feet. She didn't know what to do with herself.
So much of her life up to now had been dealing with unpleasant realities. She couldn't just go to school. She had to work a little. She had to support Mom. Mom had to support her. She couldn't always afford new shoes. Sometimes costumes meant a little less variety of food.
That was what life was like. Mom's arms wrapped around her, lifted her up off the ground in excitement.
"Oh Cathy! Ohhh!"
Cathy's face stayed twisted in sadness, in tears, though. What had she done to deserve getting exactly what she wanted?
Chapter Fourteen
Jeff could feel the check in his pocket. It was hot and it was heavy and it was burning a hole right through the pocket of his jeans before it even made it to the bank. Then he stepped through the doors and could feel the cool, pressurized air inside blasting him right in the face and it did absolutely nothing to cool down that money sitting in his jacket pocket.
He filled out the deposit slip. In the amount field, he marked 75, with four more zeroes behind it. An absurd amount of money, for anyone. But for him, it was even crazier.
It hadn't been that long ago that there was a real question if he'd be able to go pro at all.
Most college ball players go because they aren't going to be able to make it. It's not like football, where it's the norm. It's not like basketball, where you have to. Baseball, you go when you want to go, and most people go after high school.
College players make it, sometimes. But not that often. For most kids, that's the last time they're ever seriously going to play baseball. There's nothing wrong with it, but that wasn't where Jeff Hess was hoping to go. He was hoping to go pro. He was hoping to hit the Majors with his first leap.
Whether he made it or not, though, he'd already proven more than he needed to prove, to himself and to others. He'd already shown that no matter what happened later, no matter what it turned out in the end, he'd made more off baseball than some people had said he would.
Just short of a million dollars? Jesus. And it was right there in his pocket. He ought to celebrate. Do something. Whatever that was going to be, he really wasn't sure at that point. But the fact was that a celebration was definitely in order.
The woman behind the counter smiled. She might have recognized him. It wasn't totally obvious that she did, but it wasn't totally obvious that she didn't, either.
"Mr. Hess? I'm going to need to see some I.D."
He dropped it on the counter. It made a plastic-sounding clatter as it landed; she picked the plastic card up, looked at it. Looked at the signature.
"One minute, sir."
She punched some numbers into a computer and fits the check into a lock-box and then smiles. "You're all done. Would you like a receipt?"
He told her that he would, and then took the receipt and shoved it into his pocket, folded up into a shape small enough that he wasn't worried about it crumpling too badly.
The drive home was a high that he wasn't going to get over soon, either. The knowledge that he'd made all that money, that no matter what happened—torn A.C.L., blown shoulder, real bad performance in March, whatever—they couldn't come after that money.
Some people wouldn't make that much in ten years. That was twenty years worth of wages to the average person around here. He'd just worked an entire career and he'd done it by working his ass off at the right thing.
That had always been the strategy, since the very beginning. Find the thing
that is going to make him rich enough to retire by 30. Then work his ass off at that one thing, get rich, and retire. Find a little place by the sea and spend his afternoons fishing, because he's already got what he needs.
He was easing into the car when his phone buzzed. Dad was going to be out of town for the night. Business stuff. His new fiancee was going to be working late. So he was on his own.
Well wasn't that just wonderful—some celebration that would be. He jammed the shifter into drive and put his foot on the gas before he could stop himself and was on the road by the time that the phone buzzed a second time, with a second message.
Maybe he'd like to take his sister out?
That was a laugh. Yes. His sister. That's what Cathy was to him. The sister he'd fucked. For sure.
'Ok,' he sent back, stopped at a red light. No problem. After all, it was only dinner, right? Last time they'd had dinner, things had turned out so well. If he was smart, he'd leave her the hell alone. He'd avoid looking at her, talking to her, thinking about her at all, as long as possible.
But then again, Jeff had always liked playing with fire. And now he was sensing a real good opportunity to get himself burned.
Chapter Fifteen
The way the letter had made it sound, any day now she was going to get an email about financial aid. Any day now.
And unlike the mail, it didn't come all at once. She couldn't just say that at 2pm, if it hadn't come yet, it wasn't coming. So she'd been checking every day for two weeks now, every five minutes as long as she was awake, and it was starting to become extremely tiring.
Cathy didn't need much. She'd been tracking her spending on food, and she knew what she ate these days. She'd done every reasonable estimate on what it cost to rent an apartment in New York, and she could get a little place in Red Hook for pretty cheap, take the train to school and wherever else she needed to go.
As long as she didn't get mugged or killed, it wouldn't be a big deal. She'd been living in Detroit long enough that it couldn't possibly be that much worse, so there really wasn't anything to worry about on that front, either.
Just the money, and the fact that she wouldn't have much time to work. So she had to have the cash on-hand up front or she had to find a way to get guaranteed work in the afternoons or evenings.
In the end, it added up to about thirty thousand. Thirty thousand a semester, and she'd be fine. Which should be covered, no problem. She had two separate five thousand dollar scholarships that she'd managed to qualify for. They'd give her a loan for three more, which only left seventeen.
She could easily demonstrate financial need. Nobody would be able to get the kind of money that they asked in tuition on-hand. Almost nobody, anyways. But if they didn't accept her anyways, for some reason, well…
Well, then the ship was sunk. So she needed to know, and she needed to know now.
When the email arrived, she was sitting down. Still in her workout clothes, pressed into one of the comfortable leather sofas that the Hesses has brought with them from Memphis, the ones in the front room.
Jeff was still out, dealing with some baseball stuff. Mom was working, and Jeff's Dad—was she supposed to call him Dad? Jeff's Dad? Mr Hess? She didn't know and she wasn't going to ask. So she just kept avoiding calling him anything.
Jeff's Dad was out of town. Would be until tomorrow. He'd apparently had to deal with something. Who knows what it's all about. Mom told her what she needed to know, which was very little, and that was all she really needed from the situation.
Which meant that for now she had the house to herself, and she could just go around in her dance clothes until Jeff came back, and she had to flit off to her room to avoid running around in what amounted to little more than skin-tight fabric that covered everything while hiding nothing.
Not that she minded so much, really. Not that she minded at all. But he was her brother now. Not some hot guy a couple years older who was famous. Or, he wasn't her brother yet, but he was going to be.
So she did what she always did. She avoided the situation as best she could and otherwise tried to fit her day around a schedule too tight to fit much of anything.
They had calculated her award based on her need, based on her academic success and her artistic merit, and…
And she was still almost ten thousand short. Almost ten thousand. Jesus.
She had money saved up. She'd seen this coming, and she'd been saving. But ten thousand dollars would wipe out the whole thing in one fell swoop, and then when winter semester came along she'd be out in the cold, quite literally. Sleeping on ground outside the school and hoping to hell that she could find something to do about the fact that she'd freeze to death.
She wasn't surprised. This was what she was used to. Disappointment was the standard. It was the expectation. But even still, it stung a little. She set the phone off to the side and looked at the floor.
What was she going to do about it? She'd figure something out. That much was clear. But that wasn't enough. She couldn't just say that she would figure something out when she could. She had to figure something specific out. She had to have an answer, and she had to have it within the next six months.
She could save more. Tighten the belt further, try to eat on someone else's dime whenever possible, and go cheap on everything.
That would be the first step. Increase saving, decrease spending to the breaking point. Then she'd be fine.
But would that be enough? Maybe she could save another five thousand. Maybe. It would be a little optimistic, but she might be able to manage it.
Which meant that if nothing changed by Winter—if she didn't have a job and do the same thing in New York—then she'd be in the same position, just closer.
Close wouldn't cut it, though. Not when it came to having enough. Barely enough was good enough, but almost enough wasn't good. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Her chest thumps and she stares at the ground. She could sell some stuff. She doesn't have much. She might be able to get a few hundred dollars, though. Maybe three or four. Not anywhere near enough to cover the difference.
She could ask Mom to cover costumes for the coming recital. Another few hundred. That would make another thousand if she was lucky. Still short. Four thousand short.
And then that would be so restricted that she could barely breathe. She'd be cutting off her nose to spite her face, forcing herself to such extreme restriction that she wouldn't be able to do anything but save money and dream of a time in the future when, one day, she wouldn't need to save every penny.
She was stuck in concentration, her panic slowly rising but already past the point where she felt remotely in control of herself. Which was why she didn't notice her phone buzzing beside her, and she didn't notice the sound of the truck pulling up outside, and she didn't notice the footsteps outside the door.
She did notice, finally, when the door opened and Jeff walked in. The smile on his face quickly faded when he saw her expression of frustration and anxiety.
"Cathy?" She didn't answer. "You okay?"
She didn't answer again.
He shifted the bag off his shoulder and let it drop to the floor. It thudded loudly.
"You seem a little freaked out."
"Yeah, I'm freaked out. Go away."
"You know I can't do that."
"You're going to have to learn how some time. Might as well be now."
"You're right. I'll give it a shot. Okay, I tried. Can't do it. Tell me what's up."
"I have to go to the studio," she said, standing up suddenly and pushing him back. He stepped away easily and watched her go. He was too damn nosy, too damn perceptive for his own good.
She had other things on her plate. More important things. She didn't have time right now to be worrying about cute boys, regardless of how much she might think they're real cute.
The thought of the money he just cashed in the bank flashed through her mind and burned in her psyche as she slipped into the Chevy
. The entire idea was totally inappropriate. But a few measly thousand was no big deal. He'd be getting five hundred times what she needed.
And it wasn't like she wouldn't pay him back. She just didn't know when she'd be able to pay it back. But the fact that she would, that was beyond discussion. Of course she'd pay him back.
Eventually, somehow. It wasn't like she had collateral, but she could promise him. And she was going to be his sister, soon. It wasn't like it was going to be hard to collect. He lived in the same house as her.
For now. Until she moved to New York, and said goodbye to her old life. Even then, though, she'd still be his sister, and they'd still have their memories of a time before that, too.
Chapter Sixteen
She thought that she could lie to him, which was cute in its own way. As if he were some kind of idiot and she thought that he wouldn't notice that she was freaking out.
Cathy had the most easily-read face on the planet, and then she barely even bothered to deny that she was panicked. No, whatever it was, it was eating at her. It was getting to her hard-core. And it was his job, like it or not, to figure out what it was. How to help.
It was the brotherly thing to do, right? To get involved with her personal life, to fix her problems for her. And of course, if that meant spending more time with her, well… that was just a bonus. She was his sister, after all.
Not the girl he'd slept with. Not the girl who, up until that little conversation, he'd had every intention of sleeping with again. That relationship was a relic of the past. Didn't exist any more. Now he was a good brother and nothing more. Like turning off a light switch.
Of course, it was easier to do what he was doing now than it might have otherwise been, because looking out for her was what came naturally in either case.
Some guys went out a wanted to have a good time, but there was nothing behind it. They just wanted to get themselves wet. He couldn't deny that there was an element of that involved. The sex was good, she was attractive.