Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
BANON
Fuck. God damn it.
I really need to go back to the folks’ house.
I took all of Thanksgiving week off work, which was pretty hard to negotiate, and now I’m spending it at my apartment alone.
Rich has gone back to Minnesota to see his own family, so it’s just me here, eating pizza and then leftover pizza, then making mac ’n’ cheese from a box and eating leftover mac ’n’ cheese from a box.
But I don’t want to go back. Seeing Tina’s face again after how we left it would ruin me.
I know I hurt her, but I’m just trying to get her to see. If only she knew how I felt about her, she wouldn’t insist that we’re family. If she knew even half the things I think about her, she would never look at me the same way again.
I can’t have that. We’re hanging on by a thread, and even that thread is fraying the longer I stay away.
Finally, it’s Thanksgiving morning, and I’m out of excuses. I have to go to the house and face her after what I said, what she surely thinks I meant.
I take a long shower, where I think only about Tina, about her tiny waist and perfect hips, her big, bouncy tits and adorable smile. It’s true, she doesn’t smile as often now as she did when she was younger. I wonder how much high school wore her down in my absence.
That slows my hand down where I’ve been stroking myself under the hot water. I really didn’t know what they were doing to her in my name. When I was in college… well, I was getting as far away from Tina as possible.
Yeah. I didn’t visit. I was nineteen and had a thing for my fifteen-year-old stepsister. It was fucked up, and I knew I needed to keep my distance. Let her be herself without my influence, try to disentangle myself as much as I could.
In the meantime, I left her to the wolves that are high school students. Yeah, I was getting pussy at the time, and lots of it. But that was so I could fucking forget about her.
I speed up my strokes again, running my hand over my cock from the thick root to the blunt tip. How many times have I imagined Tina in her swimsuit on our Cancún trip last year, where she was playing in the water like a dolphin?
Dozens of times, the sick fuck that I am.
After my shower, I finish my energy drink and pick up the bag of groceries Mom instructed me to bring, then head out to the car.
When I arrive, Mom and Fred both hold up their arms and hug me. Fred’s a good guy, truly. I’m happy Mom found him after losing my dad. But Fred isn’t my dad and never will be.
Tina—I mean, Val, I really am trying to get it right—stands off to one side, scrolling on her phone. She doesn’t even look up when I come in.
“I’m going to start on the sweet potato pie now, Marissa,” she calls out as she heads to the kitchen. “Get the prep out of the way so that it’s just ready to go in and cook later.”
“All right, honey!” Mom calls after her, and I cringe at the endearment. But then my mother grabs me by the hand and tugs me off to one side of the door while Fred heads after his daughter.
“Banon,” she says in a strict tone, “whatever you said to Valentina, I want you to apologize.”
I gape at my mom. What does she know? What did Val say?
“I have nothing to—”
“It’s not my business,” she says quickly. “But the two of you aren’t going to ruin Thanksgiving by being all pouty and fighting. I need you to patch things up with Val before dinner. Do you get me?”
My mom is usually a pretty nice, easygoing minotaur. Usually. Not so much when it comes to Thanksgiving, I guess.
“All right, I get you,” I say, rubbing my horn. “I’ll figure it out.”
“That’s my boy.” She ruffles my hair as if I’m still five years old. “Maybe go for a walk with her and sort it out.”
Of course, she thinks a nice walk is the answer to everything.
It’s only a few minutes later that Mom says, “Oh, gosh, I forgot condensed milk.” She turns to me. “Banon, will you please go down to the store and get some?”
I see her cue and sigh. “Fine.”
“And Val, honey?”
Val looks up from her phone. “What is it?”
“Go with him, will you? Make sure he doesn’t buy Gummi Worms, and that he comes back with the right brand.”
Tina groans, as if she couldn’t be more obvious that she’d rather do anything besides walk to the store with me.
“Fine,” she says, already heading over to the doorway to grab her coat. She shoots me a glare. “You coming?”
Quickly I get my own coat, then head out after her.
We walk in silence for the first few blocks, even though I know I need to break it and say something. But what? I don’t take back what I said the other night. I just could have phrased it better.
“I’m sorry about the other night,” I finally say. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Maybe you didn’t, but you said what was true to you.”
She doesn’t look up as she says it. Her shoulders are slumped, like she’s resigned.
I kick a rock. I despise that she feels this way, when I’m the one who caused it.
“Just because you aren’t my blood sister doesn’t mean that I don’t… that I don’t see you as someone close to me. As my friend.”
Instead of heading down the busy streets, I lead us more out of the way, through the park. There’s almost nobody out and about on Thanksgiving—the path is completely empty.
“I’ve never gotten that impression,” she says dryly.
I don’t want to fight with her today. “It’s true. I’ve always cared about you a lot.”
“Whatever you say.”
We fall silent again as we keep walking, deeper into the park. There are a few benches here and there, with a wide green space for dogs to play in and people to lie on blankets and read.
Sometimes I’ve wondered what it would be like to have that life with Val. To lie on the grass with her and read our books, her head resting on my chest, my hand tangled in her hair.
Something normal. Something where I didn’t have to always hide, always try to pretend like I don’t crave her, like I don’t want to eat her and absorb her inside myself and never let her go again.
I think that maybe it’s slowly killing me. Every moment that passes where she hates me, where she thinks I don’t love her the way I do, is grinding my bones into a fine dust.
And it may never stop eating me alive unless I do something about it. She will probably react with horror, with disgust. She might even tell our parents. But what else can I do? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life regretting what things could be like if I’d not been such a coward.
Whatever the ramifications are, it’s better than Val believing I hate her forever. I don’t know that I could bear it.
“Val.” I pause in front of one of the park benches. “Can we, um, sit?”
She glares at me. “We’re going to get condensed milk. Marissa needs it, and there’s a lot of cooking to do today. I didn’t even start on the sweet potato—”
“Please.” I hold out my hand to her, and she appears confused by it. Slowly, while I wait, she extends her own hand and sets it in my palm. I wrap my fingers around it, using it to pull her in closer. Finally, she succumbs and sits down on the bench beside me.
“What is it?” she says with a tired sigh. “We’ve hashed this out already. Twice.”
“Valentina,” I say, my voice traveling over every syllable of her full name carefully, testing it. “I should call you that more often.”
She blinks up at me, perplexed. “Why?”
“Because it’s a beautiful name.”
I have to tell her. Fuck, I have to, but it’s hard. It’s so impossibly hard to break this barrier between us—the one I made, the one society has constructed around us. It feels utterly idiotic to ruin things even more with her, when it could have such disastrous ramifications for our family.
And yet. Even if she doesn’t share my feelings, which I doubt she does after all she’s been through, maybe I can explain to her why I have to push her away, why I have to distance myself from her to keep everyone safe.
Val squints. “You’ve known my name for years. You’re just now noticing?”
“I’ve loved it ever since I first learned it.”
“Then why did you make fun of it?”
Here it goes.
“Because I had to throw them off the scent,” I say, bracing myself. “I didn’t want everyone else to know that I liked you.”
I’m still holding onto her hand, but she pulls it away.
“What? You mean, liked me as a friend, right?”
“No.” I stare right into her brown eyes as I speak the words into existence. “I have never seen you as my sister. I’ve never seen you as just a friend, either. Though there’s that, too.”
“Yeah, we covered this last night,” Val says, bringing her coat in tighter around herself as she pulls away from me.
I gnash my teeth together, trying to muster what it takes to do this.
“You don’t get it!” I need her to really listen to me. “Do you remember when we all went to Cancún for Christmas break?”
She arches an eyebrow. “Yeah.”
“I couldn’t stop staring at you. Couldn’t fucking stop it. In that cute little bikini? I think about it every night, Valentina. I remember how you looked in it better than I know the back of my own hand. And how much I just wanted to tear it off you? Painful.”
I can see the moment that understanding dawns on her, but I barrel forward anyway.
“This is why you will never be my sister. Because I…” I breathe through it, even though Val sits in shocked silence. “Because I love your voice, your brain, your tits, everything. I love how you put people in their place. I love how you know your own worth. And I—”
I finally choke, because now I’m at the extra fucked-up part. The part I’m terrified of. Val is stricken, and I’m even more terrified of what she’s going to say once I squeeze out this last vial of bloody truth.
“I want you,” I manage, my voice rough and low and raspy. “I want you so, so bad. I’ve wanted you for years. It’s why I tried to escape you. Why I didn’t come home.”
All I see when I look at her is shock and confusion.
“Damn it,” she says, her breath speeding up, her expression turning furious.
I’ve ruined everything. I have literally dropped a bomb on our lives. And for what?
“Are you serious?” she asks, peering up at me with eyes like knives. “Are you pulling my fucking leg, Banon? I don’t know why you would, but…”
It breaks my heart that she thinks I would make this up just to screw with her.
“I’m telling you the truth, the real truth.
This is the monster that’s been locked up inside me all this time.
” My heart is racing in my chest, ready to burst out of me like a goddamned alien.
“I know I’m disgusting. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry for every stupid thing I did trying to prove that it wasn’t true.
Trying to prove to myself that I wasn’t fucking obsessed with you. ”
Val doesn’t speak at all as her eyes fall to the ground. She’s horrified, as I expected.
“Fuck!” I run my fingers through my hair. “Fuck, I am so sorry. I shouldn’t have said any of this, I—”
“Shut up.” She grabs my hand in hers and squeezes it hard. “Just stop.”
So I do. I listen and I stop moving, stop talking, stop breathing.
“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you for finally telling me.”
My heart spasms. Is she going to forgive me? I know that’s too much to ask, but I can hope.
“I understand so much more. And that, I’m really, really grateful for.” Finally, she looks up at me again. “Why did you out me and Cory?”
Huh? My brain stutters to a halt.
“Cory?” I ask. “Who the fuck is that?”
“My boyfriend. When I was a freshman.”
Right. Cory, that skinny guy who was always trying to get in with the football players. He thought being a filthy-mouthed jackass was the way into the cool-kids crowd, and he said some things about Valentina he regretted when I beat him to a pulp later.
“Because I couldn’t stand him,” I growl. “Because he didn’t deserve you.” I lean down closer to her, still holding her hand, clasping it tighter as my lips reach her ear. “Only I do.”