21
Growing up, Oliver’s room and my room were in the far wing of the house at the end of a fairly open corridor that turned into a narrow corridor with a bathroom at the end of it.
After shit started to happen with Beckett a bit repetitively, I began to drink a bit, just to blur the nights a little, but never ever like Oliver. If I could have read people then like I can now, I would have spotted the dependency beginning to develop.
On the weekends when Maryanne would most likely bring Becks over, Oli and I would sit in our bathroom and drink champagne. I’d sit in the bathtub, no water, clothes on, drinking so that I was never in less control than I already was in the rest of my life, but just enough to take the edge off the lack of it.
Oliver would drink till he was sloppy.
My parents had to know—had to—he was hungover most mornings, but like I said before with “acceptable sins”… Selective awareness is another way to put it.
I didn’t mind how ostracizing our bedroom placements were for the most part, but I also think it made things easier for Becks. Oliver’s overdrinking became a part of the pattern, actually, because eventually Becks would come looking for me, and we’d be in the bathroom, and he’d help Oliver back to bed, tuck him in, nudge his cheek, put some water by his bed, and then he’d come back for me.
Whether I stayed in the bath or moved back to my bedroom, it didn’t really matter.
This fucked me up for a long time, made me wonder whether I fed into it. Whether I helped him or let him. Whether me drinking led him on.
This all of course took place during that horrible age where expressed and/or obvious consent was really emphasized, and I think what happened to me dwelled in neither the black nor the white. There wasn’t language for that at the time—but I believe now “gray rape” is the umbrella term—to help us wade through nuances and conversationally facilitate the complexities of what Ashley C. Ford so aptly refers to as the “spectrum of harm.”
It took me a long time to realize that something doesn’t have to always feel wrong to be wrong. It doesn’t even have to be violent to be wrong. But I was fourteen, and he’d kiss me and I wouldn’t kiss him back, and he’d push me down on a bed and climb on top of me, and he would touch all of me, and I’d be stiff as a board, and he never stopped.
Maybe he’d say I never stopped him. I never did, I guess.
Maryanne never again came looking for him when he’d disappear. I know she knew it was happening still, in an active way. I know she knew it wasn’t a once-off, because one night after Becks had finished with me and had gone home, she stood in my doorway, and I remember how her face looked: deep with concentration—like she was trying to work me out. Furrowed brows, pinched eyes—nothing super telling, no real reason I’d remember the way she was looking at me that night except for the words she said.
“Why you and not me?” she asked, head tilted. Her eyes were full of tears, which was misleading. Sociopaths don’t feel empathy. These tears weren’t for me. They were frustration tears.
Why me and not her? She needed to know. She’d wanted him for so long… What was she doing wrong?
“Why?” she asked again, standing over me.
I didn’t say anything; I just stared up at her because I didn’t really understand why then either. I hadn’t even really identified the betrayal that happened when she walked in on it the first time and did nothing.
I wouldn’t realize for years how heavy that weighed on me, but it did. It does still, I suppose.
I thought all that shit would mean I hate being in my bedroom here, that it would be triggering or uncomfortable, but there’s something about coming back and sleeping in that room that makes me feel…stronger, I guess?
This does mean, however, that my bedroom and where Sam Penny’s sleeping are directly opposite one another.
You can bet your bottom dollar I’ve left my bedroom door ajar when I’ve done quick changes, and he’s never once accidentally seen me partially naked, but Oliver has, unfortunately.
“Ew,” was all he said. Gay brothers are so good for your ego.
It’s Thursday night, I’m home from dress shopping with Vi, and Oliver and Sam are nowhere to be seen—they’ve been out for hours, and I don’t like being in the house without either of them here.
I heard my mom come up the stairs before—she called for me—and I actually hid in my closet. It occurred to me while I was hiding in there that if she found me, it would be fairly inexplicable, but I didn’t have it in me to hear whatever it was she wanted to say to me.
So I’ve spent most of the night in my bed, pretending to sleep so that my mom keeps not talking to me, and it’s been rolling around my brain what it’d be like to roll around with Sam Penny, and I feel a little shitty about that because Dad’s funeral is tomorrow, but honestly, for all we know after what Tennyson said, maybe Dad was rolling around with someone who wasn’t Mom, so I should be allowed to think about Sam, and fuck you, Dad, anyway.
There is one hitch in my Sam Penny daydream, though. One thing that my mind keeps snagging on.
What Oliver’s face did when Sam touched him this afternoon—I’ve pored over it a hundred times, put it under the microscope in my brain… I even checked the FACS for microexpressions I might be missing, but there were a few I decided I didn’t want to know he was making.
But the microexpressions I didn’t want to check played on a loop in my mind, because I knew them anyway. AU1 straight off the bat with a AU6 and a AU12 in its slipstream.
In their crudest form? Surprise, then happiness.
Fuck me.
Oliver’s lying on his bed in one of the guest rooms, door ajar, shirt off, and somehow he looks posed? And I wonder whether he’s doing the same thing with the door that I am.
“Hey.” He looks away from the TV and gives me a lazy smile. “What’s up?”
Sibling relationships are weird. There’s this elasticity to them that’s both comforting and dangerous. Oliver said something sublimely hurtful to me earlier, and I know that he knew it hurt me, even without him knowing all the facts surrounding it. I know he knows what he said about Becks would have been like a punch in my face, and yet there is no apology.
And there doesn’t really need to be. Even if there should be.
Maybe it’s that “blood is thicker than water” shit that everyone misquotes, or maybe—more likely—it’s attachment bonds, which are real and powerful, and I think Oliver and I are bound by at least two: familial and selective social.
Our relational pattern, until now, would have him believe that he can say or do anything he wants to me and we’ll just…rubber-band back to being who we were before it happened. He is right—kind of. But elastic wears over time. It stretches more, gets thinner, loses its shape. Even when you want it to snap back to what it was, it doesn’t always work like that.
I sit on the edge of his bed. “What are you watching?”
He nods toward the TV. Outlander , season one. I mean—who can blame him? Jamie Fraser, hello.
And then I wonder the worst possible thing: Do me and my brother have the same taste in boys?
When we were kids, we both loved Devon Sawa and JTT. We used to send each other Harry Styles photos all the time. We were equally as infatuated with both boys in Pearl Harbor .
There was one time in high school where I think we liked the same boy, which was already complicated to me because I liked him during the Becks Phase, and one of my coping mechanisms for the Becks Phase was wondering whether I had feelings for Beckett—I think because if I did, maybe it would have meant that what was happening to me wasn’t happening against my will? Or that maybe if I liked him, it wouldn’t be so bad? I didn’t like him, though. I think I tried to tell myself I did, but it became apparent that I didn’t actually, because I for certain did have actual feelings for Toby Lindholm. I think Toby also had feelings for me, because one time he came to a big party Oliver threw while my parents were at a conference, and Toby was in Oliver’s grade, and Oliver had been talking to him for a bit of the night, but now, in retrospect, I can see Toby was talking to Oliver to talk to me, and then Toby kissed me in the kitchen, and I guess Oliver saw it, and he wasn’t weird about it, but he wasn’t not weird about it either?
And I didn’t really understand what was wrong; maybe I was still trying to see the world in black and white. I couldn’t comprehend why Oliver—who I knew liked boys—would waste his time liking a boy who didn’t like boys.
Delightfully simplistic.
“You’re a bitch,” Maryanne told me after Toby kissed me. I don’t think she was even truly incensed by what happened as much as she likes to take every opportunity she has to disparage me. I don’t know how she knew. I guess there’s an implication there that Oliver at least cared enough about Toby to tell Maryanne about it. He’s done that before—when we’re fighting, or something’s off between us, he’ll go to Maryanne, and she’ll accept him with (conditional) open arms for as long as it’s beneficial for her to do so. It used to kill me when he’d do it; the betrayal of it would press down on me like a boot on my neck. And now that I’m older, I get it, how alone he was in our family. It would have been terrifying. He needed an ally, and he’d find an easy one in Maryanne when the common ground was hating me.
I stare over at my brother lying on the bed, fold my arms over my chest, and make sure I have prime viewing before I ask him what I’m about to.
“Do you like him?”
“What?” Oliver says quickly and blinks four times. “No.”
His head doesn’t move with his words. He takes a sharp breath and holds it in. Automatically I look up at the shape his eyebrows are making, and I’m about to replay in my mind the way his mouth just sagged at the edges, but then—I do something I never do. I stop myself from reading him. This is the answer he’s giving me, so this is the answer I’ll take.
And you can slice it any way you like; I can tell you all day till the cows come home that I’m just respecting my brother’s right to privacy and that’s why I’m not going to read his face, but that’s a fucking lie and we all know it.
The truth is I don’t want the truth, not this time.
So I just nod and flash him a smile. “Okay.”
I close his door behind me on my way out and walk back toward my bedroom, down the other end of the hallway where Oliver’s staying, right as Sam Penny walks out of the bathroom holding a pile of clothes, only a towel around his waist.
I take one look at him and smack the hallway lights out as I pass them, because eyes naturally dilate in the dark and it won’t be as obvious that I want to jump his bones.
Sam stops outside his doorway, waiting for me. He gives me a long look for a quick second. “You okay?”
I smile up at him, suddenly feeling tired and less okay than I thought I was. “Yeah,” I lie.
“Did you find something for tomorrow?”
“Mhm.” I nod. “I see you haven’t.” I poke his bare abdomen. Rock-hard. Lust pools in my stomach. Kill me.
He presses his lips together and swallows. “I’m sorry about before,” he starts. “I don’t know why Ol went—”
“No.” I shake my head. “I know you’re not here for me. I’m sorry if I’ve commandeered so much of your time.”
“No,” he says quickly. “You haven’t. Your—” And even in this darkness I’ve thrown us into, I can see his eyes shift from my eyes to my mouth, where they hover, and then he drags them back up to my eyes.
Our proximity in this moment is undoubtedly less than one foot, less than half a foot, and the corridor we’re in allows for more space between us than that, but it’s obvious we have neither want nor need for it.
“I’m what?” I ask him quietly, and my breathing has quickened.
Sam slips his hand around my waist and jerks me quickly in toward him.
Proximity report:
Chests: pressed against one another.
Feet: overlapping
Faces: four inches, at most.
This close to him now, I can make these nonverbal, nonvisual observations:
His hands aren’t clammy or sweaty at all, nor are they cold. They’re warm. He’s not nervous.
His grip is strong, so he is sure of what he wants, and I am it.
His breathing is steady-paced and deep. He’s calm.
And with my legs pressed against him, I can attest that he is definitely packing, and in this moment, very locked and loaded.
“Your—” He swallows, then clears his throat. Then he does a tiny headshake. “Your dad just died.”
“Weird time to bring that up,” I say.
And then he lets out a single, quiet laugh before his head falls back toward the ceiling, breathing out in exasperation.
And I’m confused. His hands are still on my waist, he’s still holding me against him, but he’s moved his face away from me. I look at him as close as the light will let me. “You don’t…want to?”
He looks at me again quickly. “No, I want to. I do. I just—” His mouth pulls downward, sporting a hint of regret. “I don’t want to fuck us—” He flinches as he says that and quickly corrects himself. “ This . Up.”
“You are,” I tell him, not missing a beat. “You’re fucking this up right now.”
He gives me an amused and measured smile. A little cocky, eyes bright. “No, I’m not.”
“Seriously?” I look up at him, exasperated.
He nods once.
I stare at him in disbelief. “We’re not going to—?”
“Not now.” He shakes his head, still AU17-ing, so at least he’s bummed about it.
I flop my head forward onto his bare chest and I like where it lands.
My head tucks neatly under his chin like maybe we’re Russian nesting dolls from the same set.
I sigh, sad and annoyed and hungry and lonely but not for anything else, just for him.
“I could kill you.” My voice is muffled by him and I’m glad, because I think otherwise he’d have heard an embarrassing amount of emotion.
“Yeah.” Sam sniffs out a quiet, nervous laugh. “Tell me something I don’t know.”