“Yeah. She left. Is she here?”
I push back the door and let him in. The water in the shower is still running and there’s no ignoring it. Damn it, Sunshine. He’s not looking relieved and I can guess why as I stand in front of him in a t-shirt and sweatpants, still wet from the shower, while we listen to the water continue running two doors down.
“She’s in the shower,” I say, because it’s not like I can hide the fact. I need to warn her before she comes out. “I’ll go let her know you’re here.”
“Why is my sister showering in your house?” he demands before I can get away. He’s pissed. I’m getting the full over-protective brother treatment and I kind of respect him for it, but I don’t like the way he’s talking to me, in my own house, like I’m some sort of scumbag. It’s the same thing Margot did when she came over. I don’t think I’m particularly threatening and it’s not as if Nastya comes across like some delicate flower.
“Your sister is eighteen years old. She can do more than shower here if she wants.”
“My sister is emotionally stunted at fifteen.” He levels his eyes at me. This is not really a conversation I anticipated having tonight. I don’t even know how to respond to that.
“So you’re saying she’s immature?” It’s the only thing I can come up with. And I can’t decide which side I’m on anyway. Some days she seems older than anyone I’ve ever met and others she’s like a little girl.
“I’m saying she’s messed up.” He exhales and he looks tired, like he’s said this a thousand times before and he doesn’t want to be here, saying it now.
“I don’t agree.” I do agree. I just don’t know why or how or anything that might matter.
“I know my sister.”
“I know your sister.” I know what she tells me. The fragments of a life she gives me glimpses of on the days she’s feeling particularly generous, or maybe just reckless.
“Did you even know today was her birthday?” he asks. I don’t answer. “I didn’t think so. From the look on your face earlier, you didn’t know she had a brother, either. You ever wonder what else you don’t know?” Always. “She’s got issues and she doesn’t need another one. Leave it alone.”
I don’t appreciate being referred to as an issue.
“If there’s something you want me to know, why don’t you tell me? Otherwise you can take the condescending attitude and get out of my house.”
He doesn’t answer. He won’t betray her, and as much as I want to know what the hell is going on, I can respect that. Still, I’m not letting him make me the villain here. I want to like this kid, but he’s starting to piss me off.
“You like taking advantage of messed up girls? Is that your thing?” he asks.
“What’s yours? Pointless accusations and intimidation?”
The water stops running and I’m ready to bolt down the hall to intercept her before she comes out, but the door opens before I can get there. I didn’t even have a chance to leave her a dry change of clothes. She comes out of the hallway, dripping wet with a towel wrapped around her and all the blood drains down from my brain and my stupid dick twitches because that’s what it does when beautiful, wet, towel-clad girls come out of my shower. I wish I could enjoy the view because, seriously. But this isn’t the time, and fortunately, my dick gets the message that her extremely pissed-off looking brother is standing next to me and stays down.
She opens her mouth but sees him before any words make it out. I don’t know whose eyes are wider. Something unspoken goes on between the two of them. I can’t tell if she looks frightened or ashamed, but it looks like she’s gotten younger just seeing him. The tea kettle whistles and we’re so on edge that I think we all might piss our pants right here. Except for Nastya, because right now, she’s not wearing any. I look between the two of them and settle on her.
“Got company, Sunshine. Anyone want tea?”
Her brother eventually leaves once he accepts that she isn’t going back with him. I wonder how much hell she’s going to catch for that. Answering to people isn’t something I ever have to worry about, so it never crosses my mind, but she has a family and I don’t know how she gets away with just not going home, even if she is eighteen. She made a comment once that her parents are afraid to discipline her but she didn’t elaborate. I wonder if they’re scared of her, too. She spends most of her time here already, but how much of that information gets back to her parents is beyond me. If her family didn’t think we were screwing before, they do now.
“You’re not sleeping on the couch.” I tell her when she pulls the pillow and blanket she’s used before out of the linen closet.
“All right. Sorry.” She puts them down and starts looking around for her keys.
“You don’t have to leave.”
“But you said—”
“I just meant that the couch is seriously uncomfortable. You can take my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“I am not taking your bed. I don’t mind the couch. I’ve slept on it before.”
“So you know it sucks.”
“It’s better than always going back to Margot’s and being alone. I don’t want you giving up your bed.” She sits down on the couch and clutches the pillow in her lap.
“So sleep with me.”
“What?” Her eyes go wide and I laugh.
“Not that kind of sleep with me. Just sleep. It’s a king-size bed, you won’t even know I’m there.”
“Somehow I doubt that.” She looks around like she’s trying to figure something out. “How is it possible that you only have one bed in this house, anyway?”
“There’s a twin bed in Amanda’s room but you can’t find it anymore because I started storing everything in there and it’s underneath a bunch of crap. I got rid of the one in my old room when they needed to bring in the hospital bed for my grandfather. So now I just have the one in the master.” She doesn’t look at me like she feels bad, just like she understands.
“It can’t really be that bad,” she says, walking down to Amanda’s room. The door is always closed and she’s never gone in before, but she does now.
She steps inside to the almost non-existent pathway of visible carpet, and scans the room. There are boxes and piles of old clothing folded on the bed. A couple of random pieces of furniture I built, but wasn’t happy with, are shoved here and there; things I would keep in the garage, but don’t, because I need the space out there more than I need it here.
“Okay, it is that bad,” she laughs, before her eyes narrow with curiosity and I turn to see what she’s looking at. “You have a piano,” she says softly, stepping over to it. “Why is it in here?”
“Amanda was taking lessons. I never did. I rolled it in here a couple years ago when I needed the space in the living room for one of the tables.”
She runs her fingers along the top of the keys so lightly that I’m not sure she even touches them at all. There’s a reverence in the way she does it.
“Do you play?” I ask, because she’s never mentioned it.
“No,” she says. It takes her a second to look up at me because she’s still staring at the keys. “Not even a little.”
When I crawl into bed with her later, it doesn’t matter how huge the mattress is. I’m not completely brain dead. I know that this is a monumentally bad idea with repercussions written all over it. But she’s right. It’s just nice not being alone. And the couch is hellishly uncomfortable.
“Is it just me, or is this really strange?” she finally asks after about twenty minutes of awkward silence, because neither of us is sleeping.
“It’s not just you,” I agree.
“Do you want me to go?” she asks.
“No.” I don’t even need to do anything with her. Not that I don’t want to, because I want to touch her more than I probably should. But it really isn’t that. I just like her here.
She reaches over and finds my arm, just below my shoulder, and follows it until she reaches my hand. It reminds me of the way she touched the piano keys earlier and I can feel the trail her fingers leave all the way down my arm. There’s a comfort that wasn’t here a moment ago. Then, without a word, she curls up next to me and that’s how we fall asleep. Her hand in mine. Together.
On Wednesday in art class, Clay Whitaker shows me the portfolio he’s been working on and I want to hit him. He’s always updating, adding, deleting, based on whatever competition he’s entering it in or the college he’s applying to, and then he’ll show it to me, even though I never ask to see it and I don’t know shit about art. I don’t want to hit him for the portfolio itself, but for showing it to me here, in the middle of class, where it’s nearly impossible to keep my face blank. I think it’s a test. I look at Clay watching me, and I know it’s a test.
Every last drawing is of Sunshine. He has her face from every angle. Every emotion I can imagine anyone ever feeling is in her eyes in these pictures. I forgive him for every minute he stole her from my garage.
“Draw one for me.” The words are out of my mouth before I can bitchslap them into submission.
“You want me to draw you?” He’s annoyed or disappointed. I haven’t given him the reaction he was expecting.
“No. I want you to draw her. For me.”
Clay looks a little more pleased with that.
“How?” he asks.
“What do you mean, how?” I sound pissed and I mean to, but it’s me I’m pissed at. I just spilled my guts all over the floor in art class and now he’s going to kick them around a little bit for fun.
“How do you see her? If you want me to draw her for you, it should be how you see her. Not how I see her.”
“You’ve drawn a hundred pictures of her. Just draw another one or give me one of those.” I motion toward the portfolio.
“When you look at her what do you feel?”
“Are you f**king serious? Forget it.” He can kiss my ass if he wants to start talking feelings with me.
“You obviously want it for a reason.”
“I want a picture to jack off to. What do you care?” I keep drawing so I don’t have to look at him, but I’m mutilating the sketch I’m working on. I’ll have to start over, but I don’t care.
“Joy, fear, frustration, longing, friendship, anger, need, despair, love, lust?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“All of it,” I reply, because I’m all in now whether I like it or not.
“I can have it to you in a couple of days.”
True to his word, Clay walks into class two days later and hands me an oversized a cardboard folder and tells me not to open it until I get home. There’s a part of me that almost hoped he had forgotten or that it was a bad dream and I had never really asked. Then he shows me another drawing he’s added to his portfolio and now I know where Sunshine has been for the past two days.
“You’re obsessed,” I tell him, handing it back.
“Am I the only one?”
“Yes.” He’s looking at me skeptically and I know this was a huge mistake, but it’s one I can’t take back now. “I just wanted a picture. I wouldn’t have asked if I knew you were going to be such a dick about it.”
“Don’t worry,” he says, and for a moment, smug Clay is gone. “I’m not going to tell her.”
I accept this and we don’t speak for a minute during which time my brain leaves my body and deserts me.