PARKER 017

PARKER 017
She doesn’t answer immediately. Angela’s hand makes firmer contact with my arm, her fingers soft and splayed. She’s already turned toward me, and as juvenile as it seems, I keep wanting to look at her cleavage. It’s so messed up. She’s my stepsister. Has been forever. And we’ve been through all this before, a thousand years ago.

“You know what way.”

I swallow.

“What happened,” she says, “I won’t lie. I wanted it.”

I nod. I wanted it too, but right now I can’t breathe a word and risk breaking the spell between us.

“But Parker … it was wrong. We grew up together.”

I think that’s stretching it. We spent two years in adjacent rooms, and I was gone most of the time. I never wanted to be there at all.

I say none of that.

“At the time, I was just a kid.”

“Me too.” I don’t like how I say it. Almost like begging, as if I’m waiting for Angela to see me as pathetic and feel sorry for me.

“I didn’t know what was going on back then. You remember how I was. Kind of in my shell. I guess you’d say I was a late bloomer. We happened to become … closer … right around the time I finally started to bloom.”

I don’t like this talk of blooming. I remember how she’d bloomed. I remember how she felt to the touch. I’ve seen countless tits since leaving home. I’ve licked whipped cream and snorted coke off an endless parade of nipples. Breasts are two blobs of fat capped with tiny hats, and still one of my most vivid, most sepia-tinged memories is of that day under the pier. There was something about the first time I saw her like that. She looked vulnerable — but at the same time, I could see her as a sexual being in a way I’d never before been able to before. At first, she’d seemed childish, and later she’d seemed full of herself, prudish, naive. That day she’d been … Angela. Someone new. Someone who’d bloomed open from a closed bud, and I was there when it happened, tempted by forbidden fruit.

“But it was just hormones. We’re smarter now. Older. Wiser.”

I try to smile. It probably comes off sideways, maybe obnoxious. The jaded grin I’m afraid will convince her I’m the asshole she’s always imagined I was. But it’s meant to soften the blow as I say, “Stop it. I already feel old at thirty, and you’re making me feel older.”

“You know what I mean, don’t you?” Her hand is still on my arm. If she’s trying to make a platonic point, her touch is driving me in the wrong direction.

“I guess.”

“Have you thought about me while you’ve been gone? You know … in that way?”

Which answer should I give her?

Yes.

Constantly.

Unceasingly.

In that nobody can ever quite compare, and I may have gone through an entire modeling agency like yanking tissues from a box searching for something that felt the same.

Instead, I keep my face neutral. “I guess. Sometimes.”

Angela looks like she’s blunting her reply. “Me too … sometimes.”

Our bodies have shifted. First, when I chose Santa Monica as our destination for fun and dinner, my mind betrayed me. Now my body’s the turncoat. Fortunately (or unfortunately), hers is too. We’re almost facing each other. Our spare hands have found their matches. I swear I can hear her heartbeat and feel her warmth in the space between us.

“But you know it’s not a good idea,” she says.

“Sure.”

I don’t know that at all.

“We both do,” she goes on. “My mom. Your dad. Hell, for you, Parker? Think of the press. If we … just saying, if we were … together? Well, the press would eat it up.”

“You act like I’m begging,” I say. It comes out defensive. Parker Altman doesn’t beg. I wonder if I’m shoving my foot into the door, applying pressure, forcing distance between us.

“No, just … we never talked this out.”

We didn’t have to. Our actions said it all. I remember how much it hurt. I remember how it was unlike anything I’d ever felt, with any other girl. I remember how I swore I’d never, ever hurt that much again.

“I guess we didn’t.”

“If we’re going to be friends now … ”

“Is that what we are?”

She laughed. “For now.”

That makes my heart skip a little. Then she adds, “For now, until I get used to you as a friend, it would feel kind of wrong to leap all the way to seeing you as a brother.”

But then, she never thought of me as a brother because I wasn’t one. A roommate, maybe. A tormentor. On our best day, a friend. Except for that brief, painful period when we’d been more.

“Sure.” I raise my glass, proud of my maturity. “Friends.” And we drink to it.

But because it’s late, it would be rude to not offer her a room.

Angela accepts, and again she’s sleeping with but one wall between us.

Knowing she’s so close but so far reopens the wound I swore I’d never open again.

I lie awake for hours, my mind filled with images of our innocent past.