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“I need to tell you something,” she said, throwing it out there, sealing it. “It’s been on my mind for years.”
“Years?”
“Yeah. Since you were last home.”
“Um,” he said, sitting down opposite her on the counter. He smiled at her, and shrugged with his eyebrows. “What is it?”
“I don’t know if you remember. You probably don’t. Mum and Dad were out, and you had told me to go to bed early.”
“Yeah—”
“And you brought a girl home.”
“Okay—”
“And, um—” Sara’s voiced trailed off and she suddenly found it extremely difficult to look at her brother. Her face crumpled with emotion for a moment before she regained her courage. “I watched you from the top of the stairs.” As soon as she said it, she felt a strange sense of euphoria and of contentedness.
She looked at him in silence, and he did not speak for nearly a minute. They were locked in a small bubble of palpable quiet and tension, but the tension was not hers. She felt strangely light, strangely relieved.
“I know,” he said eventually.
“You do?” she asked, and put her hand to her mouth. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I—I don’t know,” he admitted with obvious difficulty. “I guess, I don’t know. I always kind of knew, you know?”
“Knew what?”
“Come on, Sara. Don’t make me say it.”
“Knew what?” Sara demanded, feeling her heart throbbing hard in her chest. A thousand butterflies wreaked havoc in her stomach.
“That you, you know, kind of liked me. It wasn’t the only time I caught you staring at me when you shouldn’t have been, you know?”
“You knew?” she gasped. “How did you know? What other times are you talking about? Tell me!”
“Come on, Sara,” he replied, his eyebrows dipping in an expression of exasperation. “Of course I knew. You think you hid it well? Like when I changed? Or when we were at the pool?”
“You should have said something” she said, suddenly indignant, as if donning that emotion
could mask her embarrassment. She knew the alcohol in her system was fueling her emotions, magnifying them, but she couldn’t control it. She felt shame, and she suddenly regretted the whole conversation.
Why had she told him? She hadn’t meant for this to be an admission of her secret yearnings for her brother! She just wanted to tell him that she had seen him that night. Not that she had both liked watching his nakedness, and felt seething jealousy and hatred toward the girl he was with!
“I don’t know why I said anything,” she groaned, before getting up. “I’m going to bed.”
“Sara, wait—”
“Shut up, Nick.”
“Sara!” he called, standing up at the counter.
“I said fuck off!” she cried. She went to her room and took off her clothes, and lay beneath the covers nude, feeling more naked mentally than she was physically, feeling more vulnerable than ever.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she hissed at herself. Her head was spinning. She felt drunk and out of control. And her tears began to flow.
* * *
Sara lay in bed for hours, unable to fall asleep. After midnight, she got out of bed and put on her robe to use the bathroom, and that was when she heard the music playing gently through Nick’s door. So he wasn’t asleep, either.
