The sound of footsteps outside my door wakes me. Then the footsteps are inside my room and I’m awake. The curtains make a ringing, metallic sound pulled over the rod. The mattress dips under her weight as she sits on the edge of my bed, placing her hand over my forearm.
“Wesley,” she says in a half whisper, half singsong. A melodic sound that I didn’t know I’d missed until I heard it again. “Time to get up, little bug. You have Little League today.”
She gently shakes my arm. “Up, sweetie. Up.”
“Mom?” I turn away from the feeling of the sun on my face and toward the sound of her voice.
But when I open my eyes, she’s not there, perched on the side of my bed like she had been so many weekend mornings. I stretch my arm toward where she was, where I was sure I’d felt the bed dip. But all I find in my hand is the sheet, balled up in my fist. I turn my face into the pillow to wipe the wetness away from my skin.
My insides are a mosh pit. Have been since Friday. And while I would never, in a million years, tell my mother about what I did with my boss on her desk, my need for her is an aching hole. I want her to put her arms around me, squeeze me like she did, even after I grew taller than her. Tell me she’s proud of me. Right now, just hearing the sound of her voice, telling me she loves me might help me figure out what the hell I’m going to do about it. The absence of her is a sharp pain right through my heart.
I should have known it was a dream, though. I haven’t fit into my Little League uniform for over a decade.
Amy has made an extra bacon-and-egg sandwich when I pull myself out of bed, so she can’t still be that mad at me for missing our birthday party.
“Thank you,” I say.
She doesn’t respond.
“Did you want to go out for dinner tonight?” I ask around a bite of sandwich. “My treat. For our birthday.”
Her back is to me but I can practically feel her eyes rolling. “We have the same birthday, idiot. You can’t treat me to our birthday.”
The kitchen echoes with slammed cupboards and drawers. She turns the music up too loud but she’s playing Beastie Boys so I’m not sure why she thinks that would bother me.
“Shamey,” I sigh. Her shoulders rise to her ears. She hates that nickname. But the urge to needle her anyway is a compulsion. Part of it is us—we’ve bugged each other our whole lives. But there’s a small corner of my mind that thinks it’s maybe something more. A festering little knot of anger. One I can’t quite explain but, I realize, has been there, growing larger and larger for the last few months.
“I’m sorry about Friday. It was shitty of me.”
Despite not really wanting to go to any birthday party, I should have shown up. Or at least answered her texts.
She turns around, pinning me with a look of admonishment that was originally perfected by our mother. Amy looks like our mom. I look like our mom, too, but since Amy’s a girl she’s the one who can really pull it off. I used to come home from school and yell a greeting into the house and wouldn’t be able to tell who’d returned the hello until I saw who it was because the two of them sound the same, too. And the way she’s leaning up against the counter now, her feet and arms crossed, her hair braided over one shoulder, she looks so much like Mom. My heart hurts, the throbbing ache returned.
I come around the island, lean down, and wrap my arms around her. She keeps her arms crossed but giggles when I lift her off her feet, jiggling her a few times. I set her back down and kiss the top of her head. “Love you, Amy.”
She pushes me with both fists. “You have to tell me what’s wrong.”
Hopping back onto my stool, I say around a bite of sandwich, “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Liar.” She points a spatula at me and scrambled eggs go flying. “You’ve been acting weird. You’ve been ditching me.” She sets the spatula down. “I’m your sister. I need to know who to beat up for you.”
Amy hasn’t had to beat anyone up for me since middle school, but I still appreciate the sentiment. I sit back—remember that this stool has no back and grab onto the counter at the last second. She pats my shoulder as she walks behind me and climbs onto her own stool.
“Idiot,” she mutters lovingly. “Chen was sad, you know. He wanted to hang out with you. I think he misses you. A lot.”
I shrug. My friendship with Jeremy feels like it happened to another me, those moments old, over. And yet, I ache to have them back, and new versions of them. But reestablishing a friendship like ours feels about as easy as wearing Yankees gear to a Red Sox game.
“Are you stressed?” she asks. “Because of the house?”
I gesture around at the house in question. “The house? What’s wrong with it?”
She shrugs, taking a bite of her breakfast. “We need to consider selling it soon,” she says around her food.
The way she can talk about getting rid of this home, so flippantly, feels like a betrayal.
It shocks me so much I can’t help throwing her a scowl, but she doesn’t notice.
“I don’t know. Maybe moving, selling, isn’t the best thing. We’ve got a lot on our plates right now and...”
“Wesley, the house might be paid off but we can barely afford the property tax on this place. And...” Her voice catches. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay here. This house? It’s full of Mom.”
Amy never talks about Mom like this, like her loss hurts. In fact, she generally doesn’t talk about Mom at all. She’s right, at least about the fact that this house is full of our mother. It still smells like her, for god’s sake. Sometimes I walk into a room and expect her to be there and then she’s not. It’s dizzying, the loss of her all over again. To know that Amy feels this way, to know that she feels like our mother is still here inside these walls, makes me want to leave them even less.
I want to hold on to her here. This house feels like the only thing I can hold on to right now.
I drop my head back, staring up at the ceiling. I can’t meet my sister’s eyes and tell her no. “Let’s not think about it now. There’s still time.”
“I dunno, Wes—”
“Okay,” I say, cutting her off before she can steamroll me into making the decision to sell this house. Flattening my palms on the cool countertop, I say, “I’ll tell you what’s been going on with me. But you can’t tell anyone.”
“Obviously,” she says, annoyed. “Twin Code.”
I sip my coffee. Clean my lenses. “I slept with my boss.”
The screech I was expecting, the one that I closed my eyes for and leaned away from, never comes. I peek over at her, opening first one then the other eye. Amy chews on a piece of toast, staring at the hood fan across from us.
“It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be,” she muses. “On the one hand.” She tips her head to the side. “I’m going to have to hear about your sex life, which is gross.”
She turns her head to the other side. “On the other hand.” She throws her toast down, missing her plate, and spins the stool to face me. “That is the craziest thing you have ever done in your entire life ohmygod what were you thinking?!” she yells, her voice quickly reaching screech levels.
“Amy.” I place my hands on her shoulders. “My ears.”
She throws her hands in the air. “Who cares! I thought you hated her? I thought she hated you? Are you going to get fired? Is she?”
I hook my index finger around her coffee mug, pulling it out of reach of her flailing arms. “I’ll tell you everything but you need to listen.”
She takes a deep breath, pulls her mug back toward her, and leans against the counter. “Fine. I’ll listen.” She holds her hand out to me. “Tell me.”
I gloss over the details but tell her about the kiss and then what happened on Friday night: Richard’s behavior and the way Corrine seemed unwound and how we both ended up undressed, partly.
My sister’s mouth hangs open. “Are you in love with her?”
“What? No!” I yell. A voice, which does not belong to me nor do I know where it came from, whispers in my ear, but maybe?
“No,” I say again, as much to Amy as myself. It would be just like me to fall for a woman as unattainable and complicated as Corrine Blunt. I poke a tomato slice back into my sandwich. “She said...she said she regrets it. That it was a mistake.”
The hurt is mostly gone. I’m resigned to it now. Even if I wanted to do something about it, what could I do? Beg? Not a great look. She’s already a wildly successful executive and I’m an intern with little to no experience. She’d be risking her career for me. We both would.
Amy makes a disgusted sound in the back of her throat. “Well, she’s a mistake. You’re not a mistake, Wes. You need to tell her that.”
Her words—and the expectation that I hadn’t already said exactly that—send me sitting back on my stool again. “I did tell her that, Amy,” I say quietly.
“Look at you, little bro.” She hops off the stool, taking her plate to the sink. Her sandwich is untouched. “Standing up for yourself.”
I’m sure she means it to be a compliment, but I’ve been standing up for myself for a while now. Maybe I’m not a crusader like Amy, willing to tell anyone and everyone exactly what she thinks, but going into work every day felt like standing up for myself, and confronting Amy over pizza last week felt like it, too.
The words to say just that—to stand up for myself once more—ram against the back of my teeth. Amy’s shoulders are still tight as she scrapes her sandwich into the garbage, her smile a thin line when she turns back to me. Amy and I have been on the same page our whole lives but right now it feels like we’re writing completely different books.
Instead I say, “Stop calling me your little bro. You’re only older than me by two minutes.”
The edges of her smile relax a little bit. She comes around the island, wrapping her arms around my chest and squeezing. I give a tug on her wrist.
“Stop being so tall. God,” she says with mock outrage. I smile into my coffee mug.
“How did our poor mother house you for nine months? I’m surprised you didn’t absorb me for my resources,” she says. “I’ve got to clean upstairs.” She spins toward me. “Have you seen my phone?”
“It’s in the bathroom. Thanks for breakfast.” I smile. “Love you, Shamey.”
“Don’t call me that!” she yells, her feet pounding up the stairs.
My phone dings a message in my pocket but I clean up the kitchen first, taking the time to wipe down all the counters with Mom’s favorite lemon-scented cleaner and fill up the dishwasher. Leaning against the counter, I stop with my mug of now-cold coffee halfway to my mouth when I see who the text is from.
Corrine: Wesley. If it’s not too forward of me would it be possible for us to meet up at some point today? If you don’t feel comfortable I understand.
Then, only a minute later: I’m sorry. You’re probably busy.
There’s nothing terribly anxious about the tone of her messages but I can feel her worry through the screen.
My thumbs hover over the screen, stalled by the millions of things I want to say. Like come over, right now and I’ll meet you anywhere but also, you hurt me that night and I’m not interested if you’re going to tell me that I’m a mistake again. But the thing is this: if Corrine wants to talk to me, even if there’s a chance she could hurt me again, I want to hear what she has to say.
You could come to my house. If you want. No I’m not busy right now.
There. Now the ball is very firmly in her court. Plus, regardless of what she wants to say to me, it will probably be easier to hear it at home rather than waiting until tomorrow morning.
It takes her many long minutes to formulate a response, the text bubble appearing and disappearing before she writes back: Sure. Where do you live?
I send her my address and she says that she’ll be here in half an hour.
Corrine Blunt will be here. In thirty minutes. Three-zero. I survey the living room, where unpaired socks lie waiting to be put in the laundry and old fast-food beverage cups litter the coffee table. The rug hasn’t been vacuumed in weeks at a minimum.
“We’re slobs,” I murmur in terror.
I launch myself into cleaning mode while Amy blasts her disco tunes upstairs. For a moment I consider cleaning my own room but no.
Best not to get too ahead of myself.
After twenty-five minutes, I sit on the couch with the TV off, waiting for her knock. At thirty minutes, I move to the bench by the front door. After forty, I check through the peephole, my insides a flutter of nervous and excited butterflies.
After sixty minutes, I realize I never even bothered to tell Amy that my boss who I had intercourse with was coming here but now it seems like maybe I won’t have to. I check my phone but there are no new messages.
I’m not going to text her.
I put the phone in the kitchen.
I am not going to text her.
Throwing myself on the couch with another cup of coffee, I turn on the television. The pipes groan as Amy turns on the shower. A small part of me worries that maybe something happened to Corrine on her way here. But a voice that sounds suspiciously like Amy’s reminds me that she’s probably just freaking out. Because of the intercourse.
I peel off my T-shirt—Amy insists on keeping the thermostat set at Hell On Earth—and pull my headset on and turn on my gaming console.
This is me, being “chill.”
This is a normal weekend.
This is me, not texting her. Not waiting for Corrine to come to my front door with arguably the best sex of my life and also my career in her hands.
The chatter from my headphones invades my brain until Amy stomps past in nothing but a towel, her hair still wet.
“My eyes!” I yell. “Put some clothes on.”
She yells something back but I can’t hear her through the voices of the players chattering in my headphones. A cool blast of air comes from the front hallway. I set the controller down, sliding the headphones off. I hear Amy’s voice and then another woman answering.
It’s like my brain glitches because I recognize the voice but hearing it makes me realize just how much I’d convinced myself she wouldn’t show. And now she’s here at my front door and it takes many long seconds before I stand up, pick up my T-shirt, trip over the coffee table on my way to the front hall. I get to the small vestibule at the front of our house in time to see Corrine’s dark head bobbing down the front steps.
“Ms. Blunt!” I yell, shouldering past my sister. She doesn’t stop, picking up her pace as she runs down my street. “Ms. Blunt!” I yell again, pulling my T-shirt over my head as I run down the front steps. “Ms. Blunt! Corrine!”
But she is already around the corner. I stop and look back at my house. Amy stands in the doorway pulling the towel tightly around her, mostly contrite but also a little angry. Right now is not a great time for Amy to pull the overprotective card. She lifts her chin, her jaw set.
I chase after Corrine but I don’t have to go very far. She sits on the concrete steps of a house just a few feet around the corner. I slow to a walk and stand in front of her. Boston is just starting to cool off and my skin prickles at the contrast of our hot house with the cool air. A gust of wind blows a few leaves and empty coffee cups between us.
Her eyes are downcast and she plays with the hair at the end of her ponytail with one hand. A lit cigarette dangles from the other one. Her shoulders are tipped forward and even though she is petite, this is the first time she has ever seemed small.
There are so many versions of Corrine Blunt. Strong, in charge, a leader, mostly. Beautiful and sweet. And now I know that when she comes she is this vulnerable, flushed, wide-eyed version of herself that makes me want to make her come again and again. But I’ve never seen anything like this version of Corrine: embarrassed, alone.
I hate it.
“What...” I take a moment to catch my breath. “I didn’t know you smoke?”
She tips her head back, lifting a hand to shield her eyes from the sun as she takes a drag.
“I quit,” she says.
I motion toward her cancer stick. “Well, I’m not sure if you know this, but you started again.”
Corrine won’t meet my eyes, so I sit beside her, reach out slowly to drag my palm down her forearm to her fingers. I pull the cigarette from her fingertips and snuff it out. There’s no garbage can nearby so I place it on the stair beside me with a silent promise to the homeowner that I’ll come back to throw it away later. Then I place my hand in hers, palm to palm.
“What are you doing here, Corrine?” I ask the question I was too chicken to ask before. “What did you want to talk about?”
She pulls her hand from mine, dropping her head into both hands with a groan. “I don’t know. I was thinking about...” She sighs.
Lifting her face to mine, she says, “I was thinking about you. I needed to see you. There’s so much I need to say to you.” She sounds breathless. “Starting with I’m sorry but that’s not even close to enough. I couldn’t decide if I should come here or if I’m allowing myself to cross even more lines and I bought myself a pack of cigarettes while I was deciding and then I did come here and that woman answered the door,” she rambles.
My chest tightens with how much I love to hear her flustered. “Amy,” I tell her. “My twin sister.”
She swallows and her face relaxes into a look of relief. “Right.”
“You told me how you got here. Not why,” I say, still waiting, my heart beating in what I realize is anticipation. I want to hear her say it. I want her to tell me that she wanted to see me. I need her to tell me that, after I laid everything on the line. Despite standing up for myself, telling her I wasn’t a mistake still left me feeling exposed. Because it meant that what happened between us meant more to me than it did to her.
She turns to me, her eyes sparking amber in the sunlight. “I’m here because I want... I want...” She stops, searches my face. “I want, Wesley.”
Fireworks explode in my head, in my chest, lower. She wants, potentially, me.
Slowly, I nod. “I want, too.”
She exhales. Her eyes drop to my mouth. “You do?”
I nod faster. “A lot...”
Her voice, adamant that our kiss could never happen again, saying she regretted it, that what we did was a mistake, that I was a mistake, loops in my brain.
“Wait...”
Rejection from a woman is nothing new to me. Rejection from Corrine, even if it was justified, even if it made sense, left a bruise.
“What, exactly, do you want?” I ask.
She closes her eyes. “You. To feel good. The way you make me feel. Everything.”
Her fingers grip mine so tightly they look like they’ll leave indents in my skin. No matter how much her words hurt, kissing her felt right. Touching does, too. Making her feel good feels like it should be my life’s work. I don’t care how desperate it might make me. If she wants me, of course I want her back.
When she opens her eyes again, I’m nodding.
“My god, yes.”
Her mouth twitches.
“Wesley, no one can know,” she insists. Her face falls as soon as she says the words. “I can’t believe I said that to you. This is...” Her eyes widen. “Unprofessional is just the beginning of what this is.”
Lifting my hand, I cup her cheek. “Come back to my house with me.”
She shakes her head. “But...”
“Come. Back. With. Me.”
She leans into my palm as she says, “I can’t... We need to talk about this.”
“We will. I promise.” Leaning into her, I rub the tip of my nose against hers, and she lets me. “Please,” I whisper, as her breath ghosts across my lips, my chin, my neck. I lean back to see her face. Biting her lower lip, she nods.
Corrine holds her hand out to Amy—who has put on clothes, thank god—when we get back.
“I’m so sorry about earlier,” she says, pumping my sister’s hand like she’s a potential client. “I knew Wesley had a sister, I just didn’t realize you were Wesley’s sister.”
Amy smirks at me, waves the apology away. “No worries.”
She walks into the kitchen and Corrine wraps her arms around her middle. I’m not exactly sure what’s happening here but I think I need to facilitate this interaction in some way.
“Hey.” I turn her toward me, watching her chew on the inside of her cheek. “Do you want to get out of here?” I ask. “Would you feel more comfortable at your place?”
She nods quickly, an apology in her eyes.
“’Kay.” I smile. “Give me two seconds.”
I run upstairs and grab a sweater and my Sox cap, and pull on my worn sneakers. Grabbing Corrine’s hand, I call to Amy, “We’re leaving!”
My sister pokes her head out of the kitchen. “Where are you going?”
“We’re...going to eat out!” I tell her the first lie I can come up with.
“Okay.” Amy narrows her eyes at me. “Remember: The only way to do great work is to do what you love.”
Corrine turns to me as I shut the door behind us, a confused look on her face. “Did she just quote Steve Jobs?”
I pull my ball cap down lower, avoiding her eyes as I jog down the steps. “Oh, yeah. She did,” I say.
“Why?”
I sigh. “It’s what she always says when she gives cunnilingus advice.”