We lie in her bed, sleepily rubbing skin against skin when Corrine’s phone rings. She takes the call in her office. After lying alone, my feet hanging over the end of the bed, for ten minutes I get up for a glass of water. I check out the view of the Common from her living room. Her windows are so clean I could have easily ended up an embarrassing internet meme from walking into them. The color scheme in her home reflects the one in her office. Crisp and white, clean lines and modern art and appliances. The pride she takes in her home is apparent in every detail: the gold trays under the TV, the black-and-white prints on the wall. I browse the bookshelf, filled mostly with books on business, marketing, a few on feminism, a history of salt, and most surprising, The Baby-Sitters Club. I pull the first book in the series off the shelf and sit on the couch in my boxers. The spine is well worn and the pages dog-eared. I smile; I always took Corrine for a bookmark kind of woman.
She’s still not out of her office by the time I’m finished with the first chapter. I set the book down on the table beside the sofa, next to a framed picture of a family of six, in which a blond woman with gray in her hair and a balding giant of a man flank four younger family members. Two tall, broad, blond teen boys, identical twins, with their arms around each other, another husky teenage boy who looks similar to the twins but isn’t quite their exact copy, and a smiling, younger version of Corrine. This Corrine looks more like the one in her company photo, with shorter hair and a bright toothy smile.
They stand on a beach under an overcast sky. They all wear University of Minnesota sweaters in various colors and the wind whips their hair.
“Sorry,” Corrine says, standing at the end of the couch wearing my T-shirt. It looks better on her than it ever could on me.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Just putting out a fire with a client.”
“Anything I can help with?”
She shakes her head, sitting beside me. I lean toward her, point to the picture. “That’s you.”
She nods.
“And who are they?”
She points at the woman. “My mom.” Her fingers move over the glass. “My dad, my brothers. They’re triplets. John and James are identical and Sebastian is fraternal.”
“Whoa. What are the chances of that happening?”
She shrugs. “About one in one hundred twenty thousand.”
“That...is a much higher chance than I was expecting.”
A private smile tugs her lips but other than that she doesn’t respond.
I study the photo, her small stature and dark hair contrasting starkly between the tall, blond, and thickly built boys. Her mom’s nose is a little big—Amy would probably call it aquiline—while Corrine’s is pert, the tip of it begging to be kissed...in a completely respectful and non-patronizing way. The only resemblance I can see between them is her mouth. Corrine, like her mother, has full lips, their smiles conservative.
Her father is a beast of a human. In the photograph he looks like he could take a hit from an NFL linebacker easy. Most of it is in his height—he’s definitely over six feet—but for an older guy he has a lot of muscle. I search for a resemblance between her and her brothers but still I come up with nothing. They’re a mixture of their mother’s features and their father’s size.
Like she’s read my thoughts, after a minute she says, “He’s not my biological father.”
I meet her eyes, blushing a little. “Oh.”
Busted.
“I never met my birth father.”
She looks down at her hands in her lap and I’m temporarily distracted by the smooth skin of her thighs beneath her palms.
“My mom had me young. She met my dad—” she motions to the man in the photograph “—when she was still pregnant with me. They got married before I was one and then had my brothers a few years later. They’re big and loud and I’ve always been the odd one out of the family.” She shrugs. “But we all fit together. In our own little way.”
I want to ask her more about her family, but she beats me to the plate. “They’re your age, I think. The boys.”
“Twenty-five?” I ask.
“Twenty-four.”
I nod and place the frame back on the table. “How’s your mom doing, by the way?”
“She’s coping,” she says. “Sebastian and I will probably go visit at Thanksgiving.”
“Does he live in Boston?”
“He’s in law school in Philly. John and James live down the street from each other, the next town over from my parents. They teach at the same high school.” She smiles. “John teaches chemistry and math and James runs the drama department.”
“You know a lot of twins, then,” I say. She frowns, and I point to my chest. “Amy and I are twins.”
“Oh. Right... Does Amy know who I am?” she asks.
I tuck her hair behind her ear, move closer. “Yes. Is that okay?”
She shrugs again. “She’s your sister,” she says, as if that settles it. “What did she say?” Her eyes are guarded. “When you told her?”
I kiss her throat, suck at her pulse point. “She told me...” I pause because she told me a lot and most of it I don’t want to repeat to Corrine. “She told me it was the craziest thing I’ve ever done.”
Corrine laughs through her nose. “You and me both.”
“Corrine,” I say. “I don’t want to talk about our siblings anymore.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
I stand, hold out my hand to her. “I don’t want to talk at all.” I pause, reflecting. “Unless it’s for you to tell me to eat you out again.”