Brother After Dark

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Zach.

“What’s up, bro? You don’t sound too well,” Kenzo said to me on the other line.

“Well, maybe that’s because I’m on the verge of killing myself.”

“Really? Let me know how that goes when you wake up in the hospital.”

“How sure are you that I’m going to survive a suicide attempt?”

“Bad weeds never die, my friend,” he teased.

I fell silent for a moment. I was sitting in the balcony of my room, staring out the wonderful view in front of me.

“This is serious. Is it about family?” Kenzo asked.

“Close.”

“Is it about a girl?”

“Definitely.”

“Whoa! The last girl you were obsessing with was my girl’s best friend. And I know you didn’t pursue her. And honestly, I don’t know why. You mean there’s a new girl?”

“No. Same girl. This seems to be my problem, bro. It always boils down to the same girl.”

“I… don’t get you.”

“What I’m about to tell you, man, you have to keep to yourself.”

“When did I ever spill?” he asked.

I took a deep breath.

“You remember I told you I have a little sister?”

“Oh yeah. The one you came back for. What happened to her?”

“I’ll send you her picture now. Then you can call me back,” I said.

“O-kay.”

I scanned my phone for photos of Blaire. I realized I had many pictures of her. I always took her picture. At home, in school. When she thought I wasn’t watching her, I’d take candid pictures of her.

Thank God for high-resolution cameras on phone! And Hello, stalker!

I couldn’t help it. She was beautiful. And I had this insane desire for her that I could hardly control.

I chose a close-up photo of her when she was at the library once. She was sitting beside the window, and the rays of the sun were grazing her skin.

I wrote a caption before sending it to Kenzo.

“Meet Blaire Stewart, a.k.a. my little sister, a.k.a. my biggest dilemma.”

I waited for Kenzo to receive the photo and realized why I was in deep shit right now.

The phone rang after five minutes.

“Took you that long to figure it out?” I asked.

He sighed heavily on the other line. “Actually, it took me that long to figure out what to say to you, bro.”

“You cannot tell your girlfriend,” I said.

“You kidding me? I cannot tell a soul that my best friend slept with his little sister!”

“I didn’t sleep with her.”

“Come on, who are you kidding? She spent the night in your hotel room. And you could barely hide the hickeys you left, man!” he said.

“I didn’t sleep with her,” I said more firmly.

“Wait… what? You’re serious?”

“Yeah. I’m serious. We fooled around, but I didn’t get that far.”

“Why?”

I sighed. “Because I didn’t just want to get into her pants! I was wooing her. I wanted to court her, make her fall for me. I didn’t want to fuck her, man. I wanted to make love to her.”

“And then?”

“Then she appeared in our living room two hours after I landed back home. Imagine my shock,” I muttered.

“You love your little sister.”

“To the core,” I whispered.

“And you still want the girl you met at the concert?”

“Like a drug,” I muttered.

“Oh shit! You are in deep shit, man!” Kenzo said.

“Tell me something I don’t know or I’m hanging up,” I said. It’s true. The past few days, I felt like I was going out of my skull. When she told me to go ahead and date other girls, I wanted to ram my car into a tree immediately after I dropped her off at home.

When she told me to keep fucking Stephanie Bell, I wanted to kiss her senseless, to put it inside her head that I did not even know that girl personally. She’d been stalking me, trying to ask me out, seducing me, bribing me. But I wasn’t giving her the time of the day. In fact, I had been ignoring every girl since I went to school. The only girl who’d been in my mind for months now was her.

“I think you only made it worse, man,” Kenzo said.

“What?”

“Let’s speak figuratively here, okay,” he said. “Now, I don’t know how much of a fooling around you did with her. But let’s just say you tasted the nectar, you liked it. You got addicted to it. But you didn’t eat the entire fruit.”

What the fuck is he talking about?

“You didn’t eat the entire fruit because you were saving it for another occasion,” Kenzo continued. “You thought it’s okay to prolong the agony. It was worth waiting for. Anyway, you know you are quite confident that, in the end, you will end up eating the fruit anyway. You were just setting the stage, prolonging the yearning, teasing yourself to make it more exciting. And then just like that, you realized that fruit was forbidden. It will break hearts, cause your damnation.”

“And your point is?”

“Sometimes, it’s not the fruit you were breaking your heart for. It was the fact that you forever lost the chance to eat it, when you could have done so freely before that’s killing you.”

“And what do you suggest I do?”

“Just eat the fruit, man!” he said. “Do it, and then get it out of your system. Eat it. No strings attached. Who knows? Maybe it wouldn’t be as great as you thought it would be. Maybe you’ll find out that you’ve had so much better. But at least, you won’t be left wondering what it would have been like… to eat it, to taste it again.”

“I can’t believe you’re advising me to sleep with my sister.” I groaned. “I don’t need you to convince me to eat the fruit, man! You see, at this point, I will give my life to eat the fruit!”

“But what if it wasn’t what you thought it will be. Right now, you wanted it because you think it will be good. But you don’t know that!” he said.

“What if I go for it, and I find out that it was the best I’ve ever had? How do I get out of that?”

“But you don’t know that,” he insisted. “I’m telling you. The thrill you are feeling right now is all because of what could have been. You were so close, but you missed your chance, and now it’s not coming back and you’re forever left wondering how it would feel like.”

“To eat that fruit, I would risk my relationship with my sister,” I said. “And you know I love her more than anything in the world.”

“You love your sister. You’re not in love with her! You’re in lust with her body. There’s a huge difference,” he said. “You gotta take care of your problems one at a time.”

“I can’t! I feel guilty about wanting her. But fuck, I’m losing sleep over this, man.”

“Because you think it will be the best sex you’ll ever have. But what if isn’t? What if it was all just a dream, a myth? Don’t you want to find out so you don’t lose sleep over something that’s not even worth it?”

“And what if it is? What if… I find out that we’re sexually compatible? What if we fall for each other while we’re in the business of having forbidden sex? We already love each other to begin with. How difficult will it be for us to switch our relationship to something romantic? We don’t have a future. Our relatives will not accept this. They will condemn her, talk about her. I can walk away from all this. But she can’t. They’re her blood, not mine. What do I tell our parents?”

There was silence on the other line. Then finally he said, “You tell them what the courts told them eight years ago. You’re Zachary Reed. You’re not Zachary Stewart. You’re not breaking any law here. You have all the legal rights to be together.”

I sighed. “That’s easier said than done. But you didn’t see how much she’s already suffered from this family, man. I did. I still see it. I can’t bear for them to hate her more because of me.”

“Well, then good luck hitting your head with a sledgehammer for the rest of your life,” he said.

“Thanks! I feel a lot better already,” I said sarcastically.

I saw a car approaching our house from the gates. The music in the car was loud, and I could hear laughing from a distance. It stopped in our gates and honked. After a few seconds, I saw her walking toward the car. She was wearing a yellow sleeveless dress and flared skirt that ended a few inches above her knees. Her long hair cascaded behind her back.

She hopped into the backseat where the girl April Jones sat. The top-down car was being driven by a boy I didn’t know, and another guy sat beside him. I could have sworn one of the guys whistled as she got in, which made my blood boil.

“Are you listening to a word I’m saying?”

“No. My sister just went on a double date! I gotta go!”

“Wait a minute! Where are you going?”

“I know where they might be headed. Her friend’s cousin is throwing the party of the century.”

“And you’re party crashing?”

“No. I’ve been invited. I just didn’t plan on going because I was planning on spending this night differently.”

“Hmmm… does that include seducing her? So, she would jump your bones and you don’t have to feel guilty about making the first move?” Kenzo asked in a bored expression.

“Yeah, maybe that’s what I’m doing. Because incest is not wrong if the little sister started it!” I said in a sarcastic tone.

“Look man, I know you. I know you would die for that sister of yours. So, it’s either you endure this until it wears off or you go ahead, do it, get it over it, get her out of your system. Chances are, it’s just a testosterone thing.”

“It’s really nice speaking to you, man. But I gotta go.”

“Good luck.”

I quickly dressed up in a pair of jeans, white shirt, and a dark-gray Assassin’s Creed hoodie. Yeah, I was a gamer, and right now, I just might take it beyond the game and assassinate somebody.

I took the stairs two at a time, and then I hopped in my car and drove as fast as I could to this party. The two-story mansion of Drake Jones was packed with twenty-something kids already getting wasted. I was on a mission. I searched the grounds for her. I wasn’t going to do anything. I wasn’t going to make a scene or something. I was just going to watch her, make sure she didn’t get too drunk, and more importantly, she didn’t get taken advantage of.

“Z, my man! I thought you weren’t coming!” Drake said to me, patting my shoulder and shoving a can of beer in my hand.

“Have you seen…”

“Stephanie?” he asked in a teasing tone.

I raised a brow at him. “No. Why the hell would you think that?”

“Well, rumors are all over campus that you two are hooking up.”

“What? Since when?”

“Apparently she’s been telling people since Tuesday.”

Tuesday? That was the last day I spoke to Blaire. The day she told me to keep—fuck! She heard those rumors! That’s why she said that I should keep screwing that girl.