Page 36 of Inevitably Yours

“Why areyou here and not with Augusta, sis?”

Stacy entered John’s house, dropped her bag, and embraced her brother. “Why do you think everyone just listens to you?” She walked past her brother and straight to the kitchen. John joined her.

“Stacy?”

“Fine, stop using that authority voice, and I’ll tell you.” She opened the refrigerator and started removing stuff to the counter. “Augusta is with the dynamic duo. She had an appointment this morning.”

“You wanna cup?” John offered as he poured himself an oversized cup of coffee.

“Um, does Dax have a big dick?”

John made a gagging sound. “A simple yes would suffice?”

After accepting the cup with a nod of appreciation, Stacy tested the brew. “Agh, but where would the fun be in that?” Setting the cup aside, she asked, “Scrambled or scrambled?”

John sat back down at the bar. “You’re cooking? Will miracles never cease? I think I will try…scrambled.”

“Shut up, smart ass, or I’ll spit in your eggs. Yes, I am cooking a lot now. Between those two giants I live with, it seems I’m always cooking something for someone.”

John silently sipped his coffee. Her words said complaint, but her face said content. Since not-marrying Dax and moving in with him and his teenage daughter, John had never witnessed his sister happier. She and Macy were practically best friends, but Stacy didn’t take shit from her either. His sister had even managed to form a somewhat relationship with Macy’s birth mother.

His sister was exactly where she needed to be in life, and she would move Heaven and Earth to make those two happy. He didn’t begrudge her happiness, she deserved it more than anyone, but there was a slight bitter bite of jealousy.

John wanted what she had, and for the first time, he admitted to himself he wanted that with Augusta. Screw the age difference and screw the pregnancy. Not that he was ready to watch her have a baby and hand it over to someone else, but he could appreciate it for the miraculous gift it was…from a distance, for now. Lucky for me, I have another ten days to work it out in my head.

“Earth to John? Butter or jelly?”

“Oh sorry,” he mumbled. “Jelly on one and butter on the other.”

“Why did I even bother to ask? I should know that John Roberts never changes.” She turned with two plates. One she sat in front of him, the other she placed on the counter in front of her. What does she mean by that?

Stacy dove into her eggs. If they could even be called that with the amount of ketchup on them. “Ketchup?”

“No thank you, that’s just gross. I can’t even see your eggs under there. Since when do you drown them in ketchup, anyway?” John remembered when she went through the phase of only eating egg whites with provolone cheese and salt. Nothing else. Stacy was always changing. Evolving.

“Have you ever tried it?

“No, I don’t like it.”

“How do you know if you never tried it?” Stacy teased him with ketchupped egg at the end of her fork, waving it in his face like she was still a kid.

“I just know, okay.” John didn’t realize her egg had dripped ketchup on to his plate until he took the next bite. It didn’t kill him. As a matter of fact, he rather liked it, not drowning in ketchup of course, but a little wasn’t bad.

When he looked up at his sister, her eyes were sparkling in mischief the way they always did when she thought she was right. “You did that on purpose, you little shit.”

The air of innocence she adopted didn’t fool him at all. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I upset your…routine?”

“What do you mean by that? That’s twice you’ve said routine like it’s a dirty word.” John raised an eyebrow. “Are you calling me boring?” When Stacy didn’t answer, John continued, “Just because I don’t let chaos rule my life doesn’t make me boring. I like routine. It’s…”

“Predictable.”

John continued to stare.

“Oh, John.” Stacy sighed a sound of exasperation and sadness. “First, put that eyebrow down, it looks like a silver caterpillar trying to run into your hair.” John would take offense to that coming from anyone else. Stacy knew his eyebrows didn’t look like caterpillars. Dax teased him all the time about his long-standing biweekly appointment at the salon to clean up the facial hair and keep it neat.

The fork stopped halfway to her mouth and returned to her plate. Stacy pushed the plate aside and leaned forward on her forearms. Clasping her hands together, she looked him in the eyes.

“You’ve always found comfort in…routine. Maybe it was because you wanted to give Troy and me structure, I don’t know. But after Mom and Dad died, you quit being the big brother I had always knew and started being…different.”

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