Page 77 of Nothing to This
He sensed the expectation.Brenna was waiting for him to say something else, to leap in and answer the question she hadn’t posed.He wasn’t going to do that.For one thing, his head was still so fucked by what Rylee said last night that he couldn’t think about it without getting a sharp pain in his temple.
“Well?Come on!”Brenna screeched.
On a breath and a slow blink, maintaining his calm, he raised his eyes from the paperwork, contrasting his mood to his sister’s hysterical mode.
“What?”
She glared at him.“Don’t play dumb.Tell me what happened!”
“We talked, you said it yourself.”
“What did you say?”She bounced to the edge of her chair.“What did she say?Is she pregnant yet?”
Slapping a page of the report into the done pile, his restraint wavered.“I am not going to gossip with you, Nana.If you want details, talk to Rylee.”
She growled.“She’s obviously not open to talking, or she would have called me back.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to live in wonder.”
Growling again, she pushed back to slouch in her chair, wearing a sulk that Sky would be proud of.
“You are the most infuriating couple ever!”
“We’re not a couple,” he muttered, trying to concentrate on his reading.“We won’t ever be a couple.”
In his peripheral vision, he noticed her spine uncurl slowly until she was sitting upright.“Guess that tells me all I need to know.You fucked it up, didn’t you?Shit, Jame, why did you have to lie to her about California?”
“This has nothing to do with California,” he said.“We talked about it and concluded it wouldn’t make sense to ruin our ability to tolerate each other for the sake of sex.”
She spat out a breath of disgust.“That sounds more like something Rylee would say than you.Did you kiss her?”
“What?No, I didn’t kiss her.”He would have.He’d wanted to.And Rylee had pushed him away.“She did say it and she’s right.We live together now, we get along, the kids love spending time as a family.It’s not right of us to screw with their heads by screwing each other; that would take our focus from them.We’d have to deal with all the usual relationship issues rather than just being good parents.This way we can—”
“What?Grow to hate the sight of each other?”she asked.“You think everything will carry on being hunky-dory if you just ignore what you feel for each other?Are you insane?Whoever heard of unresolved sexual tension just evaporating through sheer will?Are you moving out?”
“No.That’s the point.Things will continue exactly the way they are.”
“With you two showering in the same apartment, sleeping in the same apartment, jerking off in the same apartment.”
He screwed up his face.“Bren!Jesus!”
“Hey, I don’t like thinking about you touching that part of yourself any more than I like thinking of anyone touching one of those things you have,” she said and shivered.“My point is, no matter your mood, or hers, you’re going to be living in the same apartment, the same close quarters.So, those nights when you’re feeling a little hot, a little twitchy, you have to walk past her bedroom… maybe she’s getting dressed…”
Although she was trying to build a picture, it was so insane that she thought it necessary.
The glimmer of a smile he failed to contain quickly grew until he was laughing.“Fuck, Bren, I want her every second of the goddamn day, you think I need to be in the mood or near her bedroom to want to have sex with her?”That shut his sister up fast.“I want her in the office, every minute, even when there are twenty other people in the room and we’re dealing with some corporate disaster.Sometimes she comes over to the desk and the smell of her perfume gets me hard.Every time we’re in the kitchen at home, she moves in close, helping the kids with something or giving me a hand and her hair falls against my arm.Shit, Bren, it takes every ounce of strength I have not to grab hold of her and kiss the life out of her, even in front of our kids.”
For a few seconds, his sister just looked at him, her expression becoming more solemn.“And you think not acting on that will make it go away?Think about the logic of that.I know there’s a chance that you will jump in and the relationship won’t work out, there’s always that chance with a new relationship.”
“And then we’ll lose what we have now, which is why—”
“You’re going to lose it if you do nothing.If you don’t try, it’s going to eventually get weird.You’re going to stop getting close to her so those things you just said don’t happen.You want to be near her and horny all the time?It will frustrate you both.You’ll be anxious, and angry, and you’ll just start avoiding each other.The way I see it, you can try to have a relationship and there’s a chance it will work out.If you don’t even try, you may as well move out now, and go back to never seeing each other.”
He couldn’t imagine anything more sickening than never seeing Rylee again.It already pissed him off that he’d missed out on so much of his kids’ lives, now he was coming to realize he’d missed out on so much with their mother too.
“The night I met her, I knew she was different,” he murmured, picking up his pen to divert focus.“Being with her felt different…”
“But you didn’t pursue it.”
