Free HUGE X2 by Stephanie Brother

palms
facing forward.   “It’s been months and
it’s like you’ve just switched off.   You
won’t talk to us.   You don’t want to
spend time with us.”
    Nathan sits forward, resting his hands on the table.
“What my brother means is that we want to know what’s going on.   We’ve given you space because that’s what you
seemed to need, but now we need to
know, Carrie.   You’ve turned into a
stranger.”   I shake my head, but I know that
they are right.   I’ve been putting on a
friendly front but if it hasn’t felt natural to me, it sure won’t have felt
natural to them.   “We miss you,” Nathan adds
gently.   “We miss how things were
before…”
    “Before my mom almost died,” I say bitterly, hoping they’ll
back down when they hear the emotion in my voice.
    “But she didn’t, did she?” Ethan says.   He reaches out to take my hand but I snatch
it back.  
    “She nearly did,” I hiss.   “My mom nearly died and look what we were
doing while she was going through that.   We were….” I can’t even bring myself to say the words.   “Fuck this,” I say, exasperated.   I stand, taking my tea to the sink and
pouring it out.   I watch the liquid
disappear, trying not to register the pain I feel inside.   I don’t want to hurt them.   My stepbrothers are good men.   They have good hearts.   I know that they only want to talk about this
because they feel the same way as me.   I
love them.   But I can’t love them that
way.   Not after I promised.
    “It wasn’t your fault, Carrie.   We weren’t doing anything wrong.”
    “How can you say that?” I turn to face them, anger and
frustration boiling up inside me.
    “How can you be like this?” Ethan sounds so
wounded.   I feel awful. This is not what
I wanted.   “The way you talk, it’s like
you think we’re disgusting.   We love you,
Carrie.   That’s what we were doing that
night.   We were loving you, nothing
else.”   He stands then, and heads out of
the room slowly, like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.   Nathan turns to me but says nothing, then follows
his brother.
    Love.  
    It’s just a word.   It has four small letters.   By
themselves they mean nothing. Joined together they mean everything.   I go and outside and just stand, gazing at
our back yard.   Mom has been planting
again, and the flowers flutter in the breeze.  
    They have a truth.   They love me.   I know that as
certainly as I know the sky is blue.
    I have a truth.   I made a promise.
    I need my stepbrothers to understand that we can’t be
anything more than we are – a fake family forced to live together until we were
old enough to leave home – but they won’t.   They can’t. Because understanding why I made the promise can only end up
a being taken as a criticism of them; of the way they feel and the things we
did.   Nothing I did that night with them
felt wrong at the time.   It all felt
right and good.   The connection between
us was so deep it was almost like a physical bond.  
    So what does that make me?  
    Denying how I feel makes me a liar.   I know this.   But I can’t go back.   I just
can’t.
    I spend the next few hours locked in my room, staring
at my ceiling.   The hollow feeling is
always there but now it feels bigger somehow, and deeper.   Katelin calls me and she must hear the blue
in my voice because she tells me that we just have to go out tonight.   Excuses form at my lips but I stop myself
before I verbalize them.   I can’t lie
here all night feeling sorry for myself.   I’m letting regrets eat me alive.  
    “Sure,” I say.
    “Get your sexiest gear on, lady,” Katelin
shrieks.   She’s a great best friend,
always full of enthusiasm.   She’s
sunshine on a stick.   “I’ll pick you up
at 8 pm and we can leave my car in the lot overnight.”
    We say our goodbyes and I drag myself into the
shower.   I do as Katelin ordered and put
on my teal lace mini-dress