Archive of Our Own

He’s sick of her. Sick to death. Sick to the bone. She’s like a fucking tumor: stubborn, infectious, latches on to the blood vessels, sinks its row of miniature teeth into the vulnerable thin membranous parts, her hungry spindly roots finding her forever home and she’ll not let anything weed her out, come hell or high water. 

She’s a tough gray thing, his doomless beloved nightmare, incomparable, singular in her intractable tortuous stinkfest. Unmanageable. A foul brat through and through, whose feeble swiss-cheese brain can’t comprehend the meaning or function of boundaries. He supposes he can’t blame her much, not when their darling rotten mother has decided that Andrew is Ashley’s de facto parent, caretaker, best friend, mentor, and babysitter, but she’s no longer the little snotty-nosed kid who stuck to the bottom of his shoe like a chewed out piece of fucking gum. 

Arguably, Andrew’s an old hat at handling her; she’s a thorn in his side, but his skin has adjusted, toughened up and stitched itself up to take her in. 

He tries to convince himself that it isn’t a big deal: so what if Ashley’s in a piss poor disguise, obscuring her face behind a cringy teen magazine two tables from where he and Julia are sitting? She’s basically broadcasting that she’s suspicious as hell, especially when she repeatedly peeks from behind the obnoxiously lurid glossy magazine pages, and then immediately darts back to hide, like a sleazy washed-up PI from a bad B-rated movie. 

What the fuck is he going to do with her? She’s depressingly hopeless, even when it comes to something as easy and as simple as stalking. He watches her as she takes desperate sips of her matcha-green honeydew boba, flipping through her prop, lowering it so she can spy at them like the god-damned virgin loser she is, and then hurriedly lifting it up like a flimsy shield and slinking back in her seat. Andrew can pretend she’s an enigma, a puzzle he just can’t solve for the life of him, that she’s a weirdo with rancid vibes and be done with it, but he knows her like the back of his hand: she’s bristling with possessiveness, reeking with jealousy, and she can’t come to terms with Andrew’s time and attention being spent on someone who isn’t her. 

Andrew imagines that if he were to adopt a pet, he’d find the thing dead and buried in the backyard in less than twenty-four hours, and Ashley would have the brightest fucking smile, humming and swaying to the beat of her own drum, crooning Andy at him like there wasn’t blood crusting under her fingernails, her whole deceptive act of a sweet sister as sickening as a vial of rat poison. She’ll be the death of him if he doesn’t put a stop to her behavior. 

Granted, he tried to disabuse her of her imaginary claim on him before, but she stood her ground, unwavering in her absolute conviction that he belonged to her and she to him from the moment of her birth, or whatever poetic crap she’s bought into. It annoyed the crap out of him, but he rolled with it because he felt bad for her and he wasn’t looking to date, so what harm could Ashley really be? 

He can eat his words, right about fucking now. 

Turns out, she’s nuclear, the slow damage of radiation as it breaks down the cells: brutal, inevitable and undifferentiated. Guess he shouldn’t have underestimated her when she’s unleashed.

“Andrew, are you even listening to me?”

He hasn’t told her that he’s started seeing Julia, but she’s gone ahead and found out on her own. Did she trail him like a cockroach? Is this the first time she’s stalked him or is this the first time he’s noticed her? For how long has she been badly blending in the background? He can’t believe he’s just sussed her out: with her soft little tits practically spilling out of her tight black cropped top and her black painted fingernails and her nervous squirming—she might as well be a screaming siren. Police siren, of course. Air raid siren. Whatever heralds destruction in its wake.

“Andrew! What’s wrong with you? Who are you looking at?”

Shit. Get it together. He plasters on a quick casual smile and zeros in on Julia opposite him, Ashley like a bone in his throat, like a piece of meat stuck between his teeth. “Thought I recognized someone from middle school. It’s just a stranger wearing his face. Talk about an uncanny valley. No, don’t turn around. He’s already walked out the door. Hey, might be a little premature, but are you interested in checking out the pizza joint I told you about?”

Julia blinks, blood rising to her cheeks as she fiddles with the handle of her ceramic mug, the shy demure girl that Ashley can never be. “You mean like… for another date?”

“Yeah. You know, I like you. You’re a good time and,” he shrugs, leaning forward against the small round table and wrapping a lock of her hair around his index finger, teasingly twirling and gently tugging. Julia’s eyes are saucer-wide, her lips parting on an exhalation. Worked with Ashley and is working even better on Julia. “I think the two of us could go steady. Don’t you?”

“Definitely. I know it’s too early to tell you this, but I’m a firm believer in honesty. I don’t wanna hide anything from you. So, the other day, I was brushing my teeth, right? And, this is gonna sound a little insane, sorry, but I could totally see you standing next to me at the sink. Brushing our teeth side by side. You know, domestic and sweet and like we could do it for a long time.” Julia’s eyes are glittering, an entire future unfolding in the gold of them. 

Andrew rubs the lock of hair between his thumb and forefinger, glances where Ashley’s tensed up, and the corners of his lips twitch at the hilariously tight white-knuckled grip she has on the magazine pages. He has to take a new approach with her, try his hand at getting her to see the light of day, but what could possibly work with a girl as deranged and delusional as Ashely? She’s probably all clammy and panged up inside, throwing a temper-tantrum of epic proportions, ripening with rage, a hurricane gaining momentum. What does her face look like behind the high-sheen frivolous explosion of saturation? Is she biting down on her lower lip, the skin abused to redness, bitterness pinching the corners of her stupidly enticing mouth? Is she thinking of locking Julia up in a crate in an abandoned factory and sticking around to hear her call out for help in an increasingly distraught and weak voice? 

“That’s sweet, babe.” 

She’s never been able to hold back from inserting herself where she isn’t wanted: ugly and starved for love and wanting so badly to be desired. Juvenile, really. Like a kid that can’t read the room, flushed with insecurity, crying out for attention and stumbling over herself to prove that she’s not. A tingling sensation nibbles at Andrew’s chest, unstringing a sluggish darkness that he doesn’t want to examine too closely. It feels brutish and heavy, like it could erupt out of him and streak across the floor to where Ashley is.

He risks another glance her way; she’s looking straight at him, her crumbling expression caught between fear at being discovered and rage at what is unfolding right in front of her. Andrew pins her in place with a frigid look and leans forward over the small round table, his hands flat on its surface as he puts his cheek against Julia’s, his lips brushing over her earlobe. Julia shivers, her skin overwrought with embarrassed heat, like Ashley’s is with indignation and hurt.

“I’m a lucky guy, aren’t I?” he whispers, low enough for only Julia to hear. “Got me a pretty girl right here wanting all the right things.” He tucks a slow kiss over the softness of Julia’s cheek, all the while, he is studying Ashley, cataloging with a sick relish the tears gathering in the bright of her eyes, the vibrational tremors of her small body. Perhaps he can see through her flesh, the calibrations of her pierced heart, the weak thrum of it, like a sun on the verge of dying. Would it implode and swallow her whole?

A ghost of a smile twitches the corner of his mouth. Ah—gotta be careful, Andrew. Don’t reveal your hand too early. It’s the slow, controlled burn of a calculated fire. No quick black charring and disintegration. She won’t be easy to deal with, but, maybe today, Andrew doesn’t want it to be easy, especially when Ashley’s nose has turned such a fascinating shade of sakura-blossom pink. She’s ugly a lot of the time, but when she cries, when she’s really hurt, oh, she’s like a work of art.

He retreats back into his seat, appraising the damage, no caulking, no sewing the torn edges back together, just this new degree of devastation peering up at him, the sucking dark hallways rent open. Julia’s heart is fucked loose and wet, pulpy and cartoonishly swooning; she’s blinking rapidly, lashes fluttering against her pink-dusted cheeks, her spine melting, barely holding her upright.

“Um. No, it’s—it’s me who’s lucky. Even when we were in high school, I never thought you’d, well, known I even existed. Or, sorry, we talked now and then, but I didn’t think you’d hang out with me.” Her hands flutter as her blush darkens. She’s like a bird, her song echoing in the caverns of your throat. He stays quiet, and lets her beat her wings against the bars. Oversharing, spilling her guts at the welcome mat by his feet, feathered hair and lip gloss, girl-dust and candied perfume.

So unlike his sister: chapped lips and bruised eye bags, full heavy tits that hurt her back and practical bras dangling from the hooks on the back of the bathroom’s door, hair heavy and lanky with oil from days of not showering until Andrew has to grit out that she needs to bathe or he will drag her to the shower stall and scrub her till she’s pink and glistening as a newborn. Of course, she’ll often waggle her brows and insinuate disgusting shit, driving him out of their shitty one-bedroom apartment, and she’ll call him hours later, a pout in her voice, telling him that she’s clean, could he please come back? That she misses him and that he’d better appreciate her putting in so much effort, as if hosing herself down is a steep uphill climb.

Maybe that’s why Julia is so appealing: she’s not a handful, and she never deliberately antagonizes him. She’s mellow, a caramelized candy you pop in your mouth and swirl around with your tongue, spit and heat working it down. 

“That was so long ago,” Andrew deflects, putting on an indulgent smile, rolling Julia in his mouth. “We’re different people now.” Not really. His voice is confident, amusement dripping from its masculine plateau of near-indifference. The silliness of women in stark contrast to the steadiness of men’s grounded logic. 

“Totally,” she amends, aligning herself to his worldview, eager to please. Ashley would never try to appease him like that. She’d bite his face like a rabid dog. “Sorry to bring something like that up. Um.” Julia fiddles with the handle of her ceramic cup, moving it around on the bone-white saucer, a trickle of simmering anxiety. “How’s, um, Ashley? Are you two still in touch?”

Ah. Ashley, the destroyer, the accretion of rot, the collector of sin, the tangle of thorns; her absence is a presence, but she is not absent. On his mind. Encroaching. Festering. In the cafe, spying on his date with Julia, redolent with dolesome betrayal, as though he is being unfaithful, as though she wed herself to him and she is LARPing as the wounded wife with the bleeding heart.

And, now, here she is, invited by his girlfriend into their conversation.

Andrew tilts his head, his mouth twitching, irritation climbing its way to the surface like a drowned corpse that just won’t sink. Appearances are everything; keep it together, the configuration of normalcy, his padded resume of a perfect boyfriend, no sister banging on the doors of a closet like a trapped demonic secret.

“You remember Ashley?” he asks instead of answering. Evasion. No outright lying. That’ll come later. Let Julia construct the perceptions. 

“Oh! Of course.” Julia picks up her cup, cradling it with both hands, real careful, and pulls the flat white into her mouth. When she sets it down, she doesn’t look at him. “She’s hard to forget. She was… the two of you were attached at the hip. The Graves are two peas in their own grave, we used to say. Um, sorry if that was rude. I don’t know if you heard that before.”

The irritation is now potent, sharp-edged, your facial muscles are tensed up, a long stretch of strained silence, the grit of teeth jumping in your jawline.

Against his better judgement, his gaze jumps to where Ashley is: she no longer bothers to duck undercover, likely her inner volcanic rage-fit inseparable from the pain of heartbreak have spurred her to throw fake caution to the wind. When she sees him looking over, she glares back at him, defiant, fang and venom, putting on a tattered act of the independent woman that doesn’t need her brother to coddle her. It’s exquisite in its vulnerability.

Wipe the drool from your chin, Andrew. Your appetite is ill-concealed.

Ashley finishes the last of her drink and stands up, decisive, her back straight and her posture proud. She leaves her magazine face down on the table as she struts towards the door, her ass waving him goodbye. His pompous little sister, feigned apathy does not become her, mentored by neediness, a student of her own burning. She’ll act all superior, put on a mask of disinterest, a rite of passage as she attempts separation, but they both know she’ll revert back to her old ways.

There’s no breaking her bad habits. Andrew will have to face the sum of everything she fears and hates when he comes back home. It feels like orchestrating judgement day, early extinction closing in on him. But, Ashley and her mercurial moods can’t subjugate him. He can’t always be at her beck and call. She’ll have to see that, sooner or later. 

He tunes back into the conversation, fully present now that it’s just Julia and him.

“Don’t worry. You’re never rude,” he promises. “Honestly, yeah, she’s kind of still in the picture. But, there are boundaries. She’s old enough to realize this.” His voice is soft, reasonable, and assuaging.

“That’s wonderful!” She’s clearly relieved, her shoulders slackening. “Is she with someone? My sister always said that Ashley would calm down as soon as she got herself a boyfriend.”

His gut freezes over. The light in his eyes flatten. Over my dead body over my dead body no one can touch her not Ashley if any fucking incel lays their hands on her they’re dead meat don’t think about your sister’s cunt getting wet for someone else it’s not real. Okay, now, he needs to modulate his voice so he doesn’t sound like he’s one internal breakdown away from murder.

“We’re talking about the same Ashley, right? No way. No man has ever looked at her like that and I don’t even think she has the capacity to date anyone. She’s got no romantic bones in her useless body.”

“Andrew, that’s a little mean, don’t you think?” Doe-eyed Julia, sweet-voiced feminist, defending Ashley even when she isn’t fond of her. He’s made her uncomfortable, the sparkling ease she had on her face morphing into terse uncertainty, looking at him like she’s the owner of a trusted dog who’s begun exhibiting strange violent behaviors, over-correcting or overreacting, jumping the gun, too rash.

“Sorry. You’re right.” He puts his hands up, a pantomime of surrender, harmlessness. See? I’m not the scary misogynist you think I am. No more trash-talking the trash. “It’s a little hard to think of my sister like that, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Wishy-washy wryness. “Um. So, Ashley’s… single? She’s still living with your parents, then?” she prods, staring at him with a lick of fear, and Andrew can see it sprawling out of her, trimming expectations, preparing to bolt or maybe to draw clear lines, ultimatums and deal breakers, relationship fender-benders, let’s shake hands and hope we never cross paths again, but it’s a small town, so maybe that’s bound to happen, yuck. “Sorry, I don’t mean to sound like I’m sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong, but… we both know Ashley and how much she… um, needs you? And, you know, I don’t think anyone was able to compete with that. I mean, I heard… um, like stuff? Rumors? And… well, if she only has you, then, it’d be hard, for sure.”

She’s like a fucking hound, Jesus Christ. He honestly thought she’d be a little easier to handle and wrangle, overdosed on love-bombing, stumbling after him for a flicker of his attention, starry-eyed and weak-kneed from a rehearsed 100% guaranteed script. All the right moves and the right words and she’s folding him like he’s wet paper. He pauses, buys time by taking a measured sip of his room-temp no-sugar no-cream espresso. He knows what Julia wants to hear. It’s just not what he wants to say.

He is opening his mouth without letting his thoughts taint everything. No trace of the storm rearranging his stomach. “I… know a friend. He’s been wanting a date with her for a long time. I can maybe try setting them up.”

Sleazy fuckface who kept glancing down at her tits with a leer and when Andrew looked down, the dude’s fingers were clenching and unclenching, as though imagining what a handful of them would feel like in his slimy grip. Andrew wanted to shoot his face off so badly that he ached all over, but that was a while ago, and maybe, he can actually become a normal older brother, fully absorbing the front, the mask adhering to the skin, superglue working overtime, dormant fuck-upness erased out of existence, smoothed out in the dark, out of sight, dying, dead. 

“That’s perfect!” Julia gushes. Maybe she could gush some blood—shit, Andrew, get it together. No slitting Julia’s throat. Smile like a regular boyfriend who’s happy his girlfriend is happy that his sister is going to start dating. There: you look like a law-abiding citizen, like suitable material, like no hazard signs and church altars. Family-friendly amphitheater. “If it works out, maybe we could try going out on double-dates! Oh, which reminds me.” She’s totally bought into the idea, running with it like a fox with easy prey hooked into its mouth. Shit. Andrew’s off-kilter, jittery, overly caffeinated, heart thick and heavy in his chest as it pumps, the tattoo-drum of it like a living thing trapped inside of him. Breathe out. Breathe in. Subtle, so Julia doesn’t notice it. “There’s a new horror film coming out next week! We can grab a bite at the pizza joint after. Oh, I love pizza post movie-watching. Something so reminiscent of childhood about it.”

Andrew wouldn’t fucking now because Mom never bothered.

What’s reminiscent of childhood is the hard damage of Mom’s palm connecting with his bruised cheek, the slow fucking damage of neglect, he and Ashley like discarded toys collecting the dust under the marital bed, like inconveniences, accidental piss puddles to step around and avoid. No pizza after movies on Friday nights for Andrew and Ashley, only discount frozen dinners if they were lucky or filling their empty stomachs with water, hoping Mom and Dad would come back with leftovers from their dinner date.

Sometimes, Dad tossed Andrew a couple of dollars when he remembered and Andrew had to forgo fantasies of a greasy cheesy pepperoni pizza because Ashley was crying her eyes out for custard-filled chocolate doughnuts that she’d seen at the supermarket’s bakery and she’d overheard her classmates swear that the doughnuts had made them weep real tears, soft and sweet and unforgettable.

In the end, that night, it was worth it to shelve the pizza because Ashley, high on sugar, snuggled up to him on his lap and kissed his cheek real slow and sticky, so grateful that she was blessedly pliant and obedient for an entire week.

“Yeah, sure, babe,” Andrew says. “Horror and pizza sound great. Just like childhood.”

Ashley is sprawled on their beat-up garage-sale sofa in nothing but an oversized laundry-softened and stretched grey t-shirt that she stole from his closet months ago and refused to return because she developed an attachment so severe that it’s now her ‘comfort’ t-shirt to be worn when times are tough or when she’s on her period. He knows it can’t be the latter because he had to pull her hair to get her to take out the bathroom waste bulging with her period pads literally last week, so it must be the former. His hell-spangled hassle, crafted by God specifically to torment him. He stands at the apartment’s doorway for a couple of agonizing silent seconds, Ashley uncharacteristically quiet as she flips through the channels, the TV muted, its light glaringly bright in the apartment’s evening dimness. She looks like a doll when she isn’t scratching him like a demonic cat with hellish claws: her pink smooth knees, the fullness of her round cheeks, baby-fat clinging to her like she clings to him, her fucking kitten lips and her shapely legs that she shaves and moisturizes every day because she loves wearing shorts everywhere and hates the rough prickliness of hair. 

Lost in the chasm of the TV glow and Ashley’s silent treatment, he toes off his shoes by the rug, lifts Ashley’s legs to make room for himself and sets them back down across his thighs. 

“Where are you?”

Ashley doesn’t respond, as noiseless as the TV, but the cartilage of her throat shifts as she swallows. 

“Come on, Ashley. Talk to me.” He pats her bare leg, pre-pubescent smooth.

She doesn’t react, a stone-faced nymph, ball and fucking chain, walling herself up brick by brick in the damp cold.

It’s disquieting to come back to total disengagement.

He’s been drawing scenarios in his mind, sketching out confrontations in which Ashley arms herself with ammunition to throw at him, ceramic figurines flying at him with a startling velocity, or coming at him with a kitchen knife and threatening to kill him and then herself, desperation rolling off her in acidic stinking waves. Jilted sister. Abandoned for a shiny new girlfriend whom Andrew can fuck.

But this is something else: she’s calm, emptied out, like it doesn’t even matter to her, like in the couple of hours since he’s seen her at the cafe, she’s made peace with it. Andrew wants to laugh at himself. Ashley? Coming to terms with not being Andrew’s number one and only priority? Fat fucking chance.

She’s probably playing underhanded psychological games that negotiators whip out to deescalate hostage situations and get the kidnappers or school shooters to step away from the point of no return. Classic. Andrew is an Ashley war veteran, survivor of her showroom horrors, expert at diffusing her bombs. She isn’t particularly difficult to handle. You just have to know which wire to cut when all the wires are the same color.

“Cat’s out of the bag. For how long have you known?”

Nothing but the press of her thumb on the remote control.

“Are you thinking of killing this one, too?”

No reaction. Alright, move on to another wire.

“Suit yourself. I’m not breaking up with her any time soon, but as a consolation, I was planning on taking you to the summer carnival.”

She twitches. Ah , there we go . We’ve got a live one, boys and girls .

“Heard it’s a banger this time around. Mini-games stacked with plushie prizes, a lot of which are pink. Soft-serve ice-cream on those dreamy crunchy biscuit cones, you know the sort. Haven’t had one in… who knows how long. And my manager’s giving me all this overtime since Kelly is out with the flu, so I’ve got some extra cash to throw away. Like I said, though, if you’re not interested, then forget about it. I can ask Julia—”

“Stop it,” she whispers, real hurt in her voice. 

“Yeah, alright.” Capitulating is the best option when she’s so high-strung. Hanging by a thread. Doomed to suffocate on her neediness and her disappointments.

“So, what? She’s your skank of the month, now?”

He’s petting her pale veiny thigh like a farmer petting a calf in the slaughter season. “Hoping it lasts more than a month this time.”

“Yeah, sure, like I haven’t heard that one before.”

Poisoning the well with tributes of roasted resentments and failed relationships. All her handiwork, of course. Never your failings. Never your fingers on the destruct buttons. “Must you always be such a downer? It’s almost like it’s not worth it, being around you.” Designed to maximize the shaming, the voltage of hurt like a lightning-strike, mathematical accuracy measuring the depth of wounding, Ashley’s skin parting like butter under the scalpel. She forces him to do it. Forces his hand. He doesn’t like cutting the wires or cutting her up to take out her cotton stuffing, but she makes it so hard. It’s his defense mechanism.

“Kill yourself,” she counters cheerfully, but she doesn’t pull her legs away from his lap, doesn’t slap his hand as the fingers trace the tributaries of blue and lilac rivers running up the slab of her thigh. The downy-fine peach hairs she doesn’t bother shaving stand at attention, like he’s magnetizing them, hypnotizing them. “Whatever. When are we going to the carnival?”

“Oh? So, what? Is this you behaving? Color me impressed, Ashley.”

“I’ll color you black and blue from beatings and strangulations.”

He can’t help it: he laughs, a genuine bark of amusement bursting out of his throat. She’s a fucked-up darling who fucks him up: petulant and demanding as an infected gangrenous limb, but god, she can make him laugh, a reward for his patient suffering. “Put back your kitty claws. I’m giving you a compliment.”

Despite her best efforts, her lips curl around a stomach-punching smile. Andrew doesn’t want to admit to the angel-cold relief that rushes in and smothers the lava-floor of his insides. “Your girlfriend’s got weak survival instincts. Can’t believe women don’t see past the ‘nice guy’ act you’ve got going on. Is it your face that seals the deal?”

“What, you’re saying I’m so handsome that they ignore the red flags?” You’re having so much fun talking to her, overindulgence in the pleasure, off the wagon, back to the rank and the rot, Ashley rosy-cheeked with the attention and you, triumphant in getting her to break.

“Ok, kill yourself, for real. I wasn’t making a definitive statement. You’re cherry-picking and putting words in my mouth because your ego needs a stroke, which, for the record, is pathetic. I thought what’s-her-face would do the job for me. Literally, what’s the point of having her around?”

The amusement swells. There’s no censoring himself with Ashley, no proving his masculinity, no performing evasive maneuvers to gain as many approval points as he can. She knows the depth and measure of his soul. She knows the ripple of violence, the unstinted evisceration and the foul struggle. “Better late than never,” he snickers, then clears his throat, opting for a deep professional tone. “Here goes: a man has… certain bodily needs and when a woman is in the crosshairs—”

“That’s it. I’m done.” 

Snake-quick, she pushes herself up from the array of threadbare cushions and, unceremoniously, holds his face steady as she leans in and sinks her teeth into his cheek. He’s shocked into stillness, his brain stuck in an overheated effort at processing the press of her tits into his shoulder, the lines of her body alarmingly close that he reflexively puts his hand on her waist. Her hand is warm on his jawline, a show of faux tenderness at odds with the hot flare of pain bursting from violated capillaries and broken skin. He tries to push her away, but she doesn’t budge, a leech welded to where the blood is rich and plentiful. He breathes through his nose, steady, in control. The consequences of a belated temper-tantrum knocking on his door. “Ashley… let go.” Speaking is a mangled operation. No glitching out of it. Wires, think of the wires. “What do you want?”

She makes a sound against his spit-covered aching face. Bargaining.

“Okay, the carnival. What else?”

“Sleep next to me for a whole week,” she mumbles and then goes back to chomping.

“Alright, but, in return…” He’s not the only one at a disadvantage. Without thinking about it, he wedges three of his fingers into the cavern of her open mouth and shoves them as far as he can. She chokes and starts coughing, trying to back away, but he doesn’t let up, turning on her, pushing her down into the sofa so he’s on top of her and squeezing her face with his other hand to prevent her from closing up like a trap around his fingers. She looks up at him through wet eyelashes, scrabbling at his forearm to dislodge him, but he’s heavier than her, genetics on his side, biological evolution and weight lifting when he’s bored. Drool glistens on her chin. Her mouth is so fucking velvety and warm, her throat contracting around the intrusion as she wiggles and squirms underneath him. A thrill shoots down his spine. It’s a little hard remembering to speak. “You’ll go out on a date with Jack. Remember him? Nod.” Tears are sliding down from her eyes and into her hair, wet snail-trails on her skin. She nods and the power surges, stupor-strong, electricity coming back after a blackout. Focus on what’s important. “Good girl.” Fuck the wires. He’s taking out the garden shears. Blind clipping. So macho. “No fucking up my dates with Julia. No stalking, Ashley. I’m serious.”

This time, she hesitates and her squirming slows, an indolent surrender. His eyes are lidded when he rotates his wrist and rubs the roof of her mouth. She shudders under him, the peaks of her tits swelling towards her clavicles.

“Ashley,” he says, a warning.

She nods, more tears sweeping down her temples, streaking into her hairline.

“Was that so hard, my nightmare?”

Her eyes are diamond-hard even when they’re glittering with tears. The answer is teeth grinding down on his fingers hard enough to feel the razor-ache in the bones.

In bed, he gives her his back, but there’s no escape, no salvation: she’s right there, wriggling closer like a worm trying to get to the tasty-euphoric flesh of apples, determined, unrelenting, her arms looping around his waist, her face flush against his nape, her minty hot breath puffing on the back of his neck, dampening his skin and making the short hairs stick and clump. That’s his Ashley, his little kicked dog who keeps coming back for more because she doesn't know anything else, because she’s gone ahead and built a barricade around herself and Andrew, no one goes in or out, the Graves siblings vs. the decrepit, disgusting, irredeemable world. It’s for life, it’s ride or die till the end and, maybe, the end is fucking nigh. Her cotton-candy fantasy is not sustainable, not when she’s trapped him, turned him into her favorite fucking chew toy, a simp at her beck and call, housebroken, eager to please her and to appease her mercurial whims. He’s not going to let her play him or control him. Maybe, Julia’s right, he thinks even as his disdain skyrockets. Maybe Ashley could be a normal girl if she had a boyfriend. Someone who isn’t Andrew. Someone who isn’t poison like family is, sane and whole, comes from a big shiny happy family and he’ll rub off Ashley and she’ll marry him and have a real wedding with those stupid expensive white gowns. 

“Am I so horrible to be with?” Ashley asks in the dark, voice thick with tears.

Andrew’s heart thuds hot and heavy in his chest. She hasn’t sounded like this in a long time. The haze of her vulnerability is choking him. “Not really. No.” The words are unintentionally flippant, blank-bullets fired from his mouth. He’s sick of hurting her, sick of what her hands do to him. This isn’t what he looks like. This isn’t what he wants to be: bent-out-of-shape, transformed into a prisoner and a jailer, a tormentor and a savior. “You’re funny. I hate that you make me laugh, but it’s true. You’re also a terrible human being and I like that you’re unrepentant about it… Listen, no matter what we do to each other, I love you. You’re my sister. Your blood is my blood, which makes sense since we’re both fucked-up beyond comprehension.”

She’s feverishly happy, her grin pressed up into his warm skin where her sticky exhalations are hitting. Slowly, her body relaxes against his, a small stone sinking into the mattress. He thinks she’s drifted off, carried on a cloud of childish exuberance into the land of dreams. No longer pouty and sulky, quelled another storm, diffused another dangerous threat. Like a soldier in the trenches. She’s so warm at his back that he wishes they had a portable fan by the bedside. A shower is in order as soon as the morning rolls. Harder to keep his eyes open, interstitial darkness overtaking him. She shifts against him. Not asleep, after all.

“Andrew, what’s, um, Jack like?”

Landslide. Dread crashing down on you like a bombed skyscraper, taking sleep with it.

“He’s…” Force a serene contemplation in your voice. An impartial brother. Seal the frightful darkness in. “Decent,” he manages, lavishing the potential boyfriend with a star of approval. Fucker. Ugly. Loser. Garden shears dismembering his cock. Splurt. A hose of blood, runnels running down his hairy thighs. “Anyways, you’re not tying the knot, obviously. Just trying him on for size. See how you like him. Of course, one wrong look at you, one wrong word and you ditch him. Ghost him. Leave him for dead. Plenty of fish in the seat, whatever.” Shit. Not very subtle. He’s basically giving her an easy way out, but doesn’t he want her to seriously fuck off? No . Revulsion tastes rancid in his mouth. Disgusted with himself. Fermenting in his own sludge of self-hatred.

“Okay. I suppose I can try for you. But, I’m not making promises. You know I’m a high-maintenance, high-value woman, not one of your empty-brained skanks with nothing better to do except throw themselves at the nearest erect dick they can find to pump them full of cum.”

Forever superior in her ivory tower of virginity. The slow hitching panic fades away. “Good. That’s good, Ashley.” He’s so relieved that, after that, sleep comes smooth and easy. Like a full-bodied whiskey poured down his throat.

“What do you think? First-date appropriate?”

Andrew looks up from the Resident Evil: Village stream and wishes he could drill a hole in Julia’s head like she’s a lame fucking horse. He doesn’t know what expression he has on, maybe a slackening of his facial muscles, eyes drooping drunkenly, the ventricles of his heart loosening up enough to create glitches in the blood’s streamlined fluid movement.

Ashley’s wearing a bodycon black velvet dress with some kind of porny provocative lacy trim sewed to the hemline. She’s wearing a collar he’s never seen before—did she decide to buy it for the date? Is she really trying to win over a scumbag like him? Pulling all the stops, Ashley?—a black band of crushed velvet sitting like a coiled snake around her milky pale throat. The dress, cut short, a few maddening inches over her thighs, makes her look smaller, more delicate, like Andrew could pick her up so easily and have her pushed up over the dirty kitchen counter and he wouldn’t even feel the strain.

Stop. What are you doing? Squash the flash of images like an unwelcome bug. Think of Julia, think of her vanilla candied smell, the dimples deepening into her cheeks when she smiles, think of cutting loose from Ashley and her many-armed tentacles.

But, he’s so endeared that her hair is familiarly gathered in a low ponytail. Like a crutch, like a comfort blanket she can’t bear to throw away. When men look at her, do they all want to put their hands on her? Will this man whom he set the date up with think the same way? Of course . He’s a gooner, a fucking pussy and boobs obsessed slug.

“That bad, huh?” Ashley’s shoulders slump and she’s looking distressed, wrapping her arms around her midriff to comfort herself. 

Jesus, Andrew, get it together. “No, no, hey.” He stands up before he thinks about what he’s doing and walks up to her, his hands moving on their own, no conductor available to oversee the intent and direction, his heart swelling like an overinflated balloon in danger of popping at the slightest of disturbances. Heart attack or panic attack or the sting of jealousy overriding possessive freakish behaviour? All blending together in watery bloody brushstrokes slip-sliding on impermeable canvas. His hands perch themselves on her delicate shoulders as he scans her crestfallen face. “You look like a heartstopper,” he says, brain too scrambled to admit anything but the truth. “A real honest-to-god knockout, okay, snot-face?”

She laughs, her cheeks pink-dusted, leaning into him and looking up at him with so much hope in her star-speckled rhodolite garnet eyes that he gets, shamefully, weak in the knees, something twisting in his uncomfortably tight chest. “Wow, so you can’t be nice without being a little bit of an asshole. Good to know.”

She tucks herself against him, short enough that he can rest his chin on the crown of her head, the angel-smell of her hair like a hypnotizing corridor sucking him in and spitting him back out into memory: Mom and Dad locking them in the bedroom whenever they had guests over, Ashley getting claustrophobic enough that she started hyperventilating, her face crumbling with her fear and Andrew having to settle her down by cracking open the window of their second storey apartment and pressing himself to her back with her chest flat against the window sill, his nose buried in her hair as he instructed her to breathe in and out rhythmically until she deflated and settled. Pathetically, Andrew was also calmed by this ritualistic set-up, their hearts beating in tandem, he and Ashley crammed in the cramped bedroom, breathing in the car fumes and city smoke, stomach cramping with hunger, while their parents entertained their guests and served up club sandwiches, Mom with a probable agenda, buttering up and networking, currying favors and prodding for financial assistance.  

“I just…” he gropes for the right words. “Can’t believe you put in real effort into this.”

“You asked.”

“You mean I coerced you.”

“I can’t be coerced into anything. You should know that by now,” she says as-matter-of-factly. She takes a deep steadying breath and steps away from him. Andrew resists the urge to pull her back against him. “And who knows? Maybe this Jack and I will hit off and he’ll do something that’ll make me swoon and I’ll get him to fall completely and blindly in love with me using my effortless and ineffable charm that can’t be replicated.” 

The clench of his jaw is hard enough that pain flashes in his eyes. 

“Sounds like a plan. Let’s go.”

“Wait, what?” Ashley blinks at him, confused.

“I’m coming with you, of course. Duh. This is your first date and I can’t, with good faith, trust men to be on their best behavior without proper brotherly surveillance.”

The guarded rationality of the male. He dresses it up with the most sensible modular tone, tensed against the material threats of the patriarchy, slipping rape-date drugs in girls’ drinks, syringe needle penetrating the sweating surface of a soda can while Ashley takes a demure trip to the washroom to re-apply her strawberry flavored clear lipgloss. Anything can happen. World is a scary place. Men have incurable lusts and appetites, trust your older brother, he knows what lurks in the dense shadows. He hopes Ashley doesn’t push him on this; he’s dealing with enough as it is: the wrongness of a man putting his hands on his sister, the increasingly strange dimension that has only ever existed as a threatening faraway possibility and is now spinning in motion, Julia’s nagging in his ear: Ashley will find her center once she’s got someone else to focus on, you’ll see. It’ll be so much better if she gains some perspective and independence. He’s not being unreasonable. Men these days are capable of anything and Ashley’s wet behind the ears, so obviously she needs someone in her corner and who better than Andrew who set her up?

Surprisingly, Ashley easily nods. “Yeah, sure! Thanks. I wouldn’t mind you having my back.”

Alright. Weird. He’s been concocting this whole persuasive narrative in his mind, but he supposes he doesn’t have to weaponize it. Works for him. 

“Great. Glad we’re on the same page.” He slips on a jacket over his sweater and walks over to the door to put on his shoes. Ashley matches his step, setting a pair of pink platform Mary Janes down by next to Andrew’s sneakers. “Uh, hold on a second.” He rights himself up and stands over her while she buckles up the straps of her heels. “Aren’t you going to wear a coat or a jacket over that dress?”

She looks up at him through her bangs, her mile-long mascara-stiff lashes blinking up at him. “Not really.” 

Fucking fantastic. He scrubs his face with his palms, nearly at his wit’s end and they haven’t even left their place to meet that fuckwad. How did he think he could go along with this? What witchy spell did Julia place on him that convinced him this was at all feasible? “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” He’s not going to even attempt to talk her into covering herself up. He’ll do it himself. 

He rummages through their shared closet and pulls out an oversized leather jacket that he thrifted months ago. Like most of his belongings, Ashley’s begged him to lend it out to her, but he stood his ground and refused, because god forbid he has something that doesn’t have Ashley’s paw prints all over it. He figures it’ll be easy to get her to put it on. When he comes back out, Ashley’s sitting on the dining table, her feet swinging a couple inches above the wooden floor, the sun’s golden light flooding the apartment and catching on the sparkly glitter brushed over her cheekbones. She’s fucking exquisite and he’s letting a rando take a good whiff of her because his girlfriend practically forced his hand. Great fucking job, Andrew. You’re really making strides here.

He crosses over to stand in front of Ashley and unfurls the leather jacket around her shoulders. There’s a small part of him that knows the jacket’s got his scent on it and Ashley’s going to be enfolded in it, which, he assures himself, doesn’t mean anything. Ashley’s not saying anything, merely gazing quietly at him, like she’s waiting for a signal, for a sign, for a crack she can peer through. Her glossy lips are parted open and he remembers so clearly the tempting liquidy heat of her mouth that he has to swallow. And then, she grins, a vixen’s grin, nothing innocent or maidenly about it. She’s found her crack, his wire in the internal machine.

“Oh, Andrew, you’re being such a gentleman, today. Would you like a kiss in exchange? Better yet, would you like to cash in my virginity? Be the first to pop my cherry before dear ol’ Jack gets a try?”

Fuck, she’s impossible to deal with. He steps away from her and forces himself to roll his eyes. “Why are you the way that you are?”

“Because, oh brother of mine,” she dramatically sighs as she puts one leg over the other, deliberate and slow, putting on a real show for him. “You deserve to feel appreciated for your completely free of charge act of kindness.”

“Ashley, are you asking to be locked up?” He can’t go through with this. He’s forgotten that she’s a tease specifically designed to torture and lead men on. She’s only ever used these kinds of cringy lines on him, but… what if she actually tries them on the guy? He’ll kill him on the spot. He knows he will.

“Come on, Andrew.” She pushes her tits up at him, the oversized jacket falling off one of her shoulders in an artful display, her fingers coyly curling by her lips like she’s a femme fatale in a noir film. “Don’t be mean to me. Not when I’m being a good girl for you.” Her voice is fucking gasoline. A dark spill. Acrid iridescence. A trap with bone-breaking teeth, something straight out of a Saw film. 

He won’t participate in her fucky mind games. He’s the older brother. He’s better than this.

“This is me practicing my flirting techniques. Bear with me. Ohhh, I know,” she tilts her head to the side, clearly reveling in his discomfort. “Wanna taste the lipgloss off my lips, handsome? It’s sweeter than a maraschino cherry and you look like you’re starving for something sweet.”

Jesus fucking Christ. Fine. If she wants to mess around with him, he’ll mess with her right back. She’s chosen her poison. He won’t sit around like a dog whose sadistic master tugs on his tail for the fun of it. He’s done enough of that when they were kids and Ashley didn’t know when to quit. Maybe, this will show her. His face hard and closed, he places his palms on her knees and pushes them open so he can crowd himself up against her little velvet encased body. She squeaks and hurriedly attempts to push him off with her hands on his chest, but he doesn’t relent, the same way he didn’t relent when he had his fingers jammed into her mouth. Incest chicken or whatever the fuck. Not his fault that she’s a pro at pushing his buttons, especially when she’s stuffed herself into a dress that basically advertises all her curves and highlights the perfect handfuls of her tits.

“Um, Andrew, wait, no back up, I’m sorry,” she blabbers, flustered and nervous all of a sudden.

Andrew grips her chin roughly, pressing down hard enough that she makes a small sound in the back of her throat. “What? Can’t follow through? I thought you were a grown-up.” He leans into her, lines up his nose with her cheek and inhales deeply. She smells like her favorite strawberry shampoo and fruity sunsets with a touch of sea-salt. His lips are pressed into her skin when he murmurs, “careful, beloved. You can’t go around riling men up without being prepared to put your money where your mouth is. It’ll cost you and I’d hate for any man to take advantage of you.”

Her bird-bone ribcage expands with a shaky inhale, every movement of her body pronounced against his own. “Okay. Lesson learned,” she says, a tremor caught in her unusually meek voice. 

Satisfaction thrums in his gut, like an alcoholic buzz extending to the tips of his fingers, but amplified, heightened, the feat of bringing Ashley to heel. Not many are capable of it. Maybe, not even God. “Much better, don’t you think?” On autopilot mode, he picks up a dark lock of her hair and twists it around his index finger, tugging on it just enough for her to feel the strain in her scalp. Her spidery lashes flutter and she curls her fingers around his bicep, as though wanting to push him away but not finding the strength or willpower to.

“Don’t… Why are you angry with me?”

“I’m not,” he says, his voice contemplatively low as he considers the deep splotches of pink darkening her chest. She’s so pale that he can see the pools of blood welling up behind the thin transparency of her skin. “Am I hurting you?”

“You’ve used the same move on your whore. I’m not like your whore. I’m your sister, which should be way more important than some two-dime wench whom you’re just gonna fuck and toss away after you’ve had your fill.” She sniffles, her cheeks pomegranate-red, her eyes glassy with tears as she throws herself at him and pulls him in a crushing hug that knocks the breath out of Andrew’s lungs. “I really am trying to be good, so why are you being so terrible to me? It’s like you’re always trying to break my heart on purpose.”

She’s earnestly crying, hiccuping into his shoulder, her fingers bunching up his sweater, pulling him harder into her as though she’s burrowing into him, digging a hole in his body so she can crawl there indefinitely, brick herself up in his ribcage and stare at the world through the slats of bone.

The crazy fucked-up thing is that he would probably let her: she’s infernal against him, burning up, a feverish snot-faced girl, shaking like a weathered leaf, clinging on to her big brother lest she gets blown away and be lost forever. She has no one but him. They both know that. Magnanimously, he latches on to Ashley, keeping the smugness away from her, obscuring this damnable sense of superiority by holding her as tightly as she holds on to him, his heart flexing and twisting at every pathetic sob Ashley stabs into him. He shouldn’t be so soft on her; neither of their parents were and look how Ashley’s turned out: a little stunted girl that doesn’t know anything but the tug-of-war, the machinations of manipulations, puncturing and skinning and lapping it all up by calling it love.

“Let me take a look at you,” he can’t help but say. He isn’t even going to apologize. He can’t, because he isn’t Andy, the sucker-punched boy at Leyley’s beck and call, dumbstruck and fumbling and laboring to fix every single little thing she screws up. If he goes back to that, he’ll suffocate her with his pillow. Or, maybe, he’ll poison her incrementally, watch her vomit every day, wait her out till she weakens, a shadow of her former self, a complete degradation. He grips the back of her neck and pulls her off him. She’s an ugly crier: the tip of her nose is glossy-red, her eyes are red-rimmed, the thin skin beneath them swollen, and her chin is wobbling because she’s swimming through the flotsam of emotional suffering. “Wow, you look fucked-up.”

Triumph. Victory. He’s the only one who gets to see her broken down like this. He’s the only one she cares about enough to allow this kind of penetration. With others, she’s abrasive and nonchalant, spitting out razors and hissing like a snake-girl. With him, she can be soft, scared, aching. A bird he can crush with the heel of his foot.

“Fuck you,” she counters, but her voice is papery, tortured. “It’s your fault, asshole.” She self-consciously and ineffectually wipes away at the runny mascara with the knuckle of her finger, smearing it over her pinked-up cheek. So messy. So unwanted. A burst of affection catches him off guard, so unanticipated that he wants to run away from it, but Ashley’s blinking up at him, her mouth, despite her words, wry with shame and insecurity and hope. Now, with her body heated from the crying, the smell of strawberry and vanilla steam off of her skin. He imagines, for just a second, biting into the flesh of her upper arm, where she’s the softest, cake and icing.

“Guess you can’t meet up with your date anymore.”

“Try and sound less happy about it,” she mutters, even as her own mouth twitches in amusement.

“Could say the same thing to you,” he points out, fitting his hand to the curve of her cheek and pressing his thumb to the inflamed patch of skin, a poor pretense of a concerned brother trying to wipe off his sister’s ruined make-up. He really only wants his hands on her. His eyes on her. No one gets to have her, because no one’s been put through the wringer like Andrew has for her. He’s been starved for her (no dinner for you, Andrew, until you fix whatever Ashley’s broken), he’s been yelled at for her (why can’t you look after your sister? Huh? What’s wrong with you? I haven’t asked you for much, Andrew, but if you can’t do this, then forget about real responsibility), and he’s been locked up for her (you’ll stay in your room and reflect on your actions. No going out with your friends this weekend). “Did you only agree to see this guy for me?” A grave mistake to ask this question, but he blurts it out before he thinks better of it.

Her twilight-pink eyes roam his face, searching for something, a foothold, the chink, the wire. Slowly, she splays her palm on top of his hand, doll-delicate in comparison with his own, fine-boned, china-fine. “Have I ever been interested in any guy?” Who isn’t you is unspoken, but it lingers and shimmers in the tense haze surrounding them. Ashley’s tears misting. Andrew’s sweat rising to meet it. The sea-salt of her skin. The palpitations drumming against the interior walls of his tight chest.

It’d be a disservice to Ashley to dignify her question with an answer. Instead, he asks, foolishly, like he doesn’t know the answer already, “why not?”

She looks at him like he’s stupid, a furrow between her plucked and gelled brows. “I don’t know,” she shrugs and shrugs him off, a tremor in her dainty limbs, disappointment and denial and hurt stacked upon hurt to create a subterranean inscrutability, a relentless shuttering, no brothers allowed, a No-Andrew zone. She walks away from him, putting physical distance between them, trying to escape him, as though they can ever escape each other. Fucking sewn up together, traumatized by the same pedigree, starved out of parental approval, two maligned peas in the same rotten pods. “Why do you want to date Julia?”

He rolls his eyes. She’s being deliberately obtuse. “Because it’s the normal thing to do, Ashley.” Slicing the dead skin clean from fingernails. Well-maintained, varnished, no longing interrupting the negative space between them. “That’s what people do. They go on the apps. Talk to strangers. Go on blind dates. They fucking try to orchestrate a meet-cute with the person they keep seeing from the corner of their eyes in the grocery store. They network and join marathon clubs and go to the gym and get to know the right people and get together because they’re social animals. It’s what you have to do.”

“Okay, but says who?”

“What?”

“Who says you have to do these things? Who says I have to lose my virginity? Who says you have to go around looking for women to wine and dine? It’s all a social construct. I’m not less of a human for being a virgin and you’re not less for not dating. Do you feel like you have to date?”

Frustration bubbles up in his closed-up throat. “Well, I can’t go around asking women to spread their legs for me without being nice to them, Ashley.”

“You’re not nice to me,” she says, her voice thick with… something.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’re not pretending when you’re with me.” She perches herself on the arm of the sagging couch, looking at him through droopy lashes. “You’re… yourself. Wouldn’t that be easier for both of us?”

Fuck. He knows what she’s hinting at. Dangerously present in his body, the jugular vein thrumming, cock bursting, images rolling in his retinas like a nightmare he can’t wake himself up from no matter how much he pinches and no matter how many times he stabs himself with the kitchen knife. He seethes and burns, angry at himself, angry at her for ripping the veil, for bringing up something that should never see the light of day. They have to be normal. He has to date Julia. Ashley has to find a man to fixate on that isn’t her brother. Why doesn’t she get any of that? Why is she being so fucking stupid?

“You sound stupid,” he says, cruelty back, taking center stage, point-blank as a mercy. She is clinging to a torn portrait, oil-paint staining her bleeding fingers. Getting her mutilation and her heartache all over it.

Her cheeks radiate heat, like an animal’s infected bite. She looks ruined. “I almost feel bad for Julia. Almost . I don’t suppose you’ll let me watch when she discovers what a psychopath you are.”

He breathes through his nose. Calm. Rational. Not at all imagining what she’d look like slashed up and eviscerated, a silent corpse sleeping in her sweet grave. “Sure. Keep it up, Ashley. Enjoy being alone for the rest of your miserable life.”

Not like you aren’t miserable yourself.

Be honest, when you look into Julia’s eyes, you only see what she wants reflected back at her: prim and proper Andrew, no murder in his stone-green eyes, no sister pinned in the crosshairs of his desire, aspiring lawyer or engineer or analyst, kind and gentle, heart stitched from romance, Valentine’s day every day.

Biting down on his lip, he pushes past Ashley and out of the apartment. He needs some breathing room. Some fucking air in his shrinking lungs.

Can’t go on much longer than this.

Clearing his head will help some, cloudy with Ashley’s watering eyes, her skin baby-smooth, baby-sister smooth, goth-girl pale, and off-fucking-limits.

She doesn’t know anything about him. She has some idea, maybe, but she’s separate from him. Apart. People will have projections of a version of you in their minds, but it’ll never be a fully actualized self. Julia knows a version of him. Ashley knows another. That doesn’t make her the last bastion of authority on what he wants and who he is.

As he takes the sidewalk, pinpricks of guilt pierce his chest. Brain wracked with it. With Ashley’s crumpled up face, trying so hard to be brave, trying so hard to not cry because she’s already cried once and she knows Andrew hates it when she has temper tantrums.

She’s trying to change for him. Willing to go on the date for him. Why can’t he cut her some slack?

You know why. You love her. You want her. She thinks you’re the only one for her, but that’s an outcome that can’t pan out. She can’t be the one for you . The two of you deserve better than each other. You’re not children anymore. You can’t cling to the vestiges and echoes of the past. Be a man, Andrew. Step up for your sister. You don’t want to be a leech, do you? You have to care for her. You have to protect her. No free-loading. But, that’s over, isn’t it?

He and Ashley have to become real people and real people have real relationships and go on dates and get introduced to others and the social circles expand outwards into infinity, and the conversations revolve around the trajectory of careers, the marriages and separations, the births and deaths, the cycles of civilized life, normalized, inoffensive, streamlined. 

They have to let go of each other. It was a mistake to get so possessive of her today. He’ll do better next time and he’ll apologize to her. For now, he decides, he’ll go to Julia’s, pick her up and treat her to something nice. He bets she’ll like that. However insidious Ashley is, he won’t let her taint this idealized image of himself and his future. They’ve both done enough to each other. 

He stays over at Julia’s and sleeps in the guest bedroom. Her mother politely dismisses his apologies for inconveniencing them and dotes over him, feeds him freshly prepared tiramisu next to a decent cup of coffee. Julia clings to him like a lovestruck puppy, giggling too loudly, maximizing the public displays of affection, while her sister, Jane, growls like a guard dog in the corner, teeth bared, beaming hatred straight into his direction, laser-focused on where his hand might stray.

But, he’s the perfect, courteous gentleman; no filth housed in his vessel, just relief at having escaped Ashley, at being surrounded by people who don’t scrape him raw, because they don’t even know him; they only know the veneer, the persona he’s put together, non-threatening, safe, a regular guy with a regular girlfriend and regular dreams of making it in the cut-throat world of precarious capitalism or whatever. Minimizing the secrets. Setting the attic of childhood on fire and watching it burn along with Andy.

When he comes home the next day, there is only the chill of silence, an apartment compressed and sanitized by the total lack of a presence.

That’s okay.

Let Ashley have her performative and over-wrought dramatic hissy-fit. He’ll tip-toe around her, be true to his word and take her out to the summer carnival like he promised, which may dampen the bitter fire she’s stoking. Sucks that there’s a repeat of the pattern, a movie script whose lines they’ve memorized over and over again, rehearsed to perfection: Andrew putting Ashley in her place, Ashley pouting and crying about it, Ashley going for the silent reproach, the side-eyes and the stiff body movements, angry and scared that he’ll stay mad at her forever; Andrew coming across as the bad guy, the dangerous wolf, like he’s somehow taken a bite out of Ashley and she’s just a damsel waiting for him to vomit it out and give it back to her.

God. The self-victimization really gets under his skin; one of Ashley’s many manipulations branded as self-defense tactics. Good for her. He’s not interested in any of it, though. Entombed in Ashley’s myriad discards, her toys and her psychotic episodes and her off-brand codependency. Lame-ass chick.

He’s laid up on the couch, reading through Clive Barker, when he hears the keys at the front door jangling and the knob turning. He doesn’t bother looking up. His ears are trained to pick up on Ashley’s movements and sound breathing, not unlike a well-trained dog. Shut the fuck up, Brain. Would you like to be cooked alive in pussy shit? He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about poor ol’ Ashley and her martyrdom. Let her steep and rot in her childish whims, far away from him.

Purposely, he keeps his eyes on the page, transmitting his nonchalance, his lack of care, his bitter distaste. Of course, he’s anticipating Ashley’s explosive meltdown, his heartbeat echoing in the caverns, stock-still, the language processing pathways in his brain freezing all activity, zero-comprehension, words blurring, letters just ants crawling on the paper. Is she going to bawl her eyes out till mascara tears are running down her cheeks in parallel rivers? Is she going to pull at his hair and claw at his face? Will she terrorize him with her arsenal of emotional blackmail? He imagines this is what The Cold War must have felt like: a choir of dread. She’s inevitable. Whatever. He can withstand her. He can come out unscathed. He can—she walks past him without a bat of her clumpy lashes.

Wait… what? He straightens up, a sensation of doom knotting his gut. She’s… dressed nicely, as in… nice enough for a date: a black long-sleeved fuzzy-looking top with a wide collared neckline that shows off the length of her neck, her throat, her collarbones, and a fucking tantalizing peek of the swell of her tits. She’s wearing a tight black skirt that he’s never seen before.

What the fuck?

Ashley turns towards him. Apparently, he said that out loud. He waits for her to speak, to reprimand him, to yell at him, to say anything, only to be met with the indifference of silence. She’s impassive, her eyes flat and frigid, nothing in there that holds any regard for him, like she’s locked him out. Denied entry. Please try again later. Wrong password. Wrong fucking wire.

“Back to the silent treatment again?” He sounds too wound up to affect apathy.

“You’re right,” she says, monotone, stripped of emotion, stripped of Ashley and her usual flavors of drama. “Jack was great. He wants to fuck me. And I think I want him to fuck me.”

“Are you doing this on purpose?”

A dewiness fills her dead gemstone eyes, agony and confusion pouring out of the pores, a complete departure from the contained iciness she must have mustered. “What are you talking about? You’re the one who wanted me to go out with him. You suggested it. Why’re you acting like such a little bitch?” 

Breathe past this. Don’t say anything you’ll regret. Don’t finger the festering wound. Admit it. You’re stuck in a decaying orbit, all debris and desolation. Their little apartment fucked beyond recognition, the space between them as dangerous as a loaded gun, as deadly as unexploded ammunition. “So, what? Do you actually like him or are you using him to provoke me?”

“Dear, oh, dear. Has anyone told you that you’re a self-centered asshole? Not everything is about you. Just… listen, if you’re opting to date, why shouldn’t I do the same? Why do you get to have all the fun?”

“So, what? You’re saying that you’d see yourself having a serious relationship with this loser?” God, he is already regretting this conversation. She’s right: why can’t he let it go? Why does it get on his nerves? Why does it feel like wasps are making a home out of his twitching bloodless husk?

Ashley closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, as though she’s steadying herself against the onslaught of this verbal assault. “You thought he was good enough for me,” she murmurs with a quiet resignation, her shimmery eyelids drooping, shutting him out again as she turns around and walks to their room, pushing the door closed behind her without looking back at him.

Only after Ashely has locked herself up does he realize that his jaw is clenched so hard that an ache is shooting up his teeth. He has to focus on regulating the harshness of his breathing. He tries to pick the book back up, but all he can see on the page is Ashley’s face, the bruises under her eyes, the tremor running through her strangely clear voice, so much like when she was a kid caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to. Instead of making up excuses, she always stood her ground, never backed down, a soldier unwilling to give up the ground they fought for and paid for in blood and death. But, unlike her child counterpart, she looked brittle, whatever wound inside of her cracking wider and wider to the point of breaking her open. 

In all fairness, he shot himself in the foot when he forced the possibility on her. He shouldn’t have listened to his girlfriend. He and Ashley are inseparable, a package deal. God, he fucking loves her so fucking much it could kill him. Could melt off his organs, bones, sinew, and muscle. He doesn’t want her building her own raft and sailing off away from their island, population of two, Andrew and Ashley.

He remembers Mom and Dad leaving them on their own when Ashley was nine and Andrew was eleven. Ashley woke up from a nightmare in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep, her terror inescapable and bone-deep, her bird-small body shivering and twisting next to his under the covers because she begged him to let her in.

To alleviate her anxiety, Andrew constructed a shabby flabby tent out of their blankets, and had Ashley help him dig out the Christmas lights from the dusty boxes shoved up in the attic. Andrew got Ashley to close her eyes as he added the final touches: stringing the lights up along the bedframe and taping it over the tent on the wall because he couldn’t get the string of lights to properly bracket the limp fabric. He didn’t think it looked particularly impressive, but when Ashley dropped her hands away from her face, the look on her face was a bomb going off in Andrew’s heart, making a ruin out of him. She giggled and clapped and threw her arms around him, hugged him so tightly he thought she was trying to squeeze the breath out of him. They spent the night cuddled up in the tent, the two of them drifting on the night’s oceanic darkness, shored up against the invisible cruelties knocking on their door, Ashley’s flushed face slack with soft happiness, her cheek cradled against his chest, her arms loosely curled around his midriff.

The rightness of it nearly destroyed him; Ashley’s warmth like an inheritance, like a divine commandment: you shall have no other, thy sister is the fruit of thy soul.

But, he changed the game when he decided to step out onto his own to mingle with people who don’t matter, to assimilate in the simulation, an imperative performance, a separation from the flesh of his flesh, and for what? He thinks of Julia: a speakerphone for a mouth. A barrage of nonsense. A counterfeit. Ashley’s his life’s calling. He can see that now that she’s slipping from his grasp. Now that she thinks some shit-for-brains is worthier than Andrew for her.

He sinks back into the couch. What am I doing? What is she making me do? But, fuck, he doesn’t want to give her up. His beautiful, intelligent girl with the extraordinary wit and the hungry ruthlessness. He doesn’t want any other man’s hands on her. Doesn’t want anyone to discover her. She’s his buried treasure. Gotta bury her deeper, he supposes. Hide her where no one can find her. He swallows. Would Ashley resist? Would she rejoice? She’s got you exactly where she’s wanted you for all these salty long years. Maybe you were there all along, but you pretended, biting at the bit digging into the tender corners of your mouth, Ashley insinuating herself into his temporal lobe, crudely carving a place for herself inside, chucking away the parts that she didn’t like and surgically attaching herself so that any effort to excise her resulted in neural damage. A scorching calcification. But, this is a two-way street. Always has been. Andrew’s a part of her as much as she is a part of him, their bodies an amalgamation of conjoined fears, Ashley reared on Andrew’s lap like she was his very own, sprouted from his seed, unfettered from the rocky terrains of his imagination and unleashed upon the unsuspecting. Well, it doesn’t matter. The world is fucked, anyways, and he’d rather watch it burn with Ashley by his side.

“Ashley, wake up, sleepy-head.”

“Mmnnnh, nooooo, please, daddy, kitten needs to sleep.”

The laugh that comes out of him is genuine and warm. If there’s one thing he loves about her without a doubt, it’s her sense of humor. “Alright, kitten, daddy needs you to get out of bed so he can take you for a treat.”

“A treat?” She shoots out of the covers with a pair of glittering eyes infused with torrents of hope, her mouth agape, her hair a tangled mess like she was wrestling demons in her sleep.

“Yeah. Promised you one, didn’t I?”

“... Sure. I didn’t think you’d come through.”

Andrew tilts his head. “How come? Don’t you trust my word?”

“Umm…” Her fingers clutch at the blanket as her gaze swivels down, gloom overcasting her features. “Didn’t seem like you were interested in me anymore.” 

“You’re the most interesting person I know,” he says and the truth of it crushes the central organ in his chest till it barely resembles itself anymore, dashed against the pavement, the splatter too gory to be examined closely.

Ashley’s lips part, and then, quick as lightning, that smile he wishes he could tattoo on the inside of his eyelids flashes up at him: mischievous, gleeful, the siren back on her favorite perch, put in there by her dearest, most beloved brother. Center fucking stage for Ashley Graves. She deserves it: the attention, the accolades, the limelight, but only if it’s Andrew behind the camera, if he’s the only warm body in the auditorium’s seating, if he’s the only one coming in with the flower bouquets and the praise.

“Well, of course I am! Not to mention that we’re surrounded by idiots—every direction you look, there’s an idiot waiting to jump out of the bush. Predator of the week type of flavor.” 

“Ugh, Ashley,” Andrew snorts, the corners of his lips twitching again, Ashley like a butcher’s hook tugging at the rotten shivering meat of him, like a murder ballad he’ll listen to over and over. There’s a kind of easy peace that has settled over him at having accepted her completely, at having ceased to deny her thorny effervescence. The boundaries he was so insistent on defining and redefining scrubbed away; only the vestigial echoes of them remain, but even those are flaking away by the second to reveal the crimson hum and throb of vital organs. “Although, I do bow down to your eternal wisdom when it’s not tainted by your inherent weirdness.” He plants one palm on the duvet, the other reaches out to cradle the velvet softness of the back of her head and bends down to tenderly kiss the dear forehead, inhaling the lulling warmth of sleep from her pores. His mouth floods with saliva when she pushes herself up into him, folding herself up like the secret sketches of violence she used to tuck away between the pages of her grade 7 science textbook. He doesn’t dare pull away too far: he’s ravenous, his appetite like a malignant black hole, ready to eat her up. No holds barred. No denial he can blindfold himself with. No Julia to distract him from the ugliness of his possessiveness. “Ashley…”

“Yeah, I know,” she whispers, her voice like a tiny bird’s flapping wings: soft, feathery. “No more Jack. Bye-bye Jack. May you shrivel for a thousand years under the scorch of the sun.” 

“Did he… did you…”

“No, I didn’t. Couldn’t. When he looked at me, I felt like I wanted to vomit all over his fake leather boots. Anyways, I told him I didn’t want his hands on me. Not that it stopped him or anything. Men are fucking soulless and this one was particularly vacuous, like a machine operated by hardwired programming and the code happens to be ‘I need to stick it in or I’ll die.’”

“I’ll hunt him down and kill him with my bare hands.”

“Oh,” Ashley looks up at him, a little girl-fox, wily and coy, a slippery beauty. “Can I watch?”

Andrew grins down at her, as enchanted as he is amused. “Right, I forgot that you were weaned on Hypergore Splatterbrains and The Human Centipede . You wouldn’t balk at the sight of Jack’s intestines decorating the floor.”

“Correct! However, I fear I might swoon at the sight of my brother covered in a copious amount of blood. It’s all the new rage. The porn industry’s top hits.”

She’s crawled inside of you and you’ve crawled inside of her, a mutual exchange of deformities and classical conditioning. The proof is that she coaxes another laugh out of you, choked and fond, and you wish you could grip her throat and shove your tongue inside her the way she’s shoved herself inside of your life. An invasive adaptive species with unprecedented regenerative cellular division. Never before seen in the scientific community. She uproots everything and sinks her roots in the fertile soil of your life, tendrils spreading outwards, leafy vines swarming everything in sight, a tactical takeover. Before, you might’ve resisted, bucked and heaved, tried to cut her off at the beating heart, decapitations and deliberate choking maneuvers. Now, you want to suck on her skin, your teeth bruising the fine ceramic of her skin, the elegant slope of her shoulders, the soft creamy tops of her tits. Invade her, colonize her subconscious so she dreams of you and only you. Infect her the same way she’s infected you. Change her irrevocably.

“You know,” Andrew says, cupping both of her cheeks carefully, pride lurching in his tight chest. His sister isn’t the kind of girl who throws herself at men’s feet and begs for them to fill up the sucking emptiness that begs for love and that translates the neediness into an inviting hole for men to fuck into. “You’ve ruined me for other women, Ashley.”

She blinks her lashes, a demure act of innocence. “I thought you didn’t know how to dirty-talk.”

He laughs again and rests his forehead against hers. “You’re incorrigible.”

“And you’re a true romantic.”

She scrapes him raw. She knows him. She can probably tell him apart from others by smell alone. He wonders what he smells like to her, if he could extract it out of his scalp, his underarms, his underwear, and keep it poised near her nose, so she could always breathe him in. Shake it off, Andrew; it’s getting too precarious, too creepy, too culty. You may as well offer to sacrifice anyone who’s ever offended her to some blood-hungry demon and declare your devotion to Ashley—not Satan, because he pales in comparison to your sister.

“Alright, enough of your compliments. Let’s have a blast at the carnival.”

Ashley scampers off her bed and loses herself in the process of getting ready. Andrew watches her the entire time. She doesn’t comment on it; perhaps she is too concerned with dressing herself up, with picking out the right top, with applying as many coats of mascara as she can, with finding her favorite pair of shorts. Andrew’s happy to observe the entire process without any interference. Only he gets to see his sister putting it all together. No other man will have the privilege. He’s made sure of it. 

His phone lights up with a call notification, Julia’s name flashing up at him, a desperate interruption, almost as though the scope of whatever he feels for Ashley has breached its containment and it has crawled to besiege Julia: a premonition that she witnesses in a stress-induced dream, or the filaments of hairs on the back of her neck standing at attention, a threat with rows of concentric sharp teeth coming up at her from her periphery. Or, maybe, she’s got one of those preternatural senses that permits her to see beyond her immediate reality; she glimpses Andrew’s imminent betrayal of her trust, of the hopes she pinned on him blindly like a child stumbling their way to what they think is a donkey with its tail held expectantly aloft.

Come on, boys and girls! Transform Andrew into your favorite beast of burden. Without glancing down at his phone, he silences it and sets it on the do not disturb setting. Ashley’s coming towards him with a happy skip, two twisty ice cream cones in each hand, her face splashed in glowy neon blue raspberry, cherry coke, and watermelon candy, sugar-saturated, slicked up by condensation and sweat and spiraling laughter, merry-go-round spinning and flashing, its lights shifting over Ashley, dying her in the carnival’s palette. She looks like a lollipop he could bite into. Freeze his brain. Coat his teeth. Dye his tongue. 

“Wow, you look like a man waiting for his bride at the end of the aisle,” she teases, clearly savoring the victory, her voice like a can of cherries, sticky and cloying. 

He’s in a good enough mood to humor her. “And who’s to be my bride, then, beloved?” It comes out of him low and throaty, coaxing Ashley into jumping off the balcony with him, a knot tied, soul-binding. He watches Ashley’s face, unguarded with him, not concerned with exaggerations or faux reactions. She pushes the ice cream cone into his hand and tucks herself against his side; for wanting so much, she’s such a small delicate little thing, bursting at the pink-taffeta seams of her body, her neediness telegraphed in the press of her chest against the length of his arm, the way she twines herself around him. He breathes in her sweet strawberry-soaked scent as the two of them start walking side by side, stuck at the hip, Ashley taking a lick of the soft serve, her tongue digging trenches into the picture-perfect swirl. She’s clearly stalling and he lets her have the time, snorting into her hair and closing his lips around the tip of the ice-cream mound. his arm securing her shoulder, his fingers digging trenches into her soft skin.

“I’ve always wanted to marry you, you know.”

“I know,” Andrew says, without hesitation. 

Her shoulders lock up and then relax. “What about you?”

They feel like outsiders here, in the heart of a childhood joy denied to them. Mom and Dad never bothered with taking them to amusement parks or carnivals. Their friends flaunted their season passes and their photo albums fat with polaroids and pictures, documentation of memories worth preserving.

Andrew and Ashley endured terse and tense weekends at their grandparents’, chores to keep them busy, banished from the sight of adults who couldn’t bother, who looked at them and saw nuisance. Andrew has nightmares of being trapped in that hateful house, a never-ending loop of raking the leaves, washing the dishes, feeling like he’s suffocating in piles of laundry.

Mud on his hands. Dirt under his fingernails. Over and over. He breathes in the caramelization of the popcorn, the buttery waft in the air, the cotton-candy, the thrilled screams torn from children’s lungs as the wooden horses and the metal cars spin them around. Ashley’s warmth seeps into his body. He slides his hand down from her shoulder to settle on the curve of her waist, his finger brushing over the strap of her bra, detectable under the thin cotton of her ratty black top. The roots of his teeth are aching. 

“You were all I’ve ever known. There’s no reference point. No ideal I can dredge up, except you. The soul selects its own society and all.” 

Ashley’s breath hitches, a jagged-edged sound pressing at the base of Andrew’s throat. She glances up at him, color sweeping across her cheeks, easy enough to catch because she’s fish-pale, her skin so porcelain white that she looks like a goth doll. Andrew meets her eyes and doesn’t look away, locked on her the same way she has zeroed in on him, the two of them the center of each other’s worlds. Ashley’s steely spine doesn’t permit her to buckle, even as Andrew’s gaze turns heavy and purposeful.

She leans further into him, until her front’s nearly molded to his, her ample chest squished against his abdomen. Then, swift as a predator, she chomps down on the top of his ice-cream, just because she can. She impishly grins up at him, proud of herself for the display. His little temptress. Julia could never attempt anything so brazen. “So, you’re saying we’re soulmates.”

“If the shoe fits.” Andrew grips her chin and, without warning, leans down to lick at the chocolate gathered at the corner of her mouth, unable to reel his instincts back in, the sense of impropriety culled from his flesh. Why should he hold himself back? What is the purpose of bottling it in? The rational voice that insists on resisting Ashley is a dead withered worm. There is no hope of assimilation. No hope of civility. His tongue picks up the milky sweetness of the ice cream mingled with the distinct and familiar taste of Ashley’s skin: clean with a hint of salt from her sweat. He wants to lick elsewhere. He wants to wiggle his tongue in swirly lines around her tits, frame them in his spit, turn Ashley’s skin glossy-wet. “There,” he says, rougher than he means. “All better.” 

Ashley’s still clinging on to him, her lips parted open, and, for a second, he wonders if he’s pushed her too far, but it’s distant and disappears entirely when Ashley steps up on her tippy toes and licks the corner of his lips in a mirrored retaliation. She looks way too smug for his liking, but, from the corner of his eye, he catches the fluttery tremor of her fingers, the blush on her cheeks like the dewiness of lollipop-stained spit. “Consider it an exchange of our marital vows. You licked me. I licked you. We may as well have traded saliva.”

He laughs and parts her bangs away with the tip of his nose to kiss her forehead. The carnival is a fuzzy blur behind Ashley’s radiance. She is the only real thing registering in his overstimulated eyes. The world feels redundant, a cheap background effect, the event of its existence crashing in on itself. “Sure, kitten,” he says, and then, because his brain makes a habit of constructing personalized chambers to torture him in, asks, “have you ever kissed anybody?” It’s none of your business. You and Julia kissed—not too many times, maybe three—so delete the double standards, dump them in the landfills of your other disgusting unseemly thoughts. But, the question is out in the open, stripping him bare for Ashley to roast and pry chunks off of. 

“I haven’t,” Ashley answers him, no beating around the bush, no warfare with mass casualty. She simply hands it over to him: her inexperience, her virginity. “I don’t want anyone to know me like that. The idea of it makes me want to vomit. Besides, it is scientifically proven that all men are piggish and none of them shall have the honor of laying their hooves on my glorious body. But…” Here, she lags, her forthcoming confession flagging, the vulnerability suffusing her voice, choking it out.

“But…?”

“But, maybe… if it’s you…”

“... Maybe.”

His grip tightens around her waist, clinching, bruising. She doesn’t shy away from the pain.

Their apartment is cold and dark, but Ashley’s body is feverishly hot.

She clings on to him as though she’s forgotten how to walk on her own, her hair spilling from its messy ponytail, a velvet cap as black as a crow’s feathers. He’s steadying her with an arm curled around her waist, nearly lifting her off the floor, bearing most of her weight. She breathes harshly into his neck, moistening the sensitive skin where his hair curls at the ends. Pressed up against him, face to throat, chest to chest (mostly because he’s holding her up), one of her legs is hiked up his thigh, her fingers clawing at his back, pulling the rim of his sweater down, feeling around for a fissure, for an opening that she can peel back and crawl inside of.

Her desperation rolls off of her and hangs around him like noxious fumes and he breathes it all in, breathes her in: faded strawberry, sweet with a hint of salt from her sweat, sea water taffy melting on the tip of his tongue, so distinctive, so familiar, and it sends pangs of love shooting straight into his heart. Fucking heaven. He hugs her back tight enough that he thinks she could break in half, but Ashley’s always been sturdier than he’s ever given her credit for, cherry-flesh ripe, but feral and relentless, baptized in the fires of Mom’s perpetual disapproval and Dad’s lacklustre attention, doll-limbed, moon-faced, handled the way unwanted things are handled. But, fuck, Andrew wants her like he’s never wanted anything else in his unremarkable life. He shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t.

Accepting Ashley, knowing that she’s as essential as air can’t be synonymous with coming to terms with his desire for her. He’s isolating her, cutting her off from the rest of the world, keeping her clean and pure, but it’s what brothers are meant for. It’s what they’re tasked with, their cross to bear. Mom gave birth to a baby sister and you’re her older brother? Now, you’re her keeper; you stand between her and whatever’s hell-bent on getting their hands on her. They should—you should stop. Don’t get swept away. So what if your guts are roasting? So what if you feel like your cock is ready to burst? Doesn’t matter. Don’t think about it.

“Ashley,” he murmurs into her hair. Her face is hot against his neck. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

“Pfft, what? No. I’m not nine years old,” she half-giggles half-whines, the vibrations of her voice sinking deep into the tissue of his skin. “I’m comfortable like this. Aren’t you?” she teases, pleased with herself.

“Oh, yeah, super comfortable. I love leaning against the doorway while my sister attempts to climb me like I’m a tree.”

“Now I know why all the girls think you’re a dreamboat.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing,” she chirps. “I don’t want to nurture your ginormous ego any more than it deserves. It’s big enough as it is.”

He’s about to retaliate when the landline’s shrill ringing cuts through the quiet dimness of the apartment. There’s a phone mounted on the wall right next to the door where they’re standing, so Andrew picks it up and holds it to his ear, his heavy gaze looking right back at Ashley’s star-pink eyes.

“The Graves’ residence,” he says, his lips tilted up as he dives down and noses over the biteable apples of Ashley’s cheeks, feeling disgusted with himself, but unable to hold back, not when she makes more room for him by pitching her head back.

“Andrew?” Julia’s voice crackles through the telephone’s receiver.

What is Julia calling for? Oh, right. She’s been trying to get in touch with him throughout the evening. “Hey,” he says, a little too casually. Ashley narrows her eyes and he knows not to fumble by lying through his teeth about the caller’s identity, especially when Ashley’s plastered all over him and she can hear Julia as well as he can. He gives her a warning look: keep quiet , which she responds to with a wiggle of her eyebrows. Great. This is just great. “What’s up?” It is all he can manage right now.

“‘What’s up?’ What’s up with you? You’ve been ignoring my calls. What’s going on?”

Ashley’s hand climbs up his chest and rests on the back of his neck, her fingers fiddling with the label that sticks out no matter what he does. He shivers and glares at her warningly. The look she gives him is text-book over-wrought faux innocence, played up to the max. Ugh , she’s got a seriously hopeless case of the one-track-mind. He rolls his eyes at her and, as a punishment, hooks his fingertip under her bra strap over her thin cotton top and snaps it over her skin, a dark amusement shooting up in his veins when she gasps in shock. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

Ashley glares up at him and all he can see is an affronted little kitten with her tiny ineffectual claws out. Maybe she sees his thoughts on his face because she bares her teeth up at him and bites down on the patch of skin where his neck and shoulder meet, her teeth sinking unforgivingly, like she’s actually intent on taking a piece of him into her. He grunts, the pain searing and hot, but not unbearable, and he knows that if he tries to push her off, she’ll clench down harder, unrepentant and hungry to get back at him. He fists her hair roughly, bearing it, breathing through it, his absolution from the sickness, like Ashley’s a god dealing him his tithe in blood and bite marks.

“Are you… I mean… is she… is Ashley with you?”

He’s a little dizzy from the pain to afford the energy to lie. “Yeah. I’m with her.”

Ashley lets him go, licking the pulsing heat of the wound, putting out the fire she rained on him. Benevolent as she is cruel; one can’t exist without the other, two sides of the same coin, the one who inflicts the pain and the one who alleviates it. He affectionately pets the top of her head even as he thinks about cutting out a piece of her and shoving it down her throat, no chewing allowed, no anesthesia in her system dulling the warnings her brain releases like incandescent fireworks.

“Andrew,” Julia says. Ashley anoints him with a kiss on his cheek, soft as the graze of a butterfly’s wing. She can be soft, his girl, if she wishes. “I thought we agreed Ashley needs independence. To step outside her comfort zone. To meet new people. It just isn’t right that she sticks to you like that. She’s, what, twenty? Is this sustainable?”

“Julia,” Andrew says, soft as a thinly veiled threat. “It sounds to me more and more like Jane is feeding you these reality TV show lines. Is HR with us in the room?”

“No! How dare you say that? Like what, I don’t know how to articulate my own feelings about your relationship with Ashley? That’s… you’re trying to gaslight me. Please, don’t gaslight me.”

Ashley’s swirling the tip of her tongue over his cheek, streaking it with her spit, like she’s marking her territory. It’s ticklish and wet and, easy as a dream, he imagines her tongue swirling around his dripping cock head, strings of her drool tangled up with his pre, her valentine eyes lovestruck, her cheeks blushed-up, her mouth wide-open and her pussy sticky with her slick, open and easy for him, starved for him, her chest heaving, pink all over, the shine of a licked over strawberry lollipop. He swallows and grips her throat to push her off.

Stop, he mouths, but she shakes her head, stubborn, difficult, unruly, always at the principal’s office, always getting into arguments with the dean of students, talking back, unwilling to cede, hell-wrought. Nightmarish.

She’s a brat through and through. He thinks he knows how to deal with brats—screeeeeech! You’re fucked up, you’re so fucked, she’s not your rope bunny, fuckhead. She’s your god damned bitch sister. Not even a woman. Pack up your filth and bury it with your shot-up maggot-holed brain. But, god, he’s always secretly thought Ashley’s the prettiest girl he’s ever laid eyes on. Difficult not to notice the way men are always doing double-takes when the two of them are walking together and he’s sure they’re not checking him out, their eyes torn away from their phones and glued to Ashley’s denim-clad ass or appreciative as they dart over her generous softness. You’d like to rip their eyes out of their sockets or superglue their eyelids shut, but you settle for discreetly tugging her against your body and shielding her with your back, unspeakably glad that she never complains or questions you, obediently goes with the flow, the prying eyes momentarily defeated. Better to think of her as sexless, as a nonperson, a nonhuman, but, right now, she’s clammy and fucking moving against him, her front brushing over his clothed dick, Julia in his fucking ear giving him grief. He can’t catch a break.

“... Julia, don’t get hysterical on me.”

Ashley’s throat shifts under Andrew’s palms, but no nervousness muddies her sure-footed gaze. His fingers squeeze around the muscle, towering over Ashley, reminding her that he can hurt her if he wants to, if she forces his hand, but she stares up defiantly at him. He wants to ruin her. “Listen.” No one will touch her. Only he is permitted. He unwounds, a snap decision, smashing the self-destruct button. Slowly, his hand slides from her throat, a slow gradual descent, Ashley’s skin prickling, his touch sending shockwaves across her sensitive body, her tits shifting with her gaspy syrupy breaths, till his thumb is pushing back the hem of her shirt, the secret skin dewy under the dry pad of his thumb. She looks at him with saucer-wide eyes, her lips parted. When he speaks into the phone, his voice is a low murmur, spilling out of him along with the tightly knotted creature jamming up his esophagus. “Do whatever you want. I’m not your jailer. I’m not the abusive boyfriend they warn you about like some incel villain with mommy issues.”

He grins down at Ashley as he gently brushes the back of his knuckles over the buttons of her shorts. She’s spellbound when she looks down between their bodies, drinking up every movement, every glancing touch, hung up on what he’s going to do next. Even as a kid, Ashley had no reverence for him; unlike other sisters, she didn’t think he put the moon in the sky. She didn’t worship the ground that he walked on, much to his unacknowledged unvoiced despair. There were times when she dismissed him, trampled all over him, left him for dead while he had to pick up his own pieces, the shavings from a bloodied knife he held in her name, an atomized projection of Ashley’s hand over his own as she directed him. Now, he is directing her, he’s holding the knife over the soft flesh of her belly, thrilled at the prospect of driving it into her intestines.

“You want to break-up because of my sister? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I—It’s just weird, Andrew. The two of you are too… close, which isn’t bad necessarily, but she relies way too much on you. Ugh , we’ve talked about this before. I don’t want to keep talking in circles.”

Andrew hums and leans over Ashley, hooking his fingers into her shirt and tugging it down, revealing more of her ample breasts, the heft of them mushed up into the cups of her bra. Ashley sways on the balls of her feet and unsteadily hooks her arms around his shoulders, her hands meeting in clasped prayer, a knot on the back of his neck. The difference in their height forces Andrew’s head lower, closer to her cleavage, to the veiny tight skin stretching over the fat of her tits. She’s his patron saint of sin, of torment, of flayed flesh and rotten organs.

“Is that so?” he speaks into his sister’s goose-pimpled chest and grazes the tip of his nose over the tops of her breasts, taking deep lungfuls of her smell, the dark ditch between sweat-slick. Simultaneously, his hand wiggles past the waistband of her shorts and into the hot dampness of her panties. “What a shame. Thought we had something special. That you were different from the rest. You mesmerized me. Always…” His mouth floods with drool and he greedily laps up the taste of Ashley’s skin. Above him, Ashley strains against him, a small whimper feathering his hair. Fuck, she’s fucking adorable. “Always had my attention.” Even in the dark, he sees the glisten of his spit embellishing his beloved. “That’s okay.” He doesn’t know whom he’s talking to, but he doesn’t care.

Gently, he grazes his middle finger over the sopping wet cotton of the gusset. He glances up at Ashley, his heart mangled up at the teary-eyed desperate look that fills up his vision, her cheeks cherry-flushed, her chest blotched up with streaks of red, exhaling wobbly breaths that should be loud enough for Julia to pick up on with the phone nearly cradled between Andrew and Ashley’s heads, a line connecting them together, like the cord from their mother’s womb. They aren’t twins, but, sometimes, it feels like they could be in every way that matters.

“But… Ashley’s more important than me, right?” She asks, misery wetting her voice.

Andrew rubs at the spot where Ashley’s wettest. Is it running down her thighs at this point? Rivulets of her want leaving snail-trails, evidence of how much he’s riling her up even though he’s barely touched her. Of course. No one’s ever made her feel like this before. Her older brother’s showing her what it’s like, the only one to feel the throb of her cunt, its delicate gush, its maddening heat. Ashley threads her fingers into the snarl of his hair, shaking all over, hanging on to him, anchoring herself in the uncharted dark. “Ashley’s my girl,” he says, pulling his finger away from the soaked cotton in the confined space of her shorts, grinning up to her, challenging her, because he knows she’ll rise to it. “She may not be for everyone, but she’s for me. You get that, right?”

Ashley gathers up his hair in a fist and starts shimmying her hips down, chasing after his fingers, chasing after her own pleasure. “Julia, I gotta go,” he says, because his mouth could be doing better things and Ashley’s holding her voice back. He doesn’t want that, so he hangs up, cutting off Julia’s wait, Andrew, we’re not done . 

“So, are you— ahh, single now?”

Fuck me, he thinks. She sounds wrecked, ragged, like he’s fucking her, a little drool shining on her chin. He tucks his fingers under it and wipes off the stickiness. “Am I?” he asks, a wide grin pulling at the corners of his lips. “For as long as I’ve had you, I don’t think I’ve ever been single.”

It can’t be enough for her, the barely-there pressure, the flat of his fingers nudging her clothed clit, but she must be aching, brimming with the overwhelming teasing that he’s subjected her to, because her movements start to get jerky, stilted, and he helps her through it by pulling down the cup of her bra and latching his mouth to the suckable point of her dusty-brown nipple. His brain short-circuits—it must, because he pulls hard on it, immediately hooked, some hindbrain wire surging with electricity, power lines coming alive, the perfect fit of her in his mouth, a forever kind of deal, one taste of his baby sister and there’s no going back, no other norms to establish. She arches into him, pulling on his hair, one of her hands dropping down to claw at his neck as she grinds down on the heel of his palm, spreading her slick all over his hand. He focuses on the peaked tip with his tongue, rhythmically flicking it with his tongue, working overtime, so turned on he doesn’t think he’ll make it out of this alive, all the blood has pooled in his dick, so stiff it fucking hurts, but this is his sister’s first time, and he doesn’t want to make it about him. Not yet, at least. She undulates into him, like she’s caught between pushing her tit deeper into his mouth or canting her hips down into his hand, see-sawing between the two sensations sparking through her little body. 

“Ah, feels, mmm, Andrew, please, please,” she whines, her voice pitched higher, girlish, the quality of it like a candy he wants to suck on and melt to a thin breakable shell in his mouth. He should’ve hung up on Julia from the start, regret piling up from having missed out on Ashley’s helplessness, her dazed overwhelm, the way she struggles to hold her voice in, but Andrew squeezes it out of her, pressing down on all the right spots, bruising her, getting her off, rubbing her cunt to oversensitivity, and she pants into him, open-mouthed, chin smeared again with her drool because she keeps forgetting to swallow.

He lets her nipple slip out of his mouth, admiring its puffiness, the froth of his spit clinging to its point like she’s started producing saliva instead of milk. “You’re such a kid, baby.” He sounds too far gone when he says it, a deep-throated thing oversaturated in love. Not the right kind. It’s overgrown and thorny, a thrashing alien thing, modus operandi: penetration. Full of green-tinged poison, a biological weapon with a devastating radius. Let’s take everyone down with us, beloved. A trail of dead bodies bloated with toxins. The two of them immune to the deadly strands, inoculated from a young age, heavy and consistent exposure to each other. 

“Fuck the right off,” she retaliates, that fierceness jumping out at him, unkillable in her.

God, he’s so fucking glad he didn’t let an NPC see her like this.

He huffs out a small laugh. “That’s the spirit, beloved,” he encourages and then dives back in, running his tongue over the circle of her areola, getting it nice and wet, the way he imagines he’d eat her pussy out, and then taking her tight nipple right back into his salivating mouth, addicted, coked-up, thinking I’m gonna quit smoking if she lets me suck on her like this, no more packs of nicotine when there’s prime stimulants right here .

Ashley starts humping his hand in earnest, riding it with mounting desperation, whimpers and whines punched out of her with every dazzling star-bright pleasure rocking into her, her tits flopping against his chest, but he’s got a tight hold on her and he’s slurping it up, the sound insanely obscene, his cock hotwired to it. He could come just from having her shake against him, and the shame of it should strike him dead, but, instead, it churns his gut, a hot flood of want storming his insides, laying siege.

“Looking so fucking gorgeous, sis,” he whispers into her spit-marked skin, rubbing his cheek over her abused nipple, thumbing at it obsessively, tugging on it as he switches to the left one that’s still soft and unteased, almost domed. He puts his lips to it and suctions. “Was this your plan all along?” He asks, not really expecting an answer, the words coming to him unfiltered, flashes of lightning striking, dangerous and crazed. “Got me where you wanted me, huh? Fucking wrapped around your fingers, your tits, your cunt.” He accentuates every word by meeting her dripping pussy, almost smacking it upwards.

“N—No,” she wails. “Uhh, you’re just, ah , please , that in love with me. Please, Andrew, can you uhnn…”

“Say it.”

“It’s too embarrassing, asshole.”

“Doesn’t matter. I want you to say it or I won’t do anything.”

“Hate you so fucking much,” she says as she drags his face up to hers and kisses him hard, her teeth cutting up his lower lip from the rough impact. There’s no tenderness in the kiss—like two knives clashing, the cold clang shivering its way to the bone, iron-chilled, the friction of fanaticism. He kisses her back with the same violence, drinking up the sweet sounds she pours into his mouth, and he gives her what she’s begging for, earnestly and relentlessly rubs her clit over the soaked-through underwear, the slicked slide of it a dream come true, the porno of teenagehood rushing back to play live, the messy reality of it nearly cleaving him in half, baby sister crying her way to an orgasm, bare tits bouncing with her rabbiting. He needs more. He can’t come like this and he’d like them to come together. The romantic in him screaming murder. So, he manhandles her, spins her around and unbuttons his black denim pants to take his cock out, hissing in relief.

“Alright, baby, need you to tighten up your thighs.”

“Ohhhhh, thigh-fucking,” she says, clapping and giggling, so pleased for some reason. “It’s on my bucket list.” 

“You’ve got a bucket list?” he frowns. “Alright, no, shelve it for later. Come on, Ashley, I’m dying here.”

“Okay, don’t be a fucking crybaby, Daddy.” She takes mercy on him, pressing her thighs flush together.

He won’t leave her hanging either, gotta spoil her, maximum servicing, no getting lazy with her, she deserves the best orgasm he can give her. He sticks his hand back into her shorts and strokes her, dragging up the spurt of slick to her chubby clit to make the slide easier, smoother. To hold her in place, he wraps an arm around her waist and starts thrusting his dick between the tight valleys of her thighs, wetting the skin with his precum. Neither of them lasts long, too wound up, too worn down. Ashley orgasms with the cutest fucking squeak, the sound so surprising coming out of her, her back arched up, tits heaving and pointed upwards like she’s getting lashed. Andrew has to hold her up, thrusting in a couple of times, occasionally missing and smearing his dick over the backs of Ashley’s thighs. He comes when she tightens up around him: his sweet, benevolent beloved. His cum coats the backs of her thighs and slides down to the ditches behind her knees. He bites down on his lower lip and straightens her up when she slumps against him, too tired to stay upright.

“Nooooooo, Andrew, what’re you doing?”

“Just… stay still for a second. I need this engraved in my brain.”

She looks back at him disdainfully, but her eyes are sparkling. “Ugh, you’re such a perv. Should we get you a camera? Should we create a sex tape, next time?” 

He snorts, too amused to be annoyed, too in love to be anything else. Here lies the grave of Julia and Andrew’s relationship where Ashley and Andrew just watered the newly turned soil with their fucking. “Let’s get you cleaned up and then we’ll talk sex tape.”

“Soooooooo… not to be that girl, but what does this mean?”

They’re lying down on Ashley’s bed, flushed and warm from the shower, Ashley’s head propped up on Andrew’s shoulder, her hair loose and soft around her face. Andrew glances down at her and cups the back of her head.

“You can be that girl. No shame with me, Ashley. Got it?” She nods, but she still looks uncertain, like she’s worried he’s going to bash her head in and then bolt, maybe put a bullet in his head or drive off a cliff’s edge. “It means… whatever we want it to mean. We’re siblings. We’re all the other has. I can’t have you with other men. You don’t want me to be with other women. Sounds like a multilayered relationship to me.”

She smiles, shy and hopeful. It stabs his heart and skewers it. “We’re in a multilayered relationship. I sure like the sound of that.”

“Good. So, what’s that you mentioned about a bucket list?”

“Oh… um. A girl can’t have her secrets?”

He laughs, petting her head affectionately. “Not when it’s got thigh-fucking on it, baby.”

“Alright, fine,” she grumbles. “But this is only because I’m feeling magnanimous today. I’m your goddess divine, your savior, your favorite person in the whole wide world, right?” He nods, his smile so wide it hurts. “It’s just a list of… um, sex-related stuff I thought would be fun to try.”

“Try with whom, Ashley?”

“With no one!” She tries to edge away from him, but he’s got her pinned in his skinny arms; luckily, she’s smaller than him, her petite frame easy to keep in check. “Noooo, don’t be a meanie. Obviously, with you, but like only in my fantasies.” She shrieks when he tickles her sides, beating her fists on his chest to get him to stop.

Her laughter is a dream of coming home.