I want to kiss him, but there is no way I can do it here with Mom peering out of the window like neighborhood watch. Right now, we have to wait until Mom and Marvin have gone to bed and Landon and I are alone again in our silence. Or in the seconds before the door opens and Mom nearly catches us at it. I could kill Landon for that, right on the doorstep, out of sight of the window, Mom’s footsteps approaching and Landon pulls my lips towards his to steal a dangerous kiss.
My lips are still buzzing as Mom welcomes us back inside, my hand working fervently to bat Landon’s away as he tries to surreptitiously squeeze my ass on the way to the living room.
“Well, you two look very happy with yourselves. I guess you found the lake in the end.”
Landon and I look at each other, while we try to decide who should speak. I take control, while Landon takes to the couch.
“We found it, but we didn’t get to see much, the sun didn’t come out until we’d driven away.”
“Well that’s what happens if you go out in the rain. I did try and say. You’ll just have to go back another day.”
“I guess we will.”
“You look like you’ve had fun though.”
I wait for Mom to say more, perhaps about my glow, my wet hair, why I smell of Landon, the twelve pack of condoms I’m hiding in my bag, my still fizzing lips or even my sticky pussy, but she doesn’t. She folds neatly back into whatever it was she was doing and normality resumes. I have to fight the natural urge to sit next to Landon, tell myself that until at least 9.45pm we are stepbrother and stepsister, not lovers, and crash into one of the armchairs.
I can wait. Even if it kills me, I can do that. What I don’t know whether I can do again is keep quiet enough not to wake anyone. Once like that is an exercise in complete and utter control, twice may be pushing the boundaries of reason, especially now we have a high quantity of condoms to work our way through. Would it be that bad if Mom and Marvin found out?
It would certainly give us something to talk about in the morning.
Landon
It’s incredible how well you can get to know someone in just a few days. I knew I had a stepsister before this holiday, but I didn’t know anything about her except her name. I didn’t know how funny she was, how intelligent, how sexy, how cute, how fragile, how much she’d be into me. I know she likes to hide it and pretend otherwise, but it’s written all over her beautiful face like stars in the night sky.
It could be suffocating, or overwhelming, or completely and utterly crushing, but it isn’t, it’s none of that. Much like everything else about her,
it just fits.
We fit too, her and me, and it isn’t just because I’ve been looking for a quick vacation hook up, even though I know she worries about that. I get the feeling she thinks that when we get back to our real lives I’m going to do a sharp and sudden u-turn and Tilly and I will be nothing but a vague memory of a stolen few days in paradise. It isn’t like that. I’m not one to call it before I know what it is, but I’m not one to involve myself in something I’m not fully committed to either.
I think Tilly is beginning to understand that I’m not the man that she’s read about in magazines and newspapers, but it’s going to take a while for her to be convinced about how serious I am about giving this a go between us, especially not before we have left here and we get to be a few weeks or even a month old instead of just two days.
I could be the one reading it wrongly too. I mean, who’s to say Tilly doesn’t want this to just stay here and for us not to continue when we return home? I’d be surprised if that were the case, disappointed too, but I guess I won’t know either until we are back in it.
Our situation is a complicated one, and she might get tired of my commitments outside of what we might be building together. Part of the reason a lot of my relationships have failed in the past, beyond the fact that I seem to have a special talent for picking terrible women, is that a lot of them have struggled with my job, the fact I’m away a lot of the time, the fact that I have a lot of money, that I get a lot of attention from other women, and that they generally have to trust me around temptation a lot more than with other men.
The weird, totally fucked up thing about that is that they tend to cheat on me because they naturally think I’m doing it to them.
I don’t cheat. I don’t treat women in that way at all, but sometimes it’s hard to convince them of that.
When this vacation is over, and Tilly and I return to our lives - hers normal, mine not so much - I want us to give this a go. I think we are both at the point now where we can be honest with ourselves and honest to each other. When we first fucked, all that time ago yesterday, I wasn’t sure how the bond would develop between us, but now we’ve shared more time, and more of a connection together, I can see that it’s worth us giving this thing a go.
I’m a little worried about the stepsiblings aspect if we do end up staying together and trying to make this work, but even more concerned that if we don’t and word gets out about what happened between us here, I’ll lose my place in the team and entirely fuck up my career.
If we stay together after this vacation and things get even more serious between us, there is no way I’m going to keep this thing a secret. Coach wanted me to settle down and stay out of the papers on a regular basis so there is every reason he’ll understand if he sees that Tilly and I are committed to each other. Marvin and Rachel will just have to suck it up too. It’s a little unusual, but once you get beyond the fact that we are step siblings, and realize we aren’t related to each other and didn’t actually grow up together, there is nothing weird about it at all.
There will be the inevitable backlash in the press, the vitriol and hatred from the extremists and conservatives, but that is bound to die down eventually, especially when they realize just how magnificent Tilly and I are as a couple.
And truly spectacular she is. I work with models and Tilly would not look out of place at all in any one of the shoots I’ve done in the past. She’s so much more than that though. A lot of those women are vacuous, empty headed, big titted morons with no ambition or drive other than earning money and fucking celebrities. Tilly’s got one hell of a body, but that isn’t what I like most about her, and it’s not what’s made me keep coming back.
I could say that it’s her brain, but I’d just be lying. It’s much more simple than that. It’s the way she makes me feel when I’m with her, and the way I feel when I’m not.
That’s a powerful and important thing, and something I’m not prepared to ignore. I learned from a young age the importance of listening to instinct, and this is no different from that. No different from knowing which pass to pick out in the dying seconds of a game, learning to trust your emotions and listening to those thoughts inside that tell you that the risk is going to be worth it.
It’s almost midnight here. Tilly is fast asleep across my chest, her light breaths just about enough to lift her gently up and down, while my mind is racing along at about four hundred miles an hour.