My sister’s eyes.
Swiped again.
Alexandra’s chin.
Swiped again.
Her smile. Alexandra’s beautiful smile. Tears welled in my eyes.
Dex reached out his hand and attempted to cover the phone to stop me from looking further. I knocked it away, needing to see more. I swiped and swiped…looking for some semblance of hope that all of the previous pictures were just a bad angle or something. But by the time I frantically reached the end of the pictures, tears were falling.
Dex dropped to his knees and knelt in front of me. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He tried to hold me, offer me comfort, but I couldn’t let myself let go yet. I needed to know more. “Did your father know?”
“He claims to have had no idea.”
“Does my mother know the truth?”
“I don’t know.”
“She only started working there a year before Alexandra was born. What the hell did she do? Jump in bed with the boss the first chance she had?” I wasn’t really asking Dex a question, even though I had so many.
“I don’t know what really happened. My father was vague on all the details. Sadly, I got the impression it wasn’t because he was intentionally being ambiguous, but rather it was because having an ongoing affair was a regular occurrence for him during his marriage, and he can’t keep them all straight in his mind anymore.”
“I just don’t understand, Dex. How do you have a child that clearly looks like another man and move on? They just ended the affair after she got pregnant, and neither of them ever bothered to question paternity? Everyone just moved on with their lives?”
Dex squeezed my hands. “The affair didn’t end, Bianca. My father said it went on for close to six years.”
I’m not sure if it was my brain’s protective mechanism, or if I was just really that naïve. But I still hadn’t had my moment of epiphany. “Six years? Alexandra and I are only four years apart.”
Dex stared at me, looking deep into my eyes waiting for the click.
5
4
3
2
1
“Oh my God!” I stood before running to the bathroom. “I think I’m going to be sick.”I felt like someone had died. There was a hollow in my chest, a sort of achy emptiness, yet that emptiness weighed so heavy. After two hours of talking, crying, and polishing off two bottles of wine, Dex had asked me if I wanted him to leave. I wanted just the opposite—him to stay forever and tell me tomorrow morning that tonight was just a bad dream. Yet now that we were lying in my bed in the dark, the craziness that he could possibly be my brother was really seeping in.
Neither of us said a word for a long time. My back was to him, and his hand was resting gently on my hip until his squeezed and broke our silence. “Ever hear of the Monomotapa monarchy from Zimbabwe?”
I laughed. What the hell was he talking about? “No.”
“Know anything about Cleopatra?”
Ahhh. So that’s where his mind was at? I turned over to face him. It was dark, but my eyes had adjusted enough to see his. “I do, actually. You know she wasn’t really Egyptian. Her family roots trace back to Macedonian Greece.” I knew that wasn’t what he was talking about, but I figured I’d screw with him a little.
It worked. I heard the smile in his voice. “Oh yeah? Figures you’d know that, Georgakopolous. Anything else you learned in history class?”
“She had a thing for bad, heavy eye makeup.”
“Wiseass. You know exactly what I’m referring to.”
I sighed. “Are you saying you don’t care if I’m your half-sister or not?”
The levity was gone from his voice. “I don’t know what I’m saying. The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m in love with you. And there’s no way I’m ready to let you go. No matter what.”
“You say that now. But men look at their sisters very differently than women look at their brothers. There is no way in hell that you’ll be able to think of me sexually, if there really is a chance that we’re related, Dex.”
I saw the whites of his eyes going back and forth as they looked into mine. Finally, he reached for my hand. “Don’t judge.” Then he pulled it down his body until my hand was covering his dick. His rock-hard, fully erect, dick.
I gasped as he wrapped my fingers around it demonstrating that he was definitely able to think of me that way still.
“That answer your question?”
“I guess so.”
Dex chuckled as he brought my hand back up to his lips and kissed the top. Then he leaned forward and kissed my forehead. “Get some sleep. We’ll figure out where to go from here tomorrow.”
“Okay.” I turned over, and Dex pulled me flush against him, my back to his front, wrapping me in a tight hold. Even though I could clearly feel his erection, the hold didn’t feel sexual. It felt…protective.