“If that isn’t a line, then I don’t know what it is,” I scoff, but his words tie a band around my chest that makes it harder to breathe.
“I’m not wasting my lines on you. You’re the kind of girl who wouldn’t respond to bullshit anyway.”
He assesses me shrewdly, and for a moment, I feel like he’s pushed up under my shell, insinuated himself under my skin to see the very bones no one has ever been privy to.
“So what color am I then?” I ask before thinking better of it. He’ll probably just say I’m white, obviously.
“What color are you?” he repeats, his eyes never leaving my face. “You, Bristol, are a freaking prism.”
Grip
I NEED TO put the brakes on this.
It’s one thing to be secretly attracted to Rhyson’s sister. It’s another thing altogether to encourage her attraction to me.
And Bristol is attracted to me.
I know when a girl wants a taste. Some girls I look at and immediately know they’re slurpers. They’ll eat the soup and tip the bowl up, slurping greedily ’til the last drop. Bristol . . . she would eat you slowly, savor you in delicate bites until there’s nothing left of you but an empty plate. And then she would lick her fingers. She’s very sensual. It’s subtle, but I notice these things. The way she lifted her hair off her neck at lunch today to feel the ocean breeze. The way she explored the ridges of the empanada with her tongue before taking a bite, groaning when the flavors flooded her mouth. Her body seeks sensation, presses in to discover what the world offers to stimulate her. I don’t think she knows it about herself, and it’s a shame some man hasn’t taught her, but I can’t be that guy.
Though, I’d make an excellent instructor.
For the second time today, I find myself watching her sleep. I don’t watch chicks sleep, not even after I fuck them. It’s usually more of a . . . dilemma. More like . . . well, this is awkward. I really don’t want her to stay, but she fell asleep. My dick put her into a semi-coma, so I should at least let her sleep it off. That kind of thing. Certainly not noticing how her eyelashes make half-moon shadows on her cheeks. Or the satiny texture of her skin. Or the constellation of almost indiscernible freckles splattered across her nose because she was out in the sun today. I certainly wouldn’t be wondering if somehow she might be dreaming about me.
We talked. That’s the problem with this girl. She doesn’t just talk. She probes. She ponders. She wonders. She asks. She carries on a helluva conversation, which from my experience, is a lost art. We talked about our childhoods, high school, our aspirations, and our dreams. My favorite show of all time, The Wire. Her favorite show of all time, West Wing. How neither of us has ever seen How I Met Your Mother, and don’t understand Two and a Half Men. She can’t believe I’ve never seen Swingers. I can’t believe she’s never seen Purple Rain. We talked about things we don’t understand and aren’t sure we ever will. Things we thought we had figured out, only to realize we didn’t know jack shit. It feels fresh like a beginning, but it also feels like we’ve known each other for years.
It’s two o’clock in the morning, and her body’s on East Coast, so of course, she eventually succumbed to exhaustion, but even then, she fought it, drifting off mid-sentence. And dammit if I don’t want to wake her up and ask what she was about to say.
This is bad.
This is really bad.
The garage door opening snaps me out of my own tangled thoughts. I get up from the couch, moving as quietly as I can so I don’t wake her. Rhyson’s coming through the garage door just as I enter the kitchen. Fatigue sketches lines around his mouth. His eyes are dulled by all the day behind him and the non-stop work it involved.
“Dude.” He walks over and daps me up before slumping into one of the high stools at the kitchen island. “Shitty, shitty day. These execs don’t know what they want, and don’t know what they don’t want until you’ve spent hours making it. Anyway, thanks for picking up Bristol and taking care of her today.”
“No problem.” I lean against the wall, noting all the similarities between his face and Bristol’s. I was struck by how alike they are in other ways, too. Rhyson and I also connected right away when we were both new guys. I shouldn’t be surprised to feel a quick and deep connection with his twin sister, but I still am.
“Where is she?” Rhyson gets up to open the refrigerator, staring at its contents for a few seconds before turning to face me.
“In the living room.” I tip my head in that direction. “Knocked out.”
“On that couch? She’ll regret it in the morning. I’ll get her to the guest room.”
He closes the fridge and sits down again. I can’t tell if it’s nerves about seeing his sister after so long, or that frenetic energy we feel after being immersed in our music for so long. You’re exhausted, but you’re on this high and can’t settle right away.
“Yeah, she was pretty tired,” I say. “We had lunch at Mick’s.”
“For real?” Rhyson glances up, a slight quirk to his lips. “How’s Jim?”
“Still feeling you.” I roll my eyes but have to laugh. She’s been into Rhyson since tenth grade, but he’s never given her the time of day.
“Not gonna happen.” He shakes his head for emphasis. “We’re such good friends. Why does she want to spoil it with fucking?”
“I usually like it when girls ‘spoil’ things with fucking.” We both laugh at my half-joke. “But in Jimmi’s case, I know what you mean. Just friends.”
“Right, and that isn’t changing.” Rhyson runs his hands through his already-disheveled hair. “How is she? My sister, I mean?”
“Go see for yourself,” I say. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Four, five years,” Rhyson mumbles, sliding his glance to the side, not so much, it seems, to avoid my eyes as to avoid something inside himself.
“Man, how’d you go that long without seeing your twin sister?”
“You know how things went down with my parents after I emancipated.” Defensiveness stiffens his voice and his back.
“Your parents, Rhys, not your sister.”
“Same thing.” Rhyson’s shrug is supposed to look careless, but it doesn’t. He cares. “She’s been under their roof all this time. She’s probably just like my mother.”
The girl I spent the day with is nothing like the she-dragon Rhyson described his mother to be.
“Maybe she isn’t,” I say. “Or maybe you never spent enough time with her to know her in the first place.”
“Is that what she told you?” Rhyson narrows his eyes. “If we didn’t spend time together, it wasn’t my fault. She got to go to school and parties and shop and have friends. Be normal. Do whatever the hell she wanted while my parents tracked my every step, dragging me all over the world like a show pony.”
“I just can’t imagine not seeing my family for that long, at least not my sister, if I had one, much less my twin sister.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got your mom and Jade and your aunts. You have a normal family. I’ve got the Borgias.”
“Normal?” A snort of disbelieving air whooshes past my lips. “I’m pretty sure my Uncle Jamal was a real life pimp at some point.”
“Dude, you may be right.” Humor lightens his expression for the first time since he came through the garage door.
“Seriously! You’d get arrested doing half the stuff he tells you to do to girls.”
We laugh, recalling all the slightly disturbing advice my uncle often dispenses about women.
“Okay, so maybe your family isn’t completely normal,” he concedes. “But you have to admit, mine is the freak show that everyone had tickets to.”
Even before I met Rhyson, I’d seen the news about the courtroom battle he endured to emancipate from his parents. The sensationalized details were inescapable, plastered on the front page of every tabloid for weeks.
“I just don’t know what she wants from me,” Rhyson says softly, his eyes unfocused as if he’s asking himself.