Thomas never planned to be late for his own homecoming, but halfway across the Atlantic his seatmate—a Scandinavian goddess with a unibrow—claimed his lap as a pillow, then snored in Morse code for the next six hours, rendering rest impossible.
When he finally steps out into the June heat of his old neighborhood, he's sleep-deprived, sheepish, and newly skeptical of the allure of foreign women. America's women, he decides, have a comforting plainness. You can almost trust them.
His family, as ever, has set the scene for melodrama. The front yard is a violent chaos of water balloons and glittering sunlight and dog hair, his mother's voice slicing through the commotion: "If anyone gets so much as a drop on Daddy's grill, it's the hospital for you!" She's changed her hair again—silver, cropped, severe—but her laugh is the same as always, a big-bellied riot. At her hip, trying to smuggle a whole Popsicle into her mouth, is what must be his little sister.
Except Ellie isn't little anymore. He scans for the girl he left behind, the one with Kool-Aid stains for lips and a predilection for catching garden snakes, but this Ellie is…not that.
This Ellie is coltish and angular, two inches from being taller than their too-short mother, her hair a tangled sun-bleached mess that suggests she's still the family miscreant. Her face is fair and freckled; a thin creature wearing his little sister's skin. She catches his eye, and in the next second is barreling at him, feet slapping the sidewalk, Popsicle flying, arms outstretched.
She hits him at chest height, nearly bowling him over, before wrapping her arms around his back and squeezing hard enough to make him wince. He laughs and tries to say her name, but Ellie's already moved on, hands at his chest, eyes laser-bright and appraising.
"There's a thing on your shirt," she says.
He looks down. Spit-up blue Popsicle has formed a perfect Rorschach stain over his chest pocket.
"Welcome home," Ellie grins, wiping her sticky hand down his sleeve. "You look like a… like a European now."
"Do I? Is it the Popsicle?"
"Nah. It's the scarf." Ellie makes a face, scrunching it up in the way she used to do, when the skies were bluer than they seemed now. "Who wears scarves in June?"
Thomas tugs at the scarf. "It's called fashion, Ellie. Look it up."
She rolls her eyes so hard he half-expects her neck to snap. "God, you're pretentious now! Pre-ten-tious!" Then, without missing a beat: "Did you bring me anything illegal?"
"I missed you too, you little twerp."
She smiles at that, but the smile is gone just before he can let its visage simmer in the melting pot of his mind. Now she just gives him a quick, silent look that lands somewhere between practiced indifference and something sharper, something he can't quite read, like he's forgotten his own native tongue.
Then she's off again, disappearing into the house with a speed that makes him absurdly proud. He looks down at his ruined shirt, and then at the front door where his mother stands waiting: there's no going back to the person he was, he thinks. Europe might have made him cosmopolitan, but Ellie has always made him feel exactly like this: exposed, ridiculous, and weirdly happy.
Inside, the house is louder than he remembers. The living room is a riot of overturned couch cushions, wet towels, and the shrieking circus of toddler cousins. Some distant relative's baby is army-crawling through a minefield of Legos, pursued by a black-lab puppy so freshly acquired it doesn't even have a name. The TV is blaring an animated show at volume eleven. The air tastes of chlorine and barbecue smoke, and for some reason, Thomas's childhood piano is half-dismantled, its guts exposed. This fact is causing no particular alarm.
He pauses on the threshold, letting the sensory overload wash over him. When he was younger, he'd have thrown himself into the fray; now he hovers, a little ghostly, retracing the outlines of memory on every battered piece of furniture.
Ellie is already halfway up the stairs, her long legs eating the distance, a little limp in her gait from the time she shattered her ankle on the trampoline. She doesn't look back, but he hears her shout: "Good luck, idiot!" before she disappears to wherever it is she goes these days. For a moment, he feels the loss in his chest, the echo of a sibling-sized vacancy.
There's a flash of silver and then Mom is on him, crushing him into a perfumed, familiar embrace.
"Look at you, Mr. Manhattan Man! You look so skinny. Are you eating? Is that scarf hiding a hickey?"
He endures the inspection with practiced patience, submitting to hair-ruffling, cheek-pinching, and the ceremonial sniff of his breath. "It's called cologne, Mom. They have it in America, too."
"You're tanner," she says suspiciously, as if sun exposure is a crime. She releases him and shoves a platter of watermelon under his nose. "Eat before you die."
He perches on the arm of the sofa and picks at the fruit. There are three kids wrestling over a tablet near his knee, and one of them—Sam, maybe?—sticks a dirty toe right into his thigh. He tries to find Ellie amid the chaos, but all he sees is the trail of sticky footprints leading up the stairs, and the limp Popsicle stick she's left on the banister.
It's weird, he thinks, how she's the only one here who acts like he never left.
By the time he finds his room, it's been repurposed as a kind of panicked mother's archive: neatly stacked boxes of tax receipts, orphaned Christmas decorations, several cardboard trays labeled Ellie—DO NOT TOUCH in his mother's aggressive marker. His own bed is made up with sheets that smell of dust and lavender, and on the pillow is a postcard in Ellie's handwriting: tommy, if you snore i'm putting a frog in your underwear drawer. welcome home, loser.
He smiles, and something in his chest unclenches.
He's bone-tired but wired, so he spends the rest of the day helping his dad set up the patio furniture, and then gets recruited to ref the cousins' soccer game in the backyard. Evenings here stretch long past sunset, the air thick with bugs and the sound of lawn sprinklers. Ellie reappears just before dinner, hair brushed but wild, and Thomas takes a moment to look at her. Really look at her.
She's got that look now, the one that lands right between anti-heroine and fairy-tale changeling: long, colt legs folded up under her at the folding table, bare feet muddy, hands busy with a paring knife. She's slicing cucumbers—methodically, like it's a science experiment—scattering thin disks into a chipped plastic bowl. A thin bead of sweat makes a path down her temple, carving through a constellation of freckles. She wears a cut-off tank top and dolphin shorts and, somehow, a pair of mismatched earrings, one a silver skull and the other a neon-green gummy bear.
It's not girlishness, exactly; she'd never allow "girl" as a category to contain her. Ellie is preternaturally composed, even at ten, her body stretching out of its old lines fast enough that she seems always a little startled by her own size. Not so much precious as she was precocious. Her bones are sharp, her collarbone drawn like a pencil underline, but her mouth is still wide and soft and often stained with whatever she's eating, or thinking about eating. Her eyes, the same blue as the house's weathered shutters, are on anything but him.
He's halfway through a story about his time in Berlin, something about a street artist and a topless protest, and she's not even pretending to listen. Instead, she's counting her cucumber slices, then organizing them into pyramid piles, and whenever their mother leans too close, Ellie forms a shield with her arm, like she's protecting state secrets.
He can see the curious gleam in her eyes, the growing pains in her posture, the uncanny way light clings to her—he wants to say "like a halo," but that's lazy and wrong. It's more that her presence is a kind of gravitational field, dense and inescapable, pulling all the energy in the kitchen toward her, like a small, volatile sun.
Sometimes, in moments like this, he remembers the old Ellie: the one who'd dote on him and orbit around his mere presence, as if he was all the Earth and she was his Moon. He remembers her snort-giggle whenever he teased others but her pout and whine whenever he teased her in turn. Of course, Thomas also remembers the girl who didn't frown as much as she was now; the little twerp who clung to his shirt and sobbed as he stood at the door, waiting to leave for his so-called "higher education," begging, pleading, please-don't-go-ing until it was time to leave for his flight. A one-way-trip to anywhere but here.
But he also knows that's a trick of nostalgia. The real Ellie, the one in front of him now, is both more andless—less transparent, more herself. More sister now than perhaps she ever was.
He realizes he's staring, and when she finally looks up, she catches him. "You're doing it again," she grumbles.
"Doing what?" he asks.
"Staring. Like I'm about to grow horns."
He shrugs, busted. "Maybe you will."
She considers this, then shrugs back with perfect deadpan. "I bet you kissed boys while you were in Europe. Are you hiding a French boyfriend from us?"
Their mother snaps at her to quiet down and eat, and for a second, everything feels back in its old orbit. But when Ellie goes back to her cucumbers, she keeps one eye on him, just in case.
The rest of the evening blurs: burgers charred on the grill, cousins shooed out to the slip-and-slide, the low drone of relatives swapping gossip over beers. Ellie slips in and out of the kitchen, sometimes helping, sometimes stealing chips, always orbiting the edges—but Thomas finds himself drawn to her in a way he can't quite describe, especially when his gaze lingers on those dolphin shorts of hers.
He leans back in his chair, phone in hand, thumb flicking through the same old feed. Mute headlines and vacation photos, memes, a TikTok of a raccoon washing grapes. He tries to care, but the kitchen keeps pulling his attention back. Ellie, bent over the fridge, foraging for pickles. He catches a slow-motion glimpse of those dolphin shorts—how they ride up, how the side of her thigh shows a faint, chalky constellation of scars from bike crashes and the world's worst game of Hide & Seek. He scrolls. He glances. He scrolls. He glances again.
Now she's at the sink, all posture and angles, one hip cocked as she stacks the cucumbers in Tupperware. The shorts barely contain her, legs longer and leaner than he remembered, and suddenly he's acutely aware of just how little material there is between her and the rest of the universe.
He hates himself for noticing. He hates that it's the thing he can't not see. He tries to focus on his phone, on the table, on the puzzle of family and noise, but something in his brain keeps tagging her in every line of sight. He thinks about what she'd say if she caught him—probably something brutal-but-true, designed to make him squirm. And he would squirm, because he's supposed to be the big brother, supposed to be above it, supposed to be rational and mature and not, for the love of God, whatever this is.
Ellie's voice yanks him from his spiral: "You're not even listening. Again."
He looks up, caught. "What?"
She flicks a cucumber slice at him, hits him square in the cheek. "I said, are you staying the whole summer?"
He snorts, rubs the cucumber damp from his face. "Depends on how long it takes to get sick of you."
"Promise?"
He almost smiles, but it's a weird, uncomfortable almost—the kind that comes from being watched and wanting to watch back, but not knowing how.
Ellie's eyes linger on him for a second too long, then she drops the subject. "If you're here past July, you have to come to my game. We're number one in state now."
"Soccer?" He realizes he actually doesn't know. "Or are you back on track?"
She shrugs. "Whatever keeps Mom off my ass. Mostly soccer, sometimes hurdles. I'm team captain this year. No big deal." She says it like she doesn't care, but he can see the pride in the set of her jaw. There's a wildness to her now, this uncontainable thing, like a dog with a secret tunnel under the fence.
No, he realizes, she's not saying it like she doesn't care; not quite. She does care. She just doesn't want her cool big brother, the traveler in the family, to think that she thinks it's impressive.
"I'll go," he says, too quickly, and her lip quirks up in the ghost of a smile. "I'm proud of you, sis."
"Good. That's… heh… that's good! I hope to see you there," she says, perking up, only to catch herself. "I mean, yeah…"
He looks at her. Really looks. When did she get this old? When did he start missing it?
"You shouldn't talk like that, by the way," he finds himself saying, and Ellie quirks a brow at that.
"Talk like what?" she asks.
"Don't say ass. You're too young."
She smiles in spite of that. "I've said worse while you were gone. Way worse."
"What are they teaching you in school these days?"
"I don't learn that in school," she shoots back, almost giggling, almost coming out with it. But she holds herself back, and he can see the way she wets her lips when she licks them, leaving them glistening in the kitchen's lighting. "Hey," she says, suddenly.
"What?" Thomas asks.
"Can I, um…" She stops. Then starts again. Like the old family car. "Can I have a hug…?"
He grins. "Thought you were too old for hugs now."
"I just don't want anyone to see," she whispers, and his heart somehow soars at that.
She pads over, bare feet making no sound on the tile, cucumber smell clinging to her like perfume. Thomas opens his arms and she folds herself in, arms tight around his middle, head pressing right under his chin. He holds her, really holds her, as if he can physically keep her younger or smaller or just his. Her hair smells like green apple shampoo and sunburn, and he breathes it in like a secret.
She doesn't let go. Not at first, not after a second, not after three. Instead she shifts, nuzzling in, and he can feel the length of her against him—longer than it used to be, but just as warm. Her face is hidden. He cups the back of her head, fingers lost in the tangles, and tries not to shiver as she sighs into the collar of his shirt.
"Don't leave again," she says, so quiet it's almost not there.
He closes his eyes, suddenly aware of how many times he's already failed her. "I'll try not to," he answers, voice rough.
Ellie squeezes him harder, then pulls back just enough to glare up at him. "Swear it," she whispers.
He smiles, but she's not smiling, and so he nods, solemn. "I swear."
She lets go, but not all the way—her hand lingers at his sleeve, twisting the fabric between thumb and finger. The kitchen's empty now, everyone else outside or absorbed in their own orbits. It feels like the only quiet moment the house has allowed all day.
"I mean it," she says, and though her tone is light, her eyes are cutting. "If you bail again, I'm gonna set your phone alarm to go off every five minutes. For, like, a year."
He laughs, not quite sure if she's kidding, then looks down at her: the way her hair falls across her face, the little spot of green apple shampoo on her temple, the cinnamon of sun-dried freckles. Something inside him aches.
She elbows him in the ribs, suddenly self-conscious, then turns away and goes back to stacking cucumbers.
He stands there, feeling the ghost of her touch. When he finally sits again, Ellie's arms are full of Tupperware and she's balancing a glass of lemonade on top. She glances at him, smirk back in place. The moment is over, filed away under the million other sibling moments that barely survive the day.
When it gets dark, Thomas finds himself on the back patio with his father, both of them nursing ancient beers and watching the bug-zappers work their silent genocide. The night is thick, humid, alive with the sound of tree frogs and distant sprinklers. The cousins are still waging war in the grass, but Ellie is gone, vanished into the blue-lit world of her room.
Thomas wonders what she's doing up there. Homework, probably, or texting friends he'll never meet. Or maybe she's on her bed, headphones on, staring at the ceiling and hating the world for reasons he used to understand but has since forgotten.
His father asks about grad school and New York winters and job prospects, but Thomas's answers are vague and intermittent, and he keeps sliding back to the kitchen, to the green apple scent, the curve of her arm, the slant of her smile.
When the house finally powers down for the night and every cousin and uncle and in-law is accounted for in a sleeping bag or guest futon, Thomas retreats to his old room and collapses backward onto the twin bed. The mattress is concave in the middle, a gravity well for sleep and memory. He stares at the ceiling and counts the glow-in-the-dark stars Ellie stuck up there the year he left. Half of them have peeled and fallen, but the rest float above him, indifferent and cold.
He makes a list in his head of all the things he wants to do this summer: drive out to the reservoir, maybe, or go hiking, or finally teach Ellie how to fish. He could take her to the city, buy her a burger, show her the museums he pretended to appreciate but actually hated. He could just… be here. Present, for once. Learn to make up for lost time.
He gets as far as item six before the list tilts, and every bullet point becomes just another way of seeing her—and only her. Her hands, her voice, the way she looks when she's angry or triumphant or just tired. He feels his pulse tighten at the memory of her body pressed to his, the heat of it traveling upward and settling behind his eyes. He knows he shouldn't dwell on that, knows it's the specific brand of nostalgia that's meant to be ignored, but that only makes it stronger.
He lies there for a while, drifting between shame and a kind of hungry curiosity. He thinks about Ellie at the kitchen sink, the pale line of her hip, the way her shorts barely clung to her. He wonders if she knows what she's doing. He wonders if maybe she's just being a kid, or if she's already figured out what it means to have a body that draws attention, even the wrong kind. Especially the wrong kind.
He rolls over, burying his face in the pillow. For a few seconds he's determined to think of something else. Instead, the fabric smells faintly of her shampoo, like she's invaded every molecule of air. He wonders if she still does that thing where she sneaks into his room at night, curled up at the foot of the bed like a cat.
He tries not to hope for it. But the hope is there.
For a long time, he just lies still, letting the darkness smooth out his thoughts. But he can't stop replaying the moment—her arms around him, her head tucked perfectly into the notch of his shoulder, the heat of her breath on his collarbone. Such a tall girl for her age. Such a fine girl for her age…
He's half-hard by the time he realizes what's happening, the kind of dumb, inevitable response he thought he'd outgrown. Embarrassed, he shifts on the sheets, but it only makes it worse.
He waits a few minutes, just to be sure the house is dead quiet. When he's certain, he slides his hand to his waistband, easing it under the elastic of his boxers. He closes his eyes and lets the image of Ellie take over: the way her shorts rode up as she stood at the counter, the flash of white, the muscles tensing in her thigh as she balanced on tiptoe for a jar on the highest shelf. The way the arch of her foot looked impossibly delicate, the secret flex of her toes against the tile.
For a moment he imagines himself standing behind her, a joke on his lips, and then her looking up at him over her shoulder, eyebrow cocked, daring him to call her "little" one more time.
His hand moves slowly, barely visible as it slips beneath the waistband of his boxers. His pulse races as he tries to focus on a different image, any image other than Ellie, but she is everywhere in his mind. Each scene is sharp and vibrant, taunting him with its forbidden allure. The only sound in the room is the soft shuffling of sheets and the faint creaking of the bed, the silence amplifying the sound of his own racing heart.
In his head, Ellie is everywhere: sprawled on the porch steps licking barbecue sauce from her fingers, twirling a soccer ball on one knee, sprawled lazy on the floor in dolphin shorts, toes hooked over the rung of a chair as she scrolls her own phone. Each vignette sharper than the last, each detail more illicit and unspeakable.
The air is thick with the smell of sweat and the lingering scent of Ellie's perfume, a sweet yet forbidden aroma that only intensifies his physical response. He bites his lip, squeezing harder, and the images crystalize into something raw: her face, flushed with a sunburn, mouth open, tongue blue from Popsicle juice, gaze locked to his as she sucks the sweet out of her teeth.
He thinks of her arms wrapped around his torso, hands knotted behind his back, the soft whine in her voice when she whispered don't leave, he thinks of the heat of her body pressed so close, the tang of sweat and green apple, and in the darkness, his body doesn't recognize what's wrong about it, or refuses to care.
He cums, hard, with a soft desperate grunt—a surprised, involuntary noise he stifles at the last second by sinking his teeth into the meat of his own wrist. The sharp pain does nothing to mute the tidal rush of sensation, hot and wicked and overwhelming, pushing him off the edge before he can even catch his balance.
For an instant, his whole body arches off the concave mattress, toes curling, legs stiffening, back bowed as the finish rips through him with an intensity that is almost punishment. He doesn't want to look at himself, doesn't want to see the relief and the defeat and the raw guilt shining out of his own face, but his eyes flutter open anyway, vision blurred by a sting of wetness that might be sweat or tears—he honestly can't tell the difference.
He missed her. He missed her so fucking much, and he didn't even realize how badly until this very bite of shame.
His left hand gropes blindly for anything—a tissue, the edge of the sheet, the inside of his boxers—anything at all to contain the sticky, pulsing mess spreading rapidly over his stomach and the waistband of his underwear. He winds up using the neck of an old t-shirt balled up behind his pillow, mashing it against himself in frantic, shamed swipes. For a long moment, the only sound in the room is his own harsh, ragged breathing, mingled with the frantic, arrhythmic thump of his heart. The whole world compresses into that stifling little space: the smell of sweat and semen, the clinging echo of his own panting, and above all the persistent, sick heat of what he's just done.
Shame pours through him in hot, nauseating waves—so much worse than the generic, anonymous kind he remembers from high school, so much sharper now, because this time there's no plausible deniability. He can't blame it on hormones or curiosity or even boredom. It's personal. It's deliberate. He can't stop picturing the way she looked, the way she felt, the way every tiny, forbidden detail had nestled itself into his consciousness and made itself so at home there. He can't stop thinking her name. It echoes, over and over, in some hollow chamber between his ribs—Ellie, Ellie, Ellie—reminding him with every repetition that she's not just a passing obsession but the axis his thoughts had spun around for months, or perhaps much longer.
He flops back onto the mattress, muscles trembling with aftershocks, and stares up at the ceiling, which is still crowded with the scattered, half-glowing constellations Ellie placed years ago. He feels, absurdly, as if they're watching him in judgment—tiny, silent jurors waiting for him to explain himself. He thinks again of her arms around his waist, the press of her cheek to his chest, the fierce, almost possessive way she'd squeezed him and whispered don't leave, and the memory is so fresh and raw that it almost brings up bile. Even now, so soon after, he wants to do it all again, wants more, and the realization leaves him stunned and breathless.
He couldn't believe himself. Couldn't believe the sickness in his head and in his heart—to yearn like this, for something so unattainable for its grossness and yet its burning urgency.
His throat burns with the pressure of what he can't say, even to himself. He wants to confess, to tell someone, to shout or cry or beg for absolution. Instead he just lies there, sticky and exhausted and unspeakably alone, listening to the sounds of the house—a toilet flushing, floorboards creaking, the low mutter of a television in some distant, adult zone. He wonders what would happen if anyone found out what kind of man he really was.
He wonders if this is what addiction feels like, or madness, or just ordinary, undignified, human desire.
He wipes himself off with a t-shirt, drops it to the floor. Lays flat and stares at the ceiling, refusing to so much as blink. For a while, he tries to convince himself that it's just biology, that all the science says men his age are basically animals, that this is a symptom of loneliness and not, as it feels, a deep moral rot. He's read Freud, after all. He knows that all love is a little bit perverse.
But knowing it doesn't help. The guilt is sticky and unshakeable, and he lets it eat at him for an hour, then two, until he's certain he'll never sleep again. Until he's certain he should be executed for even thinking such things.
And yet, when he finally drifts off, it's to the memory of her arms, the freckled galaxy of her shoulder, the wild laugh she made just for him.
It takes him a full week to build up the courage to break himself further, into a hundred unrecognizable little pieces, when the extended family have gone back home and the house falls into its usual rhythm. One week later that Thomas sneaks into Ellie's room while she's sleeping.
He stands in her doorway for a solid minute before his nerves allow him inside. There's barely any light but the blue glow of her nightlight, a plastic turtle with a fractured shell, casting a broken archipelago of stars over the walls. Ellie's asleep, sprawled across her mattress in a tangle of limbs and sheets. She's on her stomach, one leg out from under a thin throw, and her face is mashed into a pillow, mouth open, drooling slightly. He half expects her to wake immediately, but she only makes a small, unconscious sound and burrows further in.
Thomas hovers, barely breathing. Every cell in his body knows he shouldn't be here—not for anything, not in a hundred years—but the urge is so powerful it's almost chemical. He tiptoes to the edge of the bed. The air is warm, thick with the smell of sleep and the faint, sugary undertone of her shampoo. The room looks like a storm hit it: clothes draped over the desk chair, socks peeking from under the dresser, a heap of soccer jerseys and bras and shorts piled in the corner as if she'd undressed by centrifugal force.
He stands over her, heart in his throat, and studies her in the blue half-light. Even in sleep, her body is a roadmap of sharp angles—elbows and knees and the slender dip of her waist—but there's something soft about her here too, in the way her hair fans out over the pillow or how her hand, half-curled, clutches the sheet by her chin. The edge of her tank top has ridden up, exposing a band of white skin at her lower back. The slope narrows at her waist before flaring again in her hips, and the sight of that bare, vulnerable skin makes Thomas's stomach clench tight.
He sits on the bed, careful not to jostle her. She doesn't stir. He lets his eyes travel the length of her, a practiced inventory: her calf muscle, the tan line on her thigh, the arch of her foot. The line of her shorts is high, leaving nothing to the imagination. His breathing grows shallow.
He's hard already, has been for the past twenty minutes, the anticipation a slow, mounting fever. He knows every excuse he'll give himself in the morning—it's just a look, it's just curiosity, it's not real—but right now he can't stop. He wants to touch her. He wants to wake her, just a little, just enough to see what she'd do, but the risk is too great.
His hand shakes as he reaches out, first just to smooth the hair from her cheek. He expects her to jolt away, to mumble or even scream, but she only sighs and shifts, the movement lifting her shirt a half inch higher. He barely grazes her, fingertips tracing the line of her spine down to the curve of her ass. The cotton of her shorts is worn thin, the fabric stretched so tight he can see the outline of the faintest underwear—if she's wearing any at all.
He palms himself through his boxers, then, unable to help it, slips the waistband down and frees his cock. It's angry and red, already leaking pre-cum onto his fingers. He wraps a hand around the shaft and strokes, slow and careful, never taking his eyes off Ellie. Each movement is a sin he can't help but savor.
He wants her to move, to do something, give him any sign that she knows what's happening, that she's complicit or at least present in his fantasy. But she just breathes, steady and slow, her lips parted in a way that makes him think of Popsicles and sticky summer afternoons and the sound she makes when she says his name, all vowels and longing. He watches the gentle balloon of her ribcage with every inhale, the tension in her legs as she shifts, restless even in sleep.
The world narrows to the heat in his hand and the blue-lit vision of his sister, the forbidden thing that's always been his and never his at all. He dares himself further, lets his thumb brush the hem of her shorts, just above the crease where thigh meets ass. His finger hovers, then dips just under, tracing the feathery line of her hip bone. She stirs—just a little—but doesn't wake. His breath catches in his throat, body taut as a piano wire. He bites down on his own knuckle to keep quiet, to keep from making the sounds filling his head.
He jerks himself off faster, then forces himself to slow down, desperate to make this last. He's never been so turned on in his life, never felt so exposed or so alive. He wants to fuck her—God, he wants it so bad it hurts. He wants to push her face into the pillow and rut against her until he forgets his own name. He wants to stay here forever, stuck in this blue-lit moment where nothing is decided and everything is possible.
His pulse explodes and his body clenches, and then he's cumming, hot and heavy, white streaks painting across his wrist and the bunched t-shirt in his lap. He moans, too loud, and clamps a hand over his mouth at the last second, eyes wild with the fear of being caught. But Ellie only groans in her sleep, rolls onto her side, and pulls the pillow tighter to her chest.
He sits there in the dark, every nerve on fire, breathing in her scent and the acrid tang of his own orgasm. For a long time he doesn't move, just lets the shame and the fury wash over him.
And just like that, he's hard again.
He can hardly believe the speed with which he's ready for a second helping. This time, however, he's bolder. This time, with Ellie rolled over and onto her side, he takes it a step further. One more step into hell, while the lust is swimming in his head and in his body like it's all a deluge of blood alcohol.
His hands are trembling as he reaches out, reckless with the second wind of arousal. This time he doesn't stop at just touching her hair or tracing the rim of her shorts. He runs his palm down the outside of her thigh, up again, and then, with a breathless daredevil's abandon, he cups her hand where it's curled on the sheet by her face.
Ellie is deeply, beautifully asleep—her fingers limp, palm soft. He ghosts his thumb across her knuckles, marveling at the contrast: the bones so small, the skin so fine-grained and alive. He presses his own hand over hers, then, heart jackhammering, he guides her hand down, folding her fingers over his length. The contact nearly undoes him. He half-expects her to wake, to scream, to bite, but she only mutters and shifts, eyelashes fluttering in the blue light.
She doesn't grab, not really—not consciously. Thomas moves her hand for her, curling her slack fingers around his cock, using her palm and knuckles as a sheath and stroking with a care that makes his whole body hum. It shouldn't feel so good. It shouldn't feel like coming home. He uses her hand as an extension of himself, a conduit for every obscene longing he's buried in the dark: her skin so much softer than his, her grip just loose enough to make the friction feel new, dangerous, impossibly intimate.
He tries to imagine what it would be like if she were awake. If she looked up at him with those glacier-blue eyes and told him, without words, that she wanted this, too. That she'd always wanted this, had just been waiting for him to show some courage, to make the first move. The fantasy is enough to make his knees lock, to make the muscles in his jaw ache as he grinds his teeth against the sound of his own gasps.
He rocks her hand up and down, slow at first, then faster, using the soft pocket of her palm to coax himself into a second, volcanic orgasm. He's so close he can't see straight, the world shrinking to the points of contact: his cock, her hand, the wild thump of his own pulse in his ears.
He lets go at the last second, letting his own hand close over hers as the orgasm roars through him, hotter and even more intense than before. He bites down on her pillow this time to muffle the sound, nearly blacking out as he spills across her hand and the sheet, a wet and sticky offering to the altar of shame.
Ellie doesn't wake, but her hand twitches as if in response. He freezes, terrified, but she only mumbles something and turns over, curling into a ball and pulling her gooey hand up to her chest. He watches in slack-jawed awe as she brings her fingers to her mouth, tongue flicking out to taste the unfamiliar salt. She snuffles in her sleep, then settles, the hand pressed under her cheek.
Thomas is dizzy, boneless, wrung out. He's never felt so fucked—or so complete. He knows he can never tell anyone, can never let on, but in this moment, alone in the blue-lit room, he either feels like God—or the other guy.
And he cleans up—as best as he fucking can—before he retreats to his room, his heart ready to burst from the cage of his ribs altogether.
The next morning, everything's calm. The family has breakfast as if nothing ever happened; as if Ellie was none the wiser. To Thomas, it appears as if he got away with it.
She doesn't look at him a certain way. Doesn't speak a certain phrase. Doesn't call him a filthy fucking pedophile like he knows he is. Instead she goes about her business, licking her cute little lips after eating, and it gives Thomas an idea on what he could do next.
It happens the following Saturday, when their parents decide the best cure for a suffocating Midwestern July is to spend all day at the country club for a "grown-up double date." They leave at noon with hats, golf bags, and a single warning not to set the house on fire. By three, the sky is a molten blur and the air is thick as cough syrup; the world is reduced to the sound of cicadas and whatever chaos Thomas and Ellie can manufacture for themselves.
By three-thirty, Thomas has finished a beer and is halfway through a box of Popsicles, and Ellie's sprawled on the living room floor, making a murder scene out of Monopoly money and the dog's shed fur. She's in a swimsuit, a faded blue one with lightning bolts that he's never seen her in before, and her hair is still wet from the backyard hose. She looks so at home at the center of this self-made universe, sunburn peeling from her nose, her bare feet hooked over the arm of the couch, that Thomas feels the urge to do something—anything—to disrupt the moment, to pull her into his orbit and make her see him again.
"Hey, Ellie," he calls, pinching the last Popsicle between his fingers. "Wanna play a game?"
She rolls onto her stomach, eyes glinting. "What kind of game?"
He grins, and it feels both dangerous and inevitable. "It's called 'Guess The Thing.' I'm gonna put stuff in your mouth, and you have to guess what it is."
She cackles—a real, from-the-belly sound. "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard."
"Then you'll be great at it."
She flops up to sitting, arms crossed. "What do I get if I win?"
He thinks about it for a second. "I'll do your chores for a week."
She narrows her eyes. "And if I lose?"
"You have to…um, wear whatever I pick out for you to the park. Even if it's super embarrassing."
Ellie considers this, but Thomas can already tell she's hooked. "You're on." She pauses, then adds: "But no dead bugs or, like, actual garbage."
He raises his hands in mock innocence. "I promise."
For a moment, this is all it is—another dumb summer game, a way to pass the time before their parents return and the air returns to its normal, oxygen-rich monotony. Thomas lines up a parade of objects on the kitchen counter: a slice of lemon, a pretzel rod, a cube of cheddar, a gummy bear, a chunk of watermelon. He's painfully aware of how hard he's had to will himself not to pick anything more obscene right away, how close he came to lining up a banana and daring himself to go all the way.
He cuts a strip from an old t-shirt for a blindfold and calls Ellie into the kitchen. She comes in, bare-legged and barefoot, hair still dripping, and lets him tie the blindfold around her eyes. For a second, her face is so close to his own he has to clench his jaw, just to keep from breathing her in.
"Oh my god," she giggles. "Is this what you did in Europe? Tie girls up in kitchens?"
"You've got a smart mouth on you," he comments. "Your friends teach you to talk like that?"
"Not telling," she replies, grinning and mischievous. She's close enough that he can see the flush at the tip of her nose. Her mouth is pink and a little chapped, lips parted as she tries to orient herself in the dark.
"First round," he says, and takes her hand to guide her onto a stool at the island. She doesn't flinch away, just tightens her grip and lets herself be positioned, a trusting little experiment waiting for the test. He has a momentary vision of her as a museum piece, preserved forever in this moment, and then he shakes it away.
He selects the lemon wedge first, pressing it gently to her lips. Ellie scrunches her face, teeth sinking in, and then recoils with a strangled noise of disgust.
"Sour. Lemon. Next," she commands, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
He tries the pretzel stick, and she demolishes it with two crunches, then offers a deadpan: "Pretzel. But it's stale." The cheddar cube is even more obvious, and she barely takes time to chew before spitting out the answer. "Cheese. You suck at this!"
He's out of distractions, heart pounding as he lines up the next thing. The gummy bear, then the watermelon, both dispatched instantly. "Can you at least try to make this a challenge?" she taunts, licking stickiness from her finger. "You're just feeding me a whole snack tray," she adds, giggling.
He smiles, but his pulse is galloping. "I have one more," he says. "But you have to promise to guess, even if it's weird."
She leans in, her trust absolute. "Fine, whatever. Lay it on me!"
He glances at the kitchen clock—three fifty-five—then down at the band of pale skin running from her collarbone to her navel, where the suit dips low. The next thing is inevitable, but his hands shake as he slides the shorts of his gym shorts down under the counter. He tries to will himself soft, but he's already semi, and the fear makes him harder.
He positions himself just inches from her face. She's still blindfolded, mouth slightly open, and the desperation in him is so bright and sharp it's almost clean.
"You ready?" he whispers.
"Ready," she says, and her voice is steady, utterly unafraid.
He taps her lips with the head of his cock, just the barest touch, like a joke. Her nose wrinkles in confusion, and she tilts her chin. "What…?"
He taps her again, a little firmer, and her mouth opens wider, tongue darting out to taste. He shudders at the touch, almost losing it right there, but she just makes a thoughtful sound and leans in, lips closing around the tip.
For a second, she freezes. Then she giggles, vibrating against him, and says, "Is this one of those weird Asian fruits? It's salty." The vibration almost floors him. "Did you get this overseas?"
He can't speak. He can't even move, for a second. Then she licks again, more deliberate, and her head angles as if to get a better read. "What even is this?" she marvels. "It's, like, kind of gross, but also… I dunno. Not bad?" She works her mouth around the tip, tongue flicking slow, and Thomas is sure he's about to faint. Every sense telescopes to the shivering, fragile point where her lips graze his skin.
"Guess," he rasps, barely above a breath. The hush is so thick that the fridge's hum sounds like a bellow.
Ellie giggles again, somehow delighted by her own confusion. "Is this… tofu? Or, like, a weird cheese? It's soft but not?" She tries another taste, this time letting her lips press further. The warmth and pressure nearly drop him to the kitchen tile. She's giggling, and the sound shakes against him, and Thomas realizes that, whatever comes next, he will never forget this moment, not ever.
He draws back, desperate not to lose himself, and she smacks her lips. "You have to tell me if I'm right, Tommy. That's the rule." She's still blindfolded, cheeks pink, head cocked like she's waiting for a punchline.
He knows what he should say. He knows exactly what to do to make this moment dissolve into laughter and plausible deniability, to retreat to that safer world where nothing is ever acknowledged and everything can be a joke. He could say marshmallow. He could say lychee. She'd believe him, and he could leave her none the wiser.
But in this humid, cicada-humming void, standing alone in the kitchen with his sister and the taste of her on him and the taste of him on her, Thomas feels something inside him shatter. Something secret and old and hungry, something he can't name except to say: this is how it feels to belong to someone else.
He steps closer, so close her knees bracket his hips, and says, "Are you sure you want to know?" His voice is gentle, almost kind.
She bristles with challenge. "Of course I want to know! I always want to know." She sticks out her tongue in challenge, and he wants very badly to tell her, to just say it and see what she does.
Instead, he says, "You have to try again. One more time, okay? Really take it in. Really suck on it. Don't use your teeth—just suck. Then you'll get even more flavor…"
Ellie's mouth rounds in a cartoon O and she makes a gigantic show of it: "Oh, come on. You want me to really try?" She bares her teeth in a fanged grin, then, obedient to the game, wraps her lips around the tip and sucks, slow and exaggerated, cheeks hollowing out as she applies dramatic, absurd suction. The sound is wet and obscene, saliva clicking between tongue and palate, and Thomas nearly doubles over as the first sharp jolt of pleasure hits. His knees lock. His vision blurs. His hand finds the edge of the counter, knuckles white.
Ellie keeps going, making a low, puzzled whine as if she's struggling to tease apart the flavor. She licks the head with the pink flat of her tongue, then purses her lips and goes again, each motion so earnest, so unconsciously lewd that Thomas can hardly breathe. He's trembling, his pulse a sledgehammer in his ears, and he doesn't even realize his phone is in his hand until he's already fumbled it into camera mode, thumb jerking the video record button with a sick, wild urgency.
The sight through the screen is even more devastating: Ellie, blindfolded, hair tangled, mouth locked around his cock, the little blue lightning bolts of her swimsuit glowing against her chest. She bobs lightly, jaw flexing, and makes a thoughtful moan as if she's considering the taste of some unfamiliar pudding. The sound is primal. Thomas bites the inside of his cheek to keep from groaning aloud, terrified of shattering the moment.
He can hear himself breathing on the video, raw and animal, but he can't stop. He's transfixed by the sight of her lips stretched around him, the glistening slickness left behind each time she pulls off, the little shimmer of spit connecting her to him like a thread. He wants it to last forever and also for it to end immediately; wants to pour himself into her, his whole self, and never speak of it again.
Ellie pops off with a noisy smack, then grins and says, "Dude, I'm not even kidding, this is the hardest one yet." She gives the tip a little kiss, like she's tasting a lollipop, then leans back, tongue out. "Give me one more real go."
"Okay," Thomas says, and his voice is so hoarse and broken that it barely registers as his own.
Ellie opens her mouth wide, tongue flat, waiting. He guides himself into her again, this time deeper, and she closes her lips around him, sucking hard, drawing him in with a slow, relentless pull. Her hands, small and sticky from the gummy bear, grip his thighs for leverage, and the sensation is so intense it borders on pain. He records it all, the twitch of her jaw, the arch of her eyebrow, the relentless focus in her posture. She tries to speak around the fullness, but only manages a soft, "Mmf?"
That's all it takes. He can't hold back, not even for a second. He cums hard, every muscle seizing, the orgasm so sudden and so huge that it blanks out his vision for a second. He nearly drops his phone; only the edge of the countertop keeps him upright.
He feels himself throb hot against her tongue and instinctively pulls away, trying to spare her the worst, but Ellie's hands clamp to his thighs. She's stronger than she looks, and she doesn't let him go. For one stunning moment she just… holds him in her mouth, the head of his cock buried past her lips, swallowing around the sudden pulse of salt and heat.
Her nose crinkles. She makes a strangled, startled sound that almost kills him with guilt. But she doesn't spit it out. She swallows, once, eyes squeezing shut under the blindfold, and the next sound she makes is more curious than disgusted. When he finally slips free, she smacks her lips, coughs, then licks the taste from her teeth with slow, deliberate thoroughness.
"That was… wow," she says, and Thomas's brain, shattered and sparking, can only process the single syllable. "What the hell was that?"
He stumbles for words, for air, for anything to anchor himself to reality. He can't believe what just happened, what she just let him do, what he just did to her. He's shaking, weak in every muscle, but somehow manages to croak, "Final guess?"
Ellie's head tips, birdlike. Her tongue works the inside of her cheek. "It's not food," she says slowly, as if working out a logic puzzle. "But it's not, like, a toy. It's… it's skin?"
She lifts her hands, unties the t-shirt blindfold with a single deft tug. Her eyes are bright, the pupils huge in the afternoon shade of the kitchen. She looks first at him, then at the counter, then down at his lap, and then—slowly, with the patience of a volcanologist watching the lava rise—at the sticky, spent end of his cock, still peeking from his waistband.
"Oh my god," she says, voice barely louder than a whisper. "You put your dick in my mouth!" She says it like a joke, but her face is a confused, fascinated kaleidoscope of blush and shock and some other thing Thomas has no name for.
For a second, he thinks she's going to scream, or hit him, or run. But she just blinks and keeps staring, as if she's been hypnotized.
She squints at him, like she's still expecting a punchline. "Wait… You actually…?" Her jaw works, processing, tasting again. "That's… That's so gross. What the heck did you feed me? Was that… did you pee into my stomach…?"
He braces for the slap, the scream, the footfalls racing up the stairs to tattle. But none of that comes. Ellie just sits there, mouth open, face as red as a stop sign, and then—impossibly—sticks her tongue out and licks the tip of her own finger, as if re-confirming the taste.
"Jesus, Tommy." Her voice is half-wonder, half-horror. "You're so fucking weird." She snorts, then sort of giggles, dizzy and shy, and wipes her hand on her bare thigh.
He almost laughs, almost rides the moment out on a wave of hysteria, but then something in his chest snaps—the soundless, sick pop of a rubber band at the end of its tension. He's never felt a need so raw, so electric it turns his limbs to static. He can see in her eyes that she's about to ask a question, the kind of question that would end the spell forever, and that's the last thing he can allow.
He moves before he can think, hands cupping her face, pulling her toward him in a motion so desperate it's practically involuntary. Their lips meet, awkward and wet, and she tries to pull back, to say something, but he presses in, not kissing but consuming. Her mouth is still open from shock and he pours himself into it, tongue pushing past her lips, tasting himself on her teeth. She makes a little sound, not quite protest and not quite acquiescence, but she doesn't fight.
He's not sure whether it's the taste or the pressure or the sheer impossibility of the act, but after a second Ellie melts under him, going slack in his hands. She lets herself be kissed, lets the violation pass through her, and when he finally pulls away she just looks at him, eyes glassy, mouth trembling, like she's uncertain what planet she's landed on.
She swallows, hard, and says, "W-why the hell did you do that?"
He wants to say sorry. He wants to beg forgiveness. But what comes out is, "I needed it." His voice is sandpaper, his hands shaking with the aftermath of violence and want. "I just… I needed it, El. I need you."
Her eyes fill with water, but she doesn't look scared. Just tired. "You're not supposed to," she whispers, lips quivering, like she's finally recognized this dream for the nightmare it really was. "You're supposed to be my brother. Y-you're supposed to… p-protect me from things like this… r-right…?"
He nods, not trusting himself to speak. He buries his face in her shoulder, breathing in the chlorine-and-girl scent until it coats his lungs. She shudders, but she doesn't pull away. He feels the heat of her skin, the thrum of her pulse, and for a second he can't move, can't do anything except hold her and hope she will never, ever leave.
But the trembling doesn't stop. It travels up his arms, through his neck, into his jaw. His mouth finds the soft curve of her collarbone, the wet line of her throat, the impossible warmth of—
"No," she fires out suddenly. A warning shot as she backs away. "N-no, please… Tommy… I… no, we shouldn't do this!" And then it finally, finally hits her, that something is dangerously wrong with her older brother. "You're my brother, you're not supposed to—!"
"How would you know?" he snaps suddenly, and she's shocked by his tone if nothing else. "Ever since I've come back, you've been… different. Still the same twerp of a sister, but different. You're… more adult now. The way you walk, the way you talk… it drives me fucking crazy, Ellie! Even the way you dress, it drives me—!"
"I'm ten years old," she parries, jabbing a finger against his chest. "And you're… f-freaking… nasty! So nasty!"
"I know," Thomas sobs, clenching his eyes shut. "I know, I'm… I'm fucking disgusting. I know I should go to hell. But… God, Ellie, please, please, I need this… you're too young to understand, but I need this!"
She kicks at his shin, hard, but he catches her ankle and pulls her to him, knotting her in a headlock and then scooping her bodily off the kitchen stool. She yowls, wildcat, clawing at his wrists, but he's already got her up and over his shoulder, her whole skinny body draped across his back like a sack of onions. She shrieks and drums her fists on his spine, howling every curse word she's ever learned, but Thomas just locks his hands around her knees and marches straight for the stairs, carrying her as if she weighs nothing at all.
"Put me down!" she roars. "You're gonna break my neck, you psycho!" But her voice is more indignant than scared.
He doesn't put her down. He doesn't even slow. He hauls her up the stairs two at a time, ignoring the way her knuckles try to gouge his kidneys, the way her bare heels dig into his ribs. At the top landing she tries to twist out of his grip, but all her leverage is gone, and she ends up face-down over his shoulder, hair trailing, swimsuit wedged up so tight it's practically inside-out. Thomas is too far gone to notice or care. He pushes open his bedroom door and flings her onto the bed, where she lands in a sprawl and immediately tries to scramble away.
He grabs her at the waist and pins her, pushing her down into the mattress. Her legs flail, but he's stronger, and after a few seconds she exhausts herself and just lies there, panting, eyes fiery and glassy at the same time.
She's not crying. She's not even close to crying. She glares at him, breathless, daring him to move first.
He does. He drops onto the bed beside her, chest heaving, arms braced on either side of her head. She's staring up at the ceiling, refusing to look at him, but he can see the pulse hammering at her throat.
"Why'd you do that?" she spits, voice barely above a growl.
He wants to say something smart, something that will crack the tension, but all that comes out is: "I didn't know how else to make you listen."
"I was listening, you idiot," she fires back. "I just… I just… you're not supposed to—"
"I know," he says, so quietly it's almost not there. "I know I'm not."
They lie there, breathing in tandem, both of them afraid to move. The silence swells, a living thing.
She speaks first. "You're so gross, Tommy."
"I know."
She turns her head, finally, so their eyes meet. "Do you… do you do that to other girls?"
He wants to laugh, but it would come out as a sob. "No. Never."
She absorbs this. "You're so weird," she says again, but there's not as much venom now. Mostly it sounds like wonder, or maybe resignation. "So gross. So STUPID. Can't get a girlfriend. Can't even get a boyfriend. So now you want me?"
"I'll stop," he says. "I'll stop if you want me to. I'll never touch you again. But please, Ellie, I need to… to do more things with you. Please, I promise I'll disappear off the planet forever. You'll never hear from me again; you won't see me, and—!"
She practically hisses like a house cat. "I don't want you to disappear, stupid! I just want you to look at me!"
He does. He looks at her, really looks, and the world shrinks to the twin points of her eyes, the blue so pale it's almost see-through where the sunlight cracks the bedroom window and lands across her face. She lies on the bed, hair spread like a fan, breathing hard. Her lips, chapped and cherry-pink, tremble in defiance. He's never seen anything more heartbreakingly brave than the way she waits, daring him to move, daring him to back down.
He leans in and she flinches, turns her cheek away—just for a second, just enough to be sure he'll keep coming. He does. He finds her lips again, this time slower, softer, and she lets herself be kissed. She isn't good at it, not at all; her teeth clack into his, and she's too eager, mouth wide, tongue darting out and then retreating. But she tries, and then she tries again, and on the fourth attempt her body finally unwinds, her jaw unclenching, the tension leaking from her elbows and hands.
He kisses her as if it's the only thing that could possibly keep him alive. He kisses her until she's kissing back—clumsy, spitty, still learning the choreography of lips—but then something clicks and she moans, a soft and humiliated sound, and her arms wind up around his neck almost automatically.
The taste of her is half chlorine, half sugar, and all summer. His hands roam, not daring to go lower than her ribs, but even that is enough to make her squirm. Her body is small and hot, skin glowing with the fever of embarrassment and shame and something else, something that tastes like the inside of his own chest. He pulls away, just enough to see her, and she's already flushed to the roots of her hair.
"That was gross," she says, voice trembling. "Y-you're so nasty… so… disgusting. I hate you," she lies. "We're like… garbage now."
"Yeah," he says, and grins, because he is, and so is she, and he's never wanted anything more in his whole life.
She grabs his wrist, squeezing so hard it hurts. "Don't tell anyone."