[All characters in this story are 18 years of age or older.]
***
So I didn’t tell my family I was dropping out of college, and apparently, I should have.
Like, really should have.
But who in the world would think things would ever go… the way they did?
I didn’t sleep well at all when Seong dropped me at home after midnight that Friday. Tossing and turning in my bed, thinking about Brandt and Eddi, crying over him cheating on me with her, steaming over both of them letting me catch them… I mean, what a couple of shits. How could I stay in the house we all rented together, knowing they’d done that? No fucking way. So I stuffed some crap in a backpack and had Seong drive me, which of course she did because Seong can’t say no to anyone, but also of course she spent the whole ninety miles telling me what a mistake I was making, how I could just move my stuff to the fifth room we hadn’t found a housemate to fill yet, how I’d be screwing up my whole graduation schedule if I blew the semester off and left, how she knew if I tried, I could ignore the fact that Brandt was in half my classes and Eddi was in the other half. You’ve got to give it to Seong — she’s a ray of sunshine telling you how much she believes in you and how she knows you can do it, you’ve just got to try. If I hadn’t already been gut-sick of my business admin major, she could’ve convinced me. But half a semester of Finance 327 and Econ 314 made me want to throw myself off a building. That’s how I finally got her to shut up, by saying, “You don’t want me to throw myself off a building, do you Seong?” And of course then I felt even more like a shit-slug under a moldy rock in an all-weeds garden, because it was hurtful the way I said it, and nobody with three-sevenths of a heart could stand to hurt Seong’s feelings and see that thing her face did when she was working her ass off trying to swallow how she felt about whatever they’d said that bothered her. Poor Seong. Nobody should be that good a friend.
Long story short, not much sleep, bad dreams when I finally did get to sleep, and then I woke up at 9:42 with the sun peeking in through my curtains and the house mostly quiet except for Dad and Kellie’s voices coming from somewhere down the hall.
Oh god, please let me get to the bathroom without them noticing I’m up and asking me what I’m doing home.
Dad’s almost as sensitive and supportive as Seong, and Kellie’s always hated Brandt, so as soon as they found out what had happened one or the other or both of them would start driving me crazy with advice or I-told-you-so’s.
Headphones.
I put my earbuds in and got my phone and Pandora-ed something and felt pretty good about my plan: keep my eyes down on the screen, nod my head to the beat, and if somebody spotted me and said something, pretend I didn’t hear and scoot into the upstairs bath where I could lock the door and run the shower at least half an hour and the hair dryer at least twenty minutes past that.
Yes, great plan.
Opening it as slowly and quietly as I could, I got through my bedroom door into the upstairs hall, walked a little ways down, got to the study, saw that Kellie’s door just past there was half-open, caught a glimpse of the happy peach walls inside, realized I could half-hear that the voices were coming from in there, got ready to zip past into the bathroom door kitty-corner to hers… let my eyes flick over to look through the gap —
And froze like… I don’t know, like some epic-level mime doing a statue impression for a billion-dollar statue-impression competition or something.
Because…
I shit you not, there they were.
My dad and my sister.
In her bed.
Naked.
And fucking.
Oh, and it wasn’t some tender, slow, quiet, eyes painting portraits of each other’s souls kind of thing. No, he had her on her hands and knees and was slapping it into her like a porn star. And apparently doing it really well, because right then, she let it out so loud I could hear her over Pandora in my earbuds.
“Oh shit, Daddy! YES! Oh God, Yes — Fuck Me!!!”
So, yeah, that happened.
I hit the pause on my phone immediately in case any notes might get out past the buds, and for that caution I got rewarded with hearing Kellie say in a just barely quieter voice, “Ahhh… Jesus… Jesus, Dad! Nnnnnnhhhh I’mabouttocome…”
And Dad saying back to her, “Yes, Baby. Do it. Come for your Daddy…”
And then some of that raw-sex grunting — the kind that, you know, absolutely explodes your sanity if you hear it coming from your father and your sister over the squishy smacking sound of him doggy-styling her into a nuclear orgasm.
“OooooohhAHH –”
Luckily they were facing the headboard against the far wall, not the doorway. I backed very slowly away. Churchmouse quiet, although I’m pretty sure even a megaphone-equipped Richard-Dawkinsmouse wouldn’t have gotten their attention.
The riot of bedspring sounds and other… oh my god, incest noises followed me past the study, where I let myself turn and sneak the rest of the way to my room as hush-fast as I could.
“Kellie… oh… oh, Kellie…” I heard on my way through the door. Then she was squealing and he was groaning and I kept the knob turned as I pulled it shut and then inchworm-slow let it rotate back to its neutral position.
What the holy hell?
With the door closed and their voices muted, I realized I could hear my own breathing, crazy fast and loud. My heart was like, ricocheting off my lungs, it was beating so hard.
And my brain was throbbing.
I don’t mean like, I had a headache all of a sudden. I mean like, imagine if every neuron in your skull started going, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH in time. And every RRr was your dad’s hips pulling back — with the muscles of his ass and thighs tensed and standing out — and then every WAH was him jamming deep into your sister’s cunt again, his hands clenched at her waist to add his upper body strength into the thrust so her gorgeous tits and her long, dangling brown hair swung forward with the power of his crotch thumping up against her twat.
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
And then after a while, in the pause between each RRr and WAH my brain made, these thoughts started showing up.
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
Okay, obviously they don’t know I’m here.
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
And I have to keep it that way.
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
They can’t find out that I know.
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
Why not?
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
Because, fuck! Fuck, shit, what the fuck! is why.
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
Also, that is not a family chat I want to have!
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
I do not want to know!
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
Know what?
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
When it started! How it started! Who started it!
RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH, RRr-WAH.
And then I realized, sitting there in the middle of the same slobby mess I’d left all over my floor at the beginning of the semester, I already did know those things. Mostly.
RRr-WAH, RRr–
That goddamn camping trip right after she graduated high school.
The one I missed because I was being pissy about something — I don’t even remember what, it was five years ago — so I went and stayed over with my friend Darisha and then spent three days getting jealous off Kellie’s Instagram posts from Unbelievably Evergreen Paradise-on-Earth National Park. The one where, after they came back, there was just something… different. Not like a secret they were hiding (although Christ, apparently they were really hiding a helluva secret)… no, I could just feel them being closer from then on. And it seemed like I had missed out on whatever had done that. And I just blamed the fact that I’d been a brat and then they’d bonded a little, and I had to take it as a lesson not to get pissy over stupid shit when I had a great sister and an awesome father and they both loved the crap out of me.
As for who started it, duh, it had to have been Kellie. Dad would never. Not in a zillion years. Even if he had the hots for her so bad it was out-and-out killing him, he would not risk hurting her by making as much as the tiniest move on something like that. It might be in his nature as a man to perve on her. (He used to tell us, “Girls, what you have to understand is, if society didn’t have a boatload of dead-serious rules against deviating from the sexual norm, guys would fuck anything. All the time.”) But it wasn’t in his nature as a human to take a single breath that might damage either of his daughters.
And the how of it starting must have been that downpour second night of their trip, when a thunderstorm came out of nowhere while they were hiking and drenched them both to the bone so by the time they got back to the tent, they had to strip to their undies and huddle inside two layered sleeping bags to avoid hypothermia.
Only holy shit they must not have even left their undies on. Of course not, a fucking life-or-death situation and they’re going to crawl into a sleeping bag in dripping wet underwear? I mean, in for a penny, in for a pound at that point, right?
Snap. It fell into place in my head as clear and sharp as the view I’d had of them humping it up just a minute before. There they are, spooned and shivering inside two nested sleeping bags with a bunch of those twist-and-heat hand-warmer things trying to get the cold out of their skeletons. His arms are around her and hers are squeezed together tight against her chest and their teeth are chattering and she feels like ice to his skin and there’s nothing sexual about it at all.
I mean, you know, at first.
But at some point the chemical hand-warmers and the sleeping bags and the shared body heat start working. And then you’ve got this strong, steamy older hunk and this sexy goddess of a young woman pasted skin-to-skin together and warm enough to think again but still cold enough they’re not ready to untangle their naked bodies. Which means sooner or later he has to apologize for his dick getting hard and pulsing against the flesh of her leg or her ass, wherever it’s landed, and he tries to get his arms loose but she clutches them to her and says she’s still cold, which of course is true and he can feel it, but not so true she couldn’t let go and climb out of the sleeping bag and get into some dry clothes. She’s enjoying the sensation of his arms holding her and his breath on the back of her neck and his cock, hard and manly, pressing itself suggestively to her thigh or the crack of her ass.
And then eventually, she makes something happen.
I don’t know if she rolls over, pushes him onto his back, and sits on it… or if she just reaches between her legs and takes hold of it and guides it into her from behind. I don’t know if she has to talk him up to it. Probably. Only maybe not, maybe she just surprises him and before he knows it, she’s got him halfway up her hot, silky pussy and it feels so good and he loves her so much it’s impossible to push her away.
But however it starts, they spend the rest of the night and probably the whole third day of their trip fucking.
And then when they get home, they start feeling guilty — not about the incest, because it’s too good. But the two of them have this thing now, and I’m not in it with them. They can’t tell me in case it breaks my brain, but it’s always been the three of us, since Mom died, and now it can’t ever quite be the three of us again, as long as the two of them are sharing something that big without me.
So they make up for it by being extra nice to me. Like, ever since then. They’re SO nice to me and both of them do everything they can to make me happy, and honestly our lives go from already being pretty great to this bonus level of greatness that’s like, ninety percent of the time so good I don’t mind that vibe between them. That thing I can feel that I think I ditched out of by going to Darisha’s like a miserable little snit.
Only I didn’t miss out on anything. If I’d gone, it wouldn’t have happened. I really didn’t have to even think that through. It was obvious. Dad would have put me and Kellie together in our two sleeping bags and then huddled by himself in his own, and it would have taken him three times as long to get warm, but he’d have gotten there eventually without being naked next to his daughter with his dick getting harder and harder as they got over the cold.
It would have been a fun trip with a shared bit of misery in the middle, and our little family dynamic would have been just the same afterward as before.
And that’s why I’ve got to get out of this house without them knowing I was here.
Because I knew, however shitty my life at college had turned, my life at home was perfect, and I didn’t want to fuck that up by having them find out I’d seen what I’d seen. I mean, maybe it would turn out okay and all, but what if it didn’t?
Suddenly, Brandt and Eddi didn’t matter for shit. I could totally call Seong before she left her parents’ house to drive back, and I could totally take over the spare room in our rental house, and I could totally finish my goddamn business degree without it eating my soul, as long as I knew I was letting Dad and Kellie have this wonderful thing I now understood about them, and as long as I knew the three of us could be the three of us forever.
But… how do I get out without getting caught?
I had a little, whoa, surreal, moment there when it hit me that in the space of maybe two minutes I’d gone from mind-smashed at finding out my family was a literal hot-bed of raging incest to being happy for them and wanting to make sure I didn’t ruin it. No sick feeling in my stomach, no jealousy… in fact, that old little “why did I have to miss that camping trip?” nag was gone from the back of my head. I’d solved the mystery of their special vibe, and now all I had to do was keep from blowing it, and from this point forward, whenever I saw them give each other one of those teensy-tiny smiles, I’d be able to go, Mmm-hmm. Nice.
But I had to get out first.
My window wouldn’t do the trick — it let out right over our deck, so even if I dropped from it without breaking an ankle, they might hear the crash. Or if they didn’t, they might find the window still open at some point, or if my neighbor’s dog was outside, they’d hear that bitch barking the way she only ever barks at me for whatever goddamn reason.
Somehow, I had to make it downstairs and out the front door without them noticing.
Damn, couldn’t they at least have shut Kellie’s door while they were fucking?
But why would they? You have a secret like that, and you’re sure no one’s coming in the house where they could see, don’t you want to take every single molecule of freedom you can? Fucking in her bed with the door open — it must have felt like the sweet nectar of liberty to them.
Which, of course, took me back to that image.
Kellie on all fours, every curve of her gorgeous hourglass figure posed to receive him, to grind her ass back with each thrust he made forward. I’m not embarrassed of my boobs or anything, but hers are way better than mine — lush and full, and the way they hung there, swaying with the rhythm of her movements, just waiting for him to reach around and get both hands on them…
Damn, did he? If I’d stuck around a little longer or woken up a little sooner, would I have seen those strong, tender fingers cupping and squeezing her breasts?
And Dad, behind her… holy crap, I’d forgotten how perfect his back and shoulders were since the last time we were at the pool or the beach. And I’d never seen his ass completely bare before, to know how exact a match it was to the rest of his hunky dorsum. And, I just now realized, I’d certainly also never seen his balls before, but there they hung in my memory, round and heavy and swinging forward and back each time he drove into Kell’s tush.
I played it on a loop in my head, just those few seconds. How they moved, what they said. The gleam of the lights off the sweat that glossed and beaded their skins.
About the time I found myself tingling between the legs, a sound broke me out of it.
Shower! Yes!
I could hear footsteps and voices, muted by the door between us and washed out by the rushing water from the shower. It sounded like both of them were in or going into the hall bathroom. I started grabbing stuff to shove back into my backpack. Then I grabbed some jeans and shoved my legs into them. I’d slept in a tank-top and panties, so, nothing else needed before I got outside.
Backpack over both shoulders, shoes in one hand, I moved to the door and listened. Just the running shower and some murmurs, too indistinct for me to make out words. So I opened the door and peeked out.
Oh fucking Christ. You two and your sweet nectar of motherfucking liberty.
The bathroom door was open.
That’s really taking it too far, guys. Come on.
The murmurs reached my ears much louder now, but I still couldn’t turn them into language. Oh, because they’re not saying anything. I caught a “Yeahhh” over the splashing water here and there, or one of their names. But whatever else they might be doing, they weren’t doing complete sentences, that’s for sure.
Could I sneak past the door? They had it open as wide as it would go.
No, one glance at the wrong time and they’ll see me plain as day. Close the door and keep thinking.
But… I didn’t.
My dad, kneeling behind my sister and mounting her like an animal, both of them sliding and groaning and really goddamn enjoying it — I had maybe five seconds of that in my memory.
And I couldn’t help it. I wanted more.
So I shucked my backpack and put down my shoes and eased my door verrrry quietly open and took one step and then another into the hallway. Ahead on my right, the doorway into the dark study, then Kellie’s room, which looked all sunny and normal from this angle, but which I now knew must completely smell of sex.
Ahead on my left, just past and offset from the hot-sex room, the bathroom door — its bright lights spilling out into the hall along with the steamy SSHHHHH of the shower.
And some actual words:
“God, Daddy, how does your cock always feel so good going into me?”
He laughed, and it was his laugh, but it was also a laugh I’d never heard because it had just a hint of drunk-on-fucking to it. Then he must have whispered something to her, because I didn’t hear a word from him, but Kellie said, “Oooh, right. That’s a very good explanation.”
And I hadn’t noticed myself moving, but suddenly I was maybe six steps farther down the hall from my room, creeping along the left-hand wall, thinking about what they must look like and about how the bathroom was laid out and whether I had any chance of finding a position where I could sneak a look or two without revealing myself.
The shower stall, big and glass-walled, stood at the far end from the door. The mirror over the sink hung facing me. If I hunkered down low enough, I could get all the way to the door-frame without being in direct line of sight or reflected in the mirror. Then maybe I could ease myself up inch by inch until the mirror let me see maybe just the tops of their heads. That would give me an idea where there were in the stall, how they were positioned, whether the mirror or my corner of the doorway would be in their view.
“Damn, honey,” I heard Dad say. “Yes, move those hips like that some more. Fuuuccckkk…”
Smart me and stupid me had been arguing whether I was too chicken to try, but that unchickened me. Move them like what? I had to see just how she was moving those hips.
“Ooh, ooh, ooh, Daddy…”
“Yesss. Yes — UH! — god, yes!”
I made it to the corner of the doorway, squatting there with my shoulder against the wall. Then I tried to go up as slow as the elevator in my dorm freshman year had moved. I could see the mirror, nothing but ceiling in it. A little higher and the top of that picture-frame came into view — the one with the potted flowers that faced the toilet.
No, shit, I’m too close to the wall. Angle’s all wrong. I won’t be able to see the shower at all from here.
I could move farther out toward the center of the hall, but that idea un-unchickened me. It just felt too exposed.
So… maybe just peep around the door-frame? No, there’d be an inch or two of my head poking out before I’d be able to see. I couldn’t risk it. But…
Slipping my phone from my back pocket, I pulled up the camera app, set it to video. The corner with the lens wouldn’t have to stick out more than a centimeter, centimeter and a half to get a shot. The two of them sounded pretty damn busy…
“Mmm, Kellie! Mmm! Yes!”
“Ah, uh-huh, pull my nips like that, uh-huh, more. Daddy, uhh — love… you… so much…”
… yeah, they wouldn’t notice a one-centimeter corner of a phone sticking out from the door, low and dark against the dim hallway. I slid the phone forward across the door-frame, saw nothing on the screen, nothing, nothing, a slice of light in the gap between the door and the frame… part of the room… the angle was making it hard to tell what I was looking at…
Bam.
He was taking her from behind again, up against the wall beneath the shower-head, same wall as the mirror was on. Her arms stuck straight out, hands spread against the tiles. Her head hung down in the spray, that long, dark-brown hair turned into a literal waterfall by it. I could see he had his hands on her tits, only with the screen so tiny and at that angle, I couldn’t make out the details.
The plus side was, they’d have to completely turn their heads to catch me. And they were way too focused on each other to do that. I tilted and angled the phone, did a pinch-zoom, and then just squatted there and stared.
My sister is hot, okay? I mean, hot in that way where you just know she has to be fantastic in bed, because not only is her body curved and plush in all the right places and trim and toned in all the other right places, and not only is her face supermodel gorgeous with a side-helping of girl next door and a cherry on top of bi-racial Malaysian-American elegance, but she just has this thing going on, this smoulder in her poise and the way she moves and how her eyes focus and grab you and that liquid swelter in her laugh.
And we’ve talked sex, so I know she likes it. And she’s not a bragger, so I know she didn’t put any exaggerations into her claims of being able to keep a guy at the edge of orgasm for ten minutes while making sure she got off a half dozen times before the finale.
But holy shit.
Even on a little phone screen I was looking at from a bad angle and shooting through the spray-misted glass of the shower, she could move.
And all of her did.
Her hips and the small of her back tipped and untipped that ass of hers, twisted it, tilted it, rolled it in time to Dad’s moaning, appreciative strokes. Her shoulders and upper spine squeezed and flexed, adding power and push to her rhythm. The deep brown curtains of her hair swung and streamed in the flow from the showerhead, and when she groaned or spoke, her neck arched to bring her face up into the spray, eyes clenched tight against it, lips wide and tongue extending into the water before she flicked out gems like:
“Uhhh… I want you to fuck me like this until my fingers prune. We need a bigger water heater, it’s going to run out too soon…”
And then Dad, pumping forward on every other word, saying, “Mmf! Yes! Just added… that one… nnghh… to the… home… improvement… list…”
My dad — he’s really chiseled for a dude his age, though he’s got more of a tummy these days than when we were kids. I’ve always been aware, abstractly, he’s a sexy guy. Bright blue eyes, sandy blond hair, not much grey. But up to now I never let my mind wander to what he looked like, doing the deed. How his strong jaw would clench in concentration and bliss. How those familiar biceps would glide under his skin as he worked them to pull his lover back against the root of his cock every time he thumped it into her. How his hands would roam her flesh as it glistened and the spray spattered off it.
Which… good move on my part, because my imagination would’ve fallen so far short. Especially when it came to putting those two bodies together.
I mean, maybe I’m biased because I love them both, and maybe the fact they were doing that Mount Everest of taboos had something to do with it, and maybe in some way it was such a… such a beautiful contrast to what I saw when I walked in on Brandt and Eddi two days earlier (namely, just two assholes grunting and shaking a bed together). But whatever it was, I could have watched Dad and Kellie all day.
I think the wet tile and being up on their feet forced them to go a little slower than they’d been banging in her room a few minutes earlier. I mean, it was still potent, don’t get me wrong. But more sure and steady. Back and out, forth and in, back and out, forth and in, then a little bit of holding against each other, grinding, grinding, grinding. A few cycles of that and Dad would reach past Kell’s head to the shower caddy, get the body wash, slather it all over her back and waist and ass and boobs, reach a hand around and down along her belly until he could suds-up her clit (agonizingly out of sight for me at this angle) and milk the moans and gasps from her.
Then literally rinse and repeat.
After maybe the third trip to the caddy, it got a little faster.
“Mm, Daddy, that’s so good.”
“Hitting your g-spot?”
“Uhhhh-huhhhhhh…”
He put both hands on her waist and stroked himself forcefully into her. I could see her fingers clenching against the tiles.
“Ghh — yes — like that –”
“Kells… wow, honey, this pussy is so hot and wet.”
“You know it loves your fat fucking cock in it.”
“Uh-huh.”
Another notch faster. I could see a trembling in Dad’s legs that I didn’t think was the muscles getting tired.
“Oh baby… oh, baby, I’m gonna come in you…”
Push. Push. Grind.
“Yes, Daddy, do it! Shoot my belly full of it — put that hot cream up inside your little girl!”
“Oh, fuck!”
Faster, wilder, rhythm starting to break.
“Pump it in me, pump it in me…” Absolute need in her voice, a little sloshy from the water rushing past her mouth.
Then, him saying, “God, I’m so close… are you close?”
Dude, I think at him, you have to be able to tell she’s close — I can see it from here!
“Hush and gush, Daddy! Just squirt it and see what happens –”
“Fuck, Kellie!”
The big one: a pull way back, and then a ram up into her that, from the gasp she let out, must have hit exactly the spot she needed.
“Ahhh-h –” (I have never heard a more wonderful sound than my sister’s voice right then.) “– Dadddyyyyy… eee… THERE.”
And then they were both arching their backs, and the tile threw their single shared groan out to me in reverb, and the moment just froze while they made that noise, louder and louder over the drone of spraying water until my brain tricked me into thinking I could actually hear him spraying inside her.
And then Kellie laughed and turned her slick body in his grasp to grab him in her arms and kiss him and I could just barely for a second see his still-hard cock between them, angled and poking her lower belly.
And then my eyes went wide and I thought, Oh shit, I really better go!
But I didn’t, not quite, not yet, because… that kiss. It was all the passion you’ve ever seen in a movie sex kiss, but more, because it was also love — fast and frenzied but pure, and I could hear Kell whimpering as her lips devoured his, and it was so completely perfect that when I finally pulled back and made it to my room, I realized I had tears streaming down my cheeks and I had to cover my mouth to keep from sobbing with joy.
So many things made sense now. Why every one of Kell’s selfies from the third day of that camping trip showed her grinning like she just couldn’t stop. Why she’d ditched on her out-of-state private school scholarship and spent a year at community college before transferring to a local university. Why her IG posts all through college showed her hanging with plenty of hot guys but never said she was actually dating any of them. Why she told me lots of stories about hooking up, but every promising relationship “fell apart” before it got serious enough for her to bring anyone home to meet me and Dad. Why she pushed me so hard to go away to school, saying it would be good for me and she’d missed out on so much by not doing that herself — even, though, pretty obviously she’d been a hundred percent content with her life as a commuter student and also, really obviously, she’d really, really meant it when she said how much she would miss me once I finally decided to go.
And of course, why she hadn’t moved out after she got her degree. I mean, common enough these days, but I didn’t think she had that much student loan debt, and damn, I knew her job paid super well.
Sitting on my floor, just inside the door, I looked down at my phone, frozen where I’d stopped recording to scurry back to my room. Two perfect people with their perfect bodies fitting perfectly together in a perfect, ecstatic physical fusion.
That whole time, they’ve been doing this.
I heard the water shut off down the hall, heard their voices, low, and then laughter, not quite so low. The flap of a towel. I couldn’t make out the words, but they sounded so relaxed.
Because that was the other thing that had needed explaining this whole time. Except for the one, huge, horrible experience when I was ten and Kell was thirteen — and a couple of years afterward as we came to terms with what had happened — we had a happy family. A perfect family. We loved each other and we barely ever fought and when we did we got over it pretty quick. Even missing out on that camping trip, and sensing that vibe between them when they got back, it was nothing more than a learning experience. Don’t be a bitch and turn your nose up when you have a chance to spend time with these great people. And like I said, they were even nicer to me from then on than they’d been before.
But right along with the vibe, there were times when the two of them just felt… tense. I wrote it off as guilt that the trip had let them bond a little tighter without me, and maybe as the strain of them having to overcompensate and keep me from feeling left out. And a couple of times I even tried to talk to Kellie about it and tell her it was okay. That I knew she was a nudge closer to Dad now than I was, and that I didn’t mind. And she’d just roll her eyes and say I was imagining things, but I could hear something a little sad in her voice when she said it, and I certainly didn’t want to make her sad, so I dropped it.
But those voices from down the hall right now — there was no sadness or tension or guilt in them. They were free, and they didn’t have to worry. They could just be, and be happy.
And I’d have to be the worst person in the world to take that away from them, so I had to go back to school instead of dropping out.
And I had to sneak out of this house without them knowing I’d been here.
The question was, how?