Like Dragonflies, page 13
“Dad…” I utter under my breath. My heart aches for him now. “Does he know?” My eyes jerk to hers, tears begging to roll down my cheeks.
“Yes. He knows.” She sucks in a sharp breath and continues, “You can’t be seen with Mars anymore. You can’t talk to anyone else about him. If we keep quiet about this, then maybe it can just fade away and you can have a normal life.”
“I don’t want a normal life, Mom. I want Mars.” His name is the saddest song I’ve ever heard. I’m steeped in salty tears just at the mention of him.
“You can’t have him. He’s your brother. You two don’t have a future. It’s illegal, Sage. Do you know how that will look on your record? And you two can’t have children together. They’ll be…messed up. So what else is left?”
My heart is ash in my chest.
The only person I’ve ever loved is being pried from my grasp, and I can’t seem to stop it from happening.
“I did all of this for you. Your life would have been hell with a father like Nathan. He’s no good. I’m sure the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I’m doing you a favor. Just lie low and cut contact with Mars. It’ll all blow over. I know it hurts now, but you’ll be fine.” Mom has the nerve to offer me a smile before standing.
She has no idea how bad this hurts. She doesn’t care.
I wish I could be as empty as her.
Instead, I’m full of jagged pieces left behind from a shattered picture that used to be perfect.
I stare at the pictures in the corner of my room and I wish more than anything I had wings like a dragonfly. I wish I could fly away from the swirling shitstorm my life has become in a matter of hours.
Mars
Unfuckingreal.
This can’t be happening.
Anger burns in my gut. And disgust. I’m disgusted at myself—with us. How could this happen? How could we not know?
Her eyes.
All those times I’ve stared into her gorgeous green eyes.
His eyes.
Dad’s eyes.
Bile rises in my throat and furious tears threaten. Is the universe that fucking unfair it would do this to me? Have I not suffered a lifetime of heartache and the bottom of the shit barrel?
I almost fucked her.
I almost fucked…my sister.
A wave of nausea washes over me. I roll out of bed and stumble toward the bathroom. My stomach empties itself and I brush my teeth as tears of shame leak from my eyes. If Dad could see me now…crying over almost fucking my sister. I let out a roar of fury and smash my fist into the mirror. A burst of pain explodes across my knuckles as the shards hit the countertop. I back away from the destroyed mirror on a hunt for something to erase the madness in my mind.
Meth.
A cold snake of temptation coils in my belly. But then I think of Mom. How she travelled down that road when she was in despair. I don’t want to start down that road again because I don’t like where it ends. Instead, I take a page from Dad’s book and hunt for the bottle. He seems to find his answers there. Cruel, harsh answers, but answers nonetheless. I find a bottle of Wild Turkey and start drinking straight from the bottle. After making my way to my room, I sit in my closet on my shoes, pressing myself into the farthest corner. I hide behind coats and pants. The spot is one I thought made me safe from my father all those years.
Now?
Now I’m hiding from worse hurts.
Crushing, soul-shattering blows.
My chest aches with the realization of my situation, and I try desperately to burn it away with the liquor.
She’s my sister.
Not my lover. Not my girlfriend. Not my motherfucking soul mate.
My goddamn sister.
Same fucking blood.
With the heel of my hand, I grind away the wetness on my cheeks. Choked sounds of anguish rip from me. Just this once, I thought I had my happiness within my grasp. It felt too good to be true and I knew it, yet I chased after it anyway.
I was gonna love her forever.
A pang slices through my chest in agreement.
She was stolen from me. Because of my dad. This is all his fucking fault. The motherfucker needs to learn how to keep his dick in his pants or use a condom.
I want to kill him.
I want to kill everyone until there’s no one left but Sage and me.
Then it wouldn’t matter.
She’s the only person who gets me.
Sucking down more liquor, I try to drown those thoughts. I can’t murder everyone in the world, and I can’t fall in love with my sister. That’s not real life.
No, real life fucking hurts.
I wake in the dark, music rattling through the trailer. The bottle is still in my grip, but I’ve downed so much of it, everything is fuzzy and confusing. I can’t seem to pinpoint exactly what has my heart in pieces at my feet. I don’t want to know.
I crawl out of the closet with the bottle in my hand. Barely, I manage to climb to my feet. I guzzle down more of the liquid memory destroyer. It feels good. The burn. It makes it all disappear. I set the bottle down with a loud clunk on my bedside table. Then, I stumble out of the room toward the bathroom.
Dad coughs from the other room, and just like that, everything slams into me all at once.
She. She. She.
My Sage.
My dragonfly.
My fucking sister.
Someone belts out a deafening roar of rage. It’s me. I’m screaming as I wobble my way into the living room. As soon as Dad sees me, he rises from the couch.
Fuck, I can’t even look at him.
His mean eyes are the same color as hers.
“Are you fuckin’ drunk, boy?”
I charge him, swinging my fist. He’s drunk too, so he doesn’t dodge in time. We crash against the coffee table before hitting the floor. Pain from the fall slices up my back. I manage to punch his ribs, but he grips my throat, pinning me to the carpet. We struggle back and forth.
“You wasted no time moving on after Mom,” I bellow, my throat hoarse against the unforgiving way he clutches my throat.
As if being burned, he jerks his hand back. “What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”
Hot tears of anger scald down my temples. “You know, Dad. You fucking know.”
“You’re the only kid I have,” he argues, his voice shaky and unsure. Guilt is written all over his face that looks like hers.
“You and I both know that’s not true,” I scream back at him. “I saw the way you looked at her. You knew!”
“I don’t have to take this shit.” He grabs his keys from the bar and storms out of the house, slamming the door behind him.
I crawl my pathetic ass back to my bedroom before passing out on the floor of my closet again.
I stare at the ceiling, numbness creeping over my bones.
Days.
Days and days and days.
How many days have passed?
Too many. So many.
When I finally plug in my phone and check, I cringe to see that I’ve been in this booze-induced fog for almost a week. I missed work and school. I’m probably fired from both my jobs. I have countless voicemails from both places. Texts from Collette, Darcy, and Dave.
Nothing from Sage.
I’ll text you later.
I promised her and I failed her. Failed my sister.
Pain crushes my chest and my stupid ass can’t help but look through my pictures folder. I need to see her. Her pretty smile stops time the moment I see it. For one second, I allow myself to see my girl. Not my fucking sister, but my girl. I see her as I knew her: perfect and sweet and mine.
My fingers hover over her name. I want to text her. To apologize…for what? For being related to her?
A harsh laugh of disgust barks out of me.
We can’t be anything.
We can’t even be normal siblings because I’ll always remember how she tasted or how it felt when her hand was wrapped around my dick. As if on cue, my cock jolts to life.
A darkness I have no hope of ever seeing through washes over me. So black. So empty. So never-ending. It’s so fucking scary. It makes me wonder if the darkness stole my mother. Is this how she felt? Hopeless and dead inside. Is this what happens when despair makes you its victim? Will I ever climb from the pitch-black depths of my new, dark soul?
I think about the shards of glass in the bathroom.
The many bottles of alcohol stashed in this house.
How Nicky, three trailers down, will sell me whatever drug I want.
I think about stealing my dad’s truck and driving it straight into a fucking wall.
Dark. So fucking dark.
But then I think about her.
Her smile. Her laugh. Her smell.
The way her ears would turn pink and her paint-speckled knuckle would tap against her lips when she was nervous. Her adorable love for grunge music. My dragonfly.
Light.
She’s light in my dark world.
Like an addict desperate for his next hit, I wade out of the fog toward her. Out of the darkness and into her bright. I find her pictures on my phone. I kiss the screen and ache for her. Fuck, how I ache for her. With trembling fingers, I text her like I promised, even if only almost a week late.
Me: I’m sorry.
The phone goes dark as I wait for her reply. Shadows from the night crawl in on me. They suffocate me. My maddening thoughts are cloying clouds and I can’t breathe. I can’t fucking breathe.
My room lights up with her reply.
She chases it all away.
Sage: You have nothing to be sorry for. Please don’t shut me out.
The aching threatens to rip my heart in two. I’ve never hurt so badly in all my life. Maybe that’s why Mom did meth. Maybe she hurt like I do. Anything to numb the pain. But Mom didn’t have Sage. She had Dad.
Sage is a fixer.
Me: Can you talk?
My phone starts ringing the moment my text goes through. I stare at it as it rings. On the fifth ring, I answer.
“Hello?” I sound like I swallowed a handful of razorblades.
“Mars,” she whimpers.
The fierce need to chase away the hurt in her voice drives off all my disgust and lingering shadows. I grip my phone tight. “Sage.”
She sobs on the other end. Loud, ugly sobs. Her heart is broken, like mine. Her soul is shattered, like mine. Her existence is empty, like mine. As she cries, my own soul bleeds hot from the corners of my eyes and soaks my hair. My lip wobbles and my throat burns with my own barely choked down sob of despair.
“I can’t do this without you,” she murmurs.
“We can’t…we can’t be together.”
“Can’t we go back to Sage and Mars? Can’t we just be dragonflies again?”
I fucking wish.
“I don’t think so,” I whisper. “I’m not strong enough. I…I don’t know if I can handle being around you.”
“Because I’m disgusting to you now?” She sniffles. “Is that why?”
A growl of anger rips from me. “Fuck no,” I snarl. “You’re not disgusting. Our situation fucking sucks. The universe is a sick, sadistic pervert. But you? You’re everything right and beautiful in the world. That’s why I can’t be around you. You are that sweet glimmer of light I want so badly. It’s a temptation and a gift I’ll never have. It’s cruel to tease either one of us with it.”
“I can’t lose you,” she whispers. “I can’t.”
“You won’t,” I vow, feeling my promise down to my marrow.
“Then I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either.”
“By phone? Just Sage and Mars by phone?”
I let out a heavy sigh of relief. “Yeah. It’ll have to be enough. At this point, I’ll take what I can get. Talking to you makes this pain in my chest lessen. But seeing you? It’d rip back open and I can’t promise what that’d do to either one of us.”
“It’s enough,” she says in a fierce, teary voice. “It’s enough.”
I spend the next hour listening to her sniffle and breathe. As I memorize every single thing about her, I curse my very existence.
If there’s a master of this universe, one day I will find him and cut his fucking throat for this.
I so fucking will.
Sage
The colors on my canvas don’t look right. The greens are too dark and the blues are too muddy. Maybe it’s just the way I see things now.
Nothing is bright.
Instead of painting a lush lakeside, I end up throwing navy and plum on my palette. Soon, my brush is streaking through the muddled blue and dull green until it’s all covered. It looks like a night sky with all the deep swirls of color.
It looks like the night sky above the field Mars loves to go to when he needs to clear his mind. I wonder how many times he’s found himself there since finding out I’m his sister.
Tears prick my eyes and I set my brush down. Dark paint splashes across my knuckles. I don’t mind the splatter. It matches the way I feel on the inside.
How did I not see that we had the same unruly hair? How did I miss those gray flecks in his eyes? Why was I so quick to write off how we were the only two people in the world who clicked the way we did?
Well…maybe we weren’t the only people in the world who clicked, but it sure as hell felt that way. Whenever I was beside him, whenever my hand was tucked away in his, or his lips were on mine, it felt like we were the only people in the world.
My lips tremble every time I think about him. Every time I picture those denim blue eyes, my stomach turns into knots. Nausea smacks against me and I wrap my arms around myself.
I’m disgusting.
I know Mars is my brother. We share DNA and I still can’t stop myself from thinking about him in ways sisters should never think about their brothers. I can’t stop imagining the way his mouth felt on my neck or the way his fingers felt inside of me.
I need to focus on something else.
Anything else.
I throw my things in my black messenger bag and head downstairs. Dad walks through the front door. He’s wearing khakis and a polo shirt. He must have just come from the golf course.
He pauses when he sees me. Concern weighs the corners of his mouth down. “Hey, kiddo,” he greets and rubs my back a little as he walks past me. “Where you headed?” His brown eyes glance at my bag then back up at me.
“To study,” I tell him. I really just need to get out of my room. It doesn’t feel like my refuge anymore. It feels like a prison full of sour memories. I keep replaying the day Mom caught Mars and I right before we had sex.
The thought makes me burn with shame and I hold my head down. Dad has no idea what thoughts I’m torturing myself with, but he sighs as if he’s in my head. “I hate seeing you like this, Sage. You wanna talk about it?”
I think about Mom telling me not to talk about it. To just let it blow over. I shake my head and try to give him a small smile, but it falls flat on my lips.
“I’m fine, Dad. Just got a lot on my mind. That’s why I’m going to study. The best thing to do when my mind is foggy is study, right?” It sounds like some regurgitated bullshit my mother would say, but her bullshit is getting me through the toughest time of my life.
Maybe Mom wears that painted on smile for a reason?
I wonder if she’s in as much pain as I am right now. How is she even functioning?
Dad presses his lips into a tight line and nods. He doesn’t probe. He lets me go.
The entire time I walk to the Newman Building, I think of Mars. I tell myself I’m not thinking about him, but I know better. While I’m people watching and going over notes in the front of my mind, the back of my mind is running wild with thoughts of Mars.
My brother.
The pang of pain that cuts through me is brutal. For once, I’m glad it’s cold outside because nobody can tell my cheeks and nose are red because I’m holding back tears.
I walk into the library and inhale the warm air. It smells like books, ink, and leather inside. I find a table tucked away in the back and flop down in a chair.
Just like he can read my mind, Mars texts me.
Mars: How are you?
Something so simple has me grinning from ear to ear until I remember that he’s not my boyfriend. I shouldn’t be smiling over him because we can never be together.
I tap my bottom lip with my knuckle while I stare at his name on the screen for a few seconds.
Me: I’m fine.
I’d be better if you were here.
Me: Just studying.
Trying to get my mind off you.
I’m so pathetic. My heart is racing, watching those three dots jump.
Mars: Okay. Just checking. I’ll let you study.
My heart falls flat and I bite my bottom lip to keep from crying in the library. I don’t know how I’ll ever get anything done because my head is a cluttered mess. Even though I’ve pulled out my books and notes, I can’t retain an ounce of information.
Instead of finishing my assignments, I look at pictures of Mars on my phone, picking out every little detail that’s similar about us. I wonder if he’ll move on and end up with a girl who’s prettier than me.
Someone who’s not related to him.
A flash of anger heats my ears and the warmth finds my cheeks too. I can’t stand the thought of Mars with anyone but me. I’m perfect for him. He lights up around me, and I can feel happiness pouring from him when we’re together.
Mars deserves to be happy.
Mars deserves me.
My phone buzzes again and I perk up thinking it’s him. My excitement dies when I see it’s only Mom.
Mom: Don’t stay out too long. I thought we could all go out to Giovanni’s for dinner later on.
Me: Okay. I’ll come home in an hour.
Mom: You don’t have to stop anywhere. I got you a latte.
She sends me a picture of a coffee cup from another coffee shop. A coffee shop that isn’t The Grind House. It’s her way of telling me not to stop by and see Mars, but he’s not at work today anyway.
