up?”
“Fine, thank you,” I grumble as I take a sip of my coffee and walk towards the front door to step outside. The last thing I want is for Stassia to overhear any part of this conversation.
“Have you…”
“No! Seth, not every man thinks with his dick. My wife’s been dead two months; it took me a full year to sleep with someone after Tessa.”
“Times are different, man. When T died, you didn’t have the kind of access to women that you do now. Get with it, join an app and you can have a woman at your door in thirty minutes if you play your cards right.” He pauses. “Well, words. You know what I mean.”
“You’re almost thirty-five, aren’t you ready to grow up yet?”
“Excuse the fuck out of you, old man. I’m almost thirty-four, and don’t turn down your nose at me because you don’t know how to pick up women. Didn’t both Tessa and Angela have to make the first move, you pussy?”
“No,” I bark. Well…maybe Angela because, again, I was still mourning my first wife. Fucker.
“Uh, yes. Tessa was like your lab partner or you tutored her or some shit. Anyway, didn’t she plant a kiss on you out of nowhere?”
I smile at the memory. “Why do you remember that?”
“Because you talked about her that summer the whole. fucking. time.” I’m silent and he chuckles in response. “Exactly. Now listen, I am about to go into a meeting but I was thinking, I could come visit soon? I know I didn’t get to stick around much after the funeral and I feel like shit over it.”
“Don’t. I appreciate that you came at all,” I say, but I can hear the resentment in my voice implied toward my sister.
“Give Elle a break, Dom. She’s stressed the fuck out.”
“And I’m not? My wife died again. I have to deal with not only my feelings this time around but a very sensitive adolescent who just lost her mom.”
“How is Stassia anyway?”
I take a seat on the top stairs. “I think she’s okay. One day at a time. She’s sleeping right now.”
“Wait, she’s staying…with you still?”
“Yes?” Where else would she be? “This is her home.”
“I just figured she’d go stay with Angela’s parents. She was practically attached to her grandmother after the funeral.”
“They live kind of far and she wanted to be close to her friends and school when she went back.”
“Interesting.”
I know my brother; for him to say something is ‘interesting’ means he has a whole bunch of thoughts on the subject. “What?”
“That you have an eighteen-year-old that’s basically a younger, hotter version of your late wife living with you.”
“Watch your fucking mouth,” I bite out, but I’m not sure if I’m defending Angela in that moment or irritated that he referred to my stepdaughter as ‘hot,’ but I feel my blood boiling.
“Oh, don’t even hand me that shit. Stassia is a smoke show and that is a fact.”
“I’m fucking warning you. She’s my stepdaughter.” I feel the anger welling up inside of me. Anger that isn’t only directed at my brother, but also at myself. We’d smoked last night and I’m just now remembering a little piece of information I hadn’t been privy to.
She had a crush on me when she was younger?
I hadn’t been angry at that fact. She was ten and I was sweet to her while I courted her mother. I suppose there’s some understanding to that.
No, I’m angry at myself for the thought that flashed through my stoned mind no more than a moment later.
Does she still have a crush on me? Does she feel anything for me now that she’s older? Has that crush developed into something else over the years?
“Actually, ex-stepdaughter if you want to get technical?”
“I have to go,” I tell him. I don’t have time to get hung up on ‘technicalities.’ Stassia is off limits. Indefinitely. And I hate myself for even having to voice that unwritten rule. It should have been a given. A line in the sand I shouldn’t even be getting close to crossing. “Don’t come here because now I have to worry about you pushing up on the very vulnerable young woman that lives here, and I won’t have it.”
“Relax, D. I wouldn’t do anything to Stassi, mostly out of fear for my life.” He chuckles. “I’m more concerned with you, big bro. Men do interesting, and at times questionable, things in times of grief.”
“You forget I know how this works.”
“You forget you slept with Elle’s best