My Stepbrother Came Home for the Anniversary, and I Didn't Know Him novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Take It Out on Me

He bent down and picked the duffel up off the floorboards, and I took it out of his hand.

"Kay," he said.

"Get in the car."

"I can't stay here. Not with them all..."

"I'm not asking you to stay," I said. "Get in the Subaru."

I walked him around the back of the garage so we wouldn't pass the tent.

I threw the duffel on the back seat and drove east on Congdon Boulevard with the heater roaring.

Neither of us said a word.

The lot at Brighton Beach was empty, and the lake was coming in on the rocks loud enough to hear through the glass.

I got out and walked down the path with my hands pulled up inside my sleeves.

I heard his boots behind me on the gravel, and then on the stone.

The shore there is flat shelves of black rock, wet with spray and stepped down to the water.

I stopped on the widest shelf, and he stopped a yard behind me.

"What are we doing?" he said.

"I don't know," I said.

"It's thirty-four degrees."

"I know what it is."

I turned around.

The wind took my braid and threw it across my face, and I let it stay there.

"For five years I told people my brother was a thief," I said.

He didn't answer.

"I told my friends at the clinic," I said. "I told a man next to me on a plane."

I had said it flat, as a fact, to anyone who asked.

"Kay..." he said.

I looked at his chest.

"I put my teeth in you. Three times. I put my nails in you and made you bleed, and you stood there and let me."

"You didn't know," he said.

"Then why did you let me?"

He looked at the lake, and the spray caught the light from the parking lot.

"It was the first time you'd touched me in five years," he said. "I'd have let you do worse."

I had been ready for a lot of answers, and I wasn't ready for that one.

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