I brace myself for 'the talk'

As it turned out, I had been right to believe that Charley wasn’t going to give up so easily.

I had arrived home on the Monday, so luckily after the slightly awkward first family dinner she was back to work the next day. But despite that, she was still going all out to try and pressure me into spending some quality family time with her. She suddenly began to message me every single day – a far cry from what I had adjusted back to – and ended up coming over to the house for dinner another two times after work. It took all the excuses of fatigue and fabricated plans with friends I could come up with to avoid her **** of suggestions.

But I knew it would get even more difficult once the weekend came, and I didn’t have ten hours of the day where I didn’t need to worry about her while she was at work. Sunday, I was good – I actually was meeting up with my friends that day, so I could get out of anything she suggested, even if she stayed at the house all day.

But I had to get through Saturday first. And I wasn’t feeling great about my chances.

The day began quietly enough, as I waited as long as possible to get out of bed, before immediately hopping on my PlayStation. But about an hour or so in, having not eaten anything since yesterday, I found myself aimlessly driving around Night City, debating whether it was worth risking running into my stepsister during the forty seconds it would take to rush downstairs and grab a snack from the kitchen.

It was almost (but not quite) a relief when I heard the knock at my door. I groaned inwardly as I paused the game, trying to steady my rapidly increasing heartrate and prepare myself for what was to come.

“Hey. Do you have a moment?” Charley strode in with her usual cheery demeanor, but after I looked up, I noticed that there was something different in her eyes that hadn’t been there the last few days. The realization didn’t do wonders for my quickening pulse. What the hell does she want now?

“Sorry, I’m kinda…” I gestured at my monitor, trying to clue her in that I was busy.

“Oh, that’s fine,” she said quickly. “It’s not important, I can wait.”

She was clearly being deliberately obtuse about the indication that I didn’t really want to talk to her. And at first, slightly unnerved by her determination, I resolved to just try and wait her out – hopefully getting to the point where she would say something like ‘Oh, I can see you don’t have time now, I’ll come back later’. And so, I carried on with my game while Charley sat on my bed behind me, watching in silence.

However, as the minutes dragged on, the awkwardness began to reach a point that it was overwhelming my desire to ignore her. I sighed, turning off my PlayStation and putting down my controller as I swung my chair around to face her. “Can I help you with something, Charley?”

“Oh! Right.” She was clearly nervous. Her eyes darted around, and her breath came quick and heavy.

She cleared her throat. “Hey, so I just remembered … we never actually got around to watching the rest of the Tarantino films last year. I know you’re not here for much longer, but we could knock out a couple before you head back. If you’re down?”

Judging from her demeanor, wanting to watch a film with me clearly wasn’t the reason she’d come in here, and I wasn’t really interested in foreplay. “Just say what you came in here to say.”

“Oh. Okay,” she replied, taken aback by my bluntness. She was silent for few moments, then breathed out hard. “I … I don’t like how things are between us now. I hate it.”

So. The big talk. I guess it should have been obvious this was coming. “Why?” I replied obtusely.

“You … you don’t know? You haven’t been very subtle about how hard you’re trying to avoid me. We don’t talk, we don’t spend any time together – nothing.”

“You haven’t seemed to have a problem with it the whole time I’ve been in Japan.”

“Okay, that’s fair,” she conceded. “I guess I just thought it would be better to cool off after things got a bit complicated over the Summer. But since you’ve been back, I … I’ve been trying. I truly don’t believe anything happened that was bad enough to turn our relationship into this. It feels like we’re estranged or something.”

Complicated. She really was something else. “This is what you wanted,” I said, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice.

“The hell it is,” she replied, making a face.

“You told me that the plan was always for us to go back to being a normal brother and sister once one of us found someone. Well Charley, this is us being our normal brotherly and sisterly selves. This is how it’s always been.”

She hesitated. “That’s not true.”

“No? Use that amazing brain of yours and think back to the two weeks a year you’d be back home while you were at Stanford. You’d spend pretty much all of it trekking around London with your thousands of friends. Us two? We’d make small talk and joke around a bit over kimchi stew for an hour or so with Mum and Dad, maybe run into each other while we were getting ready for bed, and that was it. And as for when you were away? We sent each other less than twenty texts over the four years, and half of that was birthday messages. Look through your call logs and you’ll find nothing. I don’t know where you got this idea that we've been super close over the past few years, but it definitely wasn’t from anything based in reality.”

She was silent for a few moments, and I could tell she knew I was right. “Okay … I guess,” she said slowly. “But we changed that over the Summer. And I don’t care what you say, that wasn’t because we were hooking up. It was great even without all that.”

“For someone so intelligent, you can really be quite dense sometimes. For fuck’s sake, all this change you’re talking about was not sibling bonding. No matter how much you vehemently deny it, it’s because it was becoming more than just sex – for both of us. Honestly, maybe it was from the beginning.” I was beginning to get heated, everything I’d been stewing over since the day she shot me down coming out all at once. “Anyone with some semblance of reason would be able to see that, but all you care about is your stupid fucking plan-”

“My plan isn’t stupid,” she interrupted sharply. When I looked over, I saw she was glaring at me. Her eyes glistened slightly.

I sighed again and shut my own eyes tight. “Charley, your goal of helping people with pancreatic cancer is amazing, and I’ll always be proud of you for it. No matter what happens between us. But this obsession of yours, your need to live every facet of life according to an arbitrary set of rules you came up with when you were thirteen – it’s silly, and it’s not sustainable. That’s not how life works.”

“It’s worked for me so far,” she muttered bitterly.

“Has it? Last Summer you spent two months sleeping with your stepbrother. In secret. And you were completely ready to carry on for who knows how long. Pretty sure that wasn’t on the original agenda.”

She shot me an accusatory glance. “That was all just you. And at the end, you were trying to get me to deviate way further than I had already.”

“Right. Okay.” I shrugged. “So why exactly are you in here, Charley? Clearly, I’m a bad influence. Get out of my room, stay away from me and carry on following your plan.”

“No,” she replied firmly. “I … I need you to be in my life.”

I did my best to push down the emotions that statement evoked. “Yeah, sorry, but that’s what I mean. You might be as close to it as they come, but people aren’t perfect. Shit happens; plans change. Believe me, I know – you’re not the only one who was affected by all of this.”

“Affected?” Charley echoed. She looked at me strangely for few moments, like she was trying to read me. “Are you still in love with me?” she asked quietly.

Oh, fuck off. With that, I’d had enough. I got up and brushed myself off, my head pounding like a drum as I briskly made my way towards the door.

“Seriously? You’re just gonna walk out?” she exclaimed from behind me.

“Looks that way, doesn’t it?” I retorted, spinning back around. My mind was so clouded with emotion by that point I wasn’t able to censor the words before they came out my mouth. “You want to know something really funny? I had feelings for you for a long, long time. Before last Summer, before we walked in on each other, before everything. Since I was eight and you were eleven, since the very first day we met, since Mum and Dad sat us down and told us we were going to be a family.”

Her eyes went wide, and she stiffened up, though I wasn’t sure whether it was just surprise, or she was genuinely freaked out. I couldn’t tell, and honestly in that moment I couldn’t care less.

“I put all of it on the line when I told you how I felt, and you eviscerated me. You chastised me like I was a child, like I was fucking asshole for hoping that the two of us could have a chance. If you honestly didn’t feel the same way, you could’ve let me down gently, you could’ve … you could have done a hundred different things that would have been better than what you did.”

I clasped my hands at the back of my head and shut my eyes tight. “Charley … I can’t do it. I’m not like you; I can’t just act a certain way with someone and ignore what I’m actually feeling, even if it’s for the best. Even before last Summer, it was excruciating. Now, it’s just impossible. Too much happened.” I breathed out hard. “I just can’t.”

I didn’t dare sneak another look at her after that. Instead, I found myself storming out the room, down the stairs, out the front door. I needed to get away from all this confusion, frustration. Somewhere I could be myself, but without all the baggage that now came with talking to my stepsister, the person who used to be easiest person for me to talk to in the world. I didn’t have a whole lot of options, in that regard. Just the one, in fact.

It was only natural then, I guess, that I found myself heading over to Max’s apartment.