Too Close

Heather slipped into her room and made a beeline towards her bags, ignoring her cousin as he stalked in after her and closed the door tight behind him. He stared at Heather for a moment, watching her rummage through her belongings, unsure of where to begin. He wasn’t even offended or disgusted at her actions, it just felt weird and wrong, and as the one who had possibly set her on this path with their roleplaying, he felt something akin to accountability for Heather’s sexual desires towards her own father. But how do you even begin a conversation like that?

She looked up from the bag and looked at Kurt, frozen, with the deflated air mattress still under his arm. “Who’s that for?” she asked, wondering if Brandon had taken up her offer to stay at the cabin.

“Madison,” Kurt replied, a little out of it. “She’s bunking in the bedroom with me and Victoria.”

“Really?” Heather paused her search. “I thought she’d be sharing a room with Brandon.”

“I guess some people recognise the impracticality of becoming sexually involved with one’s family members,” he remarked pointedly.

Sighing, she surmised, “you know about me and my dad.”

“Damn right I know. Brandon let it slip, as well as the video of you sucking him off that Hannah has apparently,” Kurt growled, beginning to pace back and forth. “It’s just weird and inconceivable, it just sounds like it has to be a bad joke.”

“I’m surprised that you of all people are upset about this,” Heather noted, returning to looking through her bag. “And for the record, Madison is not one of those people who understand the difficulties of dating family members. I bet it wasn’t her idea to sleep in separate rooms.”

Kurt frowned, remembering that it had been Brandon who suggested that after Madison teased him about sharing a room. But that was really besides the point. “You think I’d be okay with it because we fucked? Or because we did some daddy daughter roleplaying? Ugh, all I can think of is how awkward it’s going to be seeing you and your dad at family events and having to pretend I don’t know what’s going on.”

“It’s great that you’ve got your priorities straight. You not feeling awkward is absolutely top of the list,” Heather scoffed, retrieving her laptop and lifting it out from her bag. It had been nearer the top but it seemed to have gotten pushed down by someone borrowing her clothes. Carrying the computer, she set it down on the bed, and sat before it, one knee on the bed, the other leg off the side. Looking up over the screen at Kurt as it booted up she said, “weren’t you the one that told me that closer is hotter?”

“Shit, Heather, I was just teasing,” Kurt admitted, running a hand through his hair. “Even if that is true, it’s different when it’s your own family. How would you feel if you found out that I was fucking your mum?”

“Great,” Heather chuckled. “Maybe she might lighten up and it’d get her off my ass.”

“Bad example,” Kurt relented, dismissing that option with a hand wave. “Ok, me and my mum. That’s a more direct parallel. Wouldn’t that be weird to you?”

“I dunno,” Heather’s eyes twinkled as she looked at her cousin. “Do you find your mum hot?”

“Oh no,” Kurt shook his head. “You’re not doing this to me.”

“I mean, you do seem to have a thing for older women. Like Jennifer White…” Heather teased, enjoying seeing Kurt so uncomfortable, such a change from his usually cool, laidback self.

“What?” Kurt’s eyes widened. “How do you know about Jennifer?”

“Oh, please, you came back from camp that year all mopey and you clammed shut anytime I even mentioned her name,” Heather explained simply before another idea struck her. “Oh, and you never did tell me what happened in that examination room with you and Zack’s mom. But I did see a nurse come away from that room, blushing.”

Kurt coughed and looked away from Heather’s raised eyebrows. He knew it wasn’t a threat. Heather wouldn’t go around blabbing about that just to keep him quiet. But even if he didn’t mind the touch of an experienced woman, that had nothing to do with his own mother. He’d never even thought about her that way at all. Not that she wasn’t beautiful; in his mind she was the older, prettier version of her sister, Brooke, Heather’s mom, but never in all his sexual exploits had he even considered his mother as a sexual partner. Not even a passion induced, mid-sex cry of ‘mummy’.

“Listen, if I put this in your head, then I’m sorry,” Kurt said, sitting on the end of the bed, on the other side of the laptop. “I was just teasing. I didn’t mean for you to take it seriously or give you ideas. If I’d known it’d turn out like this, I would never-”

“So, that’s what you think. Exactly how impressionable do you think I am?” Heather interrupted, more playful than angry. “This didn’t start with you, Kurt. It was already there inside me, from before I even stepped foot in his cabin this weekend…”

“The time you saw him getting out of the shower,” Kurt remembered the story, how he’d extracted it from her during the roleplay.

“That’s right. That was the first time I saw my father as a man, when the sexual feelings began to develop,” Heather confessed, her eyes glazing with a far-off distant look as she thought about her father and how close he’d recently come to fully having sex with her. “But, before even that, I was in love with him, the type of man he is, a good man, resilient and determined. No one understands me like he does, and no one understand him like me.”

“It’s is **** though,” Kurt noted as he felt a weight lift from his shoulder. “You can never tell anyone.”

“Boy, don’t I know it,” Heather agreed as she began typing at the laptop.

“And now that I know, I’ll have to keep the secret too,” Kurt lamented.

“You and everyone else when they find out what Hannah has done,” Heather reminded him. “In fact, Zack already knows and dare I say my potential half-brother took it better than you did.”

“That’s because he doesn’t have to see you and your father together,” Kurt said, frowning at the idea of Zack and Heather being siblings. For the longest time Heather had been an only child. It was odd to think of her as anything other than that.

“You know my dad rarely goes to family functions. Any time we’re together it’s because our mothers are meeting up, not my dad. So, really it unlikely you’ll have to see us and pretend, unless you see us on the news,” Heather paused to speak before returning to the document she was wording.

“You can never be together though,” Kurt reminded her. “Not really.”

“Brandon said the same thing about him and Madison, but we already are. In every way that really counts,” Heather argued softly. “I’m not so immature to believe I can change him or that he’ll change for me. My father has never been the monogamous, exclusive type, but so long as I’m number one, I don’t care who or what else he fills his time with.”

“How enlightened of you,” Kurt exhaled, cocking his head towards the door as he heard voices travelling down the hall.

“If you don’t mind, if that’s all, I have a company to save,” Heather dismissed him, focusing on her work.

“Yeah, sure,” Kurt agreed, himself distracted as he rose from the bed and moved to the door, the voices becoming clearer and louder as he inched the door open. “Is that someone shouting?”