Chapter 3

Hi everybody. This chapter should have been posted here next week, but given how much time has passed since my last update, I decided not to wait. Next chapter will be posted in my Patreon next week and here one week later.

Enjoy!

“What a shitty birthday,” Paul thought while looking at his food. He was in a small diner next to the building he was renting a room in. He had used one of the various message boards he frequented to find it. It wasn’t much, just big enough for a bed, a small bathroom, and a kitchenette, but it was cheap and, better yet, anonymous. He also had spent his morning opening a new bank account and transferring all the money from the savings account he had with his mother as co-holder. One of the perks of being a geek was that he had been coding for money since he was sixteen. And, since he didn’t date, he had no need to spend much of that money. So, he had several thousands available, which he expected to last for a while.

He had tried to cope with the disappointment, but, when his siblings started mocking him, he simply couldn’t bear with it. Emily teasing him with her breasts while reminding him how he would never touch them - or anybody else’s breasts, while at that - was simply too much.

He wondered again what was wrong with him. ‘A normal life’, his mom had said. As if his ‘normal’ life wasn’t bad enough, with bullies abusing him at school, knowing that he couldn’t count on his big brother to defend him while his own sister was part of the clique that loved to play humiliating pranks on him.

He had waited years to join the circle. To be able to touch and kiss those lovely female bodies, to be touched, to be able to look in a girl’s eyes while being in her. But no. His mom had decided those pleasures, shared by everybody else in his family, weren’t for him.

Normal life, indeed.

“Happy birthday to me ... happy birthday to me...” he started to sing quietly. Very soon, the words morphed to “I’m a loser, that’s right ... I’m a loser, that’s right ... I’m a loser, real loser, I’m a loser, that’s right.”

Having lost his appetite, he asked the waitress to box his food and returned to his room.

Before going to bed, he checked his emails and saw several from his mom. He trashed them unread, but there was one from his uncle John. The subject line simply said “We need to talk”.

Paul looked at the mail for a long time. Then he clicked on the “Delete” button.

Emily couldn’t sleep. Her aunt’s words kept haunting her: “What if my nephew is dead in a ditch somewhere?”

When she heard that, something came to her, something dark. Emily suddenly felt sick. She felt like she was drowning, a primal panic almost engulfed her. Her whole body had started to tremble. A sob escaped her lips, but no one seemed to hear it.

She was supposed to be at a sleepover with one of her fellow cheerleaders, but a sudden bout of high fever caused her friend’s mom to take her to the ER, forcing her to return home, where she arrived on time to overhear the last part of the meeting. She had used the back door, so nobody noticed she was already home.

She recovered and listened until the end, then tiptoed to her room, and fell asleep on her bed.

Suddenly she woke up in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat. Her nightmare was so vivid that it had unlocked a certain memory that she had buried in the deepest part of her mind for years. Her thoughts came back to a bright summer afternoon when she was fourteen years old. The entire family was spending their holiday at their lake house in Wildcat Lake. Following her family’s playtime at the little beach, she had decided to explore the surrounding area. She spent some time exploring until coming across a bank of lily pads in a little pond. She was drawn to their beauty and yearned to touch them. Since she was wearing her swimwear, she simply removed her sandals and strolled on the silky mud. Suddenly she slipped and discovered that the pond was far deeper than she had thought. Her whole body underwater, she attempted to swim out only to find her feet firmly embedded in the muck at the bottom. Out of desperation, she made futile attempts to extricate herself.

Emily trembled again, recalling the pain in her lungs and the agony that she had experienced. Just as she was about to pass out, a hand had grabbed her hair and jerked her violently out of the mud. Almost to the point of hysteria she opened her mouth to cry, but what she swallowed was clean air rather than soiled water. Only after they were both on solid land did she realize who had saved her.

Recalling the first words she heard following her ordeal, “It’s all right, sis, it’s all right,” brought tears to her eyes once more. “You’re safe now, hear? You’re safe.” She had glanced at Paul’s beaming face. He had seen her walk into the water and vanish from view. With no time to call an adult, he had sprinted and dived close to where her head had disappeared in the water, just on time to rescue her.

Afraid of being punished by her carelessness, she had never mentioned the incident to her parents. Ironically, Paul never mentioned it either. If any of them had done it, perhaps a counselor or a psychiatrist would have explained her later attitude towards her brother.

When such a trauma occurs, one of the most common defense mechanisms of the mind is to forget. In Emily’s case, she had buried the memory in the deepest recess of her mind. However, a person never truly forgets. For example, a child may forget that he has been bitten by a dog but will remain afraid of dogs for years, not knowing why. Unfortunately, in the case of Emily the anguish and pain she felt at that time were not dealt with, but instead unconsciously transferred to the other party in the incident, i. e. Paul. So from that moment on, she started to dislike him.

“How could I forget it? She wondered. “If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here today,” she chastised herself. “And how did I pay him back? by bullying and demeaning him.” It troubled her conscience. She had been saved by Paul. Any other sister, or even any stranger, would have been eternally in debt. Rather, she had quickly moved on from the incident and made a special effort to break her brother’s spirit.

She wasn’t happy with what she saw when she peered in the mirror.

Her mind was awash with images of Paul, of some of the pranks she and her friends played on him, of Shirley Blake’s laugh when he asked her out. Actually, that was also her doing. He would have never dared to do it if Emily hadn’t fibbed to him that Shirley had a secret crush on him.

“Needed it the most” she recalled again. Certainly, Emily and Mike didn’t need the circle. With her great body and his hunky good looks, they had no problem attracting partners. In fact, Mike was at his third girlfriend this year. And Paul was ... just Paul.

“Safe place ... accepted and loved...” Her uncle’s words resonated with her. Certainly, Paul had not gotten much of those. Why didn’t she defend her little brother when their cousin Lisa made that ‘Tubby’ comment? Why didn’t she mention all his good traits, like his intelligence and his good heart, and instead joined the nobody-likes-Paul fest?

She liked to think of herself as a good person. Now her actions belied that belief. “I failed him,” she repeated to herself. “I failed my little brother”. Silent tears ran down her cheeks until she fell asleep again.

The next morning, she was dozing in her bed. With her eyes closed, she heard her door opening, and felt Mike entering her room. “Hi”.

She opened her eyes and looked at him in silence.

“Em ... wanna fuck?”

“Sorry, I’m not in the mood,” she answered.