Twice Loved
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 6: The Ax That Wasn’t
BRENT
I do not sleep.
I want to log that accurately, because I will be asked someday — I can already feel the version of this story where someone asks — and the answer is: not a minute. I lie on my bed fully dressed until two in the morning, running the tape. The catch. The crying. The cot. The kiss. The gasp. The drive home where my own steering wheel felt like it belonged to someone else.
Four words on my phone. We need to talk.
Everyone on earth knows what those four words mean. There is no recorded instance in human history of we need to talk preceding good news. She is going to end it — calmly, probably, with that terrifying composure, which will be worse than screaming — and the truly unbearable part is that she will be right to. I kissed her sister. In front of her. There is no defense file. I have searched for one all night and the folder is empty.
Worse: I cannot even promise it meant nothing, because at two in the morning, with nothing left to lose, a man gets honest. It did not mean nothing. I do not know what it meant. There is a region of this I have not been looking at — have been carefully, deliberately not looking at since roughly the kitchen floor in December — and last night my own body went around my back and looked at it for me, in a nurse’s office, with witnesses.
I draft eleven apologies into the typing window and delete all eleven, because every one of them is a lie of one kind or another, and I send: ok.
Ok. The condemned man confirms his appointment.
Wednesday after school, Parisa needed the library.
This was true, by the way — I want it understood that the library was not staging. She had a research paper for AP English and three weeks of careful catching-up behind it, and Wednesday was the day, seizure or no seizure, because Parisa’s response to her life detonating in a cafeteria was, naturally, to refuse to fall behind on her sources. So she claimed a table near the reference section, laid out her materials with surgical precision, and went to work.
And I — who had ridden along because that is what matched sets do, and who needed a quiet place anyway for a conversation I had been composing in my head for roughly eighteen hours — texted Brent one word: library.
He arrived in nine minutes. He must have driven straight from his house and parked badly.
I watched him come through the doors and scan for me, and I am not going to pretend there was no satisfaction in what I saw: Brent Saunders, eighteen years old, steady-handed in any actual emergency, hollow-eyed and gray with dread, walking toward what he believed was his execution. He had dressed slightly nicer than a Wednesday required. The condemned man had pressed his shirt.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey. Over here.”
I took him to a study table in the far corner — two chairs, good sightlines, far enough from the reference section that a quiet conversation would stay quiet. He sat down across from me like a man taking his seat at his own sentencing. He put his hands flat on the table. I recognized the gesture and filed it away with a pang: it was the same thing he did before delivering bad news to himself.
“Yasmin,” he started. “What happened yesterday — there’s no excuse for it, and I’m not going to insult you by—”
“Stop.”
He stopped.
“You don’t talk yet,” I said. “You listen. I have something to say, and it is going to take a while, and you are going to want to interrupt at least four times, and you are not going to. Can you do that?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “I can try,” he said. “That’s the most honest answer I have.”
Even on the gallows, that. I almost smiled and ruined everything.
“All right,” I said. “Here it is.”
“Look. I should have been more up front with you from the beginning, so what happened yesterday is on me as much as anyone. So let me be up front now.”
“My sister and I are inseparable. I don’t mean close. I mean inseparable — we have done every single thing in our lives together, by choice, since before we could talk. It is the truest fact about both of us, and it is permanent, and any future that involves me involves her. Full stop.”
“Her becoming epileptic changes everything. You’ve seen what it costs her — you saw it yesterday, you saw four hundred phones come out. You’ve also seen what almost nobody else has bothered to see, which is everything about her that is not the epilepsy.” I held his eyes. “And here is something I know in my heart, Brent, and have known for a while now, and yesterday only confirmed: I think you can be the guy for both of us. Despite her condition. Because of who you are. In fact she is safer with you in the picture — I have watched you catch her twice now, and I am telling you there is no version of her life with you in it where she hits the floor.”
His mouth opened. I raised one finger. It closed.
“We were raised around plural marriage. It is not exotic to us; it is an aunt and two uncles and half the weddings on my father’s side. I will tell you something I have told no one but Parisa: we would even break the rule against marrying sisters — yes, I know the rule, I have read the verse — because we cannot and do not and will not live separate lives. Not for religion, not for convention, not for any man. That is the standard. It has always been the standard. The only thing that changed yesterday is that I stopped waiting to say it out loud.”
I leaned forward.
“I really think you are special enough to love both of us. Both, Brent. Not me plus an obligation. Not her plus a fallback. Two whole loves, for two different women, who happen to share a face. I watched you kiss her yesterday. I gasped — you heard me gasp — and I need you to understand what that gasp was, because you have spent eighteen hours misreading it. It was not betrayal. It was recognition. You did, in one second, without thinking, the thing I had been trying to find the words to ask you for.”
The library hummed around us. Somewhere a cart of returns squeaked down an aisle.
“So that’s it,” I said. “All the cards, face up. Take us both — really take us, openly, both of us, and we find out together what that even looks like — or walk away whole, right now, no penalty, and I will think no less of you, because what I am asking for is enormous and most men are not built for it.” I sat back. “Now you can talk.”
He did not talk. Not at first. He sat there with his hands flat on the table and his green eyes moving across my face like a man rereading a paragraph to make sure it said what it said.
“You’re not breaking up with me,” he said finally.
“No.”
“You’re — “ He stopped. Started again. “I came here to be executed, Yasmin. I had a speech. It was mostly the word sorry arranged in different orders.”
“I know. I watched you carry it in. You pressed your shirt.”
He looked down at the shirt. He looked back up. And then the thing I had been waiting eighteen hours for — the honesty, the thing he could not help any more than he could help the kiss — came out of him quietly and all at once.
“I’m not sure I can do it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Handling one woman is a daunting task. One. I’ve been your boyfriend for not even three months and half the time I’m a step behind you. But two?” He shook his head slowly. “Two sisters. Two people’s hearts to not break. Twice the ways to fail. Everyone at school, both our families, your father — Yasmin, your father — and that’s before anyone says the word that comes after dating. I’d be signing up for something I don’t even know the shape of.”
“All true,” I said. “Is that everything?”
“No.” He took a breath. “Here’s the part I figured out at two in the morning, since we’re putting cards face up. I like you both. I have liked you both for a while — for different reasons, in different ways, and I’ve been telling myself the second one was something else. Concern. Responsibility. The doctor’s-son thing.” His jaw worked. “It isn’t. Yesterday proved it isn’t. You are — being with you is like being more awake. And she—” he glanced, involuntarily, toward the reference section, and lowered his voice, “— she looked up at me from that cot and I was kissing her before I knew I’d moved. That’s the truth. Both things are the truth at the same time, and until about ninety seconds ago I thought that made me the worst person in this building.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re telling me it makes me a candidate.” He laughed — one short, stunned breath of a laugh, scrubbing both hands down his face. “This is the strangest day of my life. And I held a seizure yesterday.”
“So,” I said. “What do you want to do?”
He was quiet for a moment. When he answered, his voice was steady again — the kitchen-floor voice, the one that arrived when things actually mattered.
“We could try it for a while,” he said. “See if it works. Honestly — openly — all three of us knowing what it is. No sneaking, no pretending she’s a tagalong, no lying to ourselves about what we’re doing. We try, and if it breaks, we say so out loud and nobody just disappears on anybody.” He put his hand out across the table, palm up. “That’s the best I’ve got. I can’t promise I’m the man you think I am. I can promise I’ll be honest about finding out.”
I looked at his open hand. I had run this conversation in my head a dozen times since yesterday, and not once — I will admit this — had I scripted his answer that well.
I put my hand in his.
“Then we try,” I said.
*** PARISA***
I am not getting any research done. I want the record to reflect that I tried.
I had two sources annotated when I looked up to rest my eyes and saw them — corner table, far side, Yasmin talking, Brent absolutely motionless, hands flat on the table like a man awaiting sentencing. And every neuron I own left the research paper at once and never came back.
Shit. Shit shit shit. She’s breaking up with him. Over the kiss. Over MY kiss — the one I didn’t ask for and refuse, absolutely refuse, to regret — and I am going to have to live the rest of my life knowing my first kiss cost my sister her—
Wait.
She’s not angry. I know every weather system that face produces and that is not anger — her hands are doing the laying-out-terms thing, the precise thing, the thing she does when she is building an argument brick by brick. That is a presentation. That is — oh my God.
Is she having THE TALK with him? The December talk? The one-husband talk? NOW? In the LIBRARY? Between the reference section and periodicals, my sister is proposing the entire rest of our lives—
I cannot hear a word. I am a hundred feet away behind a barricade of annotated sources and I cannot hear one single word, and I cannot stop watching, and I cannot be caught watching, so I am performing Scholarship at this table — turning a page now, very academic — while across the room two people decide what my whole future is going to be shaped like.
If this keeps up, I’m going to seize again. Kidding. KIDDING. It’s my brain; I’ll joke about it if I want to. It’s possibly the only thing keeping me from crawling under this table.
He just said something. Long. Now she’s listening — she’s actually listening, head tilted, not interrupting, which she does for approximately three humans on earth—
He put his hand out.
She took it.
Oh.
They’re standing up. They’re walking — they’re walking HERE. Look down. LOOK DOWN. You are a scholar. You are annotating. You have been annotating this same line for forty-five minutes, it is the most annotated line in the history of the written word—
We crossed the library together, Brent and I, and arrived at my sister’s table, where Parisa was bent over a source she had visibly not been reading, with the rigid studiousness of a woman who has watched the entire thing and would rather die than admit it.
She looked up with magnificent fake surprise. “Oh. Hey. Done talking?”
“Done talking,” I said.
She looked at me. She looked at Brent. She looked at our recently joined hands, now unjoined, and back up at our faces, and the fake surprise drained out of hers and left the real question sitting there, naked, the one she could not make herself ask.
So I answered it.
“Pack up your sources,” I said. “Our boyfriend is taking us home.”
I watched the word land. Our. One syllable, dropped as casually as I could manufacture, and I watched my sister — eighteen years in my shadow, fifty-one days into her diagnosis, one day past her first kiss — receive the entire future in a single possessive pronoun. The light bulb came on again, the one from the nurse’s office, glowing straight through her composure, and she turned to Brent for confirmation, and Brent — ears going red, standing there holding her book bag, which he had picked up without being asked, already — said:
“Ready when you are.”
Parisa opened her mouth. What came out, in a strangled whisper, was:
“I need the restroom first or I’m going to pee myself.”
And she was up and speed-walking toward the back of the library before either of us could react, one hand pressed to her face, leaving her boyfriend — her boyfriend, as of nine seconds ago — holding her book bag in the middle of the reference section.
Brent watched her go. He looked at the book bag. He looked at me.
“So that’s,” he said, “how the milestone moments are going to go, generally? In this arrangement?”
“Welcome to the matched set,” I said. “There are no refunds.”
He laughed — the real one, the whole one — and the reference librarian shushed us, and we stood there together in the periodicals section, shushed and grinning, waiting for the third of us to come back.
The drive home was four miles and almost completely silent, and it was the best drive of my life to that point.
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