A Striing Resemblance

My little brother Jacob and I have always been close. Despite the fact that a gap of six years separates our ages, and we don't even have the same mother, we more or less grew up together and always got along splendidly. After my parents' divorce, my father married Jacob's mom, whom he'd been having an affair with, which is what broke the marriage up in the first place. She was already pregnant with Jacob when they got married, and I was so excited about being a big sister that the circumstances of his birth never poisoned me against him, or his mother. Besides, my mother was such a depressed, self-pitying woman that even at the tender age of six, I could readily understand why Daddy would want someone "more fun" for a wife instead. I spent weekends and summers with his new family, and they always made me feel quite welcome. Growing up, Jacob really looked up to me. When he was two I would dress him up girls clothes and put make-up on him like he was a giant live doll. When he was six or seven and I was old enough to baby-sit him, we'd go on adventures all around the neighborhood and play games of my own invention. When I learned to drive, I was happy to take him places with me in the car that was a gift from Daddy, and after I left for college I was happy to have him stay in my apartment for weekends, experiencing the loose life I'd become accustomed to. It was with me that he smoked his first blunt, and I introduced him to the girl he lost his virginity to. At age 14 or 15, it was the highlight of his life to be able to brag about his college adventures to all his high school friends.

After he went to college, we didn't talk quite as frequently. He was all the way on the other side of the country from where the rest of the family lived, so he only came home for Christmas, and I usually spent that with my mother. She was still alone, and still really bitter about the divorce even after all the years that had passed, so Jacob was never welcome at her place. And even though she depressed the hell out of me, I loved her and didn't want her to be alone on major holidays. After I finished college I got a great job, and my own place in a city just a few hours from where we grew up, so for Christmas I usually treated Mom to a vacation, like a cruise or something. Jacob and I exchanged emails at least once a month and occasionally had long phone conversations, but I hadn't actually seen him in person since he left for college, and we hadn't really gotten a chance to talk in a long time either.

That all changed when Mom surprised me one year. She announced out of the blue that she was spending Thanksgiving with a friend of hers that she met online. I was shocked that my mother had been "seeing" someone she met online, apparently for well over a year! She admitted to me that she was embarrassed about an internet love connection, but she had just gotten so lonely that she started using online dating sites without telling anyone. She had met this guy in person a bunch of times and was now planning to spend Thanksgiving with him and meet his kids. She promised me that she'd arrange an introduction with the two of us soon afterward, but in the meantime I was on my own for Thanksgiving. She sounded as happy and giddy as a schoolgirl. Imagine someone actually falling for my miserable old mother! I couldn't get over it.

So I called Daddy, and of course he and his wife were happy to have me over, even at the last minute. "Jacob will be here too. He hasn't been home for Thanksgiving since he started school, but he says he wants us to meet his girlfriend. It must be serious; he's never brought a girl home before. So it's nice that she'll meet the whole family at once."

I was very, very curious to meet the girl who had won Jacob's heart. His emails seemed to indicate that he was having far too much fun sleeping around in college to get serious about anyone. But of course he was older now. Already a senior, getting ready to turn 22 soon. Maybe his wild days were behind him. And more than anything I was excited to see him again, finally. Had it really been three whole years? Amazing how time flew. I couldn't believe I had let so much time go by without seeing my beloved baby brother. I felt guilty for being so busy with my job and my life that I hadn't even flown out to visit him once.

I dressed up a little for Thanksgiving dinner because Daddy and his wife have always been a little more formal than me and mom. My magenta slip dress was tasteful but definitely showed off my assets a little too. I was proud of my full breasts, firmly nestled in their C-cup bra, my firm ass and my long legs, so I scarcely owned any clothes that hid them. I was planning to stay the night in my old room, which still held some of my childhood things, so I had a duffel bag with me as well. I wanted to be able to spend plenty of time with my family and not have to worry about getting home that same night. I had the long weekend off, so I didn't have to worry about missing work.

When I arrived, Jacob wasn't in yet. Daddy had gone to pick him and his girlfriend up at the airport. So I hugged Laine, Jacob's mom, and gave her the bottle of wine I'd brought over. I sat talking to her and her parents for about fifteen minutes while we waited for the rest of the group. Jacob's grandparents are incredibly nice people, and have always treated me sort of like a grand daughter too, when they see me. His grandpa is always pinching my cheeks and asking me when I'm going to let some man "snap me up."

When we heard keys in the front door lock, we all got up to greet Daddy, Jacob and the mystery girl. Everyone was poised and ready to smile and welcome her to our home, but we were in for a bit of a surprise.

The door flew open and Daddy said, "Hi everyone!" in a tone of voice that sounded like he was struggling to be cheerful. Jacob was right behind him. "Sis!" he called happily, and I was so happy to finally see him that I had eyes for no one but him. I flew into his arms and we hugged each other like crazy. He picked me up and spun me around, making me laugh. He was so much taller than I remembered, easily half a foot higher than my petite 5'6". His golden-brown hair had grown out longer, and was brushed back in full waves that touched the collar of his preppy polo shirt. His blue eyes were alight with happiness just as they always were when I saw him, ever since he was a baby. "You look great," he said sincerely as he kissed me full on the lips. He had never done that before, and it both surprised and rather pleased me. "I was so happy when Dad told me you'd be here. It's really great to see you."

We were so wrapped up in greeting each other that we barely noticed how quiet the rest of the room was. When we finally broke apart, I remembered that there was a third person who had just entered the room, and eagerly looked around to finally see Jacob's girlfriend.

I think my jaw dropped. It must have. Everyone was staring from her to me, and his grandparents were whispering to themselves even as his mother tried to make small talk with her and his father busied himself putting luggage away. "This is Abigail," Jacob said to the room in general. "Abigail, meet my sister, Anastasia." Then he went to hug his mom and grandparents, leaving me to stare openly at a girl who could have been my clone.

We both had the same strawberry-blonde hair and wide blue eyes with dark lashes. We were obviously around the same height, although she was wearing flat sneakers and I was wearing heels. Her bust, build and figure were basically the same, but it was in the face that we could have passed for each other. Her mouth and mine were both wide and full-lipped, our noses were both slightly upturned at the tip. We both had a similar dusting of pale freckles across our noses and cheeks, though I was wearing make-up, so mine might not have been visible. Jesus, this girl looked like my TWIN!

Abigail also seemed taken aback and uncomfortable. She kept darting glances at Jacob, as if wondering why he never bothered to tell her that she was the spitting image of his older sister. I tried to cover the awkward moment by finally getting my jaw up off the floor and speaking to her. "Hi!" I said, forcing myself to sound bright and cheerful, and not as weirded out as I actually was. "Well, it's nice to meet you. Strangely enough, you remind me of someone I might have met before."

She forced out a shaky little laugh, and we briefly shook hands as Daddy re-entered the room. "Well, why don't we all have some wine and some appetizers? I think the turkey still needs another hour or so, and then we can start in on dinner." His voice was also bright and almost falsely cheery. He crossed over to walk me into the dining room, planting a kiss on top of my head. "It's good to see you Pumpkin," he said. And then, more quietly, "Jacob doesn't seem to have any idea about the resemblance, as crazy as that seems. I'm no shrink, but it seems like deliberate denial on his part, if anything. So let's not bother him about it, all right? I don't want to freak him out." I just nodded, too stunned to reply. How could Jacob NOT see this?

We sat down in the living room and ate appetizers while we tried to have a conversation that both ignored the giant elephant in the room and avoided ganging up on Abigail with questions about herself. Unfortunately, she didn't have much help from Jacob in that department. Even though he was sitting next to her on the love seat, we hadn't seen each other in so long that he directed most of his attentions to me, and I to him. I wanted to hear as much about college as he could decently tell me in front of his parents.

Once the food was ready we all sat down to an amazing meal. My mother and I usually spend Thanksgiving at a restaurant somewhere, so I hadn't had a traditional meal in years. Abigail again sat next to Jacob, but he still wasn't paying her a lot of attention. When I spared some notice for her, she appeared to be drinking a lot. She had at least three glasses of wine even before we sat down to dinner, and I saw her drink at least another three during the dinner itself. And after dinner, when Daddy politely offered brandy to everyone to go with our blackberry pie, she tentatively accepted. It was as if she was trying to drink her obvious discomfort away.

After we all left the table and Jacob's grandparents went home and his parents shooed us away from helping with the clean-up, Jacob and I decided it would be fun to bust out the old photo albums. He laughed a great deal as we showed Abigail all the crazy pictures of him dressed up like a girl when he was a toddler, and plenty of the two of us playing around as kids. She didn't have much to say.

Finally, she excused herself. She said she was jet-lagged and wanted to sleep early. All that alcohol and food probably played a large part in her fatigue, not to mention the shock of meeting me for the first time. I smiled politely and somewhat sympathetically at her. In many ways, it was probably an even stranger evening for her than it had been for me. Sitting across from your mirror image all night is just plain disconcerting, and about the only words she'd said directly to me after our initial greeting was that she liked my dress. So apparently we had the same fashion taste, too.

After Abigail went to bed, Daddy and Laine came back in to talk with us for awhile, then finally went to bed themselves, leaving Jacob and I alone in the living room. I barely waited for the sound of their door shutting upstairs before I pounced. "Okay, Jacob — what the HELL? Daddy didn't want me saying anything in front of Abigail, but come on! There's no WAY you don't see that resemblance."

To my surprise, Jacob laughed. "I knew you wouldn't be able to resist saying something. Come on, let's not talk here," he said, standing up and inclining his head toward the downstairs guest room, where Abigail was staying. "Let's go to the tree house."

I rolled my eyes but followed him out the back door. He paused to scoop up the brandy bottle and a couple of glasses on our way through the kitchen, and passed them up to me to hold once I had climbed the ladder to his childhood tree house, which he and Daddy had built together in the biggest tree at the far edge of the backyard, where any noise he and his friends made wouldn't bother the people in the house. He followed me up the ladder and lit the little battery-operated lantern that still worked, though its light was feeble. "God I haven't been up here in ages," he said as he poured us both a generous helping of the brandy.

"Don't even think about changing the subject," I warned him as I accepted mine. He chuckled, and his eyes crinkled up at the corners in the way I always remembered. Mine did the same thing; we both got it from Daddy. I wondered suddenly if Abigail's did too.

"So why didn't you say anything before now?" Jacob asked after a sip of his drink. "Did Dad tell you not to?"

"Right in one," I replied. "He claims you don't know about the resemblance because you're in psychological denial or something — which is bullshit! There's no way you can't have noticed this."

Jacob laughed again. He always had such a great laugh, and now it was really deepening with his departure from adolescence into real manhood. "Of course I knew it. Dad's the one in denial. I told him while Abigail was in the bathroom at the airport that I think she's absolutely gorgeous — just like you."

"Okay but Jacob, you said the two of you have been dating for six months now. I assume you're sleeping with her. So isn't it weird to be intimate with a girl who looks exactly identical to your sister?"

"No," Jacob said softly. "Here, let me show you something." He stood up slightly and pulled his iPhone out of his back pocket, careful not to hit his head on the low ceiling of the tree house. He turned it on and its bright light filled the space while he accessed the application he wanted. He sat down again right beside me so that I could see the screen too. It was on a photo album, and he used his thumb to scroll through the photos as he showed them to me.

"This is Lisa. We dated freshman year. I met her at orientation." Lisa had dark red hair and green eyes, but something about her facial expression resembled mine and the noses were similar. "She has your smile, see?" Jacob said, pointing to her full-lipped mouth. Then he went to the next photo. "I left her for Jade," he said, indicating a picture of a laughing girl with light red hair and blue eyes framed by dark lashes. "You can't tell in this picture, but she sounds almost exactly like you when she talks. She didn't go to my school; I met her at some party. But I loved talking to her on the phone." He clicked over to the next photo. "This is Heather. Sophomore year. She had curly blonde hair when I met her, but I convinced her to dye her hair, straighten it, and trade in her glasses for contacts. We were together for like five months, but her personality could never come close to the looks. So I had to let her go." Whatever Heather looked like before Jacob's makeover was unclear because in the picture on his phone, she looked almost as much like me as Abigail did, but her expression was harder, her nose a little wider and her lips much thinner. "After Heather, I was with a bunch of random chicks. People on campus started calling me the Ginger-Snap because I mostly went for redheads. But apart from hair color, it was tough to find anyone else who really fit the bill. Something major was always off, you know? I met a couple of chicks who were a lot like you personality-wise but they didn't look like you at all. And you can't exactly tell a college girl to go get a nose job and liposuction and some Botox injections, you know? Last year I almost gave it up. The closest I could come was this Black girl, Regina. She was so much like you in personality that it was uncanny, and her ass was equally awesome. But I figured I'd never find someone who fit both looks AND personality. And then this summer, in walks a transfer student to my history class and I finally thought, here she is. She's a little quieter than you, and not as funny. I mean, she'll never be you. I know that. No one can ever be you. But she's damn close. When I met her, she was wearing her hair short but I convinced her to grow it out. Now we just have to work on the wardrobe. Soon she'll be perfect . . . just like you."

This entire time, I hadn't been able to come up with anything to say. I mean, what was I SUPPOSED to say?? It was flattering, very flattering. But Jacob was no virgin as I well knew. In fact, I realized with a sudden gulp, the freshman I hooked him up with when he was 15 had been a tiny little thing with fine red hair and blue eyes. Complete coincidence, right? Wrong, I thought as the details came back to me. Jacob had seen her in the dining hall and suddenly became very interested in her. So of course my friends and I made friends with her — she'd been delighted to have senior friends. And not at all displeased about being paired up with my awkward but adorable teenaged brother later on. Then again, she'd been pretty high at the time herself, so who knew.

The point is, Jacob had apparently been deliberately seeking out and dating or at least fucking girls who looked as much like me as possible. Wasn't that weird? Shouldn't I be freaking out? Why wasn't I freaking out? Why was I kind of . . . turned on??

I covered the long silence by taking a giant gulp of my brandy, and it burned its way down my throat, making me cough. Jacob pounded me on the back, smiling in a crooked, knowing way at me as the light on his phone went out. "Are you all right 'Stasia?"

"Uh . . . yeah. Thanks, I guess. I don't really know what to say, Jacob. I mean . . . why would you want to sleep with girls who look like your sister? Isn't it . . . well, isn't it weird?"

I had already asked him that question, and he had already answered it. I felt foolish, but I was no fool. I already knew what he was going to say, didn't I? I had to know. I had to. I knew Jacob better than anyone, had known him since he was born. I stared into his blue eyes, so like my own, so like Abigail's. I looked at him in the dim lantern light, slightly breathless. Suddenly it was like I didn't know him at all. It was as if some handsome stranger had taken the place of the baby brother I had always loved to distraction. Surely only a stranger would be looking at me the way Jacob was looking at me now. Only a stranger's hands would have set down his phone and his empty glass, then gently taken mine away too. Only a stranger's face would be slowly coming towards my own, and only a stranger's lips would be kissing my mouth with such gentle but firm, erotic insistence.

I responded to the kiss because I knew the kiss was his answer. It would have been rude not to respond after he was polite enough to answer my question, right? I couldn't help but laugh softly at my own ludicrous justifications.

"See?" Jacob murmured. "This is why I love you. Even now you find something you can laugh about. You have the best laugh in the world, you know that? No other girl's laugh has ever come close to it." He kissed me again, this time with such force that he pressed my entire body up against the rough tree house wall. I felt myself loosening inside, spinning the way I do when my passions are ignited. Voices rang in the back of my head. What was I doing? Jacob was my brother! This was insane! With great effort, I forced myself to break away from his amazing kiss and actually stood up. Unlike him, I was short enough to stand at my full height.

"Jacob, this is wrong, you know it's wrong. I won't deny that I let myself get carried away there, for a minute but . . . but we can't do this. I mean come on, I've helped change your diapers."