Nine years eight months two weeks and three days. That's the gap that separated Walker from his newly turned eighteen year old little sister, Splenda. Luckily for her, her name was actually Gabriella, nickname having been coined by their diabetic father who found her 'most artificially sweet' whenever there was something she badly wanted.She wasn't spoilt, she just knew how to bend people to her will with sweetness.
And Walker should know, she'd used those talents on him more than once to her advantage, the last of which being getting him to agree with letting her live with him over a thousand miles away fromt heir parents so she could attend what she called 'the only performing arts high school in the country with an irish step-dancing course'. It was this goofy reason she said that formed her decision on transferring to Crestridge for her senior year, but Carol their mom had confided that she believed Gabby had secretly wanted to be near him.
It wasn't completely far fetched. Their age difference had meant that he's been away from her for almost as long they'd lived together. And since they'd maintained a very amicable relationship regardless, it wasn't at all questionable that she'd want to spend time with him.
But a part of him, a part he wished didn't exist, wished that it were... farfetched that is. It wished she'd had a whole other reason fro wanting to be with him than the filial.
In the three months since she'd carted her belongings int o his second bedroom he had devised way s to squelch his newly developed, unwanted urges hwere she was concerned. Too bad none of them were working now. And all she was doing was sitting beside him on his living room sofa, studying form her notebook, red hair tied up neatly in a bow at the nape of her neck. He could tell from hwere he was, sitting all the way back, laptop where its name allowed, that she was lightly biting on her pink lips. Just the thought of that made him guilty as sin for knowing every detail about those lips save how they tasted.
Let's backtrack a bit, for it's not easy to describe these feelings without first telling their origins. Walker left home for college a newly minted seventeen year old, being accepted to an ivy league university with a full scholarship to pursue law was too much to say no to. So he moved across the country then, still a minor but so mature and trusted by his parents that their was little need for their concern. Perhaps they should have been though as Walker had fallen into the same trap most newly emancipated do upon entering college, regardless of their high I.Q.'s. He promptly immersed himself in the parties and sex he had kept at bay for schoolwork in high school.
He immersed himself so completely that he became known as "Walker the Keger Stalker" to his buddies and "Walker the Pussy Stalker" to the ladies. Resulting in the very real possibility of him nearly losing his scholarship, which wouldn't have been too awful as his parents would have been able to finance him. But when his very spot at the school became threatened, supposedly by the delineation of his grades, but really because of his dalliance with the Dean's wife, he'd been snapped awake, and was barely able to correct the problem before his parent's heard word.
When gone was the excessive partying and sex, Walker realized that he'd never really been 'That Guy', he wasn't the dumb ass at the party who didn't know how to stop. He'd worked out a balance, maintaining his friends and his work was an easier thing when he had his priorities straight.
His time at university and later on, on his own, was interspersed with holiday trips home, and once when Gabby had turned sixteen, a family trip to Morocco. It was that which had started his unholy fascination. After graduation, Walker had moved to New York to start an internship with a well established law firm, further widening the gap between him and his folks. With his father Thomas Pantry being a ridiculously successful heart surgeon, and his mother, Carol, the devoted wife who loathed to leave her husband's side, their visits had become fewer and further in between. So little Splenda, as sweet as something derived from sugar could be, had demanded that everyone found a week, the week that brought her birthday to take her on a trip.
Her parents had been inarguably won over by her defense that it would take less money for them to do that than to throw her one of those exorbitant sweet sixteen parties that were fast becoming a law buying her a ridiculously inappropriate car where the ribbon that would wrap it would cost more than the shots she would need for the trip.
Walker had needed less coercion, he'd already been too long away from them and the holiday would do him good. And so for six days Walker witnessed his budding kid sister practicing her wiles we 'ere she could, including on him. He had at first taken it for what it was, Gabby testing the waters of her womanhood, the sweeping looks from under her brow, and the unprovoked, ergo sultry pout just test runs for the real thing. But somewhere along the line his wires had crossed, no longer was he merely amused by her attention, he'd developed a rating system for how effective each of her little tricks were, and he'd be forever damned because of the scale by which he judged them.
He'd seen her three times over the next three years, and that had only strengthened his unnatural attraction, and now after three months of living with her, dropping her to school every morning, breathing the same air as she, it was no wonder he couldn't stop thinking about undoing her copper hair to test for himself how silky it was. And that just wouldn't do. He had absolutely no intention of ever compromising their relationship. He just needed to hold out for however long it would take for this strange period to pass.
Anyway, he had distractions, he thought, reminding himself to look instead at his computer screen. Work now was for the defense of his usual type of clients. Rich wall-street types who were more often guilty than not. And there was Lori, or Tiffany or Sonia and if he so decided, since she was already dropping all the hints, Rachel.
He had the means to keep his mind busy... save in those moments. She was right beside him, and he could smell her shampoo, vanilla and nutmegs. So unlike the strawberries and melons other girls used.
"Walker?" she broke him from his thoughts.
"Hmm?" He asked.
"Is there a law against how much homework teachers are allowed to assign over the weekend?"
"Not that I know of," he said with a chuckle.
"Well, there should be."
"But you do it anyway," he pointed out, dropping his hand before he could touch her fat braid.
"Because I have to. The system is set up for me to fail if I don't," she turned to him, focusing her blue-eyed attention. "So I have no choice but to brave the severe neck pain caused by my hunching over my books for hours on end." And then, from under her brow, one of her looks.
"Will you rub it for me?"
