"I love you too, Mel," Denny said.
"Good," she simply replied, "And you know what? What I said about last night being a drunken mistake? I take that back. I have no regrets. No regrets at all."
He just smiled at her, gave her a wink and backed off from the driveway. She waved as he drove off. A turn around the block and he was gone. Denny was gone again.
II. GOOD OLD DAYS
Denny and Melissa had always been close. Born just ten months after her brother, she was a testimony to her parents' eagerness to do grown-up things together. Even with a demanding, screaming poop machine in the house, they had managed to get Denny's mom pregnant again in just a few weeks.
The two siblings had managed to collect the best chromosomes out of their parent's gene pool, and two decades later they were both striking displays of what evolution can do. Melissa's semi blonde hair, cute round face and big, green eyes were carried by a nicely curved body with smooth, toned skin that hinted she took great care of it. All those were attributes that she had gradually become aware of during her teens. At first it made her uneasy to suddenly be the focus of boys' attention all of the time, but that soon changed, and Melissa had eventually become quite the little tease. Not that she was a shameless skank or anything. Proper enough to not offend anyone, and not really a part of the most central in-clique at school either. She just knew how to move and what to say to make boys do whatever she wanted.
But she her mother had taught her enough sensibility to keep the hormone pumped teenagers at bay. It wasn't up until the summer after High School that she finally gave up her virginity to what she thought was the love of her life. He then repaid the favor by sleeping with one of her best friends at a party two weeks later. As the saying goes, "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Revenge had been sweet, both for Melissa and her friend, who had been equally duped by that bad case of Don Juan wannabe.
Revenge had also included her brother Denny beating the living shit out of the poor sod. Brute force was one thing that Denny was good at. His life was sports, especially boxing and a whole collection of martial arts. Getting into a fight with him meant you would lose, unless, perhaps, your name was Mike Tyson. But it would be a close call. And Denny would do anything for Melissa.
The two had practically been best friends since the day Mommy had come home from the hospital and held up the little bundle in front of the almost as small Denny and said, "Denny, meet your sister. Her name is Melissa."
After a few weeks, one could not take a nap if the other one was not there too. And as weeks turned into months, and months turned into years, the two of them were inseparable. Denny always the protective one, catering his sister's needs and shielding her from everything from sharp edged furniture to other kids in the sand box.
Of course, years turning into decades changed things. No more sharing clothes or bed, and their interests drifted off in different directions. But there remained that special link, a sense of comfort to be around each other. And despite the occasional falling-out over this or that issue, they remained allies against the world through the whole of the shaky teenage years.
After High School, Denny got a job at the gym where he used to box. Since he never left the "promising" stage, he decided to call it quits before his brain was punched to ground beef. So now he trained kids instead. This is not to say that he was slacking off. Denny without a shirt on still looked like an old German Nazi poster of the perfect Arian. Blond, buff, that perfect Colgate smile and that utterly camp hairdo. The hair was cut simply to be kept out of the way because, unlike his sister, he didn't give the first damn about his appearance. He dressed in whatever was clean and at school he felt more at home with the geek squad than with his football teammates and fellow boxers.
The dating game was not high up on his list of interests. He'd been going steady with the same girl since Junior High, but their relationship was more of a charade between two friends to keep their other friends from trying to hook them up all the time. She was Catholic and a firm believer in a wedding night debut, so Denny was not getting laid either. Nor did he care to.
Anyway, the assault on the jerk that had finally nagged Melissa into opening up her thighs might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but their dad thought otherwise. To tell the truth it wasn't the first time that Denny had gotten into trouble. Being good at fighting meant that he seldom backed down from a fight, and in a typical late teenage world there sure was enough opportunity for trouble. To tell the truth, it was because he won that it looked like he was violent. But he figured that if he didn't give the other guy a black eye, he'd end up with one. Regardless, his dad decided that that was the last straw, and he sat down to have a long and serious talk with his son. The result was that Denny was going to sign up for armed service. That would teach him some self discipline, his father reasoned.
Denny put up a small show of protest just to make his dad believe that it was a suitable punishment. The fact that he had planned to enlist after the summer anyway was something that he only told Melissa.
"I can't go on like a redneck, dealing with stuff with these all the time," he had said showing his fists. "I got to grow up, Mel."
"I guess so," Melissa said somberly.
"Come on. Don't go grumpy on me. I'll stay in touch."
"I guess so," she repeated, but she didn't quite believe in it.
It was a sudden and big change in Melissa's life. In just a couple of weeks, Denny would be gone. The one person in the world that defined home to her more than anyone, the one that was closest and dearest to her would, all of a sudden, be hundreds of miles away. Nobody to banter with over the breakfast table, nobody to whine about homework with, nobody to have a good cry at when her hormones went haywire every once in a while. It would be empty.
And it was. He walked out one morning in August with a packed bag and that reassuring smile on his lips. And not even a long, tight hug and a kiss on her forehead could do anything about that hollow, gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Two years is a long time, and in the life a young woman without something to grasp onto, a lot of things can happen. In the wake of her brother first leaving, and then as his calls and letters eventually got fewer and fewer, Melissa tried to fill the space with a string of more or less failed dates and romances. They were mostly decent guys, but not even decent guys can make a relationship work unless both parties have their hearts fully into it.
Still, she learned a lot from this parade of men. Her emotional attachment and engagement may have been faltering, but she made up for it in terms of physical dedication. The reactions from guys that she had always gotten with a seductive glance and a bit of exposed skin was increased tenfold with the addition of an exposed nipple, an eager pussy and a skilled blowjob. After losing her cherry in that most unglamorous way, she had adapted a what-the-hell attitude towards sex. It was there, it was undramatized and it was hers at the bat of an eyelid. She quickly learned what made their easily led libidos quiver, and also a whole lot about her own pleasure buttons. How to push them herself and how to make her lovers push them for her.
No, it was neither lack of sexual abilities, nor lack of enthusiasm, that caused boyfriend after boyfriend to give up on her. Believe it or not, contrary to the popular cliché, most guys want more than sex out of a relationship. So in the end, she gave up on the idea of finding a soul partner, and aimed for nothing but one-nighters and a few reliable fuck buddies. She wasn't exactly unhappy with that arrangement. The Denny shaped hole was still present in the back of her head, but she learned to cope with not having him around. There were plenty of friends, a set of not too dumb parents, and her dad had a friend who set her up with a good retail job. Life was not great, but if OK was what she'd get, OK would have to do.
When Denny finally stood on his family's front porch, it had been twenty-two months, almost two years, since she had seen his face. Stationed far off on another coast, holiday visits had been quite impossible, and as he had explained in a letter, the less leaves he took, the faster he'd be back home for good.
There had been a knock on the door. A polite little tap-tap-tap, as if it wasn't his home at all. Melissa, who was the only one home, couldn't for a second believe that her brother would knock on his own door. She knew he was on his way of course, but it was with a slight annoyance over having to turn the radio down that she went and opened the door, ready for whatever salesman or evangelist nutjob she'd have to ward off this time.
"Hello, sis," said the evangelist nutjob outside and flashed her a big grin.
This particular nut was hauntingly familiar. In casual travel uniform and a three-day shave he actually had Melissa's synapses fire in the wrong directions for the first couple of attempts before making all the connections. But there was no doubt about it. Denny. The sight of her brother made her just gawk for several seconds, before she emitted a little happy squeal and threw her arms around him and placing a big, hard kiss right on his lips. Denny was back, the empty spot with his name on it was filled again, and in an instant the OK status of her existence took a major upgrade.
That summer was the best in many years for both of the siblings. Although they both had changed, they cherished this opportunity to go back in time to less complicated days, the simplicity of their childhood all over again. One more summer, just one more summer where things could be the way they once were. It had been an odd two years, where they both had been thrown head over heels out into the adult life. They had collected bruises and taken beatings. Melissa's all on the inside, a line of failures in emotional intimacy that she had promptly swept under the rug. Denny's of a more physical kind. He'd been places, met people, and on occasion gotten a lesson or two in the fact that out in the real world, he was not unbeatable. The most prominent of those lessons were still on his face, in the shape of a scar tissue running across his cheek and down the side of his neck.
