There was a time when I thought I'd never tell anyone about what happened between me and my stepbrother, not even my best friend. Time can change a lot, though, and here I am, ready to spill my secrets to the world (anonymously, of course).
I guess I should start by describing myself a bit. My name is Rose Waters, and I'm 20 now, though I had just turned 18 when most of the stuff in this story happened. I'm not a 6'0" tall blonde with big tits, so if that's the only kind of girl you care about, I might seem a little boring. There's a lot about me that is pretty average. I'm a bit under 5'5". I'm not telling you how much I weigh, but let's just say I've been called "bony" more than a few times in my life. I have auburn hair that I've always kept short; for the past few years I've had it a little longer, in a bob with long bangs that I think looks pretty cute—not to brag.
I wear glasses, always; I can't stand contacts for some reason, so I'm stuck with my glasses. At least now my nerdy black frames are suddenly cool. Like most redheads, my skin is pretty fair, and I've got some freckles on my cheeks—I hate those, by the way. To me, my chubby cheeks make me look like a little kid, but Gabe always said they were cute.
Gabe: that's who this story is about. I mean, it's about me and Gabe, but the part about me would be boring and lame if it wasn't for the Gabe part. Gabriel Jose McKinney: my step-brother. I'm skipping ahead to even talk about him, but since I'm writing about him, I thought it was only fair. If the last name seems weird, it's because Gabe's mom was Cuban, and I guess she won the coin flip to name him.
If you never heard his name, you probably wouldn't know he had a Cuban mom. Well, I guess a lot of Cubans are pretty fair-skinned, so maybe you could. He's pretty tall, about 6'3", lean, but totally in shape from playing sports growing up. Nowadays you're more likely to find him holding a guitar than a baseball bat, though, which is all the better for me. I never really liked those sports guys too much, especially since they were usually pretty mean to me. Gabe had kind of medium-length black hair, and if it wasn't too long, he liked to spike it up. He had the most gorgeous brown eyes that just had a kind of sparkle that it's hard to describe. Maybe if you've ever been in love with somebody, you've seen that look too.
I should back up, though, because things won't make sense if you don't know what it was like before my mom married Gabe's dad and I first met my step-brother. My real dad's named Ed, and he's an IT guy for a company in another town about fifty miles away. We talk a couple of times a year now, but for a long time I never saw him. Even when my parents were together, it seemed like he was never around, never had any time for me and my mom.
I learned too young the reason for that: he was having an affair with a woman at his old job, the one he had when he was married to my mom. Her name was Karen, and she ruined my life, though it took years for my mom to find out about her. She filed for divorce pretty soon after. I guess looking back I'm proud of her for not putting up with his shit.
I was only eight when my dad left, but I was old enough to understand what had happened, or at least what I thought had happened. I heard enough of my parents' fights in the last few months of their marriage to know that my mom wasn't "satisfying" my dad anymore. Evidently, his new girlfriend Karen did things for him that my mom never would. Of course I didn't really understand what that meant at the time, but I guess I always remembered that as a kind of fucked-up lesson: if you don't satisfy a man, he'll leave you behind.
After the divorce, we moved into a cracker-box house, and my mom became kind of a zombie. I mean, she went to work, took me to school, and went to the store and all. She didn't become a drunk or try to kill herself. Nevertheless, she seemed to kind of...give up, I guess. She stopped trying to dress nice, she never wore makeup, and we never went anywhere for fun anymore. She always said she was tired after work, so we usually just watched TV together at night.
I was always shy as a kid, and I never talked to boys. I had a few friends, but my only close friend was Natalie, possibly the only person in the world more introverted than me. We could talk about anything with each other—I guess you don't have to worry about gossip when both of you only have one real friend. In any event, things were pretty OK until I moved on to middle school. That's when my life took a dramatic turn for the worse.
It started out with one girl hating me, for no reason I could tell. To be honest, I can't even remember who it was. Then it was all of her friends, then their friends. If enough people hate you, then it's easier for other people to just go along. Nobody stops and asks why they're treating another person like crap—they just go along. That's how it was at my new school. The ringleader was this girl, Ashley Moore, but really it just seemed it everyone was in on it. My clothes were too tacky, my hair made me look like a boy, I was too skinny, too fat, too smart, too dumb. Nothing I did seemed right anymore, and I just believed all the awful shit they would say about me. Suddenly nobody talked to me between classes or at lunch.
It pains me to tell this story, but I think it's important to understand. I was only in sixth grade at the time, and Ashley and one of her minions splashed water on the front of my pants in the bathroom and told everybody that I'd peed my pants. Now, that might not seem like the worst bullying of all time, and I admit it's not. But I walked around ashamed all day, and not just because people thought I'd wet myself. It's hard to explain, but in my screwed up brain, I really started to feel like I had done it. I convinced myself kind of that I was to blame. I guess you can say I had an active imagination, but when people said mean things about me, I just took it really hard, like it was true even if deep down I knew it wasn't. I just couldn't toughen up against that kind of thing, and I spent a lot of time alone, crying to myself when I was younger. Yeah, I know, pathetic, right?
The worst part was that all of this was happening at an age where I started to have feelings for guys. There's one more thing you need to know about me, something that I've always known about myself, even if I couldn't do anything about it. In most situations, I'm reserved, shy, a wallflower: you get the idea. But I have this impulsive streak. It's like I get wound up too tight and then just do something crazy without thinking about it. It's gotten me into trouble more than once—let's just say I "allegedly" pushed a girl off the monkey bars on the playground once for insulting my lunchbox in first grade.
So one day in, like, seventh grade, I got sick of being alternately ignored or ridiculed. I wanted a boyfriend so bad, but I had no idea how to actually get one. I have no clue what was going through my hormone-addled mind, but I went up to this guy that I had been daydreaming about all year. I'll never forget his name: Ben Michaels. He was this skater-type guy, with long shaggy blonde hair and a gorgeous face. He always wore these skater hoodies and baggy pants that I thought at the time were so cool. Without any warm-up at all, I asked him to go to the seventh grade formal with me, and then...I kissed him. In the lunchroom. In front of everyone.
Needless to say, that didn't end well. Now, instead of being just a hopeless loser, I suddenly became the school's biggest slut. I wasn't even fourteen yet, I had my first kiss in front of what seemed like the whole school, and kids were whispering behind my back about things I wouldn't have even understood at the time.
For whatever reason, having the other kids call me "slut" was worse than anything that had come before. Of course, stupid me, I thought they were right, that the sexual feelings and thoughts I was beginning to have proved I was a slut, doomed to social mockery forever. I thought it might end after that year, but when I came back for eighth grade, it had gotten even worse. Of course I was totally a virgin. I couldn't even imagine what sex was like, but it didn't matter. Kids can be so mean.
I heard things about myself that I didn't know existed. Supposedly, I only got an A in Mr. White's chemistry class because I gave him a blowjob. (So not true! I rocked at chemistry.) I only faintly knew what that meant. Thank god for Urban Dictionary!
In school, I started trying to counteract my reputation. I never wore anything even remotely revealing. Hell, I never even wanted to look cute. I tried not to talk to boys, especially cute ones. I made myself become the world's biggest prude, and it never made a difference. No matter how hard I tried, the evil bitches at school spread stories about me and isolated me in a little bubble by myself. Outside of Natalie, who was only spared the torment by being completely invisible to everyone, all of my friends were in books for a long time.
It was towards the middle of my eighth grade year that my mom started dating Emmett, Gabe's dad. She started to wear skirts and dresses again, put on make-up, even go out on dates after work. It was like she got a shot of energy and life again. I was happy for her, even though there were things about him I didn't really like at first.
Emmett was a pretty big, burly guy—not fat, and not some kind of body-builder, but a really solidly-built man. He was a contractor for home renovations and repairs. I think he had started in the actual building stuff side, before moving to doing more sales and estimates and owning a chunk of the company. He was a lot more religious and conservative than my mom and me. While I never had to go to church with him or anything, my mom started to go with him. He was also kind of traditional in other ways. It was subtle at first, but I noticed acting more and more like the "little woman" of the house, having him do manly things like mow our grass, while she fixed him dinner and cleaned up after him.
In the beginning, I kind of thought that Emmett was a male chauvinist, I guess, but he always treated me well, and my mom seemed happy. He seemed to find me totally weird, since I didn't like girly dress up and shopping and preferred solitude and a copy of Tolstoy or Jane Austen. His way of looking at things might have been old-fashioned, but at least he wasn't out screwing around on my mom. Oh, speaking of screwing—I totally figured it out later that that was the reason she was so much perkier and livelier. I never really caught them, but I could hear things at night over the music they would play that must have been my mom sounding pretty satisfied.
Anyway, after only a couple of months, my mom sat me down and told me that she and Emmett were going to get married and that we would be moving in to a new house together as a family. It was all pretty sudden, but since pretty much everything was an improvement—the house, my mom's mood, our finances—I couldn't really complain.
The one thing that was weird was that I hadn't met his son before. I only saw Gabe for the first time when he was helping his dad carry in all the heavy furniture. Seeing him carrying sofas and armoires around with his dad, it made him look so masculine. For me, he just had "it": he was beautiful (he'd hate it if I called him that) but also strong, manly, and powerful. Even though Gabe wasn't much older, he always seemed totally in charge and way more adult than he really was in my head.
It's safe to say I had one of those classic schoolgirl crushes on Gabe immediately. Of course, I was only 15, so I didn't do anything about it. He was going to be my brother—step-brother, though. To be honest, I never really felt a big "taboo" about having a crush on Gabe. Maybe it would have been different if we were blood related. I knew my mom would freak if I told her how I felt, though. I didn't even tell Natalie. But inside, I didn't think there was anything wrong about how I felt. To tell you the truth, I actually liked the fact that my crush was also, in a way, going to be my brother.
Over time, those feelings only grew. Gabe was only a little older than me, and we were in the same grade. We had all moved in together during the summer, and Gabe was leaving his old school to attend high school in our town. I was terrified that once he saw how the other kids treated me, he'd join in, and suddenly I would be tortured at home as well as at school. What would he think of me after hearing about all my imaginary acts of slutty behavior?
Once I got in high school, though, things suddenly started to get better for me. For that, Gabe was responsible. Even though being around me probably caused a few eyebrows to raise, he never treated me bad or ignored me in school.
I remember one time, when Ashley and her group were taunting me for wearing clothes from Goodwill (my clothes were from Old Navy, same as theirs, but I guess on me the clothes suddenly became shittier). Gabe walked right up to me and told me how much fun he had hanging out with me the night before, and how we should do it again. We hadn't hung out the night before at all. He had been out on a date. He had just done it to help me out, and suddenly, girls like Ashley who had the same crush on Gabe that I did were treating me like a human being for the first time, undoubtedly trying to use me to get closer to my brother.
