There’s something you should know, something about me and your brother. It all started shortly after you and I broke up. I was walking across the floor to the sound of The First Cut is the Deepest, two rye and gingers clenched in my little fists, to a place where your brother was leaning against the wall with his friends. It must have been Rod Stewart singing – it was long before the Sheryl Crow version, and I would know Cat Stevens in any state of drunkenness – but that really doesn’t matter; the important bit is that I was walking, high heeled and made up and shaking my eighteen year old ass, and your brother was watching me appreciatively and with some pretty nasty intentions. Now, we both know that your brother wasn’t anybody’s idea of a prize – the lout still had a reputation for fighting collecting women. But I had a broken heart, you see, and I’m sure you know just how intoxicating that can be. You certainly know something about my broken heart, anyway, because you did it and this whole incident took place about a week after we split up.
Breaking up with you was a disaster. By the time I found myself in that smoggy old bar you already had a new girlfriend. Jesus, I can picture her now, with her nasty menthol cigarettes and her crunchy yellow hair. She was a total skank. Everyone said so. I saw the two of you driving around in your truck while I was walking home from work, and though it seems stupid to admit it now, I spent the last Friday night of my high school career locked in the bathroom with my sister and a bottle of Fireball. God, I hated you, and thinking about you happily plodding along without me just ripped me up; I wished I had given you gonorrhea or something lovely to ruin your sex life and keep you thinking of me. Anyway, my sister is a clever girl, and one of the better things she said to cheer me up (along with the normal crap about me being pretty and smart and having a lot to offer, and there being plenty of fish in the sea and all that) was that we should go out on Saturday night; that she would help me get dressed up and we would get ourselves feeling fine. And that’s how I came to be in that particular bar on that Saturday night in late June. That’s where I saw him, your brother, grinning and swaggering across the floor. I knew he meant business, and he knew I didn’t know what I meant, so he came over to me and asked what I was drinking. Things just blossomed from there.
Now, some notes on revenge sex: generally I don’t do it, at least not now, and my darling sis did tell me then (over her fourth G&T) that I would feel worse in the long run. Generally, this is true, but of course the temptation to make you squirm at the thought of your chief rival taking the magic prize from your very recent ex was just too great. But here’s the hitch: somewhere in the process I forgot about you, and it wasn’t actually revenge sex at all. Last call, we drained our glasses, left the bar and started toward my parents’ house. Your brother was pretty out of it. He kept reaching over, touching my fingers and waist, jamming his hands in my back pockets, and eventually I stopped walking and kissed him. That was all pretty standard, I think. But then he pulled back, looked at me hard; he leaned in to kiss me again, but instead he latched on to my bottom lip with his teeth, and pulled until he punctured it. I was shocked and afraid, and I tried to turn away, but he caught my face in his giant paws and kissed me again, this time very nicely; a kiss fit for a wedding. It tasted like blood. It was all terribly erotic and exciting, even if it was with your stupid brother, and I was inebriated enough to let myself enjoy it.
When I got home my sister was waiting on the back steps. She asked if I’d been attacked. I told her that I tripped and did a face plant into the sidewalk, silly me.
The next day I looked at myself very carefully in the long mirror in my mother’s closet. That brother of yours, he knows how to do some damage; some of the bruises were easier to hide, like the marks his fingers made on my left thigh, but the diamond shaped bruises from the chain link fence (you must remember, the one next to the new public school) remained for weeks. Really now – there is absolutely nothing like getting your fingers and toes and high heels and hair tangled in a chain link fence while being screwed by a quasi-dangerous good ole’ boy to let you in on some secrets about yourself. Secrets about me that your brother was already on to, I suppose, but that is one of the things which keeps me thinking about him: yes, he added me to his collection of women, but did he do it just because I was yours and then I wasn’t? Was there perhaps something about me, something distinct and not at all dependent on you that made him want to leave his marks on me? Did he think he was taking advantage, or did he think he was doing me a favor? I wonder, you know – I wonder about both of you, about his marriage and yours, about whether you guys ever think of me… about whether you ever compared notes.
Anyway, if you didn’t already know, that’s the story of me and your brother. And, I guess if you didn’t know, I’m sorry if you are reading this; I know that you hate fiction so I just assumed that you wouldn’t. Just pretend it isn’t about you. And don’t mention it to your brother.
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