FULL NOVELXO HUGE STEPS: Chapter 16
“We need to figure this out.” Jamie steps into the mudroom, throwing his tool bag onto the bench. “I couldn’t concentrate worth shit today. And I’m fucking tired of it.”
“I know,” I reply, sighing. “I’m the same.”
I can tell just by looking at my brother’s face that he’s frustrated and I get it.
“So, what are we going to do, then?”
Heading into the living room, I drop down onto the couch and rub my temples. It’s been a long day with Abi and my feelings for her on my mind.
“Look at you. You look like shit!” Jamie exclaims. “We need to figure out what to do. Like, right now.”
He’s not wrong. When Abi was just an impossible fantasy, I could push her to the back of my mind. I could pretend to myself that I was okay with how things were, but now I’m not. I know what it’s like to wrap her copper hair around my fingers and feel her soft, pale thighs around me. I know how it feels to have her fingers run through my hair. All of these torturous thoughts are circling around and around in my head, followed by the pang of jealousy that threads through them. Jamie and Abi on their own, laughing, kissing, holding each other. It’s like some kind of macabre merry-go-round. Whatever the case may be, we have to establish that there is no separating us, at the very least. There is no way I could deal with being the third wheel.
“Yeah, okay.” I stand up a few feet away from Jamie and pull out my phone.
“Okay… What?”
“We need to settle this now. No more skirting around it. I’m tired, you’re tired, and if we don’t go over there and tell Abigail what the deal is, it’s just going to keep going on like this. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t exactly sound like a walk in the park to me.”
He nods. “All right. Good. We got a game plan going now. So we go over there and say what exactly.”
He brings up a good point.
“Ah, well, yeah. We should probably figure that out.” I scratch at the five o’clock shadow that I didn’t have the energy to shave off this morning.
“We both want her, right?” he asks.
“I think that’s the consensus here, yeah.”
Jamie shrugs. “Then we tell her we get to share. That’s the only way things can work with us.”
“We get to share? I don’t know, Jamie, I don’t want Abi thinking she’s just some kind of object to us. Like we’re fighting over a toy or something.”
He frowns, his eyebrows drawing closer. “Well, what do we tell her, then? She needs to know the score…”
Holding up my hand, I cut him off. “Yeah, I know, man. But it’s the way we phrase it, you know what I mean? It’s not us sharing her, it’s her sharing us. I don’t want us to come off like some a barbarian, that’s all. I don’t think that would go over well with her.”
“All right, fine, but we do need her to be clear on that bit. She has to know that this is a combined thing, here. Both of us, or neither of us. I want her to know that we both feel the same for her, too.”
It would be easy to think of anyone else’s feelings for Abi as less than mine, but the way Jamie’s eyes blaze under his furrowed brow is enough to remind me that’s not the case with him, my twin brother. “Right,” I agree, leaning up against the threshold of the doorway. “Now we just need to wait to for her to get home.”
Jamie casually peeks through the blinds, before looking over his shoulder back at me. “That should be no problem. She’s walking up the sidewalk to her apartment right now.”
“Let’s wait for a few minutes. Let her get sorted.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
We both sit on the sofa and stare at the TV which currently isn’t on. I turn to my brother and he’s biting his fingernails as though he’s nervous. My brother isn’t usually bothered by this kind of thing. He’s a take-it-leave-it kind of guy, I guess because there is never a shortage of women who are interested. With Abi, though, he’s different. He’s not his usual cocky self.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he mumbles under his breath just loud enough for me to hear him.
“What?”
“You know what.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He shoots me his trademark pissed off look. “You’re looking at me like you’re wondering why the hell I’m so bothered about all this.”
I shrug, used to Jamie’s ability to read my mind. It’s a twin thing, I guess.
“Abi’s special,” he says sternly. “She’s always been different. Maybe it’s because I’ve had the chance to get to know her for so long. I don’t know. All I know is that if she says no, I don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do about it. I don’t think I can stand by and let her start dating another one of these fuckwits who has no idea what an amazing girl she is or how to treat her. I don’t want to just be her stepbrother anymore.”
I nod. “It’s how I feel too.”
“That’s good then, isn’t it? We both feel the same way. No jealousy. No divisiveness. This is what I want.”
I grin at my brother. “Guess we’d better get over there and convince that woman to be our girl.”
We make our way over to Abi’s apartment. The warmth of the sun is perfect against my skin. As I stroll beside my brother, a sense of ‘rightness’ settles over me. There are days when I think that Jamie has the capacity to drive me insane, but I don’t know what I’d do if one of us found a girl and wanted to move on without the other. I’ve never been without him. Not even for a day. I know it’s clichéd to say but he’s like my other half. If we can convince Abi that we want her, and not just for a fling, maybe this is the answer. I’ll have to share the woman I want but that means that I get to keep my brother close too. It seems like the ideal solution.
There’s only one problem.
Abi.
She’s been so resistant. The thing is we haven’t told her how we feel. Not really. I guess this is make or break.
Abi makes next to no noise though, when she slowly pulls the door open, her eyes fixated on a spot somewhere between me and my brother. Something feels off the moment she shifts away from us to let us inside, still not quite meeting our eyes. It dawns on me that she may be feeling something too, especially having kissed both me and Jamie in the same twenty-four hours, but I keep it to myself as we head inside after her.
“Hey, Abi.” Jamie breaks the silence.
“Hi,” she replies softly, fidgeting with the lace on her shirt. If I didn’t know any better, I would think she looked like she might cry. This is not good.
“Abigail… Abi. We wanted to come over and talk to you about what’s been going on –”
“Between the three of us,” Jamie adds.
It’s here where I notice how flushed her cheeks are, but I don’t want my concern for her to get in the way of the conversation. “Yes, we need to talk about that. Me and Jamie have been talking about it, and we have to be truthful with you. This whole going back and forth between being with us, and then not wanting to be with us, but then more kissing and uh,” I clear my throat, “and things like that…we can’t keep doing this.”
“And it’s not that we don’t want to do the kissing and the things like that,” Jamie adds his eyes darting to mine for a second, sending what I imagine to be violent death threats via his mind. “But we need to know where we stand…and where you stand.”
“We both have feelings for you, but I think you already know that…and we’re not willing to let our feelings for you come in between us,” I explain taking another step closer to Abi. “The only way this could work is if you are willing to be with both of us.”
Jamie steps closer to her, his gaze intense. “We are a package deal, simple as that and we don’t want you to feel like you have to choose between us. You have both of us, however you’d like us. It probably sounds complicated, but it’s —”
Abi shakes her head, some kind of panic coloring her features. “No, it’s not that. I just… Well, I don’t know who…” her voice trails off, and I take the opening, suddenly remembering the guilty look she had when she first answered the door.
“Abi, you don’t have to feel bad about kissing both of us. There’s no need to feel guilty. We could make it work, I promise you,” I say as her eyes widen. Taking her clammy hand in mine.
She stares down at our hands and then slips hers out of mine, turning to pick up a small glass of water behind me. I don’t do anything but watch as she slowly drains the glass.
“I have something I need to tell you,” she stutters, chewing on her bottom lip like crazy. All I want to do is to soothe it, run my tongue along it and hold her in my arms again. I don’t understand why she looks like she’s about to run away.
“What? What’s wrong?” Jamie asks, closing up the space between the three of us.
She takes a deep breath and says something that blows my fucking mind.
“I’m pregnant.”