She sat on the edge of the bed and watched him snore. He had had a long journey back home from America where he lived with his wife of two years. She had not seen him in the last fifteen years, not since they left high school and he had left with his mother. She did not even attend his wedding; she had been too mad, too sad.

 

She looked at him and smiled. He hadn’t changed much; and as she packed her hair into the wispy bun that he favored, the one that made her feel ten and innocent all over again, she thought how funny a little thing like a hairstyle could help wipe away a truck load of guilt, even if only for a while. She listened to the hum of his snore, and images from minutes ago flashed through her mind once again.

She could not explain what had happened. She did not even want to try. It had felt oddly exciting being alone with him after so many years, and when he had asked her to hug him, she had been too scared to, too afraid they might travel back fifteen years in time with just that simple gesture. Yet when minutes later, she had found herself allowing him drown himself in the pools of pleasure which she unquestioningly opened up to him, her fears had been eternally confirmed by the intensity of their passion.

“Why are you shy? Look at me joo,” he had joked afterwards, trying to make her face him. She wanted to tell him to stop, and allow her develop the confusing blueprints flying about in her head, but she did not say anything. Instead, she stuck to the bed sheets and refused to be drawn away. And after he had curled up to her and whispered to her how she had been sweeter than he remembered, and a hundred times more passionate than the cold fish that their father had made him marry in the name of cementing a ‘lifelong family friendship’ and retaining his pride of place as the ‘scion of the dynasty’, (a termed he scoffed at only in theory), he had dozed off; and she had jumped out of the bed, picked up her clothes, locked herself in the sanctuary of the bathroom and cried her soul out.

And this was how she emerged: decided, stronger, and more confident.

As wrong as he was for her, as much as he was her younger brother even if only from the same father, she knew now for certain that she was in love with him still, as much as he had always been with her.

She knew now that she was his apple, that she would never be able to help being devoured in secret until the wells of their passion ran dry – if it ever could.

All she needed to do was afterwards, tie her hair up in the wispy bun he always admired when they were still children – and everything would be just fine again.

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Oluwafunminiyi is a writer

Twitter: @ooluwafunminiyi

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