A Promise to my Stepbrother Read Online Free Page A

create an image of concern while being clear that I knew exactly what was expected in such a situation.
    “Yes and no.” He put his hands on his head and fell back onto my bed. “What’s wrong with me, Katie? I try to do the right thing to all the people I care about, and now I do the same thing with the new people I am seeing, and all I do is just alienate them.”
    “What happened? Did you make her mad?” At this point I was kind of happy that the date clearly didn’t go well, but I was also nervous over how Max was speaking. No one was closer to him than me, and I knew that he would rather kill himself than reveal his deepest emotions, even to me. That’s part of what made him so maddening. But here he was doing just that. What did Holly do to him?”
    “I just wanted to have a nice time, Katie. Really.” I slid myself closer to him. He was really hurting. “You know I think she’s pretty, right?”
    It pained me to answer, but I did. “Yeah, she’s kind of sad, but she’s definitely pretty.”
    “Yeah, that’s just it. She’s sad. I picked her up, and she immediately leaned over and gave me this big kiss. Then in the car she put her hand on my thigh, and she kept stroking my leg. And at the movie theater she actually took my arm and put it around her shoulder, and while I was okay with that she kept not-so-subtly tugging my hand down to rest on her breasts.” I had to smile at that point. Breasts, not tits. That was so totally Max.
    “Look, I don’t think I need all the dirty details. She was really horny. I get it.”
    “That’s the thing, Katie. I don’t think it was that at all. I think she just wanted someone to be physically close to her. At no point was there any real passion behind her actions. I think she just wanted me to want her.”
    I looked at Max. His eyes were closed, and his profile was this combination of unbelievable sexiness and deep sadness. “Was that the problem? You wanted her to want you?”
    His head jerked up, and perhaps for the first time in my life his face didn’t have the cold Max veneer. He looked alarmed and seemed almost out-of-control. “No! I’m just trying to describe to you how it was this really sad thing.”
    I nodded. “Yeah, I get that.”
    “So the movie ends, and she says we should go hang out at a Denny’s, which is cool. I thought it would be good to talk to her.” He looked at me, and his eyes pierced me in with their intensity. “She is nothing like you. All she wanted to talk about was Instagram and school and the popular kids and how cool it must be to be on the swim team. It was like two hours of desperation, Katie. Can you imagine that?”
    “Well, I have you, so thankfully I guess not.”
    “Exactly! It was like two hours of soul sucking. I’m not trying to be a gross, but it was like I had become her host. She was outlining to me how her life would be so much better by being attached to me.”
    “That is gross,” I replied, smiling. Max smiled a bit at that.
    “But then it got weird.”
    “Oh, this I have to hear.” I couldn’t believe how much Max was opening up to me. We were the closest of friends, but I never knew him before he was eleven, and in the previous five years we shared all of our dreams and interests, but one thing Max had trouble sharing was his pain and weaknesses, so this was new to me. In an odd way I felt like this was a deepening of a relationship I didn’t think could go any deeper.
    “Well, I went to drive her home, and when I went to open her car door—”
    “Always the gentlemen,” to which he nodded with a smile.
    “—She grabbed my arm and pulled me down and kissed me. I kind of smiled and was trying to think of a way to say that I appreciated her affection even as I thought it was a little creepy when she grabbed my crotch with her hand.”
    By now I knew Max’s mindset, and it wasn’t horniness, so I decided to tease him. “Sounds more like an opportunity than weirdness.” He glared at me.