Shattered Oaths

I didn't mean to watch him for that long.

But there he was, bent over the engine of his '67 Mustang, sweat darkening the back of his gray t-shirt, muscles shifting under his skin like something alive. The California sun was brutal, even at six in the evening, and he'd been out there for three hours, cussing at the carburetor, drinking beer after beer from the cooler on the porch.

I was supposed to be reading. Summer reading list. *The Great Gatsby*, which felt like a cruel joke given the circumstances. But the words blurred every time I looked up, and I looked up a lot.

Leo.

My brother.

Half-brother, technically. Same mother, different fathers. She'd been gone five years now, cancer taking her slow and mean, and our fathers were ghosts who'd never stuck around long enough to cast a shadow. So it was just us. The house on Sycamore Lane, the overgrown garden she'd loved, the silence she'd left behind.

And this thing I couldn't name, couldn't touch, couldn't even admit to myself without feeling like I was breaking something sacred.

He straightened, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and caught me looking.

I froze. The book felt like a prop in my hands, flimsy and obvious.

"You gonna stare all day or come help?" His voice was rough, teasing, but his eyes held mine a beat too long.

"I don't know anything about cars."

"Bullshit. You watched Dad work on this thing before he split. You know where the oil goes."

I didn't move. The porch swing creaked under me, a sound I'd known my whole life, comforting and worn. "You don't need help. You need a mechanic."

He laughed, low and dry, and something in my chest pulled tight. "Yeah. Well, you're what I got."

That should have meant nothing. It should have been a throwaway line, brother to sister, the kind of casual dismissal that fills the space between people who share blood and nothing else.

But it wasn't.

It never was with him.

I closed the book, set it on the arm of the swing, and walked down the steps barefoot. The grass was dry and scratchy, the concrete of the driveway hot enough to make me wince. He watched me come, and I watched him watching, and we both pretended there was nothing strange about the way the air thickened between us.

"Hand me that wrench," he said, pointing to a rusted tool on the ground.

I picked it up. Handed it over. Our fingers brushed, and I felt it everywhere. A current. A spark. Something that had no business existing.

He didn't pull away fast. He let his fingers linger, just a second, just long enough for me to know he felt it too.

Then he turned back to the engine, and I stood there like an idiot, heart hammering, blood hot, trying to remember how to breathe.

"This is stupid," I said, more to myself than him.

"What is?"

"You. This car. Fixing something that's been broken for ten years."

He went still. The wrench hovered over a bolt, and he didn't move for a long moment. Then he set it down, straightened, and turned to face me fully.

"Some things are worth fixing."

His voice had dropped. Gone was the teasing edge. What remained was something raw, something that made my stomach flip and my skin prickle with heat.

I should have walked away. Should have laughed it off, made a joke, retreated to my room and locked the door. That's what a normal sister would do. That's what a person with any sense of self-preservation would do.

But I'd never been good at walking away from him.

"Like what?" I asked.

He didn't answer. He just looked at me, and in his eyes I saw something I'd seen before, late at night when he thought I was asleep, in the kitchen when he'd stand too close, in the way he'd say my name like it cost him something.

I saw want.

And that scared me more than anything.

"Never mind," he said, turning back to the engine. "Forget it."

But I couldn't forget it. I couldn't forget any of it. The way his hands looked when they were covered in grease, strong and capable. The way his jaw tightened when he was thinking hard. The way he smelled, sweat and motor oil and something underneath that was just him, familiar and dangerous.

I'd been seventeen for three months. He was twenty-two. We shared a house, a last name, a history. We shared a grief that had welded us together in ways neither of us knew how to name.

And I wanted him.

God help me, I wanted him.

I sat on the edge of the driveway, legs crossed, watching him work. The sun was sinking, turning the sky orange and pink, and the heat of the day was finally breaking. A breeze moved through the sycamore trees, carrying the smell of cut grass and dust.

"You don't have to stay," he said, not looking at me.

"I know."

He worked for a while in silence. The clink of metal, the occasional curse, the hiss of a beer can opening. I watched his back, the way it flexed, the way his jeans sat low on his hips. I watched his hands and thought about things I shouldn't think about.

"What are you reading?" he asked.

"*Gatsby*."

"Any good?"

"It's about a guy who destroys himself chasing something he can't have."

He stopped. Turned. Looked at me with those dark eyes, the ones that saw too much, the ones that made me feel naked and seen and terrified all at once.

"Sounds familiar," he said.

My heart stopped. Then started again, faster, harder.

"Leo."

"Don't."

"Don't what?"

He dropped the wrench. It clattered on the concrete, loud in the quiet evening. He took a step toward me, then another, and I didn't move. I couldn't. I was pinned by the weight of his gaze, by the heat radiating off his body, by the years of proximity and loneliness and the way we'd become each other's only constant.

"Don't pretend you don't know," he said, his voice low, rough, barely a whisper. "Don't make me say it out loud."

"Say what?"

He stopped in front of me. Close enough that I could see the flecks of gold in his irises, the stubble on his jaw, the way his chest rose and fell like he'd been running.

"That I think about you. That I can't stop. That I wake up in the middle of the night and all I can see is your face."

The world tilted. I felt dizzy, unmoored, like the ground had dropped out from under me.

"You can't say that."

"I just did."

"It's wrong."

"I know."

"We're brother and sister."

"Half," he said, and the word hung between us, heavy and complicated and full of everything we weren't saying.

"It doesn't matter. It's still wrong."

He knelt down, bringing his face level with mine. His eyes were dark, intense, burning with something that made my skin prickle and my breath catch.

"Then tell me you don't feel it," he said. "Tell me you don't think about it. Tell me you haven't imagined what it would be like, and I'll walk away. I'll never bring it up again."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

Nothing came out.

Because I couldn't lie. Not to him. Not about this.

He saw the truth in my silence, and something in his face shifted. Not triumph. Not relief. Something softer, sadder, more complicated.

"Yeah," he said, barely audible. "That's what I thought."

He stood up, walked back to the car, picked up the wrench. His hands were shaking.

And so were mine.

I sat on the driveway and watched the sun finish its descent, watched the shadows lengthen, watched the first stars appear in the darkening sky. The air cooled. The crickets started their nightly chorus. The Mustang sat silent and broken, and so did we.

Nothing had changed.

Everything had changed.

Because he'd said it. Out loud. And I hadn't denied it. And now the thing that had been living in the dark between us, unnamed and unacknowledged, was real. It had weight. It had a voice.

It had teeth.

And I had no idea what to do with it.

He worked until he couldn't see anymore, then he wiped his hands on a rag and walked past me without a word. The screen door slammed. The porch light clicked on, casting a yellow glow over the yard.

I stayed outside.

I stared at the house we'd grown up in, the house our mother had filled with plants and music and love, the house that was supposed to be a sanctuary but now felt like a cage.

Inside, he was moving around the kitchen. I could hear the refrigerator open and close, the clink of a glass, the running of water.

Normal sounds. Ordinary sounds.

Nothing about this was ordinary.

I thought about going inside. About pretending tonight never happened. About locking my door and burying myself in Gatsby's doomed romance, a story about a man who reached for a green light across the water and drowned trying to hold it.

But I knew, even then, that I wouldn't.

Because the green light was inside that house. And I was already swimming toward it.