“You look amazing, Emma,” Aaron said. He didn’t know what else to say.
“Thank you, Aaron,” she said. “I wanted to look good for your birthday.”
Instead of sitting down, she approached Aaron’s side of the table and reached for the bottle of red burgundy. She bent in an exaggerated manner at the hips to pour the wine slowly into her brother’s glass, and Aaron could not help but notice the perfection with which her breasts hung from her body in front of him, the sharp points of her nipples aimed at the table surface. When she was done she circled around to her side of the table, poured wine into her own glass, and sat down.
She raised her glass.
“To my big brother, Aaron,” she said. “Happy Birthday.”
“Thanks,” Aaron said, weakly. It was surreal — his sister in front of him, nearly naked at the dinner table.
“I’ll bet you didn’t expect this for your birthday,” Emma said, eyes sparkling in the candlelight.
“Uh, no,” Aaron said. “I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect this. You were always good at surprises, but this is the biggest one yet.”
“I always liked keeping you off balance,” she said.
“You always did. You still do.”
“You were easy to keep off balance. You were so serious. Always studying. It was so much fun teasing you and fooling around with you.” Emma paused and smiled. “I was a brat, wasn’t I?”
“God yes,” Aaron said. “You were such a brat. It seems charming now, I guess, when I think about it, but it didn’t seem charming at the time. Just annoying.”
“I liked annoying you. I didn’t mean anything harmful by it. I always wanted to get your attention. Sometimes it was so hard. You were always focused on something.”
Emma paused. Aaron ate a few spoonsful of the bisque, watching Emma’s breasts rising and falling with her breaths. Emma ate too, but her eyes seldom left his. Emma broke the silence.
“That’s what I can’t figure out,” she said.
“What?” Aaron asked.
“What you did on the mountain. My serious, studious, older brother. Who never broke a rule. But you grabbed me and kissed me. What made you do that? I never asked you. We never talked about it. It’s driven me crazy ever since — wondering why you did that.”
“I don’t know, Emma,” Aaron said, looking down at his plate.
“I don’t believe that, Aaron,” Emma said. “I think you do know. Maybe you don’t want to say what you know. But I think you know. You don’t want to say it. But I want to hear you say it. Why did you kiss me, Aaron?”
Aaron looked up from his plate to his sister. His eyes swept her nearly nude body, pausing over her full breasts and hard nipples before they settled on her eyes, staring intently at his.
“I don’t know why I kissed you, Emma,” he said. “That’s the truth. Before that day, I would have thought anybody who predicted something like that would be crazy. I always knew you were pretty. But I never looked at you that way. But that time on the mountain . . . it was different. You were sweaty and dirty. And you were my sister. But you were so beautiful. That’s what I remember. Your face in the light of sunset. Your body. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. But when I saw you there, on the top of the mountain, I thought, that’s what I want a girlfriend to look like. I’m sorry.”