“Not today.”
“No, I knew that. I was gonna say when you got around to it, you could hit me up.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Kylie stripped out of her shirt and pants like I wasn’t even there. Even her socks came off, then got balled up and thrown safely to the side of the room with the rest. Only her bra and panties stayed on. Those, I noted, were less presentable than her outer layer. Though, of course, they weren’t intended to be seen.
“You know I’m still here, right?” I said.
“You’ve seen me in my underwear before,” she said without turning around.
“Many times. And I’ve tried to explain almost as many times why-”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. Inappropriate. Whatever. If you didn’t want to see me half naked, you wouldn’t still be looking.”
“That’s…” I trailed off, slumped, and turned away instead. It wasn’t worth arguing about again. Truth be told, I didn’t much care one way or the other. It mostly just annoyed me that she didn’t care either.
What sort of sister just let her little brother see her in her underwear? That wasn’t right. That wasn’t how these things were supposed to go. She was supposed to get mad and call me a perv and probably throw something heavy at me, or punch me repeatedly in a not-too-sensitive area. The media had collectively lied to me about these sorts of scenarios.
Then again, Kylie was Kylie. She hadn’t ever fit any of the classic cliches, not consistently at any rate, and that didn’t seem about to change.
****
I waited a couple weeks to see if Kylie would contact me on her own. She didn’t. I used her predictable lack of communication as an excuse to drop in on her again.
As before, I simply took the elevator in her building up to her loft, then entered using the spare key she’d given me. No warning, no chance for her to beg off.
Her place was tidier than I expected, which was to say a dent had been put in the number of paintings awaiting homes. There was actually a decent amount of space to walk around without fear of bumping into anything. It was a particular relief for me, since I could never tell which of her works were the really valuable ones.
There was a logic to it, she assured me, but I’d never understood it. It had never had much to do with the size of the canvas or how much I liked the painting in question, and that was about all I had to go on. I’d pretty much given up even trying to evaluate, and therefore had to be all the more careful handling or tiptoeing around piles of her work of indeterminate value.
Kylie was in her studio area. No surprise there. She was also totally naked, which wasn’t as much of a surprise as I would have liked it to be either.
I coughed loudly and pretended to examine a painting hanging to my left. It was one of the long-term residents, a swirl of dark colours that made me think of an improbably close nebula in the night sky. Uninteresting to buyers, Kylie had informed me, and I suspected she’d only kept it because I’d mentioned I liked it.
“Hey,” she said. “Wasn’t expecting you.”
“You never expect me,” I said.
“That’s true.”