We Shouldnt Have Done This Ch 01

You're wondering why my sister Emma is giving me this strange look over a drunken family meal? I'll have to tell you all about it from the beginning.

I'm Max, the 19-year-old bespectacled nerd in the family. My parents have always found me hard to pin down: I'm not stupid, but I've always done the bare minimum in everything. Addicted to video games since I was young, I built my bubble of calm and immaturity around these imaginary worlds. It's how I escaped bullying at school, inconsistent grades and the disappointment of my parents. I'm just about to finish my first year at a computer science school, but with very little motivation. My father keeps telling me that if I don't get a move on, I'll become an alcoholic and overweight on my unemployed sofa, while my mother tries not to give up hope: we all mature one day. I don't know who will win her bet.

For my sister Emma, things are very different. She's the light of the family. She has everything going for her: she's a very pretty girl, three years older than me, hard-working, and starting medical school with her characteristic zeal. On paper, she's perfect: caring, funny, bubbly, devoted to causes that are too often lost. But all these traits jinx her, especially when it comes to love. We've grown accustomed to seeing her come home, make-up running all over her days, when she's dumped that umpteenth jerk who didn't deserve her. A real artichoke heart, that Emma! As the months went by, I watched her fade away behind her textbooks, which were even more boring than mine.

I miss my teenage years spent with her. Emma and I once had a wonderful, close relationship. After childhood, when a boy and a girl are like oil and water, adolescence allowed us to build our own little universe. In my grandparents' attic, we found a Nintendo 64 with the GoldenEye game. And like two adventurous archaeologists, we decided to plug this relic into the living room TV. We were all excited to see the game launch. We quickly learned to love shooting each other, playing the main campaign over and over again, fighting over the controller to try and finish the missions in ever-shorter time. This period, which stretched into a long vacation, was the best time of my life. I think for Emma, it was a time that allowed her to step out of her ideal of a perfectly well-behaved girl. From time to time, when I pass my sister in the corridors, we make that ridiculous hand-to-hand attack gesture from the game, with the forearm as rigid as a machete, before one of us decides to make the most ridiculous death sound possible.

Here we are again, a few months before I write these lines. Emma is immersed in her studies, regularly thrown off balance by her love affairs, which I find hard to follow. And me, well, I'm still the same, absorbed in online games, my cans of Red Bull displayed on the little table where I rest my lazy legs. Every now and then, Emma comes knocking at the door. She sits down on my little sofa, pushing the packets of potato chips and other carcinogenic snacks into a garbage can with a slightly annoyed air, before spreading out her dancer's legs next to mine. There's always that guilty pleasure in her eyes. Her room is the realm of order and cleanliness, mine is the source of chaos in the universe.

I think that when she comes to keep me company between two marathons of revision, she delights in giving the middle finger to the demanding world that expects too much of her. I regularly offer her the controller, but she always turns it down. She prefers to watch me play. Sometimes, she tells me about herself, her life, her stress, her classes at university. But often, she says nothing. I listen to her when she talks to me, even though I don't know what to say to her. When she doesn't say anything, I play, without saying anything, sometimes observing her face lost in my virtual universe where there's no one to save, but everything to destroy. Before closing the door to return to her dimension, she would utter the ritual phrase:

- "Thank you, Max".

I think I was the neutral, light-hearted listener she needed.

A loud commotion from Emma's room marked the beginning of my story. We all rushed in, only to discover that the ceiling had collapsed and a downpour of water was reducing what remained of the realm of order and cleanliness to nothing. Miraculously, Emma appeared behind us, returning from the bathroom, struggling to realize that her pee break had just saved her life. Soon, the expert concluded that there had been major water damage, rendering the room unusable for months at least.

The simplest solution was chosen to remedy Emma's room-less status: she would sleep with me. My sister greeted the news with a touch of skepticism, but she didn't object. After all, there was no alternative but to sleep on the uncomfortable couch in the living room for months. I think she knew we could find a balance in the Force, between order and chaos. We all participated in the summary removal of her belongings that had survived the cataclysm. My mother embarked on a crusade to exterminate every last speck of dust from my room, to the accusatory speeches of my father blaming my lack of savoir vivre, while Emma held back her tears. My mother, sensing the crisis coming, took her in her arms and I disappeared into the small private bathroom adjacent to my bedroom to make room for my new roommate.

For the first few nights, we struggled to get used to living together under the comforter: two people used to sleeping alone naturally find it hard to respect the sharing of space. Fortunately, a diplomatic treaty agreed to share the bathroom. Then, noise-canceling headphones let my sister study in peace in one corner of the room while I shot aliens in the other. Little by little, we got used to this more peaceful cohabitation than we'd hoped. We were aware that we both had to make an effort.

But there was still a problem. A big problem, of which I'm not proud. For a few years now, I'd been getting used to watching porn before bed on my cell phone. The PornHub jingle punctuated my nights as much as my mother's "Sweet dreams". Becoming an addiction, these peaks of pleasure helped me to fall asleep and, above all, to not get depressed about my situation. And now more than a week had gone by and I hadn't really been able to satisfy my increasingly pressing needs. There was the shower, but the narrowness of the bathroom meant that any suspicious noise would immediately be spotted in the room next door. The other toilet was a solution, but staying there too long would make things too suspicious with my parents. Sometimes I satisfied myself with the speed of a prepubescent, but this gave me no satisfaction, at best a lull until the next day. Sexuality is not a common topic in the family. The few times I talked about it with Emma, it was in a very modest way, mentioning that I'd been to summer camp with a girl. And she hadn't asked me about it.

So I lay down, trying to place my knees between her and me, to protect her body from the horrible truth: my erection was struggling to pass before I fell asleep. The demon of lust tortured me, feeding my fantasies for hours on end. Like a pain-loving masochist, I watched X-rated movies on my phone in total silence when I sensed she was fast asleep. I wondered how Emma managed her own desires, which she couldn't satisfy in my presence either.

That night, my sweaty back struggled to cool down. Erotic dreams followed one another, leaving me no respite. I waddled back and forth, hoping for some mental calm, but the hours ticked by, reality merging with my dreams. Dying of boredom in my insomnia, as moonlight pierced the curtains, my junkie mind was drawn to the glistening skin of the woman who shared my bed. I began to stare at my sister's body. Her bare back in her strapless, bra-less top, her innocent little panties. Her white buttocks revealed by the ill-disposed comforter. Her muscular thighs. Her elongated neck. Her hazel hair, the scent of which sometimes called to my nose. I loved her smell, her perfume. My consciousness and vigilance anesthetized by lack of sleep, I approached her. At that moment, she was no longer my sister, but the most beautiful girl I knew. There, close to me. All it took was a few inches for me to be against her. To feel the softness and warmth of her skin. So that from her buttocks or the hollow of her loins, she could feel my shame poking through my boxers, piercing my taboo thoughts. The exercise of will lasted a good hour at least. This devious impulse repeated its assaults. She turned innocently to continue sleeping on her back, slightly inclined towards me, her far too plunging décolleté revealed under my forbidden gaze. Too irresistible an invitation. I finally gave in. I crossed THE line.

I pressed myself against her, my boxers down, ready to be pulled up in a hurry. My naked erection was pressed against her upper thigh. She reacted slightly to this contact, still asleep. Her hand, hitherto on her belly, gradually dropped to my lower abdomen. She jumped a little, as if guessing what she was touching. Her slender fingers were in contact with my erection. Just a light, innocent pressure on my sex, which was enough to make my heart beat like never before. I didn't move, for fear of shortening this delicious forbidden, watching her face turned towards me, her eyes closed. Without knowing the content of her dreams, I flinched with pleasure as she lightly moved her fingers along my penis, caressing me, somewhere between consciousness and somnambulism. Was she aware of it? Was she imagining something with another? My insides were being devoured by two wolves, the wolf of shame and the wolf of lust.

Her hand didn't move from my sex until morning.

And so began our rapprochement.

We shouldn't have done this, and yet...