Accidents.

“Of course you believe you saved her. You want to! You think you’re the only one that’s tried? Do you think you’re the only one that’s fell for that?” I was so unbelievably frustrated with him that I wanted to slap him as hard as I could across his handsome face. I settled for shoving him roughly away when he stepped towards me trying to mutter some soothing words. “She was fucked up,” I said in the lowest, steadiest voice I could manage, “before she ever fucked up her face.”

I first met Owen when he was still dating my sister. When she was still normal, or as normal as an older sister could view her younger. He was so tall and relaxed that I thought my sister had made a mistake. Sabrina always went for the intense, slight, obviously intelligent type. I was the one with a thing for broad-shouldered unexpected geniuses. He had shaggy brown hair and a baseball cap on. All I could see of his eyes was that they were dark. Now I know they’re brown. When I saw him smile, I was a goner. She was always the one who made him smile.

But even thought they were the ones who always had fun, we spent enough time together that I thought we had something equally good, if a little different from what I’d expected. I expected to fall into a jokey relationship like I did with all of Sabrina’s boyfriends. The petite brunette always had someone, and it was sort of my niche to be the one to jokingly kick them out of the kitchen in the morning when they came scrounging for food. I always got along with them, which is probably the strangest part of our fucked up relationship. Sabrina did have good taste, I’ll give her that.

But with Owen, unless I was talking, it was mostly silence. And I don’t know how to explain it, but it was enough for me. Back then it was enough. We would sit on the couch, facing each other with our backs against the arms and our legs bent up against each other’s, and he would always turn the conversation to me. I was never able to come up with hilarious anecdotes. He didn’t laugh with me, but he listened.

So when Sabrina came into my room and screamed at me and slapped me for taking her boyfriend, I was astonished. Owen had told her he was in love with me. He was the first one of those joking boyfriends who she’d ever wanted to spend the rest of her life with. All around a bad situation. And Owen never told me to my face that he wanted me. Even after that. Especially after Sabrina’s accident.

Sabrina was two years younger than me, and now she always cried. She mostly stayed in her room, where her agoraphobia kept her locked for most of the day. Our house was too big for her to deal with. Every day, it seemed, was enough to send her into a crying fit. We had eventually removed all the mirrors, and I hated, hated her for grabbing tight hold of her misery and never letting it go. Our mother let her do it. Owen let her do it.

And Owen was always there for her. He was always there for poor, troubled Sabrina. Never for her resentful sister, Emma. It was unfair of me to think or say that, but it always felt that way.

“You talk with her,” I whispered, turning and ducking my head to watch my hands grip the railing tightly. It was below freezing, and the back porch was exposed to all the wind coming off the water, but I didn’t care. “You make her laugh. It used to be something, but really it’s nothing, Owen. Why can’t you ever—“ I broke off. I didn’t want to finish, didn’t want him to see me as pathetic when I wanted so badly to pity him.

He was quiet a long time. I could hear him breathing in the doorway. He finally slid the door shut and I felt him behind me, felt him grip my shoulders. I stiffened up at the unfamiliarity of the contact. But Owen didn’t step away and respect my need for boundaries. Instead, from behind he slid an arm around my stomach, right under my breasts because he was so tall. He wrapped his other arm across my chest. I let out a long breath and rested my head against the arm curled around my shoulders. He in turn tucked his cold face against the side of my neck.

“I never speak because I love to hear your voice.”

My breath caught, and I knew he felt it, but I wasn’t going to let him fix this with words. People lied and dissembled with words.

“You never speak because she’s crushed everything in you worth saying,” I growled, trying to escape his grip. “Don’t pretend she’d not the one controlling everything between you.”

“Emma,” he said with frustration, holding me tighter. “You know—“

“What do I know?” I finally burst out, my voice barely above a whisper but full of anger. “How can I know anything? How can I know anything when all you say to me is ‘hello’ and ‘you should be more understanding’?”

“She needs me, Emma. And she needs her sister.”

I stopped struggling. I became stone. I was so good at that.

“You’re such a bastard,” I said flatly. Surprise at my tone, I suppose, led him to loosen his grip. I jerked around so that I was looking straight up into his brown eyes. “Don’t come here, and touch me, and wheedle with me to make her life easier. Who takes care of her? You listen to her bullshit. I’m the one who cleans her up after her nightmares. I’m the one—“

I finally got a hold of myself and snapped my mouth shut, dropping my gaze and concentrating hard on his chest until I could bear to look up at his face again. Owen’s face was full of pain, but how could I ever think that that pain was ever for what I was feeling. He never fucking showed it.

He was silent for a time. He never moved his eyes from mine. “Do you understand what it feels like to think you’ve destroyed someone?” he finally asked, his voice quiet.

“I hope you feel that for both the lives you’ve fucked up in this house.”

I never expected to say those words, and I never expected them to have the effect they did. Owen’s face completely shut down. His eyes turned dark and, for the first time, angry, not just frustrated. He slammed his hands down on the railing behind me, trapping me against it even though he was barely brushing against me. His furious face filled my field of vision.

“The lives I’ve fucked up,” he growled. “Right. That’s rich. Do you know what your reputation was in high school, little innocent victim of all the shit you’ve suffered? Don’t act so fucking noble and damaged. You toy with people. Everyone knew it—everyone who didn’t have their heads in their asses. Do you know how many times I had to hold Sabrina while she cried over something you’d done? Do you think I would willingly throw myself at your feet. Just because—“ He bit back the rest of the sentence and blew out a hard breath, stirring the hair around my face.

The anger that boiled up inside me was so strong that I thought I could budge him. But I couldn’t. I struggled a little, but he roughly set me back against the railing. I winced as it jammed into me, but he didn’t seem to care.

It took me a few minutes to finally calm myself. My breathing slowed. I swallowed the bile that my resentment of him pulled up. My resentment of his utter trust in the girlfriend he supposedly dumped for me. Sabrina had never been an angel.

“Sabrina,” I said, watching the cloud from my long steady exhale drift away. “Sabrina never loved me. Did you know that?”

His expression didn’t change and he didn’t answer. Fuck him. I’d say this, and I would never see him again. I’d move out. I’d get away from both of these manipulative assholes.

“I’m the affair child. I’m not my mom’s. Sabrina was hers. Sabrina was the one she loved.” My sudden violence in shoving him off then shocked him into letting me go and stepping back so I could hug myself. “She turned…every friend against me. Either she worked on them and convinced them I was using them, or she turned me on them—by the time I realized—“ I broke off that tendril and ruthlessly pushed it aside.

“She knew every single one of my insecurities.” I hugged myself tighter. “I don’t know how she knew how to hurt me so easily. She had people believing I was just as much of a whore as my real mother. I was cornered by the locker rooms so many times. My….first kiss wasn’t my idea. He broke my nose. He didn’t exactly stop there.”

Owen’s breathing hitched. It felt so good to show him how deserving she was of hatred. It didn’t feel good to remember that high-school bastard’s rough hands on me.

“So,” I continued, throwing off my dark voice and adopting a mocking, upbeat one that made him wince, “If you want to stand there and yell at me on her behalf, go ahead. Tell me she cries over the things I’ve said to her. I’m such a cruel older sister, standing here and resenting her when all she’s tried to give me is love. I should be happy to take care of that stupid, fucking angel.” I’d somehow raised my voice to shouting levels. I’d somehow tangled my voice with tears. Owen stepped towards me with his hands out and reaching. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d backhanded him viciously across the face.

“Don’t you dare try to comfort me the way you’ve comforted her,” I said without inflection. Owen’s hand had instantly gone to his cheek, but he let it drop. I continued to cry, but I did it silently. “Just because I don’t pour my heart out to you on a daily fucking basis doesn’t mean I don’t have one. You’re always trying to pull this shit out of me, and apparently you’ve hated me because I won’t let you trick me the way everyone else has.” I narrowed my eyes to slits. “I’m glad I figured that out. I’m glad I finally have you figured out.”

I could see Owen’s jaw clench, saw the muscles jump. He swallowed hard like he was going to say something, but I’d said so much that I never wanted to hear his voice again.

“You’ve been dragging me along for such a long time,” I finally said.

Owen once against took a step toward me, but I crossed my arms and moved back. He stopped, and he took a deep breath. “When I…broke up with Sabrina, I told her I couldn’t love or need two people, two sisters, at the same time.” He was telling me this like I didn’t already know he loved me, and it struck me that he wasn’t aware of what Sabrina had told me. “So I want you to know that I’ve….never…hated you. No matter what I believed about you.”

I sneered and he let out a groan of frustration.

“I didn’t break it off with her to get with you,” he said as if I’d suggested that he had. “I broke it off with her so I wouldn’t be lying to her every time she said she loved me. I broke it off to get away from both of you. I couldn’t--” and here his voice cracked “--be with you around her when she loved me so much.”

There were a few beats of silence. When I spoke, I didn’t even address the fact that he’d as good as confessed his love for me.

”Sabrina doesn’t love anyone,” I said quietly. “She loved her face. She’s broken because that’s all she had. I’m fucking glad it’s gone. All that…fucking superiority is just gone. When I clean her up, I revel in what she’s become.” I wanted to scare him with my serenity. I wanted him out. I wanted him dead and I wanted him to love me the way I thought he had when Sabrina’s accusations all those months ago had made me hope.

His eyes didn’t even flicker. “Emma,” he breathed, stepping towards me and taking my face in his hands all at once. I wished I were strong enough to push him away. I was strong enough to use words. Words and I had always had a love-hate relationship. They destroyed me, and I used them to destroy.

“If you’ve touched her today, I don’t want your hands on me.” His hands hovered just above my skin now.

“God, Emma. Did you ever love me?”

My frustration hit its limit. How dare he demand that I expose everything inside of me? Had I not given him enough in my outburst? Did he have to take everything?

Fucking take it.

I grabbed his coat and jerked him down, making him stumble and slam me back against the railing as we mauled each other’s mouths. I was crying harder than before when he delved into my mouth with his tongue and set his teeth to my lips. The hands I’d refused so vehemently slid under my jacket and under the waistband of my jeans. As I clasped my own around his neck, lifting myself against him, he gripped me against him and moved us against the side of the house. His fingers fumbled with the zipper on my pants until he finally just ripped them apart and down the seam.

We could barely stand. Between us, three feet were on the ground, and he hooked my other leg over the railing. Owen kept me trapped against the side of the house, and even though his thrusting was frenzied and almost painful, his hands on my face and in my hair were so gentle. I could almost believe he’d never hated me and I’d never hated him. We found release at the same time, and I almost hated him all over again. So fucking perfect for each other, I’d always thought so. But he…

God, I could never get Sabrina out my head.

My breathing steadied long before his and both of my feet were back on the ground. He kept touching my face, my mouth, my neck, until I couldn’t take it anymore.

“I want you to go,” I said quietly. Owen stilled completely for an instant. Then those hands I hated pressed against the wall as if it would hold him up, forming a loose cage around me.

His eyes met mine with more intensity than I knew he had, which was saying something.

“You can’t love both of us. And I’m not staying. I bought a plane ticket yesterday.” Despite everything, despite saying I’d never amount to anything, Sabrina was going to have to see me leaving. She was going to know that I was going to college when she would never be able to, stuck inside and futureless because of her love of her former beauty. Poor, miserable bitch.

“Why are you running, Em?”

He never called me that anymore.

“I’m dropping dead weight and focusing on the future. It’s not running away. You’ve always been so blind,” I sighed, knowing this would anger him more than anything.

“You can’t just ignore your past—“

“No, Owen, but I can not let it drag me down into this Hell that Sabrina’s created. You can stay here. You can throw yourself into this need you seem to have to save someone who doesn’t want to be saved. You can let her destroy you. I’m leaving.” I took a deep breath. “I’m going to school.”

“She…needs me,” he said, like he’d said earlier.

“She needs control over someone.”

“I need you, Em.” He’d never said that before. “Even when I thought I could love her, I knew I’d never need her.”

“It’s pretty fucked up that need is a level above love to you,” I snapped. I hated that he was comparing his feelings for the two of us. I wanted it to just be me. It never would be. “I don’t need to suffer for the rest of my life because you want both of us. You love how much she needs you.”

He opened his mouth.

“But I don’t need you,” I pushed on viciously. “I’ve never needed you. Or her, or mommy, to love me. I’ve never needed anyone. You’re obviously looking for some sick, dependent relationship. You can’t fucking have it from me.”

For some reason, he laughed, and I could hear the tears in his laughter, and I almost let myself break. For him. But his love wasn’t enough to keep me in this place, if he really did love me. He wasn’t going to use me while she used him. I refused to have that link to her anymore.

“How can you—just—Em, I’ve been in love with you since I met you.”

“I love you.” I gave him that. He swallowed again, his eyes more haunted and unwavering on mine. “But I can’t be her sister anymore. You link me to her, because you are never going to let it go. I know you won’t. I can’t handle that. When I find someone else I can love, it’s going to just be me, and just them. There’s not going to be some fucked up familial, incest thing to make me hate them at the same time.” I sucked in air and forced my body to relax. He was so warm against me. “I’m going to love someone. I want to be happy.”

“I want you to be happy,” he finally said. It hurt a lot more than I thought it would that he couldn’t declare himself severed from her. I buttoned my ripped pants, ignoring how wet I still was, and waited until he let his hands slowly slide down the wall and he stepped away.

Before I went inside, I half-turned back towards him, but refused to meet his eyes. “Berkeley,” I said quietly. He understood me. “That’s where I’ll be, if you ever love me more than you need me.”

Need and want were selfish words, and they loved to torment me.

It was time to escape the words I’d learned at home.

A/N: a little darker than I normally indulge in. I started writing this at 8 this morning and finished at 11, so tell me if there are typos) I really should move on to my homework, as opposed to just saying I will.

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY!

My song for the day (not that it has anything to do with the story): Laughing at You - Head Automatica