Two Different Memories When I was 19 and Kendra was 18, we were alone in our parents' house, lying on our parents' bed watching TV. We only learned recently that we're half-siblings — her father is actually my father's brother — but back then we were just brother and sister, close in a way that had always set us apart, even in a house that was already dysfunctional enough without us adding to it. She was in front of me, both of us on our sides. I felt it before I did anything — a vibe, like electricity running straight through me. My heart was pounding. My hand was actually shaking when I reached out and put it on her waist, just above her hip. The second I felt her body under my hand, I knew how aroused I was. She turned fast. I yanked my hand back, sure she was angry. She wasn't. I saw it in her eyes and she saw it in mine, mirrored right back, and we fell into each other. We kissed, hard and clumsy and passionate, and dry-humped there on our parents' bed. We didn't take our clothes off. We didn't know enough to. That was the start of almost a year of it. Sneaking around the house. Oral sex, hands everywhere, pushing right up to the last boundary again and again and never crossing it. We both wanted to. We never did. To me, it was beautiful. Then Kendra got a serious boyfriend. I had a girlfriend, off and on. It fizzled without ever being ended, and we didn't speak of it again for nearly twenty years. Hannah is part of why we couldn't just bury it. Hannah and I dated in high school and broke up — before Kendra and I ever happened. Kendra and Hannah didn't break up, though. They stayed close after we split, and they stayed close through everything that came after: Hannah and I marrying other people, living separate lives, both of those marriages failing. We reconnected years later, after my divorce was done and hers was still in progress. It felt like a second chance at the first real thing I'd ever had. We've been married three years now. I told her before we built a life on it. I confided what Kendra and I had done as teens, all of it. Hannah accepted it — reluctantly. She could accept a past that happened in that house, at 19 and 18, if it stayed in the past. Kendra's husband Ryan has never been told anything. And Kendra and Hannah are still close — daily, tell-each-other-everything close. I'm close with Ryan, too. He's one of the people who trusts me most in the world. So the four of us weren't distant in-laws keeping secrets at a distance. We were in each other's houses, on each other's couches, in each other's lives. Kendra and I had always been extremely close, too, even after we stopped. That's what finally got to me. Not just wondering why we never spoke of it — wondering how she carried it. Last year, when I was 39 and she was 38, I finally asked. "Do you remember when...?" "You must have dreamed that," she said. "I don't remember." I believed that she could believe that. Kendra has blocked out whole pieces of our home life that my other sister and I remember clear as day. Forgetting is how she survived that house. Then later she messaged me: I lied. I remember everything. And then: that she had forgiven me submitted by /u/egodeath1968 [link] [comments]
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