Obsessive Saint

ELI **Fourteen Years Old** The wedding was beautiful. Everyone said so. I heard it seventeen times between the ceremony and the reception -beautiful, stunning, perfect -the words passed between adults like currency, exchanged over champagne flutes and canapés while the string quartet played something I didn't know the name of but would spend the rest of my life hating. Mom looked happy. I was trying to be glad about that. I was sitting on the stone steps outside the venue when he found me. Dorian Voss. Sixteen years old. Dark hair. Eyes that were too still for a teenager's eyes, trained on me with an attention that felt uncomfortably like being studied. I had seen him twice before. Once at a dinner three months ago when our parents had announced the engagement. Once at a Christmas gathering I'd spent the entire duration pretending not to attend. Both times he had looked at me exactly like this. Like he was trying to solve something. "You're not inside," he said. "Noticed that, did you." He sat down beside me without being invited. Close enough that I could have moved away. I didn’t. "I don't like it either," he said. I looked at him. "I didn't say I didn't like it." "You didn't have to." The string quartet drifted through the open doors- which was unfortunate for my ears. I looked back at the garden. "Does your father do that?" I asked. "Make decisions and then inform you after?" "Always," He said. "Does it bother you?" A pause. He then picked up a small stone from the step, turned it over in his fingers, set it down. "Everything about my father bothers me," he said simply. I almost smiled. Almost. Inside, someone clinked a glass. The toast was starting. His father's voice carried through the doors, warm and certain, the voice of a man who actually seemed in love with my mother. Neither of us moved. Maybe it's because we don't want this wedding to be real or that we'd both gone from an only child with a single parent. Either way, reality is cruel enough to keep moving even when you’re not ready for it. "We're brothers now," I said. The word sat strangely in my mouth. Too large. Wrong shaped. He looked at me. Something moved behind his eyes- there and gone, like a light in a window you couldn't be sure you'd actually seen. "Step," he said quietly. "What?" "Stepbrothers." His voice was careful. Like the distinction mattered enormously, and he needed me to understand that it did. "Not brothers." I frowned. "What's the difference?" He stood. Brushed off his trousers and looked down at me with those too-still eyes and said nothing for a long moment. "Brothers don't get to choose." He walked back inside. I sat on the steps for a long time after that, listening to his father's toast, the applause, the music starting again. Thinking about the difference between brothers and stepbrothers. Thinking about choice. I didn't understand what Dorian meant. Not that night. Not for a long, long time. I would. Eventually. I would.