I don’t know how long it took for me to fall asleep, but by the time I woke up it was mid-afternoon.
Kiegan was in the living room, sitting on the couch with an open bowl of Udon noodles, some chicken Tempura and a six pack box of donuts with two missing, a tiny bit of icing in the corner of Kiegan’s mouth telling me exactly where they went.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” he told me softly, inviting me over to the couch. “I just got back with the food about twenty minutes ago, your noodles should still be hot,” he told me, nodding at the closed container with chopsticks sitting nicely on top.
“Thanks,” I muttered groggily. I didn’t really feel that hungry, but as soon as I thought that, my stomach grumbled in disagreement. I unwrapped the chopsticks and dug into the noodles. I could feel Kiegan’s gaze on me, and I knew he had questions, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer them.
“It’s going to be ok, you know,” he told me eventually. “We made a choice, but we can always change it. If it’s going to be too hard, we can always deny our relationship.”
I shook my head. “It’s not that.”
“Ok. I thought there was something at the end. When your mom said she was pregnant, your face just went completely white. But it’s ok if you don’t want to talk about it. Eat up,” he told me, and turned on the TV. Of course the news was back to being about us. Not too much happened on boxing day, it seemed. Kiegan quickly changed the channel to a Grey’s Anatomy repeat.
I ate the noodles, barely tasting them, my insides feeling like they were going to explode. I had to tell someone. Every cell in my body was desperate to ask Kiegan for his opinion, to have him tell me what to do. He was so good at this sort of stuff.
But at the same time, I was scared. The last time I’d told someone I’d been called a liar, ostracized, and it had led to me leaving my family completely.
What if the same thing happened again?
What if Kiegan decided he wanted nothing to do with me if I told him?
I could feel the tears welling up inside of me again. There was a certain irony to it; after all this time, after I’d spent years of my life hating my brother, I was now debating as to whether or not telling him my greatest secret would drive him away from me completely.
If he can’t handle your worst secret, then what do you expect to ever get out of this relationship? My brain asked the most sensible question of all, and I debated it. What was I expecting to get out of this relationship? Great sex? National scandal? This was serious. If Kiegan and I were both willing public embarrassment by coming out, then it had to mean we were both pretty serious about this, right?
And that meant I almost owed it to us, to the relationship, to tell him. No matter what the consequences.
Finally, I spoke.
“What would you do, if you knew someone would be in trouble, but there was nothing you could do about it?”
Kiegan looked at me. “I don’t know. I guess I would maybe try and tell someone who could do something about it?”
“What if they don’t care?”
“I guess it would depend on the situation, and how much I cared about the person. If it was someone I really cared about, I would probably do whatever it took to make sure I could do something about it.”
I nodded and thought about what he said.
“You always wanted to know why I left the family and ran to Seattle, right?”
“Yeah. But seriously, if you’re uncomfortable, you don’t need to tell me.”
“No. I do need to tell you. You need to know.”
I stared down at the coffee table as Kiegan subtly turned off the TV. Tried to gather my thoughts. How do you tell someone something like this, how do you admit it? Finally, I just came out and said it.
“Your Uncle Edward molested me.”
There. I’d said it. Straight up. No bullshit, no sugarcoating, that was the truth. That was what had happened.
“Fuuuuuck,” Kiegan muttered in reply, but before he could say anything else, I had to keep going. I knew I had to tell him everything.
“It was just before I’d graduated from high school. I was seventeen. He was staying with us for the night, and after everyone had gone to bed he came into my room. He put his hand on my breast, then fingered me, and whispered in my ear not to bother telling anyone, because they wouldn’t believe me anyway.”