“It’s cool, Gabs. Shit happens when you party hard,” Eddie said with a dismissive shrug of his broad shoulders.
“Yeah, Aunt Elena came by the house and told our mom. She was pretty fucking mad about that shit,” Rob echoed his twin in a more reproachful tone. “You should have invited us back then too, prima…”
“Whatever. You’re here now, so keep an eye on those stairs for me, okay? Come on, Michelle,” Gabby concluded with a laugh and a wink, hooking her arm under Michelle’s and dragging her along with her, “let’s get a drink already. Maybe your brother can teach these two brutes how to be an athlete without being a meathead.”
Despite the ominous grunts and the menacing glares that he received from Gabby’s twin cousins after her parting quip, Tyler was quick to find common ground with Eddie and Rob and defuse that potentially uneasy situation. As it turned out, beside being former stars in the school’s football team and currently playing as linemen in their college’s team, the beefy twins were also big fans of mixed martial arts; though he was not especially into it, Tyler had watched a few UFC fights himself and had acquired a decent enough knowledge of the sport by listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast, which the twins also followed. Once those basic common interests were established, it was easy for Tyler to engage the huge grim-looking twins in conversation.
From across the room, Michelle couldn’t help but smile as she watched how her brother’s relaxed confidence enabled him to quickly win over Gabby’s cousins to the point of making them chuckle and chat amicably with him. Unfortunately, now that Tyler had broken the ice and humanized the two grim brutes on the sofa, a few giggly cheerleaders also started gravitating toward him and the beefy twins, the boldest of the girls going as far as to sit down beside Eddie and Rob while others, much to Michelle’s annoyance, buzzed around her studly brother, tittering away at whatever he said. That was nothing new and nothing to worry about, Michelle knew, but still she found it hard to stay focused on conversing with Gabby, especially because Michelle didn’t really have much to contribute to her hostess’s monologue about Kylie Jenner.
Between a distracted nod and a monosyllabic word of generic agreement, Michelle repeatedly glanced at Tyler, often meeting his piercing gray eyes and catching him smiling at her. As subtle as Michelle tried to be, her swift glances in her brother’s direction didn’t go unnoticed. Shifting topic abruptly from her frivolous rant and displaying her characteristic mix of sharp perceptiveness and effortless seductiveness, Gabby froze Michelle when she let out a longing sigh before speaking in a gentle purr.
“Honestly, I have no idea how you do it, girl… If Tyler was my brother, I’d have serious problems not jumping his bones all the time. And by that I mean that I wouldn’t really have a problem doing it, you know?” Gabby concluded with a throaty chuckle as she leaned closer and elbowed a suddenly panicked Michelle. Meeting the brunette’s mischievous dark eyes, Michelle barely managed to hold back a gasp as she considered what the teasing, conspiratorial glint in Gabby’s gaze might mean.
“What!? What are you talking about?” Michelle mumbled in as calm a tone as she could muster, only succeeding in extending Gabby’s impish laughter.
“Come on, girl, don’t get all prudish with me now…” Gabby went on, her smile broadening and her tone growing ever more languid. “We’re the Game of Thrones generation after all, incest is kinda mainstream now. I know that you’re super into the show, just like me, and I bet you’ve also read all the books, right? The way I see it, you and your brother aren’t quite blonde enough to be actual Lannisters, but I could totally see you two in a Cersei and Jaime type of scenario, if you know what I mean…”
Forcing herself to chuckle along with a coquettishly winking Gabby, doing her best to keep it together while her thoughts whirled in a million fearful directions in an attempt to evaluate if the brunette was just kidding or if she actually suspected something or lastly if it was just her own silly head overthinking Gabby’s teasing joke, Michelle eventually willed some words out of her suddenly dry mouth.
“Uh, well, maybe… I don’t know…” Michelle haltingly began, before gathering enough presence of mind to say something that would make Gabby drop the whole incest thing before her own nervousness might betray her somehow. “I’ll tell something for sure though, Gabby: you’d fit perfectly in the cast as a Dornish princess. Like, perfectly!”
Much to Michelle’s relief, playing on Gabby’s vanity worked like a charm. Within moments, the two girls were engaged in speculations and theories about Game of Thrones, with more than a few strategic references to Gabby’s stunning looks thrown in here and there by Michelle, just to make sure that her hostess stayed focused on herself and didn’t circle back to talking about forbidden sex, fictional or otherwise.
Michelle’s nervousness was completely dispelled by the time Gabby took her leave with a practiced smile to go make an appearance among the rest of the guests, leaving the curvy girl free to rejoin her brother. All through the following half hour spent hanging with Tyler, Eddie and Rob, Michelle couldn’t stop marveling at how alike the twins looked even though they weren’t identical, but mostly she was shocked by how starkly different from Gabby they looked. The only thing the three of them seemed to have in common was a kind of depth and intensity about their dark brown eyes, but, if she hadn’t been told they were cousins, Michelle would never have guessed that Gabby, Eddie and Rob were related at all. Eventually, as the huge twins started chatting up some of the cheerleaders, Tyler disengaged from the conversation, so that he and Michelle could return to the main party and lose themselves in the crowd.
Not that they actually got lost. As soon as they left Gabby’s elitist lounge, the siblings ran into the people they were more used to spend time with in school, mainly Michelle’s fellow nerds from the debate team and Tyler’s swimming buddies. Chatting and drinking and laughing, time went by faster than either of the siblings expected, yet in the back of their minds they were both counting the minutes until the moment when it would be appropriate to leave the party and go back home, so that they could get naked and jump into bed to pick up were they had left off after their stress-relieving anal romp in the car earlier. That moment came not long after midnight, when the vast majority of the people was either high or drunk or both and the crowd had moved en masse outside the house, to dance away on the deck or jump into Gabby’s spacious pool in various states of undress.