Ollie looked nothing like his sister. People usually didn’t believe they were big brother and kid sister, with only a year between them. He had pale, steel-grey eyes to her liquid brown, and dark, almost black, curly hair to her gold-shot, caramel brunette, and no facial features in common with either his mother or his sister. All he shared with his sister was the charmingly quizzical expression that was such a family trait.
He was at least six feet tall, with a lean, defined, powerfully athletic build honed by years of competitive swimming, weight-training, and now his latest sporting obsessions, Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts. Izzy was about six inches shorter than he was, almost exactly the same height as their mother; when Carol Bartlett walked down the street with her daughter, people who didn’t know them would have sworn they were sisters, once they tore their eyes and thoughts away from those elegant figures and the mouth-watering feast of taut, quivering buttocks, that is, and yanked their brains back up past their belt-buckles.
Part 2: If you want my help, convince me:
As he watched her, secretly admiring her long, smooth legs in her short skirt as she stalked up and down the room, Izzy cooled down, having worked her way through the alphabet to dredge up names she could call her older brother. Ollie waited patiently for her to run out of things to call him and get to the reason for her being there, although he suspected he already knew. Unless she wanted something, Izzy usually steered clear of him; she knew only too well what he thought of her friends, and her taste in men, and so avoided confrontations with him.
Ollie had, meanwhile, pretty much given up on trying to convince his sister that the latest flavour of the month was usually a sweet-talking, rancid scumbag, and had defaulted to his backup position: when she inevitably found out what a clingy, wannabe bad-guy piece of human effluent her latest boyfriend was, she’d come to Ollie to get him off her back, he and his MMA pals would make said scumbag and his friends regret the day they’d been born, and then the cycle would repeat.
He mourned the fact that she never seemed to learn, and it hurt him, because he knew what she was going through, and it was all so unnecessary; if there was some way that he could make her see him and what she meant to him, she’d never have to go through what she continually put herself ever again, because he’d always be there to protect her, love her, and make it right for her.
But Izzy didn’t know, or didn’t swing that way, or just didn’t care enough to work it out, and so he waited glumly to see what had happened this time; for her to be here meant she had something on her mind, and eventually the single cog in her head she seemed to use for rational thinking out of that whole sharp, finely-tuned mind he knew she had, would remember its job, mesh itself once more, and clue him in.
So he waited, his face impassive, while she hurled increasingly lurid and unlikely, yet oddly half-hearted, accusations at him as she slowly ran out of steam.
“OK Skanky, are we all done now?” he enquired, raising an eyebrow at her quick flash of anger at the name.
“Don’t call me that, you body-waxed man-shagger!” she retorted hotly, and with that, honour was satisfied, hostilities were over, and the truce had been signalled. Izzy sat down on the bed, and Ollie took the chair, raising a “Really?” eyebrow at the damp patch, and getting a weak, embarrassed grin in return.
“Now, tell me, Iz; just why did you feel the need to come in here and rub one out? I’m sure you have more than enough wanking-space in your own room?”
Izzy frowned at him.
“It wasn’t like that, and stop saying that! You’re just saying that to make me feel embarrassed, so cut it out!”
Ollie inclined his head slightly and raised an eyebrow at her, his invitation to keep going, so she plunged on.
“I came in here to ask for your help. Yes, I know, I must be crazy, or ill, but there it is; I need your help, OK, are you happy now?” she pouted, her lip thrust out in a manner Ollie found almost unbearably sexy; for a brief second he toyed with the idea of just grabbing her and kissing her, biting that adorable lip, and playing it by ear from there, but Mr. Rational rescued him, telling him that would be a stupendously bad idea; if he tried it, he knew Izzy would probably scream the house down like a fucking banshee, and he’d be kicked out of the house forever.
So he leaned back in the chair instead, staring at the ceiling, anything to take his gaze off the vision perched on the end of his bed with that unbearably sexy expression on her face.
“What do you want from me this time, Iz? More of the same? Because your little favours have a way of turning into bloody great big problems.”
Izzy opened her mouth to object, but Ollie held his hand up for silence.
“Please Iz, before you bother to deny it, cast your mind back to those psychos you dated; let’s see now, first there was ‘Greggie’; I had to beat the shit out of him just for being Greggie. Then there was ‘Brucie’. What a fun-filled, psychotic bag of Aussie-outback serial-killer charm he was; throwing him through a shop window and down that escalator was a public service.”
He rested his elbows on the armrests and steepled his finger in front of him, looking away into the distance.
“Then there was Glenroy, such an all-round, mum-loving, church-going nice guy he was, according to you, but then he and his wannabe-Yardie pals slipped you a roofie and had you all set up for a gangbang snuff movie when we found you. He’s lucky he’s still alive after Moxie finished with him; as I recall, he smashed his throat and scalped him when he ripped that stupid Afro weave off his head; I hear he had to have his trachea rebuilt, and they had to use skin off his arse to graft onto his head; word on the street is he looked like a cross between an old alligator handbag and a failed lab experiment when they’d finished with him!”
Ollie grinned mirthlessly.
“Last I heard, when they deported him, Jamaica turned around and re-deported him to Angola; seems he lied to everyone about where he was really from, and now he’s in jail in Luanda having his arsehole stretched every day by, well, just about everyone, actually; apparently, smack-heads and drug-pushers are fair game there…”
He paused, his eyes hooded, and his face expressionless.
“And then there was Tommy. Ah yes, Tommy, ‘sweet’ Tommy, ‘rich’ Tommy, ‘misunderstood’ Tommy, spoiled, vicious little dick Tommy. If you remember, last Easter, he abducted you, and threatened to slice you up on a bandsaw because you said ‘no’ to some four-way action with his mincing, pencil-dick, rich little pansy school-boy friends. I still get a warm glow from the look on his face when he answered the door in his Hugh Hefner robe and I grabbed him by the balls and squeezed. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to hammer a cocktail shaker up someone’s arse when you’re standing on their face? I think shoving all those ice-cubes and a pint of gin down there and giving him a good shake didn’t go down too well, judging by the noises he was making. Still, the ice must have helped take the sting out of it.”
Ollie grinned wistfully at the memory.
“Poor little Tommy’s wandering around now with a size 9 arse, and a size 19 arsehole; that was a good night’s work, and one he’ll never forget; the way he walks now, he looks like his legs are on backwards…”
He paused, his faint grin dying away as he rubbed his eyes tiredly.
“And then, out of all the low-life’s you could have chosen to hang with, you picked that prize dickhead, greasy little Khadif, with his knock-off Armani suits and fake Rolexes and that pathetic, tricked-out, low-end 3-Series Beamer; don’t bother to deny he was a dealer: everyone in Fulham was buying dodgy meth and rocks from him.”
He sighed and leaned back in his seat.
“Apparently Khadif wasn’t as street-smart as he thought he was, and it was only pure, blind luck you weren’t with him the night the Crane brothers caught up with him and had a high-level business discussion about turf; as I remember, all the police ever found were his fingers, most of them, anyway, one of his ears, and some of his teeth, and those were embedded in a tree…”
He blew out tiredly, his eyes slitted, distant.
“Iz, do you know how close you came to just disappearing? Sweetie, I can only bail you out so many times. I can’t take on people like the Crane mob; I wouldn’t even know how to start; if you’d been there when they grabbed Khadif I don’t know what…” he trailed off, biting his lip, stopping himself just in time from blurting out just what she really meant to him.
“Izzy, I keep trying to tell you, but you won’t listen, you just keep getting mixed-up with some of the biggest loonies, losers, idiots, dummies, and dopey little chancers. They all end up peeling their faces off the pavement or out of their own arses, and you still don’t learn, you just go on to the next one. All the favours you need from me end up with me and my friends unwinding some psycho from you, and someone getting badly hurt. So what, or who, is it this time?”
Izzy stared at him, her eyes huge as he went through the litany of bad choices she’d made. She could hear the note of disappointment, and a tinge of something else, too, in his voice, and, for the first time, it saddened her as she began to realise what she’d been doing, and what he’d been doing for her, and what it had cost him.
“Come on, Izzy, it’s late, and I was hoping for a little time to myself, if you get my drift?” he murmured, and this time she heard the barely suppressed frustration in his voice.
“What, Holy Saint Shulagh, Jesus’ favourite little sunbeam still holding out, is she?” she grinned acidly, glad to get off the subject of her and her woeful taste in men, and onto Ollie’s adventures among the local girls, a subject just as painful and hard to bear.
Listening to him talk about this girl or that was like peeling scabs for her; every time one of his week-long relationships went south she felt like screaming ‘What about me? What’s so wrong with me? Look at me, damn you!’ but of course she never did, because that would for certain ruin whatever little she had with him.
So she listened, grinding her teeth, while he talked about the latest girl who should have been her.
Ollie grinned back ruefully.
“Yeah, Shulagh Devlin’s fucking hard work; we get so far, and then… pffft; nothing, her knees stay welded together, and I have a massive case of… well, I guess you know what I have a case of, so if you don’t mind…” he trailed off meaningfully as he jerked his thumb at the door.
Izzy ignored the hint; instead she sprawled on his bed and looked thoughtfully at him. Ollie tried looking everywhere but at the bed; the sight of his hot sister sprawled on his bed, in her short skirt, with her long, flawless legs crossed behind her, was threatening to give him a hard-on he really didn’t want to explain to her…