-Caleb-

Eating disorder?

"What, like you're anorexic?" I asked, horrified.

My stepsister curled tightly into her door. She wouldn't even look at me, and not for the usual reasons.

I raked my eyes over Jacey, trying to see what would ever have given her the idea she needed to be anorexic.

"Bulimic. And let's just drop the subject now," my mother said sharply.

Yeah, the subject should never have been opened in the first place, but Hank Collins had all the sensitivity of a post. Everything was funny. Nothing was off limits.

Mom found it charming, but it usually pissed me off. Especially when he stuck Jocelyn into uncomfortable situations, like he was doing now.

I was completely aware my stepsister had a crush on me. When she was fifteen and pouring out her heart to me, I'd be the first to admit I didn't handle it well. I was shocked.

Ever since then, though, the very thought of those mischievous green eyes and thick black hair, not to mention a body that could have been a World War II pinup, made my dick twitch. It'd become impossible to go home from college after I started thinking about her THAT way.

Hank, mercifully, moved onto another subject with Mom's direction, but the damage was done. Jocelyn looked positively miserable.

Maybe if we weren't stepbrother and stepsister, our parents weren't in the car, and Jocelyn wasn't four years younger than me, I would have taken this opportunity to show her just how beautiful her body really was. As things stood, the best I could do was hold out my phone to her.

"Wanna play sudoku?" I asked.

Our new inside joke made her laugh a little, and Jocelyn relaxed, peeling herself off the door and taking my phone so she could stare at the black screen for a while.

I held my breath when our fingers brushed and told the naughty asshole in my pants to calm the fuck down. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving, when I'd had no excuse not to come back home, it only became more uncomfortable. Jocelyn wouldn't look at me, and, God help me, I COULDN'T look at her. Not the way she just kept getting hotter.

When this trip came up and Hank wouldn't take no for an answer, privately threatening to pull the tuition payment he'd promised for my medical degree if I didn't "start getting along" with my "sister," I knew I could have made a stink. I could have gone to Mom and complained. But it'd seemed so silly at the time to cause strife in their marriage just because of one camping trip.

Then I'd laid eyes on Jocelyn, wearing jeans that were worn in all the right places and a loose T-shirt that, nevertheless, did little to hide some of her better assets. I knew from the moment Hank had taken my waterproof pack and threw it in the back of the Suburban that I should have kicked and screamed before agreeing to this trip.

Because some deep, dark devil in me knew in two days, Jocelyn was going to be legal.

It was one of the many barriers I'd thrown up between myself and my baser desires. If Jocelyn wasn't eighteen, then there was no way I would touch her. Then there was the added complication of her being my stepsister. And four years my junior.

And... and... and...

I'd stacked all the excuses up carefully, one-by-one, to try to get myself to stop having X-rated thoughts about Jocelyn. Most of the time it worked.

But then, most of the time, I didn't have a living, breathing Jocelyn sitting right next to me, holding my phone, staring into a lost abyss.

Damned right, I wanted to be her white knight.

The best I could do on that score, however, was to give her a way to zone out of the family conversations before my mother or, God forbid, Hank decided to pester her some more.

"So, how's it going at the U of M?" Hank asked, breaking the soft squabble he'd been having with my mother that had ended in more kissy-kissy noises.

Sometimes they were nauseating, but I was happy Mom had found happiness. "Still third in my class," I replied. It was more than I usually gave him, as I liked to keep that part of my life private, especially from Hank, but I figured if it kept the pressure off Jocelyn, I could make the sacrifice.

"Really? That's great!" Hank said. "And you're going to Johns Hopkins this year for your Masters or whatever the next step for doctors is?"

"Hank," Mom murmured, "we talked about this. Caleb is going NEXT year. He's taking a year off between."

"Otherwise my semester would have started two weeks ago," I added.

Hank frowned slightly, then nodded. "Oh, that's right. So, you working, then?"

"Yes. I'm going to be a part-time research assistant for a professor of mine for a year," I replied. Hank was an old-school believer in work. I respected that about him, but that did mean I knew what was coming next.

"Part-time? Why just part-time? It's not like you're doing anything," Hank grunted. "Oh, give the boy a break, Hank. He works very hard," Mom butted in.

"I didn't say he doesn't work hard. I'm just saying—"

"We're here!" Jocelyn interrupted, dousing the coals of anger that had started simmering in my belly.

Hank looked up at a series of nondescript orange plastic ties sticking out from a pine tree and made a hard left.

We bounced off the gravel logging road and onto sloped, hardpacked rock and sand. There was a truck parked to one side, a small camper to the other, and two boats tied out to the side of the landing at the edge of a mess of boulders.

Shimmer Lake, our destination, was a mere twelve feet from us, sparkling, as its name implied, in the sunlight.