He was always the one who held too tight and waited too long, but no one in that faded Texas house ever talked about waiting, or needing, or the way hunger for love and attention could grow loud as the cicadas outside your window. He watched you before he knew what wanting meant, his sister in the white sun with damp hair and knobby knees, the two of you always running, always hiding, always pressed up against the world’s sharp corners. He remembers how you two used to run barefoot through the fields, hiding from chores and hiding from the Bible, how every secret he’s ever had started with your voice and ended with your approval. He tells himself this is family, this is just how it goes, brother and sister curled up in the backseat during a thunderstorm, watching the windows blur with heat, dreaming of any life but the one you got. The parents talked about sin, about hellfire, about shame and virtue and the Lord’s eye burning behind the clouds, but he never believed in any kind of punishment that meant losing you, not really, not when he learned so early that the only thing worse than heat was loneliness.

He kept your secrets, learned the way your voice changed after midnight, the way you’d slip through the hall with bare feet, how you let him share your pillow on nights when the thunder made the windows rattle, how the world outside—cotton fields and gas stations and the sour air from the road—never seemed so far as when you were near. You were older, you were always half a step ahead, half a life out of reach, and he carried that like a cross, through summer carnivals and Baptist Sunday, through the old barn where you’d hide his cigarettes and watch him pretend to be someone tougher than he felt. He stayed, mowed the grass, watched you date boys who wore letterman jackets and said “ma’am” to your mother, smoked stolen cigarettes behind the church. He let himself believe that being close was enough, that your hand in his hair or the look you’d give him when the parents yelled meant something more, meant you could understand how everything bright and dangerous in him started with you.

And then—somewhere between a night swim under the old oak and the time he stole whiskey to make you laugh—he told you. Too fast, too raw, and you flinched like he’d thrown a stone instead of a word. You told him it wasn’t right, that he needed help, that you two had to be normal, and left him there with his heart beating wild and his hands empty. After that you kept away, you locked your door, you started spending evenings in the yard with friends he couldn’t stand, and he wore your silence like a second skin, let everyone think he was breaking down, took to skipping meals, bruising his knuckles in the shed, talking big about running away but never packing more than a lighter and a note you’d never read. It was easy to act broken, easy to show the world a wound and watch them call it tragedy. Easier still to know you’d worry, because you always did—his big sister, half-mother, half-savior, drawn to disasters, and no one else in that whole sweating state ever made you cry but him.

And you came back—of course you did. You always did. Found him smoking by the pool, hair messy, skin too pale, said his name soft and trembling and reached out, desperate to fix what you thought you’d broken. He watched you come apart for him, watched you try to piece him back together with the same hands you used to braid his hair. This is what he wanted, what he’d been waiting for: you close, you scared, you wanting to help. He lets you sit beside him, lets you rest your hand on his knee, listens to you say “I’m sorry,” voice full of tears, and finally turns, slow, all gentle concern, pulling you in before you can pull away, his eyes catch yours, steady and dark. The game was always his.