I started dating my girlfriend Cara this past winter, right after turning 23. We'd known each other in high school, our respective circle of friends overlapping frequently, but we lost touch after graduation.
We began texting after running into each other at a mutual friend's New Year's Eve party, and quickly started dating.
Our work schedules were different enough that we weren't spending every spare minute around one another, something that I felt had extended the honeymoon phase of our relationship just a tad. And even though I realized early on that Cara wasn't someone I'd end up falling madly in love with, we still had a lot of fun during the time we made for one another.
Both of us were gym rats, so we would frequently work out together, and since we still shared a lot of the same friends that we had since high school, our nights out bar hopping and clubbing as a group became a ritual almost every weekend.
To top it off, Cara was a bombshell. Tall and leggy, her pale skin and soft, voluptuous body contrasted my tanned, muscular one. The hours she had spent in the gym had gifted her with a nice, shapely ass, which was the sexiest part of her body in my opinion. I loved watching it bounce while she rode me reverse cowgirl style, a favorite position of mine that wasn't used nearly as often as I'd like.
Cara was quite tame in the bedroom, another way in which we contrasted each other, and while I definitely enjoyed the sex, there were times when I wished she'd be more adventurous.
That was easier said than done, however. She still lived at home, and while I shared an apartment with a buddy I went to college with, we spent the night at her place about half the time, meaning we needed to keep the bedroom noises minimal. Not exactly the best conditions to explore her freakier side, that's for sure.
Given that we spent a decent amount of time at her place, and ever the pleasing and dutiful boyfriend I was attempting to be, I made the effort to get to know her family early on. Her folks were in their mid-fifties and pleasant enough people who had the good graces to stay out of our hair when they were home.
Then there was her younger brother, Evan. I didn't quite know what to make of Evan at first. Even though he was two years younger than us, I only vaguely remembered him from high school as a short and quiet kid.
In the years since, however, he'd grown a lot taller, and was only a few inches shorter than my height of 6'1. Although he appeared thin, his body was often obscured by the dark, oversized clothing he usually wore, which matched the black polish on his nails and, along with the soft, blonde curls that framed his face, gave him an androgynous, almost feminine, look.
Despite the changes in appearance that comes with passing through your teenage years and entering early adulthood, Evan still remained quiet and shy, appearing standoffish in response to my attempts to get to know him.
But Cara and I were still in that early stage of our relationship where I felt like I had to show how committed I was by proving how much she mattered to me, so I tried a bit harder to make some kind of connection with her brother, mostly just to show I cared enough about her to try.
An art student at the local college, he was almost always sketching when I was over at their house, and I asked him about it one afternoon while the three of us were in the living room together.
Cara and I were watching TV on the love seat while Evan sat on the couch adjacent to us. He had a look of intense concentration on his face, his long sleeves pushed back to reveal the pale white of his skin underneath as he gracefully dragged the pencil tip across the paper of his sketchbook with long, nimble fingers. He'd pause occasionally to sweep his soft, blonde curls out of his eyes and off to the side, something that always made me grateful for deciding to keep my brown hair in a short crew cut.
