Not many places could make me feel calm the way my old bedroom did. My parents hadn’t decorated it since I’d moved away—an act I’d never really appreciated until the moment I pushed open the door and glanced around at the familiar, stripy blue walls I’d spent my teenage years staring at. Then I was grateful for their refusal to admit I’d grown into a man in the blink of an eye.

Twenty-five years old.

I was twenty-five years old, and back seeking solace from that one room. Not from a girlfriend, a wife or even a friend, but from four walls, an old, slightly worn out carpet, and that three-quarter bed that still had my black and white bedding spread over it. Nothing had ever matched. If I sniffed hard enough, I could practically smell the tinge of teenage sweat and marathon masturbation lingering in the air. A small smirk tugged at one corner of my mouth as I sought out my old posters on the far bedroom wall. There they were—boobs, bikinis, and buttocks that would, and frequently did, make my mother blush. I wasn’t naïve enough to pretend that the only reason they were still on the wall wasn’t because of my father. “Let the boy keep his room the way it’s always been, Lo,” he’d told Mum. Sly old man. Those ladies were fresh enough to give anyone morning wood.

Except me, apparently. Sure, I appreciated their forms as I stared at them, but there wasn’t much happening down in the trouser department for me at the moment. Not a single thing. There hadn’t been much of that happening since the day I’d watched Natalie walk away from my apartment after I’d set her free to live the life she deserved. The realisation that she was no longer mine stung, even if I knew it had been the right thing to do. Since then, my body had been numb and my life had been placed on pause. Not even multiple afternoon drinking sessions in Daylight Dollies strip bar could get anything stirring in my trousers. I was beginning to think that it wasn’t actually my heart that was broken. It was my dick that was fucked.

I guess the loss of a good woman did that to a guy. If only love came with a warning label and a list of possible side effects, maybe I’d have known what would happen to me once I let go of the second love of my life. Once made me naïve. Twice made me a fool—a feeling I wasn’t too comfortable with. It was hard to blame anyone but myself for this one.

I shook my head before dumping my overnight bag on the floor and making my way over to my bed. My arse fell into place with a small bounce, forcing me to plant my hands into the duvet. I didn’t allow a sigh to escape me. It felt like all I’d been doing for weeks was sighing. I sighed into my pillow when I turned over on a morning and realised she wasn’t there. I sighed into my coffee cup when I thought of something funny to make her laugh, lifted my head and realised I was alone. I sighed on my way out of the apartment. I sighed on my way to work. I sighed on my way home from work. I sighed when I ate alone. I sighed when I showered alone. I sighed and sighed until I was scrubbing my face with both hands in frustration and wishing someone would cut my air supply off just so I could never sigh again. I wasn’t built to be this guy. I wasn’t made up of parts that functioned if I allowed myself to wallow.

Grabbing my old tennis ball from my nightstand, I sprawled on my back and stared up at the ceiling for a while. Taped there were some old pencil sketches I’d drawn when I was younger. Faces of people I’d never met. Animals, including birds, I used to see sitting in the trees in our garden. Ships, islands, the ocean, the ocean, the ocean—man, I loved the ocean—as well as those weird abstract drawings I used to attempt. I’d drawn it all during my teenage years. Art was one of the ways I’d lost myself to any high school or adolescent pressure I’d felt. The other way was using the tennis ball currently in my hand to throw out some of my aggression. It was what I’d done as a kid. It was how I’d sorted my thoughts out—my very own form of Marcus meditation. Lifting my arms up until they were poker straight, I tilted my wrist into position, waited patiently until it felt right, and then I threw the ball at the wall. Within seconds, it had bounced back into my hands. I threw it again… and again, and again and again and again, losing my anxiety and tension in the soothing repetition of the throws.

It wasn’t long before I heard the door creak open and footsteps enter my room.

“Hey,” she whispered as she crept in.

I smiled flatly, not looking her way. “Hey, little sis.”

Sammy pulled out the chair from under my old desk before sitting down and making herself comfortable. Her hands found some old sketchbooks that she picked up and put down three times before she let her shoulders relax and finally turned to face me. You could practically hear her jumbled thoughts bouncing around in that head of hers.

“Sammy, kiddo, I’m okay.”

“You don’t look okay, Marcus,” she said softly.

“Never judge a book by its battered cover. I’m good.”

“Really? Because the last time I saw you on your bed throwing your signed tennis ball at the wall, you had just punched Daniel Devacio in the nose, and Mum and Dad were desperately trying to get the school not to suspend you.”

“You remember that?” I smiled.

“How could I forget? It was the first time I saw Mum look at you like you weren’t the golden child.”

“Even angels have their weaknesses. That Daniel douchebag shouldn’t have tried to cop a feel of my goods.”

“He said he was admiring your keychain.”

I scoffed, sounding more agitated than I really felt. “The fucker crept up behind me, put his hand in my back pocket, and I’m supposed to believe that he just wanted to take a look at a crappy keychain? It had nothing to do with him making a play for my misters at all, right?”

Sammy’s smile was clear when she spoke. “Oh, Mr. Floppy-Black-Hair-And-Piercing-Green-Eyes. You think everyone fancies you, don’t you? Even the guys.”

“No.” I caught the ball again, throwing it back harder this time and flinching when its return forced my fists into my chest. “But, it’s a well-known fact that Daniel Devacio had a thing for me, and it’s also a well-known fact that he had a huge issue with those little things I like to call… boun-da-ries,” I drew out sarcastically. “Me punching him in the face was a reflex reaction to someone creeping up behind me and coping a feel of the goods.”

“So why did you cover for him? Why didn’t you tell everyone what he was really trying to touch?”

“Oh come on, Sammy. I couldn’t exactly out the guy as a random plum-toucher, could I? The kid was lost. You heard how screwed up his family were. The shit he went through. He had no one. And, you know… High school is a fucking cruel place. People—kids—they’re mean. It wasn’t my place to out him. It was my place to remind him that he couldn’t do that shit to me, though.”

“So, you said all that to save him the embarrassment of being accused of touching your butt?”

“Affirmative.”

“And you ended up getting into more trouble than him for it.”

“I guess so.”

“You’re such a hero.”

“That’s me. Always the good guy.”

A thick silence filled the room and I felt Sammy stiffen. I didn’t have to see it. We’d spoken on a number of occasions since I’d split up with Natalie Vincent. Sammy, caught between a rock and a hard place because she was Natalie’s best friend and my little sister, had come over to sleep at my apartment a few times, too. I’d always sent her home before it got late, reassuring her with fake laughter and false durability. I knew she looked up to me, and I knew seeing me struggling to find my feet would only cloud that admiration. Call me an egotistical prick, but I wanted my little sister to think I was indestructible. I needed her to know she would always have someone strong in her life… besides our parents.

It turned out, however, that I wasn’t as strong as I’d made myself out to be, and once the shock of the breakup truly sank in and the adrenaline to survive had worn off, I found myself seeking refuge with my parents.

I hadn’t really taken into account how that would make me look to Sammy.

She cleared her throat beside me and shuffled around in her seat, agitated.

“Go on, Sam. Say what you have to say. Let’s get it out of the way before the tension in the room suffocates us both.”

“You know I’m worried about you.”

I caught the ball one final time, let out a sigh and pressed my full hands to my chest before I turned my head to look at her.

Shit, she was worried. Her little eyes were sunken, and her face was ghostly pale. She was even doing that biting her lip thing that instantly made me think of her best friend Natalie, and all the times she had looked at me with the same embarrassed uncertainty.

“Why are you worried?”

“Because you’ve come home, for a start.”

“Is it so bad that I want to spend a bit of time with my family while I can?”

“It’s not bad, but I know you, and it tells me that you’re not yourself right now.”

“It’s just a relationship split. Millions of people go through this every day. There’re worse things in life.”

“I don’t care about the millions. I care about you.”

“Kid, heartache isn’t something you can just take a pill to get over. There’s no door I can walk through and shut behind me to lock the good memories away. She was in my life for five years, and the fact that she isn’t now is going to take some adjusting to. It’ll take time, but I’m doing okay.”

“You’re not.”

“Sure I—”

“Stop pretending, Marcus. That’s how you’ve ended up where you are now, by pretending too much. It’s why you and Natalie wasted so much time—”

“We didn’t waste time,” I rushed out, cutting her off before she could finish. “We occupied a slot of time she had free.”

“And were those years free for you, too?”

“I had no one else to keep me company at night.”

“You loved her.”

“I still love her.”

Sammy swallowed at my admission. “I love her, too,” she told me. “But, even though we’ve cleared the air, and I understand her feelings, I’m a little mad at her for being as stupid as you were.”

“You haven’t told her that, have you?”

“No. My thoughts won’t benefit anyone. I went out of my way to be supportive. She’s my best friend. I don’t want to allow my few weeks of sulking to come between us.”

“Good. Keep it that way.”

“Why are you so hell-bent on protecting her from the fact that the breakup has screwed you up?”

“Like you just said, it benefits no one. Natalie did nothing to hurt me. If anything, she stayed with me longer than necessary so she didn’t hurt me. She’d probably still be here now if I hadn’t confessed some things of my own to her.”

Sammy scowled. “What did you have to confess?”

“Some old demons and nightmares, sis. Don’t make me relive them. All you have to know is that I wasn’t much better than Natalie. I lied to her. She lied to me. We were two liars—two pretenders—just filling time and enjoying each other’s company. Did I want it to work out? Sure. I could have married her tomorrow. Seriously. I could see a future with her that would have made all our parents happy. It would have made our friends happy. We’d have probably been happy, too, for the most part, but it wouldn’t have been the best life we could live. Things would always be missing. We started on a breakup—a rebound thing. She was vulnerable, and I knew it. I chased her anyway. She told me she wasn’t ready. She made it crystal clear what Alex meant to her before we got together. Hell, I cradled her in the cab that night on the way home from his parents’ house. It wasn’t like I couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it pouring from her. I just hoped…”

“He wouldn’t come back?”

I shrugged before staring straight into her eyes. “And that I could be more for her than I was.”

“I’m sorry, Marcus,” she offered, tilting her head to one side. Her sorrow was my sorrow. It always had been. What was hitting me right then, though, was that my sorrow was her sorrow, too.

I smiled a little brighter, opening up an arm for her to come to me. Without me needing to speak, Sammy climbed on top of my mattress the same way she used to do when she was a little girl and I was a little boy. Her head fell into the crook of my arm, one hand on my chest while she pushed the other between her knees.

“You know what I want?” I asked her.

“What?”

“I just want to stop thinking about things for a few days. I want to be home, around you guys. I want to spend some time with my little sister.”

“I think I can allow that,” she said through a grin.

“I want to eat Mum’s homemade stew that tastes like burnt wood. I want to help Dad with some manly shit in the garage, like fixing up a car or something equally unimportant.”

“Dad breaks more than he fixes.”

“I want us to be kids again, Sammy. We’ve gotten boring.”

“Speak for yourself, loser.”

“Oh, okay, okay.” I chuckled. “You think you can share some of your exciting life with me for a while? Help a brother out?”

Lifting her head, she looked down at me, all twisted smirks, pale green eyes and red hair that couldn’t have been any different from mine. “I think we can make that happen, stinkhead.”

“Without the insults?” I smirked.

“Nope. I’m all about your experiences being authentic. Therefore, from this moment on, it’s my duty to tell you that you absolutely fucking reek. You need a shower. A proper shower with soap and shampoo. Not a woe-is-me shower where you just stand under cold water and watch your feet turn blue.”

“Hey!” I cried, unable to hide my amusement.

“I mean it, Marcus. Freshen up, get your tracksuit on and meet me in the garden for a game of basketball.”

I bolted upright, my eyes widening as excitement took over. “Mum and Dad haven’t sold the net?”

Sammy shook her head enthusiastically. “Nope. Dad got it out of the garage the moment he knew you were coming home.”

“Fuck, yeah,” I whispered.

“I’m going to kick your arse,” Sammy told me, tapping the end of my nose before she bounced off the bed and made her way over to the door.

“Go easy on me, kiddo,” I called out. “I’ve got a wounded ego and a broken heart.” I clutched my chest, making my face look pained when she glanced back over her shoulder at me and shook her head. “I’m weak from love and I’m injured right to my soul.”

“There are no excuses in competition, Anderson.”

“Wait… that used to be my line.”

“Now it’s mine.” She huffed out a laugh before she disappeared out of the door for good.

I let all the tension fall from my shoulders and took one last glance around my room, taking in everything that had meant something to me when I was younger, wondering if I could make all my nothings into somethings one more time. You build things up, they fall down, you pick up the pieces and start building again, right?

Right.

“Come on, Marcus,” I whispered. “Moping has never really been your style. Your new life starts right here in this room. Back to the start we go. How bad can it be?”