I Found You

by Lisa Jewell

She was almost as tall as him now, his sister, all legs and hair, not quite grown into herself but almost there. The resemblance between them was startling enough, he hoped, for it to be obvious that the gawky, scruffy girl in a damp waterproof jacket, patterned nylon sweater, and faded baggy jeans walking alongside him was not romantically connected to him in any way. She was a slow developer. She’d worn her hair in a plait down her back until only recently and still didn’t wear makeup. But she was suddenly quite desirable—he could see that—raw and new like a half-blossomed flower, embarrassingly beautiful, in fact. He felt a surge of awful fear rise through him, a strange mix of disgust and tenderness. Disgust at himself for being a man, for every bad thing he’d ever thought about a girl, for his base instincts, his low-level throbbing urges, predatory needs, filthy mind, for all of it. Disgust at the knowledge that now men like him would look at his sister and think things and feel things and then purge themselves over her. And tenderness because she did not know.