Inspire by Cora Carmack

it thumps against the floor. I rest my elbows on my knees and shove my fingers into my hair because now I'm thinking about her body, how it had looked against my sheets. All that smooth, unblemished skin. Perfect. It doesn't seem possible, but her body was the closest damn thing I'd ever seen to it. I remember the way her wet dress clung to her after our water fight in the shower.
    Shit. Shit . I needed to stop thinking about this or I was going to make a fool of myself in more ways than one.
    “Wilder,” Gwen's high-pitched voice calls. And that's exactly what I need to distract me. I stand, moving closer to her dressing room.
    “Yeah?”
    “I need help.”
    I blew out a breath. It would probably make me a bad brother to ask if Lennox could help her.
    “Can I come in?” I ask.
    She doesn't answer, just pulls the curtain aside enough so that I can duck inside.
    She's covered. Mostly. But it looks like the black and red dress she has on has some kind of wrapping mechanism, and she's tied it up all wrong. I unknot the bows she's made to start over, but then I'm not really sure how the thing is supposed to wrap either.
    “It goes there,” Gwen tells me.
    “I don't think so. What about here?”
    “That looks stupid.”
    We try a few more ways, and we get close, but something about it just looks slightly off.
    “Maybe we should just try another dress,” I say when my back starts to ache from bending down to her level.
    “Need some help?” a voice asks outside the curtain, and it's not Lennox, but Kalli.
    The fabric rustles, and she opens it just far enough to peek inside, but that's enough for Gwen.
    “Kalli!”
    Apparently I wasn't the only one impacted by that meeting in the grocery store. Gwen can barely remember things I tell her an hour later, but she hasn't forgotten Kalli's name. She shrugs off my hands where I've been messing with the ties to her dress and flings herself through the curtain onto Kalli.
    Kalli’s laugh puts her smile to shame, and it moves through me like electricity. She squeezes my sister tight, and as she looks down at her, I swear she’s freaking glowing.
    Hell, I think she’s just one of those people who shine a little brighter than everyone else. The ones that always seem to draw your eye in public, the ones you find yourself looking at for a second time for no other reason than simply because it’s where your eyes want to go.
    And my eyes definitely want to go to Kalli. Not just a second time, but a third, and a fourth, and over and over again. She pulls back and gestures for my clumsily dressed sister to step inside the dressing room again, and she follows behind her, closing the curtain. I swallow.
    The room had felt generously spacious a few moments before. Now I'm all too aware of the inches between us, and the space vibrates with something almost like static. Kalli kneels, putting her farther away from me and closer to my little sister. She undoes the ties I'd been wrestling with, and then she loops one side of the wrap through a small hole in the dress at my sister's waist that I hadn't noticed. There's one on the other side, too. And once she's fed both ties through, she wraps them again around her waist, hiding the holes, and completing a perfect bow in the middle of Gwen's back.
    My sister twirls once, the skirt fanning around her, brushing against my knees and Kalli's stomach. She comes to a stop, her eyes meeting Kalli's in the mirror, as if seeking approval.
    “Very pretty.”
    A blush sweeps over Gwen's apple cheeks and tiny nose.
    “Really?”
    “Really. You look very special in that dress.”
    “This one!” Gwen cries, looking up at me.
    “Are you sure? You don't want to get one that's a little easier to put on?”
    She leaps forwarding, clinging to my knees, and says, “Please, can I have this one? Please, Wilder.”
    I try to surreptitiously check the price tag, but Kalli sees it. Damn. Nothing to do about that.
    “Sure,” I promise. “If this is the one