Kevin and I spent another couple of days in bliss together with the occasional interruption by Jules or someone else who needed to discuss “Book Stuff” with me.  After two leisurely days in bed with Kevin I could honestly say that I was head over heels in lust and in love with the man and I was pretty sure he felt the same way about me.  I’d been in love before, or at least I thought I had been, but whatever I’d experienced was nothing compared to what I felt with Kevin.  With him I felt like my entire world revolved around being with him and instead of it being scary and feeling like a stalker, it just felt right.  Pretty much everything I did led my thoughts back to him and would then be followed up with a great big goofy smile, my face blushing three shades, and my body swooning with aftershocks of happiness from whatever sexcapade we’d most recently participated in.  To put it simply, it was pretty damn cool.

After our whole talk about Kevin’s marriage and children, the only Big Ticket item we still needed to discuss was my brother and how he died.  As usual though I kept putting it off and making a billion excuses about why I needed to wait “just a little longer” before I told Kevin my big dark secret.  We’d be walking Vinnie on the beach and I’d think about spilling my guts then would think, “But it’s such a lovely moment and I don’t want to cry…”  Or we’d be lounging around after dinner and instead of telling him I’d think, “But I really want to jump him right now… maybe after sex…” I basically had an excuse for every situation but the closer we got to leaving for New York the more I knew I had to bite the bullet and tell him my story.

Finally one morning after we’d watched the sunrise and I had my usual tears in my eyes I whispered to Kevin, “Ask me about Sean…”

“Hmm?” he asked and kissed my temple, he was sitting behind me and I was leaning back against him.

I closed my eyes and cleared my throat, “Ask me about Sean.”

“What do you want me to ask?”

“I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to tell you about him but I can’t do it. If you ask me though I won’t be able to say no.  Just ask me.” 

My hands and body were starting to shake with nervousness and Kevin wrapped his arms tighter around me before speaking quietly in my ear, “Tell me about your brother, baby.”

I paused for a moment trying to figure out how the hell to start and finally just began blurting things out in a rambling mess, “I’ve never told anyone this, Kev.  People who knew me before he died know what happened but anyone I’ve met since has never known the details.  I never knew how to say it let alone how to deal with questions that people would have so I just didn’t do it.  I figured that telling people that he was dead was enough information, I didn’t need to go any further.  He’s been gone for almost seven years and I’ve never told anyone…”

“Just take your time… I’m not going anywhere, okay?”

I nodded and sighed, “I know… and Kev, I really do want to tell you.  It’s just… hard.”

He rubbed his hands up and down my arms, “I know, baby…”

“You know we lived together, right?”

“Mmm hmm…”

“The year he died he was working on finishing his bachelor’s degree in business.  I was writing full time by then so I had a decent amount of money coming in and we got this amazing apartment in Tribeca with this awesome view of the city… We got a great deal on the rent because Josef knew the guy who owned the building and there was this awful leak in the apartment…” I laughed thinking about the apartment.  “We were on the top floor so we had the best view and yet every time it rained or it snowed and then melted we had water leaking all over.  It was to the point where we had buckets strategically placed in the apartment and had taped circles around the buckets on the floors.  But the guy who owned the building knew how much it would cost to properly fix the leaks and wasn’t ready to do it so we got cheap rent in exchange for quick fixes that never worked for long.”

“Sounds fun…” Kevin said with a smile in his voice.

“It was…” I said and nodded with a smile.  “We had so much fun in that place… Christian was practically our third roommate too, he was there all the time.  It was just a really great time, you know?”

Kevin nodded and put his chin on my shoulder, “Then what happened?”

“Sean was doing an internship in this big company that was basically his dream job.  They loved him and were totally going to hire him after graduation.  He loved everything about that damn job.  We lived close enough that he could walk to work and didn’t have to pay for transit.  We could even see his office from the balcony of our apartment. As happy as he was though, I hated where he worked.  It always gave me the heebie geebies and he knew it.  Every time I would see the building I’d grab my locket and pause to send him happy vibes.  Even if he wasn’t at work and was with me, I’d still do it and he’d roll his eyes and laugh at me.  But I always said that it didn’t matter that he wasn’t there because the next time he was there my love would be there waiting for him.”

“That’s cool…”

“He thought it was silly but he also tolerated it.  He knew that I had my twinges of psychic stuff like Mom and he just appeased me.”  I turned so that I was sitting sideway with my legs hanging over the side of the chair and I could see Kevin’s face.  “I don’t get clear pictures like my Mama does, I just get feelings sometimes.  Like I’ll know something bad is going to happen before it happens.  And sometimes I know when someone is going to die… I might not know who is going to die, but I know that it’s going to happen. It’s scary… the death one.  It’s only happened a few times though, thankfully.  The first time I felt it was when I was just a kid and my dad died.  I didn’t know what was going on, I just knew I felt ‘weird.’  But then years later when my grandma died I got that same feeling and I totally remembered feeling the same way before with my dad.  Then a celebrity that I had this huge crush on died and it happened again.  So that’s how I labeled it the death feeling.”  Kevin nodded as I played with the hem of my tee shirt and stared at my lap.  “I felt it the day that Sean died.  I knew it had something to do with his work and I begged him to stay home.  He wasn’t even supposed to work that day, he had Tuesdays off because he had a class on Tuesday afternoons.  But someone he worked for had a birthday wasn’t going to be in the office and she asked him to do her a favor by going into the office to tie something up for her.”  I paused as my chin trembled and I started to cry, “I didn’t think he was going to die, I just wanted to keep him away from whatever was going to happen because I knew someone was going to die.  I begged him, I cried, I pleaded for him for him to get someone else to do his errand but he insisted on going.”  I wiped tears from my cheeks and took a shaky breath, “He said, ‘Come on, Kel… if something that bad was going to happen Mom would know and she would have called by now…’  He also said that I was being overly emotional because I was tired.  He knew I’d been up all night writing a chapter for a book and it was a really emotional chapter which always takes a lot out of me.”  I shook my head and looked at Kevin, my eyes filling up with tears all over again, “He made sense… I was tired and I trusted that we would have heard from Mama if something terrible was going to happen.  So I let him go…”  My voice caught in my throat as I let out a sob.  “…and I never saw him again.”

Kevin pulled me into his arms again and kissed my temple over and over, “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I’m his big sister… I’m supposed to protect him, I’m supposed to make sure he’s safe.  It didn’t matter that he was an adult, he was still my baby brother, Kevin… I was supposed to protect him.”

“Oh, baby…” he sighed, his lips against my head.  “Baby, I don’t know what happened to him but unless you were right there and you had a part in his death, this… whatever happened… is not your fault.  It might feel like it, but it’s not…”

“If I’d been able to make him stay though…”

“Honey, what happened to him?”

I closed my eyes and held onto Kevin tight, “His office was in the north tower of the World Trade Center… on a floor above where the plane hit.  He was one of the people who couldn’t evacuate because the explosion from the plane ruined the stairways.”

“Oh, Jesus…” Kevin sighed and squeezed his arms around me.  “Kel…”

“He shouldn’t have been there, Kevin. I should have been able to stop him but I gave up.  He… I… I just gave up.   He wasn't supposed to be there, it was Tuesday.”

“I know it feels like you should have done more to protect him, but honey no one knew what was going to happen that day.  Weird feeling or not, you didn’t know… You asked him to stay home, you told him why, and he made the choice to go.  Baby, please don’t do this to yourself… you are not responsible, the terrorists are.  The people who planned it, hijacked the plane and flew it into the building… they are the ones responsible.”

I nodded against Kevin’s chest, “I know… I really do know that.  But I can’t help but feel like I didn’t do enough.” 

Kevin held me for the longest time and I held on tight to him just looking out at the beach listening to and watching the waves.  When I spoke again my throat was scratchy from crying and my voice sounded a lot like I had a bad case of laryngitis.  “His tower was the first one hit, but the one that fell last.  I was on the phone with him when the second plane hit and I could hear it both through the phone and from our balcony.  And when that first tower fell… God, Kev… I knew he was going to die.  He did too.  He told me how sorry he was that he hadn’t listened to me and he joked about how he never did listen to me enough.  He was about to die and he was cracking jokes…”

“Sounds like a great guy…”

I nodded and bit my lip as I cried all over again, “He told me that all the love I’d sent to his office was right there with him and that no matter what he knew how much I loved him and he was going to be okay.  I sat there and watched his building burning and listened to him trying to make me feel better and I couldn’t do a god damn thing.  I never felt so fucking helpless in my life.  And then at 10:28 am I watched him die.  I watched him fall out of the sky with thousands of people and just die…”

“So how much of Tuesday Morning was about you?”

“Pretty much all of it…” I said and shrugged.  “I wrote it when I’d left New York and I’d come down here to stay with Mama for a while.  I didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was going to live but I knew I couldn’t stay in that apartment anymore.  I came down here and slept for a week and anytime I wasn’t sleeping I was crying.  Then one night I started writing.  I couldn’t stop… I wrote for three days straight barely stopping for anything and then the first draft was done.  I wasn’t writing it to publish it, I was writing it for my mom and for me. The morning I finished writing it was the first time I watched the sun rise over the water.  I sat there and cried because it was so beautiful and it was the first time since Sean was killed that I felt like there was anything good left in the world.  I gave the story to my mom to read and she sat down and didn’t move until she’d read the whole thing.  We cried together of course and she told me that the story needed to be shared with the world.  I didn’t believe her… Of course I was delirious by then because I hadn’t slept in days…” I chuckled and looked at Kevin wiping my tears on my sleeves.  He smiled and tucked my hair behind my ears.  “But she made me promise to at least have my editors look at it.  The rest is history…”

“Oprah’s Book Club history…” Kevin said with a grin.

I smiled and nodded, “Yeah… It’s funny cause Sean gave me my locket when my first book was published.  The card that he put in the box said that he couldn’t wait for the day that I’d be on Oprah because she’d chosen my book for her club.  And the picture that’s in here of us…” I said and opened up the locket to show Kevin.  “It was that same night and he was cracking us all up acting out how he was going to act when he met Oprah.  We were laughing so hard I almost pissed my pants but Christian was snapping pictures and this one was the best.”

“I can totally see how much you two love each other in this picture…” Kevin said as he looked at the photo. 

“That’s what Christian said too.  And it was so true… it’s one of my all time favorite pictures of us.  I knew right away that I had to use it in my locket.  Now it just means that much more because the book I wrote because of Sean was what led me to Oprah and even though he wasn’t able to meet her, he was there with me the whole time, you know?”

“That’s awesome…”

I nodded and looked at Kevin, “I miss him so much.”  My eyes filled up and tears spilled down my face, “Going to New York is really hard now.  I’m usually okay after a little while but I kind of freak out at first.  That’s why I needed you to know before we go… I didn’t want to go all bat shit crazy on you and you not have any idea what’s going on.”

Kevin chuckled and wiped tears off of my face, “I appreciate that…”

“Did I scare you away?” I teased with a grin.

“Maybe a little…” he laughed and then ducked as I reached out to smack him.  “Kidding!  I’m kidding! I’m not going anywhere…”  He kissed me and then pulled me into a hug, “Thank you, for letting me be the first person you’ve told your story to.”

“Thanks for listening…” I whispered against his chest. 

“Thanks for crying all over my shirt…”

I giggled, “Thanks for being my snot rag…”

He tipped my face up so I’d look at him and he smiled, “Thanks for the amazing sex we’re about to have…”

I held his face in my hands, “Thanks for loving me…”

He grinned and leaned in to kiss me but stopped to whisper against my lips first, “Ditto, baby…"