Walking into Deli's room is like entering a bohemian tent. If I forget to duck, my head gets tangled in a multitude of Indian silk scarfs draped from the light fixture in the centre of her ceiling to small hooks screwed in the walls.

The room smells like incense, and some weird doped-out flower-power song about honey bones creates a mellow, dreamy atmosphere that makes me wonder if I'm asleep or on drugs. My sister is sitting at her art desk, and no, she's not gazing into a crystal ball or trying to read tarot cards while a one-eyed mangy cat keeps a jaundiced eye out for intruders. 

https://youtu.be/29uruM5-VYo

The cat lying on her desk, intermittently tapping her paintbrush, has both his eyes, and he is watching me with keen interest, waiting for the best moment to pounce. Delia is in the process of designing her next weird-ass t-shirt for some charity or another. Her designs are pretty popular; she often gets requests from organisations and businesses. Well, my sister knows her stuff, though my first reaction to most of her designs is usually: Huh?!

I crash face-down onto her bed and pull a few of her gazillion pillows on top of my head. Lying here, buried under her pillows, I suddenly realise that I've seen Kira do exactly this on so many occasions. Perhaps we do have something in common after all.

Deli's bedroom is one of my favourite places to hang out in, as funky and strange as it is with samples of her warped designs pasted on the walls, the sewing dummy, wearing parts of a dress being created, standing in the fashion design corner and all these friggin' pillows. I guess it is because Deli's presence is one of my favourite places to hang out in.

"What's up, Ethe?" she asks when she finally returns from whatever artistic plane she'd been hanging out on. Delia is not typically the bohemian kind; she likes to experiment with vibes and themes. I'm never entirely sure what I'm going to walk into when I enter her room. The last month she'd been in touch with her inner flower child, but before that, there'd been a few weeks of space invaders... or something alien... I never really got it. A while back, she scared the crap out of me by going full-on death-rules-us-all Goth on me, black walls, the works.

It didn't last long; Deli doesn't have the self-discipline required to be perpetually depressed. Her natural bubbliness kept on getting in the way. I rather like the current theme; it's very calming. I often nap here, especially when she's here too, drawing, painting, or making clothes.

My other favourite place is anywhere Kira is. She doesn't want me in her room, but I still manage to get in there, and she hasn't kicked me out even once when I took a nap in there. She always just carries on as if I'm not there.

I wonder if my bedroom is one of her favourite places too. When she's at our house, and the weather turns bad, throwing thunder and lightning around, she always runs in there and crawls under my duvet whether I'm in bed or not. She does that even if Delia is home. I asked her about it once, and she said something snotty about my room being such a horrible mess; it won't get attacked by the storm because it looks like it has already happened, so the storm will think, mission accomplished, and move on.

I think she was lying.

"You're wrong," I inform Delia, turning onto my side to look at her when she lies down next to me and performs an excavation to find my head under her pillows.

"No, I'm not," she says without any doubt at all.

"You don't even know what you're wrong about," I scoff.

"Doesn't matter; I'm never wrong."

I cannot argue with that because it's true, but I'm going to try anyway. "I don't stand a chance with her. She thinks I'm her brother and doesn't agree with you that I'm the amazing, adorable kind. She thinks I'm the annoying, irritating brother she got stuck with and would like to be rid of."

"Awwwww, that's just because you're my little brother, not hers," Delia grins, tapping the tip of my nose as if I'm a friggin' toddler. Well, at least she knows who I'm talking about... I think.

"Yeah, that's right," I fully agree with her logic. "Please tell her that I'm your brother, not hers. I'm your little brother, that's two meters taller than you. "

"Ten centimetres."

"And weighs 100kg more."

"About 30... give or take."

We were born via caesarean, and the doctor happened to pull Deli out first, something she takes a lot of pride in, prompting her to try and protect me my entire life. It's cute, especially since I've outgrown her in size and can pick her up and throw her over my shoulder when she tries to stand up to bigger guys on my behalf. I do think that most guys are more afraid of Delia than they are of me.

"Trust me, Ethe," my big sister says, stroking my hair from my forehead. "Kiki loves you."

"Of course she does," I grunt. "I just told you! I'm her annoying, irritating brother that she's stuck with. She has to love me."

Delia rolls her eyes and gives me that look I always get just before she flicks my forehead, I wince in anticipation, and she doesn't disappoint.

"That's not what I mean."

"Well, doesn't matter what you mean," I grumble, rubbing the spot where her finger struck me. "You're wrong. She might love me as a part of her extended family, but she doesn't see me as a potential boyfriend at all."

"You're right," Delia agrees, shattering the thin glaze of hope coating my heart. Now I am disappointed. I could've just tried to communicate with Kicks again if I wanted my hopes crushed. She's good at crushing me.

"Don't look like that," Delia smiles, patting my cheek. "She loves you but is wired to see you as her neighbour, my brother and an annoyance. Come on, Ethe," she adds when I frown at her. "Face it! You've been trying to annoy the girl every chance you got for 12 years. You're an annoying pest. It's part of the reason why I love you so much."

"She's so friggin' cute when she gets mad," I grin, making Delia chuckle in answer.

"I know, but it means you'll have to re-program her to see you in a different light."

"She's not a blooming computer-"

"I've given it a lot of thought," Delia is very good at ignoring me when she doesn't want me to interrupt her speeches, "and I know that just informing Kira about her feelings or reasoning with her or talking to her is not going to work. She needs to realise it herself. Firsthand. I think you need to tackle the whole situation like a project."

"Were you using oil paint without ventilating the room again? "

"Remember when Dad said you'd never make it in engineering if you don't learn to do maths correctly and push up your marks?" She is still ignoring me.

"I got the right answers-"

"Yeah, but you could never supply the steps... Never mind that!" she grumbles, flicking me on the forehead again. She thinks that doing that brings me back on topic. She's wrong. It just pisses me off, and when I eventually retaliate, flicking her forehead, she acts all indignant and shocked as if she couldn't see it coming a mile away. "He was going to make you quit rugby and take extra math classes and stuff, but then you got Kiki to tutor you."

"Right, it helped get my grade up," I don't see the relevance here. "But we just did maths all the time, and at the end of it, she still just saw me as the annoying brother dude. Maths is not very romantic-"

"I'm not saying you should get her to tutor you in math again," Delia says with a frustrated sigh. I wish she'd just get to the point... if she has one. "You need a new project, one that places the two of you in a different kind of setting, where you are forced to be together in brand new, preferably romance-inducing ways."

"Ah," I agree, finally seeing the light. "I should kidnap her! Take her to Grandpa's mountain cottage and keep her there until she falls in love with me or admits to herself that she already loves me."

I probably saw the wrong light because Delia is blinking at me in slow motion, clearly not dazzled by my superior scheming skills.

"What?"

"Ethe, that is not romantic."

"It's not?"

"No! Stop watching anime."

I chuckle and, reaching out, pluck at a stray blond ringlet framing her face. "Don't say scary things."

She laughs and tries to flick my forehead again, but I grab her finger, and now she's not getting it back again. If Kira is right and I really am an idiot, it is because my sister flicked most of my brains away through the years.

"I'll give it some more thought," she shrugs, futilely trying to free her finger from my grasp. "Try to think of something plausible and fun that the two of you can work on together. Then you can use the time to break through Kira's barriers and wake her up to see the things she's blinded herself to."

I'm still not sure that Kira actually has romantic feelings for me. At best, she loves me the way I love the cat that finally decided to launch itself from the table and is currently trying to make itself comfortable on my head, flicking its furry tail under my nose. I love this cat to pieces, but I don't want to date him.

I cringe, chortling in discomfort when the animal starts to wash my ear, tickling me with his sandpaper tongue. He is happily purring, flexing his paws, and digging his nails into my scalp in a massage that is gradually growing painful.

I found the little black and grey runt stuck up a tree during a storm. It was on the feral side, clearly the baby of some stray cat and a demon, not used to human interaction. I never found the mother, and nobody reported a missing kitten, so this became his home, and he took over our lives.

He seems to favour Delia and can almost always be found somewhere in her room, but he still makes time to try and destroy my bedroom. When I begin to look too scrawny for his liking, he kindly leaves some dead birds and lizards on my pillow to remind me to eat more, do some weight training, and bulk up.

I also often see him lounging on Kira's window sill, trying to encourage me to pursue the girl I love. The girl who is so close to me almost all the time and yet is so friggin' far away. Whenever she is snuggling him, he gives me a this-could-be-you-if-you-play-your-cards-right look.

Yup, Scamp has my back. 

Right now, he has my ear, though, and his grooming is going to draw blood soon, so I grab him off my head and pull him into my arms for a cuddle. He loves cuddling. He always does it with so much gleeful aggression.

"Maybe I should volunteer at the Turtle Shelter," I make an incredibly brilliant suggestion while letting go of Delia's finger to try and pry the cat's nails out of the flesh of my wrist. I think I might need surgery for the task because they're dug in there pretty deep, and the little monster's hind legs are running a marathon against the inside of my arm while he's trying to bite chunks out of the soft section of flesh between my thumb and forefinger.

"Oh, hell no!" Delia says way too vehemently. "Stay away from the shelter!"

"That's what Kicks said when I asked if I could help out too." I don't know what to make of their shitty attitude towards my selfless offer.

"Yeah," Delia agrees, pulling a face. "Those turtles have been through enough trauma before they were rescued; they're trying to rehabilitate them and return them to turtle society. They don't want to expose the poor things to your brand of chaos and crazy."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" I'm a little offended now... no, I'm a lot offended now, but Deli is just giving me a look, and when I gasp in pain, she gently unhooks the cat's claws and removes the vicious creature from my body.

"They have a lot more animals and things there than just turtles, and I don't have my own brand of chaos and crazy," I tell her, flicking her forehead for a change. Big mistake because Scamp sees it as an invitation to attack my finger, and Delia is clearly not going to save me this time.

"You do! I even designed the t-shirt to announce it!" She declares, flicking my forehead, reminding me that I shouldn't have let go of her finger.

♂

After re-attaching all the limbs the cat tore from my body, I stumble up to my bedroom with the hell-fiend hot on my heels. He curls himself into a comfy ball on one of my pillows when I fall into my bed and turn on my side to look at Kira's darkened window.

Her curtains are drawn, but I can still imagine her lying in bed, sleeping in her abandoned, innocent way.

Time is running out! 

This is our last year of high school. Next year, we'll be going to university. That is going to be an entirely new world filled with strangers and wonders. I won't stand a chance out there. If I cannot win Kira's heart in this safe, controlled environment, there is no way I will be able to win it out there in the wide world.

I'm going to lose her forever.

My grandfather told me that he is getting ready to transfer his Citroën DS to me. He always said the car would be mine as soon as I graduated high school. I love that car, and hearing him say that was awesome news, but it scared the crap out of me. The moment he'd talked about for most of my conscious life is almost here now.

Delia's right; Kira is not the kind of person who responds to being told how she feels and what she thinks; she needs to figure it out for herself, or she won't see it. Nobody knows her as well as Deli does, not even her father and they are very close. If my sister believes that Kicks feels the same way about me as I feel about her, then it's true.

I need to think of a good plan to put Kira in a position where she can really see me for a change outside of all our regular family-orientated interactions and face her feelings for me.

I glimpse her feelings sometimes. She says and does things that give me hope and confirm Delia's claims. How am I going to make her see that I am the only guy for her, just like she is the only girl for me? 

I went out with multiple girls, kissing many of them. I was practising, but I was also trying to find a spark with one of them, but the more I did that, the more I realised that the only girl I wanted to kiss was Kira. I don't want her to do something similar to realise that I'm the one for her. I cannot stand it when other guys look at her. If she went on a kissing spree, I'd go on a spree of my own, and my spree will involve a lot of punching and blood.

There has to be a better way.

I knew the Citroën was the only car for me the first time I sat on Grandpa's lap and held the steering wheel while he drove around the neighbourhood.

That's it! Kira needs to take me for a test drive!

♂♀