The Happy Result Of The Unfortunate Affair*

   She was two months past her sixteenth birthday when she discovered she was pregnant. 

   That discovery had terrified her. 

   Obviously her parents, her mother and her stepfather, would want to immediately know who the father was, wanted to know who his parents were. 

    She cried when she considered all that entailed - the embarrassment, the tremendous emotional strain, the complications.

    It was somewhat of a relief when her stepbrother simply admitted that it was him. Three years her senior, he had lived in the same house, sleeping in a bedroom less than twelve feet from hers on the other side of the hallway, for the past nine years. 

    Neither of them had considered the other attractive in any manner whatsoever, until about six months before her sixteenth birthday, when one of her school friends had pointed out to her that her stepbrother was "hot."

   It was then that she started to think about him...differently. Slowly he became much less of an aggravation, much less of a nuisance. 

   He began to notice the change in her attitude a few weeks later. She was far less modest when she got up in the morning, walking down the hallway to the bathroom in just her underwear and a T-shirt. She seemed to go out of her way to pass through doorways at the same time he did.

   At first he tried to push the ideas/fantasies that were sprouting in his mind out, but slowly he started to cave in. The night of her sixteenth birthday was the last time he said no, to himself and to her.

   Now, twenty-two years later, their child was celebrating her graduation from college, something neither parent had ever thought would happen.

   It had been over a decade since both the parents and the child had stood in the same room together. Today, as they looked across the large round table at each other, at their respective current spouses, and at their own parents still happily together despite all that had transpired, they both wore countenances that suggested relief, if anything.

   Relief, it was assumed by all the other relatives and friends gathered in the small room with them, that somehow, some miraculous way, they hadn't screwed up the life of the young woman who was laughing and smiling with a group of her friends and fellow college graduates.

*This is a true story, as told to me by one of the parents of the college graduate and confirmed by other parties with knowledge of the situation.