Over the weekend she asked me to go with her to the movies. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when she was finally ready to go. She’d spent time on making herself up and she’d dressed as if we were going on a real date. She looked gorgeous and I told her so repeatedly. I could tell that she was very happy with the compliments that I paid her. I even went so far as to buy her flowers when we were in the city. I even took her to dinner afterwards and it turned out to be quite a romantic evening.
During the following week, I took a trip to Palm Springs and asked her to go with me. We spent a nice day around town and I treated her first to a beautiful lunch and then to a nice dinner. We spent some time going around galleries and other nice spots.
Needless to say, we were dating, without formally asking each other out. It didn’t matter to others if I was with my sister, we were just spending time together, although all of our excursions were planned to keep intrusions to a minimum. The three cities we had to worry about were Brawly, Imperial, and El Centro. So we made trips beyond or away from them.
All the while our goodnight ritual continued, only with each visit out, our contacts became more leisurely. It was nice to be with my sister and to hold her in my arms when the night came, but it was all platonic. Our contacts did hold physical pleasure, but the impression was not that of sexual involvement. There was no way for us to justify such involvement and there was no way for us to approach the subject without a clear-cut hint from the other that it was okay to approach the subject that way. I couldn’t give her a hint like that without breaking a legal and moral trust. I would risk a lot of embarrassment and humiliation if everything was one sided only, although I was sure beyond belief that everything was not one sided.
I tried to read into her behavior to see if anything betrayed her motives, even though I remembered my mother’s conversation very clearly. But, nothing was black and white. My mother’s words were my mother’s; they had nothing to do with my sister and I couldn’t just act based on what my mom said. What if my mother read things wrong? Again, humiliation and shame would follow. Although, I was quite sure that my sister would not outright shun me. She may admonish me for being un-brotherly, but we had advanced quite far to be reproached severely. It is just that I didn’t want our relationship to change into just a brother-sister thing. I liked what we had. It was refreshing and invigorating.
As a result of our “dates”, we became very comfortable with each other and as a result of being together in movie theaters or in restaurants, or just being with each other on long drives, our physical contact became more frequent and our touches became less restricted.
She also started to spend more time in my room during the nights before going to sleep. Our goodnight ritual in the beginning involved her coming to my room, our hugging each other, and her going back to her room right after. As our familiarity increased, our ritual changed where she wouldn’t leave immediately after the hug, but hang around talking to me about different things and we would hug again when she would leave for the night.