Not Quite as Expected

"Hey' we're having a party on Saturday. Why don't you come?" she'd said. Simon wondered if he would have accepted if he had known that her rather large group of co-habitants included her brother, cousin, and uncle. Particularly since his first thought upon seeing Brother was that he could probably break Simon's neck without much effort.

It wasn't as bad as Simon feared early on, but when later in the evening he ended up alone with the three of them, his nerves won out. "So, is this where you tell me if I hurt her, you'll kill me?"

Uncle scratched his jaw and smiled thinly. "Oh, no. If a decade of knifework drills didn't get her to the point that if she wants you dead, she can take care of it herself, I've been doing something very wrong."

"We would help her hide the body, though," Cousin added, grinning, which earned him a half disapproving, half amused look from Brother.

Scrambling for anything resembling small talk, Simon asked, "A decade? How early do you start teaching..." He flailed a bit.

That did lead to some comments about the place they had grown up at - apparently a farm in the middle of nowhere. Cousin made sure Simon knew how his crush had taken to castrating livestock.

Simon wondered what exactly he had gotten into.