pretty girls who get so close riding you that they freeze up completely. hips going still. face crumpling. "i'm gonna cum i don't want to cum yet i'm not done—"
hands finding their hips. starting to move them slowly.
"keep going."
"i can't— i'm too close i'm gonna—"
"i know." moving their hips faster. not slower. "keep going anyway."
a devastated sound. hips moving despite themselves now, chasing and fighting it at the same time. "please— please i'm right there please—"
reaching down between us. thumb finding their clit.
the whimper they let out at the contact.
"no— no no no please that's too much please i'm gonna cum please—"
not stopping. working slow circles while their hips keep moving. feeling them get impossibly closer. feeling them try to still themselves and moving them again.
"you're not done." i remind them. "keep riding."
"i can't i can't i can't—" crying tears now. hips moving frantically despite every protest. body completely overriding everything their mouth is saying. “please let me cum please i’ve been so good please—”
"not yet." thumb still moving. steady. "you said you weren't done. so finish what you started."
a sob. hips working desperately. thighs shaking with the effort of taking all of it while i keep rubbing slow deliberate circles and refuse to give them what they're begging for.
"please—" barely a word anymore. "please please i can't hold it please—"
watching them fall apart trying to hold on. watching them lose every single battle with their own body while i stay completely unbothered underneath them.
Chubby sister who blushes when you kiss her tummy. Chubby sister whose soft thighs feel so good on either side of your head, which jiggle so beautifully as you eat her out.
i want to be someone's porn puppy... film me while you're fucking me, make me post pictures of myself. watch as everyone objectifies me and get off to knowing that i'll only ever entertain your advances... film yourself touching me while i sleep and make people pay money to see it, and use that money to buy me pancakes and treats after for being such a good boy !!
She came to live with you and mom after her father passed away. Who was your father too. You barely knew the man. Cared even less. He was a deadbeat who walked out before you could care.
Now this girl, his other daughter sat there on the doorstep. Dropped off just like that. More like dumped. Her mother didn't seem to care. She looked like a drowned rat in the rain. Clutching a soaked backpack to her chest she looked like she'd cry any second.
Mother pulled her in asking me to fetch a towel. The moment the girl was inside, she was already apologizing. For what? She was the one dumped.
"Im...Im sorry...sorry...I...can go a-after the storm-"
Mother put a finger to her lips shaking her head "Sweetheart, you are going to stay right here. Now, as soon as we get you dried off, I'll see if there is something warm for you to wear"
"S-Sorry...I'm so m-much trouble"
Why was she apologizing so much? Sure this was a bit weird, but not like she was trying to demand anything. She was so skinny, barely anything to her. You huffed putting your hands on your hips, this girl flinched at it, not good "Hardly trouble at all. Let me get you something to eat too. Hold on there are some microwave snacks I can make up. You're not, allergic to anything are you?"
She stood there as mother started to dry the girl off "N-No...I don't think so."
"Good enough"
While coming back with a plate full of those little pizza things you could hear her. She was crying, quietly, like really quiet. Mother was running their clothing through the wash, even the stuff in that backpack was all soaked. She was curled up on the couch in a set of fuzzy pj's you had outgrown.
Setting down the plate she jumped, startled, all the while trying to wipe her tears away "Sorry...sorry... I didn't mean to get dumped here..."
You sit down next to her. She looked so small but she couldn't be that much younger than you. Her hair was still a bit of a mess. Same color as yours, or maybe a bit lighter "Hey, easy there. Don't worry about that right now. Right now you should be enjoying terrible snacks and some cat videos." You pick up one of the snacks, blowing on it before holding it towards her "Say ahh"
There is this look she gives you, confused before slowly opening her mouth slowly. As you pop the snack in you could wear you see the start of a smile. As she finishes the first one she opens her mouth again, waiting.
You didn't intend it but, why not. Same as before you gently pop the next one in her mouth. This time you know you saw her smile. She was cute. Then as you kept feeding her, it came out just like that, as easy as could be "Good girl"
She squeaked, really squeaked, like a startled mouse. She tried to hide her face in her hands so fast. She shook her head making this tiny whine. She was really cute. Though she was your little half-sister. Of course she was going to be cute.
She looked up at you through her fingers "D-did you really mean that?"
"I wouldn't say if I didn't. You're being such a good girl. A brave one too. I can't imagine how awful this must be for you, but, you're safe here okay?"
"Promise?"
Your nod alone had this girl smiling again "Promise. I'm your big sister. Of course I'll keep you safe."
She wrapped her arms around you in a great hug as she nearly bawled her eyes out. You hugged her back nearly as tight. Petting her hair softly as she cried on your shoulder. You let her. What else were big sisters for?
Finally as it felt like she had cried herself it had gotten late, very late. Helping her to bed you almost took her to the guest room. A thought later and you pulled her along to your room. The last thing this girl needed was to be alone.
"A-Are you sure that's...that its okay?"
"You just got here, besides we're both girls."
She shifts in place looking at the floor "I'm...I'm not really a...girl-girl..."
It takes you a moment. Then it comes to you "Oh fuck"
She winces when she hears you. She pulls away fast, too fast "Im sorry! I'm sorry...I'll sleep somewhere else, I'm sorry."
"Is that why she left you here?"
She nods slowly looking like she's about to cry again. Both hands held to her chest, watching you. Waiting for, something.
"If I get my hands on her..." You take a deep breath to calm yourself and hold your hand out to her "Well if you say you're a girl-girl then you are a girl-girl."
"P-Promise?"
"Promise."
This sweet girl ended up asleep in your arms. She felt so small curled up against you. Her head resting against your chest. She was safe and sound under the covers with you. Even in her sleep she held onto you like you were the only thing she ever really wanted.
That was how you started to become your little sister's keeper.
Talking to your friend Danika helped ease some of the pressure in your head about your relationship with your sister Reagan, but that idea you had on the way to her house, to go to therapy? Probably still a good idea.
Chapter 22
♫ (#3)
Reagan flops down on the couch next to you, her exposed thighs squishing together below one of the cool-toned pairs of cotton short-shorts she's taken to wearing on blisteringly hot days like today. She reaches her hand out to touch lightly on your own sweaty leg while she swipes around in her phone. "Bio-Hunters 3."
"Yes. It's out?" It hasn't been that long since the last time the two of you went on a date, but you're feeling quite thirsty for another, and for better air conditioning than the recently blown-out failure in your apartment that building management still hasn't fixed.
"Next week-or, nine days. I'll buy tickets?"
You place your hand on the back of your sister's, savoring her touch even with the heat. "Hell yes. God, August flew by." She chuckles a little bit. "I'll say." You return to the prompt. "But, I thought you didn't like 2, you said it was terrible?" She rubs back and forth on your thigh, squeezing it occasionally. "It is terrible. Those action scenes sucked. But the soundtrack was good, and I'd watch any movie that makes you laugh like that, it's fun. You're cute." You blush. "Thank you…" After a moment, a thought occurs to you. "Is that why you like Satanic Space Station?"
"Mhm." She pinches her lips together as she taps on her phone, then she unsticks her eyes from the screen to look over to you. "And the practical effects in it were weirdly good." Her palm is sliding further into the valley between your legs, and it's making some of your words slippery. "There's… only like, four shots of the devil in it though. And uh, the, rest of it was miniatures?" Her eyes are focused back on her phone, and it's hard to tell if her hand is on autopilot or she's good at multitasking. "And there's an art to that." You take your hand off hers to keep it from inhibiting her ongoing exploration. "I wouldn't, call that movie art."
"Neither would I, it's definitely trash. But sometimes there's something good in trash, like a… an unopened pack of cookies in the middle of a bunch of paper." Your focus completely shifts to her bizarre comment, and you feel baffled. "What the hell are you talking about?" She gestures vaguely with her phone, looking up for a moment at the cowboy show on the TV. "I'm not saying I would eat the cookies. But they're untainted, in their little sealed box."
It's been a while since Reagan had one of her 'massive fucking weirdo' moments. "What? What the hell are you talking about? They don't matter if you can't open the package without getting them filthy." She looks back over at you and rolls her eyes a little. "Look, the metaphor doesn't follow all the way through, but you know what I mean."
"No, I don't think I do?" She takes her hand off your leg and puts an index finger under your chin for a brief kiss. Your cheeks tingle and you close your eyes for another, but she immediately returns to her phone with both hands. "Anyway. Saturday?"
You nod, then realize she can't see you from where she's looking, so you give an "Mhm", to which she responds with a hum. "Matinee or evening?"
"Hmm. Day, so we can get pizza after. Or, wait, could we get a pizza first and watch the first two before we go, if that's okay with you?"
She muses "That's a great idea." and it's already getting you excited to have a movie date and marathon planned. "Really?" She locks her phone and tosses it to the free space on the couch past you. "Of course. I like watching things you want to watch, even if they're terrible, and they are terrible." She smirks at you with the provocation, but you have to admit she's kind of right. Well, only kind of right, the action scenes aren't that bad…
Reagan butts the apartment door closed behind her on the planned afternoon, the cardboard box in her hand wafting the smell of high-quality bacon on an artisan pizza. There's been a little sauciness in her voice since she woke up this morning, and she winks at you. "Hey hot stuff."
You avert your eyes to shuffle the icy glasses of citrus soda to make a place for the food, dodging eye contact when you say "You talkin' to yourself now?"
She bumps a hip into you. "Ohhh, look who's getting her game on!" Though validation of your flirt sneaks away with your air for a moment, you play it cool and only blush a little at your own flirtiness, but your response is miles more than the apparently unflappable recipient of the compliment. Extra flirting is part of your plan to try to marshal the confidence to get a little handsy with your sister in the movie theater later - assuming she picked the venue with the couple's loungers again. One metaphorical hand has fingers crossed that she chose the right one, but the other is avoidant with a little shaky skittishness at the thought of being so ostentatious in a public setting, and you can't tell which one you want gripping the wheel tighter.
For now you have pizza though, and the two of you stopped bothering with separate plates a few weekends ago, instead pulling the table closer and taking turns to lean forward and eat over the box. The new habit feels familiar already, but the flavor of the food isn't - Rina talked you into trying the new special at the fancy pizza place a block from your workplace, and though the array of bacon, green peppers, and salami is good, you feel a little wisp of yearning for something more familiar instead.
As that feeling sits with you, the afternoon glare on the TV obscuring a movie you watched two years ago shifts your focus to the ephemeral reflection of the room overlaid on the screen. The moment suddenly feels… off, like a dream.
It's supposed to be dark. The pizza is supposed to be chicken and cheddar. The soda is supposed to be wine. You're supposed to be hiding your feelings.
You shake your head, twice. It brings you back to the moment, a collage of unfamiliar colors and flavors that somehow makes you nostalgic for those tension filled nights months ago. By all rights you could mimic them at will now, but the one thing about those times months ago that you can't get back is the relief from angst that those occasional shared nights gave you. For some reason your heart aches with a strange echo, yearning for release from an emotional torture that you're not feeling anymore.
You look to your sister, poised over the pizza box with a slice in neglect while she watches an action scene that she supposedly thinks is terrible. Mouth half open, crumbs on the legs of her capri pants, the 'shaved' side of her hair long enough to disqualify itself from that adjective, chipped blue nail polish.
She's never looked more perfect to you than in this moment. You've seen every version of her, the poised and self-assured version of her she builds on nights out, the sweaty and emphatic version poised naked atop you and searching for sexual release, the dissociated one with her head a world away from pain she's trying to avoid, and now the scruffy mess that she is right now. Each one as ideal and exquisite as the others, all images you could drink for years and never be sated. You'd take a picture of this moment if she'd let you, but at the very least she'd brush the debris off her lap, and it's part of what makes her flawless in this moment. You'll have to just commit it to memory.
Reagan, glorious and imperfect and perfect. Your relationship is working. Both your relationships are working. You can see light, not just at the end of the tunnel, but around you where you are now, lighting the walls and the floor and the tracks you're walking on. If you're lucky, you can do this forever, live with her in this brilliance for eternity.
But there is that part of you that still somehow aches for the emotional intensity of the times you shared that were worse. Not a lot. Not enough to actually want it back. Just enough for a drop of nostalgia to color the water of your heart with black-gold for a moment.
No thank you, lovely girlfriend, I will not be getting popcorn tonight, I plan to be doing very indecent things with these hands in an hour, and they cannot be buttery for something so impolite. Yes to the cookies though. Extra napkins for sure. The blue slurpee-wait no the red one. They have the white flavor here? I didn't even notice, yeah that one. Thank you my dear sister, you are the only one with a brain between us at the moment. All I have is a throbbing heart and bad intentions.
You get into the theater and survey your row. You got lucky with only one other couple in a paired seat four spots down, for now. They're very close, hands and thighs touching; do they look like they might get involved with each other during the show too?
Do you? When you looked in the mirror this morning you saw a girl split halfway between nervous anticipation and a core of confidence growing more and more as her life continues to shape into something fulfilling. She was sporting a thin but cozy purple sweater, black short-shorts for easy reciprocal access if desired, bracelets and lip gloss omitted to avoid interference, and a ponytail used to replace a head band at the last second.
Her smile was nice. The smile was even nicer when her sister leaned past the doorframe to ask if she was ready to go.
That girl is biting her lip now though, holding hands with her love during movie trailers, both wanting the cookies to show up right away to get them over with, and also hoping that they take an eternity to allow her to hide from her own intentions for longer.
Your palm is sweaty, and you keep getting little itches all over the place. Ray squeezes your hand and asks "You okay, sis?", so you take a deep breath and give her a grin and a nod, then you kiss your sis-your girlfriend! You snuggle closer to Reagan and consider just putting the whole frisky thing out of your mind to just enjoy the movie.
But no! You didn't spend all morning as a little shrimp marinating in your own adrenaline just to coward out now. You're a big girl and you're going to grope your sister-girlfriend in a public movie theater. Like a pervert.
Your hand finds her waist when the lights go down, and the cookies are taking too-long/not-slow-enough. The main theme of the movie is a remix of the first's familiar theme, and Ray taps along with the thrumming bass on your thigh. Just as the new fated-to-die protagonist is introduced, your view is obscured by the theater attendant bringing your food, and you separate from Reagan for the few brief minutes of the film that you plan to keep your hands to yourself.
The hot water in the bathroom sink helps offset the very effective A/C in the building, but it does less to mitigate your shakes than you'd hoped for when you left your seat to clean up, and when you return you can feel wavering in the voice restrained in your throat. Reagan gives you a brief rundown of what you missed, something about the introduction of a religious theme that seems bizarre for the setting, but the details bounce right off your eyes as you stare at your sister in the seat beside you.
It's a moment you've felt so many times before, attraction and need poised behind your lips as you stare at hers, the sounds of action and monsters a backdrop of emotional dissonance, but somehow it feels like the right kind of intensity for the moment. Her gaze lingers on you for a few moments after her explanation, but before she can ask what's up you lean forward and kiss her. She tastes like white slurpee, lips vaguely sticky and about to be cleaned by your invasive tongue. She doesn't hesitate to respond; whether she expected this or not, she's ready for you, and she pulls you a little closer at the peculiar angle afforded by the sloped seats. Though you're half-tempted to climb all the way on top of her as your lips dance together, you're helped by the 5% of your brain still dedicated to processing your surroundings and context.
Reagan however, is at the mercy of the part of your brain that withheld that proximity for a much better reason; your creeping fingertips start on her stomach, ostentatious enough to dance a little bit as you trace up and down across her ribs. The sensual touch flushes even more blood into your face as you trace down to the hem of her blouse and tuck under the silver fabric, lifting the garment with your thumb and gently tracing your skin lightly across hers like she does to you so often. All the hair on her body raises to stand on end, and you build the confidence to latch onto her lower lip with a bite, holding for several seconds while you push your hand up along her back, stopping at the strap of a bra that you're feeling aroused enough to consider unlatching.
You release your teeth and Ray's hot breath of relief is accompanied by a hand moving to your jaw so she can pour her own intensity into kissing you in response. Her lingual dexterity and drive is almost enough to distract you from her body, but you spent too long thinking of this moment to be distracted by any tricks she's already used on you. You decide, fuck it, unhook her bra after three clumsy tries that make you laugh a little under her lips, and slide your hand around to play with her breast. It's hard to tell if the moans suppressed under Reagan's hot breath or the soft feeling of her body is turning you on more, but the nerves at doing all this in public are steadily being smothered by your own heat.
Climbing over to straddle her is sounding like a very appealing option at the moment, but you instead adjust yourself up a little further in the seat to give yourself the angle to reach down to her waistband. The tightness of her jean shorts makes slipping your fingers inside their edge feel so lewd that you accidentally moan your arousal outright, and all the hair on the back of your neck shoots up as you pause and pull your head away to glance at the other couple in the row. You're fortunate enough to find them seemingly enthralled by an action scene that Ray would surely smirk at if given the opportunity, and you turn your attention back to her.
It spreads a grin across your face to see her looking enraptured by your attention, and the flush on her face is several shades more rewarding than the modest starburst of satisfaction you'd expected all this to give you. You resume your invasion of her clothes slowly, the fabric snug enough to make every inch feel like a mile as you trace toward her center. Her seamless panties are luxuriously soft, and your fingers slide over them to reach all the way between her legs, where you're greeted by a heat that murmurs a smoky invitation for attention, matched by Reagan's lip bite as she stares deep into your eyes. As much as you'd like to spend the rest of the movie's runtime there with fingertips and palm and lips and tongue, you know you probably don't have the time to get her all the way off right now.
She'd probably be too loud anyway.
The shorts don't give you an ideal angle for stimulation, but you give your sister's body your undivided attention as you play around and find out what works best, and you can tell from the way that she's squeezing your shoulder that her somnolent responses to your stimulation a week ago weren't emphatic by simple virtue of drowsiness. Though the way that her lips are pausing more and more between each kiss tells you how needy she's feeling, the awareness that the moment does have to come to an end sometime before the credits roll lingers in the back of your mind. It's hard to say how long you've been touching her for, but you can tell from the little groan when you retract your hand that Reagan doesn't consider it to have been long enough.
The new taste of teasing her is just as sweet on your tongue as your shared drink was, and you can feel her temperature take several minutes to cool under you after you snuggle back onto her, a leg laid halfway over her and a chaste hand on her waist again as you pretend to watch the movie. The real show is the playback of the groping being projected onto the interior of your mind and reverberating in your fingertips, and if you'd been asked what happened in the movie when you stood up to go, you'd have been as good as guessing.
You're deprived of the chance to finish what you started in the shadowy apartment later, because Reagan immediately pins you down on your bed and playfully snarls "We'll get you better makeup in the morning~" before attacking your neck and collar bone and everywhere else she can reach with a mouth that seems determined to make you squeal like stripped brake pads. When your breath starts to catch and thin with lightheadedness, she climbs up from between your legs to breathe air back into you with measured kisses, finally graciously conceding to your request to wind down for the night, rather than resuming her intentions between your legs.
She tucks you into her arms while you idly rub at your tender neck, and after a few moments she reaches up to replace your hand, gently massaging moans out of you through the marks as you fade off to pleasure-dulled sleep.
The sun is too bright when you wake up, but apparently your smile is giving it real competition behind the order kiosk at your work. Reagan successfully roused you a little early before your shift to help you buy properly toned concealer and powder to hide her ravaging of your tender neck, and her suggested energy drink invigorated you enough that even you can hear the bubbliness in your voice for hours after she dropped you off.
You finish counting the tips from the sticker-covered jar on the counter and write down the result, then turn to Rina to continue your conversation. "Tell you what 'R', I'll buy you three Celsiuses if you stop asking me about my ex."
"We can skip the bribe if you stop looking so smug all the time."
It's so much easier to parry and return her little jabs now that your confidence in your life and self are on the rise. A laugh bubbles out of you as you reply "I do not look smug! I'm just happy, that's all. You're just jealous you haven't gotten any since you fumbled Catarina."
"That's low. It wasn't even my fault, her kid just didn't like me."
"I bet he'd have liked you better if you could remember his name right!" You waggle a finger at her, and she deliberately avoids making eye contact. "Hey, I'm just bad with names! You let me call you 'Candace' for two months, how am I supposed to get shit right if nobody tells me what the hell they're called." She hands you the warm cinnamon bun out of the toaster oven and leans on the counter as you turn around and call for the customer who ordered it. When you turn back she's smiling. "For real, it's good to see you so happy, kid. I'll take that other shit back, this mystery girl is clearly a good thing for you. You ever going to bring her in here?"
"No, you'll try to get her number."
"You worried she'd give it up?" You laugh at the image, Rina trying to drop hints and flirt on the sly, Reagan too eternally cocky to even blink at the kind of asinine compliments your coworker might drop. "Yeah, no."
"Little lady's feeling awful confident. Why'd you two ever break up in the first place if she's so locked in on you?"
Now that's a delicate question to figure out a half-truth for, you wouldn't want to completely make something up and have your story change later. "We… had a fight. About what we… wanted our relationship to be. She considered it more uh… platonic, kind of, and I wanted it to be more than that. But, after it all happened we missed each other a lot, so we got back together and figured out something that works for both of us."
"Seems to be working real well."
"Yeah, I think so. Anyway, I'm on break. Try not to sexually harass any customers for their phone numbers while I'm gone."
"Oh, fuck you."
"You wish."
The convenience store is out of your favorite two flavors of energy drink, so you decide to try out a brand with twice the caffeine content. You half choke on it when you walk back through the door of the coffee shop to see Reagan waiting by the counter, swiping through her phone at the head of a nonexistent line. She smiles when she hears you clearing your carbonated throat and she looks up to see you, and the flush on your face stays active well after your airway is clear while you take her order. So does the smile you try and fail to suppress, its intensity renewed every time you glance over at her seat while preparing her frappucino and coffee cake. When you bring the items over to her she asks you a few questions about the store and your manager's name, and you're in the middle of joking that she looks too similar to you to deliver an 'anonymous' compliment subtly when Rina calls out to you. "Hey C, we just got an online, six lattes. Gimme a hand."
You turn back to Ray with a warm grin and half-whisper "It was good to see you. I'll see you at home." She nods and asks "Having a good shift?" You nod emphatically, and she… gives you that special smile, present-free.
Would she have kissed you then, if the store were empty?
The six drinks line up in their folded paper carrier nicely, and you find yourself staring out the front window of the shop, a loving and wistful little smile on your lips. You giggle a little bit at the memory of Ray complimenting how your work slacks hug your curves, and your reverie is broken by a little "Hmph." beside you. You blink your glassy stare clear and turn to look at Rina, arms crossed over her chest. She continues "Still thinking about that ex of yours?"
A little bit of your smile wanes, and a wisp of adrenaline prickles the back of your hands. "Yyy-eah. I'm not being smug about it."
"What's your ex's name anyway, you never told me." Your sixth sense actually had you ready for this. You say it totally normally: "Rose."
"Oh really? I thought you said her name was Danika?"
Fuck, did I really actually say it was Danika? Fuck.
"No, that was my other ex."
"Oh, okay. Where's she live? It seems like you see her all the time."
Oh fuck, I can't remember what her address is. And do I even want to be giving real details about Danika anyway? Oh wait she's asking where 'Rose' lives.
You throw out an arbitrary lie. "Uh, just a bit south, in the suburbs."
"Oh really? I was getting the idea that she might actually be closer to home." Your blood feels hot and cold at the same time, and each breath weighs more than your lungs seem to be able to lift. "No, she's 35 minutes away."
Rina raises an eyebrow. You take a step backwards. "What? I told you to stop asking questions."
You can't even see clearly enough to tell what kind of tone she's using, the words are just black letters superimposed over your view of her accusatory eyes. "I saw how you were looking at your sister, rubbing your neck when you saw her. You should have used more setting powder."
Your hand jumps to your neck, reflexively rubbing at one of your bruises, and even as you do it you realize that you're probably smearing more makeup off, but you can't stop.
No, no, no things are going good now I can't lose my job, I can't screw everything up-
No.
One strong circuit connects and a line of charge points you in a single direction. You take a step forward again, and it feels like someone else's face pretending to be affronted on top of your own fearful heart. "What are you talking about? That's my sister, Rina. What's wrong with you, that's disgusting! I was just happy to see Reagan because she's my best friend and I love her. And not like that, god! Now stop pestering me. Christ. My girlfriend and my sister are none of your business."
She backs off. Her brusque apology seems real. Maybe. But who knows how a normal person is supposed to react after they accuse someone of incest and get rebuked. You sure don't.
An hour and a half left in the shift. You can't hide the shaking in your hands, and you submerge yourself in next week's deep cleaning tasks to quiet the impending tsunami in your head.
The clock hits 8 p.m. with you forearm deep in a soapy bucket, and you wash your hands and walk out without a word to Rina. The car feels hypothermic even in the blistering September heat, and you're inside the front door of your apartment before you realized you'd taken the keys out of the ignition.
"Cadence, what's wrong?" That voice, her voice, dissolves the dried concrete on your lips, and words start to pour out as you fall back against the door. "Rina, she fffound ou-said something. Like she knew, I'd been talking about my girlfriend-a little-and she said that I was looking at you weird and I-…" Reagan stands up and takes your face in her hands, eyebrows furrowed. "Does she know about us?" You put a hand on the back of one of hers, and the touch pushes one of the wheels of your train of thought back onto the tracks. "No, I said, um…" You swallow. The words bounced around your mind like red-hot coals for hours, and now that you're faced with actually repeating them it feels like they're going to pull all the teeth out of your mouth when they go. "I, said…" You lean forward and kiss Ray, needing it for the courage to admit what you'd said, but instead of giving you strength it gives you tears. You push forward and wrap your arms around her waist to hold her tight, trying to force the words out, managing them a few at a time over her shoulder. "I, said, that you're, my sister, and that it was, disgusting, and-" A fresh wave of sobs wrack you, and she pets your hair for a few moments, but it's clear you're not going to recover from this in a time that would make sense for standing.
She guides your unresponsive feet over to your couch and sits you down, adjusting to pull your back between her spread legs. The position immediately loosens the tension in your body, and the tears stop forcefully pushing out of you and instead flow like a trembling river. It takes less time than you'd have expected before the tide stops, and you break the silence first. "Are we disgusting, Ray?"
Her certainty is fortifying. "No, Cadence, we're not disgusting."
"We're not normal."
"No sis, we're not normal. But that doesn't mean it's bad."
"Danika said everyone knew we were weird."
"Oh? She said something to you too? She said we were weird?"
"Yeah, she said everyone knew we were weird, but I got distracted and forgot to ask what she meant cause I was too high."
Hum.
You ask "Were we weird in school?"
"Well, I don't think so, but I guess I don't know. She said that it seemed like we liked to only have each other." Some of the warmth returns to your heart again. "You only wanted to have me?"
"You're my best friend Cadence, always have been. Everyone left me, except you. I'm… sorry I didn't hold on tighter." She undoes your ponytail and smooths it out with her fingers, then she kisses your hair and starts to trace her fingers around your ear and down to your collar bone. The angst is starting to meander out of your soul again, but it stops at the door to turn its mournful face back for a moment. Your voice is quiet when you say "I'm sorry I left too…"
She knits her fingers together in front of you to hug you to her, and she holds you still for a moment. Her head moves forward to rest against you. "No. You didn't leave. I left." She takes a deep breath, then she continues before you can respond. "You were badass today. I'm proud of you." Little bubbles of gold burst in your heart again. "Really?"
"Yeah, really! It clearly hurt you a lot to say, but you did it, and you got her off your back. You did get her off your back, right?" You nod and slump a little more tension out of your body, leaning further back into her. "I mean, I think so. She mumbled a little and didn't say anything else."
"Good. Hopefully she doesn't bring it up again." You nod and stare for a little while, then lean your head back and sideways onto Reagan's shoulder and stare up at the ceiling. "Therapy."
"Hm?"
"Oh, just, I thought about going to therapy a while back. I kind of forgot about it, but it's probably a good idea still. I'm going to look into it again tomorrow."
"Sure."
After a few moments you air a thought that's been edging around the back of your mind. "I think I know what I want for my birthday." She rubs your collarbone and hums in a prompt for you to continue. "I think I want to do a chill movie night with cheesy movies." A finger traces up your neck to gently trace along your jaw. "Another movie marathon date?"
"No, just-"-god the word sounds so stupid why can't I say it normal-"-sisterstyle?"
"Okay." You can't tell if your brain is making it up or if there was another layer in her tone. You stumble over your words to make sure you don't give the wrong impression. "Don't get me wrong, yesterday was wonderful, a really good date, but I just want to have a night like we used to, you know? Simple, I guess." You reach a hand up and feel around to gently touch her face. "I think just because we're dating doesn't mean we should stop doing the sister stuff we've always done, casually, you know?" She reaches up to place her hand on the back of yours and interlace your fingers, then she rests them both on your shoulder. You turn your head to lean your cheek on her fingers and speak before she does. "I'm sorry I've been forgetting that."
"You don't need to apologize."
"I guess, it's just, I should be thinking of doing more, like, uh, sister-dates." You chuckle at your own phrasing. "That was stupid, I don't mean that they're dates." She laughs with you anyway. "What's a 'sister-date' then?"
"Clothes shopping, or grocery shopping, or a movie night where we're not touching all the time."
Hum. "We don't need to be not touching for it to not be sister time to me, like I said. It's all sister time with you to me, and I like touching you a lot." You rub your cheek on her a little more, relieved. A thought comes to mind. "You've settled into this uh, situation pretty easily, huh?"
"Situation? Dating?"
"Yeah, but I mean the whole… incest thing…"
Her free hand gets antsy and starts to play with your hair. "Mhm. You know, it kind of makes sense, why you ended up feeling the way you did-do. I've always been too handsy with you, haven't I?"
Your cheek lights red, memories flashing through your mind of dozens of moments when she was close enough to kiss, her grasping one of your hands that was sweatier than it had any right to be, touches on your thighs that made places on your body so hot you felt ashamed and lightheaded. A time when you collapsed onto her lap in a fit of laughter at something she didn't mean to be a joke, looking up at her and giggling as she traced her fingers across your collar bone, wondering if you could laugh in just the right way to make those fingertips accidentally slip under the collar of your shirt. You reply, barely above a mutter "I wouldn't say too handsy…" Another hum.
As the blush lingers, your responses all those years ago feel like flashing lights, and it seems wild that "You really never noticed anything back then?"
"Nope."
"I mean, I guess I get it, but it still just seems so wild. I was so obvious."
"Why would I have ever thought about it? I trusted you. I never got the impression that you were trying to get in my pants, and apparently I just don't see the romantic stuff like everyone else does."
'You trust-ed me?'
It's not too hard to catch the words in your palm before you say them. She trusts you again, you're pretty sure. She'd have to, to accept you touching her in your sleep like you did. You'd thought about doing it again, but the idea of getting all the way out of your bed to do so without prompt had made you feel like too much of a creep to go through with it. Thoughts had whispered in your head that you'd gotten lucky, that it was just the one night that it had been okay, that-
Fuck it, just ask.
"Do you trust me now?"
"Yes." Not for the first time, a shower pours envy over your head, wishing you could be as certain of anything in life as she is in resolutely placing her trust in you again after you hurt her. It couldn't hurt to be obsequious and ask again. "And, the other night, when I climbed in your bed and… did stuff to you? You're sure that's okay?"
"Sure. What about you? If I did the same?"
"Yeah, that would be um-" You swallow. "-that would be a lot of fun, if you, wanted to."
She leans her head as close to your ear as she can. "Well then, maybe I can help get your mind off of things…" Her legs straighten out more and one hand follows along down toward your hips, catching a finger under the hem of your shirt and pulling it up a few inches. The wispy tickle of her fingertip against your skin makes you shiver, and words you wish you didn't have to say come out in a staccato. "Well uh, I wish, but tonight-" Her hand splays out flat and starts to drift up toward your chest. You do your best to continue "-I, still have work early tomorrow, and I, ah, am still pretty tired…"
She circles one side of your bra with two fingers and then slides them into the other cup, brushing around in a circle as she whispers "My baby sister wants to be responsible? She can't handle getting groped and worked up by her sister before she sleeps?"
You have half a mind to protest about being called 'baby sister', but her hand squeezes around your breast, and the other tucks into your waistband to trace back and forth, making you shiver again. Protest seems like a dumb choice at the moment, keeping her hands moving seems much smarter. "W-ell, I think maybe it's fine, we've alllll-ready got the makeup, I'll just, set an extra alarm-"
"Mmm-nope!" She retracts her hands and pats down your shirt. "Cadence has work, and I'd be a terrible girlfriend to keep her up when she needs to be responsible."
Your body's disappointment has substantially more volume than any voice of responsibility. You get up and twist around to poise on hands and knees in front of her. "It's fine, please, I want more-" You press your lips to hers over and over again, showing her how needy she made you with that little tease, and though she meets your energy, she keeps her hands to herself, and it's not long before she hums and pulls back. You can feel the desperation still on your face, and the smugness on hers almost makes you legitimately mad. You can hear your voice cut a little when you press. "For real, it's fine, if I go to bed in an hour I can still get six-and-a-half hours in, I'll set an extra alarm."
Reagan moves forward to speak to you as close as she can get without your noses touching. "Needy girl. Just a few minutes then~" You turn your head and bridge the gap to kiss her several times before pulling free just long enough to say "You're a bastard." and then you dive back in and smother her smug laughter.
Precisely seventeen minutes and forty-six seconds later you ruefully roll over in your bed again, body still feeling sensitive and hot. You consider running yourself a shower as cover to give yourself the satisfaction you're still desperately thirsty for, but if your dumb girlfriend is going to cut things short so you can sleep, then you might as well get the stupid sleep.
The minutes after coming out of a therapy video call are strange. You were just talking about something bad or unpleasant, something you didn't like or had complicated feelings about, but you aren't drowning in misery when it's over. Strange.
Coming back to your room, your apartment, the world. Emptier than it was before the session, but in a good way. Like if someone donated your books to clear space off of shelves you didn't know were even cluttered.
Someone following your lead when you called him 'Jeremy' or 'my father' or 'dad', abiding the most recent term you used even if it was different than the one prior. Moving on when you figured out that you don't really care about him leaving. You were in Reagan's arms within an hour of his leaving, while the little discontents swirled around. Your sister's body and touch and care melted all those feelings before they could take form - 'unloved' and 'doesn't care' and 'unwanted' all proven wrong without a single word.
Unloved is a two way street though, and you're guilty of that. A session of background and context as a beginning, a session of walking through your father's ghost to turn it to mist, and you left off ready to talk about Flora. It's almost a grace that she's gone - your flight from the house can't hurt her anymore.
Next on the docket to address is that - your feeling that death is a mercy compared to what you subjected her to. You gave the name of the loch of guilt you plan to drain, but the actual purge is still upcoming, and you have a nervous kind of anticipation for it. Stray thoughts still tell you that you don't deserve to stop feeling remorse and guilt, but as misery dries up in each part of your life, it's easier to see, and feel, how holding onto waterlogged books makes you a bad librarian.
"Hey Ray?" She's facing away from you while she washes the dishes that accrued while you each prepared the ingredients for breakfast burritos. They're fewer than those you'd have needed to bake the cookies you really wanted, but you're still not sure if forgiveness reaches as deep as flour.
"Yeah Cads?"
Cads? That's new.
"What do you think about therapy?"
"Seems to be working for you, from what you've talked about it."
"Yeah, I think it's been good! What I meant though, was what do you think about doing it? It's a little expensive, but I think it's worth it."
Hum. "No." Curt, but not derisive. She didn't really consider the idea.
"Why not?"
"It's not private."
Peculiar. "Uh, what? I mean, there's doctor-patient confidentiality? It doesn't have to be about like, private things, I talked about Jeremy and…" You trail off.
What constitutes 'private' for her?
She dismisses it casually. "I don't need to talk about him." There's some little trail of color in the air that doesn't match the smell of bacon in your meat scissors or the scent of dish soap. "I'm… going to talk about Mom and Flora too?"
"That's what I mean, I think those things are private. I don't want to share those things with anybody but you."
'Th…at's…'
The words trail off in your mind without making it to your lips as you stare at the back of her head for a few moments. You want to tell her that that's the kind of sentiment that composes 'emotional intimacy' for you, but it's clearly a family thing, so you let it drop and ask "There's nothing else you'd want to talk about?"
Hum.
She finishes the current cutting boards and turns to face you, then she dries her hands on a towel and crosses her arms. Even through a relatively flat affect you can tell by the little upturn on one side of her mouth that she's legitimately considering your question. After a few moments of the spotlight you turn back to your task to break the eye contact. Eventually she asks "Is there anything you think I should talk about?"
"I mean, I don't know, I don't want to tell you what you should do or talk about or anything, I'm sorry if I was pressuring you." She touches your shoulder gently, and her fingers are more gentle than her tone was a moment ago. "No, I mean that as a real question. Do I seem like the kind of person that needs therapy?"
"I don't think it's really that kind of thing-" She cuts you off. "Wait. That was wrong, I didn't mean it quite like that." She makes a noise of consideration. "As the person that knows me best, do…" Huff. "As my sister do you think there's anything I need to talk about?" The poise of her question makes your uncertainty feel like failure. "I, don't think I really know that. You seem to just get over stuff quickly, and maybe I'm the weird one for taking a long time, I think."
Hum.
You take a tentative step in the conversation. "You talk less than you did when we were kids now."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Since like, middle school-ish? The start of it - or, when you started."
Hum. "Okay." You try to be gentle with your poking. "Do you feel like that's like a 'thing'?" She steps over to start spoon ingredients into tortillas and wrap them in aluminum foil, and she asks "Did talking about Jeremy feel like a thing?" Proximity feels nice, working side by side on a shared project. "That's kind of what we talked about, that it didn't feel like a 'thing'. Most people feel more of a sense of abandonment, and I didn't really get that, I guess."
"Do you want to talk to him again?"
"I've got another appointment next week-oh." You make a sound of denial, realizing who she meant. "Definitely not."
"Then you're not really missing anything."
"True, I guess… the therapist did have one idea that he specifically suggested in the last session, going to see the old house."
"Ah."
"What do you think of that? Do you want to come with me? He said it might be good for me to see it again after mom and Flora died, since I… never went back before it was gone." That truth kind of feels like a fact of life now, the black ink nearly washed off your soul. The idea is casual to her too. "Sure, I can make the drive. It was the same as ever, really." You accept the answer with a positive sound and take your turn at the sink to get the bacon fat off your fingers. Once you're dry you tuck your arms around Reagan from behind while she works and put your chin on one of her shoulders as best you can with her little bit of extra height. "It's not about money, right?"
"The therapy? No, it's not that at all." You got your answer, but you want to keep the physical contact, so you ask "How's the job search going?"
"I'm working on something." The uptick of positivity in her tone alleviates some of the swirling feelings inside you. You murmur "Okay." and hold her for a few moments, finally giving her a little kiss on the back of the neck. "Want to go tomorrow?"
"Sure, I'm free."
It's hard to say if the grey house is empty, there's only one car along the curve of the sidewalk nearby it in the cul-de-sac. You clear your throat and ask Reagan "Do you remember much of Nebraska?"
"Sure. School mostly. Boring stuff. It was nice sharing a bedroom." You reach toward the driver's seat to take her hand. "Mm…" A little time passes with just the sound of the car's A/C while you ruminate. "Why'd you want to move to a new bedroom then?"
"Felt like that's what you were supposed to do when you grew up, and I was ready to."
"Ah…"
Makes sense.
You muse "This place felt more like a 'childhood home' than Nebraska, even though I was already 13 when we moved in." You give a little laugh. "That make any sense?" She gives a little hum.
You watch the windows, and an uncomfortable sense of voyeurism starts to creep in when you get the impression that a light just turned on in the room you never stopped picturing as your mother's bedroom. "You think things were really better between mom and Jeremy before we moved? That's what I remember, but it just seems so strange to believe." Your sister's fingertips lift away from the back of your hand to tap along your knuckles in sequence while she stares. After a while she says quietly "They had to have been better at some point. They couldn't have just always been bad, they'd have never gotten married."
"Did she ever show you her wedding pictures?" Reagan shakes her head. "She pulled them out after he left. She talked about how expensive they were, how the photographer kept wanting to take extra pictures of Janey instead of her. She was jealous that the bridesmaids got to wear dresses that showed their cleavage." You sigh. "She told me that she'd been waiting a long time to do it. Until we got out of highschool. She kept smiling at the pictures, but she smiled at me more when she told me that. She was crying so much though."
Ray pulls her hand away and she starts to root around in the bag of pretzels you bought on the way into town, then she washes it down with some of your oversized mixture of blue and green slurpee flavors. The cup sits in her hand on her thighs, and it feels like you can almost watch the ice at the bottom of the plastic container melting before your eyes. A drop of condensation runs down from its top down onto her exposed thigh, and it starts to feel like the time for retrospection might have come to an end for the day.
You look back at the porch, and those ghosts. Your mom waving you goodbye, and…
"Do you think mom would have been happier dating women from the start?" Reagan's response is flat. "I don't know."
That makes sense.
You answer your own question. "I don't think anything that would have kept her from meeting Flora would have been the right path for her. It's just… such a long time to go to meet the right person." You can feel yourself walking down the same tunnel as the ghost of your mother for a few moments. You waited twenty years for your true love too. You stare over at your sister, watching her thumb flick back and forth at the edge of the drink's curved lip while she stares right through the house. You weren't waiting quite as long as your mother. Not exactly.
You wonder for a minute about the idea of Brynne meeting Flora before Jeremy.
You're too selfish. Not for yourself, for the idea of you not being born, but for Reagan not being born if your mother had erred closer to your own sexual disposition than your sister's, finding a woman from the start instead. You reach out and put a hand on Reagan's thigh, warming it from the cold of your shared drink and the blowing air. She looks over to you, and you can see that antsiness in her body again, held back behind a thousand-yard stare while she lets you have your time.
You pitch it as a question so that Ray doesn't feel like she's rushing you: "You're ready to go." She nods. "Sure."
Once you're two turns out of the cul-de-sac, she turns the A/C down to half from max, and fruitlessly searches in the bottom of her bag for more pretzels at a stoplight. "I'm out, can I have some of your goldfish?" You hand them over. "Sure, I'm actually for real hungry though. Want to stop for Cafe Crepe before we head out of town?" She takes the little plastic package from you and eats a little handful. "Sure."
"Crawfish Daddy?"
"Whatever you want."
"Pound Town?" She looks over at you for a second, then her eyes refocus back to the moment properly. "I don't want cake." You poke her arm. "Come on, you know you want to go to Pound Town!" She waves a hand in the air. "For a lesbian, you like that name a weird amount." You giggle a little. "Oh come on, they wouldn't have called it that if they didn't want people to make jokes. They could have called it 'All Caked Up' if they wanted people to take it seriously." You grin at her until she's done pulling through the intersection and looks over at you again, then she breaks into a grin of her own. "Shut. Up."
You laugh again. "You want me to look up directions?"
"No, I know how to get there."
"You sure? It'll take an hour if we go down main street-"
"It does not take an hour, and I hate pulling out on the highway up north, you can't see shit before you turn-we're not going to Pound Town!" You cackle at having tricked her, and it bubbles down to a final "Hehe." She sighs and hands your snack back. "Crawfish Daddy. Call ahead, they get stupid busy at lunch. I want a beer, you're driving home."
Third week, third therapy session. First of October, too warm for the leaves to fall yet. Warm enough that the rain isn't sucking the vapid warmth out of your empty skin like it was last January, and December, and November. The emotional forecast isn't predicting any ice this year.
Your therapist looks away from the notes in his lap and smooths down his hair, a tic you've learned not to be distracted by. "Flora?"
You blow air out your cheeks and lean back. You go ahead, picking up on the sentiment you'd half completed when the first session ended. "I wish I'd gotten to know Flora better. It was just…" Your mouth is empty, even if you put words in it. "…with everything…" Your mind feels empty too, a block puzzle simulated by a single bleacher in a vacuous school auditorium. "I guess, I just feel like a coward for running away. Like I could have been a better daughter, if…" You take a deep breath and shake up the can of emotional fizz you need to embody the emotional truth you want to believe. "I did okay. While I was there, I did okay. I liked her. She liked me, I think. She deserved…"
The carbonation fizzles out, and you don't really know how long you spent staring past the propped up phone at the black TV on the modest little sky-blue table in the corner. One of the drawers seems to be off its rail, but it might just be a trick of the light.
Your therapist breaks the silence. "Life… isn't really a matter of deserving things. What do you feel like she deserved?" The canted drawer is sticky to your eyes for a moment before you refocus on your horizontal phone screen. "Yeah, I guess that's fair. Who deserves anything."
"That's not what I meant, my apologies. I was trying to say that circumstances are always so complicated that it's hard to rectify outcomes with the virtues of the people who suffer."
"Oh. Yeah…"
The therapist offers some directional guidance for the conversation. "You talked about Flora, but you haven't really talked about your mother. Was it official, did she remarry?"
Your eyes brighten. "Yeah, it was a quiet thing - she didn't even invite me and Reagan! She just did it in the backyard, the two of them on their own." You shake your head, smiling. "They were just wearing these fancy pink dresses when I got home from my classes, and Flora pulled me over with 'a surprise' and they showed me their matching rings. I think mom wanted to do the exact opposite of what her mom pushed her into when she married my father. Apparently she was still paying some of the wedding off when Reagan took over her financing stuff after it happened."
"Oh, so Reagan spearheaded the financial management after the accident?" You nod. "She did the whole thing. Didn't even actually let me help at all, even though I offered. It was kind of at a time when she wasn't really um, wanting anything from me." He picks up a pen and begins to lightly tap it on his wrist, maybe to keep himself from smoothing his hair again. "A death in the family can certainly put tensions on relationships in ways that we might not always expect. It's not surprising that she might have pulled away a bit to not rely on you, and not be as communicative as normal"
"Yeah, I mean, it wasn't about that really, I don't think." There's a little pit in your chest, but it's easy to push down.
"I see." He pauses for a few moments. "Have you talked to her since, about how she feels about it?" You wave in the air. "Oh, yeah, yeah. She didn't have much to say at first, but we cried about it a bit a few months later. I think she's over it."
"Oh, so it's been a while then? You didn't mention how long it was ago."
"Ah, yeah, it's been, I think, coming up on a year or so? October something - no wait, November."
"Mhm. You said that you think your sister is over it. How do you feel?" You give a big sigh, and take a while to feel around while the therapist waits you out. "I wish I'd been there. Or, not like, there, but home. I wish I'd been there for Reagan, but I didn't even go home after either. I was already gone, Reagan had to come get me."
"You were 'gone'?"
"Moved out."
"Ah, it's understandable that you'd have done so, it was about that time, right? A few years into college."
"Ye-well, no. I should have been home."
"You should have been? You had school to attend, why do you say that?"
"I didn't leave for school. I actually dropped out, because I moved. Me and Reagan had a, fight." You've arrived at the topic that you're most anxious to talk about to another person. It feels like breathing air straight out of hell to say it. "I… 'caught feelings'. For her. R,… romantic feelings."
The therapist pauses for an uncharacteristically long time, and fear of judgment keeps you silent. When he speaks, his formality seems forced. "Romantic feelings. For your sister."
Your voice is quiet, timid. Ready to run and hide. "Yeah… We'd just, always been close, and I realized that I loved her for real, and I, I wish I could have helped it, but…" He inclines his head, but a little dial spins internally to turn your words, and you backtrack. "No, I don't wish that. If I hadn't, we wouldn't be good now, we wouldn't be together and good together like we are."
"You're 'together' now? Romantically?"
"Yes, well, sort of. It's romantic for me."
"And sexually?"
You blush at the memories of it, looking down at your hands. "Yes. It's been a lot sometimes, but it's good. I like it, and we're getting good at it together." A little timer goes off on the other end of the call, and the way he calls an end to the meeting sits with you strangely. "Well, it looks like we're out of time for now. I'll need to review my notes. My assistant will get in contact with you to schedule our next appointment once a time is free."
You follow Reagan into the kitchen to help with groceries once she gets home. "Hey Ray. Just got out of therapy."
She hands you a carton of brown eggs. "Still good?"
"Yeah, we talked about Flora a bit. Looks like there was one last cobweb to brush out. But, there was like this, thing."
"Hmm?"
"I finally brought up, y'know, our relationship, and I don't know, he, his questions were short. He said he'd have his assistant get in contact to schedule the next session when there was a time open, but each of the other times he'd get them scheduled before the end of the call."
"Is that different than usual?"
Where the hell are you going to fit another styrofoam bin of mushrooms? "Yeah, a bit, he usually guides the conversation more. There was an actual timer that went off this time too, and he usually just says that we've run out of time. I think he might have been mad about our relationship? Uh, not mad really, but disapproves?"
You hand Ray a nearly empty container of fungi and she chomps on the last few heads. In between bites she says "Hm. You should stop seeing him."
That seems like a big jump.
"Are you sure? Why, that seems like a lot?" She tosses the package into the trash and cinches the bag up to take out later. "If he doesn't support our relationship, then I don't think he'd be a good influence on you. You started therapy cause of how Rina made you feel."
"That wasn't the only reason. Besides, he doesn't need to support it, just, be okay with it, I guess."
"Sure."
"I don't know, I'm probably just reading too much into things, like I always do."
Reagan nods and raises an eyebrow, leaning on the counter to look at you. "That's true." You move on, asking "Speaking of, have you finished Leisure and Loss yet?"
"No, I got distracted by some, research. You read damn quick."
"Yeah, the detective not being the protagonist made it really interesting. You gotta catch up, I wanna talk about the ending!"
"We can just talk about it now, I already read it."
You protest "I know, but you keep saying I'm reminding you of details that slipped by you. You forgot that they show you who the killer is ten chapters before the ending!"
"I remembered that part, just not how long it was before the ending, and I remember the ending."
"Then who did the killer turn out to really be?"
"It was the captain's wife, they tried a last minute fake but it was just a rubber hand. Come on, when do I actually forget things?"
"You forgot my tenth birthday!"
"I did not, I gave you my brownie 'cause yours melted in the sun and it was too icky for you to touch." You point at her with a sly smile alongside your lie. "True, but that was my ninth birthday!"
She stares at you, eyes narrowed. For a long time. Eventually she reaches out and pokes your nose. "Well I didn't forget this one. We're going shopping before we start the movie marathon. Or the day before, whichever."
You figure that your therapist probably signed off atypically last time just because he's had a hectic schedule lately, once he shows up late for the fourth session. You cover some basics about the visit to your old home that you forgot to bring up the first time around, then circle around to where you left off, giving a brief rundown of how Reagan barged her way into your apartment after eight months.
He asks "Have you gotten the opportunity to get some space from your sister since that event?"
"Well, we've got different schedules, so we don't always run into each other every day. At first I was kind of avoiding her a bit, but now I feel lonely on the nights when she's out by herself."
"Hm. It's important that you maintain some space for yourself in such a small apartment." You shrug. He asks "Who knows about your relationship?"
"There's Danika, who uh," You chuckle. "Saw right through me like, right away. She's the one that gave me the idea that Ray might be aromantic."
"Aromantic?" He takes a little note. You explain "Yeah, she doesn't really feel any romantic feelings, except for with books and movies a little bit." He nods, showing that his comment was an acknowledgment and not a request for a definition. You continue "And there's Rina, at work. Sort of." You give a brief explanation of what happened and the anxiety you felt afterwards.
"It seems that this kind of information could compromise your job, no?"
"That's what I'm kind of worried about, on top of the other stuff." You blow air out of your cheeks and slap your thighs lightly. He makes a u-turn. "You said your sister is aromantic, but you're still asking her to participate in a romantic relationship with you? How has that gone?"
"Uh, well, things were kind of complicated at the start, but it evened out to pretty good after we figured out she's aro and she bought her guide book."
"She's following a 'guide'?"
"Yeah, it's like… 'How to build a good relationship from the base' or something. I can't remember the title right now."
"There seem to be several things indicating that this situation is tenuous." You shrug, shadows swirling in the pool of your mind. He continues "Which matters more to you, your relationship as sisters, or as lovers?"
Looking back, it's become clear that you can't really separate the two, but… You did still have something when your true feelings were locked up. "Sisters."
He takes a few moments, possibly figuring out how exactly to lead the conversation. "Doesn't dating put you in jeopardy of losing that?"
You look down and pinch the fabric of your pajamas between your fingers, taking a long time to roll the starfishes between your fingertips. "Yeah. I guess." With only half a second's pause, you look back to your phone screen. "But I won't give up. No matter what."
"Then-" He pauses after the first word, then he pivots. "-well, it's important to be realistic-"
"No…" Your word hangs in the air, and you can feel some of the growing confidence in the righteousness of your relationship fraying. You've treated the endeavor of therapy with sincerity and openness, but there's a little antsy fear building-
No.
Your fingernails scrabble over the stitching of your conviction, trying to get a grip. Your voice grows guarded. "What are you trying to say?"
He makes it sound like normal therapy talk: "It's just a complicated situation, and people can be forced into bad decisions after a tragic event. It seems like it might not be a healthy-"
The rest of his words submerge under static and pressure in your head, and you're starting to feel panicked and choked up. Your breathing picks up pace and you start to pinch your fingers together hard enough for it to hurt. Your ears register him saying something, but the words bounce off the wall between you and this poor semblance of an authority figure.
Reagan's voice is in your head, telling you to stop seeing him. The words are a helpful little push, but you picture her in your mind; holding her face in your hands, trailing your fingers across her jaw, looking into her eyes, holding her in your arms and being held back. The choking stays, but you fight through it, and you can hear an echo of Reagan in your mind when you speak. A cold voice through a hot throat. "You're against our relationship. Aren't you."
He says something. Something-something-social, something-something-inappropriate, something-something-something-something.
Words. Stupid words.
More ice. "I don't think this is a very good fit." You feel like a statue, and the little man in the phone screen just a little puppet doing a little puppet dance and saying little puppet words: "I'm glad you can see that now, it's important that-"
"No, this." You lean forward through a world gone still and empty and press the end call button.
You asked your sister Reagan to go slow, and she did. You've never felt more connected to her than you do right now, bathed in afterglow.
Chapter 21
♫ (#3)
Ms. Reagan Forscythe.
Reagan Forscythe.
Reagan.
Ray.
Your sister lying feet from you, staring right into your eyes, and you back into hers.
The only woman you've ever loved. The only one that you ever will love, you know deep in your heart.
So much time, so much heartache, so much shattered glass in your chest screaming for you to let go, to back off, to stop loving her, to find someone else to fixate on.
All worth it, because she's here now, and she's yours, and you're hers.
"Hey."
"Hey." A gorgeous voice, underlined with force of personality and understated conviction even when she's uncertain like she is now. "How are you doing?"
You smile. "Good." After a lifetime of your sister being your rock on frothing shores of brine, it lines your heart with gold to be able to soothe her worries. "Really good." She told you that holding hands is you being there for her, and you've never been more 'here' than right now. Her fingers lace perfectly under yours, warmths meeting in your palms and connecting you like you always should have been. "Thank you for going slow."
"I should have gone slow from the beginning." You expect to feel that loud spray of emotional static at the reminder of that first night, but it's just a whisper now. You squeeze her hand, sharing your relief with her. "It's fine, we got here in the end, right? That's what counts." A little wave of calm ripples across her pool of emotions.
Has anyone else made it worth going slow?
"Was it like this with other girls-er-partners?"
Hum. "Yeah, when it was good."
Hmm…
"Mm, is that bad?"
"I just wish it was special with me."
Foolish…
"Why? …isn't 'good' enough?"
You sigh. "Yeah… it is. As long as it's good for you too."
Her eyes wander for a moment, and then unfocus.
It is good, right?
She just said it was good, but you just asked again, and maybe she just said it was good the first time for your sake…
"It's definitely good."
She means it, but tiny flames are dancing on the wick of your insecurity again. "Even though I don't know what I'm doing?" She laughs a little bit. "For someone who doesn't know what she's doing, you've got pretty good intuition."
"I did some reading of stuff, over the years." Somehow it's still embarrassing to describe your relative virginhood to your sister, even after everything. Your mind circles around to this morning, reading off your phone in the shower, trying to let your imagination replace the character in the smut with your sister. Your time in the steam taking so long that Reagan joked about coming in to get you, driving a spike of nervousness into you with the feeling that she knew exactly what you spent so long doing in the bathroom. "And some more last night and this morning…"
She winks, and it makes you even more self-conscious that she was onto you. "I'd make a joke about you sending me what you've read so that I can read it myself, but how about you just keep showing me what you've learned."
"Wait, you read smut too?"
"A few times, but I usually just hook up instead." It's usually easier to think about, but right now it prickles at you to picture your sister in some faceless stranger's bed just to get off. "It's that easy for you? To just have sex with whoever?"
"Yeah."
She was so intense that one night, giving so much attention but demanding so much, liquid heat spilling over the edges between you, too much raw physicality to fit in a single vessel. "You must have been pretty pent up not doing that for seven months." And afterwards, too much watery emotion in you to tread in without starting to drown. "What if having sex back then hadn't fixed things? Fixed… us?" She's taking too long to answer, so you quietly spin the emotional coin in your fingers and ask "What if I'd said no?"
"… Back to normal, I guess." Her answer, printed in 12-point Times New Roman in the center of an 8.5 × 11 inch page, five words scribed with no more significance than 'lorem ipsum' filler text. Unassuming and small and easily ignored. Like you and your needs. "I don't think I could have ever done that."
She goes rigid, for a long time. Maybe you could do something about that, fix it for her. Soothe her, insulate whatever sparking circuit of emotions she's enduring under the control. Do more for her than she would have done for you, if you'd done what you thought would have been best when she pushed herself on you.
She didn't do those things for you that night. You don't now. "That hurt me." It's still quiet in the bedroom, and the ghost of misery speaks through you in a tearful whisper. "I tried so hard." You can feel it again, that silent black hole draining the emotion from you. The chasm of distance between your fulfillment tonight and the bottom of the pit you saved yourself from is making your bed a mirror to reflect the hollow version of yourself that you know you'd have been without that night. "It worked. It hurt, but every day more and more of it was locked up, and eventually it was just little tiny glimmers that were there and gone." A breath. Cinnamon and sweat in the air. "You said 'no matter what'. I asked you for 'no matter what'." Damnation of her on your breath. "But not that."
Her stillness breaks and she grips your hand hard enough to hurt, causing your ribs to clench tightly around your heart with fear of rejection for being honest, but then she throws herself onto you, choking and clinging to you like a life preserver in an obsidian sea as the sun disappears over the horizon. "I'm sorry…" You can barely hear her, and the words are unfamiliar to hear from her lips. "I'm sorry!"
You clumsily hug her at the awkward angle and feel her shudder, praying that the growing cracks don't fracture her completely. It lasts too long, and whatever pain still resonating in you dissolves. She needs you, she needed you and you both fucked up, but the parallel world of failure is torturing her. You try to pull her up to look at you, but she clings harder, her breathing desperate and her body lava-hot against your skin. It takes too long. She's never broken down like this around you, and you know deep in your heart that she would never be this vulnerable with anyone else on the planet than her dear sister. Your chest constricts with fear and her pressure, and when she finally eases off you get the deep breath that your lungs and your emotions needed.
Your reality twists into a surreal mirror image when she shuffles off the bed. Through time you can feel Reagan in the same spot you are, watching her sister shuffle off the bed while she ignored the pleas to her. You can feel that same fear of emotional disconnection that she felt that night. Her heart echoes to you through the long hallway of nights past, urging you to wait by the bathroom door like she did, every second and inch away from her stretching the eternity between you further and further into unfathomable distance.
She doesn't make you wait as long as you made her wait that night, and though her hands are cold when she returns, she lies back down next to you and she's there for you again, fingers intertwined. You can't subject her to your stare as long as she can look at you, and your mind bobs around in a little paddle boat for a while, letting all the moments of the day slosh around while you find your center. You hold it within you for a moment, but in truth your center is lying in front of you, skin touching, but not close enough.
Closer.
Do it right this time.
It's not the first time, it's not even the first time today, but I still need to get it right.
You step right up to the edge, and you should already know the answer, but it's still just…
"You look like you have something on your mind." You feel pathetic to have to ask if you can kiss her again after your first snubbed attempt at the question, but you do. "Can I kiss you?" She stares into your eyes, seeing you clinging to the railing of uncertainty. "You really needed me to actually say yes, didn't you?"
You nod and shut your eyes to stop tears. Reagan puts a finger on your lips, then draws it down to pull your bottom lip open slightly, and she hums. It coaxes your eyes back open, and she says "Yes, Cadence. You can kiss me." You dart forward to press your lips to hers, desperate for the release, but holding on a single touch like a seal into hot wax. After the sensation has burnt its way into your mind, you pull back, but instead of relaxing, your sister drills into your eyes even further, pinning you like a butterfly until she speaks. "You can kiss me any time you want to." You stare back for a few moments, but then your gaze drops.
Knowing me, I could still find a way to fuck it up and find a time when she doesn't want it. It's not like I don't have a record…
Your tone turns deathly afraid. "Can you forgive me for kissing you without permission?"
The pause is long, and you don't realize that she's waiting for you to look at her again until she stops waiting and lifts your chin to look at her. "Yes, Cadence. I forgive you."
Little relief bubbles into a complete collapse of stress-alleviated laughter. When your eyes open she's smiling at you, but you can see that she's looking at you like a child and not at the woman that she loves-
What-ever!
It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, who cares if it's not golden ichor to her like it is to you, you can kiss your sister whenever you want and she forgave you and it's okay now! It's okay when you kiss her now, and it's okay when you kiss her again, and this time and this time and it will be the next time and every time and she's yours and the only woman that could ever matter and the only one you want to kiss and she's beautiful and her lips are divine and touching them with yours lights the world with glittery string lights and with shimmering reflections of joy and everything lovely in the world.
Once you've had your fill of her kisses (for the moment) you take some time to lie on her chest and feel the snakes of demonization uncoil from around your spine and freeze behind the glass of a parallel life that you're finally leaving behind for good.
Hopefully.
Your emotions dance and sway in this new world of light, each inch illuminated by the brightness that accompanied you throughout twenty-one years, the longest blink in the world hiding you from its warmth for an eternity now rendered minute. It's okay to tell her how long she's been everything to you. "Do you know why I call you Ray?"
"No, you never told me. Is it not just short for Reagan?"
"It's because you've always been my Ray of sunshine."
…
Wait no why is she freaking out-
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry"
-why is she freaking out what the fuck-
There's too many 'sorry's and not enough breathing and she's starting to freak you out and this was supposed to be sweet-
You put a finger to her lips and she doesn't stop, completely ignoring your attempt to make her pause, and you shift to clamp a hand over her mouth so that you can breathe and she can breathe and you can pause this bizarre reaction to figure out what the hell is going on. She makes eye contact, but there's still fear and panic in her eyes, so you climb on top of her and slowly release, moving to pull her wrists away from where she'd pressed her palms to her head. "Ray, are you okay? What is it?"
She jerks her hands as soon as you speak. "I hurt you so bad I hit you I fucked you up I'm a monster I-"
It clicks now, but her words are still pouring out of her without any conscious control, worse than they did in the staccato bursts in the kitchen so long ago. You insist "It's okay-no-" She tries to interject again, and you let go to put a finger to her lips. "We're fine now. Please just… calm down."
Twenty minutes ago you might still have held yourself to the hot stove of blame hard enough to completely reject any apologies, but now you might be able to accept the aloe of her apology once it stops pouring out of her mouth in a spout of blood. "It hurt, but it's okay now. We were both… bad, and we both hurt each other, but it's okay now. We got here." You know her well enough to gauge that she needs a more concrete affirmation of the present, rather than just reassurances about the past. "I'm okay, and I'm happy. And… you're happy too… right?"
She takes a while, but you can tell it's not just raw calculation. She's letting the answer flow through her and soothe the places it touches. "… yes." She takes a tremulous breath, then the calm voice you're accustomed to comes through. "Yes, Cadence. If you're happy, then I'm happy. And… I'm happy for me too." She breathes, and you breathe too. She ratifies it. "This is good. I like this."
You take her face into your hands and lean down for a long, emphatic kiss. Showing her that everything you are is here, all for her. Your eyes meet again, and you can see contentedness starting to sheath her exposed vulnerability. You kiss her again, and again, and again. She may not connect this way, but the more you can show each other who you are and how you love, without reservation or apology, the more stable you'll both feel, and you can each be what you want to be in the relationship.
And who you want to be in life.
You pull back and hold her gaze with yours. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I don't care how bad things were between us before. I forgive you, and… I think I can forgive me too. You said that you forgive me, and maybe it was just about the one kiss and not everything else, but whatever. I feel okay, and I forgive you. And now I need you to forgive yourself too. Please."
She looks up at you, and she's searching. It doesn't take her long to find it, and her beautiful irises aren't a mirror to her own soul, she's looking through those discerning eyes into you, looking for and finding the forgiveness deep in your heart.
"Okay, Cadence. Okay."
You caress her face for a long time. Your eyes linger on hers for a while, then they release to trail around her skin behind your gentle fingers, feeling the little nicks along her jaw from when she fell out of a tree at eight years old, trying to keep up as you climbed high enough to see the golden retriever over the back fence. Another surreal moment falls through the night, feeling your real body finally able to caress her and show her how beautiful she is, like you wanted to do at sixteen when she leaned up to look at the marks on her jaw in the bathroom mirror, bemoaning how her skin never scars quite right.
You'd fantasized this kind of touch, what you'd do, what you'd say, what it might lead to, but now that you're here, it isn't a moment for words. Not right now. You want your attention, care, and saccharine focus on the spot to soothe those worries, for your love to soak through your fingertips and your eyes, to line the marks with gold like kintsugi, making her better than she was before she was broken. Your thumb traces back and forth over the two notches, and…
She twitches a little under you. She's been patient, quietly letting you explore, but you look back to her dark eyes, and you can tell your delicate attention didn't work on her.
That's okay. I can have these moments. They can, just be for me. They're still beautiful, even if they're just for me.
She licks her lips and adjusts her hips, and you take the hint. "Thirsty?"
"Definitely, but let's just go with some water now, yeah?" You scoff at her stupid comment, but smile anyway. It's dumb, but who knows where your relationship would have ended up if you sister weren't so horny?
She sleeps in your bed with you.
You sleep in hers. Some night drives after long shifts you wonder if you'll open the door to find her asleep in your bed, thinking up ways to tease her about it when she wakes up. She's always in her bed.
You sneak into it sometimes, wrapping her arms around you while she barely rouses enough to snuggle close. Once, you switch out her chest pillow with Heim at 2 a.m. as a joke. You wake up to "Hey Cadence?" and blearily open your eyes to the afternoon sun. You get a quarter second's image of her silhouette outlined against the window of the living room before she bops you with the stuffed animal and stalks out of the apartment in a short black dress you've never seen before. "Sleep tight!"
You take an extensive shower, reveling in the day off ahead of you. Your moisturizer bumps against a new glass vial on one of the shelves behind the mirror, and you take it out to examine. 'Delicate Rose'. Or is it Rosé?
That seems like a strange choice for her.
Freshly lotioned and appreciating the cool air of the apartment, you pick up your phone to find two texts from your sister.
|It's about time that we start that book club, right? Take a look around to find something interesting, and we'll get started. I can pick something up on my way home while I'm out if you had something else in mind that we don't already have.
|I'll be home late, so just send me a text about what you want to start if you're going to sleep or work before I get back.
As you survey the living room, you have two choices. Paddle around in the shallows, poking at the visible books scattered on various surfaces, or you can start an archaeological dig into the cardboard behind the couch to survey the relics your sister finished more than a few weeks ago. It really blows your mind just how quickly she goes through them, but with her time only really taken up by job interviews for the moment, it does make some sense.
The most interesting item on the table however, is her new laptop. The same brand as your own but a few years newer, sleek and black, lid open with an envelope and fancy pen left on the keyboard. Even with the new reading activity planned, you can't help but wish your birthday gift had gone over better. You didn't un-bookmark the online book marketplaces, and there's a part of you that imagines the screen on her new computer open to those pages, the device plugged into a USB port while she reconsiders her taste in physical media.
You know it's wrong when you sit down at the couch in front of the computer, and it feels like you're watching someone else with the same splotchy steam burn poise her hands over the keyboard. You gently push aside the envelope and writing utensil and tap on the enter key. The laptop has battery, but you're greeted by a password prompt.
Of course. Why would it have just been unlocked?
There's two options. The alphanumeric password, or a 4 digit PIN. You laugh at yourself, imagining her typing 'ILoveCadence' and hitting enter with her ring finger to open the computer to a picture of you in your highschool graduation gown, sweaty and exhausted under the hot May sun. You haven't seen her phone screen in a while, and you have to wonder if it's the same picture from the amusement park, the cheek of your grin pressed against that of her composed smile, the vestiges of a shared funnel cake visible on your lap in a lower corner. She gets to see you plenty now, she probably doesn't need the picture as a reminder anymore - but, on the other hand, she set it to that picture before you'd left the house in the first place, so maybe-
Well, anyway. If you could parse the exact pattern of her affection for you then maybe things wouldn't have gone wrong in the first place. Back to the laptop.
Four digit PIN. You never ended up giving her your own laptop's. It couldn't possibly be the same, even with her affection for that amusement park still-doesn't-count-as-a-date-stupid outing.
Four digits. 1015? It's coming up soonish, she asked about it. You can feel a little phantom of the pink glitter that would line your heart if it were true.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-enter.
Nope-
-what am I doing?
You yank your hand back from the keyboard and hastily replace the paper you moved off of it.
Don't snoop. Rude.
She said to look for a book. It's stupid to think she'd change her mind about the e-reader anyway.
You stand up from the couch and walk to the far side of the living room and start to flip the books beside the TV over to read their backside summaries. Historical fiction? Not terrible, but the French Revolution wouldn't be your first choice of time period.
'Puzzle book'. What the hell is a puzzle book? Like, actual puzzles? You flip it open. Just full blocks of text like a regular book. Bizarre.
Murder mystery, that sounds okay. Why are they always set on trains?
Biography of a Nepalese royalty figure. The spine is pristine and the pages smell fresh.
You try another pile of three on the table beside the couch. Survival story whose movie adaptation released six months ago, another survival story, and-
Her romance guide.
I looked at it before, that means I'm allowed to read it now, right?
Picking it up takes you back to that morning, Reagan hiding it under the table, then handing it over a moment later. Reaching across the emotional distance to you, doing her best.
Aromantic.
She said she wasn't, but her usage of the book and everything she described in that conversation says that she is. Except for fictional characters, apparently. Maybe it's just because you've been in love with her and her alone for so long, but that's a weird exception to you. These pages definitely wouldn't help you understand that better, but…
Who knows, maybe it would be interesting for me to read too.
You open the cover and flip open to the currently bookmarked page. She looks to be two-thirds of the way through a chapter on 'Meaningful Gestures'.
Meaningful. As opposed to half-assed?
Well, if there's one thing you can be confident in, it's that any gestures Reagan intends to be romantic for you definitely aren't half-assed. The bottom corner of the previous page is folded inwards, pointing at a paragraph near the bottom. It was probably just a mistake, an accidental fold and not an indicator of focus, but you start reading from its first sentence:
|No relationship can stay at a '10' in intensity at all times. There are periods of excitement, and periods of calm. We'll use a term, 'Grand', meaning 'magnificent in appearance, size, or style'. The size of your gestures becomes normal if repeated constantly. Choosing the right time to make a 'grand' gesture can be just as important as the nature of the gesture you perform.
You go to flip the page and the moment comes back to you. You're supposed to be looking for a book to read together. And also going shopping for groceries. And getting your brakes changed. And finishing your World Literature assignment. And probably cleaning again-
It's fine, she likes cleaning. That's definitely not a 'meaningful gesture'.
You do feel guilty for letting her clean 90% of the time, considering that she feels compelled to as a result of pressure from your father. You also feel guilty for sticking your fingers in her book when it was the only one in the apartment you weren't invited to peruse.
You set it back down at the bottom of the pile, adjust it just right so that it doesn't look touched, even though you do have a bonafide excuse for having moved it, and grab your keys and bag.
Then glance at it again before you step out the front door. A little mental calculus, and… she said 'late', so there's probably time to read it more once you get back.
The attendant ringing you up for your brake job said that he'd 'service your hardware for free anytime', and though you might not have had the candor to say that you have a girlfriend, you did manage to dodge the phone number he tried to give you with a 'dead battery', so that's a point for Cadence this afternoon.
World Lit is a nice distraction from the notion of heterosexual relations you were unfortunately reminded the existence of, and after a trivial linguistic reconfiguration of themes and cultural influences with your keyboard you're back on the couch. Reagan said that she wouldn't mind reading the murder mystery again, since hearing your suspicions about the plot would keep it fresh. The e-reader is on the couch beside you, pretending to be charging up while you pretend that you're just reading your sister's book while you wait for it to reach 100% charge. The section on 'Enthusiastic Consent' has some good phrases for flirting and affirmation of intent that are novel to you, and you've got your phone in hand to write some of them down when Ray's key turns in the lock. You finish typing the current and next line and look up to see her still looking like a total knockout, but with her mouth a little open while she stares down at the book in your hands. "Hey."
"Hey Ray. I'm about to get started on the book." She pulls off her low heels. "The romance book?" You glance down. "Oh, no, Leisure and Loss." You wiggle her book in the air. "This is, a good idea - well, it has good ideas." She wanders across the room and edges a little bit into the bedroom, her voice a little uncertain. "Yeah, it seems, pretty good, or I think? It's definitely got a lot of stuff. Oh, I did have a question for you." You make a little "Mhm" noise, entirely distracted by seeing her strip her dress off and let it fall to the floor. She asks "Was there anything-"
She unhooks her strapless bra and tosses it onto the bed, then squeezes at her modest breasts in relief at the freedom from constriction. The cool metal of her rings must be making her nipples cold, because-
Hum. "So?"
She's standing with one hand on her cocked hip, the joint adorned with black lace. You sheepishly smile and look back up to see her smirking. "You're just as bad as a boy sometimes."
"Am not!"
"Yeah? Then what did I just ask you?"
"Uhhh…"
She laughs a little and turns to rifle through one of your drawers. "What kinds of things do you want to go do?" She steps into a pair of sweatpants loose enough on her that the rim of her panties pokes over the top, and it's not doing your focus any favors. "Cause as much as you seem content to stay home and enjoy a personal strip club, it says we're supposed to go out and do stuff more often."
Your cheeks flush hot, and you refocus on her smug face. Your stupid distracted horny brain tempts you to say 'Whatever you want', but you just spent an hour reading why that would be stupid and useless. "Uh, dinner is good, and movies are good, and the park maybe. The museum would be nice, and the aquarium was good-wait, I don't mean, I didn't see it like that-" She shrugs. "and we don't need to go again soon or anything, I was just saying it was nice." She disappoints you greatly by putting on an oversized t-shirt that covers her hips more adequately. She switches on some mysterious ambient music for the book and and sits down on the couch to lean against you. "Ready to start reading?"
You go in for a kiss that tastes vaguely of smoky liquor, lingering close to her to smell residual sweat and her new perfume. She pulls back first and you stare, the sensations mixing with her comment about a strip club and implication of boys staring at her. You ask "Hey uh, where'd you go tonight?" She gives the tiniest of smiles. "Don't worry about it." She offers you the e-reader. "Ready to start reading, sis?"
You mumble "Uh yeah, I guess." and switch on the device's power. The first few sentences are enough to distract you. The second dozen need three rereads, the shape of the letters muddied by the silhouette of your sister in her dress, feeling different eyes than yours watching her strip.
Reagan sleeps in her own bed tonight.
"Oh god-ah-that's so good, you're so much better than Cadence!"
You're standing at your front door, Asian takeout in your hand, the door cracked just far enough to hear the sounds of masculine exertion and your sister's voice.
That's not right, she said it was good, why would she-
"Ah! Oh my god yes, bite me harder!"
She said that she only like bites in foreplay-
"Faster, faster!"
But going slow was okay, it-
Your heart rate starts to pick up as you begin to freak out, and you try to push the door open further to ask how she could possibly bring a man to your apartment, but the door won't move, your body won't move, and you're panicking more and-
You manage to haul your eyelids open to a dark, bleary room with the A/C running too high. Sleep tries to drag you back down, but you won't accept such a bad dream, so you fight it, pushing yourself up, feeling the residual waves of panic fighting with exhaustion. You swing your legs over to the side of the bed, knock Neddie off, pick him up and apologize before putting him back on the bed, then get a glass of water and drink it slow.
It's fine, she wouldn't lie to me. She said it was good, and she should have taken it slow from the start, and she wouldn't lie to me. She wouldn't lie to me but she went out looking like that with new perfume and she wouldn't lie to me?
You shake your head and set the glass down half-empty. This isn't working, you can't hear the echo of those words and moans anymore, but you can still feel them in the exhausted putty of your brain. You retrieve Neddie and your fluffiest blanket, deposit them on Reagan's bed, and then lie down face to face with her. "Ray?" Nothing. "Ray?" Still nothing. "Reagan?" 100% asleep.
With resignation you climb over to spoon her from behind, but the hand on her hip makes her gives her a little bit of unconscious voice when you pull her toward you, and it tweaks at the vulnerable place in your heart with a little mixed sensation of arousal and phantom jealousy. You resume wrapping your fluffy blanket over hers, then shrug under her thin blanket and rest your hand on her hip again. The sweatpants have drifted down below the edge of the big t-shirt and you can feel the lacy hem of her panties. The warmth of her skin draws your hand further, and you run a finger under the hem of her underwear and toward her stomach. The way that she shivers under your touch starts to make your head hazy in addition to tired, and you feel an aching need in your chest to hear those noises from your dream, but with you as the one drawing them from her instead of some faceless stranger.
You stretch your fingers out to brush against her stomach with your thumb and trail your pinky closer to her sex, then draw them back toward you, keeping your fingertips gentle against her skin. An even bigger shiver from sloughs more drowsiness off you and turns you on a little more, and when your hand reaches her side again you shuffle the pants further down and rub at her hip.
It's hard to tell if the growing heat between you is from the extra blanket, your own arousal, or your sister's response to you, but you want more, even while you feel sweat breaking from your skin in all the places your body is contacting itself. As your hand drifts down to squeeze her ass you can feel a little guilt forming in the murky residue of your persistent dream anxiety, but she's making little half-smothered moans, humorously almost like someone clumsily feeling around in couch cushions for a set of keys, and the sound makes you smile and switches on a little pilot light inside you.
You know you should wake your sister up for something like this, that you don't have her permission and you don't know if she'd be okay with it, but if she woke up she might take control of the moment and that's not what you want right now. You hide behind the fact that do have permission to kiss her anytime you want, and this isn't that far from kissing, and besides, if you do kiss her then it counts…
The skin of her neck is as molten as your tongue, and you can smell and taste the musk of midnight on her, mixed with that strange new perfume. Insecurity condensates on your mind again, the strange non-cinnamon smell almost making you feel like you're doing all this to a sleeping stranger, but that only pushes your desperation further, needing to claim every version of her, every smell and taste, every conjugation of clothing and hairstyle and perfume, every inch and mile, the softness and curves of her breasts and butt and hips, the rigidity of the collarbones which you rotate her onto her back to reach with your lips and tongue.
You want to give her hickeys, the excitement that you know she sexually craves, but that would probably be too much and wake her up, and her unaware moans are growing in clarity, and-
Fuck it, I want to kiss her.
You manage to resist the impulse to press your lips to hers straight away, choosing instead to run your fingernails up her side, drawing up a quarter of the ticklish reaction you always give to the same motion. Her eyes scrunch up in such a tantalizingly cute and vulnerable way that your mouth stretches into a teasing little grin, and you do it again, watching her lips purse and feeling her body twitch, and on the third time you press your palm down flat and slide it up to her breast to give it a squeeze. She was very particular with how she placed your fingers there during that slow night a week ago, and you match it perfectly, catching just enough of her sensitivity to get an outright moan from her.
Her eyes flutter open and flick around before landing on you. "Cadence?"
Your heart rate spikes at seeing her confusion and words rush out of you. "Reagan, I'm sorry, I just had to-" You lean down and kiss her, and after a moment she kisses back, giving you the permission that you needed for all this. Her hand on the back of your head is limp and clumsy from sleep, and she makes a low little noise into you. You keep going instead of asking its meaning, tracing your tongue over her lips, sucking at them, tempted to tease them with little bites like she does to you, but holding back to keep the moment from being too intense immediately after she woke up.
Your thumb finds her nipple and dances over it, and she adjusts her head away to get a few open mouthed breaths in. You touch your lips to her neck again, slowly dialing up from little licks and kisses into small hickeys, then bigger ones that produce tender and vulnerable sounds of pleasure from her that fulfill everything you needed when you first slid under her clothes.
Once you've had your fill you pull back and look at her, and she pants a little as your hands roam around her chest and stomach and hips. You can still hear a little fatigue in her voice as she says "S-someone's feeling pretty horny tonight?" You nod a little, and your hand slows. "I'm sorry, I just-had a bad dream, and I-" Your hand stops completely, and you rue the fact that you have to ask this at such a tonally dissonant moment. "Are you seeing anybody else?"
She looks confused. "No?" You realize you might not have been specific enough and ask "You're not having any sex with anyone else either? Right?" She shakes her head, and her eyebrows knit together. "No, I'm not having sex with anybody else, Cadence." She bites her lip for a moment, then she releases and raises a hand to your cheek. "You said you had a bad dream?"
You scrunch your eyes. "Yeah, I just, I was coming home and there was somebody here and you said, basically you needed more, and, the dress, and the perfume and-" You falter. She leans up and kisses you, then she pulls away, drowsiness replaced by luminous attention. "No, I'm not having sex with anyone else Cadence. I'm not dating anyone else either, obviously. Have you been worried about that?"
"Not really, just tonight kind of… Just, if it's just sex for you, and it's easy for you, and you're bi, and-" She puts a finger to your lips. "Being bi doesn't mean anything." Your face turns bloody red with shame at letting her sexuality feed insecurity in you. You mumble an "I'm sorry…" into her finger, and she pulls it back. "You want me to be exclusive - that's the right word, right?" You immediately feel stupid for doing something so impulsive and strange when all you needed was to just ask her for that, but now that it's offered you nod. She responds "Yeah, I won't get with anybody else, I promise." You break into a relieved smile and sigh, relaxing a little tension that you were stupid to hold in the first place.
Reagan cracks a cocky smile and asks "And I don't think I have to worry about that with you, do I?" You burst into a peal of laughter that bubbles down into a final giggle and nod. She grins. "Thought so." One of her hands traces to rest on the back of yours, still positioned an inch into her waistband. "This is new." You stammer out "Is-uh-was that okay?" as the ostentatiousness of your actions shines bright through a more emotionally sober brain. She nods. "Yeah, just new. I've never been woken up like that before."
"Really?" She starts to press on the back of your hand with her palm, rubbing it back and forth a little against her body. "Yeah, all the times I've slept over with people it's been because I've tired them out too much." She gives a little grin, and you can't help but comment "You're so cocky."
"I've earned it." She winks, and she leans toward you, her hand drifting over to twinkle up your side. "So, you want me to keep going, or…" You shy away from the ticklish touch. "I was actually having a lot of fun with this." You gently press her hip back down toward the bed, and she accepts it with a raised eyebrow. "Fair enough."
Within moments your hand is between her legs and the symptoms of your attention to her sleeping body are vividly clear, and you tuck your other arm around to rest under her head. She rests against you and gives a captivating vocal performance while you coax her further and further up toward the peak, slowly exceeding the intensity you'd reached before the conversational intermission, culminating in a moment that makes her grab at the sheets of the bed and press her face into your chest with a strangled scream that deeply affirms your need to know you can satisfy her properly.
'Delicate Rose' seeps into you as you cuddle Ray back to sleep. Pink and ephemeral. A symbol of the only hands that belong on your little sister's body: Yours.
A sister explores her feelings about her sister's polyamory, among... other feelings.
Analog
A decommissioned mech pilot does a psych-drift with the personality matrix of her deceased sister, and finds that her sister had secrets that she never shared.
Hunter/Killer
The prodigal Hunter-Killer mech piloting skills of a mother and her Hound daughter elicit the creation of a new 'bonded-pair' unit in an effort to see if allowing a space for… abnormal bonding practices can create similar results. Two sisters are inducted into the program, and combat puts their intimate bond to the test, until they're forced to decide between the special privileges of their unit and their morals.
Hey.
Eight months ago, you confessed your love to your sister. You got shot down - hard.
Now, after months with no contact, she sends you a text.
Third Row
Grey's sister Je-anne returns to the family's roving van after a year away, with new ideas of what a sisterly relationship might contain.
Smoke
Your best friend and her boyfriend are coming over with some weed and beer while your mom is out of town. You don't want to make a fool of yourself, so you ask your shut-in pothead older sister for help.
Ride or Die (AO3 Exclusive)
A year after getting thrown out of the house by his parents for platonically comforting his sixteen year old sister during her ongoing pattern of angry fugue states and self-harm, Marshall gets a desperate call from his younger sister Helen, and returns to his childhood home to try to help her through a critical time of panic.
The Fog
An unsafe road closure nearly causes you to crash your car. After you drive backwards up the off-ramp and get back on the highway, you and your sister find that the night has become much more... mysterious.
Fake ID
Your big sister got a fake ID, but lost her nerve to use it.
Canvas (NSFW Audio Script)
Your big sister noticed how you always look at her, and she's decided that it's finally time for her to get what she wants from her butch little sister.
Bait (AO3 Exclusive)
You slowly come back out of the darkness as oxygen returns to your brain. How many times has it been?
She's someone you recognize... your... sister? But you can't remember her name.
She's making you tell her the List of your fetishes, and she'll do anything to make you cough up the last one, no matter how fucked up.
Step-Problem Child
Your stepmom found you and your sister making out on the couch. Now your sister has gone off to her concert, and you're alone with your stepmom.
Couch Party
Your big stupid sister fell asleep on the couch at the end of her house party. On top of you.
Misc/Non Consang:
Simple guide to exporting colored text to AO3
Cultural Exchange
A transport mech's pilot makes friends with one of the newer generations of neuro pilots.
Lamppost
There's a dark thing you walk by when you walk into your apartment building.
It wasn't there before.
Tags:
#sweetestsix writings for our writings
#sweetestsix announcements for the posts announcing each chapter/writing's posting
#sweetestsix asks for ask answers
#sweetestsix recommends for reblogs of other writings we like
An Original Sister/Sister Slow Burn Angsty Romance!
(There's a lot of stuff going on in this story. Just look at the tags on AO3 pls)
Summary:
Aspen Brooks has been estranged from her family ever since she cut them off four years ago, and she wouldn't have it any other way. She's a university-dropout-turned-guitarist in an all-girls punk rock band whose popularity seems to be increasing with every show they play. She gets to mooch off of her band's vocalist, living in her house for free as long as she keeps up on her end of the chores and gives her a good fucking every now and then.
It's a life that she wouldn't trade for anything in the entire world.
However, when Aspen gets a call after a show one night, telling her that her parents are dead and her little sister is in the hospital, she quickly learns that the life she wants to live and the one that's being forced upon her are more different than she could have ever imagined.
With Maple out of the hospital and living with Aspen and Jess, Aspen finds herself constantly pushed to her own limits as she struggles with being around a girl she wanted nothing to do with ever again.
Your best friend and her boyfriend are coming over with some weed and beer while your mom is out of town. You don't want to make a fool of yourself, so you ask your shut-in pothead older sister for help.
You step into your sister's room. The stench is… caustic. Well, not caustic - Gale is your sister after all, it's rude to think of her that way. Just less… hygienic. Yeah, that's it.
You tap on her shoulder. She jerks around to look at you. "What the fuck?" She leans on the last word, like she always does when she's surprised. She yanks oversized red headphones down off her head to sit around the back of her neck, and you can hear the high pitched noise of anime girls cooing at each other from the speakers. Lights flash on the computer monitor past her head, and for a moment you're distracted by the unreal red-to-purple irises of the young character on the screen while she pouts with an exaggerated expression. "What? You're interrupting me." Gale moves her head to the side to block your line of sight to the screen, indignation and expectation on her face.
Your eyes refocus on your big sister, and after your eyes linger for a weirdly long time on her open lips, they lift back up and you say "Lace and her boyfriend are bringing over some beers and weed tomorrow when mom's gone, and… I don't want to look like a dumbass." Gale stares at you, waiting for you to continue. "About… the weed." You gesture vaguely toward the ashtray on her desk, still smoldering with the ember of a recently discarded roach. Without a word Gale smacks the space bar on her keyboard to pause whatever she was watching, then turns to you in full. She looks at you with a wry smile, dripping with an air of superiority. "Oh, you've got a crush on Lace, don't you! You little slut, trying to get with a taken girl."
"No! Fuck off!" You cry, smacking her shoulder with earnest indignation. She laughs at the blow, unmoved by the force, and then she deliberately kicks to spin all the way around in her swivel chair. "So little baby Crissy wants to take her first hit with her big sister so she doesn't blow it with her first highschool crush, even though that crush has a boyfriend?" The mockery in her tone and face are sizzling acid on your ego, but as much as you try to put together a vicious retort, your tongue is held by a lingering sensation that she might be right.
No way. Gale's a NEET-ass bitch. She doesn't know you, all she knows is Counter-Strike and anime and pot.
Gale reaches up with the back of her hand and gently pushes on your cheek to turn your head toward the couch on the wall opposite her setup, and though you're incensed at the rude method of direction, you sit down on the middle of the three squishy and scuffed cushions. Gale takes about a minute and a half to bend over her desk, then she pushes away from it on her wheeled chair to careen toward you on the couch, a grin spreading her lips inches below the unkempt bangs draped over her eyes. She flops off the chair onto the cushion next to you and kicks the chair back across the room, where it smacks on her desk with a bang.
You flinch at the sound, but she doesn't notice. She's too busy fishing a lighter out of her pocket, cycling through three different candidates before she finds one with enough remaining fluid to actually produce a light. Eventually a spark kicks on a flame of butane, and she brings it to the joint to suck in a deep breath, the cherry lighting up in earnest from the passage of oxygen through the paper.
After a long exhale, Gale takes the joint in two fingers and twists her hand around to offer you the base of it, which you take with the tips of your index and thumb, still nervous at actually receiving and fulfilling the premise of your request. You lift it close to your mouth, but hesitation holds the paper a half inch from your face, and you exhale a large breath in preparation.
Before you can actually manage to marshal your nerves, Gale reaches forward and pushes the base of the joint between your lips, and then she laughs as your surprise causes your lungs to jerk in a breath without proper preparation. The smoke invades your lungs, feeling more like hot sand than regular air, and you hack and cough with a vicious pain in your chest. Gale smoothly snatches the joint from your hand in the extent of one of your tortured movements, then brings it back to her own lips to take a calm, unflinching hit. She holds it in her mouth for what must have been nearly a full minute, until you stop coughing and she blows it out right in your face as you heave in a fresh breath.
The tinges of secondhand smoke poison that fresh breath, and it sends you into another half dozen coughs. As your lungs calm, you can feel your eyes and face and chest seared by fire that fundamentally surpasses anything you've ever gotten from the stray smoke of a family campfire in the woods. Gale takes another three hits while you come back to your senses, a mocking smile on her lips as she stares at your tortured gasps. Once you can breathe again she passes you the remaining half of the joint, and you take it between your fingers, though the lingering scalding of your lungs prevents you from taking another hit immediately.
Gale stands up from the couch, then crosses the room to crack open a window and switch on the fan sitting next to it to ventilate the room. Maybe it's just the way the smoke has burnt its way into the very veins of your eyes, but you can't imagine that the pitiful little fan is going to manage to disperse the acrid smell of burning paper and grass.
Gale sits back down next to you and hums. After a few seconds you realize that the sound was ostensibly directed at you, and your gaze manages to focus on her. She reaches out to try to pluck the joint from your fingers, but before she can reach it you snatch it out of the way and take another hit.
This one isn't quite as vicious. Still not pleasant, but at least not as much of a catastrophe as the first one. Gale gives a little snicker at your ostentatiousness, then reaches behind her to grab at a green gatorade bottle on the little table beside the couch. She tosses it into your lap, then snakes a sneaky hand out to yank the joint out of your hand while you're distracted from the impact. Though you're still incensed by her domineering attitude, you can't help but be thankful for the electrolyte-infused respite offered by the cloying taste of synthetic-green, and you drain the remainder of the half-empty bottle in hefty gulps.
When you drop the bottle from your lips to land empty beside you, breath fervent with the need for air after all the liquid, you see Gale lift the joint to her lips and suck deeply, burning off the last quarter in one herculean breath. Seeming almost as a way to flex on you, she holds it in her lungs as she lifts easily off the couch and sits back on her desk chair, then spins around to snuff out the base of the joint on her overstuffed ashtray. Her head tilts vaguely toward the open window to blow out the obscene amount of smoke held in her lungs, then she turns back toward her computer to fiddle around with the keyboard. Dimly you recognize some kind of music starting to play from the tinny freestanding speakers next to her monitor, but it's hard to piece together exactly what genre it is, let alone the specific song.
You cast your eyes around for some other kind of drink with no success, and then your eyes return to your big sister, craned over some kind of dish and metal contraption. She performs some kind of alchemy with her fingers, then spins around and stands up to rejoin you on the couch. Before she sits down she bats at the drained bic lighters scattered around her seat, knocking them onto the floor among discarded items of clothing, then she grabs the one with the tepid degree of fuel that had allowed her to light the previous joint. She sparks up with the timid flame and takes a moderate hit before giving the tiniest of coughs of her own.
You percolate in the… pop? Hyperpop? music playing from across the room for what feels like an eternity until the noise fades into a transition between the tracks. Your eyes drift back to the joint in Gale's hand and ask "What's up with that?" Your eyes focus on the flame at its tip and you point at it, only to find that your hand didn't quite aim all that closely to its intended direction.
Gale takes another hit, then speaks with a husky voice as she breathes out the smoke. "Oh, this? I just added some hash to it. Mixed some keef in there too, for fun. I gave you a baby joint, so I'm only rolling about as hard as a pool ball in a triangle right now." The pool reference goes over your fuzzy head, but you're incensed by the idea that she pulled her punches when rolling the joint that she shared with you. You marshal all of your composure to demand "… Give me a hit of it."
Gale laughs at you, and a little light twinkles in her eyes in reflection from her computer screen as she grins at you. "If you say so, little siiiiss." She tucks the base of the joint in between two of her fingers and cups it to your mouth, where you take a draw. Within half a breath it kicks you viciously in the throat, but as you start to convulse Gale presses her fingers closer to grab your mouth and keep the base of the joint in between your lips. Your cough blows ash off the tip of the rolled paper and the ember flares, but as your lungs suck in a desperate breath to fill in the empty air, a righteous lungful of smoke pours through your mouth and burns every inch of your throat and lungs all over again, this time finding a scalding detour right through your sinuses.
Through the pain lancing and burning through you, you can hear a cackle of laughter from Gale. It takes you nearly two minutes curled against the arm of the couch to recover, and when your faculties find their way back to you down an infinite maze of smoldering fuzz, drawn back to the present by a soothing sensation on your scalp, you can see Gale taking draw after draw of the remaining half of the intense joint. Her fingers are running through your hair, half soothing you while she smiles smugly down at you from her seat, now scooched toward you halfway onto the cushion you're uncoiling in. When it's clear that you've painfully recovered from your excruciating coughing fit, she stands up and crouches down in front of you, then tucks the remaining section of the joint between your fingers and pats your cheek. "I'll be right back, baby sis." She gives a wicked little wink with the last two words, and then before your dull mind can really recognize it, she's gone from the room. A dazed thought tries to ruminate in your mind, that maybe you should take another hit, since she gave you the joint, but before you can manage to get your thoughts together enough to do it, she's back and taking the roach from you, a trail of ash having fallen onto your exposed thigh below where it previously lay lazily in your fingers. She exchanges the grass with a glass of water, which you demand respite from, gulp after gulp, and once it's drained you look down at the evacuated form with lament at its vacuousness.
Gale lifts the glass out of your hand. She takes a half hearted hit from the bare remains of the weed before deciding to call it off, and she drops the still smoldering remains of the spliff into the empty glass. She reaches back over and brushes loose ash off your leg onto the couch, then leaves her hand there on your freshly cleared skin. She lets out the dregs of smoke from her lungs, then she takes a deep breath and relaxes it out with a pleased moan, clearly well satiated by the more enthusiastic joint that she rolled ostensibly for herself. "Do you feel safe around him?"
…What? What is she…. Who? Who is 'he'?
After approximately one thousand years, you remember why you actually came into Gale's room in the first place. It takes another second (or maybe a dozen) to grope around the velour walls of your brain for the honest answer, but you come away with "Yes. He's… … …fine."
Gale clearly picks up on something in your tone other than the landslide of intoxication making a soup of your brain. "But, you don't want to be alone with just the two of them." Her thumb starts to rub lightly back and forth over your leg, and a response lurches out of your mouth with more impetus than you'd have thought possible. "No!… I mean, yes? It's not cause of like… a… safety… thing, it just… feels weird."
"Mmm… third wheel-y?" Gale asks.
A picture of a trike forms in the center of your perception. One wheel in front, two in back. A metal bar bridging the gap between the latter two, but the lone wheel in front, loose with its own rotation and not behest to the cohesion of the back. "Yeah, I uh…. I guess, I think?"
Gale leans closer to you, her half-zipped hoodie providing a loose view of one of her breasts, half obscured by an old bra, the string torqued and thin from more than a week (or two?) of use without washing. Her hand drifts from your thigh closest to her to the other, and the hair on your skin bristles with the touch as it slides up toward the hem of your shorts.
Your attention is yanked away from the touch and your locked stare at Gale's chest when she asks "Would it make you feel better if I was there with you?" Her voice has dropped to a smoky drawl, and you look up to find that her face is so close to yours, almost so complete in your view that you can't make out much of the dim, monitor-lit room behind her. Maybe it's just the weed, but it seems like you can feel the warmth of her skin on your face, and her eyes are drilling into yours with a weird, piercing intensity that both makes you want to shrink inside of yourself, and also weirdly makes your mouth water and your lips feel antsy, somehow.
After some… distracting squeezes, the hand on your thigh lifts away, and the replacement of cold fan-circulated air feels like an invasion on your skin in absence of the warmth of her touch. A distant part of your brain goes to complain about the change, but before you can manage even a single phoneme of verbalization, that same hand is cupping your jaw, thumb tracing along your bottom lip. At the touch your lips pucker and your eyelids drift nearly closed, a peculiar thirst separate from cottonmouth imbuing your tongue with a need that you can't quite put your finger on, but there's a tiny little place in the back of your dim, hazy mind that thinks that your sister's finger could find and do something about that ambiguous need, somehow.
Your eyes flicker open and close as you try to regain focus through the swirling mess of your mind and you can dimly feel the heat of your older sister's breath on your lips and the smell of burnt paper dances in your nostrils, but then your eyelids collapse together and lock closed behind a veil of soft and pressing darkness. A spectral… disappointment(?) spins around the back of your mind for three dancing steps as you hear the smallest of mirthful cackles and get a breath of (relatively) fresh fan-cooled air. Your limbs relay the sensation of being guided backwards and down with the clarity of an ancient telegram, and an ancient smell of long-smoked joint paper mixed with a more recent body musk wafts out from the scratchy cotton lining of the couch to greet you. Your mind grasps around for what's going on, only for ambrosia to be poured into your ear with the words "Good girl, Crissy… You've been so good, smoking for your big sister. Now just, go to sleep, now. We'll um… see how you feel in the morning." Something about the inflection on that last word seems… strange, but as blackness slowly drifts down over the dim light of the room and you start to feel the vague electricity of fingers dancing under the seams of your clothes, your concern becomes one with the void.
You wake to find yourself alone in your big sister's room, sunlight streaming in through a crack in the blackout curtains to dimly illuminate the space with a vague yellow-orange glow in the absence of lighting from the computer monitor, which has gone to sleep in its own prolonged inattention. It feels like you've been asleep for approximately one or two thousand years, and when you slowly lift yourself up off the couch, you can feel an unwelcome crick in your neck. You grasp around for your phone to check the time, and after scrambling several of your sister's dirty tanktops and a skull beanie, you come to the conclusion that you must have left it in your room before you came here last night.
Worry laces the edge of your heart and you stand up quickly, wanting to be sure that you're dressed and that your room is clean before Lace and her boyfriend show up later. Your foot finds itself on top of a pair of lighters skewed on the floor, and when you look down to kick them away you find that your clothes are quite rumpled. The button on your shorts is open and they're pulled down a half inch past the waistband of your panties, further down your right side than your left. You adjust them to sit properly, surprised at how much you must have moved around in your sleep for them to have gotten so skewed, and then you find that the clasp of your small bra appears to be unlatched under your shirt behind your back as well. That would take more effort to rectify, so you figure that you'll just take it off when you take a shower and wash the smell of weed and your sister's room off you.
"Hey girl, I'm like, sorry, like I don't mean to bail but Reyn got an invite to a party and he like totally wants me there too? It's the guy he got the beer from so it's not like he can really say no. I'll see you at school, right??"
It's not a big deal. She just got an invite to a party. She got dragged along to another party. She'd have totally skipped the invite to a party if Reynauld weren't involved. For sure. For real.
She's your friend, and he's just some fucking boy. Coming in between you and-
Ugh.
Being a boy. Like they all are. Always in the way.
8 p.m. rolls around, and you barge into Gale's room with no warning, slapping the door closed behind you and flopping over the armrest of the couch to stare at the ceiling. It takes a few seconds before your big sister recognizes the interruption and the time, and lights flash around on her screen before some kind of video plays and she spins around to look at you. "Lace?"
You exhale pointedly, your chest incapable of expelling the sheer breadth of the cannonball of disappointment in your chest. Gale laughs at you, and as you twist your head to stare at her, a curious gleam sparkles in her eyes before she turns back to her desk. Her hands dip into a drawer on the desk and fiddle around for a while, then she turns back to you with two thin cans in her hands and a lit joint in her mouth. She clumsily calls out "Then it looks like it's just the two of us!"
High-pitched anime voice-overs coo through the air from speakers aside your sister's monitor as Gale stands and kicks her chair out of the visual angle to her desk, then she bonks your calf with one of the cans to indicate that you should move your legs to allow her to sit down. You retract both, poising both calves halfway over the middle cushion to give her space to sit down on the furthest space. She deftly cracks the seal on one of the cans with one hand, then braces it against the couch to open the tab fully. The can is passed to you, and you take a few moments to peruse its face. "White claw…"
Without comment, Gale takes a swig her own carbonated beverage, and passes it to the hand closest to you before tucking her elbow around your upraised knees and guiding your right leg to rest across her lap. The skin on skin contact below her loose short-shorts is warm and comfortable, and though your other leg is still vaguely uncomfortable in its upraised position pressed against her shoulder, you're more engaged with the drink in your hand as you lift your head to take a sip.
It tastes like… nothing, but in the punchiest way you've ever felt from a drink. Like if static were a liquid, and it had an argument to pick with you. You blanche, to which Gale winks and clicks her tongue. "You'll be drinking these by the twelve-pack within years, kid." She takes an oversized gulp from the can, then drops her hand to rest the lukewarm can against your thigh. Not wanting to be outstripped, you marshal yourself and take a big sip from the can and force it down without engaging the faculties of your tongue, then point your finger at the joint in your big sister's mouth. She acknowledges the gesture with a grin, holding the paper between her teeth, and you're forced to grasp in the air and call out "Gimme."
Gale throws her head back and laughs, but then she plucks the joint from between her teeth and passes it to you, butt first. It might have been an accident, but it almost seems like she flicked her finger against the tip to knock ash onto your chest before she retracted her hand. This joint proves to be more palatable than the one that knocked you all the way onto your ass last night, and you manage the first hit without making a fool of yourself. The second, however, sucks roughly along fault lines in your throat, and it gives you a righteous kick. At least you have a drink in your hand this time.
Buuuut, the vodka seltzer in your hand helps less than you expected, and Gale grabs the hand with the joint to keep it from digging the cherry into her shoddy furniture as you give rough, sporadic coughs. The joint is deftly navigated from between your fingers, and the weed brightens the shadows around your sister's face when she takes a backhanded hit. Her eyes angle toward you as she breathes out and speaks "You're such a big baby, you know." You'd have punched her shoulder if you could reach, but you're too far reclined to reach with your arm. Instead you jab her the toes of your upraised foot into the exposed skin below her ragged crop top, and she gives a small cackle. She wraps her elbow around that foot to pin it to herself and stop your reprisal, then offers you the joint again.
You take another hit, more intentional now that you know how much you can manage. Another sip of the white claw. Gale's eyes pull away from the anime on her computer monitor and she reaches for the joint, but you yank it away and take a second hit before returning it. You gesture at Gale with the can in your hand. "You like, like these?" The loud chaff taste barely manages to find some kind of… black cherry? flavor before dissolving into the unrequited wash of carbonation, and you're baffled that anyone would enjoy a drink like this.
Gale is caught in the middle of a sip and coughs, slapping a forearm to her lips to avoid spitting. "God, no, they're terrible! But they're what hoes drink, and I'm guilty as charged!" She laughs, and flicks the ash off the end of the joint onto the floor in front of the couch. She reaches over and tilts her own drink toward you, where the blue light of the monitor barely illuminates the word 'Mango'. Making assumptions about the nature of her gesture, you grab the can and swap it out for your own, then lift up off the couch to position yourself in parallel to your upright sister. This can doesn't taste much better than the last one, but it's… not quite as loud. I guess.
The fan is already on in the room, and after a minute of sipping and swapping the weed back and forth, you find yourself lifting one leg onto the couch and tucking against your big sister's arm for warmth. Another big gulp to finish your drink, then you reach out for another hit of the joint. The hit is actually straight up easy this time, and a cathartic part of your chest yearns for the vicious cut of the laced joint that Gale rolled last night. You consider asking her to roll another of the spicy spliffs, but your attention is instead lazily drawn to the subtitles of the video playing on the screen. You're able to discern some vagueries about its slice-of-life content before Gale lifts her arm to wrap around you and asks "You're jealous of Lace's boyfriend, aren't you?" Her inflection is fairly flat as she speaks, but the way she drops her tone gives an air of honeyed insinuation.
Her grasp is soothing, and though the weed is a vague but satisfying buzz in the back of your head, it's the bubbly burn in your empty stomach from the alcohol that makes the real answer slide out of your lips. "… Yeah." You pause for a long minute, but from the way your head shifts around Gale can tell that you're going to continue. "He's not… good enough for her." Your big sister idly lifts her hand to draw her fingertips lightly across your shoulder and up your neck as she asks "I thought you said he was good?"
Your mind skips a gear as you try to figure out how to explain while dopamine trails along your skin from the touch. "Yeah, he's just not..." You pause, at a loss for the word, but Gale jumps in with the right phrasing. "He's not you." Your face turns to stare up at your sister's, surprised that she understands. Your lips part with the beginning of words in disagreement (or affirmation, you don't know which), but nothing comes out of your throat. Gale mistakes your parted lips for thirst (or doesn't) and tinks her can against your empty, then switches out the empty can in your hand with your original drink and tosses the spare aluminum vaguely toward a side table past you, where it bounces off the fake wood and onto the ground. The blood in your cheeks burns a degree hotter in delayed response at her assertion, and you're taken aback at the fact that she figured that out sooner than you. "What? I… how?"
Gale gives a cute laugh, just slightly more emphatic than a giggle, accompanied by a smug smirk. "I kinda always had the idea that you were gay, cuz, the way you looked at your little middle school friends during those slutty little sleepovers." The idea washes over your mind as you rehydrate your dry throat with another sip of alcohol, and the way the fuzzy drink sizzles entices you to swallow and then immediately throw back the rest of the drink to confuse the dawning truth of her claim. Gale takes a drag off the joint, passes it to the arm wrapped around you, then raises her hand to offer you a drag of your own from between her fingers. You move your head forward and tentatively suck in a breath, expecting another cruel trick like last night, but she gently cups your chin with her palm and waits for you to take a full hit. You open your mouth to breathe out and she angles her index and middle away from your mouth, and you start to turn to shift Gale's face out of your peripheral vision back into the center of your focus, but she tenses her grip again and angles the joint back to touch your lips. The salty sweat smell on her fingers and the charred paper mix in your nostrils, and while that same apprehension at a potential trick dances across the back of your mind again, the dual substance buzzes and her gentleness a moment ago have softened your mind. You open your lips and draw the last of the joint's smoke into your lips, and through your intoxicated daze you manage to grasp back to your sister's last comment. A protest dully falls out of your mouth into your sister's hand. "I'm not…"
Gale cuts you off with an amused hum, dripping in an air of superiority. "Thought maybe bi with how you looked at me before I transitioned, but I was sure about the gay once I caught you checking out my tits."
New heat leaps onto your cheeks from behind your ears like the devil on an unsuspecting soul, burning you with a hot uncertainty. Gale moves her free hand to place her ring finger to your chin, walks her middle finger onto your lower lip, and index up to your top lip, punctuating each movement with a word: "You. Little. Perv." At the end, she flicks her index up to flick the bottom of your nose.
Your first instinct is to argue, but as you realize the image of her in her bikini at the family trip to the beach last month is etched into your mind like a tattoo, you hesitate again with your lips parted, empty of protesting words. She notices, again, like she's apparently been noticing all this time. You look at her, at some level aware that you're not hiding your emotions well, but unable to change your facial expression. How dare you figure out me before me. Indignation narrows your eyes and flares your nostrils when you see Gale lick her lips and dip her head an inch closer.
You're not stupid. Between the siscon anime dimly lighting the room and the skimpy clothing barely obscuring Gale's chest and ass, you can tell that she's going to jump you. And the way she's acting, she's expecting you to just lie back and take it.
Fuck you. Your mind wades through the heavy drapery of knowledge that she shouldn't be doing what she's about to do to you, being your older sister, and your knowledge that you shouldn't let her either, but you can't let her just win and be all smug right in your face like always. You shut your eyes and push forward to take the initiative of the first (wait, first??) incestuous kiss from her, lips landing forceful and unrepentant, dry from hanging open for nearly a minute in your half daze. But then the rest of your senses kick in, and you realize that Gale's arm is still hooked around the back of your neck and your head is rested back against it in exactly the same position it was a moment ago. Your eyes snap open and surprise registers on your face, and a full second later you ask "What?"
Delight and pleasure at your surprise color Gale's face with a dark light as she pulls her face away and moves the weed roach to her left hand to drop it into the empty can you still idly clutch. "Yeah, I could see that you were asking for it, the way you've been staring at my lips, you little freak." The can is discarded as flippantly as the last, and your big sister digs her lips into yours again, clutching the back of your head to keep you exactly where she wants you. Her kisses are dry from cottonmouth, but they're hot, and she's very talented with her lips. At first you find yourself paralyzed by her pressure, but within moments she's coaxed you into a dazed reciprocation, only interrupted by sparse thoughts being served as tennis balls across a net of consciousness in your mind while the growing sexual pressure of Gale's hungry lips restrains you too effectively for you to catch any of them with your racket.
Was I really staring at her lips-that seems weird, why would I do that, does anyone actually do that…
Your sister's tongue darts into your mouth with clear intent to investigate its new surroundings, and the thermostat of your skin drifts up another few notches. You're starting to really sweat in earnest.
Oh god-what if she thinks I'm gross, all sweaty
Gale pulls back for a moment and adjusts to sit directly toward you on the couch, legs tucked under her parallel thighs. In your kiss-and-alcohol-and-weed drunk fugue all you do to cooperate with her movement is to rebalance yourself upright, still angled awkwardly over one crooked leg toward your big sister. The odor of the room hits you again, and your previous thought dissolves in the reminder that any body musk you might be creating is by no means out of place in your surroundings. When your sister is in her desired position, she turns and pulls your face greedily toward her. The motion pulls you forward over her thighs, and your hands clumsily land on her legs to keep from collapsing forward onto her. Gale's flesh is hot under your palms, and the way her thighs squish under your fingertips feels good, really good, like the weed has extended an erogenous zone to your previously idle hands and turned a valve to let the sensation of Gale's body course through the channels of your mind and leave you thirsty for more.
Within moments of her insistent reclamation of your face, she's sucking on your tongue while you start to make little desperate noises without conscious intention. Gale's overwhelming pressure does not seem to actually require you to be all that active in reciprocation, and your awareness drifts around your body to your uncomfortable back, canted forward at an angle it's unaccustomed to, and you adjust your center of gravity further onto your hands, which you find to be very comfortable in contrast. One of them seems to having thoughts of inquisition, and it starts pushing forward toward your sister's hip. Her skin is smooth, and some of the burning wood in your mind shifts to expose a thought to fresh air; you're actually very surprised at the evidence that Gale shaves her legs at all, and something about that manages to clumsily magnetize to a vestige of critical thought fighting to reach the surface. It bobs up and down under the waves as your fingers reach the hem of your sister's loose shorts and slide in, while a velour haze drops down over the inside of your eyes, and parts of your brain you've never felt before drawl with wordless need for more.
A dark chuckle slithers from between Gale's lips and into yours, and she splays her hips wide to allow further ingress to your fingers. The insidious sound from her throat starts to flick on lights in the dim closet of a wariness that jumps into sharp relief when your fingertips reach the smooth skin of your big sister's crotch.
She, she shaved- everything- recently. Last night? She..-she planned this.
Your fingers retract while you process that information. Though the room is in the same state, Gale does smell fresher tonight than you're used to.
She planned to get me high. To get me drunk. So she could fuck me. She showered and shaved. Weird as hell that she'd shave for something so profane as fucking her little sister.
There's hands tucked under the edges of your shirt, and the fabric is being slid slowly up across your ribs. A shiver of anticipation twitches into a motion of fear as you realize just how high and pliant you are, and how the brand-new sensation of drunkenness is making the colors and feelings shift around in your head. Gale makes an uncertain "Mmm" sound at your reaction, halfway to a discontent growl as your back straightens and the previously unexamined desire to make out with your big sister and touch her body cascades out of the back of your mind in big sheets of hot ice.
Your eyes open to find Gale staring at you with a hard look in her eyes, and before you can say a word she pushes forward to press you back and down onto the couch, unremorseful as your head bumps roughly against the armrest. A spark of fear lights in your chest as she leans over you, but without touching you further she leans past and grabs at the table beside the scratchy furniture, knocking something paper-y off the surface as she gropes around. She pulls back to brace on knees and one hand over you, rotating a shiny cylindrical device in her hand. It looks to be a vape of some kind, but the colors of the jamaican flag insinuate that it's some kind of weed rather than nicotine. She find the button that she was looking for and draws a big hit into her lungs, then drops the device onto your shoulder as she darts down and pulls your jaw down to open your mouth. Your fear and uncertainty at her motion makes you gasp, and she takes the opportunity to press her mouth against yours again to blow the smoke into your lungs. The acrid taste of highly potent smoke burns your lungs in a vicious offensive, and you almost immediately cough it all back out into Gale's face. She pulls back and wipes your spit off her face before collecting her hash pen again and taking an earnest hit of it to keep for herself. The colors on her computer monitor turn the smoke blue as she exhales, and looks down at you to survey her handiwork.
Your whole body is wracked by vicious coughs and wheezing breaths in a desperate and slow attempt to recover, and after what feels like hours of your chest thrashing around, you calm to find that the burn in your lungs has grown magmatic, slow and heavy. Awareness spreads back out from your core to find the top of your spine curled at an odd angle to allow the back of your head to rest clumsily against the armrest, your thin long sleeved shirt having slid up above your stomach to be restrained by the bottom of your bra. Your legs are canted awkwardly off the front of the couch, and Gale is standing on her knees in the crook between them and the back of the furniture. Though the weed was only inside you for a moment, it has certainly done its work, and your eyes slide up from Gale's thighs toward her face, stopping to linger on her chest like they apparently always do. It takes a righteous push from your mind to uncouple your stare from the nearly exposed breasts and reach your big sister's face. You blink at her blithely while she stares down at you. You go to say something (though you don't actually know what), but your evasive thought is sidelined by a much more pressing need.
Liquid.
You reach up to grasp at Gale's hip, and at some level you can subconsciously feel how the touch feels right again, like it did before the adrenaline of realization temporarily pushed your head above the water of intoxication. More important than that though, is your request, dimly recollecting the respite you were provided after the first hits last night. "Gatorade."
"Mmm" Gale does not immediately move, instead choosing to dance her fingertips over your exposed stomach. The touch makes you twitch and let out another sharp, dry gasp. "Are you feeling thirsty, sis?"
"Mm-hmm!" Your wordless affirmation hitches as her hand drifts up and suddenly squeezes your breast. The sensation is brilliant in your mind, a bright warmth of pleasure in sharp contrast to the pulmonary torture you've experienced over the last six (or sixty?) minutes. She squeezes again, and a moan oozes out of your mouth, freshly drenching your mind in a renewed need for more. She leans down and grasps both sides of your chest, kneading them with uncompromising force that makes your head spin, then finally pushes both of your tits to together to just barely touch through the padded fabric of your bra before releasing them to bounce back to a resting position.
Gale stares down at you with a smug smirk on her face. "You want more after your drink?" You find yourself nodding emphatically, and she stands up to cross the room toward her desk. In the absence of that pleasure your mind tries for the millionth time tonight to try to surface back to coherence once again. Relays try to click in your mind with only vague success, but as your eyes drag across Gale's bed to see the ragged purple bunny plush that used to match the pristine one in your own room, a spark plug manages to light in the flooded engine of your mind. You retract your legs and curl up, back resting against the armrest as you give a half-fuzzy protest "…Gale… wait, no, you shouldn't, we shouldn't, shouldn't be doing this."
Without turning to you, Gale continues to smack around the contents of a deep desk drawer while she laughs with dark humor and insinuation. She twists around and cracks the top of another white claw with a sadistic grin on her face, and pistons in the engine of your mind manage to turn one cycle. "Gale, no, wait, I… wait…" The room spins a little as you try to put your thoughts together properly, but the alcohol warmth still oscillating in your stomach stirs the swirling paints in your mind every time you try to get a cohesive color out of them, and you're left without any coherent words of protest.
Gale finishes cracking the can and stalks toward you slowly. "Wait… mm, no I don't think so. Not after all this time waiting, seeing if you'd realize on your own." She reaches the couch and positions herself in front of you, legs spread in an A-frame against your upraised calves while she takes a hefty swig of the drink. She makes a pleased sound as she swallows, then she pries your legs apart and leans down between them to push the lukewarm can into your fingers. Your limp lack of response doesn't facilitate her intention, so she tucks her palm down to push your fingers against the can and press it toward your lips. "Drink, little sister." The room gives another little eddy as you try to somehow focus your eyes on the can and her face above you at the same time, and when the insistent can reaches your lips, your mind short-circuits and you take a clumsy sip. It pours down your throat without protest, but the angle is bad, and some of it sloshes out the rim and onto your cheek. You try to pull your head backward, only to find a scarce quarter inch of space between your previous position and the armrest of the couch. The white claw follows your movement, and you take another desperate sip to mitigate the flow of the tilted drink before it splashes all over you again.
You manage it more cleanly this time, and are allowed a precious breath of air when Gale retracts the can and throws the rest of it back in several herculean swigs. The can joins its brethren on the floor, and when you reach up to mop at the liquid on your cheek with the sleeve of your shirt, your sister snakes out a hand to stop you. She leans further between your legs to press them wider with her hips, and her breath is hot on your face as she presses her tongue long and hard along the splash of sticky moisture on your skin. Her hands drop to land beside your head and next to your ribs, and Gale is upon your lips again, each of your mouths freshly moistened by the alcohol. Her tongue dances on your lips and presses into your mouth, slipping in and out between tiny bites at your lips that make you squeak in pain, the noise thoroughly suffocated in your big sister's unceasing kisses. After what feels like twenty unrelenting minutes to your dizzy brain, she pulls away with a wicked delight on her face, and she regards you for a few thirsty moments before she gives a hungry growl and dips down to your neck. One or two of your dumb faculties try to tuck your head in the way to stop her, but she roughly shoves your head out of the way with her own and presses her lips to your neck with the same intensity that she first forced on your mouth tonight. You're only allowed a dozen moments of tender but very firm kisses before she begins to suck at your skin, the building intensity from light to hard a steep gradient. Within thirty seconds, you're earnestly squealing out in sharp protest.
A strangely coherent voice in the back of your overwhelmed mind sparks up and reassures (warns?) you that your mother will surely hear you and come to stop this sick dance, but before it even finishes its first sentence, another voice bearing the last dregs of half-sobriety in your head reminds you and the other voice that she's gone for the night, and you're completely subject to your sister's lusts. Your internal round table is completely wiped out as you feel Gale's teeth nip at your skin right on top of a fresh hickey, and a cry kicks out of your mouth in a new register. Teeth drag harder against your sensitive skin and it draws your mind along with it into a smooth channel of warm static. You can feel a hand jump up from beside your ribs to land on your body, bracing with a surprising gentleness against your breast. Your breaths drift from spastic panic to a deeper panting, and when Gale squeezes her hand and digs her teeth into you in tandem, the two sensations bleed together in a sparking golden pain-pleasure. A foreign sound of deep pleasure presses out from your chest in a tone that you've never heard before, and it relaxes your fingernails from digging into Gale's back to instead clutch her closer to you.
Your noise causes a shiver to run through Gale, and she gives a satisfied growl of arousal, vibrating into your neck. She nips at you another half dozen times, denying you the newfound pleasure of being bitten in earnest, before she tears her head away to dig into the fresh skin on your other side, biting deep and hard, teeth pinning your flesh together in an exquisite agony that threatens to boil over the edge and sear your brain in scalding pain. You try to moan again, but your tendons and airway are constricted too much to let out cleanly, and it torques into half a moan and half a strangled whimper. Gale finally pulls her face away from your body and stares at you with a liquid fire that you've never seen on her face before the blistering heat of this night. "Do that again."
The pressure of her gaze and impetus of your big sister's command push your mind to try to figure out what she means, but half the power lines in your head are loose and sparking against the tarmac instead of making connections to other terminals. "I… uh, do- what??" Gale laughs at your ineptitude and leans forward again to an inch from your face. She squeezes your chest with terse force and commands "Moan for me." Regardless of whether the trifecta of alcohol, weed, and pleasure in your mind would provide the neurological reaction required to obey with conscious will, your body responds immediately to the pressure on your breast and you let out a moan that pitches up into another squeak as she pinches her palm to increase the acute pressure. Gale's eyes roll back for half a second and she gives a low laugh of deep pleasure, then she presses herself forward onto your lips again with a single hard kiss.
In a moment of haze while Gale pulls back from you there's a little tickle of a wish that you had another white claw to re-moisturize your thirsty mouth with, but before the slow thought manages to turn into any kind of intention you can feel your hips being lifted to brace your ass slightly up onto Gale's thighs as she sits back onto her haunches. "God, you're so sexy, little sister. My little slutty toy, all buzzed up and deliciously pliant for your big sister." She leans forward slightly to flick up your shirt past your bra, and she drinks in the image with clear relish. Her tongue flicks out to lick her lips, as she scrapes her fingernails against your sensitive throat. "You're so goood at being bitten - my favorite. Makes me wish I'd done this to you sooner." She winks at you with a wicked grin and strips her sweaty crop top over her head to reveal a flushed chest and pierced nipples, each of the golden bars angled at a diagonal pointing from her shoulders down toward her navel. She squeezes one of her tits for a moment before her hands drop down to your exposed stomach, tracing her nails with excruciatingly moderate force down toward your waistband. That responsible, reserved (stupid and prudish?) part of your mind circles around again, and a voice perched on a cloud of idealism manages to pipe a sentiment through your mouth while you grab at Gale's wrist. "No, wait, Gale, stop, this, my first time, like this, not like, this…" Even as that voice talks through your mouth, the golden dripping wetness of arousal is pooling in a lake in your mind and between your legs, and you half regret the words.
Not that it really matters, because your sister's nails slide under the waistband of your shorts and panties, and the clouds under that resistant voice burn away to make it drop drown in the fresh wave of need splashing around your hips and toward your crotch. Either sensing the new wave of pleasure and delight from your open mouth and rolled back eyes, or simply not caring about your protest, Gale responds "Stop? With my delicious little sister lying there drooling over my fingers? Not a chance. You're asking for this." Her fingertips flick toward and away from the skin under your waistband as she draws them back and forth between your outer hips to below your stomach, laughing each time your hips buck upwards with need and demand for them to move deeper under your clothes as they reach the center. Your eyes catch one moment of her lower lip caught between her teeth in sultry arousal before her fingers flick to release the button on your shorts and slide the zipper open, and your eyes slam shut and your back arches with a wordless demand for a continued invasion of your clothes.
Her palm drops to press flat on your pussy and she pushes upwards ever so slowly toward the new opening in the fabric wrapped around you, and when it reaches its peak she pulls it and her other hand to the side to snag on your waistband and pull your shorts roughly off your hips and force your legs straight up to slide them off your legs. Humor and arousal lace her voice as she practically moans "Oh, oh, oooohhhh, girl, look at how wet you are for me. For your big sister. You little slut!" Your eyes spark back open as she smacks lightly between your legs, the sound moist and dampened by the thin fabric still wrapped around you. Before you can try (and fail) to protest at the strike, the outstretched fingers turn to a flat palm and she starts to press up and down against you, each motion drawing you further and further out of your remaining conscious presence into a warm, wet bliss that draws your hips forward and back with her movements. As your eyelids drift open and closed in time with the pressure you can see Gale's free hand dug into her own shorts, moving in parallel while her tongue flickers in and out of needy lips.
In one dip of your eyelids, the palm switches places with her thumb as she rubs in smaller motions against your most sensitive area, the friction from the cotton pressed against you thoroughly lubricated by your desperate moisture. When she perfects a rhythm that draws ecstasy into a blinding point of light in your brain, you dimly register squeaks and moans cascading from your mouth in arbitrary patterns. The squeaks overtake the moans with desperation as you reach (maybe? but not quite? but maybe it was) the third orgasm you've ever had in your life, and your legs wrap around you sister with unrepentant force. She crashes down against you before you can quite reach past the precipice of the peak of pleasure, so close you could almost touch it. Gale's head thumps against the armrest beside you as she laughs again, clearly laughing at you, but you couldn't care less. If laughing at you is the cost of her touching you like this, violating you like this in a way that a sister never should, then you might as well be wearing a sexy-clown halloween costume.
In the position you inadvertently pulled her into, Gale is fully pressed down between your hips, spreading them uncomfortably wide, and though you dimly wiggle to try to indicate that your legs need a respite from the uplifted position and the impending force between them, your sister either doesn't register, or doesn't care about your nonverbal protest. A kiss smacks into your lips again during the ongoing buzz of your pleasure, and you moan into her in a daze. Your moan is matched by Gale's own, and when she pulls away she lets out a wicked hiss in preparation for the pursuit of her own sexual vindication. She reaches forward and digs both her hands under your bra to squeeze roughly at both your tits, and with another laugh at your tortured exhales, she wraps her hands around your back, one to lift you, the other to unclasp your bra. The hands circle back and roughly pull at both the garments on your upper body to slide up and over your cooperating, outstretched arms. Freshly exposed, you feel a tingle of embarrassment dance around in your eyes, but the sheer, dense, drooling arousal on your sister's face manages to quell your insecurity and keep you pliant. Not knowing what you're actually trying for, you raise your hands and grab in the air at your big sister. That sadistic gleam sparks in her eyes again and she moves forward to press her own tits into your grip, and a fresh new wave of arousal washes in and out of you at the newfound sensation. Gale finally gives her own earnest moans at your direct stimulation of her body, and her eyelids dip as she oscillates gently forward and back with your squeezing motions. You're barely aware of it, but the soaked arousal pouring through every molecule of your body is painting your face in an absurdly lewd picture of desperation, and after a minute Gale starts to pull her chest back out of your grasp, inch by slow inch. A grin splits her face as she looks down at your pathetic pout as your fingers reach less and less of her breasts, culminating as a laugh as she sits back on her haunches once again.
Her hands grope her own breasts again as she gives a tantalizing smile and teasing moan at you, then she pulls back and stands up off the couch. Your legs finally manage to hit horizontality and blood rushes back into them, pulling the heat of arousal annoyingly back away from your more erogenous zones. Little motes of awareness flick in and out of resolution in your mind as your senses return to you. I'm… half-mostly naked, I'm… soaked, it's hot and cold in here, I'm, um… high and uh,,, drunk? and that's… that's Gale, and she's… god she's so hot, and-wait, what was that? She's my sister, why is she this hot-and, wait, why am I so naked? Lace was supposed to… oh wait, mom is out of the house, and Lace was supposed to come, and she didn't, and… wait, did I come?
Gale! She was-she is-she-… God, she's so hot. Your mouth waters at the image of her at her desk lifting another can to crank more alcohol into her system. One of your eyes blinks closed and open out of time with the other as you dimly call out "Gale, uh… I-want some?" Her eyes flick down to yours as she finishes the can and sets it on her desk. Her eyebrow raises and she gives you a smirk, before tilting downward to regard the contents of her desk. She pokes at an item there, then looks back up to you. "Mmmm, no. I want to do this again, and if you can't remember this in the morning I'm going to have to get you high and drunk to seduce you all over again, and that sounds like a lot of work." She stalks back over to you with clear intention and leans down over you. "You're such a pretty little slut for your big sister, and that's just how Gale likes you, Crissy." She leans down over you to place both hands beside your head. Your dazed mind desperately wants her to push further down and kiss you, but instead she grasps the back of your head and shoulder to lift you up and off the couch. The room, the continent, and the whole world spins around you as the blood in your body rushes around like a tilt-a-whirl, but your sister clutches you to her chest as you cling to her for dear life. After the eternity of twelve seconds everything stabilizes, and you can feel your face growing hot at your new proximity to Gale's breasts. Your mouth decides its interest without the input of any of the rest of your brain, and you start to lick and suck lightly at your sister while she runs her hands through your hair. The tinge of a motherly vibe drifts toward your ears as her voice drips "Oh, what a good girl…"
When your desperate mind becomes needier and the gentleness of your lips and tongue gives way to acute force, Gale pulls you away to look up at her. "Bed." Some kind of vague disappointment at the interruption of your attention to her body gets about forty percent of your attention, but when your head is turned by the back of her fingers again to point at the messy bed behind you, your wet loins agree that it's exactly where you need to be right now. A springy backbone of dignity would like to think that you strode over to the scattered sheets and solitary stuffed animal on the bed with intention, but the reality is that you stumbled over while barely managing not to trip over loose belts and cans. You collapse onto the soft cushioning and sink into the space between bunched up sheets, reveling in the smell of your sister. While last night you might have had some kind of aromatic protest at your Gale's room, this far into intoxication and delicious stimulation it has become a kind of acrid aphrodisiac that turns your mind into smoke all over again, as thoroughly as if you were on the couch having a viciously potent joint forced between your lips once more.
You manage a few precious breaths before you feel the damp fabric of your sister's soft shorts tossed to land on your head, and you hear your sister's body creak the springs of the bedframe as she climbs onto the mattress behind you. You snatch the garment and take a lewd and needy sniff, but as you drop it and turn to face Gale again, your face is shoved heartily back into that same musk that you were just treasuring. The breaths are choked by a bad angle until you feel your sister positioned behind your hips and pressed against the base of your thighs, and she pulls you back and upward to press against her. She takes a moment to lift your hips up to brace more conveniently, then adjusts herself to press her bulge against you properly. It initially seems like the height difference between you might be a little inconvenient, but from the way Gale starts to rub against you, it's pretty clear that her extra height is not going to be an inhibition to what she's about to do with (to?) you.
After a minute of cursory grinding, your big sister leans back to give her hands an angle to grope and stare at your plump ass, fingertips digging in and massaging with intention. She gives a little growling half-laugh of arousal, and the mix of explicit attention and firm stimulation draws long, crooning moans from you. You're barely aware of your movements as you gently sway around to the energetic sound of the anime opening song playing across the room, the same episode having been on repeat for at least two (or a dozen?) repetitions by now.
You really should have expected it, but you're still startled by a sudden smack on the left side of your butt, and it makes you squeal in surprise and pain. Gale seems to like that reaction, so she matches it on the right, and then the left immediately again with no time to recover. The aftershock steals your breath for a few moments after your second yelp, but the throaty moan of satisfaction from your big sister immediately makes the pain worth it, and you feel like a good girl for accepting her rough treatment. You're given a long, smooth press of two fingers all the way from your clit to the base of your covered opening, then Gale pulls your panties down an inch and smacks lightly at the sides of your thighs to indicate that you should close your legs to allow your underwear to be slid off. You gladly cooperate, feeling a growing excitement the approaching activity.
Once you've been stripped and you start to spread your legs again, your motion is halted by your sister grabbing both your thighs to keep them pinned together as she sinks her teeth into the freshly red, sensitive skin of your ass, jaw clamping with emphasis to dig well into your muscle. More intense than the combined bites and chest groping on the couch, the stark pain and pleasure from your (apparently very) sensitive ass pops colorful fireworks behind your eyes and tears a wild cry-moan from your throat, and you sink your chest down to the mattress to present your ass to your sister with clear emphasis. Outside your view Gale laughs with evident delight, squeezing your ass again as she calls out "Oooh, little Crissy is a major slut for ass bites, huh? Don't mind if I do!" Without giving you any kind of lighter lead in, she snaps and bites at you again, scraping her teeth against your skin, sucking to give you vicious hickeys, digging into your muscle, and overall tearing at you like someone eating a steak with no knife.
After an eternity of moaning and wet drooling onto your sister's bed, Gale's teeth move down to the sides of your thighs, and that pain makes you leap up onto your hands while yelps spark from your throat. The sensation much less pleasurable for reasons you can't parse in your crossfaded and sexualized daze, and in between bites you lean forward to get your legs out of her reach. Thoroughly expecting to be yanked back toward her, you clumsily distract with a request for what you've been thirsty for since you first landed on Gale's bed. "Gale, I want, I want you, inside me."
Gale returns to stand on her knees behind you and spreads your legs again. "Oh yeah? Tell your big sister how bad you want her to fuck you." You can hear the smug smile in her voice, and for the first time since you've known her, the image of that cocky and self-aggrandizing expression that she always wears when she feels powerful turns you on instead of making you mad. You can hear the voice of that slut that she's been calling you as you moan out "I want you so baaad." You push backwards to try to press against her cock, but her hand catches you and pushes you back forward. "Mmmm, try again! Tell your big sister how much you want her to fuck you." It takes a few (or a bunch?) of seconds for you to process the demand and specific emphasis, but it finally registers. Before you actually give her the words that she wants, a sound from across the room manages to bounce into your ear and give you a tiny spark of inspiration.
"Pleeeease, fuck me hard, onee-chaaan!"
You hear a muted gasp twist into "Oh, fuck" and without warning your big sister slams her cock into you, your slickness practically a red carpet for entry. While ecstatic excitement and stimulation slam into your mind like a tsunami, the pain of losing your virginity to the first penetration you've experienced is a sharp sting in between your legs, and it twists your voice into a strangled "Oh" that chokes up your throat. Gale gasps in earnest from excitement and the sensation, pressing herself as far in as she can go, before she registers your reaction. You can almost hear her mutter "… Sorry…" in a quiet and rueful voice, and she pauses to let you recover and adjust. It takes you less time than you'd expect, likely as a result of how the alcohol has relaxed your body, and after fifteen seconds you pull yourself forward an inch and slide back to test the waters. There's still a tinge, but nothing unmanageable. You repeat the motion, moving further forward and sliding back harder, and Gale gets the message that you're ready to go. She grabs your hips and starts again, beginning with a moderate pace and quickly moving up to fervent thrusts that rock you back and forth and rob the control of your shaky limbs to be facilitated by Gale's hips and hands, clutched tightly on your own hips.
Within minutes the residual pain of the initial penetration has faded, and is replaced by the sharp bursts of delicious pain from your sister slamming her bony hips into your recently-bitten ass. Your moans follow in immediate succession after each impact, but Gale's are more spastic, sometimes throttled by her body's fervent demand for oxygen intake as she exerts herself. Her breathing ramps up in pace, but before it reaches a peak that you'd expect to be accompanied by an orgasm, she slows down and starts to more calmly rock your body back and forth on her, one hand tucked between your bodies to squeeze your ass as she moves. She moans out "God, you feel so good little sis."
Hearing that seems to be starting to do something for you in the same way it has been turning on your big sister, and you can feel a warm shiver run up your spine. She feels overwhelmingly good to you too, and your breaths turn to long, drawn out moans in simple affirmation of the overall heat of the situation. You want to reply that she feels good to you too, but your mind hangs up on how to say it for just a second, which way to refer to Gale. You try with "You feel so good inside me, big sis."
She breathes out heavily, the end twisting into a little wicked laugh. She rewards your ongoing drift into the fetish of the night by wrapping her hand around and under you to play with your clit, little flicks at first that make little motes of light burst in random spots behind your eyelids, then slow circles with flat fingers that make you moan and drool as orange-gold energy burns in your pussy. She asks you in a low tone "Oh, you like that you little slut?" You moan out an affirmative "Uh-huuuuuh"
Gale laughs again, and starts to move her hips to push her cock in and out of you with emphasis. After a few minutes of delicious buildup, she switches to using two fingertips to pinch and rub at your clit, their intensity slowly ratcheting up as the motions of her hips slow back down while she focuses on stimulating you. Your moans kick up in pitch and pace, and as the energy builds by inches in your body and you near your orgasm, Gale slows for a moment and tells you "Tell me you want it, little sis."
Full of vicious desperation, you shout "I want it so bad onee-chan, please!" You don't get the reward that you want, because the word 'onee-chan' hits your big sister like a trigger phrase for a sleeper agent, and in less than a second she's back to pounding you again, panting like an animal. As the minutes pass you start to slip and slide back up toward the peak of pleasure again, and a need starts to pulse inside you to reach it this time, to not have it taken away from you by your sister's needs again. You want this to go on forever, for your sister to pound you until you come over and over and keep going until you pass out. But, eventually she's going to cum, and as the impact of Gale's hips continues to jar your random syllables in your thoughts, it occurs to you: Oh god, she's going to cum and… she's going to cum… inside me?
You've never really given any thought to the notion of someone coming inside you, having not bedded anyone at all, let alone a guy. But Gale is a girl, she's your sister, and as the fact of what is coming soaks into whatever pleasure-thirsty approximation of a brain is left in your skull, the idea that your big sister is going to cum inside you lights a new bonfire in the center of your mind. Drowsy excitement makes you moan Gale's name, and her intensity manages to kick up another notch, bruising your ass from the repeated impacts while you tilt backwards a little further to provide the most resolute and stable position for her to thrust into.
That dumb little incorrect voice from earlier that told you that your mom was home and could save you speaks up again, trying to press one word somewhere into the seams of the intoxicated rapture ensconcing you. It takes five thrusts from Gale before it even registers as a word, and probably a dozen more before your remaining intellectual faculties can start to poke at it.
Pregnancy?
Your moans quiet when that word does manage to flip on a dingy desk lamp in a corner of your mind, and it gets allotted about 4% of your brain cells. No, getting pregnant is just a thing that you have to worry about with boys. The little voice manages to rack up a point in the 'correct' column by reminding you that no, that's a genitalia thing, not a gender thing. God, you don't want to worry about it though. It's fine. It's-fine! A new sound of impact seasons the sweaty air as your sister's bedframe begins to rhythmically bang into the wall from all the chaotic movement atop it.
That little voice seems to be being fucked stupid too, and it wins another notch in the 'stupid' column when its broken syllables suggest that you might wake someone up in the otherwise empty house, and you clumsily realize that if it's been wrong twice, then why would it be right about the whole pregnancy thing?
After all, Gale is eight, four… nine months on HRT? A year? Two? How long since her-birthday!? Another thrust jars your mind out of its calculations as it tries to triangulate the timing through the dimming lights in your brain, and a fractured assumption of 18-36 months falls into your mental lap. Can she even get girls pregnant at eightTEEN months anymore? You haven't been paying too close attention to the details of your sister's transition - it's tough to notice anything with her always in her room, and you'd felt kinda weird about her since she came out. You've never been really sure why, but maybe-THIS! might be why???
Three-quarters of a thought manage to grasp around at your memories and vaguely gesticulate that it's impressive what she can manage for penetration as this point, but that value is knocked down to one-half by another impact that digs your face forward and straight into the crotch of your sister's stuffed bunny. The sensation of the worn fabric casts the silhouetted memory of little flowers on the inside of your mind as you remember the sweet plum smell of your own perfume on the matching bunny, just one door over in your own room, and those afterimages burst into fresh neon as your sister pounds you harder into her mattress.
A rough hand grabs and yanks the stuffed animal away from your face, and Gale growls with a desperation in her voice "Moan for your big sister!" as her hand tucks into your hair and grasps the base of the strands. The angle is bad, but the strained moan-whimpers you manage to resume are wholly sincere as the pace and intensity of her panting grows harder and harder. The impacts slam into your ass with righteous force and you can feel yourself grow hot in anticipation of the climax you know your sister is finally reaching, and she finally cries out with wordless scream, and she plows you bodily down onto the rumpled sheets as her sex pulses inside you.
While her orgasm didn't push you to a proper one of your own, you can feel a peculiar moral decay occurring inside yourself from the satisfaction of your body bringing your big sister to such a catastrophically intense climax. The swirling black-gold of satisfaction and pride at having a body that could do so much for her needy demands taints everything it touches, and you can feel it paint every inch of faux-sobriety and real-intoxication left in your pseudo-conscious brain.
Gale twitches and her muscles in her body gently writhe as she rides out the last vestiges of her orgasm, and her breath is hot in your ear. Even through all the drowsiness pulling you down, that steamy breath and those hot low tones still raise all the hairs on your body and a demand tries to make a break for the door to request more stimulation from your big sister before the bouncer of exhaustion manages to catch it around the waist and eject it from the queue.
Your sister clumsily flops out of you and onto her side, and the awkward angle of her weight on your calf demands your accompanying movement. You drag your leg out from under her limp form and stretch out your tendons for a hot half a minute, then tuck back against her, butt pressing against her crotch. Her breaths are already becoming slower as she starts to lose the fight against fatigue, but she still manages to yank a sheet out from under herself to wrap around the two of you before she pulls you against her. You grasp around for a pillow and eventually find one to tuck beneath both of your heads, and though the soft cotton is an immediate siren to your fading mind, your other faculties are beginning to circle back around and make requests of you. Your dry mouth is the first to make a vague inquiry in regards to some kind of liquid restitution, and though you could ignore that request, all the drinks poured down your throat by your own accord and those against your will have all caught up to you, and you need to use the restroom.
With an enormous sigh, you bluntly throw yourself forward a few inches on the bed to rotate to a position that will let you climb to your knees and make it off the bed. Gale, still hazy, throws out a hand to grab at you, and when she misses she asks "…where…are you going…"
"Water." You meant to say 'Bathroom.', but the fact that they're both liquid issues mixes things up in your brain somehow. You stumble to your feet and make a half-assed attempt to find your underwear, but before you can reach it you can see how soaked they still are, and you elect to just make a stop at your room on the way back instead. The hallway to the restroom is far too long and at tilted at least 15 degrees further toward the ground than you recall, but the wall is solid and you eventually find where the light switch is hiding from you in the tiled room at the end. Time seems to be scaling in and out of infinity in your smoky daze, and each time its expanse shrinks down to within grasp you find yourself another notch further toward passing out. After you acquire new underwear your hand is on its way to Gale's doorknob again, before some strange sensation in and/or around your face insists upon itself in a language you don't seem to be able to speak correctly anymore. You dazedly go to ask it what the hell it wants, and when your mouth opens like dusty parchment you realize that it's water! Of course it is. Liquid. Right. Thirsty. You are. That.
Another thousand years pass before you return to your sister's room again, and the fresh smell of sex mixes with old sweat as you close the door behind you. Gale is back in bed, though she clearly got up for at least a moment to acquire yet another white claw to handle her own thirst. That stupid little voice in your head tries to tell you that you should stop her, that you should make her drink the water that you brought back with you instead, but your aching body, still wrought in messy, smoky, drunk afterglow elects to veto that notion on the premise that the more she drinks, the more likely she is to do all that to you again. Another half-assed thought tries to imply that this won't happen again, that you shouldn't let it, but the hazy recollection of Gale saying something along the lines of "I want to do this again and I don't want to have to seduce you about it" snuffs out that idea with the certainty that you want to do it again too; she won't even have to seduce you. You'll probably ask for it, the little slut you are. She won't even have to get you drunk next time - but, you do want her to get you drunk next time anyway. Maybe you should play it a little coy to get her to get you twisted and make her 'force' it on you a second time?
Gale croaks out in front of you "What are you doing, loser?" You realize that you've been standing by the bed with the plastic cup of water halfway to your lips for what was probably a full minute while you thought. You shake your head and search for the nearest surface to set the water on, pushing a jacket and loose phone charger off a nightstand. The thought flickers in your mind to offer your big sister some water again, but that smart plan to let Gale be as drunk as possible asserts its brilliance again, and you climb back into Gale's bed to flop down and against her. She finishes her can and flicks it off the side of the bed, like the (four? six? you stopped keeping track of the number of cans discarded on the floor back when you could still count) others, and she pulls you tight against her. She lets out a big sigh that blows past your ear and makes your hair stand on end again, then she murmurs with a tremulous, drunken fear in her voice "I thought you were going to leave… I thought… I… do you hate me now?"
You turn your head halfway toward her and look up at the ceiling, the proper angle to view her too far for you to bother while you fight off a heavy drowsiness. "Of course I don't hate you, you're my sister." Gale starts to ask another question, but the world above the bed takes another sickening spin and you cut her off. "Now, fuck off and let me sleep..."
You turn your head back over, and though you're vaguely aware that Gale still tries to say something else to you, a big black curtain of wavy velour slips over your eyes to subject you to the exquisite stage play of twisted exhaustion.
You planned a special date for your sister Cadence, and it seems like you got it right. Now it's up to you to get the sex right.
Don't forget to take it slow.
Chapter 20
♫ (#3)
You get back into the car with your sister, and though you're at least mostly sure, you still have to ask "Was it a good show?"
Cadence's smile brightens the car more than the light from the stereo. "Yes! They were both really good, it's been a really great day. A great date."
"I'm glad." When you put the car into reverse and turn halfway around to check behind you, she looks over and catches your eye again for a moment, and a little nervous smile turns into… was that excitement?
Hopefully.
On the way home, Cadence oscillates between little gushings about the underwater feature and joyous singing, favoring pop tracks that err into emotional and romantic themes. Her enthusiasm is charming, and her comments don't need much more than noises of acknowledgement, so you get the chance to try to focus on the night waiting for you across the city. Your mind first drifts to the remaining vestiges of the of the shower fantasy that linger in your mind and you start to feel a little hot under the collar, but instead of mentally exploring that again, you repeat the tenets you read in your book and online, using that 'one night' as an example to create a contrast against.
God, that was so exciting, but the whole point of tonight is to take it slow. The best way to do that is to start soft. She's certainly very soft, and I need to take time to pay attention to every part of her, especially by listening. That part's easy, she makes such sexy noises, especially when she gets worked up by my tongue, but I need to not rush, to take time to ease off and work back up. That's probably the most important part, and the best way to remember that is to breathe, and focus on her breathing as a signal for how much she's ramping up-
"Oh, yeah, I thought they were both interesting too. I didn't know that Venus might support life on the winds… -oh, and the war footage was interesting - I was impressed how they made it work for a dome projection like that. You think it'd have blown people's minds back in the 40s to picture that?"
She asks "I think they had planetariums back then, didn't they?" You shake your head. "Movies were still pretty new back then, and we use computers to map projected images for the semicircle. They couldn't do that at the time, all they could really do was to film something flat and then transpose it onto another film reel."
"How did they do that?"
"I'm not really sure."
"Ah. ~Grow me a garden of roses
Paint me the colors of sky and rain~…"
She drifts into singing along to a new song, and you review the prescribed directives again.
The last few in there are more foreign, except for making eye contact, she makes such cute faces and her eyes are so expressive that I have to make sure not to stare sometimes. Holding hands seems… awkward? And laugh, don't take it too seriously. Laugh about what?
All parts of be in the moment… I'm always in the moment with sex, so…
I guess it's a matter of keeping Cadence in the moment. It seems like she gets caught up in her head when it gets to be too much.
Ease off, make eye contact, make sure she's breathing, start soft again, and don't rush when I work back up. Okay, I think I've got it. A combination of physical intimacy and emotional intimacy. A learning experience. Be present-
"-… What do you like about marine life anyway?" You interrupted her song, remembering that you should be in this moment as well, but she doesn't mind. "They're pretty." A little smile sneaks across your face. "That's it, all it takes? Do you like me just cause I'm pretty?"
"No, I, there's a lot I like about you!" Her protest is emphatic enough that you placate her. "Relax, I'm just messing with you." She continues anyway, clearly interested in actually answering your joke question. "You're super smart. I think that was the first thing I looked up to you about. Well, admired, I guess, I think you're supposed to look up to me, right?" You wave a hand in the air dismissively, and she continues "But I like looking up to you though!" You glance over at her coy little smile, and it takes a second for you to register her reference to your height and smile back. She continues "Sometimes I heard people say that you're bitchy and rude, but I don't think that's true."
That might have been a surprise to hear if you hadn't been told that that was a turn on for someone you hooked up with in highschool years ago. "Maybe that's just because you're my sister and I'm not bitchy to you."
"No, I don't think so. You're just really straightforward, and that's cause you care about people understanding what you have to say, because you say what you mean, and you think people should hear that and believe you." You make a little noise to acknowledge the notion, having something a new reflection of yourself to think about. "Mm, you're meticulous because you believe in doing your best all the time. You don't usually try at things you don't believe in, and it means I know what things you really care about. I don't think people can usually see that." She pauses for a little while, then looks at you. "I like you because I love you." You look over, smiling at her joke, but her face is serious. After a few moments she breaks into a smile. "And you definitely are very, very pretty."
You incline your head and smile. "Thank you." After a little bit she asks "…What do you like about me?" There was just enough lag time that you think that she might have been waiting for you to reciprocate the question without prompt, but you can't say for sure. You make a little noise and take a while to think. You know you probably shouldn't comment on her appearance first.
Then again, that was where she ended and also what prompted the line of conversation, so it would be a natural thread to use.
"You're very pretty. Hell of a looker." You catch her eye and wink, and she blushes nicely. "If I had your looks I'd never be insecure." She sounds quite surprised. "You're insecure?" You concede. "Ah, well, not much, but that would shrink to zero if I saw your face in the mirror." She protests "But I like your face though, you're so much prettier than me!" She sounds like a cute little kid, and it's charming, but that sentiment isn't good for her self-esteem. "You don't give yourself enough credit, sister." She actually surprises you by pausing and looking down to play with the hem of her dress, quietly saying "Yeah… you're right."
The pause gives you a few more moments to compose a list: "You're attentive. You care, a lot. You're my sister." She interrupts you. "You like me because I'm your sister?"
"Yeah?" She has a little intake of breath, but then she concedes. "Fair enough."
You continue. "You're smart. You try hard. You like me, and that's more than any of my friends ever did." Cadence reaches over to put a hand on your thigh and squeeze it, and you appreciate the gesture. You can feel in your heart that Cadence would still have always been your best friend even if the others hadn't left you one by one. You reiterate "You really care. And that's something that most other people don't do."
Your sister seems to have chosen the right mood music for herself during the drive, and when the aux cable unplugs in the parking lot, it signals the beginning of the rest of 'date night'.
Stairs, your pink key in the lock, a purple clutch and a black purse on the table beside the door, and then you're in front of Cadence, hands on her waist, her eyes clearly nervous but holding strong under your stare.
"Do you still want to have sex?" She swallows and nods, and you raise your hands from her waist to hold her jaw, one hand on the back of her neck. You stare deep into her eyes, taking longer than you calculate would be comfortable for her, but you have to be sure, and so does she. "Do you feel like you're ready for it?"
"Yes." You lift her chin and lean in for the kiss that will decide everything, your fingers buzzing with the knowledge that the entire apartment and both your lives are balanced on this contact like the blade of a razor. Your lips touch, and-
It's quiet.
The second one is quiet too, but she lifts a hand to cup your cheek and move into you. Her breath brushes you for a half moment of separation and you go again, and on the fourth you turn things up a single notch of the hundred-twenty percent of intensity you can turn on.
The dial ticks to 2.
You sidle a little closer, gently touching your hips against hers, dropping your hands to wrap around her waist, letting her hold your face as you kiss, your attention vaguely distracted by the quiet sounds of lips that you're usually too worked up to notice during sexual encounters. A little breath on your lips brings your focus back, and you lean your hips into her with a little more emphasis. Her hands press into your face a little firmer, and you keep your body still aside from the meeting of your lips, wary of what the pressure might mean.
…
Not a warning sign. You turn up the heat a little past a simmer, starting to make out with more deliberate intention, teasing your head a little bit back and forth with the motions of your lips with playful energy, still keeping a deliberate hand on the throttle as you start to get a little turned on. Your sister is still in control, setting the pace, and you're patient, unpracticed as you may be in this sedate pace of sexuality.
I'm patient.
But you are happy when her tongue starts to run over your lips, and you open them to let her in. She's timid at first, but after some nervous investigation, she starts to develop a taste for you, and the pressure of her fingers on your cheeks starts to dance along with the motions. You press your bodies together with proper warmth and the space for her arms grows thin between you, so she lifts them to wrap around your neck, accepting your reciprocal lingual investigations between her lips with tiny little wisps of moans that soothe some of the tension in your shoulders, reassuring you that she's appreciating the current pace. You relax into the activity more, following along and responding to her in kind, but staying at her rhythm. When you start to feel her hot breath on your face between contacts you're confident enough to drop your hands casually to her hips, and you get a little "Mm"
That's… it's good. Good. Either her body is very sensitive, or she's very emotionally sensitive to your hands on her. With the way her tempo kicks up by a quarter you're certain it's at least the latter, possibly both. You spend more time enjoying the warm bath of her lips, and when she pulls away to gaze at you, you resist the impulse that would come naturally at that moment, to turn and press her against the wall, but instead you play nice, and just look back at her. Her eyes are saucers and she's staring at you with a mix of adoration and observable arousal, and you give her some time to stare before her hesitation lasts too long for your own tastes.
You invert your previous impulse and turn to press your own back to the wall, pulling her gently by the hips to follow. It seemed like her plan was to keep staring, so you move through the look to kiss her again, letting her adjust to press her chest forward against you and place one hand on your hip and the other on your face again. After a few moments you pull at her lower lip with yours using more emphasis, and then give her the tiniest little nip with your teeth.
She immediately pulls back and her hands leap off of you. Worry blooms black in your heart, but then you realize that she's rubbing at her lip and laughing. After a second she catches your eye and clearly sees concern there, because her giggling calms. "That just tickled!" A wave of tension releases from your shoulders again, and you almost visibly sigh with relief, instead asking "No more of that then?" She pulls her hands down past her chin and replies "Maybe, but just not quite that little, or it'll tickle again." You nod and move to pull her close again, but she stops you with a gentle palm on the chest. "Not too big either?"
Naturally.
"You got it, sis."
God, that was stupid, I shouldn't be reminding her we're sisters right now-
But her eyes are closed again and the word didn't seem to abate her enthusiasm, so you give her a little lead in with more kisses and then go for a more emphatic bite on her lip. She squeaks in a way you don't know how to parse, but she keeps moving, and before you go for another she actually surprises you by going for a nibble of her own. It's a little clumsy, pinching the surface rather than getting any tender flesh, but you're most certainly going to encourage her. You murmur a little laugh into her mouth, and she tries it again, placing her teeth properly and getting a moan from you. After she releases she leans a half inch away with a little giggle, and your smiles meet when her lips find yours again - maybe letting a bottom take the lead can be fun, if she's this adorable?
She's still just a puppy though, timid about taking any steps you haven't, so you turn up the heat by sliding your hands down to squeeze her ass, and that immediately gets a gasp that transitions into her pouring even more energy and fervor into making out. It's an appropriate acceleration on the road of taking it slow, each notch ticking away on the speedometer putting more life into her. She can't stop moaning as you massage her butt, the vibrations on your tongue are intoxicating, and her breath is hot on your face. You're starting to get properly worked up yourself, and you decide to check her pulse by slipping a few fingertips under the hem of her dress to brush lightly against her skin, then gently press the tips of your fingernails against her and trail up a few inches.
That pulls a fresh gasp from her, and you take the opportunity to pull back and catch her eye. She looks nervous but anticipatory, and you tic your head toward the bed. "Shall we?" The line is unacceptably tacky by your standards, you'd normally have either simply used the motion as a wordless command or pushed your prey onto the mattress yourself, but she follows along with your direction and sits primly on the edge of it, looking chaste with gloved hands in her lap and a nervous smile as you approach. A line of text is inked in your brain, take time to ease off and work back up, so you refrain from pulling any of your clothes off for the moment and stand beside her. She stares up at you as you reach down to guide each of her hands up, sliding your fingertips slowly under the cotton and across her palms to push the gloves off. You can see how each touch raises all the hair on her arms, and when each garment is on the floor you press your flattened fingertips into each of her palms and lightly push her backwards onto the bed. You're going to take it slow and work back up, but there's no way you're going to sit on the edge of the bed with your sister to kiss like shy schoolgirls having their first lesbian experience.
You elect to straddle her rather than place a knee between her legs, and putting her hands on you isn't going to twist the dial any further than the fifteen percent you reached against the wall, so you move one of her hands to your chest, placing it in the right spot to give her a good angle to the sensitive flesh of your small breast; boys have failed at groping you pleasurably enough times that there's no way that you're letting your sister make the same mistake. She does better right away, and her touch draws an earnest moan from you. You keep eye contact through it and from her little lip bite you can tell that you're on a good path. You find yourself wishing you'd skipped the bra today, but there'll be time to take that off later.
Your lips meet again and Cadence generally manages to keep her attention well split between kissing and squeezing you, her other hand coming to rest on your waist. Her touch is delicious, and the fact that it's your sister groping you is stoking your fire, so you sit back vertically and trace your fingers along her neck, trailing over the amethyst on her choker, down the center of her collarbone, and then over to her breast, appreciating the texture of the fabric and the way it teases implications of the body underneath. Cadence seems to be withering under your eye contact, so you look down at your hand and appreciate the way that she squishes under your pressure, feeling your body and face grow warm at the tender moans you're massaging out of her. She still seems nervous when you look at her again, so you lean back down again and put your lips to her ear. "You're gorgeous Cadence, and you feel so nice in my hands…" Your horny brain wanted to say 'baby sister' instead of her name, but your growing attraction to the reality of your incestuous sex hasn't quite drowned your more prudent faculties.
Yet.
She shivers at your low tone, and you move closer to her ear for a quick lick and nibble on the earlobe that makes her moan-squeak in a way that earns her another compliment that you flavor with an affirmation of what she needs: "Your noises are so tasty, I'm glad you want me to take my time enjoying you." She hums another needy moan just from your words, and you smile. Listening to her is so easy. You could lean down to dig your teeth into her shoulder right now, but you'll take it slow…
Mostly.
You nip at her jaw and make her squeak again, then wrap a hand around the back of her neck to angle it up for better access by your mouth. The choker is in the way of the majority of her delicious neck, and you fumble with the latch with one hand while you trail your tongue over the exposed skin above it, ultimately failing and needing to lean back up for a minute while you use both hands to find the tiny latch and unclasp it. You toss it off the bed behind you in the vague direction of the desk, then turn back and cup her jaw, lifting a thumb to her lower lip and pulling it down slightly. "You doing good, Cadence?"
She nods eagerly, and you give her a little more to look at, pulling your blouse up and over your head. You half consider leaning down again and pinning one of her hands to the bed to make her learn how to unclasp another girl's bra one-handed without looking, but you can play with your food another time, so you strip it off of your own accord. And, there will be another time, you're growing confident. If you can keep the pace this even and know when to ease off for the night, you'll definitely be doing this again in the future. And, faster, once she learns how to handle your intensity.
Eventually.
For now, make sure she breathes. She's not doing a ton of it now, as she stares at your bare chest, her expression surprisingly fixated and seemingly awed. It surprises you, considering how often she saw you topless growing up and the last seven months in this apartment, but…
That's the point of taking things slowly with a romantic girl, I guess. To be fair, I only get turned on by seeing her undressed around the apartment sometimes. Context really does matter, I suppose.
You bring both her hands up to your chest and she broadly squeezes with one hand while playing with the other nipple with her fingertips, and you close your eyes and soak in the pleasure, moaning while you fumble with the fastenings of your slacks, planning to make them convenient to strip off later. Her attention to your chest stops disappointingly soon and you open your eyes, half-ready to tell her to keep going, but then you're surprised by warmth and moisture as her tongue swirls around your nipple, drawing an equally swirly and surprised moan from you that you'd have been proud to pull from someone you were stimulating. She spends a deeply satisfying amount of time attending to your breasts, switching between them not just once, but twice each, squeezing and licking and sucking with an enthusiasm as unique to her as her exclusively lesbian sexuality is among the partners you've bedded.
She looks proud of herself when she finally breaks contact and looks up at you, and you'd say she's earned it. You push her back down on the bed with a grin of your own and stand to slide out of your slacks to reveal gray lace panties matching the bra on the floor beside you, then climb back over her, nudging her legs open to slide one of yours between them. You can feel from the heat against your thigh that she's thoroughly turned on already, but your attention to her neck was interrupted, and you'll be rousing a higher temperature from her before you focus your attention elsewhere. You lean up to her ear and give a playful little half-laugh-growl before you slide back down to her neck, planting a few resolute kisses on her before trailing your tongue all the way from her collarbone up to the back of her jaw. Her breath follows along smoothly and you move into hickeys and little bites, but the more intense of the former and any of the latter spike the pace and intensity of her breathing in a way that sound more like catalysts for hyperventilation than the kind of smooth pace intended for the night.
Another time, maybe.
You pull away and return to kissing her until she seems more relaxed, then you slide your hand flat down her front until you reach the hem of her dress high up one thigh. You dance your fingertips back and forth under it and revel in the way it makes her eyelids flutter, then finally ask "You ready? I want to see you." while pulling the fabric up an inch. She still sounds surprisingly nervous after everything you've done so far, but she murmurs an "Mm-hm", and you both lean up and away from the bed together to get the right angle for you to pull the garment over her head. Before she can flinch at the additional step you tuck a hand around and unhook her bra to pull it off, and though it may be tedious, it is still kind of cute how she tries to cover up her chest as she lies back down without it. You know that simply exercising outright force to lift her hands above her head probably isn't the right tack at the moment, so instead you drop your fingertips to her sides to trail upward. You weren't sure if it was going to tickle her or make her shiver, but since it turns out to be the former, you nimbly snag her flailing wrists and gently press them to the bed beside her head. "You don't need to hide from me."
She turns her head to the side to avoid eye contact. "I know, I just get-"
You interrupt "I don't want you to hide from me. I'm your girlfriend, right?" She turns back timidly and gives you a little nod, so you encourage her. "You're the most beautiful girl I've ever been with." It's a bit of an exaggeration, but she could use the ego boost. You prod "You aren't dating me to hide from me, are you?" She looks down, but then back up to you without prompting. "No."
"Good." An idea: "Good girl."
Yup, that did it. Should have known.
Instead of her cheeks going vaguely pink and cooperating just a little more in response to the praise, she relaxes completely and stares up at you with a fulfilled little smile and a nod, in spite of a vicious blush on her cheeks. She gets another kiss as reward for her earnest cooperation, and then you slide down her body to tease at her nipple with your tongue. Her relaxed hands on your shoulders are a nice relief from the nervous tension you'd been expecting in her body, and it's scant moments before the growing heat inside you is catalyzed by the more intense noises that you've been thirsty for ever since getting back from that first shopping date. Her skin is so delicious, and god, she'd never be able to stay dressed for more than an hour around you if you got to exercise your sex drive as much as you'd like. Every sex-drunk impulse in you says to bite her nipples and drink in the little scared squeals you know she'd make, but there's time to investigate her amenability to that on a less delicate evening.
Though her voice and moans are breathy, her breathing is stable, and you feel like she's ready for more, but before you pull your attention away from her chest, you double check your mental reservoir of directions. Hold hands…
Not happening.
You resume kissing her, stoking the fire building in you by pressing your thigh between her legs, small smooth movements that distract her from your lips in a way that deliciously redirects her steamy moans onto your face. The sensation of power and control over your sister is intoxicating, but you're getting very thirsty, and you skip spending more grinding or returning your attention to her neck, lifting away instead and sliding your index finger between her lips for her to suck on for a moment, then you pop it back out and start to make your way down her body, looking up to maintain eye contact with her and watch the nervousness rising in her that makes you want to bite her thighs in ways that would probably cinch too tight a pressure over her engagement with the evening.
You laudably resist, stripping her panties off, and…
Oh, that moment, when your tongue touches her, when she cries out, thinking that she was ready for it but still ending up shocked, it's exactly what you wanted. She's putty under you, warm oscillations of twitchy energy…
"You're so tasty, baby sister." Who cares if you're calling out the incest that makes her nervous. She's under your tongue and exactly where she should be, and the noises she makes are so good. She's sensitive enough that within a minute you have to wrap your arms around her hips to keep her still enough for you to work. For such a timid girl she can writhe like someone trying to put on a show, and though you'd normally pause to force eye contact and tell her to stay still as an exercise of dominance, you don't bother, not wanting to distract her from enjoying the moment in whatever way comes natural to her.
You're starting to be washed in the head rush that makes topping submissive girls so intoxicating, and your pace on her increases, building momentum in her as the heat of your own body ramps up. The dial is getting slippery, and it twists up to 90% for a few moments before you feel a small sedation in her movements. You pause long enough to squeeze her hip to prompt her to look at you, and you see fresh timidity there. You accept the buzzkill of slowing down; you're not going to redline this. You switch to flat motions of the tongue and tender sucking at all of her that you can reach, moving a hand down between your own legs to play with yourself at the same time, keeping yourself hot and engaged while making sure you don't do too much to her.
Though it wasn't your intention to get as far as you do toward your own release, her noises and soft sensitivity to your lips and tongue draw you far enough that you finally sacrifice some of her momentum to push yourself over the edge, locking your lips on her to moan directly into her sex as your body shudders and pleasure washes through your mind.
Cadence's fingertips wander with little motions in your hair as you finish, and once your twitching ceases she tucks her fingers under your jaw to gently pull you toward her, so you follow her direction to climb back up her body. From her eyes you suspect that she wants you to kiss her, and once you start she kisses you back over and over again, the deep motions seeming to be sentimental somehow, and it's ratified when she pulls away to wander her hands and eyes over your body and tenderly say "You're beautiful, Ray."
You smile, about to give her a reciprocal compliment, but then her fingers find their way between your legs and gently brush against you, drawing a new shudder from you that distracts you from speaking. From the little smile that pulls up one side of her mouth you can tell that she liked the effect, and she dances her fingers over you, finding the right angle and pressure to make your legs and arms weak, your position poised over her in jeopardy. Her free hand lifts to play with your nipple with a surprising degree of force, and it's a lot, it's-
She hits just the right spot on you and your arms collapse, bumping your cheekbone against hers before your face skips past hers to land on the bed. You hear her give a little laugh close by your ear, and-
It's not fair, overstimulation is my job and she has…n't even come yet and how am I supposed to f…ocus-
"Ah!" Without warning her lips are on your neck and she's sucking on your skin with surprising intensity for not having led into it, and it's lighting your body with new sparks that make you huff and pant into the mattress.
Ap-parently taking it slow is advice for what to do to her and not what to expect-
"Ahh!" You suddenly pull away from a bite you weren't expecting, and your sister's expression cinches with worry. "I'm sorry, was that bad?" You pant a little before answering "It's just, bites are more of a foreplay thing, at least for me."
"Oh, I'm sorry…" She shuts her eyes and pulls her head a little to the side with a vicious blush, so you prompt her to open them again with a kiss. "Cadence, don't worry about it, it's fine." You indicate your ongoing enthusiasm by stripping off your panties and replacing your leg between hers, and the back-and-forth tide of the night returns to light sedation with gentle pressure from her thigh on you while you grope her naked chest more. After a minute you tease the intensity back up by tweaking her nipple, and you hope that her squeaks are enough of an indication that you can rev back up, because you're starting to get very thirsty to get her all the way off.
Her responses to the pressure from your leg guide you to a particularly unique tempo and force that you haven't practiced with any other partners, and her moans pick up noticeably when her hands start to wander over your body, stroking and groping at anything they can reach. You're surprised she hasn't pulled you in for more kissing, but with the way that her eyebrows are cinched together above closed eyes it seems like she's ready for you to move back down her body again. You trace your tongue over one of her hips, taking a moment to earn a shudder from her by lightly tracing your teeth against her skin, then your tongue is pulling her back up toward the peak again, heat building in your head and burning your eyes, feeling the dial of pressure in her body approach the maximum, wishing you had a third hand to touch yourself while yours work on her, and-
Her breath catches and she's silent for a moment, then it peaks in a high note that twists the muscles in her legs around your head. You pause with a wet mouth against her for just a moment while she shakes, then you resume your motions to follow her through the waves, her whimpers bleeding in and out of moans that you'd drink up all night, but as soon as her fingers start to frantically press on your head you ruefully concede and pull back, willing to not scramble her brain with overstimulation.
For now, at least.
You climb back up and make your sister taste the triumph on your lips, then lie down next to her and pull her onto your chest, her motions slow and half dazed. You lie that way for a long time, playing with her hair like you've always done whenever you pull her into your lap to comfort her in moments of sadness. A deep tension relaxes out of you, feeling content that you did your job, gave her the right experience, calculating and practicing new patterns and frequencies that should have created equilibrium in your relationship that you hope she internalizes as sincere and not transactional.
You let her steep in peace and quiet without investigation until she returns from a bathroom visit, and instead of tucking herself back into your arms, she scoots a pillow over next to yours and lies beside you to stare into your eyes. "Hey."
"Hey." After a second you get your question. "How are you doing?"
"Good." You must have shown some visible relief that you didn't explicitly register, because she follows up with "Really good." She reaches out and places a hand palm down on yours, intertwining your fingers. "Thank you for going slow."
"I should have gone slow from the beginning." She squeezes your hand. "It's fine, we got here in the end, right? That's what counts." You let some of the amnesty sink in, and she asks another question. "Was it like this with other girls-er-partners?"
Hum. "Yeah, when it was good." Her lips purse and the side of her lips pull up with her own hum. You want to know that reaction better. "Mm, is that bad?" She wiggles her head a little. "I just wish it was special with me."
"Why? …isn't 'good' enough?" She gives a little sigh. "Yeah… it is. As long as it's good for you too." Going slow was out of your normal procedure, but what really mattered was that it didn't hurt or overwhelm Cadence. You did enjoy it yourself too, in its way. It was deliberate and considered, and it feels like something you're reasonably well equipped for in the future. Intuition tells you that this wasn't just an on-ramp to the kind of sex you usually have, but something you'll need to do again; it's just a matter of figuring out when it's important. Your mind returns to the moment, and unless you just didn't pay enough attention in the first place (clumsy), her eyebrows are a little more delicately angled. You spin the vinyl of your memory back a few beats, and recall her last comment. "It's definitely good."
"Even though I don't know what I'm doing?" You give a tiny little laugh. "For someone who doesn't know what she's doing, you've got pretty good intuition." She seems a little sheepish. "I did some reading of stuff, over the years." The blush on her cheeks blooms stronger. "And some more last night and this morning…"
"I'd make a joke about you sending me what you've read so that I can read it myself, but how about you just keep showing me what you've learned." You give her a wink.
"Wait, you read smut too?"
"A few times, but I usually just hook up instead."
"It's that easy for you? To just have sex with whoever?" She sounds very surprised. It makes some sense that she is, but it really is just normal to you. "Yeah." She looks toward the bed for a few moments, then meanders into "You must have been pretty pent up not doing that for seven months."
A deep breath, and she asks another question, her voice tremulous. "What if having sex back then hadn't fixed things? Fixed… us?" It takes you a while to think, having less material than you know you should. She adds onto it: "What if I'd said no?"
"… Back to normal, I guess." It doesn't feel like enough, and the second the words leave your mouth your throat chokes, having to eat the fact that you hadn't thought it through nearly well enough before you jumped her.
Her voice is small and on the precipice of hurt. "I don't think I could have ever done that."
'Yeah.'
It doesn't make it out of your mouth, air seems like it's meant for someone better than you. You sit with the silence for a long time, unable to squeeze her hand like you want to. You didn't fail, but in your heart, knowing that you did that with the potential to fail, not having a backup, with no rational reason to think that things would be able to go back to the adjusted 'normal', you're a failure anyway. She drives another nail into the coffin that you almost buried yourself in. "That hurt me." You want to say sorry, but just like every other time you've had to say it in your life, your throat is a pinhole that the words are painful to push through. Another stud. "I tried so hard."
Speaking is easing pressure in her, but she's tracing her fingers across broken glass just lightly enough not to immediately draw blood. "It worked. It hurt, but every day more and more of it was locked up, and eventually it was just little tiny glimmers that were there and gone."
"You said 'no matter what'. I asked you for 'no matter what'."
"But not that."
Your heart tears and you squeeze her hand in a spasm, but it's not enough. Though your damned stupidity should have made her disconnect from you, you roll over and throw yourself on top of her, arms clumsily pressed against her sides below your face pressed to her chest. You hug her, probably way too hard. You try to choke it out-
'I'm sorry!'
It dies in your throat, and you try again. It's harder than ever, because it was the right decision, it did fix things, it fixed you and it's better and it's good now.
Again. "I'm sorry…" Too quiet. She needs this.
"I'm sorry!"
She wraps her arms around your upper back for a hug that half matches your intensity. After a few moments she tries to pull you up to look at her, but you're not ready for that. You still need to cling to her, to make sure that it's real, that she's here, that you didn't shatter her and yourself forever. You would expect tears, but all you get is needy heat, a wordless demand for her to stay, to not leave, to not let you ruin what you have now and warp what you had before everything changed. You can feel her body getting very hot under you, and you ease the pressure off from your hands, to which she gives a deep breath. You're still not ready to let go, and she wraps her arms around you at the awkward angle and lets it fade out for you.
You can't make eye contact when your grip loosens, and she says your nickname and traces a hand across your back as you shuffle off the bed. You loosely grasp it for a moment, then take a few minutes to hide in the bathroom. Cold water on your face cools off your self-hate, and she looks concerned when you return, but the fact that you hold her eye contact and lace your fingers again when you lie back down seems to soothe her worry well enough for her to let it drop.
After some time passes Cadence closes her eyes and breathes for a while, but you can tell she isn't fading into sleep. She opens her eyes with clear intention, and you sit for nearly twenty seconds, but she doesn't let her thought out. Her eyes seem to be flicking to your lips and back, and she has a little sharp intake of breath each time that she's trying to hide. You break the silence with a suspicion and a line you used previously. "You look like you have something on your mind."
She surprises you with a question instead of action. "Can I kiss you?" Looking into her eyes, you see less conviction than you think she should have at this point in your relationship. The last moment those two sentences were exchanged simmers in your mind. You ask "You really needed me to actually say yes, didn't you?" She nods and shuts her eyes to stop tears. You raise your hand to her cheek and draw your thumb from her top lip and down to pull her bottom lip open slightly. It doesn't open her eyes, so you make a little noise to prompt her. She opens back up emotionally, and you etch the words in stone. "Yes, Cadence. You can kiss me."
Before you can blink she's across the space between you to press her lips into yours, holding on a very firm contact, and you can feel her shaking against you. After a long time of trembling lips she pulls back, but you don't want her to live with this fear. "You can kiss me any time you want to." She confuses you by looking down, visibly sad. When she speaks, her tone is a chalice of fear that makes you instantly worry that you've done something wrong in the last few moments, before you register her words. "Can you forgive me for kissing you without permission?"
Your feelings about that moment so long ago have waned over the months, but you still hadn't confronted its reality again fully until right now. The memory still pokes into your jaw by reflex, but you take a few deliberate breaths and mix the memory of her agonized face from back then with the delicate sister in front of you right now. The old image fades, and the feelings along with them. A discarded seed fell into the soil in that painful moment long gone, and now it has bloomed into something better than each of you ever would have been without that moment of mutual pain. You reach out and touch her cheek. "Yes, Cadence. I forgive you."
Emotions boil over her features like a science fair volcano, and she falls into a limp, half-spastic giggle fit. She's such a sweet girl. The admission sinks into you more completely, and it relaxes a tension in your spine that you've held for more than a year and a half.
She opens her eyes again as the laughter fades, and once it's finally done she practically leaps over the space between you to roll you onto your back and attack you with her lips. Her energy makes you take a turn to laugh back, the noise smothered as it reaches your well occupied lips, and when she's burnt off all the pressure she slumps down onto your chest and moans with relief.
Breath fades into complacency, and then she has another question for you: "Do you know why I call you Ray?" She's just always done it, ever since ninth grade. "No, you never told me. Is it not just short for Reagan?" Her voice presents it in a little sheen of gift wrap: "It's because you've always been my Ray of sunshine."
-your sister's face, wrapped in a maroon scarf on brisk November day so many years ago, eyes bright and innocent, saying the nickname for the first time, the one that you've internalized as your own more than the one given to you by your parents-
-the kitchen, your sister slumped on the floor, her cheek red and emotions shattered, looking up at you with a dam breaking in her eyes before she buries her face in her hands and sobs, each wail of her voice tearing the air open around you and freezing your heart into stained glass of cold resentment-
-that night, seven months ago, her hair wet with rain and face soaked in tears, wrist clutched painfully in your grip, her eyes black holes in an obsidian abyss, so dull they couldn't reflect any light from the lamp in the dim room, all the brightness in her long gone-
A cage clamps around your mind. Your brain is trying to lock itself, shut down, stare right through the blame like it doesn't exist to save yourself from twisting the barbed wire of pain that you caused her back around your own throat, but panic is pushing the tissue of your brain through the bars and deforming the shape and you're awful, you're evil-
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm sorry"
-what the fuck is wrong with me, she's my sister how could I do that to her-
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry"
-why did I hurt her fuck how could I do that, she's Cadence she's my Cadence what the fuck did I do what the fuck have i done-
"I'm sorry-" -there's a finger on your lips but you have to say it- "I'm sorry I'm sorry"
Cadence's hand clamps down on your mouth and it forces you to stop, to come back to the moment, to see her absolutely freaked out above you. "Shh, shh, please please it's okay, it's okay Reagan it's okay." She's almost as panicked as you, and you both take long moments to slowly calm your breathing. Before she releases she awkwardly adjusts to straddle you, then she pulls her hand away slowly to grasp your wrists and pull your hands away from your temples, where you didn't even realize you'd shoved them. She holds your hands close in front of her chest, and she quietly says "Ray, are you okay? What is it?"
Hearing the nickname sparks it again- "I hurt you so bad I hit you I fucked you up I'm a monster I-"
"It's okay-no-" She puts a finger up to your lips when you try to interject past her words again. "We're fine now. Please just… calm down."
She leaves her finger there for a long, long time. When she continues she chooses to be honest, even though she can see the stake driven through your slowly calming chest. "It hurt, but it's okay now. We were both… bad, and we both hurt each other, but it's okay now. We got here. I'm okay, and I'm happy. And… you're happy too… right?"
That's what breaks through to you, your sister shining the beam of light into your brain that she always viewed you as. "… yes." You take a shuddering breath, hold it, then let it out with flat control. Your voice is more coherent than you'd expect. "Yes, Cadence. If you're happy, then I'm happy. And… I'm happy for me too." Another deep sigh and exhale. "This is good. I like this." She releases your hands and holds your face in hers.
I'm good.
"I'm good, sis. I'm good." She leans down and kisses you, long and tender. She leans back an inch, and she smells nice. Sex and some kind of perfume you've never noticed on her, something smoky and purple. She holds her eyes on you for only a moment, then she kisses you over and over again, taking long pauses between them, each one a word in a language that you don't quite parse, but the murmuring of her lips calms the residual black static in your mind, gently unthreading each of the strings pulling you taut. Maybe kissing is her being there for you too.
Eventually she pulls back six inches and her eyes gently hold yours. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I don't care how bad things were between us before. I forgive you, and… I think I can forgive me too. You said that you forgive me, and maybe it was just about the one kiss and not everything else, but whatever. I feel okay, and I forgive you. And now I need you to forgive yourself too. Please."
theartofmadeline
areudirty
blakekathryn
