“Don’t be an asshole. Just do it.”
Don muttered something about the union and amateur-hour horseshit, but Reg just walked out, ignoring him but still nervous. About how it was going to go, not about that cocksucker’s empty threats. Soon enough the curtain went up. People laughed when they were supposed to – Daniela sodomizing Kenneth to bring out the falsetto in his voice, Russ facing down the Wongs in a three-way cock duel that ended up with all the players tumbling into the orchestra pit. They gasped at Lindsey hanging from her labia (and unseen, from her waist and ankles) thanks to clamps and string while she drank water and told a few jokes about coming to New York on a two-day bus trip from South Dakota. Lots of applause for Russ’ touching solo spoken-word piece about wishing he could invite his grandparents to see his show, but how they likely wouldn’t understand. (The audience plant, an older woman, nearly missed her cue when she rose from her seat to blow Russ kisses, but that clumsiness just gave the whole thing a bit more verisimilitude.)
Then the finale. Reg could barely get hard, not even after a bit of surreptitious frigging. Forget the peeled ginger in the bum, it was the applause that did it. He was out there and hard and so it went well. There were giggles and quiet smiles between the players as they dropped to their knees or spread dry mouths and wet snatches. It had been two hours under the lights with nothing but the occasional draft from the wings, but Reg still had goosebumps. He wasn’t the only one. And they fucked. Boy did they fuck. The Wongs coated Daniela like she was a pastry of some sort; Jeanette’s face and chin were drenched. The cunt juice ran down her neck and stomach to mix with her own perspiration. That just made the effect better though, when they all lined up to take their bows.
Yes, the effect. Ten figures, all standing hand in hand, with big smiles and bow, with the traces of one another’s bodies pressed into the skin. Impressions of arms and ass cheeks, flanks and thighs red from being pressed into the boards. Across the expanse of skin, there was left a picture – a man and a woman, too many limbs and stretched across thirteen feet of glowing actor, entangled in the act of physical love.
Departures
David Findlay
My sister Cecilie was the last one home. By the time she arrived, we’d stacked forgotten aunts and brand-new cousins in the front room and master bedroom, Uncle Ron and his frightened-looking third wife in my old attic room, and me in back of the upstairs library. In the frenzy of relocation someone even moved my mom’s ashes in their ugly urn from the obscurity of her old study to the sill of a stained-glass window overlooking the front stairway. The guests just kept on coming, but I wasn’t going to consider letting anyone else stay in my sister’s room.
At midnight on the eve of the funeral, Cecilie arrived with an unexpected retinue: a leather-clad room-mate I’d never heard of and a quiet young person of indeterminate gender who held the door for both of them, then disappeared into the bathroom. Cecilie’s wardrobe took up three bags, each of them as heavy as I’d been when I worked security. I helped their grateful driver to prise each case one at a time from the boot and the back seat, feeling a little bit heroic as I bore the brunt of the weight. The room-mate was lovely. Her outfit was so distracting that it took me a moment to realize she was the same height and build as my sister, with the same waist-length blonde dreads and the same cat’s-eye red glasses. Her dog collar and air-soled boots were pink, accenting the shiny black surface of her miniscule outfit. She bounded out of the cab, shook my hand and began bustling packages to the porch while I held my sister. Cecilie and I hadn’t ever really given each other physical comfort before, and I didn’t want to let go.
“It’s crazy, CeeCee. Glad you’re here.”
She smelled like lube and lavender, and her hair tickled my ear. In her usual insanely high heels, my little sister was far taller than me. Cecilie pulled slowly away, kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “Bet you’ve got it totally under control, big bro. Isn’t Izzy a peach?”
The rare compliment found its mark and for a moment I felt like a responsible adult. Izzy? If Izzy was the room-mate, “peach” didn’t begin to describe her. I watched her ass flex beneath the tiny, too-tight skirt as she wheeled one of my sister’s bags across the expanse of lawn to the front porch. Dancer’s thighs, grey translucent stay-ups . . . a guy could get obsessed with that kind of shape. I allowed myself a moment’s fantasy of lifting her skirt and sliding my hands up the back of her thighs, cupping her cheeks, lifting the skirt higher, higher, all the way up until . . .
“How far up?”
Izzy was asking me about where to take the baggage, and I’d been caught ogling her posterior before we’d even got her into the house.
“Um, yeah, second-floor landing, then to your right. Cecilie’s the first door on the right next to the little washroom. Or would you like a hand with that?” I had almost caught up when Izzy popped the most massive bag over her shoulder and trotted across the porch. Her skirt crept higher, showing another hint of her muscular, round rear.
“I’m fine, Graham, but maybe you want to watch from the bottom of the stairs just in case I fall?”
I looked down, chastened, and imagined the view from a tongue’s length away.
“Someday when you’re moving slower, maybe?”
Flirting with my sister’s room-mate(?) new girlfriend(?) was probably not a brilliant idea, given that Cecilie would be a handful to keep in line even if I were on her good side. Maybe Izzy would help? She certainly seemed capable of being a distraction. As I struggled with the other bags, their mute, androgynous companion came out of the bathroom. The three of them unpacked nonchalantly into Cecilie’s room as if it were the most obvious thing in the world that they’d all share her ancient twin bed. I tried not to imagine what they’d get up to beneath the quilt Gran Amble made. I tried to think myself calmly through the question of whether they were actually doing any harm by ignoring customary small-town decorum when every gossipy relative in the world was camped at our place. In Abercrombie, one doesn’t usually advertise three-way gender-queer liaisons as blithely as all that . . . unless you’re Cecilie.
When everyone was settled down, I brought a six-pack upstairs, spread my bedroll in the copyright law section and stripped down to my long johns. The moon was almost full, and the library was aglow with reflected light. Done with stressing about funeral arrangements, my brain turned to happier thoughts. I imagined Izzy’s ample cheeks spread around my stiffness, grinding on my face. The house creaked as only ancient oak can, and I kept wondering if I heard my sister’s bed over the other household sounds. It took many hours and a lot of beer to get to sleep.
When I woke the moon had dropped to the east and there were long shadows in the hall. One of the horde of relatives had spilled something foul in the downstairs kitchen. I cleaned up, nibbled at an excellent curry from the day before, and tried to get excited about reading an antique monograph on ownership and origination. There was plenty more beer in the back of the fridge, and there isn’t really a wrong time for beer. Time passed.
Our house has only been in the family since the sixties, but it was built long before the advent of indoor plumbing. The master bathroom is an opulent afterthought, with marble and tile hiding the odd angles, copper pipe girdled to the inside wall, and custom brass mermaid fittings that Mom found at some estate sale. An inset tub opposite the window allows an unbroken view of the disrepair behind our house, dilapidated outbuildings and unploughed fields matching the neighbours’ equally decrepit acreage. I had spent my first few days back alone, wandering the broken stone half-walls at the property edge during the daytime and soaking by candlelight in that huge, stained porcelain tub every night. Up to my neck in makeshift decadence while overlooking ruin, it was a good vantage point from which to remember the drama, trauma and comedy of growing up in Abercrombie. The luxury of that room was now usurped by relatives, so I tiptoed back up to the second-floor toilet, which is carved into a slant-ceilinged cupboard next to CeeCee’s room and as narrow as the master bathroom is wide. I slipped in just as a lithe shape grabbed the door.
Dad’s plaid bathrobe was tied loosely at her waist, flapping open as she pulled the door closed. I recognized my sister’s panties: gauzy pink silk that shouldn’t still have been intact. Flooded with shame, I remembered sneaking those and additional handfuls of her underwear from the laundry hamper, making off with them to this very bathroom. Smelling them, touching them, touching myself as I inhaled her scent, bringing them redolent and sticky back to the laundry room on days when it was my turn to do the household wash. Even if I hadn’t been exponentially increasing the wear on them, they should have long ago been outgrown and discarded. CeeCee goes through clothes like most people go through Kleenex. She would be thirty in days, and I first jerked off in those panties when the two-year gap between us felt like aeons, when she and I were snarling teens who barely spoke to each other at school. Nobody keeps underwear for seventeen years!
“I guess she was right.”
“I beg your pardon? Sorry, you’re welcome to use the bathroom, I can wait . . .”
“She must have been right about you and her underwear. You look like you’re witness to the ghost of puberties past. See something you like?”
Izzy untied the robe. Her areolae were large and light brown, puckered with the chill. Her hips were wide, straining thin fabric. She reached into the pockets and drew out threadbare brassieres, more small panties, all of them familiar. I must have made some incoherent sound.
“Don’t stress, honey. It’s OK. It’s OK if you’re the kind of depraved twistoid who gets off on his little sister’s smalls. I won’t tell anybody.” She snickered. “Apparently it’s still working for you.”
Physically trapped, confronted with my own unforgivable behaviour and full of beer past my bladder’s capacity, I should not at that moment have been painfully, pointedly tumescent, but there it was. My erection was aimed through my long underwear, across the bathroom and directly at my sister’s gorgeous girlfriend’s snatch.
I blame the beer. I’ve never been exactly a model of restraint and impulse control. I’ve never been one who tries to resolve social awkwardness by grabbing for somebody, either, but that’s just what I did. I could feel my movements as if they were instructions to a faulty robot waldo: I flexed my shoulders and stepped forwards, reaching for the nearly naked woman before me. Izzy smiled and let my weight pull me past her, tugging my forearms to the left as she nudged my hips off balance. Her bare left foot did something subtle and sweeping and she caught my shoulders, effortlessly taking my weight so I didn’t hit the bathroom floor too hard.
“Careful, big boy.”
Standing over me, relaxed and apparently unfazed, Izzy tested the resilience of a flowered cotton bra. It tore, as did the cotton panties she tried next.
“Take those off.” She gestured to the long underwear tented around my slightly diminished stiffy. “Off!”
Izzy seemed mildly surprised that I hadn’t immediately, unquestioningly obeyed her. I was too shocked by the whole pattern of events not to obey. I wriggled out of the long johns and the hardwood floor was cool against my back. “What did you just do there? I’m sorry. I mean, what happened?”
Izzy ignored my questions. She bent closer. “Put your hands together up beside the cold water pipe.”
I complied. Far too easily, she used another familiar twist of silk to bind my wrists above my head.
Far too fast, I found my ankles secured with old bras to the radiator and the sink. Izzy immobilized me with the same smiling ease a flight attendant brings to their safety spiel. I was waiting for her to point out emergency flotation devices and air masks, but instead she knelt directly over my face. I nearly passed out from a sudden mixture of joy and shame-tinged desire. I could feel the blood streaming into my cock, feel it pulsing with each heartbeat. “What are you doing? Where did you get these?”
“On eBay. Where else? What does it look like I’m doing, pervert?”
It looked like she was putting her hand slowly down the front of the too-tight panties, taking her time, relishing my response. She was going to wake up the rest of the house if she kept talking so loudly. I saw her expression change as her fingers found sensitive tissue. I bucked against the air behind her. I felt the way I had after I got my first piercing, or when they pulled me out of what was left of my first car. Floaty. Unreal. A little out of synch with the outside world. She opened her eyes and stared me down, laughing. Her breasts did amazing things when she laughed. She stood again.
“Breathe, Graham. Inhale. You’ll pass out otherwise.”
From the robe pocket she tugged a piece of fabric that wasn’t actually underwear – a red silk scarf. It, too, had been a regular part of CeeCee’s wardrobe, and it, too, had been the target of my adolescent onanism. Once.
How had she known?
“I can explain!” I sounded like an idiot.
“No you can’t, and you shouldn’t try. This morning’s theme is going to be ‘honesty’. Can you handle that?”
I nodded.
“Speak up, Graham.”
Izzy gave orders with a gentle, certain authority I had never encountered before.
“What? Ummm . . . sure. I can handle honesty.”
“Excellent. I knew you could. Raise your head.”
The praise made me glow. Why should I care what this stranger thought? Why would I let her do this to me? Obediently, I raised my head and let her tie the scarf around my eyes, doubled over itself and wrapped twice around my skull. The world went dark. My cock bobbed stiffly and my bladder ached.
Izzy laughed quietly again. “Your reaction is very gratifying, Graham. Are you ready to be honest?”
“Yes.”
“I like honesty, Graham. I’ll reward honesty. Would you like to be rewarded?”
Her voice was close, now. She smelled of lube and lavender.
“Yes, please.”