Triptych, An Erotic Adventure (14 page)

Katherine and he would replay the scene in her bedroom, pretending to be the dogs. Crouching, rump to rump, falling over with their laughter. He remembered them discussing what this kind of behaviour was about. The male dog sticks its thing into the female. He remembered the hot and sweaty afternoon, not long after the framed picture of Romulus and Remus was hung on their wall, when Katherine first suggested that human men and women sometimes did exactly what those schoolyard dogs had been doing.

The man puts his thing into the woman’s thing.

Aaron did not remember ever having seen a woman’s thing. He must have seen Katherine’s because there were photos of them as toddlers sharing a bath, but despite their closeness they had been separated early in life, put in adjacent rooms, allocated different bath times even though they still used the same water. Aaron sometimes stroked his penis in the bath, and if he imagined that this was the same water that had
been touching his sister’s naked body only minutes before, his little penis would get particularly stiff and a strange excited prickle would spread across his skin.

You have a boy thing and I have a girl thing. So maybe I am not your Remus at all.

Aaron thought about this. Their parents were out at the shops and they were sitting on the floor of Katherine’s bedroom, gazing up at the painting on the wall.

No, he decided. That didn’t make sense at all.
You can’t see Remus’s bits in the painting,
he pointed out.
You can see Romulus’s thing but Remus might be made just like you after all.

Is your thing like that?
She pointed up at the painting and Aaron felt a little rise in his groin at the thought of showing it to her.

Not really.

Well, what is it like?

Why? Do you want to look at it?

Her slow decisive nod. Aaron could remember it even now, her first gesture of consent. The excruciating humiliation of that first reveal, the aching twitch of his erect penis as she showed him hers.

It was more this memory than the image on the screen that had aroused him now. He took hold of his cock and stroked it, pulling the base of it down towards his body. Katherine sometimes still gave him a hand job, yet he always found his own fingers more certain, even after all these years. She had too light a touch, she tired too easily, losing the
rhythm. Sometimes he wondered if his attempts, infrequent now, to pleasure her with his mouth had lost their power for her too. The times when she was on her knees before him he would have to concentrate to remember that he was not on his own.

The dog recovered in an instant. If only Aaron still possessed that kind of stamina. In the early days of living with his sister as if they were husband and wife, he was sometimes so overwhelmed by the idea that he could have sex with her whenever he liked that—lying in a pool of his own sweat, his face smeared with her juices, the condom still hugging his exhausted penis after their second coupling of the evening— he would catch just a glimpse of her spit-slicked breast and begin to harden for a third time. It seemed his lust for her would never come to an end.

He watched the dog sniffing around Rachel’s thighs; she had assumed the submissive position. The delicate fingers of her friend, Leda, were buried to the knuckles in Rachel’s glistening slit. Leda held her fingers out and the dog licked at them. He noticed the red worm of its penis slipping out of its sheath once more. The dog leaped onto Rachel’s back and she pushed towards him, shuffling her hips to meet his. She was as enthusiastic as the dog and it was sweet, too, to watch Leda ease back onto the floor, reaching up to massage Rachel’s clitoris, helping the girl to reach the orgasm that she seemed so desperate for.

Katherine used to be equally excited about their sex.

Sometimes they would fall asleep, his penis still held into the heat of her body, her arms locked around his shoulders as if she would never let him go, and then, in sleep, her body would still be hungry for him. The soft dance of her hips rocking back and forth and him, inside, once again becoming hard.

His orgasm was quick and inescapable. He came, and it was the image of Katherine, waking from sleep, surprised to be already in the midst of it but pleased nonetheless, kissing him deeply and pressing her breasts against his familiar chest. This is what tipped him over. This was always what tipped him over. The dog ejaculating into the enthusiastic Rachel was merely pleasant background noise.

The dog pulled himself free and his penis swung loose, dripping onto Leda’s face beneath them. A sight that many a man would pay for, he acknowledged, but his own moment of crisis was still reserved for the image of his sister-wife.

They agreed to meet again. They would, he supposed. This could be the beginning of a regular occurrence. They mentioned a barn, horses, and Rachel’s human mate who was not able to join them on this particular occasion. A pack, they called it, a family of lovers.

Aaron was not so much aroused by the bestial mating as intrigued by the strange mechanics of the thing. Yes, he would love to see them with the horses, mostly because he could not exactly imagine how that copulation would occur. And he quite liked Leda, the slight waist and dark thick hair
that reminded him of the woman he loved. All roads led back to Katherine, it seemed.

Aaron closed the computer. He was suddenly exhausted. He dabbed at the dampness in his lap with a tissue. The apartment always seemed ominously empty at the end of one of these sessions, so that he occasionally wondered if he would bother again.

But they passed the time. Without the distraction of sex on a screen there would be just a large first-floor apartment looking out to another apartment block and another behind that. Lonely people, of course, stacked like Lego.

His life with Katherine was relatively insignificant when viewed, say, from the apartment across the road. Perhaps they would be shocked, those Lego people, to know that Katherine and Aaron Fitzgerald had shared a surname since they were born. Maybe there would be a raised eyebrow, nothing more.

Their sex life had begun in secret, the idea that they would be discovered was, perhaps, part of the initial spark. But they quickly moved from that first delicious revelation to other, more penetrative explorations.

Their parents, active in the church, were often out of the house performing good deeds, taking meals to the sick and the elderly, doing odd jobs at the church hall or organising plays with the youth group. They structured their dinner times as the pastor structured the morning services. The family would sit at the dinner table, stiff white napkins laid out across their laps. There would be thanks through prayer before the meal
and a main course of cautionary tales, followed by the news of the day and family notices during dessert.

‘Your mother and I will be visiting Mrs Leonard tomorrow afternoon. Aaron, you will have to walk home after school with Katherine.’

‘No worries.’

They would eat their dinner with trembling fingers. An afternoon without their parents meant an afternoon of furtive exploration. They did not need to glance at each other to know that they had both begun, very slightly, to tremble. That night they would lie sleepless in their adjoining rooms. Aaron would scratch at the thin layer of plasterboard separating his bed from hers. Katherine would tap back. They had arranged their beds at exactly the same distance from the back wall. An aerial view of the house would look like a double bed with a partition bisecting it. They chose matching blankets, matching sheets. They even chose matching furniture and the same pale green paint for their walls, despite their parents’ suggestion that Katherine might like something warmer, a salmon colour or at least a peach.

Katherine had begun to shoot up to her full height and flesh out. She was racing ahead of her younger brother, who had only just begun to feel the first hormonal rush towards adulthood. Her body was a wonder to him and he often pressed his own pitiful flesh against the leaf-green wall, imagining that she would be pressing her ripening breasts against her side at that same moment.

On this particular occasion they walked home from school together in silence. They barely glanced at each other and yet, whenever their fingers touched, a jolt of excitement passed between them. Aaron’s little penis was rigid by the time they arrived back at the house.

Their parents were not there, of course, and Aaron could barely manage the key in the lock. He dropped it and was forced to bend and rummage in the mulched garden bed at the side of the front steps. Katherine, as always, was much calmer about it all. She took the key from his trembling fingers and fitted it easily into the lock.

‘I’ll get it, Romulus,’ she said. Aaron’s mouth was too dry to manage the reply—
thank you, Remus
—that he customarily gave.

Inside the house she was miraculously calm. She made them each a chocolate milk and Aaron gulped his too quickly, making sure to wipe his mouth, knowing that she would never kiss him with a childish chocolate moustache.

‘Good boy, Romulus,’ she told him then. ‘You drank all your milk and now Remus is going to give you your prize.’

She held his hand and led him to her bedroom. It always happened in her bedroom.

Aaron let Katherine lead the way. She had been the first into the world and had beaten him to every milestone since. Katherine was the one to steal the half-bottle of crème de menthe from the dusty sideboard, pulling back her heavy winter coat for him to see the neck of it nestled against her
chest. She drank first, of course, and she was the first to tell him that he would not enjoy the flavour.

In the exploration of their bodies it was his place to wait for her invitation. He was often afraid that his excitement would become too much for both of them. Sometimes when she let him touch her body he imagined he would explode, and the shrapnel that hurtled outward from his disintegration would lodge in her skin, slowly poisoning her with his lust.

This was the afternoon that they had been waiting for. He knew it even though they had not discussed the possibilities of an afternoon unsupervised; she knew it too. Somehow her actions seemed weighted with purpose, the chocolate milk presented like a magic potion in a silver chalice, the few steps to her bedroom a ceremonial progress.

She unbuttoned his shirt first and he could see the thudding of his heart through the skin of his scrawny chest. Katherine began to take her school dress off, struggling with the zipper. He knew he should help her with it, but he felt as if his hands had swelled to the size of melons. He would only fumble roughly with the thin summer fabric. He was the Incredible Hulk from the comic book; in his clumsy exuberance he would somehow damage his delicate sister if he so much as attempted to unhook the clasp of her bra.

When Katherine had finished peeling their clothes off them they stood naked in the middle of the room. The she-wolf peered down maternally from her place on the wall as Katherine took Aaron’s head between gentle hands and guided
his mouth onto her breast. He had seen these breasts appear, growing as if by magic, from two shapeless little pads to these perfect globes. His mouth watered every time he caught a glimpse of her erect nipples through the fabric of her uniform. It was difficult not to stare on those chilly mornings as they walked to school. Now, with his lips parting and the little nub of her excited nipple set firmly between them, he felt his own excitement bouncing up against his stomach. She noticed it too and slipped her hand down to curl around his penis.

How was it that Katherine knew exactly what to do? It was as if her body had all the rules of sex hard-wired into its flesh. She seemed to know just how to hold him in the palm of her hand, the perfect pressure on his penis, the soft comfort of her stroking fingers. Her body could excite and soothe, both at once. She dipped her head, craning towards her own breast, pressing her mouth against his, and found his tongue. He felt hers curl into his mouth, the two of them both tickling at her own nipple. The thought of this rang in him like a bell, an exquisite note that set his flesh to vibrate, and then it happened. The sudden rush of it. His knees buckling and his hips convulsing and he pulled back to gasp, and watch his penis throbbing in her hand.

There was spit on her palm. For a moment he was mortified. Had he urinated, just a little? What if he had disgraced himself and she was disgusted with him? But she looked up at him and no: nothing he did could disgust his sister. She was Remus to his Romulus. She reached behind
them for a tissue and wiped the mess; held it up for them both to investigate.

‘You ejaculated,’ she said. ‘That means you love me very much.’ He nodded, unable to speak. ‘And you know what? I love you very much too. Feel how much I love you. Touch me and you will see.’

Katherine lowered herself to the carpet and spread her legs. He touched the dampness, dipped his fingers into the wet heat and brought them glistening to his face.

‘That’s my way of saying I love you. That’s my way of saying I want you to put your penis into me.’

‘You do?’ They both knew that this was going to happen. The afternoon was singularly charged, with a kind of adult lust that they had not experienced before. Their parents were away. They were alone with each other. It was inevitable that they would approach that final barrier to the world of adult games. Aaron was already hardening and with this new information he became even harder than he had before the ejaculation.

‘Yes.’ A grave nod. ‘Today is when we do it properly.’

‘But…it’s not wrong, is it?’ Aaron knew you shouldn’t do these things with your sister. The other boys made jokes about it, and then mimed vomiting, fingers aimed at their open mouths. He had met some of their sisters and he had felt proud to see that his own sister was smarter, wittier and more beautiful than any of theirs.

‘It isn’t wrong if you don’t ejaculate inside me. I will get
us condoms next time, but for now I think it is safe if you just put yourself in and push just a little bit back and forth. If you feel like you are going to…’ she gestured vaguely at his groin, ‘do that again, you have to pull out. I know that will be hard but I will help you. Is that okay?’