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i.
the first time it happens is white-hot and unexplainable. it’s an unreal phenomenon, it’s unprecedented, it’s scary and strange and makes your heart hammer in your chest and your hips tremble in a way you never imagined they were designed to.
you come with her name in the back of your throat, buckled and bucking up, teeth digging into your wrist harder than you should let them because you’re sixteen and you’re messy and your brother keeps odd hours. he could come home whenever he felt. he knows the sounds and he knows the signs because they pay the bills and, dear god, he would never let you live it down, would never let up on you.
but you come with your sister’s name in the back of your throat and you can’t breathe, you can’t breathe, you can’t breathe.
you miss her skype call that night, too busy scrubbing the sweat and spunk and shame off in a too cold too hot shower. you miss her next three skype calls. you meticulously craft half-hearted explanations and she brushes them off, feigns great disappointment and sorrow. you play along like you always do, pseudo-sincere as standard as you take persistent sips of water and hope harder than anything she doesn’t try again until you shake off the shame. (if you were a praying man, you’d make this a top priority.
you’re not a praying man.)
ii.
the second time it happens is a month later. it’s twenty three days later and you haven’t done it since, haven’t done anything. you try and control the thoughts, the whispers in the back of your head, the latent repressed desire. you think of how she would laugh at you for this, how she would lift a carefully-manicured eyebrow and take down notes in violet ink and confidentiality, how she would diagnose you for something-or-another and you wouldn’t understand what she said, reading level too high, words too long, no thank you, no thank you, how you would listen to her voice but not her words and oh, god, her voice, how her voice does this thing where it dips when she asks rhetorical questions, her voice when she makes droll fun of you, sultry and maturing, your sister’s voice when she explains things you don’t understand and her voice when she reads and her voice cracking over two shitty webcams and too many miles, she won’t be visiting for months, her voice when---
you have a problem.
you have a problem and the second time it happens you almost cry when you cry out her name but you haven’t done that since you were four years old and a katana caught your arm. you don’t cry. striders don’t cry.
the second time it happens is better than the first but so, so much worse and you really thought you kicked this, you thought it was a one-time thing. these things happen, you know because you looked it up, these things happen and they don’t even mean anything, a weird hormonal side effect, but the second time your breath hitches sweet when your finger slips and the vision of the perfectly generic girl on your lap twists and when you come it’s to an imagined chorus of oh, brother, harder, harder, wouldn’t bro be disappointed?
you don’t sleep too good after that.
iii.
in three weeks and six times you start to develop a pattern and with the pattern comes routine. in three weeks and six times you’ve learned just how long it takes for miss imagined flavor of the night to become something wrong and wretched and better and in three weeks and six times you know the inevitability of locking your door and putting on headphones. you know what will happen when you undo the button on your skinnies but you do it anyway, you do it anyway, you do it six times in three weeks and the intervals between healthy, vague fantasy and being a terrible brother withers to not enough time at all.
you do it anyway.
after the fourth time you realize she is an integral part of this, you can’t avoid her presence here, you can’t deny your mind what it knows it wants, so you do the next best thing.
you writhe facedown, open-mouthed on your sticky texan mattress and your calloused fingers worry the bedspread and you spread yourself as thin as you can, your legs as wide as you can, your patience wearing thin six times in three weeks and you earnestly think you may be going crazy from how much you want her, from the sheer fact that you do. your breath dies in your throat and your gasps ghost out into the too-hot room, high-pitched whimpers and needy pleas, too-falsetto, too-amateur, too-anything. you hiccup for air. you hiccup for air. you pause. your fingers slide carelessly over your clit (your head) and your breath catches as your hips lift up off the surface and your voice reaches intensity and
you
stop.
you stop before you can make this any worse because you have already come with your sister’s name in the back of your throat six times more than any man should and you hate yourself, you hate yourself, you hate this and you hate yourself and you hate how much you want her.
you have never had so little control.
iv.
after a while you lose count. after a while it became so commonplace you stop thinking to take note of the fact that it happened, yeah, it happened again because after a while you come to assume it will. it’s systematic: lights, body, stop, lights, body, stop, wash it away, wash away the guilt. repeat. you shower harder every time, skin burning bright, skin on fire. you scrub over the marks you’ve given yourself from overcautious sound-muffling and overzealous sound-production until red covers blue covers freckles and strife scars. some are new. some are attempts to get your energy out, to fade your head the way only strifing could, and sometimes that works. sometimes it works but not often enough and you scrub, you scrub harder than you jacked off as an unacknowledged rule, you scrub harder than you should.
bro notices the water bill and you ease out of it. it never really made you feel less dirty.
v.
it would be a lot easier if it was just about the sex, if it was about the masturbation, if it was about the powerful curves of her body and the fullness of her lips and the way she looks in the middle of the night. it would be easier if it was just about how much you like seeing her in those tight skirts she wears sometimes and how much you’d like seeing her slip out of them.
if it was about curves and lips and skirts, you would’ve gotten over this months ago.
it’s november 11th the day you realize you’re in love with your twin baby sister and you don’t eat for two days.
vi.
on your birthday you let yourself orgasm on purpose. you let yourself orgasm on purpose and you do it again that night and you let yourself orgasm on purpose and you and rose share birthday cake three hundred miles away on webcam and she says, happy birthday, brother dearest and you pull a face and she chuckles softly at you.
vii.
the last time you do it is two weeks into summer vacation, two weeks in the grey space between junior and senior year. you wake some ungodly hour before noon but the houston sun makes it too hot to sleep and you’re starting to get comfortable with the thought of this, with the rhythm. she was never meant to be yours and you were never meant to be hers but there isn’t anyone else.
you know. you try.
the last time you do it you’re long past trying to reserve yourself, far past repressing it. you get into it easily and your mind is heavy with sex and guilt almost equally, now, the latter barely winning but you’re sleepy and hot and used to the shame. it’s two weeks into summer vacation which means she’s coming down to visit. it’s tuesday morning and her plane lands thursday at one thirty and you’ve been preparing for her presence.
mostly in sweat and sheets.
now, though, you rut into your hand a little, shameless and unsynchronized. precome slips over your stuttering fingers. you bite the pillow. the curve of your spine illuminates in the patch of easy sunlight and you imagine her hand over yours, her skin slick with morning sex and tongue at the shell of your ear. you imagine the top row of her teeth grazing the skin behind, down, teeth grazing the skin of your neck and the crook of your shoulder. rose would leave sweet little bruises blossoming on your hips as her mouth worked your back, you think, digging your nails into the spot, she would grind against your ass and talk dirty to your shoulder blades. your thighs tremble as you try and stay bent like this, half on your knees, half of your chest supporting you. you gasp unevenly into the pillow, her name in that moment the only hymn you ever sang in your life, muffled, muffled, muffled.
you moan.
someone knocks on the door.
someone knocks on the door and you squeak a silent cuss into the pillow, take it from between your teeth and call, “shit, bro, fuck, go away, i’m trying to sleep here.” your voice is panicky and surprised and it’s not like you to put this much intonation into one sentence but you’re caught off guard, and your sister’s voice hums, “really, dave? you must’ve been having a marvelous dream,” and you slip
off
your bed.
“sup, rose,” you croak, your voice breaking halfway. it pitches too high, too obviously to seem as causal as you intend. you rush to shove yourself back into your discarded boxers and shades before opening the door and leaning, decisively careless, in the doorway.
“what, it thursday already? or was the wait just too much for you?”
you start to babble before she can respond. “don’t worry, i mean, it’s okay, seriously. i understand. the last girl just left, actually, you’re just in time. must be your lucky day,” and rose drawls, “oh? is that what i heard?” and your junk twitches minutely in your patterned draws as you brush the comment off. what you mean to say is, ‘her or one of the others,’ or, ‘oh, you know groupies,’ or ‘it’s a hard life, rose, but someone has to sleep with all these brazilian models.’
what comes out is, ‘what did you hear?’ you pinch your eyes shut soon as it comes out, too late, too late to take it back and all she does is lift an eyebrow and smirk.
“an interesting response, i must admit. shall i catalog it now, or would you rather i endeavor my reenactment first?’ and your brain goes offline, goodnight, that’s all folks.
so it takes you about twenty whole seconds to realize what she’s implying here, the way she’s fucking with you. the way she always fucks with you, how she always has, how she probably always will and how she will never, ever mean it.
“i,” you say. “uh,” you say.
“i see we’re making progress in the language department,” she mocks gently, and you regain hold of your mental capabilities.
“glad you noticed, lalonde. was up all night practicing, you know, i’m totally spent. how about we continue this conversation after the fucking sun rises?”
“glad you noticed, lalonde. was up all night practicing, you know, i’m totally spent. how about we continue this conversation after the fucking sun rises?”
“david, it’s a quarter past one.”
“what did i say about calling me that. ‘sides, what’re you even doing here, anyway? you hijack a plane or something, lalonde, were you just too excited to wait until thursday ? it’s cool, you can admit it. limit three autographs per person per day, though, so there wasn’t much of a point to it. i mean,” you wave your hand absently, “i know you were just pissing your panties in anticipation, but really, don’t you think you’re coming a little strong?”
her lip twitches. “’coming’ what? i couldn’t quite hear.”
“i said don’t you think you’re coming on a little strong.”
she smiles with a flash of teeth behind her black, black lips and says, “why don’t i catch up with ‘bro’ for a while and you get back to your… fans,” and you say, “great idea, later,” and you catch a rogue wink before you slam the door.
you spend the next seven minutes laying on your back in alternating waves of shock and humiliation and then the next forty six making sure you look just good enough for it to look like you didn’t try and look good for her.
it’s a very delicate balance.
viii.
rose had squirreled her way into your bed. the apartment doesn’t have a guest bedroom and your discussion of sleeping arrangements ended in a standstill and she squirreled her way into your bed with the vaguely feline air of nonchalance she does mostly everything.
though, okay, it wasn’t so much a standstill as much as you refused to sleep on the couch, bro told you to be a fuckin’ gentleman, little man, don’t make your sister sleep on the goddamn couch, and rose said something about sharing a bed with you that made your heart puke all over the inside of your chest pretty fucking fantastically. you agreed with a grumble to take the damn thing, you were a courteous as fuck host, rose, don’t say i never did anything for you, and you snuck back into your bed while she brushed her teeth.
but then she slipped in beside you like nothing at all had changed and you could feel her presence on the hairs of your neck for eons after, her warmth overpowering you, her scent like crest toothpaste and old paper books and home.
you fall asleep inches from her, millennia after she does.
ix.
“that all you got, strider?” she bites into your collarbone, rolls her hips to propel the thrusting. your head knocks back inelegantly and she exploits it, dragging her tongue up the hollow of your neck. the cold air on the strip makes you shiver and you can feel the area she left drum softly, weakly, with the beginning of a bruise.
you open your mouth to try and respond but she cuts you off with a kiss and your whole life narrows down to a single moment, the single sensation of her mouth over yours, her tongue over yours, her body over yours. you forget what anything else ever felt like, what it was like when she wasn’t part of you, when she wasn’t dominating you, when she wasn’t with you, and when she makes motions to push you on your back all you can do is oblige. whatever she asks.
she does something with her tongue that makes you jerk up like a fish on shore and she breaks away to trail back down to your chest while you gasp for breath. she does this thing in swirls that make you moan her name, filthy and long, drawn out over days and days and days. you think about getting to eat her out after this and push away the thought to make this all last longer, partially for yourself and partially for her but overridingly for your reputation.
(you’re desperate and she knows it. hopefully she’ll let you live it down.)
your whole life is set to a soundtrack of her name played out over minutes and crushed between milliseconds, roseroseroseroserose all coalescing, all converging to the point where it isn’t even a name anymore, it doesn’t have any meaning beyond syllables to string together when you’re drunk off her tongue and fingers.
nothing has meaning beyond her tongue and fingers.
“dave,” she whispers. “dave?” you could get off just to your own name in her voice. she shakes your shoulder with a third arm. you hear her chuckle beside-above-around you, a dark chocolate hum, and you can’t tell if it’s out of place or not but it feels slightly off.
the bed dips at your side and for a third of a second you hallucinate that it’s another rose come to join you before you wake up in a cold sweat and
oh.
oh.
“pleasant dream?” she asks conversationally. you want to die. you want the world to swallow you whole, take no prisoners, you want the earth to devour you so you don’t have to exist in her presence any longer and you want to die.
“uh.”
“mm. that good?” she leans down and kisses you, then, lips impossibly full, hand coming under your jaw. you instinctively melt against her, bend to her, tilting your head just so to make it go smoother and it’s the best first kiss you’ve ever had until you remember it’s actually happening.
“rose, what---”
“heard you saying my name,” she murmurs. “woke up to it, actually. you seemed pretty enthusiastic. you wouldn’t want the neighbors to hear, would you, dave?”
she tilts her head and makes slow circles on your cheekbone. “mind if i join on the fun?”
you open and shut your mouth like a fucking trout and she drags a thumb across your bottom lip and stops you. her eyes wander down appreciatively, hungrily, but her voice is suddenly serious when she asks, “is this alright?”
you nod against her hand and she kisses you. hesitantly, you place your hands at her waist, calluses grazing over too-soft skin and you hold her like you could break her even though you know without question you’re the fragile one. you aren’t really afraid of breaking her.
you’re afraid of breaking this.
you are so, so used to this being a dream, and when she slides one hand up into your hair and shifts to straddle you, you let out a little half-broken sound that you didn’t mean to make. you think you see her smirk down at you but the lighting’s bad and your eyes roll back into your head, head rolls back into the pillow. she dips back down and your hands tighten minutely at her sides, holding onto her like you’re holding onto life. you’re half dazed but now fully awake and you have no clue why or how this is happening but you’re content to let it continue without question lest you find yourself asleep.
all you can do is kiss her back with everything you’ve got and beg and plead you won’t twitch too desperately under her. your hands move down to her ass as if by gravity’s influence and she makes a little sound against your mouth that’s really more encouraging than sexual, like it’s intentional even though you don’t think it is. she sounds under control even like this and knocks your ego.
you spend minutes like that, passionate but not too fast, not too fast, and when she moves one hand down to trace the outline of you hipbone, you edge the hem of your tank top, you freeze. she pulls away from the kiss and away from you.
“is this okay?” her lips are swelled and flushed, her eyes half-lidded but blown. you want nothing more than her in that moment, you want her so much it hurts, but you aren’t really sure if you want her to see you as much as you want to see her.
you want the real her and the version of yourself you’ve fabricated, you want her effortless natural beauty and flaws pushed up against a natural, flawless chest, a dave with no scars, a dave with nipples that didn’t need reapplication. you want her to have the version of yourself you sometimes want to be when you’re feeling shitty, when you’re at your worst, when the dysphoria is at a climax. when you can’t grip your sword tight enough to cut through it so the blade snaps and the beast snarls back. you want to feel like you deserve her.
you hesitate.
you want to say yes so bad, to assent, to give her this and get what you’ve wanted for months, for years, honestly; you want to say yes and let her see you and to feel okay about it.
you’re proud of yourself but you aren’t used to that from others. no-one has seen your top scars except bro, and he’s… bro. he fucking paid for them, he manipulated the system to get your dismal insurance to cover some unnamed part and when they refused to fork over the rest, he did it himself. he’s seen you around the apartment in the houston heatwave, he’s seen you blog half-dressed into the afternoon, he’s seen you strife on the roof.
he’s seen your top scars but no-one else has. rose says, “if this is too much, i understand. we can continue what we were doing, we can go at your pace. and it’s perfectly alright to want to stop,” and you sort of look up at her and realize who you’re talking about here.
this isn’t some random girl---fuck, this isn’t even terezi. terezi was all sharp teeth and sharp words, she’d poke and prod and investigate. this isn’t that girl in freshman year who cooed and called you brave, this isn’t any of the girls before that 'experimenting with their sexuality.' late night skypes and pesters and phone calls flood forward, times she let you talk about things you didn’t plan on talking about, times she even told you shit, shit she didn’t tell anyone else. shit you didn’t think she told anyone else, anyway, and knowing how well you know her, shit she never did. this is rose, this is rose your---your sister, fuck, but this is rose, the person who knows you better than anyone, better than even you. better than she knows herself.
you nod and she nods back, you shaky and her almost grateful, like she wants this as much as you do, and. huh.
well then.
she slips her fingers under your shirt and you sort of come to, lifting your hands off her waist and replacing them over her own, helping her. your hands are a little bigger than hers, you note with a touch of pride, and the thought is buried at once by the sensation of her fingertips on your ribs. The fabric goes over your head and she studies you like so much dusty literature, pores over you like a lovecraft, reads you like a story she wants to savor. this is the first time you’ve seen this look on her face lit but anything other than a cheap book light or glow of lamp, and you soak it in like dying breaths. you don’t feel as exposed as you expected, though, you feel---appreciated? like she’s looking too close, yeah, but only because you’re something worth looking close at. you feel like making a smart comment but you can’t get your mouth to work right under this sort of scrutiny and attention.
“rose,” you croak like a prayer, and she looks up at you with stars in her eyes. “can i…?” she asks, and you whisper, “yeah,” and she does. she ghosts fingers over you like you’re something sacred and you swallow heavy. she traces strife scars and ribs and the subtle contour of your abs and you watch her do it, watch her fingers and finally her face. you’ve imagined her on you like this a thousand times but you never imagined it this way, never imagined the intimacy would be so intimate.
she brushes over one of your top scars and your breath catches. the scars have lost their feeling but the skin around them is ultra-sensitive and her deliberation is impossible to miss. she meets your eyes for a second, like a head’s up, and then ducks down to drag her tongue over the spot. you squirm beneath her, tiny noises pinned to the back of your throat and fingers tangling in sheets. you whimper and feel her smirk against you as you degrade yourself for your lack of control.
isn’t that what you want, though? part of you chimes in. you tell that part to shut up. it is what you want, fine, but it’s not something you want her to know.
she flits her tongue over your half-dead nipple and your brain crashes.
“rose, i. this---fuck---not really f, fair.” she flattens her tongue down against your chest and rolls it. you lurch under her.
“how so, brother,” she mumbles against your skin.
“don’t---fuck, don’t call me that, not---not ever, but not now, jesus christ.”
“duly noted.” her voice is quiet and low. “were you going to say something, or simply blaspheme?”
you groan, but only half from her grinding suddenly against you.
“your shirt’s still on.” you try to pout but you don’t think you have the facilities.
“oh? so it is.”
and then it isn’t. you stare at her as she did to you, taking in her soft curves, the folds of her stomach as she straddles you. you’re enraptured by the failing moonlight and the alien shades of blue it casts on her, how it turns umber-ochre to something entirely otherworldly. you wonder at how her hair falls in perfect, messy rivulets around her face and how you can only make out shapes on her face, just the shapes, not the whole thing. you drink her in and wish suddenly and strongly you had the lights on, that you could do this in the middle of the day. for a wild, timeless second you revel in her presence, thinking how you could drop what you were doing just for this, just to look at her half-clothed in half-there light. but you’re seventeen, you’re a wretched seventeen year old virgin. the only thing more incredible and daunting than this is the prospect of being able to touch her.
“so?” she says finally. it sounds like she’s going for confidently indifferent but you hear the undertones of insecurity, of her caring what you think. it puts you somehow at ease. you aren’t sure what you mean to say, or even if you mean to say anything in particular, but all that comes out is a deep, mindless “fuck” and she says, “in time,” and you sort of half laugh, half exhale at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
“that a promise, lalonde?”
she rolls her eyes at you but smiles, small and sincere and slightly doting, and she leans down and kisses you and you kiss her back. she settles down against you and you hold her. you hold her like you never held anyone, close but not suffocating, chest to chest, breasts to scars; you hold her easy and effortless.
she feels like home.
x.
you wake up at ten thirty seven with your half-naked sister in your arms and a feeling of freedom, the weight of love and wanting and being wanted displacing residual guilt. you brush a stray hair from her face and watch her eyelids shift against her cheek, and when she wakes she’ll kiss you long and slow and you’ll happily let her. for now, though, for now you sleep, content at the simplicity.
there’s a box of condoms outside your door with a note you’ll pretend not to read and you’ll pretend not to know why bro left it there, but you don’t know about that yet so you don’t worry about it.
he’ll be weirdly cool with it in the way he’s cool with basically everything and you’ll feel perfectly okay about everything in your life for the first time in a long time.
but for now you sleep.