by MV Ellis
We set a frenzied pace, pounding into each other as though trying to imprint ourselves on the other person’s body and mind. I felt something fuse between us, a deeper connection than we’d had before. It heated the blood in my veins and the love in my heart. It captured my mind and bonded our souls.
Somewhere along the way, rational thought left us and instinct took over. Our bodies danced to choreography we hadn’t composed. When I felt Marnie’s muscles flutter around my dick, I let go too, roughly pulling out of her just in time. The sight of my cum as it covered the dimples at the top of her butt was by far and away the hottest thing I’d ever seen.
I braced my hands on the rail and rested my forehead against her shoulder, my whole body heaving as I struggled for breath and sanity amongst the madness that Marnie had unleashed in me.
The conscience is a weird thing, and when I say weird, I mean fucking annoying. The dogged persistence of mine was a pain in my ass 24/7. So often I’d wished I could be more like Arlo—zero fucks given about anyone or anything unless it served his own agenda. I’d learned early on that not only was I not built that way—in fact, I was plagued with an overactive conscience. It stood to reason, really. I was opposite to my twin brother in just about everything possible, except looks.
My asshole of an inner voice had been niggling at me since before the date/not date. I questioned my motives for organizing such a romantic evening for a “friend” so soon after Arlo had ended things between the two of them. A friend whom I just so happened to have been in love with since the dawn of time. It insinuated I was abusing her vulnerability and cashing in on what was more than likely to be a rebound, knee-jerk reaction to the split. It repeatedly asked me what kind of asshole did that to his brother and his friend.
I had been forced to admit that I was that kind of asshole. I wanted Marnie so badly, and had for so long that my conscience had certainly had his work cut out for him trying to make me see reason, but just as I thought I’d silenced him forever, he kicked back in at the most inopportune moment. The moment I came back down to earth after the most soul-searing orgasm of my life.
I stared out over the city of New York below me and dared myself to admit that not only had I always loved Marnie, but I always would. I realized I wanted nothing in life beyond what I had right then—Marnie in my arms, on my lips, around my dick, and in my heart. It was the exact second I contemplated a real future with her.
Against everything my mind, body, and soul wanted, I pulled back from the rail and turned Marnie toward me. She looked up, startled. I was sure that prior to that she had been as lost in her thoughts as I was in mine.
“I’m sorry, Marnie. I shouldn’t have… This was a mistake.” The words were out of my mouth before I had any hopes of stopping them. Fuck.
The look in her eyes as she heard them would haunt me for a lifetime. I couldn’t recall ever seeing someone look so hurt. So broken. Not even when my dad died and us boys were in pieces. I felt this differently too, as I’d been the one to inflict this pain. Not life. Not cancer. Not bad luck. Me. I’d taken the heart of the person I cared most about in the world and torn it to pieces.
Marnie blinked rapidly, and as though magically erasing the previous exchange with the swoosh of her extravagantly long eyelashes, she seemed to transform before my very eyes. Suddenly, there was no trace of the hurt that had marred her features only seconds earlier. Her eyes shone bright, but not with tears, and a dazzling smile curved her lips upward into an expansive smile. She was nothing if not all showbiz. The mask was back in place, the one I realized with a painful pang of recognition that she wore most of the time. The unaffected, unemotional, tough-as-nails girl I’d first met in high school was back in full effect.
“Yeah. You’re right. Let’s just pretend like it never happened, then it never did. You’d never want anyone to know what just went down, right? And I’m sure as shit not about to spill my guts to anybody, so your secret’s safe with me.” She winked conspiratorially and turned her smile up another few notches.
I hated that this was who she’d had to be to make it through life, and I despised myself for the fact that I’d just made it onto the list of people whose actions had forced her to adopt this persona. Maybe I had more in common with Arlo than I’d previously cared to admit. I’d always painted him as the big bad wolf, but in the past, he’d accused me of being a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Maybe he was right. For all his faults, and there were many, the one thing everybody agreed about Arlo was that he was honest about who and what he was. What you saw was what you got. He didn’t sugarcoat it or try to hide it. He was unapologetically Arlo, and whoever didn’t like it could kiss his ass—and frequently did. I was the good guy, everyone knew that, but on what basis had I earned that reputation, and did I really deserve to keep it when here I was trampling all over Marnie just like Arlo always had?
A big part of me wanted to take the words back, to admit to the lie and tell her the truth. The whole truth. The facts from day one until now. An even bigger part wanted to beg for her forgiveness and ask her to be mine forever. But with my conscience in the mix, all I did was return her fake smile and light tone.
“Yeah, cool. I think it’s for the best. I should get out of here too, let you enjoy the day in peace. Take care.” I lowered my lips gently to her forehead.
She spun away from me, turning her back to look out across the city. “Okay. See ya. You can let yourself out.”
The bitter irony that we were conducting this incredibly fake and utterly heart-wrenching exchange while totally naked—Marnie with my cum slowly running down her ass, and me still sporting a semi—wasn’t wasted on me. What an epic fucking mess I had created.
I nodded, even though I knew she couldn’t see me, grabbed my clothes from the floor, and opened the door to the balcony. I dressed quickly in her front room, all the while telling myself to go back to her on the balcony.
The twenty long, fast strides it took me to walk out of her apartment were the hardest I’d ever taken. Each time I forced one foot in front of the other, I willed myself to go back, press rewind, and undo the hideous shitstorm I’d unleashed. Even though I knew deep down I was doing the right thing, that in a few weeks or months Marnie would thank me for not allowing her to make a horrific rebound mistake with me, at that point I felt like the scum of the earth.
I left her building, hailed a cab, and slid into the back seat, pressing my back against the cracked faux-leather, wishing to God I could just disappear. Because life’s an ass, not only did I remain very much present, but my taxi driver took one look at me in the rearview mirror, and I saw the spark of recognition flare in his eyes.
“Hey, aren’t you that guy? That guy from that band? The one all the girls love? Is it Marlow… something…?”
“Arlo. He’s my twin brother.”
“He has a twin? Wow, you sure you’re not yanking my chain? You look just like him.”
“Nope, not kidding around. I’m his identical twin. He has way more tattoos than me, that’s mostly how people tell us apart.”
“That so? Well, you learn something new every day. So what do you do?”
“I’m in a band.”
“Really? Well, that musical gene must be real strong if you’re both in bands. What’s the name of your band? Anything I would have heard of?”
“I guess so. I’m in the Heartless Few, same as Arlo.”
“No shit. Now I know you’re playing me for a fool. You’re him, right?”
“Nope. I’m his brother, Luke. He plays lead guitar and sings lead vocals. I play rhythm guitar and do backing vocals.”
I saw the driver’s eyes narrow suspiciously in the mirror and laughed a little. This was by no means the first time I’d had variations of this conversation, and I was certain it wouldn’t be the last. I always had been and suspected that in the eyes of the world, I always would be the “other twin.” I’d come to terms with that fact years previously. That was life. Some people
were destined to always play the lead, while others, myself included, would always be supporting cast, there to fill the minutes before the star of the show lit up the screen.
On the way to Ryan’s Brooklyn loft, I sent him a quick message to let him know I was en route. I had a key card, just like I did for Stevie’s place, but I didn’t like to show up unannounced regardless. I just didn’t want to go back to Arlo’s place, for obvious reasons. Besides, I needed Ryan’s honest, and sometimes downright brutal, advice on the situation with Marnie.
Me: Hey bro, you awake, and home alone? I’m on my way. Gotta talk to you about something. Stat.
His response was instant.
Ryan: Sounds ominous. Home and not busy. See you soon.
I let myself in and headed straight for the refrigerator, hoping he had something stronger than OJ in there. I was in luck. He had a few beers that would do nicely. As I reached for the opener to crack one, Ryan’s voice took me by surprise.
“Dude. You realize it’s like 7:00 a.m, right? Is this the morning after the night before, or the start of a big day?”
“Shit! What are you, some kind of panther or something? I didn’t hear you sneak up behind me.”
“I didn’t sneak, just walked. Besides, you can’t be that surprised to see me, surely? It’s my place, and you just called to say you were heading over, so you knew I was here.” True. He stood leaning against the doorframe, hair wet and dripping, a towel tied around his waist.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” I narrowed my eyes suspiciously.
“Nah. I’ve always got time for you, man. You didn’t answer my question before. Beers at dawn is more Arlo’s style than yours. What’s up?” He nodded toward the beer in my hand.
“Ah… so I fucked up. Big time.”
“Okay. Do I get to guess what happened, or are you going to tell me?”
I stared down the neck of the bottle at the amber liquid long and hard before answering.
“It’s big. I slept with Marnie.”
Sixteen
Marnie
Time was a funny thing. I used to think it was absolute, fixed and unarguable. That’s what they told us. A day was twenty-four hours. Each hour was comprised of sixty minutes, each of those was comprised of sixty seconds. A week was seven days, which in turn meant that there were 604,800 minutes in a week, and 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Day followed night, followed day, followed night, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
In reality, time was what you made it. Or in my case, what you didn’t. When Luke left that day, I did something I hadn’t felt desperate enough to do for years. Something I’d wanted to avoid at all costs. Something that I normally managed to resist, even when the urge struck, but that at my lowest point, I didn’t have the strength. I headed to the store and bought myself a sickening smorgasbord of high-calorie treats: family packs of chips, cookies, a gallon of ice cream, pop tarts, pizza pockets, and bottles of Coke.
I even stopped in and bought a family bucket of chicken and biscuits with fries at the local fried chicken joint. They were to be my starting point, given that they were best consumed hot. I’d made a dent in the rest of the food while the pizza pockets were in the oven. Then when every sorry scrap was gone, when I’d licked every crumb and every grain of salt, I’d washed the whole thing down with liters of Coke, chugged straight from the bottle. Then I’d headed to the bathroom and purged the lot.
After that first time vomiting in the bathroom at school, that had been it for months. Of course, on that occasion it had been purely accidental, a natural gut reaction—pun intended—to the horrific realization that what I’d hoped was my worst nightmare was, in fact, my waking reality. However, the sense of peace that came over me when I was finished and the numb silence in my mind afterward had lodged itself in my psyche. Despite the grossness of vomiting, the dull high I felt as a result had almost been worth it. I’d banked that feeling to revisit later.
Later hadn’t come as soon as I would have liked. After breaking the news of the death of my parents, my teachers then delivered another blow. As I had no next of kin or emergency contacts listed on my school file except my grandmother in New York, I was going to be placed into government care. The stranger in the principal’s office, Ms. Morgan from CPS, explained that she was going to take me home to collect a few belongings, then deposit me at a group home until a more permanent solution for my ongoing care could be reached.
I had blanched at the mention of going home. Of course, nobody in the room was aware of the scene I’d witnessed there earlier that day, so they had no reason to suspect I’d be terrified to return. I kept my mouth shut and nodded dumbly, sure that under the circumstances everyone would attribute my strange behavior to the shocking news I’d just received.
When I got back to the house, everything looked just the same as it had when I’d left that morning—the same run-down chaos it had always been. The only real difference was that the living room door was closed—which I didn’t recall ever having been the case in all the years we’d rented the shithole we called home—and sealed with police tape.
Later, when questioned by the attending officers as they tied up what they considered to be an open and shut case of double suicide in the small hours of Tuesday morning, I maintained my story that I’d seen and heard nothing untoward that day. I told the officers that I rarely saw or interacted with my parents in the mornings before school, or at any time, and that quite often they weren’t even there when I left for school. I had explained that the day had started like any other, and I’d hurried out the door, skipping breakfast, as ever, completely unaware that my parents were dead only a few feet away. Nobody ever needed to know any different, and nobody ever would.
I had languished in the group home for what had felt like an eternity, until Mia had come to my rescue. Kids in those places were watched like hawks for all sorts of reasons. I never forgot the feeling vomiting had given me, but I was never really left alone long enough to try again. Still, somehow I knew I would. I also instinctively knew not to mention my urges to my mandatory state-appointed psychologist.
I wasn’t an expert, but even in my limited experience, I could tell that the state care system was where psychiatric practitioners went to die. In fact, I was sure that Dr. Durven, had actually died some years previously, he seemed so unenthused by his work. At the very least, he’d given up the will to live, which was more or less the same thing. I’d wondered countless times if, like me, he’d found himself there through want of a better option. Or any option. Were he and the other doctors assigned to us last-chance-saloon, dregs-of-the-earth kids there against their will? Was treating us some kind of community service, or penance? It definitely seemed that way.
Though I doubted he would take any proper or relevant action even if I had told him, I decided it was for the best that those details were not on my record. That being the case, when Mia finally got custody of me, she had no idea it was even a thing. To be fair, it kind of wasn’t. At that stage, I hadn’t actually done anything, just thought about it. Again, it was months in Mia’s care before I was able to make those thoughts a reality, when left alone in the house one evening while Mia was at her monthly social craft club meet-up.
As soon as she left the house, in what I was later to realize was a total rookie error, I’d gone through the kitchen cupboards like a tornado, scarfing down everything edible in sight. Having a well-stocked kitchen had been such a novelty when I’d moved in with Mia that I had totally been obsessing about eating all the things since day one there.
It was only when a few hours after I’d completed my wild feeding frenzy and the warm and numb feels I got from barfing it all up again had worn off, that I realized that I was going to have to explain to Mia why her previously groaning pantry shelves were now almost bare. In the event, I’d lied and told her that I’d had friends around in her absence, who were hungry, hungry hippos and as a result had proceeded to eat her out of house and home.
I wasn�
��t sure if she’d bought it, but she didn’t raise any objections except to my having friends over to the house without her prior knowledge or permission. I was able to safely assure her that it would never happen again, given that it had never happened in the first place and no such group of hungry and gregarious friends existed. In fact, no group of friends existed. Period. I made a note to better cover my tracks in the future, which I did, and as far as I was aware, Mia had gone to her grave with no inkling of my secret shame. And there was definitely shame. Unlike when I’d barfed on impulse at school, that day I felt immense guilt for causing the vomiting myself.
And yet I hoarded money like a miser—pocket money, lunch money, birthday money, any other chicken change that came my way—knowing I’d seek that outlet again. When I had enough money for a large food stash, and a Mia-less opportunity arose, I’d go buy everything that was on my mental “to eat” list, eat it, then purge it. I quickly became addicted to the temporary feeling of peace and serenity it brought me. The blessed release from thinking and, even better still, feeling was worth the effort I had to go through to achieve it. Before I’d embarked on that journey, I hadn’t anticipated how short-lived the “high” I felt would be. Then like any addict, I felt trapped in a vicious and endless cycle of impulse, relief, guilt, and shame. And repeat.
As thankless as it was, without that outlet, I sometimes felt that the oppression of my feelings would kill me—not through anything I did, or didn’t do, for that matter. I wasn’t about to end it all like my parents. I just felt at times like there was no way I could cope with continuing to feel the way I felt about all of the shitty shit I’d been through in my short life, like just the effort of breathing in and out under the weight of everything I was carrying would eventually get too much for me, and my body would give out.