by Krissy Kneen
Aaron turned the computer on and looked for Susanna. She had disappeared; had been absent for weeks now. Of course she could have gone on holidays. Skiing. The people at Katherine’s work went skiing quite often. They took their expensive goosedown coats and bought single-purpose equipment and went off to Japan or New Zealand or Switzerland for a week or two. Perhaps Susanna would turn up again tonight. Maybe tomorrow. For now she was just a name on the screen with a little grey box beside it.
Aaron knew he was an optimist. When he was a child he had believed in Santa Claus for far too long. Even when the other kids at school had already stepped through to the world of cynicism he was still writing his Christmas letter and letting Katherine help him glue sequins to his felt stocking. Katherine, helping his parents in their seemingly innocent lie. His tears when he found out were all the more desolate because it was Katherine who had colluded with his parents. She sobbed alongside him, clutching his shoulders; he remembered the words of more than thirty years ago as clearly as if she had said them this morning. I didn’t want to destroy your dreams.
He looked through his Skype list and saw the name Rachel, lit up with a green glow of possibility. He closed his eyes and felt that same creeping hope, that Christmas wishing. Maybe his loneliness would conjure her like a genie. His Susanna, a woman he had never even seen because she never turned her webcam on. For all he knew she might be a man. She could be anywhere in the world. She could be a Maori man, a German woman, a matron with arms like a sailor or some balding ex-criminal with a teardrop tattoo.
It didn’t matter really. Whoever she or he was, Susanna had been close to him when no one else except Katherine had really spoken to him in years.
When the call came in, the tinny sound of it, Aaron twitched in his chair. He opened his eyes and saw the name Rachel leap up onto the screen. He hadn’t really expected Rachel to call him. She’d said she would, but he discounted every assurance made on the internet. It was a place where you need not be a liar in real life to reinvent yourself, polish the edges of your story. Change your identity one sentence at a time.
He’d thought he had seen the last of the zoo girls but here they were again, or Rachel anyway, calling him up at the agreed time. It was almost disappointing to see the name attached to the call. The zoophiles. Aaron wasn’t sure he could get very excited about their strange kind of bestial sex. Was the idea of two girls lying with an animal even remotely sexy?
He supposed he could disconnect the call if it was too much for him. That little boy who was so excited about Santa Claus had a sister who would protect him from his own expectations. Now, Aaron. Don’t be disappointed if Santa is just too busy to visit our house tonight. He has hundreds of other girls and boys who don’t have any toys to play with at all. At least we have each other. You have to try not to be too excited. Go to sleep, and I will be right here on the other side of the wall. Tap if you need to know I’m there, and I will tap right back.
Aaron’s cursor hovered over the jumping icon.
At one time, every incoming Skype was Susanna. It was her humour he missed most, the comfortable nightly banter. And although he had never seen her face, he missed his idea of her. She wore glasses in the fantasy he had constructed, she was studious but pretty. A blonde, he thought, because Katherine was a brunette, the most beautiful dark-haired beauty. Sleeping beauty. Heavy-lidded and forever exhausted from her day, tumbling into the kind of sleep that a pill might bring to other women. The all-encompassing sleep that hinted at astral travel, other worldliness, fairytale princesses.
Not a brunette, then. He had made Susanna into a cheerful, studious blonde, a literature student. She certainly was well read. She shared this quality with Katherine, they were both good readers. Aaron struggled to keep up, ordering books that one woman or the other had recommended, asking Katherine to check them out of the library for him.
He suspected Katherine hated the library. Once it had been a job that excited her. On her first day she had raced home to tell him that at last she could spend all day surrounded by her favourite books. She brought them home, great towering piles of them, devouring them greedily one after another, but her enthusiastic reading had slowed as the exhaustion of the daily grind set in.
Now she mostly read just one or two pages, struggling to stay upright on the couch beside him, her head dropping onto his shoulder, the fragrant waterfall of hair tickling his cheek as she slipped into her enchanted sleep.
She usually rose before dawn. He would hear her soft clatter start up in the kitchen so early that only moonlight poured through the gap between the curtains. Sometimes, when he cuddled with her on the couch straight after dinner, she would talk with him in low whispers, kissing his chest and snuggling into his arms. After a time he would feel her grow heavier, as if sleep brought him more of her physical body even as it made off with her soul.
He remembered the day Susanna stopped calling him. It was just like that, a sudden cessation of contact. He felt as if he had come home to an empty house, any trace of her gone in an instant. There had been no hint that she was losing interest in their internet play, she had seemed as ardent a lover from one moment to the next. He sat puzzled, a little hurt, waiting for her call for almost a week, too shaken by the loss to call up the usual parade of faceless torsos.
After a second week of silence he dragged himself back there, to the safe terrain of the chat sites. Men mostly, but sometimes women too; bodies in various shapes and sizes, some beautiful, some not; all prepared to masturbate for him with little provocation; each one a warm human presence located elsewhere. It filled in the hours while Katherine slept.
He closed the bedroom door. Katherine lay like her fairytale alter ego on the crisp cotton sheets of their bed, her brown hair glowing red in the pool of the bedside light. He blew her a kiss from the doorway and she smiled in her sleep as if the little dart of love had landed on her forehead.
He had always loved her—from the moment he was born, although he didn’t remember it at all. Their parents told them that he had reached out with his new-formed fist and grabbed Katherine’s chubby toddler arm, his eyes still without focus, his mouth forming its first ever grin at the sightless touch, the hiccupping laughter surprising everybody in the room.
He had bonded with her from that first moment and from then on every new and wonderful thing the world gave to him he would grab and drag—crawling first, then taking shaky steps, then finally running—to bring the new treasure to his sister, seeking her approval of every new discovery.
They were so close that in the years before Katherine shot up in height, most people took them to be twins. She grew to be a willowy beauty, but Aaron still remembered her as the boyish kid of their childhood, whispering her secrets to him. Running through the scrap of bushland behind their suburban house, daring him to follow.
One Christmas when he was nine and Katherine was still a twelve-year-old tomboy, their parents gave them matching prints of the Rubens painting Romulus and Remus, the wild and naked children suckling on the tit of a she-wolf. Even now, Rubens was one of Aaron’s favourite classical artists, a passion he used to share with the elusive Susanna when they were still nightly companions.
The zoo girls had a Rubens print on their wall too. He had glimpsed it through their webcam while the pair were demonstrating their pantomime of bestial sex, the talkative girl mounting the quiet girl as if she were a dog, panting and humping and nipping at her back. The laptop had been disturbed during their exuberant display and as it tipped he glimpsed the painting hanging above their bed. Leda and the Swan, the Rubens version, the one he and Susanna loved the most. It was only because of this painting that Aaron Fitzgerald had given them his Skype address.
They worried him, these girls. Their naïve brazenness aroused not only his desire, but a protective impulse. Some other men he had met on the internet would take advantage of their openness. Some men would film them secretly and post the video for profit. He was tempted, of course, to film th
is session for his own pleasure. How often would he get to see two girls cavorting with a dog? He could play the footage back if it aroused him; he could show it to Susanna. If she ever returned.
He watched the flashing of the Skype call waiting to be put through. No, he would not record this. He never had and probably never would record anything people showed him on the internet. He knew it was ridiculous, but part of him imagined that if he respected other people’s privacy they might possibly respect his own.
Aaron Fitzgerald accepted the call, raised his glass of scotch to his lips and rattled the ice.
Are we on the farm now? he tapped on the keyboard. After a second a figure emerged from the dark jumble of shapes on the screen. It was the chatty one, Rachel. The pretty one sat behind her, rubbing the short clean coat of the kelpie in her lap.
‘You’re not going to turn your webcam on?’ Rachel leaned towards the screen. She was wearing a dressing gown and the neck gaped a little as she bent forward. Aaron could see the soft curve of one of her breasts, that slight delay of image as she moved in discrete frozen moments. There was a strange excitement in watching this staccato hide-and-reveal, the thrill of a security camera, an element of covert espionage.
Aaron felt the familiar stirring in his groin. These relative strangers about to reveal their bodies to him on the screen.
No, Aaron typed, I don’t turn my webcam on anymore. I am afraid you have to take me (as it were) in the dark.
‘How do we know there isn’t a group of you, sitting out there watching us? Jerking off?’
I assure you there is only one of me and I also assure you I will be touching myself as I watch you. It turns me on to think that I will see you with your friend there. This is your friend?
He watched as the prettier one leant to kiss the kelpie on his neck. The dog turned over to let her scratch his belly and Aaron was treated to a display of the dog’s excitement as the woman scratched and rubbed the soft fur between its legs.
‘Sure. That’s my friend, but how do we know that you are even a girl? You say you are a zoophile but what’s to prove that?’ The chatty one moved back to sit on the couch beside the pretty girl and the kelpie yipped and flipped over onto his stomach, licking the woman’s chin and beginning to rub his hips against her leg.
You can’t know for sure, but you can choose. The internet is like that. You can close this connection at any time. Or you can take your clothes off and let me watch as that puppy mounts you, and enjoy that kind of exhibitionism for what it is.
The chatty one stood and dropped her dressing gown. Nice breasts, thickening waist…but none of that mattered. The mistake women often made, Aaron thought, was to expect that men watching them would be judging their bodies as they judged themselves. Very few women showed themselves on their webcams, and although Aaron found a certain pleasure in watching the men bring themselves to orgasm on the screen, his preference had always been for women; he would appreciate them for what they were.
He felt his excitement mounting as the chatty one— Rachel; he would need to remember their names—Rachel turned to her friend. The kelpie leaped onto the ground and jumped up at her hips, its penis stiff and red, its teeth nipping at air. He watched as she lifted her friend—Leda, that was easier to remember—by the hands and unbuttoned her housecoat. The body revealed was almost as slim and taut as Katherine’s body; she looked like Katherine, this one, a thick head of curled brown hair, a small waist flaring to more generous hips, a coy smile. Aaron was surprised that even amid his online infidelity he became more excited by someone who looked like his lover.
He unzipped his pants and took hold of his penis without removing his clothes. There was no preamble. Rachel, mistress of ceremonies, eased her friend to the floor and the puppy needed no more encouragement. The little creature jumped with a sharp bark onto the woman’s rump and, with Rachel guiding his penis into the right position, he was in and humping her.
Aaron was fascinated. The sight of this kind of copulation was so new to him he forgot to stroke his penis at all. He sat with his cock semi-erect in his hand and gazed at the bucking of the little dog’s hips; saw Rachel ease herself under the pair to watch the penis slipping in and out of her friend’s vagina, reaching up once or twice to stroke her clitoris.
The dog scratched at the girl’s back and jerked his hips sharply. The moment of ejaculation, Aaron supposed. When he hopped off from on top of her there was a brief pause; it seemed the pair were fused together, and Aaron was reminded suddenly of the dogs he had laughed at in the schoolyard, locked together tail to tail after the act, surrounded by a bunch of giggling school kids.
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.