Triptych, An Erotic Adventure

by Krissy Kneen

  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 t
heir 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?’

  And Aaron nodded. He was already climbing her body, hovering over her, holding himself up with his hands spread beside her shoulders. He jabbed with his hips and she shushed him gently.

  ‘Softly now. Slowly. Do you know what a virgin means?’

  He didn’t, but he knew how to be gentle when she told him to. He lowered his hips till he was kneeling with his penis pressed against the little wet slit. She reached down and dipped her fingers into herself and spread the juices over the tip of his penis, holding the outer lips open and lifting her hips so that the end of his penis butted up against the tight warm wetness between her legs.

  It was impossible. His penis would never fit in there. After several attempts, Aaron felt his cheeks blazing red and he rolled off her and onto his back. His eyes were damp and he rubbed at them crossly with his forearm.

  Katherine rolled towards him, pressed her naked body against his flesh and whispered in his ear. ‘A virgin means I have a little flap of skin that must be broken before you can get your penis inside. It is going to hurt me a bit. Everyone says it is “exquisite” when you get over the pain and there’s a man’s penis inside you.’

  A man. Aaron felt himself rising to her good opinion of him.

  ‘“Exquisite”. Isn’t that a lovely word? That’s what I want. I want you to be my first exquisite man, because I love you more than I love anything.’

  She climbed on top of him then and eased herself into position. There was so much of her wetness now that he slipped away, across the slickness of her lips. Even this kind of rubbing on the outside was almost too much for him. He wanted to be inside her more than he could have imagined possible.

  He saw her holding her breath and scrunching up her eyes and suddenly she was on him and slipping down around him, a gorgeous pained whimper and he was ashamed that inflicting pain on her also increased his excitement. He was a monster. He felt himself giving in to his own capacity for damage and just for a moment he wanted to cause her pain. He wanted to tear that little flap of skin she talked about. To hear her whimper again.

  Aaron lifted his hips to meet her and grabbed roughly at her thighs. She made a little sharp noise in the back of her throat and it was done. He felt the tightness slip up over the length of his penis. He was inside her. Inside the body of his sister.

  They stayed like that, a perfect fit, one inside the other like Babushka dolls. He knew in that moment that this was where he belonged. He wanted to stay here like this forever.

  He had found his home and there would never be another moment as perfect.

  She opened her eyes and stared down into his. Her pupils were large with her excitement. She began to rock there, lifting, settling down and the surge of lust was so overwhelming that it was only a matter of five thrusts before he felt the wave crashing over him. He lifted her hips off his and held her above him as his penis shuddered and began to pump out its second gush of seed. They both stared down at the place where the pearly drips arced up and into the new thatch of her darkening hair. When the shuddering was over she lay beside him and parted her thighs and they both looked in awed silence at his juices mingling with her own on the outside of her blood-reddened lips.

  Aaron felt like he would never again see anything so completely holy; he had never felt this much devotion in prayer. He bent towards her torn skin and kissed the tender lips and Katherine smiled and wiped the mix of blood and sperm and her own juices from his face. When his lips were clean she kissed him deeply, a curl of tongue, an exchange of spit.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘no one can ever part us.’

  ‘Blood brothers,’ he said.

  And she shook her head. ‘You can’t call me your brother anymore. I am a woman now. I am not your Remus, I am not even your sister now. You know, now I have become your wife.’

  Aaron nodded, and the kiss he gave her was a vow; and when they were forced to pull away from the kiss so that they could breathe once more, their faces were wet with tears. Tears for the death of their brotherly pact. Tears for the birth of a new kind of love.

  The bed was warm near Katherine’s body. He slid in between the sheets and inched over next to her. He still found her arousing. The smell of her skin, her hair. Such a familiar aroma, sometimes he mistook the smell of her sweat on a shirt for his own. This was the problem, he supposed. The curse of familiarity. Despite his desire for her it seemed, on the rare occasions when they did make love, that he was reliving a beautiful memory. He struggled to feel the immediacy of the act and, since his last birthday, he had begun to lose his ability to consummate at all.

  Katherine assured him that this happens to every man as he trudges into middle age. She had turned forty herself a few years ago and Aaron realised that she was speaking about herself as much as him. At one time her orgasms would rack her body, arching her off the bed as if a giant hook had fallen from the sky. Her teeth would clench, her toes would curl and her hands would make fists around the sheets, tearing them out of the neat hospital corners Aaron had made.

  The pulsing of her cunt was the most amazing sign of her shattering delight. He used to feel the clench, the tug of her muscles around his penis or his fingers or his tongue and it would be as if the palpitations might completely swallow that part of him. It put him in mind of astrological events, of a distant universe caught in the tractor beam of a black star, of planets wheeling around to their own death.

  Perhaps it was only these last three years, perhaps it was already five or six; but he thought the force of her orgasms had been diminishing. The dark star almost spent. His own planetary trajectory remained constant in this less volatile environment. He had tested his theory with a finger the last time he felt her orgasm, the gentle palpitations. More like a sleepy infant sucking without intent.

  Aaron had pressed his cold stomach onto her warm hip, draped one arm around her and let his fingers rest on the vaguely raised nub of her nipple. He looked up to where the Rubens print hung above them and wondered if now, after all these years, they had finally returned to their original roles suckling at the teat of life together: twinned once more in the manner of a brother and sister.

  Aaron was asleep when Katherine returned from her run. He slept away the mornings. Sometimes she would open the door a fraction and wait, damp with sweat, her hair a tangled mess the way she knew he liked it. Aaron disliked the way she combed her hair back for work, clipping it coyly into a chignon at the nape of her neck. He liked her best as she was at this time of day with her cheeks flushed from running, pinched red by the cold morning air. Sometimes, in past years, he would wake suddenly and see her at what he said was her most radiant. She remembered him reaching for her, the gorgeous eyes heavy-lidded, still weighed down by sleep. And she would risk missing her bus to go to him, their need for each other suddenly reignited.

  She waited, hoping, but he did not stir. Katherine sighed. She closed the door with a gentle click and crossed the corridor to the bathroom.

  Her morning runs were the one true hour of joy in her life. After her shower she would eat a light breakfast, then drag herself to the library where she would spend the day shelving and shushing and listening to the pointless prattle of the other librarians.

  It seemed that everyone else in the world found their neighbours endlessly fascinating. Apparently the distance of a swimming pool from a garden fence was newsworthy, so too a reality TV show about amateur cooks. There were so many of them these days that she could never really tell which show they were speaking about. Yesterday there had been a seemingly endless conve
rsation about the colour of the bathroom cabinet in some television renovation. Would avocado really look good next to aubergine? They might as well have been speaking about a fruit bowl.

  Katherine remembered, for a moment, the bedrooms of her and Aaron’s childhood. The light green paint; how they both fought to make sure their rooms were painted the same colour. She remembered the wall that separated their rooms, the sound of Aaron’s fingernails scratching at the barrier that separated them. The way she would press her breasts against the wall, just as she’d told him she would. The days when they had not yet touched.

  She remembered this time with a little thrill of desire. The impossible idea of Aaron’s body pressed against her own. Some nights, she thought she would ignite with the heat of her desire. She would set the sheets on fire and the lime paint would crackle off the wall and if the wall charred between them and disintegrated their bodies would fuse together as if they had been born conjoined, twins that could never be separated.

  Katherine dipped her head under the steamy heat of the shower. Aaron always asked her to use the fan, he worried about mould. But she liked the foggy damp that clouded the mirror, softening the lines and creases that had begun to appear. She was getting old. She could see it in her skin. No matter what creams or lotions she used, she could not banish the dry patches, the dark liver spots that had begun to spread on the backs of her hands. The cluster of moles that she had had on her neck since childhood now spread darker and more bulbous, and she wore heavy necklaces with her work clothes to hide behind.

  No wonder Aaron spent his mornings asleep in bed, it spared him the clear light of reality. In the evening, when they crossed paths briefly before sleep claimed her, there were things to hide behind. Soft lighting, wine, the crocheted throw rug she pulled over her lap and up to her thickening waist. He sat beside her on the couch. They hugged, but he did not really look at her. They never fought; they still found things to laugh about, they agreed on movies, literature, art. And yet she felt, as she had before, a growing distance from her brother. Her lover, her husband.