by Anne Brooke
Ah, what happy childhood memories that phrase brought back to me. If only my mother knew that not chewing was really a plus point. Oh, she probably did. Oh, well.
Mark must have somehow followed the train of my thought or been indulging his own. “I had thought Liam did everything properly,” he said, with a hint of a growl as his fingers tightened on my cock.
“Well, of course,” was my mother’s reply. “From a son of mine, I expect nothing less.”
I smiled with what I hoped looked like innocence personified and took another mouthful—of stew, rather than anything else. After a while, Mark’s grip took on a rhythmic intensity of its own, and I had to try to remember to breathe normally. Whilst continuing to eat.
At the same time, I felt somebody’s foot ease its way along my ankle and up toward my knee, over my trousers. It looked like Johnny had no intention of being left out. If I’d thought the Delaneys having sex with me in the cinema whilst not watching Four Weddings and a Funeral was pretty risqué, I’d been as deluded as the man behind us. Because being felt up by the terrible twins under my parents’ dining table was surely the most dangerous thing I’d ever done, apart from how I came to their attention in the first place.
Oh, but it had been worth it.
Here and now, however, I wasn’t sure how reasonable it would be to slip down beneath the table and see to the twins’ non-food related needs. I had no option but to let them both have their way with me under the tablecloth, whilst retaining a wide-eyed smile on my face and a modicum of conversation.
“What are the gallery plans for next year?” my father asked, mopping up some of the stew with a hunk of bread. “Anything interesting coming up?”
I opened my mouth to reply, just as Mark’s fingers tightened ever more strongly round my cock.
“Uggh!” I said. “Yes, I mean, yes. Melissa’s decided to have a year of quarterly themes alongside the artists she’s already booked in.”
My attempt to sound like a sane member of the gallery community ended in a high-pitched yelp as Mark concentrated on kneading my tip, just as Johnny’s feet reached the side of my knee. My father frowned, and I made a brave attempt to carry on with what I’d been trying to say.
“She’s not going to do seasons either—too obvious. It’s going to be—ah—colors. Green, blue, black and red.”
“Sounds seasonal to me,” said my father. “Spring, summer, autumn and winter.”
I shook my head, focusing on him properly. “No, it’s not like that. Melissa’s got more imagination than the rest of us put together. She’s starting with summer.”
He laughed. “She would. Good for her.”
Then his eyes took on that intent my mother and I knew so well, and I wondered if the frenzied pacing was about to start again. Luckily enough, not this time as he bent his head and continued to make notes and scribbles on his sheets of paper. As I watched, the touches of both Delaney twins became less demanding and the intensity of watching my father work took over once more.
I’d almost forgotten what it was like. The way his hand instinctively carried out whatever his head was telling him and made him utterly unaware of anything else going on. How I envied him that. Sometimes I thought I might have come pretty close to it now and again in the days when I was drawing, but not with any of the stuff he thought I should be doing. The only pictures I’d liked were the ones he’d been disappointed in.
Which only proved you could never judge what you were best at yourself. As I’d thought…I’d made the best decision to stop painting. I was sure of it, wasn’t I?
I shook my head and turned away from my father’s drawing notes. It was only then I realized everyone was staring at me and nobody was talking.
“What is it?” I said, as quietly as possible to avoid disturbing the genius at work in our midst.
“You,” Johnny said, with a whisper and presumably taking his cue from me. Slowly, he withdrew his foot from my knee, reached across the table and took hold of my hand. “I’ve never seen you so engrossed. At least not when it’s not to do with us, anyway.”
“Enough, please!” my mother interrupted quietly. “Too much information, boys. Too much information.”
“Mrs. O’Connell,” Mark said, his voice gaining all our attention in an instant, except my father’s, “there can never be too much information, especially for people in our business, but I’m sorry on behalf of my brother, who can be rather trigger-happy, in many situations.”
He frowned at Johnny, who gave an apologetic shrug and let go my hand.
At the same time, Mark gave my cock a last gentle squeeze before easing away. He pushed his chair back and stood. He’d obviously made a decision of some kind. What it might be entirely escaped me.
“I think we should go and see Mr. O’Connell’s art now,” Mark said and gazed at my father, who didn’t respond, as he was still in that wonderful, magical world of his own.
Johnny gave the table at large a bright smile. “What my brother means to say, Mrs. O’Connell,” he murmured, “is this: perhaps Liam can show us around your husband’s gallery while his father is occupied. What do you think?”
My mother nodded.
“Darling,” she said, tapping my father’s shoulder as hard as she dared. Tapping was a fine art, in our family. “Darling, Liam’s going to show the Delaneys around your gallery. They won’t touch anything, and I know you’ve tidied it up, but speak now if you have any objections.”
Silence met her request, and my mother shrugged. “You go ahead,” she said after a couple of tense moments. “If any late disagreements develop, don’t worry. You’ll hear them.”
“Thank you,” Mark said. He headed to the door first, assuming, as usual, that Johnny and I would follow.
It was only as he was about to leave the room that the obvious difficulty occurred to him. He swung round. “Liam!”
“Yes, sir.” I trotted up to where he stood waiting for me.
“You need to show my brother and me the way.”
“If it’s not too much trouble,” Johnny added from behind me.
Oh no, the twins would never have to worry about that—nothing was too much trouble where they were concerned. I eased my body as close to Mark’s as I could get in order to open the door and saw his pupils widen and darken as our hands touched. If my parents hadn’t been in the room, I would have been tempted to offer myself to him right there and then, but I knew my mother would have insisted on my cleaning up afterward, and the domestics would have killed the mood.
I allowed myself a brief touch of my leg to Mark’s groin, which felt pleasingly hard and then I slipped through the door and smiled at the twins to follow me.
“See you later, Mother!” I called out, in case she was tempted to join us. I had plans that definitely didn’t include her, and which didn’t have much art in them either. I only hoped the twins felt the same.
I needn’t have worried. Even before I was halfway along the corridor leading to my father’s studio, Mark grabbed me and pressed me against the wall. He pushed back my hair and lifted my face up to his before kissing me, his tongue possessing my mouth and tasting of wine and spices.
“Mark!” Johnny whispered, just as I’d decided I was definitely going to get my lips around the cock Mark was thrusting against me. “We’re not at home now.”
He was right, but I couldn’t help a sigh of frustration when Mark disengaged his tongue and half turned to face his brother. Maybe parents wouldn’t be such a passion killer after all, as long as I couldn’t actually see them.
“I know,” Mark said, hardly bothering to lower his voice. “But Liam’s been teasing me all through dinner and I couldn’t take any more.”
Johnny laughed and folded his arms. “I’d thought it was the other way ’round,” he said, and I couldn’t help agreeing.
Mark snorted, and shifted so he was gazing straight at me again. “Liam teases me just by being who he is,” he said. “Always and in every way.”
“It’s all right,” Johnny whispered, so close his breath drifted over my forehead and somehow cleared my thoughts. “Mark will take you places, Liam, but I won’t let you fall.”
Keeping my eyes on Mark, I gripped Johnny’s hand as hard as I could and then, with my other, reached up and stroked Mark’s cheek. I was discovering ways of love I’d never known I could find.
I swallowed. “I love you both,” I said, “and I don’t care who knows it.”
“Good,” said Mark and gave me an unexpectedly refreshing smile. “Let’s see what we can find in your father’s studio then.”
As Mark unpeeled me from the wall where he’d been holding me such a willing prisoner, Johnny chuckled. “I don’t think my brother’s just talking about art.”
Neither did I.
Even so, my father’s studio always made me stop and look and dream. I hadn’t been inside for quite a while, not since I’d given up my own painting, and I hadn’t anticipated revisiting it when I wasn’t by myself either.
Today, the wild blending of color and light and the huge size of the canvases made me blink. I let go of Johnny’s hand, which I’d been clutching, and stepped toward the half-finished painting on my father’s easel. He must be waiting until he’d completed it before telling my mother. That was how he usually worked.
I stood far enough away to get the full effect. The scene was of a wood in winter, the clouds threatening the sky and the wind whipping the branches into movement. The tones were grey and black and silver, although just at the bottom, my father had included two small figures, one dressed in red and the other black. They were walking away into the heart of the picture, lost in the wind and the trees. Even though only half of it was complete, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I wiped the back of my hand over my mouth, slowly, just as strong fingers gripped my shoulder and swung me around. It was Mark. He stared at me, but said nothing. He was waiting for me to speak.
I swallowed.
“You see,” I said at last, not really recognizing my own voice, though surprised it was still so steady. “Look at how my father paints. I can’t ever be like him.”
Johnny padded around the two of us until he stood behind me. He touched my neck, massaging the tightness I hadn’t realized was there. Unbidden, a soft moan left my mouth before I gasped into silence again.
Mark licked his lips and turned his head from right to left so his gaze took in the farthest arch of the studio he could see and back again. He nodded.
“Your father has painted many beautiful and exciting things,” he said, “but none of them is as beautiful and exciting as you. Take off your clothes.”
“Here? In the studio?” I couldn’t help the question. It was like asking a worshipper to desecrate his church. In my naivety, I’d imagined Mark wanted to see the studio first and then have his wicked way with me. I hadn’t thought of them happening both at the same time. More fool me. And more fool me for questioning, too, because a frown flashed across Mark’s expression and his lustful gaze became an angry glare.
“Do I need to ask again?” he snapped.
“No, sir!”
Even as I spoke, I was unbuttoning, unzipping, pulling, tugging and stripping, and in less than a minute, I was naked. I liked to think speed under pressure was one of my great talents and, hell, by then I’d surely proved it, more than once.
Mark nodded his approval. “Does the door lock?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Lock it, please, Johnny.”
Johnny obeyed. At the same time, I realized just how cold the studio was. My father always swore keeping things cool helped the artistic muse, but it wasn’t having the same effect on me, though right now my muse was a very different one.
“May I ask a question?” I ventured.
“Of course,” Mark said.
“Might we have the heater on?” I pointed at the small portable heater kept in the corner of the studio. It had been placed there at my mother’s insistence, but, as far as I knew, it had never been used. I hoped it still worked.
Mark laughed. “You think my brother and I can’t keep you warm enough?”
“Not at all,” I replied, deadpan. “However, I like to provide the best possible entertainment to you both, sirs, so I have to make sure the equipment is up to speed.”
Johnny groaned. “I can’t bear much more of this. I’ll put the heater on. Although, didn’t we come here to look at art anyway?”
“Yes,” Mark said with a sigh, “but there’s no reason why we can’t do both, is there?”
There certainly wasn’t, not to my mind. As Johnny fiddled around with the heater controls and proved it was working, Mark gestured at the paintings.
“Your father is very good at what he does. Even I can tell that. I admire it because we Delaneys are very good at what we do, too. It’s a matter of pride. There are many things you’re good at also, Liam, not least of which is making my brother and me very happy. Very happy indeed.”
He paused, and I swallowed. “Thank you, sirs.”
“Now,” Mark continued, “when I decided to bring you here, I was going to make my plan easy for you, but having seen how little attention you were paying us at dinner, I think I’m going to be rather more demanding.”
Oh good, I thought, and my previously only half-hard cock began to perk up and take a real interest once more. Maybe heat wasn’t the main ingredient for a good performance after all.
Johnny laughed, stepped forward and brushed my tip with the back of his fingers. I groaned.
“Nice,” he whispered. “As always.”
Mark murmured a warning. He was good at that in a way no other man I’d known had ever been, and the sound made my cock even more excited. Which apparently wasn’t the reaction he wanted.
“Don’t get Liam too warmed up,” he warned. “We’ve quite a while to go before we get there.”
It turned out Mark’s plan was for me to be naked and paint. Whilst they did whatever they wished to me. It certainly sounded like a plan, but I wasn’t sure how much artwork would actually get done. Not to mention whether, after all this time, I could even produce anything worth looking at anyway.
However, I set up a fresh easel with a small canvas and found my father’s spare paints. I was surprised to see he still kept the brushes I used to use in the smaller of his two cupboards. I thought he’d have thrown them away.
Then, when I was ready, almost, I gave Mark a quick look to see if he still meant it—he did—and Johnny a longer gaze for courage. Finally, when I couldn’t do anything else, I smeared some cobalt blue onto my paintbrush and, heart pounding so hard I thought they both might hear it, dabbed a long line onto the white space.
When Johnny sank down, easing in front of me, and licked my balls, I almost dropped my brush entirely, and the deep blue paint spattered on his hair. I made a small noise in my throat—an apology—but Mark shook his head.
“Leave it,” he said. “Keep painting. The rule is this—if the picture’s not finished to my satisfaction, then you don’t get to come.”
Johnny kept on sucking and licking me, taking one ball and then the other fully into his mouth. It was hard to concentrate on anything artistic, but I resolved to do the best I could.
“Liam,” Mark’s whisper was once again more of a threat than a promise. “Keep your mind on the job. I want your full attention on the task I’ve set. Whatever Johnny and I choose to do, you keep on painting. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Gripping the paintbrush rather more firmly—which was, in itself, similar to the way Johnny’s lips were teasing my balls—I swept the brush upward across the canvas so a feathere
d line of blue drifted diagonally from the bottom left to the top right. It divided the rectangle of whiteness into two unequal but mirrored triangles. I would have preferred them to be more equal, but accuracy was almost impossible to obtain when one twin was starting a blowjob, while the other was standing silently behind me so I didn’t know what he was doing.
“Mark? Sir?”
“Don’t worry.” His voice came from near the vicinity of my neck and the warmth of his breath eased my fear. “I’m here. I’m not leaving you, and neither is Johnny. Trust us. We won’t let you down.”
“I know, thank you,” I said.
Actually, it wasn’t them letting me down that concerned me. I was finding it increasingly hard to think about any sort of art when my prick was waving about in the vicinity of Johnny’s hair. At this rate, it would be strong enough to hold its own brush in the near future, though I wasn’t convinced I could explain any of the painting results to Melissa.
Still, it could well start an interesting trend.
“That’s a fascinating beginning, Liam,” Mark whispered, as he breathed a series of light kisses across my naked shoulder. “I like the way you’ve divided the picture in two. You seem to enjoy things that come in twos, don’t you?”
Yes, I certainly did, but could you blame me?
While Mark nibbled the skin at the back of my neck, I spat on my little finger and feathered the paint more fully at the top where it was too strong. Something in me needed the canvas to be powerful, but not without kindness. Maybe Mark was right. Maybe whatever I drew, whatever I painted, even whatever I thought or did would have the stamp of the Delaneys within it. So much had they imprinted themselves on my blood, in so short a space of time.
“Go on,” Mark said softly. “I’m liking it so far.”
So was I, oh yes.
All the while Johnny concentrated on my balls, and Mark on my neck, I was able somehow to paint. Each lick, each stroke or nibble against my skin brought out another line, another thought or color. My brushes created tone and vibrancy, eating away at the blankness of the canvas and forming their own small world. It wasn’t only me wielding the brush, but Mark and Johnny egging me on, grounding me in my body so my mind could fly free.