“Come on,” she said, taking my hand, “let's go up in the attic.”
Our bodies bedecked, we tiptoed down the hallway to the attic door and creaked up the worn, withered stairs. The heavy rain pounding on the uninsulated roof had cooled the air up there considerably. The place was a mess of old mementos that brought back-through our sensitive noses first- the whole atmosphere of our nearly forgotten childhood.
Toys, dolls, picturebooks, pillows. Old shoes, old clothes, yellowing comic books and warping, forgotten hit records. A book of snapshots: Sandy on a bear rug with an ass poking up that hardly hinted at the fullness of the one I was caressing and poking a finger into now; me in a short-pants Fauntleroy outfit looking very sophisticated and distinguished save for the gap where my two front teeth should have been; the two of us together, Sandy smiling gleefully into the camera and me smiling adoringly up at her.
The grey light from either end of the attic was dim, but it was enough to see by, and enough to smell by as we moved from trunk to trunk, digging up and fondling the most trivial and worthless objects, each of which was charged with a glowing aura of remembered, or imagined, joy.
One of the trunks was locked, but I pried off the lock with a screwdriver. None of our things were in it. Everything was our mother's, and bore the stamp of her college days-pennants, textbooks, dried-up flowers, love letters. Sandy wanted to read them but I told her it was none of our business. I was about to close the trunk when out of curiosity I took a large, unmarked, sealed envelope from the back. I opened it, found another, slightly smaller envelope, which I opened. It contained a stack of about a dozen eight-by-ten color photos of our mother in the nude, taken when she was perhaps eighteen or nineteen. I blushed crimson with embarrassment and excitement as I looked at them. She was posed at every angle, in all kinds of light, indoors and out. Her body was ravishing, and her face was exquisite. She resembled Sandy a good deal, although she didn't have my sister's catlike sensuality- her mouth wasn't quite as heavy and pouting, her breasts weren't quite as full, her hips were a little slimmer-but I couldn't remember ever having seen a more gorgeous woman.
“My God, she's beautiful,” I said, spreading out the pictures and darting my eyes from one to the other. I couldn't get enough of her. I waited for Sandy to say something and when she didn't I looked to my side. She had disappeared, had walked away and stood with her back to me and her face in her hands. I sprang up to her and encircled her from behind with my arms.
“Sandy, what's the matter?”
“Nothing,” she sobbed. I took her by the shoulders and turned her around with a good deal of difficulty. She still hid her face in her hands. I tried to pull them away as gently and as firmly as I could, but she resisted.
“No! Don't look at me! I'm ugly. She's been telling me that all my life and letting me know it every way she could and now I know it's true. Go look at her! She's beautiful! Let me alone!”
“Sandy, please…”
“Everything we've done today I know you'd have rather done with her, so let…”
“Oh, Jesus, are you wrong!” I pulled her hands away from her face roughly and looked with anger, pain and longing into her big, helpless, tear-stained blue eyes. “This is the only happy day I've had in my life since they busted us up. If you don't believe me I'll drown. Don't look away Sandy, look at me. You're beautiful. I worship you! Everything…” I licked the tears from around her eyes. “I love everything about you, even your tears taste good.” She cracked a smile. “You have the most beautiful face and hair and shoulders and tits and legs and cunt and feet and ass and eyes and everything. She doesn't compare to you. She's cold and skinny and flat-chested and you can't even tell what's behind her eyes. Besides,” I added, “she's too old for me.”
This got a quick laugh and a longer, trusting smile and she bounced back from vain, temperamental fishing- for-compliments female to sexy, friendly, purring feline. She kissed my salty mouth and squeezed her tits against my chest.
“I'm sorry, Terry. I guess all this kid stuff just piled up in me. You must think I'm a jerk.”
“I know how she treated you. She was jealous because we were so close.”
“You'd think I was the kid sister and you the big brother.”
“I grew up today.”
“Even your voice is getting deeper.”
“I guess my hormones got a workout.”
“I love the way your voice is getting, Terry. Read something to me.”
“What?”
“I don't know. Something spooky and scary. To go with the weather.”
I rummaged through a stack of books and found an old edition of Poe. I looked around for Sandy and couldn't find her.
“Where are you?”
“Over here,” she called from the other end of the attic. “In the playpen.”
I walked over toward the sound of her voice and saw her lying in our old playpen, posing on her side like a baby doll, sucking her thumb. Her unbabylike breasts precariously bulged from the confines of the tight black ribbon while the ribbon around her hips had fallen away from the open, inviting pink folds of her fuzz-rimmed sex.
“What are you doing in there?”
“Sucking my thumb. Come on, get in. It's still big enough for both of us.”
I climbed into the playpen and lay down against her, leaning my back against her soft thighs and resting my arm along her hip as I opened the book. She ran her long fingers up and down between my thighs.
I flipped the pages and stopped at a story whose name was familiar but which I had never read. It began: “During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.”
The story seemed appropriately goose-pimply and harmless until the undertow of the tale started to drag us to a direct, if not wholly conscious realization that Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeline, were expiring, had expired, would expire, were doomed, by their passion for one another.
By the time I finished reading the story my voice had become funereal and the darkness (though it was still mid-afternoon) had so thickened I could hardly see the print.
“Terry, I don't like that story,” she said, pulling me down alongside her.
“Neither do I.”
“What's going to happen to us, Terry-are we going to wind up like them? Drying up together in an old house?”
“Don't think about it, Sandy-it's all too far off. Kiss me and black it out of your head.”
“Undress me first-take off these damn stupid ribbons-I don't want anything between us.”
I ripped off the two strands of silk from her body as she unraveled the bow from my penis and then pulled the ribbon off altogether.
She lay back, her eyes burning into mine with longing, lust, love, vulnerability and beauty. “Fuck me, Terry, please, fuck me and don't ever stop.”
I lowered myself onto her and slid my painfully hard, throbbing prick slowly into her hot, resilient vagina while we both gasped for air and shuddered with the first foretaste of the joys that lay locked between us now. When I had sunken in all the way up to the balls and our pelvic bones kissed lightly we began to move our bodies together and I felt as though my whole bloodstream and nervous system were immersed and thrashing there, and they were.
The rain was pounding on the roof right above us. We weren't in any big hurry to get anywhere- dessert could wait, we were concentrating on the meat. Our genitals-like a hand in a heavily lubricated rubber glove-fit perfectly and, fully immersed, touched at every point. We knew instinctively, to the last millimeter, how long we could withdraw without losing touch, did so at every stroke and never broke away.
She had drawn her legs up around my waist as a kind of restraint against my too violent sallies which threatened to end the game on the spot. My hands roved around and into her ass, up her back, around her breasts, up to her throat and in her hair. We kissed, moaning, until I couldn't tell the difference between her mouth and mine and our blended saliva tasted distilled. We sweated against each other, heavily, until my body was anointed with her sweet secretions and her body with mine.
I wanted to go on fucking her forever and never have to stop, or face anything else in the world again. But after about an hour or two or three — I have no idea how long it was except that the rain was letting up-I felt a
