I watched my sister break both her arms on television. ESPN2, the 2016 tryouts for the winter Olympics. She was that good. But being that good in Giant Slalom meant that when her left ski caught something - some divot, some stupid imperfection in the ice-slick snow over which she was hurtling, she went down arms first onto a frozen surface that was as hard as concrete. If you're a skiing fan or a sadist you've seen the fall on You Tube, and its aftermath: the tall girl, crumpled against orange fencing at the edge of the course, writhing in pain after her endless, rag doll tumble, her helmet lost, long dark hair pitched across the snow, both of her arms splayed uselessly at her sides, the bones between her wrists and elbows twisted into impossible angles.
*
Fast forward two weeks. My parents' home on a mountainside in North Conway in New Hampshire, Mount Washington in the distance. I pull up in my rented car, on a month's Family Medical leave from my job on the West Coast.
The conversation with my mother. Their trip planned for months, their tickets bought and paid for. 40th Anniversary. A cruise. South America, where they'd never been, and where, in all likelihood, they'd never manage to go if they didn't do it now. But Maggie, home, broken, helpless, depressed. Shit, who wouldn't be? Dreams crushed, maybe for four years, maybe forever. Thinking, shit, Ma, sure Ma, both of you go. It's never been about anybody but you two. That's why I put a continent of distance between us. While Maggie stayed at home and worked and worked at pleasing you, impressing you, trying all the way to the doorstep of the Olympics to satisfy whatever could never be satisfied in the two of you (and should have been by the simple decency of having children. Me. Maggie. Us.). And look where that got her.
Saying, instead, "Of course I can, Ma. I can find a way to make it work. It's only the 21st Century, I don't have to be there to work from here. Of course I can. I will. I wanna. She's my little sister, Ma. I'll take good care of her. I totally will. I love her. I love her.
I do.
I just didn't know, right then, how crazy much.
*
And so walking up the front walk to the doorway. Letting myself in. To my wood-paneled, throw-rugged childhood, to my sister Mags, one-time Olympic hopeful, sitting on a couch, quilt-wrapped, wearing a tank top that exposes both of her arms swathed in casts from above the elbow. She is watching TV: the first season of Jessica Jones on Netflix. Our beloved parents already gone on their second fucking honeymoon. And Mags, pale-skinned, wan with pain, giving me from the couch a smile that I didn't think she could be capable of, waving one cast-encrusted arm at me.
"Hey, Johnny," she greets me. The words mean nothing. But her voice says that she understands everything, and that, in the end in this house, she knows (we both know) that it's only ever us. Two fundamentally unloved children, bound to each other by love. "You here to take care of me, big bro?" she asks.
"Who else?" I ask her.
Who else, I think, in this whole fucking world?
*
"Okay," Maggie says. "The list of things I cannot do."
We are sitting in the kitchen, drinking hot chocolate that I've made from a pair of Swiss Maid packets.
"Well, some shit I can do first. Okay? Shit. And piss. I can shit and piss. And wipe myself after both. I can sorta struggle into and out of my own clothes. I cannot reach behind myself to do my own bra. Which I'm accommodating myself to, you'll be very glad to know, by just not wearing one. Bathing is a ridiculous challenge. Mom's been helping me and now I'll have some woman from Visiting Nurses coming in three times a week to help me with that. So I need you to cook for me but not feed me. I can manage a fork and spoon. I can make coffee and I can even pour milk in it."
"I can't believe they just dumped out on you," I say to her.
"Oh, yeah, Maggie says. "And Percocet. Every four hours like clockwork. Helps with the arms too."
*
Our first dinner: fresh pasta from a Whole Foods that didn't exist in this town when I left, with tomatoes, basil and mozzarella rounds; and a cheap but decent cabernet from Trader Joe's. We are both oppressed by being in our parents' house. Me more than Mags, I suppose, since I'm the one who ran away the farthest.
For a long time, we dance around the main event, but eventually I ask,
"So what happened?"
"Where? On the slope?"
I nod.
"Nothing. Everything. It was good run. My turns were all crisp, I wasn't nicking the poles at all, I had control of my speed. Then my left ski hit something, some little mogul-ette or something I'll never know what, and the next thing you know, my left leg's distended, and I couldn't control it, and I, like, totally knew I was fucked. And so I put my arms up to shield my face and when they hit, I mean, the ice was hard, Johnny - concrete hard. They had me clocked at seventy-four when I went down. When they hit, I heard them both just snap. And I have never, ever, felt so much pain. And then I do the whole tumble thing. You saw that on You Tube, right?"
"Oh yeah, babe. It looked awful."
"It totally was. So I just crashed into the barrier at the side of the track, and then it was just hurt, hurt, like, you wanna die hurt. And there's everybody running over. And, god, you know, Johhny, what I was thinking while I'm, like screaming there on the ground?"
"No, what, babe?"
"I mean, I knew I was fucked, okay? But what I felt really pissed about was that, Jesus, I had obeyed every rule there is, I'd been a good student, I'd been this, like, totally dedicated, like, Olympic level athlete. And they should have been proud of me, you know? Mom and Dad?"
I waited. There was nothing for me to say. I knew what they were like.
But instead, "Hey, I'm cold," Maggie says. "There's a reindeer sweater on my bed upstairs. Wouldja?"
I smile, run my hand across the top of her head as I go. Her skull feels delicate beneath her hair.
Her room, upstairs, hasn't changed since she was a kid. That thought makes me sad and fills me with a fierce protective love for Maggie. They should have been proud of her. They should have been anything. They should have been there when she got hurt. They should be here now.
We had shitty parents.
There was only us.
I loved her.
I love her now.
*
Back downstairs, with the thick, woolen sweater, its woven reindeer gamboling from shoulder to shoulder.
"You'll have to help me put it on," Maggie says miserably.
So I do.
She raises her arms to receive it, and when I bend to pull it over her, she gives me a brief kiss on my forehead.
"So you wanna know what I was thinking, big brother?"
"Sure: I tell her. Tug the sweater over her shoulders, her outstretched arms in their snow-white casts.
"That I'd always lived by every rule. That you got away, and I stayed and I obeyed and I did all the right things, and now it was all gone, just ruined, y'know?"
"I know, Mags."
"And I was laying in the snow, in more pain than I could ever imagine being, and I could see, hear people hovering around me, saying things like, oh shit, which really helped. And I decided right then that I wasn't going to obey a single goddamn, fucking rule for the rest of my life. That I wanted to be like you and get away and never do what was expected for me for the rest of my life.
"I'm not sure I'm all that rebellious, hon."
"Doesn't matter. It's just that, right then, I wanted to be as brave as I always thought you were, and just be done with all the rules and all the shit. I just wanted to, like, float outside my body and find you and just hold you and cling to you, coz' we're it babe, we're all we got is each other.
"And at the worst moment of my whole fuckin' like, Johhny. I just wanted to be with you. Does that make any goddamn sense at all?"
"I dunno, Mags. But it almost makes me happy."
"Yeah. Made me kinda happy too."
She moves her cast-bandaged hand on top of mine on the kitchen table.
"I'm glad you're here now, Johnny. There's nobody else I wanna be with right now, okay? Just you."
"I love you too, Mags."
And I don't know if I've ever said anything that true to anyone else.
Not ever.
*
She takes her hand from mine, tries to stand up from the table (How did it get to be ten o'clock?), half falls back into her chair. Says: "Fuck, I shouldn't've drunk that wine with the Perc's in my system. My head's whirling." Stands again, more deliberately, more successfully, but winces at having to balance herself with her left hand on a chair back. "Double Fuck. I think I need to go to bed. Can I leave you with the clean up?"
I look at her arms.
"Could you, like, even help with the clean up?" I ask.
"No, but I could keep you company. But I feel, like, too wasted to keep anybody company right now. Like maybe I talked too much."
"You didn't. Go to bed, sis. I got it here."
She leans to plant another kiss on my forehead. It is sloppier than the first one. Says, "Your drunk sister loves you." Then wanders out of the kitchen.
I listen to the sound of her stockinged feet move down the hallway and up some stairs before turning back to the table. I am rinsing dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher when I hear her voice from upstairs, yelling
"Fuck!"
I go to the foot of the stairs. Look up past the rows of pictures of the two of us, growing. From kids to almost-grown-ups.
With bruised souls.
And one broken body.
"Mags, you okay?"
"No. Doublefuck! No. Fuck. Help."
Upstairs. The door to her childhood room half-open. Still, I knock.
A muffled "Come in."
I do. And burst out laughing.
It's the reindeer sweater. She couldn't get it off over the casts. And now, somehow, it had gotten entangled in her tank top and the whole mess of her shirt and sweater was wrapped around her head. As promised, she wasn't wearing a bra.
My sister, tits out, head lost in fabric.
You had to admit, it was kinda funny in a kinda pitiful way.
Muffled "Fuck you, Johnny. Just help me get this off, okay?"
I sit beside her, manipulate the sweater and the tangled tank top up over her neck, head, upraised arms.
When freed, she says, "Don't laugh, you asshole. Then gestures with her head to a long blue t-shirt draped over a chair beside her bed.
I get it for her.
She is sufficiently defeated by the whole experience that she simply raises her arms and lets me slide it over her. I watch, with muted admiration, her breasts rise and fall with the movement of her arms. They are not large, but they are beautifully shaped. Pale pears of flesh, topped by pink, visibly bisected nipples. On a girl who is not my sister, they would, I think, be more than simply admirable.
Mags lifts her bottom to let the shirt slide comfortably over her. I watch her admirable tits disappear under fabric. I work on separating and folding her tank top and sweater as she fumbles with the belt at the top of her jeans. Then, "Fuck," she whispers and looking, I see tears forming in the corner of her eyes.
"Hey," I tell her, "let me."
I unlatch her belt for her. Look at her. She nods and I undo the jeans A top button, then three more. I am briefly, uncomfortably conscious of where my hands and fingers are and then she is loose. I stand away, and again we exchange looks that amount to a silent giving of undignified permission.
"Sure," I say, then, pulling from the cuffs, I tug her jeans down her legs. Again admiring, half against my will the skier's firm musculature beneath her skin. She raises and lowers her bottom again to ease the process. I fold, look at her, watch real tears coursing down her cheeks.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I won't laugh at you again."
"It's not you," she says. "It's them, It's everything. Two weeks ago, I could ... I don't know, I could do stuff. I could ski Grand Slalom like only maybe a dozen women in the country. Now I can't even take off my own fucking shirt. I feel like complete useless shit. And I didn't want you to see me like that, Johnny."
"What, your boobs? Mags, I've seen boobs before."
"No, not just that. Yeah, that too, I guess. But I mean, just so, totally, y'know, helpless."
I reach for her. Move a hand across one cheek, wiping .
"Would it help if I told you that, as long as I had to see your boobs, they're kinda nice?"
"Oh great. My life has gone to total shit and the only one who admires my boobs is my brother."
"Better than nobody?" I suggest.
She smiles at me. Sadly. Happily. But at least not crying anymore.
She leans into me. I wrap an arm around her shoulder.
I whisper at her,
"It's alright, Mags. You can do no wrong with me, you know? I love you."
A long time passes
Holding her, I grow aware of:
The athlete's muscles of her back and shoulders beneath her t-shirt
The hard plaster of a cast surrounding one arm beneath my fingers.
The quiet harmony of our breath
The softness of those admirable breasts moving with every breath she takes against my chest
until the combination of wine and Percocet bring her slowly to unconsciousness. When I know she's asleep, I lower her onto bed., lift and tuck her legs beneath the covers Although she is a strong girl, she feels incredibly delicate in my arms. "It'll be alright," I whisper at my sweet and broken sister as release her. "I totally love you, sis."
*
So when did we move from a simple fractured siblings to what seems in retrospect inevitable? I'd like to think it wasn't the relatively little moment of seeing my sister half naked and effectively headless that first night. That would be kind of tawdry and, I don't know, not much more than biological. And we were so much more than that. Whatever it was made of, our love was built on years and years of parents who never loved us enough, from whom we could never run far enough, or to whom we could never prove enough. What happened between us happened because we were alone in our childhood home, where we couldn't hide from those shared and isolating feelings behind the lives we'd built for ourselves outside those doors. Our love was built on a loneliness that only one other person in the world could understand. And maybe the fact that, at the moment I found myself in my childhood home with my sister, there was no one else in my life, or in hers.
There was only us.
And, because she was broken, and needed help, there was between us an enforced ridiculous intimacy of the body that, at that time, in that place, for the two of us, became as well, an unavoidable intimacy of soul. That took, in turn, our bodies down a strange and fractured road toward what the word might have a label for, but what to me was always and only about love.
*
So. First there was the intimacy of bathing.
On Wednesday, after a couple uneventful days together, her pre-arranged visit from the visiting nurse. A sweet-tempered French Canadian woman named Gaudette, who was built like boulders and would have been adept at the lifting and moving of injured bodies in and out of bedsbathtubs. Rooms away, I listen to the low women's voices floating from behind a closed door. I am preoccupied skypeing with work back home. Coding issues with the company's Chinese website. Somewhere, somehow, somebody had pasted in the wrong PinYin characters and our speakers were now advertising a sexual capacity undreamed of by its designers. Our software engineers were amused, Chinese executives predictably less so.
When I switch off, the nurse is standing in the doorway.
"How'd it go?"
"Not great. She's still in the tub. She asked me to leave. She's pretty upset."
I take this in.
"We all know her, y'know. In town. Since she started skiing competitively in high school. We've all followed her. I mean, Jeez, the Olympics and all. What happened was just so awful."
"I'll talk to her," I tell her.
"You want me to stay? I could help her get out..."
"It's okay," I say. "We'll be okay."
We.
*
I slide down the wall outside the bathroom door. Late afternoon sun bathes the hallway in crisp winter light.
"Hey, babe, how you doin'?"
"Great, Johnny. Totally fucking great."
Then, after a while.
"I lost it, Johnny. She touched me and I just lost it with her."
"That's okay..."
"No, it's not. She was nice enough and I shit on her. Now I didn't get washed and I can't even get myself out of the bathtub and I'm wet and I'm dirty and I'm cold ..."
"Wet, dirty, cold ... You by any chance trying to seduce me, Mags?"
Snort of laughter.
"Yeah, right."
"You want me to come in?"
"Like we have a choice?"
"I guess not."
I push up, put my hand on the glass knob, twist, push.
Mags in the bathtub, sitting upright, arms resting on each side of the old clawfoot tub.
"Look at me," she says. "I can't even cover myself in front of you."
I sit on the toilet at the end of the tub. Look.
Those admirable boobs. Tight muscles of her torso. Hint of the shaved area below. She is objectively beautiful, my sister. Even with two broken arms.
"You want me get you a towel?" I ask.
She shakes her head. It's alright, she is telling me silently. It's us. We're alone in the world. You can look at me. It's fine.
"Hot water'd be good," she says.
I reach and turn on the spigot. Hot water gushes onto her feet.
"Look what I can do," she says, and, reaching a leg up, manipulates the opened spigot with her toes.
"Gifted," I tell her.
"Olympics," she says, half-laughing. She is a picture of naked rue.
"I still need a bath," she says.
And when I don't move,
"Don't worry," she says. "No rules."
*
No rules.
Or, more to the point, only one rule: to care for her.
With love.
I use a washcloth to avoid touching her while touching her.
Leaning forward as I soap her muscled back.
What we talk about:
"So, on a scale of one to a hundred, how weird is this, big brother?"
"One twenty-five. At least."
I move the washcloth down her spine between the wing bones of her back. I grow acutely aware of the thinness of the terry cloth between my hand and my sister's body.
"Lean forward more," I tell her.
She does. I move my washcloth'd hand around her neck, behind the thin shells of her ears. Then, squatting further forward, I gesture her to move her head back. Her neck, when she does, is long and delicate. To reach her, I lean across her body, bracing myself on the far rim of the tub. Mags is broadly open to me, beautifully so. I move the washcloth around her neck, cheeks, eyes, forehead. She closes her eyes as the washcloth passes, then opens them. We are looking right at each other, barely a foot of distance between us. I dip the washcloth into water beside her hip, find soap and lather it up for more.
"Front?" I ask her.
In answer she raises her useless, cast covered arms.
"No rules," she says.
"No rules," I tell her back. "Okay."
I move the washcloth down from her neck along the hard bone between her admirable breasts, then across her taut belly and along her laddered ribs, then there is nowhere else to go.
I look at her. She nods permission.
"You said they were nice."
"They are."
"Then go ahead."
I let the washcloth drift across her: first left, then right. My palms pausing, circling above her areolae. Hearing, but not reacting to, the slight indrawing of her breath as I touch, wash, caress through the mediating cloth. Her eyes closing. I feel the faint but undeniable hardening of her nipples beneath the veil of fabric.When, at last, my hands start to withdraw from her, her fingers find me, hold me where they are.
"Fuck, Johnny," Mags says. Her voice grown slightly husky. "That actually feels pretty good."
"The weirdness quotient just went to 150," I tell her.
"I don't care," she whispers. "No fucking rules, remember?"
Her fingers are pressing my hand down onto her breast. The stiffening beneath my fingers now unmistakable. To the left, her other nipple rises visibly, in sympathy with the one that we are (together) holding. I let the pressure of her fingers guide me until I am lightly squeezing her, then releasing, then gently squeezing her again.
"Mags," I say to her.
It is a warning, a question, a prayer.
Her fingers lessen their pressure and she subsides away from my hand to lean back against the back rim of the tub. With a lazy foot, she turns the hot water spigot off.
The moment, the enigma of touching my sister, fades. Only now, as she sits back from me, the line of her pussy is no longer hidden between her legs.
Her mound, the top of her slit rise - barely, almost teasingly - out of the bath water.
Her eyes are still closed.
She slides down deeper. The hint of her pussy submerges. But her nipples float taut on the surface as she sinks down into the soap-grey water.
"It's okay," Mags says. "There's more of me. Keep going."
*
No rules, Maggie. No rules.
I start with her legs, avoiding, as I had initially above her waist, any immediate contact between my washcloth and the sexual parts of her. Her thighs, when I touch them, are knotted with muscle, and yet vaguely fatty beneath my fingers: profoundly, excitingly womanly. As I wash near, but not on, her vulva, I am aware of my own, entirely normal reaction to touching her so intimately, to the unmistakably sexual fact of her nipple having stiffened beneath my hand as I washed her more-than-admirable breasts.
"I'm kind of a dyke, y'know," Mags says to me as I wash a knee. The calf and thigh of this, her left leg are still brown-and-purpled with fading bruises from her fall.
"No, I didn't," I say. "Know about that. You've never talked to me about who you've fucked."
"Well, I'm telling you now, big brother." She stretches, eyes still closed, languorously in the water.
"I've been with guys," Mags says. "Two. But I've been with women more. Five times, I think. I mean, five different people. Way more than five times. And I've liked it more with girls. The way they make love. The way it can be so hard and so gentle at the same time. I've never had that with a guy."
"Wrong guys?" I suggest.
"I don't know. I think it's deeper than that. But I'm twenty, Johnny. I don't know if I like guys or girls more. Or both. I don't really know anything about anything."
I lift her leg higher out of the water to wash a shinbone, ankle, the delicate bones of her foot. She half-giggles as I move the washcloth between her toes.
"I thought you said you weren't gonna do rules anymore, Mags. So does it really matter?"
She thinks on this for a moment, doesn't answer.
Instead, says, "How about you, Johnny?" Asked from behind closed eyes.
"How many girls have you slept with at your ripe old age of twenty six?"
"I dunno," I tell her. "Half a dozen?"
"What was it like?"
"I dunnno. Different, each one. Everybody makes love differently. That's the amazing thing of it. How you get to know this special secret about somebody you make love with. What they do, what they like. What somebody looks like when she comes. It's like the way they use that word in the Bible, you'know? Abraham knew his wife. I mean, you make love with someone, you just ... know them ... in a way that nothing else is like that. I mean," I say, laying down the one leg and reaching into the soapy water to draw out the glistening other. "I don't know what I mean." I soap the cloth, begin to move it along her calf. "I think I'm kinda ... confused ... by all this ... this naked, shit, this washing you. I'm flustered."
"S'okay," Mags murmurs. She shifts her weight a little clumsily in the water, making ripples. "You know stuff about me right now that you didn't used to. You know what my boobs look like. How they feel when you touch me. How my whole body feels when you touch it. At least through that washcloth. I mean, you're washing me, for chrissake. Nobody knows that about me, Johnny. What I feel like when you wash me."
"Nobody's ever?"
She shakes her head
Her eyes are open now.
She looks at me.
"Nope," she tells me. "Bathtub virgin."
I am leaning across her, drawing the soapy cloth through the other set of toes, along foot, shin, knee, the powerful fleshiness of Maggie's thighs. My sister is intensely, excitingly female under my hands. And I am, no getting around this, hard for her in my jeans.
Two hundred, two hundred and fifty.
We are off the fucking charts.
And now, at last, my washcloth finds, obscured from sight under water, the secret part of her between her legs.
My hand drifts upward from her thigh across her belly below her navel, then downward until at last I feel the cloth catch slightly on a stubbly softness below the water. I touch through cloth a fleshy roundness hear each of her legs, perceiving that it is her labia I am caressing now beneath the water, and how, like her nipples moments before, they are swollen with the fact of my touching, washing them. I move the cloth inside that swollenness, imagining as I touch here there the flowering of her inner lips at the sweet bottom of her body.
"Lift up a little," I tell her. She does. She is, my sister, so lazily obedient to my voice and hand. I move the washcloth further beneath her. And now I am washing the harder hidden region of her asshole. At this perhaps unexpected touch, a little gasp escapes from her. Her nipples rise and tighten visibly as I move the cloth between her cheeks and then drift backwards to move again inside the garden at the bottom of her body. Unseen underwater, the cloth moves easily on a film of soap and I feel or sense her own noticeable warmth in the water around by wrist and fingers.
"And Abraham knew his sister," I whisper at her.
"Don't," Mags says. And when I hesitate, continues, "No, don't joke about it. Don't. No rules, okay? I want," she says and falls for a moment silent. I move my washcloth on, around, inside her sex.
Her eyes are wide open.
I wash, wait for her, wash some more.
"I mean, no rules, okay? Really, for a minute, just no rules at all, okay, bro? I just wanna feel alive for a minute, Johnny, like everything isn't shit and my life isn't over, and I just wanna feel beautiful inside for a second, can you even understand that? I mean, I can't even masturbate right with these right now." She wiggles her fingers: the bottom joints encased in plaster., "I just wanna ..."
"You wanna come," I finish for her.
There is nothing I do not know about you, Maggie.
Little sister.
Almost nothing.
And when she doesn't answer right away, I ask,
"You want me to help you come?"
She looks at me, wide-eyed, embarrassed, defiant,
"Yeah, Johnny, I think I do."
"And no," she says. "I mean, I don't want you to just help. I want you to make me come, Johnny. I want you to make me come. Coz' you're the only person I think I can feel beautiful inside with right now, okay? I mean, we're here, and there's only me and you, I mean, shit, in a sense there's only ever been me and you, and right now, I'm naked and you're washing me, and it's making me, holy shit what it's making me, and, but, I think I need this from you more than I need anything from anybody else in the world, right now, or I dunno, ever. I just wanna feel okay for a minute, more than okay, you know? I wanna take all the shit and just let it be something beautiful for a minute and I think the only person I can do that with is you, coz' I can't do anything for myself and I know you love me ..."
And "Shhh," I tell her.
And "Okay," I say. "I get it. I think I do."
I close my eyes briefly and see her tumbling over snow. And I do get it. I understand. It is her and me. And it always has been. And, Mags, you are my sister and I would do whatever you want me because
"I love you, Mags, I get it and I love you and of course
(sweet girl, my sweet, my broken-armed sister)
"If you want me to of course I can,
I will."
*
Now my hand is pressing the washcloth more deeply into her. I feel, beneath water, that she is opening to me. I move my hand, my probing fingers, slowly, lovingly inside her lips as she brings the soles of her feet together and, by that expedient, opens even more widely to my touch lips. And, touching, I find the velvet smooth inside of her, and locate through cloth the swelling nubbin at the top of her unseen cleft. I move, with growing confidence, the washcloth in a circle above that tiny thing, then downward until two of my fingers find the edge of a further deepness and I slide the washcloth a little (barely, but it's enough) inside her. Mags moves with me now, folding herself around my hand in the bath water. I give her gentleness and roughness in equal measure, plowing with my washcloth a line between her unseen clitoris and the edge of her vagina and back again. I feel the tenseness of her body flow into me from her thighs and lower abdomen as she curls more tightly around me and her breathing becomes short and rapid. I feel through cloth, through my hand, the building tightness of her body flow electrically into me until my own blood swirls in my stomach and into my member and I am suddenly, fiercely, secretly hard in the presence of my curling, softly moaning sister.
"You are," I whisper to her, "completely beautiful. Let go, babe. Just let yourself be beautiful with me."
No rules.
I rub her, I caress and wash her, move my washcloth under water and inside of her. I touch her shallow and I touch her deep until, finally, she twists in the bathtub, rolling from her back to her side, her broken arms still clinging awkwardly to the sides of the tub; .and her legs pull up, her thighs pinioning my wrist, my washcloth fingers inside of her. Water sloshes around her, crests the rim of the tub, soaking me, the rug, the floor
while my free hand finds her exposed back, the soaking, glistening skin of her arm, her shoulder, the soft, incredible rise of flesh that is the side of one of her admirable breasts. For this hand, there is no washcloth, I am touching my sister's skin as she moves, breathes, pants, sloshes beneath my hand and fingers.
There are no rules.
I know this woman.
And below the water, I feel the spasming roil up from deep inside her, my hand is pinned, immobile, and I move only my fingers within her, but it's enough. I feel the folded shock of her in my hand, my moving fingers, I feel her contractions all the way up into the nerves and muscles of my arm as she reaches suddenly, and at long last, he moment she has asked me for.
And she dissolves, dissolves, moaning beneath the hand of someone who loves, who knows her.
And there are no rules. No rules at all.
And I am hard as a rock in my soaking jeans, rich with the knowledge that I have done what she asked me to, that I love her,After we were done, and I'd dried her, both of us shaking body and soul, Mags retreated away from me to her room upstairs.
Time moved, passed.
A few hours later, I had dinner ready. Steak tips and potatoes on skewers, a salad of sour greens. I even cut up the steak into manageable pieces before I called her.
She came into the kitchen. Sweat pants and a t shirt. Her admirable (once, hard-nippled) breasts moving inside the t-shirt as she sat.
"Aw, you even cut the meat into bite size pieces for your invalid sister. That's so nice."
I nodded acknowledgment of my good qualities.
Then, sitting. She fixed me with her blue-green eyes, said - with far more import,
"Johnny, Wow."
"Wow, dinner?" I asked. "Or wow, I just frigged you off in the bathtub a couple hours ago?"
"I think, yah, that's more the wow I was thinking of."
"You okay with that?"
"With that wow? The frigging come-in-the-bathtub wow? I think so. I mean, you don't suppose we can just pretend that didn't happen? Go back to just brother and sister?"
"I dunno, Mags. The topic might come up again if I give you another bath."
Her smile at this is both sad and radiant.
"Yeah," she says. "It's kinda like, you sleep with somebody from, I dunno, school, or the team or work, that's my whole frame of reference, and it, like, happens because you're both drunk. And then you see each other the day after and it's like, I don't know if we can go back to being just friends."
"I've had it happen where you could. Where it was just a hookup."
"Yeah, but sometimes, it can't just be just a hook up. Like if you cry or something."
"Or, like, if you're brother and sister?"
"Yeah, that's an officially complicating factor, I guess."
"So did you? Cry?"
"No. I just went to bed. I slept. I was, like, so - emotionally - spent that I had to just have a coma for a little while. How 'bout you?"
"Me? Nothin'. I went out, I took a walk. I forgot how early the sun goes down back here. Then I just made dinner. I mean, normal stuff. So I wouldn't have to think the whole time about ..." And I stop, unable to name it.
"About, wow?"
"Yeah, wow."
"So what are you thinking now, Johnny?"
"About wow?"
"About wow."
"I dunno, Mags. I'm sure as shit not sorry. I mean, I'm glad that I could give you that. What you wanted. That I could make you feel ..." I stop again. Unable, maybe afraid to give us a name.
"Good?" she asks. "Beautiful? Known?"
"Yeah, all of that."
Then after a moment, I ask,
"What about you? How you feelin', Mags?"
That sad, radiant smile rolls like momentary sunshine across my sister's face.
"Good," she says. "Beautiful. Incredibly known. I feel like, ..., like, wow. So much wow. Like, there's the you're my brother wow. And there's wow, that I don't care about that, not really. Not at all. Because, wow, there's no rules for this, for us, For this broken sister you have to feed and dress and wash.
"And then there's this overwhelming wow, that, Johhny, I have never come like that in my life before. I mean, god, it was so intense, I thought I was gonna die. Or something. And it wasn't 'coz of these (she looks briefly at her broken arms and all they mean) or how unhappy I am, oh, I mean, it was because of all of that, but it was you, Johnny. It was because I know you and I can trust you with how unhappy I am and why and then somehow, you were washing me and I just trusted you to do things to me. I know that's like all kinds of abnormal, Johnny, or at least it's supposed to be. But you know me, Johnny. We know each other better than anyone, I think. I mean, I know you know me better than anyone I've ever slept with. It's like you know me down to my soul. And right now, you're the only person on earth I want to show my soul to. And god, Johnny, when you touched me. I mean, you touched my body. But I feel like you made my soul come. Does that make any sense at all?"
"Yeah," I tell her. "I think it does."
"But how did it feel for you, Johnny? Washing me? Touching me like that. How are you about all that right now?"
"That's two questions, Mags. Right now, I'm okay. I'm fine. I always said I'd do anything for you. I guess now we know that really means anything. But at the time, while I was moving that washcloth between your legs, and you were ... I guess for a couple minutes there, I didn't feel like your brother, or your soulmate or anything. I just felt like a guy about you, Maggie. And I couldn't get past that. Not completely. I'm not sure I can right now."
"You don't mean you had a ..."
"The size of Detroit, yeah. For you."
She thinks about that for a moment.
"Well, I guess that's the only normal thing that happened all day, isn't it? I mean, if you look at it objectively. I mean, I'm naked in the bathtub and you're washing my pussy, for chrissake, and I'm sexually, you know, aroused like no tomorrow and then, you're touching me, I came and I was probably just like this pheromone volcano, so it had to be, like, just human for you to ... I mean, how could you not, you know, at least react?"
"Oh, honey," I say. "I reacted. I thought I was gonna bust my zipper or something."
That half-sad smile flickers across her face again.
"So, did you do anything? While I was asleep?"
"What, you mean like ...? No, that woulda felt too weird. I mean, all the stuff in the bathtub, it was like you gave me permission, you know?"
"A little more than that. I kinda begged you..."
"Yeah but, still. I didn't feel like, I mean, masturbating to you? That just woulda felt like it was beyond the bounds, whatever those are. Not without you knowing. Or something."
"So now I know."
"Yeah."
"So do you still want to?"
"Jesus, Mags, I don't know."
"I mean, it'd be okay, okay? Look, I feel kinda bad. I mean, you gave me an orgasm, Johnny. You gave me one so bad I could barely walk afterwards. And I can't exactly reciprocate. So if ... washing ... me, gets you, you know, all hot and bothered, maybe you just should. Like I said, we're in a place where the rules don't count. Maybe they will again someday. When these casts are off my arms and you're back in Seattle. But right now, this month that we're together and I can't do anything for myself, I mean I need you to wash my pussy for god's sake. So they're off. The rules are all off. They have to be. And I think, no, I know I'm gonna ask you to do what you did for me today again. Coz' I think that's gonna help to keep me alive, to tell you the truth, as weird as that fucking is. So, no rules, Johnny. And if it helps if you know you can, I dunno, relieve yourself or whatever, then you've got my permission, bro. Whatever you want to do, it's alright.
"And besides," she says, smiling demurely. "I think you might get another chance tonight."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, there's something we didn't do this afternoon, that I kinda need to."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning, I'm kind of behind on my grooming, you might have noticed. Down there."
"You mean your ..."
"Yeah, dude. My pubes. Among other things."
"Yeah, okay, I mean, felt some stubble. I didn't know if that's how you ..."
"Well, I don't. I shave, y'know. And I thought for a while, maybe I'd just go all hippie chick till my arms healed. But now it's been three weeks and it's getting, like, my pits, my legs and, you know, down there in southern Gloriana, it's getting uncomfortable."
"And you wanna?"
"Well, yeah, if you don't mind. And, if you have to do my pussy and you get ... then I guess I wouldn't mind."
"Maybe I'll try not to."
"I thought you said I had great tits."
"'I said, good,' I said. 'admirable,' even. 'Great''s a pretty high bar."
"Okay, so my not-so-great tits," Then, striking a mock-sexy pose, asks, "But, what did you think about my pussy, big bro?"
"I didn't exactly see it through the soap water. But it did feel kinda stubbly, to tell the truth. So maybe check with me after."
"Maybe I will."
*
No rules, Maggie.
No rules at all.
In the bathroom again, where just a few hours before I had touched my sister through a washcloth and made her come.
Maggie sitting now on the rim of the tub, her sweats shrugged off. Azure panties and a t-shirt, those long legs of hers dangling inside the tub. I turn on the hot water, step inside the tub and turn to her, razor and a spray can of Barbasol in hand.
"You're gonna get soaked," Maggie says, pointing at my blue jeans with one broken arm. "Maybe take those off."
And when I don't respond immediately, she says,
"Johnny, I'm sitting here in my panties. And where am I gonna put my legs?"
The logic of it seduces me. I sit on the back edge of the tub and strip my jeans off, toss them across the room. Sit.
"Plaid boxers," Mags chuckles. "Fashionista."
"Shut up," I tell her. Pat my knee. "Leg, please."
Obedient, Maggie stretches her left leg across the bathtub, plants it across my bare knees, smiles.
No sadness in her smile this time.
No rules either.
I look at her, think, unbidden of the teardrop breasts beneath her t-shirt.
Maggie says, "You may begin."
I reach into the running water, bring a handful up and drop it through my open fingers onto her leg. Use my hands to spread it all around her. Feel beneath my palms and fingers the softness of her skin, the small, incipient stubble of untended female hair. Eventually I spray a line of shaving cream along her shin. And spread it over skin and stubble with both hands. She was right about the jeans. Even this small operation is soaking the legs of my fashionista boxers. She was also right that I might find it hard to do this without getting hard.
Not totally, but enough to feel a warmth and small tumescence growing as I touch her.
Which I do my polite damnedest to ignore.
Instead I draw the razor in long lines up her leg.
Then again.
And again.
And when I'm done, her leg is glistening smooth; and striped by lines of uncollected shaving cream. These, I rinse away with more water from the tap, picked up from the running faucet, dropped, spread by hand and caressing hand.
My undiscussed tumescence grows in size and semi-urgency as I touch her.
My eyes (my prick, to tell the truth) drawn irresistibly toward the azure fabric at the jointure of her stomach and legs, and beneath that moment of color, the part of her that I have touched - (once , through cloth and soap) but never seen.
I think I smell the faint tang of an excitement from her, from there.
No rules, Maggie.
Maggie, what are we doing?
She lowers her shaved left leg, presents the other.
Again: water, shaving cream, razor, water. My hands moving along Maggie's slicked legs, knees, thighs.
I make her smooth.
I touch her smoothness.
She stirs under my touch, then draws her leg away from me.
Brushes, as she does, the distension in my shorts.
No rules no rules no rules no rules.
No comment though. Her light touch passes.
"Now pits," Mags says. And lifts her shirt up over her head, exposing again those admirable breasts. "Come over this side," she tells me. "It'll be easier."
I obey her.
She glances downward as I do.
"I'm watching, you know."
"I know," I tell her.
"And I think my leg just brushed against a pretty definite erection under them plaids, mister."
"Yeah, Mags, I'm kind of aware."
Her smile. Much radiance. But something more. A complicated thing, this smile of my almost naked sister.
"It's kinda cute, you know. You make me come, I give you a hard-on. We're, like, so definitely in the no-rule zone right now."
"I'm pretty sure it's called incest, Sis."
"Shh. No rules, no names. And I think only if you fuck me, anyways. Right now, it's called shaving."
She lifts an arm.
*
Let me tell you, there is something about a woman's armpit: the tender softness, the pretty hiddenness of the flesh as I touch her, lather her, shave her. One armpit, then the other. I move around her in the bathtub to shave each part of her. My boxer shorts are tenting and she laughs.
"Main event now," my sister tells me.
She stands, there is no shame in her, and pushes down her azure panties into the shallow pooling water at our feet.
"Here's what you didn't see this afternoon," she half-whispers.
There is the mound of her, triangular, inverted. A thickness of lips, partly swollen, already a little parted to expose the inner flesh. She is, as promised, covered by a soft, unshaven down, and she is visibly damp inside her cleft.
"It's beautiful," I say. "You have the most beautiful ..."
I pause. Unable to articulate the thing that I am looking at.
"Pussy," Maggie says. "Say, Maggie, you have a beautiful pussy."
"Maggie," I say. "You have the most beautiful pussy."
She smiles again, accepts the praise.
"Wow," I tell her.
"Yeah," Maggie says. And then, "Now you."
A moment, then:
She says, "Then you can shave me."
She says, "I know you're hard. I told you it's alright. I'm soaking wet inside. I've got two broken arms, but I'm beautiful. You touch me and I feel so beautiful. Please, Johnny. Let me see how beautiful you think I am."
I think for a moment, decide. Then step out of my boxers too.
I'm massively engorged. My dick is and straining, almost dancing toward the ceiling.
"Well, Johnny, honey," my sister says. "Is that really all about me?"
She looks at it and looks at me.
And after a minute, says, "You're pretty beautiful yourself, you know."
And then, "Okay, let's shave me."
*
She sits. I kneel in pooling water in the space between her knees. Beside me, hot water gushes from a faucet. I have a raging hard on in the presence of my sister.
"Washcloth?" I ask.
She shakes her head.
And so it is with my hand and fingers that I bring her water from the faucet, and dampen her where she is already, differently, damp, and cover the soft, dark down of her with cream. I stretch her outer lips with two fingers as I draw, gently, the plastic razor in small strokes along, across the delicate bottom of her cleft. She shudders -it is not a little thing - beneath my touch. While I harden more and more completely. Surprised that that's even possible.
(But it is
possible
because I am holding, touching my little sister's pussy, I am shaving my sister's lovely, sculptured lips. The secret pink of the inside part of her that I stroked through a washcloth only this afternoon, is blossoming outward at my watery touch)
Now I move the razor downward over her mons, watch (feel) thin lines of hair disappearing as the razor passes over her. I bring warm water from the faucet, pour it over her and stroke away shaving cream, hair stubble, water with my hands. She is all smoothness now. I have, it seems, every permission to look, to touch, to know and understand her.
She is so beautiful. And naked.
And I am (I think, I hope), beautiful too. There are no rules between us. Done, I sit back from her, regarding her, my member throbbing against my belly.
Can a man's unfulfilled ridiculous hard-on be beautiful?
Can I be beautiful in my beautiful sister's eyes?
"It's okay," Maggie says. "You can if you want."
"Christ, Mags, you saying what I think you're saying?"
She shrugs, naked.
We are naked in a bathtub together.
We are five years old.
We are twenty and twenty six.
My naked sister, two feet across from me.
"No rules, remember? And you won't even have to think about me. So we can eliminate that complication. You can just look at me instead. I give you permission, Johnny. Just look."
*
I touch myself.
I touch myself.
I am tentative at first, moving my hand along the underside of the poor, dancing thing.
"Is this alright?" I ask her.
"I said it was."
And so, permitted, allow myself the luxury of wrapping my sex in my fingers and stroking slowly. And looking, as I do, at Maggie, her breasts, her broken arms, her eyes.
She looks back at me.
And puts her finger down inside her own cleft, moves with me, apart from me.
Says, looking, "Hey, let me help."
And extends first one shaven leg and then the other. Her feet finding, caressing, finally replacing my hands and then,
"Holy fuck," I say. "Foot job? Where'd you learn that?"
"From a lesbian friend. A teammate, actually."
"A dyke?"
"She moonlit as a heterosexual."
"She was good."
The vast, incredible softness of her arches.
"And I'm not?"
"You, my darling sister, are amazing."
"No rules," she says. Her feet move like silk, like flesh, like water up and down my shaft. Her arches find my frenulum, I flinch and then relax into the soft intensity of her touch. While, across from me, two of her fingers move with a languor that develops its own intensity inside the new-smooth folds beneath her body.
I see her building.
So am I.
Her feet surround me, twist, stiffen with her own excitement.
"I didn't" she says, looking down briefly at her fingers moving in her pussy, "think I could do this. By myself."
"You aren't," I almost whisper. "You're doing this with me."
And then, without warning, she pitches forward, she is coming for the second time in a day, with me, in this bathtub, with the silkflesh soles of her feet squeezing, squeezing me, until I feel her presence deep inside my asshole and my belly and my dancing and contracting balls, an orgasm flows up into me and then I follow her lead and blow off like Vesuvius and I know my sister the deep way she knows me, I come while she touches me and touches, touches herself ...
And there are no rules and we have broken them all.
And I love my sister.
And we slide town together from our opposite sides of the tub
until we are tangled, legs wound, still damp and detumescing.
"Oh, god," I say to my sister; and
"Oh, wow," she says to me.
And, "Maggie, what the hell are we doing?" I ask her.
And she has no answer
except to lean into, against me
the teardrops of her breasts crushing into her broken arms as they press, hard plaster against my chest
and I am holding her, touching, breathing her, and I am enveloping my sister's broken, beautiful body inside the circle of my arms.
And I am thinking, O my god, this is incest.
And I am thinking, O sweet Jesus, this is love.