The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes

Departures

David Findlay

My sister Cecilie was the last one home. By the time she arrived, we’d stacked forgotten aunts and brand-new cousins in the front room and master bedroom, Uncle Ron and his frightened-looking third wife in my old attic room, and me in back of the upstairs library. In the frenzy of relocation someone even moved my mom’s ashes in their ugly urn from the obscurity of her old study to the sill of a stained-glass window overlooking the front stairway. The guests just kept on coming, but I wasn’t going to consider letting anyone else stay in my sister’s room.

At midnight on the eve of the funeral, Cecilie arrived with an unexpected retinue: a leather-clad room-mate I’d never heard of and a quiet young person of indeterminate gender who held the door for both of them, then disappeared into the bathroom. Cecilie’s wardrobe took up three bags, each of them as heavy as I’d been when I worked security. I helped their grateful driver to prise each case one at a time from the boot and the back seat, feeling a little bit heroic as I bore the brunt of the weight. The room-mate was lovely. Her outfit was so distracting that it took me a moment to realize she was the same height and build as my sister, with the same waist-length blonde dreads and the same cat’s-eye red glasses. Her dog collar and air-soled boots were pink, accenting the shiny black surface of her miniscule outfit. She bounded out of the cab, shook my hand and began bustling packages to the porch while I held my sister. Cecilie and I hadn’t ever really given each other physical comfort before, and I didn’t want to let go.

“It’s crazy, CeeCee. Glad you’re here.”

She smelled like lube and lavender, and her hair tickled my ear. In her usual insanely high heels, my little sister was far taller than me. Cecilie pulled slowly away, kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “Bet you’ve got it totally under control, big bro. Isn’t Izzy a peach?”

The rare compliment found its mark and for a moment I felt like a responsible adult. Izzy? If Izzy was the room-mate, “peach” didn’t begin to describe her. I watched her ass flex beneath the tiny, too-tight skirt as she wheeled one of my sister’s bags across the expanse of lawn to the front porch. Dancer’s thighs, grey translucent stay-ups. . a guy could get obsessed with that kind of shape. I allowed myself a moment’s fantasy of lifting her skirt and sliding my hands up the back of her thighs, cupping her cheeks, lifting the skirt higher, higher, all the way up until. .

“How far up?”

Izzy was asking me about where to take the baggage, and I’d been caught ogling her posterior before we’d even got her into the house.

“Um, yeah, second-floor landing, then to your right. Cecilie’s the first door on the right next to the little washroom. Or would you like a hand with that?” I had almost caught up when Izzy popped the most massive bag over her shoulder and trotted across the porch. Her skirt crept higher, showing another hint of her muscular, round rear.

“I’m fine, Graham, but maybe you want to watch from the bottom of the stairs just in case I fall?”

I looked down, chastened, and imagined the view from a tongue’s length away.

“Someday when you’re moving slower, maybe?”

Flirting with my sister’s room-mate(?) new girlfriend(?) was probably not a brilliant idea, given that Cecilie would be a handful to keep in line even if I were on her good side. Maybe Izzy would help? She certainly seemed capable of being a distraction. As I struggled with the other bags, their mute, androgynous companion came out of the bathroom. The three of them unpacked nonchalantly into Cecilie’s room as if it were the most obvious thing in the world that they’d all share her ancient twin bed. I tried not to imagine what they’d get up to beneath the quilt Gran Amble made. I tried to think myself calmly through the question of whether they were actually doing any harm by ignoring customary small-town decorum when every gossipy relative in the world was camped at our place. In Abercrombie, one doesn’t usually advertise three-way gender-queer liaisons as blithely as all that. . unless you’re Cecilie.

When everyone was settled down, I brought a six-pack upstairs, spread my bedroll in the copyright law section and stripped down to my long johns. The moon was almost full, and the library was aglow with reflected light. Done with stressing about funeral arrangements, my brain turned to happier thoughts. I imagined Izzy’s ample cheeks spread around my stiffness, grinding on my face. The house creaked as only ancient oak can, and I kept wondering if I heard my sister’s bed over the other household sounds. It took many hours and a lot of beer to get to sleep.

When I woke the moon had dropped to the east and there were long shadows in the hall. One of the horde of relatives had spilled something foul in the downstairs kitchen. I cleaned up, nibbled at an excellent curry from the day before, and tried to get excited about reading an antique monograph on ownership and origination. There was plenty more beer in the back of the fridge, and there isn’t really a wrong time for beer. Time passed.

Our house has only been in the family since the sixties, but it was built long before the advent of indoor plumbing. The master bathroom is an opulent afterthought, with marble and tile hiding the odd angles, copper pipe girdled to the inside wall, and custom brass mermaid fittings that Mom found at some estate sale. An inset tub opposite the window allows an unbroken view of the disrepair behind our house, dilapidated outbuildings and unploughed fields matching the neighbours’ equally decrepit acreage. I had spent my first few days back alone, wandering the broken stone half-walls at the property edge during the daytime and soaking by candlelight in that huge, stained porcelain tub every night. Up to my neck in makeshift decadence while overlooking ruin, it was a good vantage point from which to remember the drama, trauma and comedy of growing up in Abercrombie. The luxury of that room was now usurped by relatives, so I tiptoed back up to the second-floor toilet, which is carved into a slant-ceilinged cupboard next to CeeCee’s room and as narrow as the master bathroom is wide. I slipped in just as a lithe shape grabbed the door.

Dad’s plaid bathrobe was tied loosely at her waist, flapping open as she pulled the door closed. I recognized my sister’s panties: gauzy pink silk that shouldn’t still have been intact. Flooded with shame, I remembered sneaking those and additional handfuls of her underwear from the laundry hamper, making off with them to this very bathroom. Smelling them, touching them, touching myself as I inhaled her scent, bringing them redolent and sticky back to the laundry room on days when it was my turn to do the household wash. Even if I hadn’t been exponentially increasing the wear on them, they should have long ago been outgrown and discarded. CeeCee goes through clothes like most people go through Kleenex. She would be thirty in days, and I first jerked off in those panties when the two-year gap between us felt like aeons, when she and I were snarling teens who barely spoke to each other at school. Nobody keeps underwear for seventeen years!

“I guess she was right.”

“I beg your pardon? Sorry, you’re welcome to use the bathroom, I can wait. .”

“She must have been right about you and her underwear. You look like you’re witness to the ghost of puberties past. See something you like?”

Izzy untied the robe. Her areolae were large and light brown, puckered with the chill. Her hips were wide, straining thin fabric. She reached into the pockets and drew out threadbare brassieres, more small panties, all of them familiar. I must have made some incoherent sound.

“Don’t stress, honey. It’s OK. It’s OK if you’re the kind of depraved twistoid who gets off on his little sister’s smalls. I won’t tell anybody.” She snickered. “Apparently it’s still working for you.”

Physically trapped, confronted with my own unforgivable behaviour and full of beer past my bladder’s capacity, I should not at that moment have been painfully, pointedly tumescent, but there it was. My erection was aimed through my long underwear, across the bathroom and directly at my sister’s gorgeous girlfriend’s snatch.

I blame the beer. I’ve never been exactly a model of restraint and impulse control. I’ve never been one who tries to resolve social awkwardness by grabbing for somebody, either, but that’s just what I did. I could feel my movements as if they were instructions to a faulty robot waldo: I flexed my shoulders and stepped forwards, reaching for the nearly naked woman before me. Izzy smiled and let my weight pull me past her, tugging my forearms to the left as she nudged my hips off balance. Her bare left foot did something subtle and sweeping and she caught my shoulders, effortlessly taking my weight so I didn’t hit the bathroom floor too hard.

“Careful, big boy.”

Standing over me, relaxed and apparently unfazed, Izzy tested the resilience of a flowered cotton bra. It tore, as did the cotton panties she tried next.

“Take those off.” She gestured to the long underwear tented around my slightly diminished stiffy. “Off!”

Izzy seemed mildly surprised that I hadn’t immediately, unquestioningly obeyed her. I was too shocked by the whole pattern of events not to obey. I wriggled out of the long johns and the hardwood floor was cool against my back. “What did you just do there? I’m sorry. I mean, what happened?”

Izzy ignored my questions. She bent closer. “Put your hands together up beside the cold water pipe.”

I complied. Far too easily, she used another familiar twist of silk to bind my wrists above my head.

Far too fast, I found my ankles secured with old bras to the radiator and the sink. Izzy immobilized me with the same smiling ease a flight attendant brings to their safety spiel. I was waiting for her to point out emergency flotation devices and air masks, but instead she knelt directly over my face. I nearly passed out from a sudden mixture of joy and shame-tinged desire. I could feel the blood streaming into my cock, feel it pulsing with each heartbeat. “What are you doing? Where did you get these?”

“On eBay. Where else? What does it look like I’m doing, pervert?”

It looked like she was putting her hand slowly down the front of the too-tight panties, taking her time, relishing my response. She was going to wake up the rest of the house if she kept talking so loudly. I saw her expression change as her fingers found sensitive tissue. I bucked against the air behind her. I felt the way I had after I got my first piercing, or when they pulled me out of what was left of my first car. Floaty. Unreal. A little out of synch with the outside world. She opened her eyes and stared me down, laughing. Her breasts did amazing things when she laughed. She stood again.

“Breathe, Graham. Inhale. You’ll pass out otherwise.”

From the robe pocket she tugged a piece of fabric that wasn’t actually underwear — a red silk scarf. It, too, had been a regular part of CeeCee’s wardrobe, and it, too, had been the target of my adolescent onanism. Once.

How had she known?

“I can explain!” I sounded like an idiot.

“No you can’t, and you shouldn’t try. This morning’s theme is going to be ‘honesty’. Can you handle that?”

I nodded.

“Speak up, Graham.”

Izzy gave orders with a gentle, certain authority I had never encountered before.

“What? Ummm. . sure. I can handle honesty.”

“Excellent. I knew you could. Raise your head.”

The praise made me glow. Why should I care what this stranger thought? Why would I let her do this to me? Obediently, I raised my head and let her tie the scarf around my eyes, doubled over itself and wrapped twice around my skull. The world went dark. My cock bobbed stiffly and my bladder ached.

Izzy laughed quietly again. “Your reaction is very gratifying, Graham. Are you ready to be honest?”

“Yes.”

“I like honesty, Graham. I’ll reward honesty. Would you like to be rewarded?”

Her voice was close, now. She smelled of lube and lavender.

“Yes, please.”

“Were you watching my body this morning, Graham?”

“Yes.”

Izzy knelt at my waist, the heat of her cunt bright and sudden on my pelvic bone. I bucked reflexively.

“Be still! Were you thinking about touching me?”

“Yes.”

Izzy’s nails stroked the skin just outside of my nipples on either side. I fought to control my movements.

“Good little boy!”

I stilled my reaction and stored away a little piece of anger to use on her later. I let my face show calm and contentment.

“Sorry!” Her apology was instantaneous. “I gather that’s not a good word combination. I’m sorry, Graham. No insult intended.”

I wondered who had trained her. I wondered if she had a weapon. Without any obvious external movements, I tested my bonds. Solid. Tight. With her astride me, I couldn’t even muster leverage to tug at them. Five minutes too late, I realized how completely Izzy had me.

“Really, Graham, I’m sorry.”

Her lips were tender on my nipple, and her crotch pressed harder on my hip. She stayed that way, kissing softly, as my body gradually relaxed. Belatedly, I realized that she was taking much of her own weight on the outside leg. I wasn’t used to any of this, least of all the experience of a stranger’s gentle consideration while utterly powerless on my own bathroom floor. I wanted to cry again.

“It’s OK, honey.”

She kept saying that. It wasn’t. She was wrong.

“When you wanted to touch me, what part of my body did you want to touch?”

“Ah. . everything!”

“Honesty, Graham. Remember?”

“Your ass. Your thighs.” I tensed again.

“Thank you.”

Izzy slid a tiny bit lower and more towards the centre of my body. The change was dramatic. Her weight was an unbearable pressure on my bladder and her rear was an unbearable teasing near-friction against the tip of my cock.

I tried to flex my abs to take her weight, and then to twist away.

“Still!”

“Bitch!”

“Yes, Graham. Your cock is very hard, Graham.”

I was silent. The house creaked.

“May I mark you, Graham?”

“Yes.”

I felt her teeth at my neck, at my nipple. I heard her breath, felt her hot cunt shift on me again. I went way inside to a wordless, hungry place and stayed there. I went way outside to fantasies that nobody should have, and stayed there too. Her bites were cruel. Her tongue teased. I needed to piss. I needed to come. The combination was fucking with my brain in delicious, wrong ways. I needed to scream. I whispered, “Please.”

“Please what, Graham Edward Gryn?”

“Please. . give me more.”

“More questions? Certainly.”

I groaned quietly. She raked her nails along my chest, brushed my balls with her fingertips and left her hand lingering by the underside of my bobbing cock.

“Do you masturbate?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“I have lovers.”

“Where?”

“In America.”

Her hand drifted away.

“Chicago, and just outside Chicago. Three women. They know about each other, but don’t know each other.”

“Thank you.” Her hand was back, stroking my cock with a feather touch. “Have you ever been to a prostitute, Graham?”

“Once.”

Her hand paused.

“A few times. Once that was good.”

She chuckled. It wasn’t an unpleasant chuckle. “What made it good, Graham? In detail.”

She squeezed, once, bending low and grazing my chest with her nipples.

“She was beautiful, and funny, and she got really wet. She. . spread and let me watch while she played with herself.”

“Nice.” Izzy’s hands were insistent, varied, attentive.

“She, um she had really pretty tits. Like yours. She told me about her fantasies, and listened to mine. She sucked me long and sloppy, with lots of slobbering and no condom.”

“Did you come in her mouth?”

“No.”

“Did you fuck?”

“Yes.”

“Did you come in her pussy?’’

“No.”

“In her ass?”

“No.”

“In her face?”

“No.”

“Did you come on her pretty tits, Graham?”

“No.”

Her hand slowed, teased. “Tell me.”

“We fucked for a long time. We were in the kitchen at a place I was renting, and it was a Saturday morning. I made us a pot of coffee, and we drank it naked while she sat on my cock. She took two sugars and one cream. She kept her glasses on.”

“You like girls with glasses?”

“Yes!”

I felt her turn around, felt her adjust her knees beside my shoulders. Izzy’s hands were both on me now, slow and steady. Her pussy was over my face. I strained up towards her.

“Did you come, Graham?”

“Yyyes. I did. I came in my hand.”

“Yes?”

“We fucked for a long time, and she let me suck on her titties, and then she fingered her ass while I watched, and she asked me if there was anything else I wanted.”

“And?”

“And. . I said there was. I asked her to lie on the kitchen table on her back.”

“Yeah?”

I felt fabric brush across my lips. Her pussy smelled like water tastes after a day of dehydration.

“I asked her to play with herself again while I licked her asshole.”

“You what?!”

“I rimmed her while she wanked, and then, when she was ready. . she peed. She pissed all over my face, and I came in my hand licking her butt hole and drinking her piss. And I liked it.”

“I bet you did! Dirty, dirty, fucker. Nasty perverted man. Thank you for telling me that, Graham.” Her hand held my cock at the base, and I could feel her breath on me. “I bet you wish I’d let you do that, Graham.”

I said nothing.

“I bet you wish you could let go, too, don’t you?”

Her lips were wet and warm and suddenly around the tip of my dick. I nearly passed out. The sensation was gone just as suddenly. Slicked, her hands moved more urgently, pumping my cock.

I groaned again. “Please!”

The house creaked alarmingly. Something, probably her tongue, reached out and joined her hand, twirling big, wet circles around the head. . then it stopped again.

“Are you a filthy pervert, Graham?”

“Yes.”

I felt the shift of her weight, then I could hear her fingers in her cunt right over my face.

“Are you a sick, depraved fucker, Graham?”

“Yes!”

“Will you do whatever I ask you to?”

I felt the first warm drops on my face before I answered. “Yes! Yes!”

For a while, there was just sound and taste and sensation. Her hand on me kept pumping, slowly, erratically. Izzy’s piss hissed out into the panties through her fingers, on to my face. She made it last: stopping, releasing, grinding against my lips, pausing, then letting it flow again. Her mouth would descend on my cock for a second then she would pull back. As her stream in my face subsided, she leaned forwards again. It took me a while to figure out that the smooth, soft pressure was her sliding my cock between her tits.

“Let it go. Now, Graham. Soak me.”

I heard her hands moving faster and I heard her breathing accelerate again.

“Come on, Graham. Do it.”

I tried. Nothing happened. I relaxed. Nothing happened. I thought about holding her by the hair, kneeling in front of me with her mouth open, and I did it. Izzy shook and was quiet while my piss spurted between her breasts and down between us. Her fingers danced a constant, constantly changing pattern. Relief and pleasure and permission to experience both at once threatened to split my head open. The last few gouts splattered her chest and mine, and I felt her mouth on me again for a brief, tantalizing second.

“Wow. That was good, Graham. So good. Do you want my mouth now?”

“Yes!”

“Do you want me to suck it?”

“Yes, please.”

“Tell me to suck it.”

“Suck it.”

“Say ‘Suck it, slut.’”

“Suck it, slut.”

“Say ‘Suck it, CeeCee.’”

I froze.

“Say it!”

“Suck it!”

“Say it!”

“Suck it already, slut!”

“Say it! Tell me!”

The floor creaked.

“Suck it, CeeCee. Suck the piss out of your brother’s dick. Take it down your throat, little whore, and gag on it. Suck it and don’t stop sucking on it. . Oh! Cecilie!”

There was a pause while I waited for the world to end.

The house creaked again, loudly. Izzy’s mouth was extraordinary. Her tongue laved the underside of my cock while she took it deep in her throat, and she held that depth for an impossibly long time. She licked and sucked and slobbered and smacked so loudly I was certain she would wake the entire house, and her hand didn’t for a second stop frigging her juicy pussy above my face. Eventually, I felt her do something I’d only heard about people accomplishing with their lips.

“Was that what I think it was?”

“Yeah, some people don’t even notice. Do you mind?”

“Hell no! Does that mean you’re going to sit on it?”

“Beg me.”

“Please, Izzy, put my dick in your beautiful, sweet-smelling pussy? Please?”

“Nicely done, but that’s not what I want to hear after all. Tell me.”

I was so hard in her hand that the band of the condom was biting me.

“Sit on it, girl.”

“Tell me.”

“Sit on it, slut. Fill your pissy slit with my dick. Sit on it, bounce on it, stuff it up your coochie and come on it! Damn it, Izzy!”

“Tell me!”

“Fuck! No.”

Izzy laughed. “If you won’t give it, I’ll just take it. You’ve just forfeit the use of your mouth, Graham.”

The panties were rank and wet. I tried to bite her when she stuffed them in my mouth. Her first slap felt as if it loosened some of my teeth.

On the second slap, I opened my aching jaw and my mouth was full of warm, salty, sodden panties.

She was already sliding down on my cock by the time she took off the blindfold. I was almost disappointed to see her there. The locked door had not opened. There literally wasn’t room to open it. The woman sitting on my cock was not my sister. I had now in spirit broken every trust with CeeCee, but she was safely asleep in her bed, and this tramp, this impostor had not won. .

“You’re a good brother, Graham. Shoot it. Come for me. Come for me and pretend you’re not thinking about fucking your little baby sister. Come in my wet, wet cunt and pretend you don’t wish it were CeeCee squeezing the jizz out of you. Shoot it, big brother! Shoot it, Graham, come in me. Come in your sister. Come for your sister. .”

I came. I came. Oh Lord, I came.

We looked at each other. She pulled a penknife from the robe and sliced silk from my ankles and wrists. Tenderly, she rubbed circulation back into my extremities, pulled the panties-that-weren’t-CeeCee’s from my mouth. I hadn’t expected her long, sweet kiss. I hadn’t expected her incredible, wordless gentleness as she sponge-bathed me, held my cock again as I pissed more of the beer, pulled the long underwear on my exhausted body and walked me to the library. At the door, she put my father’s bathrobe over my shoulders. I watched her step back, naked, down the single flight of stairs. I watched her, confident and quiet, her hands full of shredded underwear, avoid the creaking board on the landing and slip into my sister’s room. Crying felt almost as good as coming had, and I slept through sunrise for the first time in weeks.

The actual service was ridiculously huge, bolstered by a silent phalanx of burly business associates, two teams of lawyers from competing firms and another last-minute influx of relatives and faux-relatives. Dad was not the most social person on the planet on the best of days, and there was no way his quiet printing business should have merited the attention of so many bigwigs. I kept wanting to check if the self-important strangers from the city were at the right funeral, but Abercrombie doesn’t tend to have more than one a month.

Something had changed in the years I was away, and Dad’s new associates had an odd similarity about them, as if they were all part of the same strange club. I was genuinely flummoxed. A clump of my suddenly paunchy, greying school friends had paid their awkward respects, determinedly overcoming our decade’s absence to stride up and shake our hands; murmur their best wishes for us. Their dignity and genuineness was a gift, and for the first time I was glad to be back.

Cecilie squeezed my hand. We were standing on raised earth by the grave, with our hometown’s mist starting to obscure the departing guests. She was characteristically inappropriate in an impossibly form-fitting black ball gown, the plunge of its neckline accentuated by a spill of lace veil. In the context of that presentation, her push-up bra was the kind of overkill that challenged all of anyone’s best instincts. This was not the time for another sibling battle. I was speaking sternly to myself, repressing both the instinct to stare and the annoyance I always felt when my little sister’s appetite for attention outdid her good sense. Atop these familiar responses was a new terror about what her lover might have said, what she might have heard. Cecilie looked at me with big, trusting brown eyes and squeezed my hand again.

From the greyness behind us, an ursine bruiser whose nose had more than once been reshaped by non-surgical means approached us. An oversized umbrella danced in his nervous paws, twirling like a silken mushroom as he spoke to my sister.

“You, ah, intimate with the deceased?”

His accent was hard to place, but my first guess was Russian with a Glaswegian overlay. His meaning was harder to parse.

“I beg your pardon?” Cecilie was as confused as I.

“You were his girl? Ee kurtizanka? Accept please my condolences. Of me the name is Jimmy. You will be need someone to look after you of now. It appears you are like a nice girl.”

He held out his arm in a way that suggested she should take hold. The gesture came perfectly naturally to him, however insanely presumptuous it might have seemed to us. He so did not look like a Jimmy, and the accent overlay was sounding more like Israeli. It still took us both a while to pull meaning from the elegant oddness of his sentences, but Cecilie recovered first.

“His girl? No, Mr Jimmy. Yes, I am his. . I was his daughter. Daughter. Doch’. Not prostitutka.”

He turned red at the same time I figured out “kurtizanka”. I’m not a violent man, and I have never been the kind of “chivalrous” lout who hits people in protection of anyone’s reputation. It surprised me greatly to discover that I had backhanded Jimmy. It surprised me more to discover that he was still standing. This did not bode well. Even someone twice my mass and a half-metre taller should have the grace to collapse when I whack them that hard. His blush faded, while the left side of his face remained an angry red where my hand had struck. He flexed his own oversized hands, dropping umbrella and overcoat just as twin rugby tackles at waist and ankles spread him flat on the dewy grass.

Christian Hail, captain of 1989’s most feared ball team for miles, was breathing heavily, grass stains on his too-tight grey suit. There was a grim smugness to his expression as he sat on Jimmy’s chest, going slowly through the much larger man’s pockets. Michael and Manny Caruthers each held one massive leg, while Edmond Arrigakar, younger brother of my first steady girlfriend, pinned Jimmy’s head and shoulders.

“He’s got a piece! The fucker’s got a piece! What kind of idiot thug brings a cannon to a blessed funeral?”

“Watch how you pull on the man’s gun.”

Cecilie watched the portly ex-ballplayers tugging a tiny, elegantly chromed weapon from Jimmy’s waistband.

“That’s the safety you just turned off. You’re pointing a loaded, cocked pistol at your mate’s knee, Manny.”

Cecilie took the weapon from Manny’s shaking fingertips. She yanked a lever on the top, tapped a rounded black clip out of the handle and tossed both into her purse.

“What the fuck was Dad doing for these goons, and when did you turn into a pugilist?”

I had no answers. More of the old team was showing up, comfortingly boisterous now that they had a more familiar task. Someone passed me a flask. Fog hid time’s work on the living as we stood among the dead. They let Jimmy stand, resembling cygnets around a limping, lumpy swan as they marched him away.

When I squinted, I could just make out clusters of unfamiliar mourners trying not to stare at us through the fog. My hand hurt.

“Whaddya say we hijack the lawyer’s limo and see if they’ll give us a lift home?”

Mimicking Jimmy’s gesture, I thrust out an arm for Cecilie to hold. She took it gratefully, managing not to lean on me too hard as her heels poked plugs in the graveyard turf. I still held the flask. I wanted to get home and get properly soused so I didn’t have to think about what my dad had been working on, or about my sister absently, happily stroking the pistol in her purse.

She wasn’t going to let me have a quiet drink.

“So while you were defending my honour, had it occurred to you to wonder how I paid for law school?”

It was my turn to blush. I looked up at the roof of the car, wondering how many bugs would be standard issue for a lawyer’s limo.

“You didn’t have to. .”

“No, I probably didn’t have to. I could have done less interesting things for less money. I did have a choice. I still do.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Bollocks. You want to lecture me about being foolish and reckless and mad.”

“Not now I don’t. You’ve taken all the fun out of it. What are you going to do with this hard-earned new law degree, miss?”

Cecilie beamed. “Nothing, probably. I don’t half hate law.”

I thought about getting out and walking home. I thought about her girlfriend’s mouth. I thought about the glimpse of elaborate gartered and stockinged thigh my sister’s gown displayed, and I thought a lot about the Christian notion of hell. If it existed, maybe I’d see my father there.

“Mr Gryn retained us in the early eighties when his clientele began to ask him for jobs that were not entirely, er, within the realm of traditional printing practice. We helped him to find offshore locations for that aspect of his business, and to keep his dealings within the legal frameworks that those nations required. The environments to which he moved proved a phenomenal source of new work for an artist of his abilities, and soon we were handling a few million pounds of business traffic every month. You two (and Ms Gryn’s mother, should we succeed in tracking her down) are the sole heirs of a fortune that far exceeds the GNP of Chile for last year. Do you understand?”

I did not understand. Cecilie seemed to.

“We’re rich, bro. Filthy, stinking rich.”

“Huh?”

Cecilie was already asking the important questions. “What’s the current legal standing of our father’s enterprise?”

“Perfectly legit. We had a visit from two Dutch government agents a couple of years ago over suspicions your father’s enterprise was printing passports, but. .”

“Were they?”

“No, Ms Gryn, the last of that side of the operation was phased out for good in 1991, on our advice. On paper it never actually happened and the only records we retain are those that keep people like Jimmy on their best behaviour.”

“You were there? By the grave today?”

“Our representatives were. They may not know firearms, but they have other skills.”

Out the office window of Hannaford amp; Locke, I watched as two tugs dragged an oversized barge too far starboard in the twisting, narrow waters beneath Burnsey Bridge. The barge hit a piling and the entire bridge tilted alarmingly. A semi on the bridge skidded across two lanes and stopped with the cab dangling over the water. I couldn’t see the driver. As I watched, cranes, ambulances and a flittering black helicopter arrived at the scene. My sister crossed and uncrossed her legs beside me. The stockings were pearl-grey fishnet, with at least six elaborate catchments for garters.

“Mr Gryn? Graham? Are you all right?”

“Just fine, thanks. A little distracted is all.”

“Of course, Mr Gryn. Trying times, and a great deal of information to take in.” Indeed. Cecilie put her hand on mine.

“I think my brother could use a drink. I know I could. Do you people keep any whiskey here?”

My father’s oily solicitors didn’t bat an eye between them. Nor did they offer us a choice of whiskies, as some younger employees of newer firms might have. The heavy crystal goblets they produced brimmed with a liquid that had too much peaty, potent golden musk to have been created by mortal hands.

I signed something that acknowledged our commitment to keep seeking CeeCee’s mom and to set aside a third of the assets in her name, excluding the house but including a property in Scotland we’d never seen or heard of. I signed a dozen more documents, handed the sheaf of paper back across the desk, and looked back out the window. Then they gave me the whiskey.

Mr Locke smiled in a thin, careful way. “I’ve met Ms Flowers. It will be my deep and abiding pleasure to locate her and hand her the keys to her ah, new Scottish castle.”

“Castle?!”

“Yes, ma’am. Parts are in poor repair, but it’s doing well for a fourteenth-century structure. Do you wish to reconsider ceding ownership to your mother?”

CeeCee looked at me. I shrugged.

Cecilie cleared her throat and sat up straight. “No, when you find her, it’s hers. But a castle? Really? Wow. How? Oh, never mind. Weirdness.”

There was a tiny alarm clock tattooed in green on her inner thigh, with thin, coiled black cables running up from it towards. . I drained my whisky and looked out the window again.

The helicopter had left. My stomach didn’t like me. I didn’t like me. I wanted more whiskey, but Cecilie walked me out of the office, hailed a cab and held my tired head to her shoulder for most of the ride home. I had this doomed, horrible premonition about walking back into the house, but she walked me up, under Mom’s ashes, past her door, past the bathroom, and tucked me in to my nest in the library.

“Sleep it off, Graham. You did good. Thanks for being there, big brother.”

The Cecilie I grew up with would never have said that. I slept. I dreamed. Time passed, as it will.

At some point they took me out to get fitted for a tux. I spilled curry and whisky on it at a strange wake. The whole room was full of fawning strangers and distant cousins who reminded me how their names were spelled. None of the respect for the dead you might expect at a funeral, but none of the raucous reminiscence by actual friends and family a real wake would have. I might have made an inappropriate comment or two. At the point when I tried to start fisticuffs with a guy who could have been Jimmy’s larger twin, my sister’s silent partner cut suddenly between us and steered me into a beige alcove of the bland, “pub-style” chain restaurant in which the whole ill-conceived event occurred.

I stared. “Are you bonking my sister?”

“Absolutely. Are you too blotto to be out in public?”

“Unquestionably. How come you never talk? What’s your name?”

“Pauline.”

“Really?”

“Really. I swear on a stack of original Batman comics.”

“All right then, Mr Pauline. How do we get out of this benighted place? Where’s CeeCee?”

“She’s in her car, waiting with Izzy.”

“Whose car? We’re Gryns. Nobody’d give us a licence!”

Pauline cracked a small smile full of sharp-looking teeth. “They assigned you guys a car, a driver and a bodyguard, but even together they wouldn’t be wide enough to stop that ambulant mountain you were insulting. Come back to the house. All your relatives are gone. . and there’s more whiskey.”

“I see why she likes you, Pauline. Common sense and clear priorities.”

“Naw, it’s probably my good manners and small hands. Step this way.”

The driver didn’t speak, but he got us home in eighteen minutes and his limo smelled of fresh cedar.

I stared out the window, which meant watching the reflection of my sister and her double making out while Pauline stared out the other window. The bodyguard’s name was Fidel. He checked the house from top to bottom and gave us his number before departing. Pauline and the girls skipped upstairs.

I headed to the kitchen in search of liquor. I wished for a Chicago whore and a pot of coffee. The bed creaked. I wished for a less active imagination. It was hard to decide between beer and whiskey, so I chose both. After my first two beers and midway through my first triple shot, Pauline came downstairs. I didn’t stare or fall over, but I did choke a little. Pauline wore combat boots, a grin, and more piercings than I was aware one small body could accommodate. It was oddly embarrassing to be staring at the shaved, multiple-pierced pussy lips of a person I had defaulted to treating as male. I redirected my gaze upwards.

“You’re adjusting to the temperature in Abercrombie?”

“No, I’m cold as fuck, but your sister figured this would get your attention.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you come upstairs, I can get under a blanket with a hot-water bottle and you can get your dick sucked. Again.”

I wondered if conversations before my dad died had made more sense, or if that was just an error of memory.

“You’re down here naked to offer me head on Izzy’s behalf?”

“No, Graham, I’m offering my own mouth, which is reasonable skilled and salivating a little bit at the prospect of being wrapped around your big, juicy meat.”

“What if I turn out to have a soft, tiny wiener?”

“Come upstairs. I’ll work on the softness and I’ll show you how I know it’s not tiny.”

“What if I like how stiff your nipples are right now? What if I’d like some of your mouth right here?”

Pauline knelt and crawled towards me. Crew cut. No visible tattoos. More muscular definition than on any body I had previously seen in real life. Tiny, pointy tits pierced by vertical bars and rings placed horizontally. Big brown eyes. I watched those eyes approach. I looked into those eyes as Pauline quietly, deliberately began to massage my balls through my trousers with a strong tongue. When my sister’s no-longer-quite-so-androgynous companion turned, stood and walked upstairs, I followed.

On the second floor, I got to the door of my sister’s bedroom and hesitated.

“Don’t worry, Graham. Come on in. It’s just you and me.”

“How about we go up to the library?”

“No, I promised to show you how I know your dick size. Besides, my hot water bottle’s in here.”

Pauline sat on the distended rubber bubble and pulled up Gran Amble’s quilt. I thought about personal pronouns. I thought about unzipping my pants and standing on the bed. This last thought carried me to action, and I found myself looking into the cupboard nestled in the crook of my sister’s ceiling while Pauline got energetically to work on my cock. The cupboard housed CeeCee’s volleyball trophies, a stack of my old girlie magazines(!) and two exhaust vents from the adjacent bathroom. One vent curved up and through the roof, one stopped midway to the ceiling and ended. . in a mirror. The water bottle squished and gurgled. The floor creaked. The bed creaked. Pauline sucked back another inch and the bathroom light came on.

“You’re kidding!”

They weren’t. Pauline choked a little. The reflection was inverted, and it took me a second to realize what I was seeing. Their backs were to the bathroom vent, and I had a crazy moment of realizing how hard Izzy and my sister had worked to emphasize their similarities. Even next to each other, the resemblance was striking. CeeCee was bustier and wore more ink. Izzy was more muscular and had a more upright posture, but their hair was identical, their asses were the same generous roundness and their gestures moved at the same even pace as they stripped off each other’s bra. It was obviously a well-rehearsed show. I was watching their regular routine, something they did for money, for strange men. I tried to step away from the vent, but Pauline grabbed my ass and kept me in place, in mouth, in range to see my sister undressing from above. The implications of this view were starting to sink in. Pauline passed me a bottle.

I was not going to think about CeeCee watching me come all over her panties, year after year. I was not going to think about her watching me sitting on the john jerking it to these very same magazines that were now inches from my nose, their pages still stuck together. Whiskey burned my throat on the way down. Pauline’s throat was hot, too. I leaned into the heat. CeeCee grinned up at me. Pauline choked again, and I wondered if I was going to weep or come.

“Are you going to come, bro?”

Her voice was as clear as if we were in each other’s arms. Pauline did something astounding with that tongue piercing.

“Are you?”

CeeCee spoke directly to the vent, up to me, breaking the fourth wall. Izzy lapped whiskey from between her spread legs. Their pubes matched. For the hundredth time that week, I thought about waking from a nightmare that had become sexual in all the wrong ways. Pauline slurped and licked at my balls, humming happily.

Cecilie smiled and pushed Izzy’s face lower. I dealt appropriately with the spectacle of my sister frigging herself while her doppelganger ate her ass, which is to say that I yelled, pushed Pauline away, ran out of the room and stood hyperventilating on the landing with my dick still flapping out of my pants.

My three tormentors came out of the bathroom and from CeeCee’s bedroom next to it in uncanny synchronicity, each of them bearing a litre of whiskey. Pauline wore the quilt, too, but appeared to have abandoned the hot-water bottle. CeeCee spotted me, smiled and fell over. The other two caught her and her bottle, propped her up and advanced towards me.

“This has been a long time coming, Graham.” Izzy was slurring her words a little.

“Where did all this booze come from?”

“Our lawyers. Isn’t that sweet?” Cecilie staggered slightly, but the three of them kept coming. It was like a horror movie, or a porno, or the scariest elements of both combined. I could not move. I knew it was going to be sick, bad and wrong, but I could not budge.

Pauline reached me first, handed over the bottle and knelt before me.

CeeCee and Izzy dropped to the edge of the landing, watching us. Their hands were busy at each other’s cunt, but their eyes were fixed on the wet, slippery juncture of Pauline’s lips and my improbably stiff cock.

“Did you put Viagra in the whiskey or something, Pauly? How come he’s so hard?”

“Maybe he’s still into watching his sister.”

Izzy slipped a slick forefinger into CeeCee’s butt. I wondered if I would go blind immediately or during subsequent months of reliving this moment. There was something both performative and very genuine about the way they were together. I imagined they were an amazingly successful duo. I imagined that maybe they were so good at performing that they didn’t have to actually touch their clients. My wishful thinking isn’t any more hampered by realism than anyone else’s.

CeeCee licked her lips. “Are you going to save some of that for me, Graham?”

I struggled not to spit up a mouthful of impossibly good whiskey and wondered if I could drink myself into impotence before the unthinkable became more thinkable.

“This firewater, sis? No, you’ve got your own.”

“The cock, Graham. I want some. I want you to fuck me.”

Izzy and Pauline pulled their respective hands from various orifices and applauded. I gaped and sputtered. Pauline kept sucking.

“About time you asked clearly for that, honey. About time you got it, too.” Izzy was saying exactly the wrong thing. The world was not behaving. Dad would have blamed me.

CeeCee stood, wobbling, near the edge of the landing, precariously close to the edge of the last long flight of stairs down. All of a sudden I saw the drunken tragedy about to happen, pictured her losing balance and tumbling to her death down these same stairs. I pulled away from Pauline for the second time in one night, miraculously avoiding being maimed by all those pretty, perfect teeth. I stepped forwards too late, saw the slow-motion collapse begin, and threw myself across the landing to intercept CeeCee’s fall. Even in the haze of my rush to catch my sister I noticed the calm of Izzy’s placement, carefully bracing herself against the banister, poised. Even as I tripped on my own ankle-bound trousers, I noticed Pauline snapping into place on the other side of the landing, also braced and waiting. Almost as if they had rehearsed it. .

I fell atop Cecilia, saw her head expertly caught and pillowed in Izzy’s lap, and only knew for sure I’d been bamboozled when Pauline landed heavily on my back, sandwiching me on the landing atop my naked, squirming sister.

“Watch it!”

Izzy slapped the falling urn out of the air just above my head, dashing it against the stairs above us. Grey powder and slivers of ceramic spattered us all. CeeCee gasped, looked horrified, and dabbed a splinter from her bleeding cheek.

“Oh shit.” She sounded suddenly, perfectly sober.

I spat my mother’s ashes into her face and started to laugh. “Get off me, Pauline. Now.”

There were little stinging punctures all up my neck, bleeding into the tux shirt. Ashes and spilled whiskey made a vile, bumpy mud that showed brown-grey on my jacket. I wondered how much it would cost to replace the whole bloody, crusty mess, and then I remembered the insanity of our meeting with Locke and Hannaford. One ruined tux was not going to send me to the poorhouse, one skanky sister wasn’t going to melt my brain and one mouthful of my mother was not going to ruin my night. I stood, pulled off the uncomfortable dress shoes, yanked off the red-streaked white bow tie, tore off the jacket and shirt and wiggled out of the trousers. Blood dripped from a cut in my forehead, pooling around my eye and dripping on CeeCee’s perfect knockers. She looked like an extra from an X-rated zombie film.

“Got a rubber, Pauly?” I might have had rubbers in the tux pants, but everything else was punctured by shards of ceramic, and it didn’t seem the right situation to risk holed condoms.

Cecilie pulled her knees up around her ears and looked at me. “This time, Graham. . this first time I want skin on skin. Do it.” Gone was her uncertain slur. I had been duped by a master.

I knelt. I pressed the head of my cock against the delicious, sticky wetness of my sister’s pussy. I wondered if I could stay hard through this impossible, mad, stupid moment. Cecilie canted her hips up, reached down for my cock and pressed it against her asshole.

“Do it. Now. Before I change my mind.”

I did.

Sometimes ass-fucking feels like a scary struggle. Sometimes it feels like the smoothest, sweetest wrongness a guy could do to his gorgeous, plump-bummed, spread-wide-open little sister. This was one of the latter times. I pressed slow, steady. I realized midway through opening up her butt that I couldn’t really feel my own cock. I’d gone numb from excitement and feeling overwhelmed. We looked at each other, my sister and I, and we laughed as I pushed into her ass a little deeper. Pauline appeared with a pump jug of lube and applied it liberally. Those really were small hands. Most of Pauline’s left hand slid into CeeCee’s pussy and her eyes crossed. Izzy tapped gently at CeeCee’s clit, and the four of us began to build a rhythm.

Sensation returned to my cock as I relaxed. My cock sunk further into CeeCee as she relaxed. As I pushed in the last few inches, she made a noise I’ve never heard another human utter.

Izzy looked at me. “What was that?”

“Er. . I hit bottom.”

“Hit it again! Three years of boffing this hottie and she’s never sounded like that. Give it to her! ”

I did, looking down at her skin distended around me. “Change your mind, yet, sis?”

Cecilie smiled beatifically. “Just stuff it in me, Graham. Like I’ve wanted you to since I knew what fucking was.”

“You’re kidding. You hated me.”

“Not really. Thought about this every night and watched you every day. .”

I slid in again, slow, deep, slippery with lube into my sister’s impossible tightness. “Filthy, sneaky little voyeuristic princess. You know it was you I was thinking about. Still is. I can’t believe I never figured out that vent.”

“Who are you calling filthy, Graham? Fucking panty sniffer! Pervert. Fuck me, Graham. Just like that! ”

I watched Pauline’s hand push CeeCee open and open again, timed my own strokes to alternate. Izzy and I were breathing in tandem. She looked smug and euphoric. Izzy had set this scene up, I was sure of it, and I was grateful. In her expression, I think I saw how much she cared and how much she would risk for my sister. I tried not to feel competitive. I pushed in a little harder, and CeeCee’s breasts bounced with the impact. I wanted to be in her always. My perfect, pretty, sneering little sister had become this horny, warm, wet woman who wanted me. “I love you, Cecilie.”

CeeCee blinked. Ashes, blood and sweat mixed on our skin with fragments of ceramic. The effect was surreal. “I know, bro. I can feel it.”

I reached for somebody’s whiskey bottle, took a pull of it and got a mouthful of lukewarm tea.

“You didn’t need to set up all this elaborate game, but I’m glad you did. You both make pretty convincing drunken sluts.” I spat the tea into CeeCee’s face, grabbed her ankles and pushed in again. Hard. She squealed.

Izzy slapped a little more emphatically at my sister’s clit. “Are you going to come for us, honey? Come around your brother’s big, hard cock?”

“They both should.” Pauline stroked and tugged at my balls. I wasn’t in any hurry to orgasm, and I was feeling so full of liquor and beer that I probably couldn’t anyway. This time when I reached for a bottle it was pure whiskey. CeeCee clenched around me, wiggled her rear and leered. “Give it to me! Graham, you’re the brother everyone should have. I love you too.”

She laughed as she came, her asshole spasming around me and her face reddening. “Holy shit! Yes! Yes!”

Pauline’s guffaw joined in behind me. “You guys are amazing. I don’t believe you’re actually fucking.”

CeeCee held me close, made sure I didn’t pull out. “This is so fucking sick. It doesn’t get any nastier. Damn!”

For a moment, we both believed that was true. I relaxed, pushed in further and concentrated on releasing the valve that should be shut when one fucks. It took a moment, and then the floodgates opened. I breathed deep, looked into my sister’s eyes and waited for her to notice I was pissing up her ass.