Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/2406149.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M, M/M
  Fandom:
      From_Dusk_Till_Dawn:_The_Series
  Relationship:
      Kate_Fuller/Richard_Gecko, Seth_Gecko/Vanessa_Styles, Richard_Gecko/Seth
      Gecko
  Character:
      Kate_Fuller, Richard_Gecko, Seth_Gecko, Vanessa_Styles, Jacob_Fuller,
      Jennifer_Fuller
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe, Foster_kids, Implied/Referenced_Underage_Sex, Incest
  Stats:
      Published: 2014-10-05 Updated: 2016-06-10 Chapters: 5/? Words: 22683
****** Kin ******
by grayglube
Summary
     “I think everyone should have a family.” Her daddy smiles, whole and
     happy, but her momma’s is smaller, gentler. Life starting. For her.
     And someone else, too. Maybe. (AU foster siblings)
Notes
     AU in which Pastor Fuller and his wife adopt the Gecko brothers and
     they grow up alongside Kate. Seth is the older brother in this.
***** Chapter 1 *****
Late at night Kate can hear her parents talk in whispers. Her mother’s firm
‘no’ and her father’s soft ‘think it over, pray on it.’ She’s eleven and thinks
she’s very wise for her age. Her mother says she has an old soul. Her father
says she’s growing up with a strong sense of God’s grace.
 
She’s counting down the time until her twelfth birthday.
 
It’s three months away, but it’s the date she’s set up in her mind, not just
because it’s a service day and a birthday for the first time she can remember
but because she’s told her daddy it’s going to be her baptism.
 
And with all the gravity an eleven year old can have she thinks, in a level
sort of way, that these sorts of things, the life changing things...the life
starting  things should all come together in some special way. She’s told her
momma. She’d smiled and said she was a good girl, a smart girl, and that she
was proud.
 
Full circle.
 
Kate is an only child. Her parents talk back and forth about it, her momma says
it’s up to God and her daddy says he thinks God has already told them what they
should do.
 
But, her daddy’s a pastor and her momma worries so much about others that Kate
thinks it’s hard for her to worry about  their  family too.
 
“I need to think about it.”
 
Kate hears her mother say in the kitchen before she’s walked all the way down
the stairs, before her parents can see her. Breakfast smells like blueberry
waffles for her, hash-browns and coffee for her daddy and cinnamon oatmeal for
her momma.
 
Her daddy says good morning and his smile is bright like the sun. He kisses her
momma on the cheek once, her shoulder pops up a little and a smile stretches
her cheek, “I’ll think about it pastor. Okay,” she claps her hands. “Breakfast
time. Kate?”
 
And Kate sits and says one of the things she always says before breakfast, a
favorite proverb of the week or a small little girl sermon of daily faith and
peace and love. The world from a child’s eyes, her daddy says, her mother
squeezes her hand.
 
Her daddy smiles down at the table, catches her reaching for the syrup before
she’s finished, one eye cracked open and a friendly wink that her momma catches
and taps both of them for.
 
“Kate?”
 
“Yes?”
 
“What would you think if we open our home to other children?”
 
“You mean like adopt?”
 
“Jenny” her daddy starts.
 
“Jacob, I think Kate has a say too.”
 
“I think everyone should have a family.”
 
Her daddy smiles, whole and happy, but her momma’s is smaller, gentler. And
they look at each other, peck each other a kiss and Kate forks a waffle.
 
Life starting. For her. And someone else, too. Maybe.
 
All good things, she thinks. She wonders and waits.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
The boys, two of them, arrive three days before her birthday. She’s not upset,
not even when her momma has to leave to go change the sheets when one of them,
small and nervous and nauseous pukes in his bed and Kate is left sitting next
to the sewing machine, waiting for her momma to come back and finish hemming
her baptism robe, it’s white but she needs another layer under it.
 
Her momma doesn’t come back for awhile.
 
She’s not supposed to touch the sewing machine, but she can hem by hand. She’s
putting in the modesty panels and someone’s in the doorway.
 
“Are you making curtains?”
 
Kate looks up.
 
She holds up her robe, “It’s for my birthday, my baptism.”
 
“Aren’t you a little old for that?”
 
Kate smiles, sews another two stitches, “Maybe. Which one of you was sick?”
 
“Me.”
 
Behind his glasses he looked pale and his forehead is shiny, “Are you okay
now?”
 
He nods. Stares at her without ever coming further into the room.
 
“Did you rip it?”
 
“It’s so it’s not see through.”
 
“Because you have to naked?”
 
The question makes her mouth drop open, but she shuts it, despite her cheeks
getting hot, his stare and blank expression make it hard to tell if he’s trying
to instigate something, her daddy told her it might be a tough transition for
the two of them.
 
Told her to give them time.
 
“No, we don’t have to be naked.”
 
“So are we going to have to wear white dresses and get dunked in a lake too?”
 
Instigating.
 
She tries hard not to frown, one of her stitches tangles, she has to cut it out
and put it in again.
 
“Not unless you want to.”
 
“Where’s the bathroom?”
 
She puts down the robe and gets up, “I’ll show you.”
 
There’s one connected to her parents room, but her daddy is sleeping so she
shows him the one downstairs.
 
“There it is.”
 
He stares at her expectantly.
 
“I don’t really need to use the bathroom.”
 
He walks past her, and to the fridge, looks inside, shuts it. Kate watches.
“What are you doing?”
 
“You’re mom’s been three feet away for the entire time we’ve been here. I just
wanted to look around without her crawling up my ass.”
 
“Don’t curse, Richard.”
 
He stares at her for a long time. It makes her feel stupid for chastising him.
 
Give them time . “Sorry.” She says, looks at her toes, squishes them against
the tea-brown tiles.
 
He opens the fridge again, his glasses reflect the light against the dimmed
down kitchen. “Is this your cake?”
 
“Yeah, we need to put icing on it still.”
 
“I like icing.”
 
“Me too.”
 
“You can call me Richie.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“Tonight when me and Seth go to sleep your dad won’t try to sneak in and jerk
us off, will he?”
 
“No. Why would you ask something like that?” Her cheeks feel hot again, shame,
pity, anger. Single emotions brought up by simple words,  give him time .
 
“Are you lying?”
 
“No! Of course not.”
 
Anger.
 
“Good. I’d set him on fire in his sleep if he did.”
 
Fear.
 
“You shouldn’t say things like that.”
 
Anger, again.
 
“People shouldn’t try to touch kids.”
 
Discomfort.
 
“Did somebody touch you?”
 
Pity.
 
“A pervert put his hand down my pants, once.” Richard grins at her as he turns,
sways against the fridge door in a way her momma always tells her not to cause
she might break it.
 
“Did you tell someone?”
 
Concern.
 
“I didn’t have to, I poured grits over his hand at breakfast. He had to get a
finger taken off. That was the last house we were at. His wife liked tropical
fish, she knew, Seth put bleach in their tank before the social worker came to
get us.”
 
“Nothing bad will happen to you here. I promise.”
 
“Swear.”
 
Kate doesn’t think twice, “I swear.”
 
“If you’re lying, I’ll eat your cake.”
 
“Kate?”
 
Richard is already shutting the bathroom door behind him as her mom comes down
the stairs.
 
“Oh, Kate. Don’t leave the fridge open honey. It’s too late to eat now.”
 
“I was just bored, sorry. Richie said he felt sick again. I didn’t want to just
leave him.”
 
Her mother’s gentle smile makes her wrinkles show, the toilet flushes in the
bathroom. The water runs. And Kate’s mother says she’ll show Richie to bed
while Kate puts on her pajamas.
 
With no other choice but to leave, Kate goes and at the top of the stairs Seth
sits, legs outstretched and arms crossed on his knees. “Where’s Richie?”
 
“Bathroom.”
 
“You’re house is nice.”
 
“Thanks. My mom is coming up.” She holds out a hand, he let’s her pull him up.
 
“Your mom is weird.”
 
“Sometimes,” Kate nods. The words come easy, words she can’t ever think herself
without feeling guilty. “She’s sick, I think. She’s been sad for awhile.”
 
“Why?”
 
Kate inclines her head to listen to her mother downstairs, the bathroom cabinet
opens, the squeaky metal banging as it shuts, and the soft soothing words
adults give to sick kids as they give them medicine for hurting bellies and
scraped knees and stick a thermometer in their mouths.
 
In the boys room, plain and clean and a little cold from the open window to air
out the smell of someone being sick she tells Seth in as few words as possible,
because that’s how people explain bad things. Or should, Kate isn’t sure. Maybe
it’s just the way people talk about things they know they should feel bereaved
about but don’t really because it isn’t a bad thing that’s happened to them,
only someone they know.
 
“She lost her baby, last year.”
 
Seth says ‘oh,’ nods. Spreads out on his bed, Kate says goodnight, sews
stitches and pretends nonchalance as her momma and Richie walk by, she hears
his ‘goodnight, Kate’, but looks up too slow to give him one back.
 
Her momma shakes her head fondly, “I thought I said it was time for pajamas.”
Kate asks if she can finish the lining first. Her momma shakes her head but
promises to teach her the sewing machine after school.
 
It will be the last at school day before her baptism and the boy’s first day at
a new school.
 
Kate thinks there’s a certain sort of symmetry in it, she goes to bed wondering
if the boys are happy, or, at least not scared, and that it’s not too cold with
the window open.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
The boy’s are quiet and polite. Though Seth looks everywhere but at the person
he talks too and Richie stares at everyone.
 
On her birthday they all have cake, it’s a small party because the boys need to
acclimate , her dad says, and all of her friends might be too much at once.
 
But her momma let’s her go to a sleepover.
 
Kate tries not to feel guilty, but she does, and at nine at night feigns a
stomach ache, even though it’s sinful to lie and it’s only her first day of
actual accountability for her sins, and someone’s mother calls hers to come and
get her.
 
She’s in the back seat, curled up.
 
Her mother says she must have gotten sick because of other kids now.
 
Kate says she hope Seth doesn’t catch it too.
 
Her mother peeks back at her at a red light and says she’s sorry her birthday
ended with her getting sick.
 
“Maybe it’s a blessing, maybe I should be home.”
 
Her mother’s smile gets a little smaller, “Yes, maybe. Close your eyes so you
don’t get car sick.”
 
===============================================================================
 
 
At Christmas she explains they are going to a midnight  service  not a mass,
they shrug off the difference.
 
She tries to explain but eventually her daddy hears them at the kitchen table
and sits down to answer questions she’s never really needed to ask about things
regarding her church.
 
It’s strange but she learns something too.
 
On New Year’s they light up sparklers and the neighbors burn their christmas
tree, her momma frowns, they can see the little fire through the fence slats.
It's disrespectful she says. Kate hears Seth tell Richie that so is putting it
out on the curb for the garbage man who won’t pick it up for a week. Kate spins
her sparkler between her thumb and ring finger, ponders the thought and decides
he’s right.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
Easter is next.
 
They hunt for eggs in the park and at lunch her daddy asks if the boys want to
say grace.
 
Instantly she is worried, not that they won’t but that they do and are bad
about it.
 
Seth shakes his head and Richie says he doesn’t know how.
 
On either side of her, her parents’ hands in hers relax the grips they didn’t
know had tightened.
 
Kate says she will.
 
And, Seth grins at her a little, Richie stares at her while both their eyes
should be closed.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
At the end of Spring they set up the inflatable pool, she floats on her back
once the sun sets and watches the stars come out. Her momma lets her get a
bikini, it has a long top, at the department store she comes out disappointed
and a little angry.
 
When her mother asks what’s wrong Kate frowns. Feels like crying.
 
“I shouldn’t worry about it but I do.” She crosses her arms over small breasts
and holds out a rejected bathing suit that doesn’t fit, gapes empty where other
girls’ aren’t.
 
“Oh, honey. It’s okay. We all worry about things like that.”
 
Four days later, she gets her period at school.
 
In the nurses office, lying down she hears Seth.
 
He jammed a finger playing basketball in gym. He sits down in the quiet room
with cots and asks if she’s okay.
 
Stomach ache.
 
He looks at her funny and then at the doorless gap at empty chairs and a little
microwave  where the nurses heat up their lunch and the fridge where the
diabetic kids keep their insulin and juice boxes.
 
“Really? Or is it because…”
 
Her face get’s hot and her head hurts and she feels like she so embarrassed
she’s going to cry.
 
“Because.” She answers.
 
“If you ask they give you tylenol, I think.”
 
She tells him they did already.
 
He doesn’t say anything else and she faces the wall. Embarrassed tears. She
hopes he doesn’t tell everyone. Her momma picks her up and takes her to the
drug store.
 
She tells her it’s a good thing, that it means she’s growing up.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
Seth and Richie have the same birthday, twelve hours and a year apart. Richie
wants the same caked she had, Seth wants ice cream instead. Her dad helps make
them.
 
Seth is fourteen and Richie is thirteen before she is.
 
But they look happy and she takes pictures with a disposable camera she bought
on her own. She wraps it and gives it to Richie, because he seems to remember
things better than Seth, and for the both of them she helps pick out clothes.
 
They look underwhelmed but hide it. She giggles, better her than her dad who
would get khakis and polos or her mom out alone thinking basketball shorts and
jerseys are the things to buy. No, blue jeans and t-shirts and a sweater for
them each and things they can rip when they climb fences and fall off the
trampoline.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
School is over and her Daddy is counseling people at the church who are having
a hard time in their marriage, her momma is watering the flowers. Kate is going
to camp. The boys are staying behind. It’s too soon her daddy said, but they
told Kate they don’t really want to go.
 
They distrust other kids and loathe authority figures.
 
She’s come in to pack and she hears them in their room, the door is closed but
her room is next to theirs, she tries to be quiet when she slips her ear
against the wall, knees making her bed creak.
 
“Spit first.”
 
“Ouch!”
 
“Shhh.”
 
She hears sounds, a quiet groan.
 
“It went all over.”
 
“Sorry.”
 
“Ewww. That’s not funny.”
 
There are hysterical giggles and someone leaving, down the stairs.
 
And Kate knows, she looks at the wall, hard. Knows that boys are gross and do
stuff. And she also knows that it’s none of her business, that stuff like that
is  private . But, Richie and Seth are brothers. She wonders if it’s a boy
thing. When she was in first grade, at a sleepover, she sucked Melissa
Shorlie’s tongue in her mouth, and they laughed too and did it some more until
her older sister told them it was gross and then told their mom who told her
momma and Kate wasn’t allowed to sleepover anymore, so Kate isn’t sure if boys
do things like that too.
 
There’s a knock on the wall.
 
And another, Kate sits very still and wonders if it’s Seth or Richie.
 
She feels guilty and ashamed for not letting them keep what’s  private
private. She knocks back and suddenly, Seth or Richie, it’s Richie, is out of
their room and standing in the opening doorway of hers.
 
He stares at her.
 
“I wouldn’t tell.”
 
He nods.
 
“That stuff is private.”
 
No nods, just a stare.
 
“I didn’t mean to hear.”
 
“Sorry.”
 
She shakes her head. “It’s okay,” she tries for a smile. “You’re boys.” Like it
explains everything, it might. She doesn’t know.
 
But Richie doesn’t look very convinced, so Kate wonders if maybe boys don’t
normally do gross things, and then instantly feels like she’s given away secret
information.
 
“I’m not stupid, Richie. I know what boys do.”
 
“Do you?”
 
“Sorta, yeah. Girls do things too.”
 
“Like what?”
 
“It’s private.”
 
“Do you do private things?”
 
“I think everybody does.”
 
His nose crinkles. “That would be gross.”
 
She nods, mouth pursing. “Yeah. I guess.”
 
===============================================================================
 
 
The have more christmases and easters and birthdays and the boys talk more and
her dad puts out a curse jar, Seth puts in the most, but what makes her dad
most surprised is when the runner up is her and not Richie. She gets nudged
under the table for it a lot.
 
It’s like a joke they all share.
 
Richie has to put in a nickel every time he rolls his eyes though so they end
up about even since Kate has to put in a quarter like Seth for bad words.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
Seth kisses a girl named Vanessa in the cafeteria right before the bell rings
to say the buses will be leaving, Kate sees them one day, she’s on her way to
the track for cross country practice.
 
They see her, Seth introduces her as his sister and she smiles back. Vanessa
asks if she wants to hang out after school one day, her jacket smells like
cigarettes and Seth has one behind his ear.
 
She says she has to ask first but that she’d like too, and then she tells Seth
to not let their dad see the cigarette. He salutes her and she runs the rest of
the way to practice so she isn’t late.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
Richie turns fifteen first and Seth is learning to drive. Her dad and him are
out practicing in the empty parking lot outside the church, her mother is
grocery shopping.
 
Kate is doing her earth science report on rocks, which are boring and
tasteless, and that’s her first sentence and she can’t get any further because
the boys’ room is still next to hers and Richie’s bed keeps squeaking.
 
He’s masturbating.
 
Masturbating.
 
She learned the word Vanessa. Trading secrets in the backyard on the
trampoline, and Kate was thirsty for new vocabulary words, and secret
techniques.
 
Vanessa, a year older, knew more than Kate thought anyone did.
 
But the shower head isn’t one you can take off in their house and Kate doesn’t
really think fingers feel good inside. She’s tried but is too worried her bed
squeaks too, so she doesn’t  do it unless she’s alone upstairs.
 
And even when they aren’t home it’s usually daytime, and things aren’t as
private in the daytime.
 
She drops her index card box with definitions in it on the floor, she doesn’t
mean too. Richie’s bed still squeaks, and then it stops and she thinks he’s
biting his pillow, because he coughs a few seconds later and sometimes she’s
walked in and there’s a circle of teeth imprinted in saliva on his mint green
pillowcase, like he’s just been doing something.
 
There’s a knock on the wall.
 
It’s weird.
 
And gross.
 
Kate rolls her eyes. Knocks on her desk. She hears Richie laugh.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
It’s her fifteenth birthday. She stopped liking red velvet cake a year ago
because she learned it was made of beets and once she’d known it never tasted
the same. Seth nods, says it looks like you’ve eaten a human being once you’ve
finished a piece, but Richie still likes it and Seth makes dirty jokes about
girls on their period that Kate doesn’t get until it’s hindsight twenty-twenty.
 
By the time her mother needed to know what she was supposed to be baking the
boys said they would decide and Kate just said ‘whatever,’ she doesn’t mind
surprises.
 
They put a cake dome over a platter and sing happy birthday and when they
proudly reveal their surprise she can’t breathe, just laughs, her daddy shakes
his head, her mother puts her chin on her palm and hides her smile.
 
Birthday meatloaf with her name written across it in ketchup and a one and five
candle.
 
She tells them they’re stupid, and laughs and laughs and laughs.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
Her dad installs another bathroom on the second floor.
 
She thinks it’s because someone always has to pee when someone else is in the
shower or an elbow always ends up knocking someone’s toothbrush out of someone
else’s mouth and into the toilet. Richie says it’s because her dad doesn’t want
her walking in on someone doing something private.
 
She raises her eyebrows and he just keeps eating his cereal with her on the
porch while her dad and her uncle caulk the tub.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
They are all invited to Vanessa’s sweet sixteen. Seth knows first, because he
says he has to light a candle on the cake and Kate doesn’t really know what
that has to do with anything but she thinks it’s Vanessa’s way of knowing for
absolute sure Seth isn’t kissing other girls, or really it’s so Vanessa knows
that Seth knows he’s isn’t allowed to kiss other girls.
 
And Kate get’s an invitation two weeks before on lavender card paper in a black
envelope with a butterfly sticker stencil on it and a lollipop taped to the
front that she thinks it’s supposed to be an exclamation point at the end of
her name because it’s on upside down.
 
And since it says plus one and semi-formal Seth tells her she has to take
Richie.
 
Her mom takes pictures of them in semi-formal apparel on the porch.
 
At the party, while inside the golf club dancehall other kids Cha-Cha-Slide,
Kate stands on the balcony porch while Richie smokes a cigarette.
 
A lot of the girls sitting at the table where Vanessa had set up a game where
everyone does silly dares complained because of the smoke.
 
Kate uses it as an excuse to leave, she doesn’t like dare games. Richie offers
her his cigarette, she doesn’t inhale, just blows out the acrid cloud she’s
sucked into her mouth.
 
Richie wants to sneak off to the golf course and see if they can get to the
driving range.
 
Kate thinks they probably lock up all the clubs after it closes, she tells him
that and he looks disappointed.
 
“Are you going to do this next year?”
 
Kate shakes her head.
 
“Oh, no.” Richie sounds disappointed but when she peeks at him he puts on a
face and in a shrill voice says, ‘You have to! You promised I could light a
candle! You promised!’
 
Kate shoves him, he grins wickedly, wagging his cigarette up and down.
 
Later when they get home, she’s washing her face and he’s brushing his teeth at
the narrow sink counter, she looks at the top of his head as he spits a gob of
blue minty stuff towards the drain and then where his face always used to be is
his throat and she says ‘woah.’
 
And she asks how he got so tall.
 
Richie shrugs says he drinks his milk. Seth, walking past snorts, head coming
around the open door frame, still in his blazer and slacks, button down
untucked and open at the collar, “It’s because he jerks off a lot,” Seth stands
on his tip toes and mimes an orgasm and rolls his eyes up into his head, Kate
thinks he’s trying to make a comparison about something but she just isn’t
understanding it, not completely anyway.
 
“Seth’s still short because Vanessa sucks out all his vital nutrients.”
 
Kate stuck in the middle, pushes out with a grimace and a ‘so disgusting,’ they
stand in the bathroom making hand gestures and she slams her door on their
laughter, and Seth trying to do some damage to Richie over the Vanessa thing.
 
Alone in bed Kate wonders if it’s true.
 
She tries to think of a way to ask Vanessa that doesn’t give away that Richie
mentioned it or that Seth told Richie or that Kate wants to know about blowjobs
for anything other than curiosity.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
It’s summer vacation again and Kate is swimming in a real pool, she’s alone,
Seth and Vanessa vanished for ice pops and wine coolers inside the house twenty
minutes ago and Kate doesn’t know if that’s true or not.
 
Vanessa comes back without Seth and says he’s looking for snacks.
 
Kate reads a magazine in Vanessa’s hammock and Vanessa is trying to blow up a
pool float. Seth has a cardboard caddy of four winecoolers and a bag of ruffle
chips. Vanessa groans, “took you long enough,” and Kate smirks down at the
magazine, ties to make sense of pie charts related to female orgasm or a poll
of best ways to give oral sex. It’s cosmopolitan and at home her mother rips
out the articles she;s most interested in before she can steal them away.
 
Seth shakes his head, sits down in the patchy grass and tries to kiss Vanessa,
she turns her head and proclaims that he took too long and that while he was
gone she decided she was a lesbian and that she was leaving him for Kate.
 
Kate looks up, big eyes and Vanessa has a knee up on the hammock, making the
net pitch towards her, and her kiss tastes like the rubber nipple of the pool
float and her tongue tastes gamey and weird when it slips over the top of hers.
Vanessa pulls back and Seth has gone a different color, coughing on a chip and
a splash of purple red wine-cooler down the bob of his throat. He’s laughing
and Vanessa pummels him, straddles him in soffe shorts and her bikini top.
 
Kate hears the double beep of a car that they seem to miss.
 
“Nessa, your mom’s back.”
 
“Shit!”
 
They hide the wine-coolers under the half-inflated float and Seth is still
laughing and Kate tells Vanessa she needs a breath mint.
 
They stay out until her momma comes to pick them up. Richie is in the passenger
seat.
 
Her momma runs into the house fast to take something off the broiler and Kate
gets out, is almost to the house when she realizes the boys are still in the
car, Seth leaning from the back seat to tell Richie something. She walks back
to the car.
 
“But Vanessa forgot that she didn’t brush her teeth afterwards.” She hears Seth
tell Richie as she’s about to slap a palm on the driver’s side window to make
them jump.
 
They look up at her, Seth horrified, Richie with a smile starting, “Eww, are
you telling him Vanessa tried to make me her girlfriend? Grow up.”
 
They get out of the car.
 
Richie waiting on the other side and Seth with his arms over the hood, “Tell
Richie what you said after she did it though.”
 
She struggles to remember, “That she needed a mint.”
 
Seth dissolves in giggles, Richie tells him it isn’t funny and walks away,
angry. Seth shrugs, Kate shrugs back.
 
A week goes by before Richie tells her Vanessa gave Seth a blowjob before she
kissed her and Kate brushes her teeth four times, her tongue stings and she
doesn’t talk to either of them for two days.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
Seth gets a growth spurt and Richie losses all his baby fat when they are all
officially in high school after summer ends.
 
And they ask Kate if she’s still the same cup size.
 
“The lord giveth,” Seth starts, waving a hand at himself.
 
“And the lord taketh away.” Richie finishes, pointing at her chest.
 
She’s angry and mortified and is spiteful to them every day until one day
during a basketball game Seth stops running and hunches over, walks off the
court and tells his coach he can’t breathe.
 
In the emergency room she holds Richie’s hand as hard as he holds hers. The
doctor, tall in her high heels with a navy blue stethoscope around her lapels
and hair so long it seems like a health hazard not to have up tells her parents
that it’s a spontaneous injury. Lots of boys with Seth’s build get it. Tall and
skinny and a chest wall that is trying to keep up.
 
He’s in the hospital for nine days and Richie throws a fit that he has to go to
school and can’t stay.
 
Seth comes home and shows her the stitches where they put a chest tube in to
let out all the air around his lung.
 
The same night Richie doesn’t knock on the wall but she hears them try to be
quiet on the other side of it. She hears Richie in the bathroom brushing his
teeth at one in the morning, she walks past on her way downstairs, she’s
thirsty.
 
And nosy.
 
On her way up the stairs, Richie asks her what she’s doing. She takes a sip of
orange juice, tired, trying to ignore that he’s fifteen and Seth is sixteen and
that he’d already brushed his teeth earlier and that Seth is just home from the
hospital, and that she’s jealous and her only kiss was a joke and then another
bigger joke.
 
“Going to bed. I have to be up for practice in the morning.”
 
He’s wearing sweatpants and his glasses are hanging off the curled-down waist,
she’s lonely she realizes. But she doesn’t tell him that and he walks into his
room first and she drinks her orange juice in bed.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
She breaks her right wrist after she doesn’t clear a hurdle. It’s at a practice
and it ruins her hopes at track and field, she didn’t make Cross Country J.V.
and after she gets it casted at the doctor’s office her father forced her into
when it swelled up to the size of navel orange and turned purple she’s in a
foul mood.
 
Her legs are fuzzy and Vanessa is grounded so she can’t help her shave them.
 
She nicks her ankle and leaves three bloody footprint on the bathroom floor.
 
Richie puts the band-aid on for her and tells her boys don’t care about hairy
legs, he says it very seriously and pushes a finger up her prickly calf, she
pulls her leg off the toilet seat and tells him Vanessa only shaves her legs if
Seth comes over.
 
Richie tells her Seth has to shave his pubes now because Vanessa got one stuck
between her teeth and her mom saw and that’s why she can’t see Seth and why
he’s been in such a bad mood.
 
Kate hides her pink girl razors in her room.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
She’s on student council with a boy from church. His name is Kyle. He kisses
her in the back of the church in a sunday school room while they’re cleaning
up. Seth sees, whistles.
 
“Preacher’s daughter strikes again.”
 
Kyle looks confused and then steps back like he’s been splashed with hot water.
 
Kate is so angry she could spit. Seth is her ride but she wishes she could walk
instead. She won’t speak to him in the car.
 
She doesn’t talk to him at all until she can hear him tell Richie. “Why do you
always have to go around talking about other people’s business?”
 
His head cocks sideways, eyebrow raised, “I don’t know, you were the one making
out in Jesus’s day care center. Sorry, if I interrupted, I feel bad for ruining
your chances at a first fingerbang.”
 
Richie shifts in her side view, looks at her and then down, digging into his
pocket.
 
Kate doesn’t like his quiet expression. If it wouldn’t get her grounded for the
next two weeks, she would steer forward and slap Seth. Instead she shakes in
place, “Oh my god! It was a kiss. One. Not everyone is like Vanessa, Seth.”
 
“Fuck you, Kate.” Venom in his voice, he pushes past her and out in the hall.
“Seth wait. I’m sorry!” she wails, but there are loud stomping feet on the
stairs before a door slams.
 
Kate wilts onto the nearest bed with hands on her face.
 
“I am such a bitch.”
 
Richie jimmies open the window, looms down near fresh air, speaks to outside,
“He’s just being a dick.”
 
“He’s been so.... mean . About everything! What’s his malfunction?”
 
The click of a lighter and she looks. He’s blowing smoke. “Don’t mention
Vanessa for awhile, she isn’t talking to him.”
 
“What? Why not?”
 
Richie’s grin is slow and secret. “I shouldn’t tell you. But he didn’t make me
swear. So, should I tell you?”
 
“No. It’s not my business.”
 
And she knows it isn’t her business, repeats it over and over again but
finally, “Okay, tell me.”
 
“Tell you what?” He’s smirking, head inclined to the side once he’s blown out
smoke. She puts a hip on the windowsill, watches someone, probably Seth walk
down the dark almost nighttime street. Everything is indigo and the trees are
inky on the horizon.
 
“What’s going on with Seth and Vanessa.”
 
“Oh,” Richie sucks in a drag, lips curling, laugh coming out with the smoke,
controlled, no coughing, “She wants him to lick her pussy and he hasn’t and
keeps not licking her pussy every time he sees her.”
 
She plucks the cigarette from between his fingers, inhales, rolls her eyes,
“Could you not say that word?”
 
“Pussy?”
 
“Yeah.”
 
“Why?”
 
“Because I’m a girl and it’s rude.”
 
She passes back the cigarette, sits on the edge of his bed. He whispers very
slowly, “Vagina.”
 
“Don’t say that either.”
 
He nods his head, expression jovial, and more than a bit condescending, “Is
this a girl thing?”
 
“No, just...you don’t have to say anything besides ‘lick her’, I know what it
means.”
 
“Do I have to put quarters in the curse jar?”
 
He flops down next to her and tugs on the back of her shirt until she’s on her
back next to him and they are both contemplating the ceiling.
 
“I promise I won’t tell momma that you told me Seth won’t lick Vanessa’s pussy
like three times and didn’t put money in.”
 
“Out of context that makes Seth sound like a cheap hooker.”
 
Kate shuts her eyes and kicks out her legs, suddenly angry again, “He is  such
a cheap hooker. Do you have any more cigarettes?”
 
They smoke, silently until Richie’s head turns and he asks, “So what do you
call it?”
 
“You mean a...girl’s stuff?”
 
“Yeah,  stuff .”
 
“Ewww.”
 
“What?”
 
“The way you said it. Like:  stuff  a verb, to put inside.”
 
“You are weird. Answer the question.”
 
“I don’t know. I mean, it’s weird, like it’s just another part.”
 
“Well all the other parts have names, arm, leg, head.”
 
“Well, okay. Maybe it’s not just another part. Pussy sounds like someone making
fun of it.”
 
“So it’s an  it .”
 
“It’s not a mythical creature. You should write about it in a journal if you
think it’s so interesting.”
 
“I have a journal.”
 
His sudden admission makes her turn her head, “Do you?”
 
“Maybe.”
 
“Uh-huh.”
 
“I write about pussy in it.”
 
She’s going to ask about him and Seth. And her and him. And how he knocks on
the wall and she knocks back but she doesn’t. She likes the answer she’s
already convinced herself of. They are just sticking together. It other ways
too, sharing spoons and tying each other’s shoes and heads on shoulders and
bandaids and growing pains and all the stuff they might be ashamed of if anyone
else knew or if one them knew doesn’t matter so much because only they know.
She’s sleepy, not making any sense.
 
Richie tells her he calls his  it  his dick.
 
“Yeah?”
 
“Yup. This is my dick, my dick is me.”
 
“Is that an impression of Seth?”
 
He grunts, maybe, sure, some other noncommittal sound of assent and she tells
him quietly that she’s never seen a penis before. He asks if she wants to see
his and she doesn’t know if he’s joking or not.
 
“I don’t think I ever want to see one,” she starts and then stops at the
incredulous look on his face, realizes she’s lying, amends with, “Well, not
yet.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“Is that weird?”
 
She needs assurance that it isn’t, from a member of the opposite sex.
 
“No.”
“It’s just…” she considers her words carefully, finds them, speaks them, “like,
it makes things very serious. To see them, a person, like that. I think.”
 
“Yeah.”
 
“I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t want to grow up.”
 
“That’s a pretty adult thing to say.”
 
She nods gravely and puts out her cigarette in a empty glass he’s using for an
ashtray.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
She’s at Vanessa’s, girls only, they watch a movie. One Kate could never catch
at home.
 
Ballerina rivals, it proves informative, it’s violent and weird and the
masturbation scene ends on a horrifying note that makes Vanessa cackle.
 
She’s fifteen and has only ever kissed one boy, once, and she lies awake
sometimes, bored, wondering, waiting, and she can’t remember when someone
knocked on the other side of the wall.
 
On her stomach she pushes her face into her pillow, pretends like she’s kissing
someone and then less innocently biting someone, chest maybe. Vague fantasies
and her hands meet between her legs and she just prods for awhile, bored,
aimless, slips a hand down her shorts and her undies, pets at the short hairs
on her mound, she’s been shaving, feels like there’s an expectancy of it, and
she wants to know how for later, when she older and someone might expect it.
She rubs, and holds her muscles tight, in her belly and her ass.
 
She still doesn’t know if her bed squeaks but it’s late and lately she’s been
interested in really trying to find a way that she likes. She raises her feet
and calves and it seems like it makes everything tighten up, all her muscles
and her rubs against the bony ridges of her wrists, touches the little dab of
almost-but not stickiness on the crotch of her panties with fingertips.
 
Her foot taps the wall and she stills, she doesn’t know how loud it was or if
anyone is awake, she’s holding her breath and suddenly needs to breathe, she
does and then holds it again, listens and then with a fingertip inside her
underwear slipping up the seam of where she’s getting wet there’s a knock on
the other side of the wall.
 
She huffs against her pillow, her feet drop back to the bed but she pushes one
out from under the sheet and slides it to the wall, it’s a soft sound, and she
isn’t even moving her hands or her hips but the liquid pull between her legs is
a warm slosh from navel to knee at an answering tap.
 
For awhile she doesn’t move her foot at all, just thinks, waits, she wants to
take her shorts off, and her panties, feel, for real, how wet she is on her
palm and her fingers, she’s so warm.
 
She taps her foot while she dips a small finger inside, bends her leg and puts
her knee tight against the wall, the matte yellow paint of her bedroom wall is
cool on her forehead.
 
And Richie raps.
 
“I’m trying to sleep, dick head.” Seth grumbles in the next room. Kate holds
her breath, tries to listen, hears only her own blood whooshing.
 
“Go to sleep.”
 
“You’re gonna wake Kate. Do it in the bathroom.”
 
There’s a muttered reply she can’t hear, bed springs creaking and then their
door opening and closing, soft shuffling steps in the hall, and for a moment
she thinks her door is going to open, she’s out of bed, quick and not without a
sound of it’s own.
 
She tries to hear breathing, only hears her own despite who she knows is still
in the hall, and she stands, waiting by her bed, walks slow and careful to her
door which has never seemed further away and waits. Scared to reach out and put
a hand on the door, press her ear against it. There’s a quiet sound, someone
clearing their throat quietly as they swallow.
 
He moves, in the hall, and she opens the door, her hands and the back of her
neck washing with heat and she sees him half-turned and then turning back.
 
She doesn’t shut her door all the way but steps out enough and she thinks
Richie is moving in to kiss her, maybe, might be, and her eyes shut, scared,
excited, waiting, but his mouth moves dry and smooth against her ear.
 
“He’s not asleep.”
 
Seth. She pictures him standing, listening at the door like she was. It scares
her too. In a different way. In a trouble sort of way. Because Seth smirks and
taunts while Richie is quiet, always staring but not in a mean way.
 
She pulls her head back, the nightlight in the bathroom give the hallway
shadows and she tilts her head in the direction of the room her mom makes
crafts in and sews the tears in their jeans and jackets. Richie is staring at
her. She stares back until he nods and she walks down the hall, he does too,
close and quiet, sneaking in and shutting the door, there’s another nightlight
in the outlet under the sewing machine.
 
It makes the shadows sharp and he blocks most of the light with his body.
 
She doesn’t know what to say, so she says nothing just stares down at their
bare feet and then up at where her chin is level with his chest, he has
freckles and a paler strip of skin under his hipbones than on his arms or
belly.
 
There’s a line of hair under his navel and she wants to touch it.
 
But she doesn’t, she leans her shoulder back into the door.
 
And he’s not really a boy anymore, but she still feels like a girl. Thinks,
maybe she might always.
 
When she shifts she can feel the slippery inside of her underwear moving. The
leaky spill of it from where’s she so suddenly hot.
 
He touches her hip, thumb slipping under the band of her shorts and the elastic
of her underwear, touches the bone and puts his lips against hers.
 
She presses back with her mouth and he breathes against it, she does too,
tongue peeking out to poke the smooth wet inside of his bottom lip and then his
other hand against the doorframe and his body leaning in while she leans back
her neck.
 
His mouth tastes like a cigarette, but her lips are spit slick when he pulls
back and she’s breathing hard, chest against his and she wonders if he can feel
her nipples through her t-shirt.
 
“You weren’t kidding, were you?”
 
She doesn’t understand his question, he knocks knuckles against her chin and
she shakes her head instantly, “no.” It’s a whisper back.
 
His expression doesn’t change.
 
“You were...too?”
 
She nods, his bare feet are on the outsides of hers and his thumb rubs a mark
on her naked hip, it smoothes up a little, until it’s under her shirt and on
her waist and she likes it. His big warm hand still and steady from the bottom
of her ribs to the dip of her waist and his thumb on her belly button.
 
Her hand reaches, brushes against him bold and small, knuckles gauging  a part
of him she shouldn’t have any real idea about, not specifically, not hopefully,
certainly not. He feels hot there, like she feels hot.
 
He looks unsure, unsteady and trying to be very still. And she tries to find
the resolve or the balls to tell him that she’s  so  wet. It’s an unspoken
mantra in her head that she never does say. They stand together, silent for so
long she loses the spark that made the words start tumbling over, a twisty
mobius strip that she doesn’t share with him. She tells him they should go to
bed.
 
He nods.
 
And she leaves.
 
He stays.
 
In bed she touches herself, sure and searching, thinking about what they could
have done, things she’s glad they really didn’t but thinks about anyway as she
mouths sounds against her pillowcase until very very late.


 
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Notes
     So this is all Seth and Richie POV scenes, there are some scenes
     towards the end that are going to overlap with the next chapter which
     will mostly be Kate POV because of stuff going on. The timeline in
     this chapter overlaps a little at the end.
===============================================================================
Her uncle is a Texas Ranger. There’s a joke in there somewhere, a western up on
the silver screen, the brothers: pastor and a ranger, the holy man and the
gunslinger. And her Aunt is big red hair and a twangy voice that sounds younger
than her face looks. Earl and Ramona, Seth thinks, yeah, that’s Texas. Stetsons
and open carry on their hips. It’s sad when Aunt Mona gets cancer, they catch
it late and Uncle Earl comes over for Thanksgiving a widower. There’s a couple
from church, Freddie and Margaret who’s almost too pregnant to walk without
duck steps.
 
When they go around the table it’s somber, things they are happy for.
 
Earl says ‘getting up in the morning without any pain,’ jaunty smile, half-
false. Pain is more than arthritic knees and a sore back.
 
Seth’s thankful for the comfort of holidays, ones that go by with all the
fixings, all the decorations, ways of measuring time without a stopwatch. But
he just says he’s thankful for family, with a tone that passes the question
down the table to his brother.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
He misses cold winters. Snow. It’s brisk and next to him Kate is bundled,
perpetually cold it seems like once winter comes. Seth and Vanessa are
somewhere, but the night is noiseless and the lights are out. It’s almost
Christmas and Kate wanted to see the twelve Stations of the Cross at the Shrine
of Our Lady.
 
It’s solemn seeming, more so than when the festive green and red and white-blue
lights are turning the night into sparkly holiday cheer, and they missed out on
the operating hour carols and candy canes.
 
He doesn’t mind. He likes the feel of sleeping places. Closed for the season or
after five or the places in town where Sunday means closed.
 
Jesus is larger than life size and Mary is crying as a Roman spears him in
perfect stillness.
 
There’s a girlish shriek of glee and he knows it’s Vanessa, Seth is happy.
They’re lurking somewhere with a flask of peach schnapps, sticky girl alcohol
he hates it but Seth gets it and says it’s because he’s a gentlemen.
 
Richie always tells him to change his tampon.
 
Kate sighs into her crocheted scarf, blue like Mary’s shawled egg looking head.
 
They walk along, stop, look, silent.
 
They come to the empty tomb, and he tugs on her scarf, guiding the way up the
hill and the stone stairs of the shrine. She follows, but at the gaping mouth
of the fake but not fake rock tomb she stops. Stares like a kid at an open
closest door that looks more sinister by nightlight.
 
“Come on,” and he feels a little like Seth when he says it. Bad. Not nice. But,
with Kate, he’s not always nice, not quite mean, something else. He’d call the
feeling naughty but that’s not right, too kiddish, not enough to paint the
whole shade the right kind of black.
 
Darker. The color right before sinister and right past goading.
 
She walks and her boots are loud on the stone, and they stand in the dark in
the shadows of the empty tomb.
 
In the dark she reaches for the back of his jacket and he asks if she’s afraid.
There are things he doesn’t know about her, even after all their growing up,
even after all the secrets there’s the simple difference of boy and girl
between them and he knows she’s kept things from him.
 
“Do you know the feeling where you walk into a place and it’s like you just
walked into something.”
 
“What do you mean?”
 
And their voices don’t echo as much as he thinks they should.
 
“Like when you try to force magnets together but you have them facing the wrong
way so they push apart instead. Like that. That’s how it feels.”
 
“Oh.”
 
She tries for a different comparison, “Like when you plug a set of headphones
in and there’s that sound that isn’t a sound right before the real sound starts
to come through.”
 
He nods, “The presence of something that isn’t really there, like that?”
 
In the doorway he can see her outline, the bulge of her scarf circling her neck
and the pom-pom on her hat.
 
“Yeah, that’s it.”
 
There’s a word for what she means, he can’t think of what it is. Maybe not a
word but the sentiment of one. He wishes he could find it for her. They sit on
the steps outside the tomb, he smokes, she doesn’t, says she thinks she’s
getting sick and he thinks he can feel the weight of the tomb behind him,
against his spine. Against his side and arm she’s warm.
 
Seth and Vanessa swing up the path, giggle-buzzed. It’s makes Richie feel like
him and Kate are the parents on a park bench watching kids play, talking about
things children can’t articulate. It’s accurate enough, him and Kate are MENSA
level but Seth and Vanessa might turn out to be GED twenty-somethings in a few
more years.
 
Vanessa leans on Seth and his brother’s steps stumble.
 
Seth shouts loud and long like he’s Tarzan and Kate cringes, “He’s going to get
us caught.”
 
Richie flicks away his cigarette. It erupts into sparks when it hits the stone
steps, orange lace illumination and he reaches into his jacket, pulls out
jangling keys.
 
“They’d get caught, we’d hide behind the tomb.”
 
She chuffs with silent laughter, shifts her legs, knocks the soles off her
boots together and they give off a dull rubber sound, a ball bouncing in an
unsatisfactory way before it rolls off.
 
After they drop Vanessa at home, after they get home, after Seth climbs the
stairs with too much concentration to pass as sober, after her bedroom door has
shut, and after he’s finished smoking a final before bed cigarette the word he
didn’t have before floats close enough to catch. Lodestone.
 
It feels right, though the definition doesn’t, is opposite to the idea of
pushing away. He goes to bed.
 
Their laundry ends up being done together, he needs a shirt for Sunday.
Jennifer, who he has never called Momma like Kate or Ma like Seth started as a
joke that turned into some soft and sweet habit, has a migraine.
 
Jacob’s at the church, preparing for the service. Kate is trying for a six
minute mile, it’s the odd incongruent fact that she can do a ten-fifteen two
mile that has her seething. Seth is watching Vanessa stretch against the chain
link around the track in the interim between Kate’s practice and his playing
taxi.
 
===============================================================================
 
Richie is folding laundry.
 
Static has stuck socks to sweaters and a pair of Kate’s underwear to the inside
of one of Seth’s shirts. A load of whites and Richie doesn’t think there’s
anything prettier than white cotton panties on a girl.
 
He’d never steal them, because they aren’t his, and he wouldn’t be as crass to
sniff them in the middle of the laundry room but he does set them on top of the
dryer and looks at the softly fraying lace around the leg holes and the washed
out pink bow at the top, set right in the middle.
 
And while he irons and starches his shirt for church service he thinks about
how he’d have to omit some things from a confession if the church was catholic.
 
Lust-filled thoughts and incestuous ones, real and pseudo.
 
The kind of daydreams where he’d take a pair of her underwear and tuck them in
his pocket, rub the lace between thumb and forefinger, but only after he’s
pulled them down her legs, felt the wet sponginess of the crotch between the
same fingers, see how the pink of the little bow matches up against what’s
underneath.
 
He hangs his shirt on the rack over the dryer. False lavender scent of starch
inside his nostrils, detergent, fabric softener and shoves everything else into
a basket.
 
There’s a second-hand eroticism to seeing her things and he stops himself from
disentangling them from the rest of the laundry and laying them out like paper
dolls cut out on the dotted line wardrobe.
 
Kate is spring colors and cotton and bikini cuts. Soft shades Richie favors,
subliminally or just trained to like through secondhand exposure.
 
Seth’s favorite colors are dark and at night his brother tells him that he
doesn’t think he’s seen Vanessa wear the same underwear twice, vampy colored
lace that comes wrapped in tissue paper and put into a bag every girl
recognizes on sight.
 
Richie asked if it was boring, Seth didn’t know what he meant. The same old
novelties compared to old favorites that can turn you into a pavlovian mutt.
Seth called him a little old man and to stop thinking before his brain boiled
over.
 
===============================================================================
 
He’s got two party horns in his mouth, he blows and they unfurl, his lungs
crackle against the sound, Kate laughs, Richie steps sideways and then into the
party.
 
Vanessa’s hands are on his shoulders and Seth love New Year’s.
 
It’s not their house, or Vanessa’s, it’s Kyle’s and he only invited Kate. But
Kate tells them it’s not as if anyone expects her without them.
 
Richie had snorted. Seth shrugged, let the idea foment, and called Vanessa.
 
He figures why not cock-block the kid trying to bone his little sister? That’s
half the point of being a big brother, isn’t it? Richie didn’t answer. Vanessa
just cooed, told him he was bad. But she said it in a nice way that had him
kissing her on one still-semi swollen post wisdom tooth extraction cheek.
 
And Kate skims along the edges of the small groups, her party dress silver
striped.
 
It’s basically youth group but with balloons until someone shows up with
champagne, Kyle’s older cousins, and slowly, by degrees the good Christian
youth find their way to inebriation by plastic flute-full and red solo cup
swigs.
 
Vanessa and Kate dance, twin-like festive orphan annie hair, like ribbons
curled with a scissor edge, unfurling and popping back while they move, and
Richie plays beer pong, ignores a tall summertime blonde who has won the
genetic lottery or bought stock in the push-up bra.
 
He waits, picks on pretzels and chips and watches kids younger than him dry
hump through the loopholes of abstinence.
 
He claps his brother on the back as he passes, steals a beer yet un-balled and
swerves around to find his girl. He pulls on a curl, not Vanessa’s it turns
out, but Kate’s, it straightens and springs back. She rolls her eyes and he
asks if he can pull Vanessa away. Kate waves a hand, smiles, steals his beer
and he raises his eyebrows.
 
Again, her eyes roll and he knows it’s from hanging out with Richie too much.
 
And Richie is all smiles and big swings and misses at the ping pong ball.
 
“Think we’ll have to carry him?” Vanessa smiles up, mouth hot on his jaw and
ear. She’s got bright pink lips and they probably look like Barbie doll
identification stamps on his skin, but he doesn’t mind.
 
It’s not a regular party, not one where they usually find themselves, it’s a
good kid party in a house with a cross hanging on a wall in every room.
 
Kids kiss and dance too close but he’s seventeen and so is Vanessa and they
aren’t exactly living up to the good word. More like outlaw code. She likes the
Quick and the Dead and Bugsy. He’s John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart before
Casablanca. There’s a black sharpie heart around their initials in the girls
locker room and he’s got one of her silver stud earrings in his lobe. He may be
seventeen and a boy but he knows it’s: Meant. To. Be.
 
He asks if she wants to go back to her house.
 
New Year’s Eve, he croons, whispers the idea to bring in midnight half-naked
and under her lavender bed sheets. They’ve done things, will do more, but time
isn’t always opportune and he presses closer. Her parents are out in a hotel
room for the night, bringing the romance back and Seth thinks it’s the best
idea they’ve ever had. Vanessa called him gross.
 
He just smirked, told her even her parents had sex and made noises to mimic her
mom. Now standing around with rowdy kids, most of them too young and too nice
and too good making too much noise he’s starting to wish they never came.
 
She tosses her black curls, he wants to feel them between his fingers. She says
no. That they have to stay, that she’s the ride. He nods. Tries hard not to be
disappointed, perfect opportunities thrown away and he can’t figure out why,
but the way she says things sounds like half-lies.
 
The party goes on. Kate is giggle-buzzed, pink cheeked, talking loud and
excited about the Mexico missionary trip the church is doing to Kyle. Kyle, who
sits close but not too close, and smiles and keeps the subject on the thing she
wants instead of interjecting how pretty her hair is or how cute her dress
looks or anything with any semblance of a game plan.
 
He sees Richie, surly, and the tall blonde from earlier trying to move close
enough to his orbit that gravity takes over. But his brother doesn’t seem to be
into the basic conversation of boy and girl and school and tip toeing around
everything on everyone’s mind when there’s booze and no adult supervision.
 
His brother is walking away, glaring at everything.
 
And suddenly, Seth can’t find Vanessa and when he does he’s had another beer
and being left alone in the middle of people having more fun than him has put
him in a black mood. He puts his hands a little too far up Vanessa’s skirt, she
calls him a pig and stalks off. The night is ending, Kate wants to go home, and
Richie is quiet in the back of the car, eyes closed behind his glasses and
forehead on the window.
 
Kate looks like she’s sleeping, wilting like her curls against her own side of
the backseat. It’s two in the morning. Seth asks a question with an expletive
to find out why Vanessa is ignoring him as she drives. She turns on the radio.
 
He wants to know why she’s being such a tease. She stops forcefully at the stop
sign. From the side he sees her mouth pucker, her jaw pinch.
 
“You are such an asshole.”
 
He knows he can’t call her names, because it’s rude, because it’s not right.
 
Vanessa drops them off. He slams his door. Kate helps Richie navigate his way
into the house and helps him take off his shoes.
 
He talks at his brother as he pulls on sweatpants. Richie mumbles things back,
complains about his glasses hurting his face, and whines about his
disorientation with pitch, yaw and roll. Not that Seth understand what he’s
talking about.
 
“Are you going to contribute to the fucking conversation or complain about how
much you drank?”
 
“And you wonder why she won’t fuck you.”
 
“Fuck face,” Seth tosses his socks at him. Richie brushes them away, leans up
on an elbow, smiles, lazily, “She’s not going to fuck you while she’s on
antibiotics.”
 
“What?”
 
“Fucks up birth control. Read a book.”
 
“How do you know she’s on antibiotics?”
 
“That’s the whole reason she was the designated driver. Wisdom teeth. You were
there for the conversation. Which, since you have poor listening skills means
you didn’t hear, and so, there you go.”
 
Richie flops back and Seth tries for nonchalance as he sits and falls back
against his pillows, “There I go, what? You gonna slur another truth bomb at
me? Go to sleep.” He curls onto his side and stares at the wall. He thinks he
should text Vanessa.
 
Richie’s bed squeaks and there’s the heavy sound of something hitting the
floor. When he turns Richie is shuffling on his knees over to his bed, he looks
like he’s about to tip over, a hand outreached for balance that pushes out
straight.
 
Seth rolls over all the way to his other side, rolls his eyes, about to ask
what his brother is doing until Richie starts speaking first, “You haven’t
gotten laid because you don’t listen.” And when Seth opens his mouth to speak,
Richie’s fingers move drunkenly down his brow, catch on his mouth, “Shhhh.”
Loud lisping whisper of sound and then quiet and serious, “Listen.”
 
He swats the hand away, Richie falls back on his ass.
 
“...You. Are. So drunk.”
 
“I need to vomit.” And he shuffle-jogs out.
 
Seth mumbles at the wall, “Go for it, champ.”
 
And from behind the half-closed door he can hear half-quiet tones of
conversation. Kate soothing, like a mother. Richie whining. Seth smiles,
reaches for his phone, texts a succinct ‘yo, imma dick’ to Vanessa. Waits for
the screen to go florescent blue-white with a reply.
 
He hears Richie puking, Kate laughing.
 
Then her head poking in after a little knock, her curls are unfurling, her eyes
are sleepy, glassy, still buzzed, she smiles softly, “which toothbrush is
Richie’s?”
 
“Green.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“Hey, Kate.”
 
“Yeah?”
 
“How pissed is Vanessa?”
 
“Um. I don’t know. What did you do?”
 
“You are no help.”
 
“I’m the one who’s going to brush Richie’s teeth for him so you can shut the
fuck up.”
 
“Oh well well well.”
 
She flips him the bird, turning away from the door she’s been rocking back and
forth against her shoulder.
 
Richie makes loud sounds of protest about something, probably the need for
dental hygiene.
 
The phone on his nightstand lights up. Vanessa. No, automatic from the data
company telling him about free data and limitless texting for $39.99/month.
 
He sighs, his crotch tingles with the need to piss.
 
The scene in the hall he walks into makes his brain bang out like a candle for
a stark moment. Little Richie who hasn’t been little for a while looks like a
caveman, his glasses are next to Kate’s crinkled tip-toes, her naked heels up
off the ground and her mouth under Richie’s.
 
Little Richie’s got two big hands all over Katie-Kakes and Seth wants to wolf-
whistle at them.
 
And it’s not until one of his brother’s hands pushes fingertips down the
waistband of her shorts, arm flexing straight, hand searching, and the other is
darting quick, up to cup a tit, that she coughs, head moving to the side, she
coughs again and toothpaste flecks speck the breath she coughs out a second
time.
 
He hears Richie say knock-knock, answers ‘Who’s there?’ and Kate sputters,
Richie staggers, almost crushes his glasses.
 
Kate wipes toothpaste off her mouth and Richie grins a sloppy Colgate smile,
mint green running down his chin and chest, “It looks like you two sucked off
the tooth fairy together, you gonna rinse or can I piss?”
 
While Kate swishes and spits, Seth pees, door open, Richie sitting against the
wall in the hall. Kate looking pointedly at her own reflection.
 
As he leaves, Richie points out he hasn’t washed his hands, says he should
always wash his hands, since he has a girlfriend he fingerbangs all the time.
 
Carefully he skirts around Kate, their bare feet stepping on each other as she
puts her toothbrush away and he sings happy birthday while washing his hands.
 
He thinks she’s gone when he looks at Richie and asks if he takes his own
advice.
 
Kate swings back in, and without words, picks up his red toothbrush and drops
it into the unflushed toilet bowl. Richie dissolves into giggles, catches her
ankles as she walks passed into her room, Seth can see in the mirror his hand
run up to the back of her knee.
 
She pushes him over with her foot once he’s let go.
 
In bed, at four in the morning, he’s unable to sleep from sudden sour stomach
nausea and no text from Vanessa and Richie’s intermittent waking from sleep to
puke into a trash can lined with a plastic bag from the grocery store, Seth
reasons it must be the booze. Root of all evils. His head hurts and he doesn’t
sleep well.
 
===============================================================================
 
Vanessa gets Kate in on powder-puff football, they make pink jerseys in the
kitchen, glitter and stencil letters, Vanessa’s breasts push out of a bright
citron sports bra from the ripped V of the collar, Seth swallows lemonade and
whispers in her ear as he goes by that she look lush.
 
Vanessa clicks her teeth, snarls at him, playful, back in her good graces he’s
giddy and horny in equal measures, he watches her with two hands at Kate’s
jersey pull until it’s ripped too.
 
“I can see your dirty pillows, Kate.”
 
She scowls. Vanessa reaches out, pokes at Kate’s chest. Kate pulls back, hands
up and defensive, “Knock it off.”
 
Vanessa smiles, “They are decorative pillows. Not dirty ones.”
 
Seth swings up to sit on the counter, sips his lemonade, grins slow and wolfish
back at Vanessa, “Isn’t the point of decorative pillows that you see them?”
 
Kate huffs, throws a handle of glitter in his direction.
 
Vanessa too.
 
As Kate leaves he shouts, “Baby’s first boobs,” after her.
 
At night he talks about girls with Richie, and all their parts. Sometimes he
talks about Vanessa, vaguely, because he tries not to get into specifics.
Richie doesn’t ask for details anyway so Seth doesn’t feel like he’s keeping
secrets.
 
Sometimes they talk about Kate. Seth wonders out loud if she’s a virgin, Richie
says she is, but Seth mentions Kyle from church and Richie says Kate doesn’t
like boys like Kyle.
 
Seth will grin, wide and bright white at his brother.
 
“Yeah…,”
 
“What?”
 
“Kate.”
 
“Yeah?”
 
He wiggles his fingers indecently. Makes a letter V, flicks his tongue between
his fingers.
 
“No.”
 
“I’m not an idiot.”
 
“Well, you’re not a genius, Seth.”
 
“Well, Richie, What the fuck does that make you?”
 
“I’m a fucking prodigy.”
 
“Okay, prodigy. You really think a girl goes sixteen, seventeen years without a
boy getting their fingers wet because of them?”
 
“Kate’s not like that.”
 
“You’re only saying that because you’re in love with her little tits.”
 
“Smaller breasts are more sensitive. That’s science.”
 
“That’s good cause Kate’s only got a mouthful anyway.”
 
Richie looks distinctly more irritated than he did at the start of the
conversation.
 
A day later they sit in the stands during the homecoming pep rally pre-game,
and then in pink polos they cheer on their girls. Kate tackles Vanessa and
Vanessa grabs her around the legs in retaliation, they go down and come off the
field with both their flags pulled and grass stains on their asses, bloodied
knees and bruised shins.
 
In the glass of a cased bulletin board, Kate is examining a bruise riding low
under her clavicle. Seth sneaks up and asks if he should get Vanessa to kiss
better what her elbow did. Kate rolls her eyes.
 
“Did you know little boobs are more sensitive than big boobs?”
 
“That’s a gem, Seth. Really. That must explain why you are so emotionally
inept, you are just a really big boob.”
 
“Wonder if that’s how they came up with that.”
 
“Ask Richie.”
 
“Yeah, Richie knows everything.”
 
And Richie comes up to them, “Not everything, but lots of things.”
 
===============================================================================
 
 
They all go camping.
 
They go to the range and shoot clay pigeons. Jennifer doesn’t like guns, but
Jacob grew up on a healthy Texas diet, he tells his wife she should be glad he
doesn’t go around with a Stetson like his brother.
 
He’s not a bad shot, none of them are, but the shotgun kickback has Kate
clocking out early, rubbing Bengay on her sore shoulder a few hours later.
 
Camping is alright but for the most part Seth would rather sleep in the car.
 
His tent is over a root it’s also full of eight-legged friends, and Seth can’t
stand spiders, he sleeps next to the fire pit.
 
He hears the zip on one of the other two go up, feet on leaves, night sounds.
 
It’s Kate.
 
He comes out to sit with her and his brother.
 
“It’s fucking cold as balls out here.”
 
“Sleep in the tent stupid.” Kate tucks up her knees, feet in big blue woolen
socks with leaves stuck to the bottoms, her shorts curl up high on her thighs
and she pushes her bare legs up against her chest, tight under her big brown-
beige sweater. One of Richie’s, the socks are Seth.
 
“Spiders.”
 
“We can switch. Mine doesn’t have spiders.”
 
“Yeah?”
 
“Let’s just push them together.”
 
They reorganize their sleeping bags, unzip them into squares and sleep on the
spiderless side and bundle close but not too close.
 
Seth curls on his side, Richie’s side against his spine and Kate is curled up
under his brother’s arm. It’s nice, the three of them, once he squirms his hip
off of a tree root under the tent floor and forgets that there are things
living in the corners with eight legs and millions of eyes.
 
He dozes.
 
Wakes almost fully to quiet tones and soft rustling, a girlish sigh and gruff
mumble. He feels the roof wool of Kate’s sock graze the back of his knee, he
shifts, stuck on how a foot away Kate’s got her leg thrown over Richie.
 
There’s heavy heat curling through his groin, there are nighttime sounds and
breathing that’s not quite heavy, sleeping bags and the distinctive scritch
sound of them against the tent floor and Seth is getting hard.
 
He’s stuck in the groggy state of half-awake and horny and he thinks about the
two people under the blankets with him, moving furtive and quiet and they might
not be awake but Seth doesn’t turn his head to check.
 
Richie puts his back to him, and Seth wonder’s if Kate’s pulled up against his
brother’s chest. Wonders if Richie’s got hands sneaking under her sweater.
Wonders if Kate had been pressing herself against Richie’s hip, while asleep or
while awake. If it’s innocent sleep-filled fumbling or sneaky and sure groping
while they think he’s asleep.
 
Seth’s got a hand down his sweatpants, resting on the inside of his thigh,
familiar blood thrum of an erection starting to get serious.
 
He wonders if his brother has been fucking their sister. Because by now, that’s
what she is, their sister. But maybe it’s truer to say they’re her brothers
since she was there first. He can’t decide if one way makes it wrong and the
other right or if it’s the same either way.
 
He brushing his dick with a swipe of his thumb and wonders if Richie’s sneaking
hands, soft and slow up her sweater, right now, has her holding her breath when
one holds a tiny tit and the other moves down the front of her shorts. Wonders
if Kate’s wool socks are rubbing back and forth on Richie’s legs.
 
He waits for sounds to bleed out, hears nothing like a moan or a whispered
expletive, but that doesn’t mean anything. Richie could be pressing the heat of
his dick against the small of Kate’s back, weepy tip leaving a wet kiss on the
dimples over her ass.
 
His brother’s fingers could be pushing against where no one’s touched her
before, not even herself, maybe. Kate could be having her first orgasm and Seth
can’t sleep with his dick suddenly so hard.
 
Richie might be slipping fingers under the elastic of her underwear and Kate
might be biting her arm to keep quiet when they press her open, slip up and
down her slit, thumb rubbing circles on her clit. Richie would do it slowly, he
thinks.
 
Seth ruts up against his palm, thinks about Richie’s fingers in Kate’s mouth,
to help her keep quiet, to make them wet before they slip inside of her.
 
Next to him there’s an exhale, an answering sound or the byproduct of dreams.
 
And he wonders if Richie shifting next to him is to get his sweats down low
enough and his dick out, if he’s working Kate’s shorts down to her knees.
 
If in the dark, Kate’s pressing hips and ass back for him, if Richie’s got her
quiet and compliant and scared of making a sound.
 
And there’s a hard jolt through him, instant hot wash of more potent and
persistent arousal in Seth, Kate who wants to fuck Richie in a tent next to
their sleeping brother or Kate who Richie’s working up, coaxing in a more wrong
way. And Seth can believe that his brother is that way too.
 
Suddenly there are fantasies of Kate who is completely aware and has been
fucking Richie in secret or Kate who’s about to lose her virginity in the midst
of seventy percent ‘no’ and thirty percent ‘fuck yes’.
 
Seth’s fingers are getting slick, thick line of wet slipping out of him, he’s
going to cum soon.
 
And he thinks of Richie’s dick, stretching her open, just the tip, like a
lollipop popped between a girl’s pouty kissy face mouth. Thinks about a hand
over her mouth, thinks about her eyes wide open, lips slick and cheeks pink,
Richie pushing in, slow, hot, thick and Kate squirming, socks and feet rubbing
on Richie’s calves, thighs trying to open like butterfly wings.
 
The steady in-out timed to night sounds and rustlings, wind and animals moving
outside so no one hears them.
 
He thinks about Richie’s lips mushing against the back of her neck, leaving
marks under the fall of her hair, her nails leaving crescent moons on his
forearm, holding her in place while he fucks her like a rotten creep in the
tent, telling her not to make a sound.
 
Seth doesn’t want to think about Richie like that, but it’s hot. The fantasy
world of being bad, doing things that no one can tell you not to. He thinks
about Kate feeling for the first time someone’s cum inside of her, full of it,
thinks of Richie’s fingers sliding through his mess to finish her off, three
fingers to take his place, thinks of how filthy their fucking would sound, how
impossible and loud it would be for them to catch their breath. How they’d
bleat or bleed sounds, groan or moan the other’s name.
 
Seth comes against the fleecy inside of his sweatpants, the image of Kate and
Richie kaleidoscoping into strange vague naked limbs and tongues and it’s
Richie under the blankets with his mouth between Kate’s legs, or then Vanessa
and Kate between each other’s legs and then it’s him and Vanessa and Kate, and
then just him and Richie.
 
As he comes down there’s Richie’s gruff tones telling him not to move, and a
hand slapping the sleeping bagged humped around his shoulders.
 
Richie telling him it was a spider and Seth too fucked out to care.
 
He turns his head. Catches Richie’s sleepy grin and hand gesture of jacking
off. Kate is asleep. On her back, one arm elbow out above her head, her other
hand flat on the strip of bare navel from where her sweater has risen. One leg
kicked out and mouth open, breathing loud and she’s asleep and Richie’s been
awake the entire fucking time.
 
Seth wipes a dirty hand over his throat, Richie grimaces then smashes dead
spider onto his bicep and rubs it in. Seth makes loud protesting sounds, kicks
at Richie under the blankets, Richie kicks back. Kate shifts in her sleep,
rolling onto her stomach telling them to go to sleep.
 
Her arms stretching to cover his brother’s collar and after they’ve fallen
asleep and after Seth’s stolen a greedy portion of sleeping bag from them both
Richie’s pulled her over him, back under the blankets. Seth wakes up, sees them
chest to chest, Richie’s big hand up the back of her sweater, her thighs
pillowing his hips from above and her sleeping open mouth leaving wet circles
on his throat.
 
He nudges them awake. Better they have to get up than get caught dry humping in
their sleep by Pastor Dad.
 
Kate makes her exit, Seth teases Richie about his morning wood. Wonders,
secretly, what Kate thinks of it. Richie calls him an unkind word and beats off
fast and efficient with no loud vocals.
 
“At least try to pretend you’re having a good time.”
 
Richie flips him the bird.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
She wants to get out of the house, he’s got his junior license, they take her
daddy’s car and she puts her feet on the dash.
 
It’s Wednesday which means it’s Sunday, or Sundae-y, according to the signs in
the ice cream place.
 
He takes her there.
 
She gives him a sideways look, raised eyebrow when the girl behind the counter
smiles at him. Her name’s Melissa, she works Monday, Wednesday, Friday and he
comes for ice cream on Wednesday.
 
She sits behind him in U.S. history, and across the room from Kate in A.P.
English composition. Sometimes he’s the last person to come in on a Wednesday
night, and Melissa sits with him on the bench outside the store windows and
they eat ice cream together.
 
On New Year’s she kissed him but Kate doesn’t know that. And more recently than
that, after school, working on a project for class in the library, she kissed
him again, more came afterwards at her house a few blocks away from his.
 
Melissa’s practical, smart, pretty, and she likes him. But, Melissa likes boys
who aren’t him too. Richie understands, girls aren’t all nail polish and
gossip, pink glossy smiles and perfume that smells like the lingerie store in
the mall.
 
He lost his virginity while her parents were at work, came quick, too quick,
she’d been a good sport about it, giggled. Made him laugh about it too. She’d
looked at the clock and made a face of disappointment, said he could give her
an I.O.U.
 
He’d been surprised how easy it was, how simple, nice. Melissa isn’t easy, no
rumors about her blowing someone in a guestroom at a party or critique on how
she dresses at school. She’s discreet and always smiling and Richie likes that.
Long blonde hair and tan freckles all over the tops of her nose and cheeks. The
biggest tits he’s ever seen on a girl who doesn’t crack one-twenty on the
scale. He likes that she’s tall enough that he doesn’t need to do more than
tilt his neck to kiss her.
 
“Hey, Kate.” She grins.
 
“Hey, Mel.”
 
“So, old man sundae and what else?”
 
“A what?” Kate laughs, looks at him for an answer.
 
“Vanilla soft serve and black cherries, old man sundae.”
 
Kate’s nose crinkles, “Too sweet, hot fudge sundae with peanuts and peanut
butter.”
 
“Little or a lot?”
 
“A lot.”
 
“You know how they stuff dog toys with peanut butter? That much.”
 
“Jerk.”
 
Richie grins, stares at the back of Melissa’s head while she makes their
sundaes, “Your braid’s crooked.”
 
“Thanks, Vidal Sassoon.”
 
When Kate’s looking at cakes, back turned to the counter, Melissa forks off a
sliding cherry from his sundae and pops it past her lips. Smirks dirty at him.
He rolls his eyes and smiles. Look down at his feet, “You are no fun, Richard.”
She flicks a shelled peanut halve at him from the counter.
 
She never calls him Richie, just like he never calls her Mel.
 
She slides their ice cream cups across the top of the metal counter and she
smirks at him like he smirks at her in the hall when another boy is talking to
her, she’s somewhere on the spectrum between Kate and Vanessa. And she’s going
to be graduating. Richie thinks he might miss her more than he misses her, it’s
a strange feeling, under his sternum, achy flutter tumbling around.
 
It makes him smile a little, put his hands in his pockets.
 
She gives them a jaunty salute as they leave.
 
Kate, looking thoughtful in the passenger seat scrapes at the paper bottom of
her ice cream cup, turns to look out the window, lets out a soft sigh.
 
“What?”
 
For a moment he expects her to turn, inexplicably with a smile like Seth’s and
say something with a smirk, secret girl vibes like a radio transmission. But,
instead there’s a grim little pull of her mouth, a squiggle.
 
“Nothing, just...I don’t know. She looks happy, that’s good.”
 
“You expect her to not look happy?”
 
“Well...no, but, you know her brother died right? Like, I don’t know,” she
searches, eyes looking forward, “last year, year before. It was at school.”
 
“You mean the kid who died at a football game?”
 
“Yeah, I think it was during a practice.”
 
“I didn’t know it was her brother.”
 
“I think they were twins.”
 
Kate doesn’t say anything else. He sees Melissa in school, thinking about
things he didn’t know before, looking closer to see signs he might have missed,
signs that say she’s lost a sibling. He can’t see any.
 
But later, after school, her parents gone, they stand in her living room and he
sees the pictures on the walls and the mantel and later in her room there’s
another on her desk. Tall and blonde like her, glasses in black frames and
Richie, for the first time wonders if she loved her brother. Richie wonders if
she likes him because he might remind her of him.
 
Knows he’s not the only person in the world to cross some moral stigma line but
he doesn’t ask, doesn’t say anything.
 
Melissa tells him, not with any planning but when she checks the mail and finds
scholarship paperwork for her dead brother in with the cable bill and her
cosmetic subscription box. He watches like a scientist with a specimen as her
face changes, no smile, cheeks losing color and her teeth biting into her
bottom lip in a way he hasn’t seen.
 
It’s the first time he’s seen grief up close, she doesn’t cry but she looks
like she can’t remember what she was doing before, blank suddenly. And slowly,
in increments, she comes back, smiles in a way that isn’t real, “Sorry, it
still fucks me up.”
 
He nods, “Yeah.”
 
She waves the mail.
 
“He got into the school I wanted to go to, thought about cutting my hair and
lifting weights, sneak in as him.”
 
“Those might give you away.” He points at her chest and her mouth pulls at the
corner.
 
He doesn’t know how best to comfort a girl, not in any real emotional way, he
gives her two orgasms, before and after his own, it’s slow and unhurried and
her parents are in the middle of peak season at the ice cream place so it’s
easier for him without the worry of someone catching them. It’s something he
learned from Seth, through secondhand information about Vanessa and the general
idea that sublimation helps people deal with shit.
 
“You read a lot.” He’s mouthing at her nipple, chest dewy with sweat and tan
like she lays out topless in the sun, there are freckles like sand clots all
over her torso, like the underbelly of a fawn.
 
She looks at her bookcases.
 
“Lots of textbooks, I get them from the thrift section at the library. I only
read certain parts.”
 
“What parts?”
 
“Lifespan psychology, mostly kids and teenagers, sex obviously, abnormal
behavior.”
 
“That what you’re going to school for?”
 
“Yeah.”
 
“Do you think I’m abnormal?”
 
She makes a loud sound, hmmms in a way he can feel through her skin. “You?
You’re pathological.”
 
He nods, pushes his mouth around her breast, as much as he can until she
squirms and sighs, “Can’t believe I took your virginity.”
 
“I’m a quick learner.”
 
“You’re alright, I don’t think you can stand being anything except
exceptional.”
 
“That your professional opinion? Aren’t you a little young to be a doctor
already?”
 
“You’re going to need to practice, practice, practice if you ever want to go to
the Olympics.”
 
“I think my brother was watching a porno where that was the plot.”
 
There both too fucked out and lethargic for another bout, it’s the last time he
sees her that way before graduation. He borrows some of her books, pages tabbed
and highlighted, she says he can keep them. Seth reads them too, quotes off
statistics relating to sibling rivalry and masturbation and incest.
 
He thinks Seth goes through some sort of heteronormative crisis, no homo shit,
in cycles like a girl’s period every month. Richie tries to explain with short
answers, Kinsey scale and formative years but Seth thinks that translates to
weight measurement and something to do with puberty.
 
Across the room Seth’s thumbing through a book, says suddenly, as Richie is
stretched out, trying to sleep through the heat of noon, “Did you know thirteen
percent of siblings have sex with each other at some point?”
 
He’s off a little by the breakdown of the numbers but Richie’s too tired to
elucidate the subject of sudden conversation, “Yup.”
 
Seth is making a face at him, his lack of enthusiasm or mitigating his
sometimes guilt over the things they sometimes do when they’re lonely or horny
or bored.
 
“Here’s a part for you: ‘Often the incest begins as a kind of teasing, playful
activity with prolonged kissing, wrestling and surreptitious genital touching.
Over time, these activities can develop into overt genital touching, without
any physical force being used’ the end.”
 
Richie flips his pillow to the cool side, mumbles something, asking what the
point is.
 
“…nothing. No point. None. At. All.”
 
Seth smirks, Richie sits up, full attention given to the conversation, he’s
very ready to participate, if just to knock Seth down a single smug peg.
 
“Does it bother you more that I don’t think of Kate as my sister like you do or
because you think I do and that means I won’t put your dick in my mouth?”
 
“…”
 
“Because, she’s not my sister. Or yours. And you get jealous and whine when
your dick is not the topic of discussion or the top of the to do list.”
 
“So says Richard the Monk.”
 
“Not a virgin, Seth.”
 
“Blowjobs don’t count.”
 
“Not from you they don’t.”
 
“Who?”
 
“Not Kate, that’s what you’re worried about right?”
 
“No, you two do whatever you want.”
 
“Wasn’t her.”
 
“Okay.”
 
Richie lies back down to sleep. Seth makes irritated sounds from across the
room.
 
“Are you going to tell me, or not?”
 
He doesn’t and Seth is pissy about it for the rest of the day.
 
===============================================================================
 
Kate’s dress is petal pink, long pleats, chiffon and satin, girlish. Seth
forgets that it’s called sheath style and when Vanessa asks he says it’s like a
condom. Richie corrects him. The girls go out and try to find matches shoes,
bags, they decide what flowers they want for their corsages and pick out
pictures for how they want their hair.
 
Vanessa and Seth are graduating.
 
They’ve got a beach house rented with three other couples. Kate is going with a
group, a group with Kyle. Richie is staying home. Prom, with no promise of
booze and shitty music, is not something he considers a night worth
remembering.
 
Kate corsage is in the fridge next to Vanessa’s. Three days before prom.
 
And then there’s a phone call from Kate’s aunt about her dad and her mom and
Richie tells Seth to go get her.
 
Seth and Vanessa go to prom.
 
Kate puts her dress in her closet and spends the night on the couch, next to
him, trying not to cry.
 
She does.
 
Her mom’s dead and Richie wishes he felt worse. But he hasn’t had a mom for
almost as long as he’s been alive, wasn’t really sure how to suddenly have one,
and now Jennifer’s dead and Kate’s like him. Dead mom, dad that’s going to be
useless in the aftermath. For a while, at least.
 
===============================================================================
 
She turns seventeen fifteen days after the funeral.
 
They have cake and candles in the dim, unlit kitchen in midafternoon. It’s
quiet and everyone is there. Earl, Freddie, Margaret, baby Billie, her dead
mother’s sister. Biggest birthday party in a while, afterwards Freddie and
Margaret take them to the fair, the one they advertise every year on the radio
with the same jingle they’ve used for a decade, the one they find themselves
humming sometimes while they drive once school starts its final round of
homework and state testing.
 
The three of them walk around, sharing pink and blue cotton candy from a bag,
sticky fingered and not knowing what to say. At least, he doesn’t know what to
say, feeling like he should. Kate is just silent. Richie might have nothing to
say.
 
The only thing he knows to do is hug a girl when she cries and according to
Lifetime movies to make sure you don’t leave them alone in case they get
depressed and try to ride the Ferris wheel alone just so they jump off of it.
 
He’s scared.
 
He doesn’t like silence.
 
Doesn’t like coming home to a house where the lights are off inside. It reminds
him of when he was a kid and how he knew if the lights were off then his dad
was sleeping off a half-bottle of nine dollar rum on the couch and it was safer
to sleep in the backyard on the porch.
 
They find Margaret and Billie post diaper change in the car near the bumper
cars and walk together until they find Freddie minus boots and hat on the
mechanical bull.
 
They all take a turn.
 
He goes ass over head in about three second. Richie bounces off with a not much
better time and messed up hair, pomade unstuck and stumbling around until Kate
gives him back his glasses.
 
When she gets up, bare feet tight against the underneath of the fake animal
contraption, he hoots and claps at her fourteen seconds, hair whipping and
chest pressed out, Richie is standing next to him, mouth breathing, Seth nudges
him back to composure. Wonders, not for the first time, or the fiftieth if
they’ve done things they’d have to confess if they were Catholic.
 
He leans close, mutters with half his mouth that Jesus is watching. Richie
scowls, walks forward with a dirty look directed back at him and hands Kate her
sandals.
 
“Ride a lot cowgirl?”
 
Her blush comes after the confusion eases and her cheeks go a furious red, she
coughs, steals his tickets from his pocket and drags Richie towards the bumper
cars. Seth follows, leans over the fence and snaps pictures for Margaret on a
disposable camera.
 
Things feel normal.
 
At night he pretends not to notice Richie sneak out of bed, pretends not to
hear Kate’s bed squeaking as someone else climbs in, he pretends to be asleep
like he pretends to not hear Kate crying all the time, or the way it stops when
Richie climbs under her covers.
 
***** Chapter 3 *****
Chapter Notes
     Sorry for the wait
She’s at practice, stretching out, dreading three rounds of hurdles and sprints
for warm-ups. With her forehead pressed to her knee she can feel a pull on her
hamstring that’s asking to be rolled out.
 
Vanessa pulls on her ponytail.
 
“Seth’s here.”
 
And he is, gesturing at them from a quarter mile down the track at the edge of
the chain link. Vanessa hop-pops up and sprints. Kate doesn’t lift her head to
watch them kiss-kiss-kiss until a whistle blows for practice to start. She
wonders if he came for that alone or because Richie made him her ride.
 
Before she’s done stretching Vanessa’s back and breathing hard, palm on her
chest.
 
“You gotta go,” there’s the pause for a necessary hard inhale, “car accident.”
 
She’s gone, running and then in the car and Seth drives silently after he tells
her what’s going on, red puffy faced under the eyes and sniffling to stop snot
from running.
 
She holds it in until the waiting room.
 
She thought it was Richie, felt her abdomen fall out like a trap door, viscera
weightless, Seth tells her it’s her parents and her chest hurts, like too tight
ace bandages, and she can’t decide which felt worse.
 
And she prays, prays, bargains and makes deals in her head. A nurse tells her
that her dad is sedated in the ICU, breathing on his own, doing good, looks
good.
 
Her mother must be in the ER, she’s told.
 
The nurse isn’t sure. Someone will come out to talk to them soon.
 
And her mother is dead and she just nods. Cries, cries, cries. Tries to find
gratefulness somewhere for her father, and she does, feels sick, wonders what
God would say.
===============================================================================
 
 
Richie finds her mother’s pills, cleans it all up
 
There’s a call about a car accident, Uncle Earl heard it on the scanner. Home
alone, Richie calls Seth and wanders the house, aimless, clear headed with
empty unspecific thoughts.
 
There are carelessly dropped pills on the carpet. He picks them up with careful
fingertips, they tink into the empty orange bottle that he puts back in the
medicine cabinet. Thinks, without real resentment that there’s some comparison
between the solace of doctor prescribed poison in its trademarked plastic and a
baby rattle. The mirror clicks shut on the evidence he’s smart enough to
recognize as evidence.
 
At the hospital a day later Jacob says it was a deer. Richie leans down, close
to his pillow, once everyone else has left, tells him he cleaned up at the
house.
 
Jacob nods, Richie leaves and lets him cry without someone trying to make him
feel better. Jennifer’s dead, there’s nothing anyone can do to make him feel
better.
 
And Richie knows some people need grief to serve as penance.
===============================================================================
 
 
Jennifer’s sister comes to keep house, she tucks them in to bed, grocery shops
so they don’t starve, and sorts the socks. Earl keeps Jacob out of sight, only
half-sober but high functioning, Kate cries, Seth is silent, and he tries to
keep his mind on every ball in the air.
 
He remembers waiting everything out on the stone bench next to Seth, cigarette
split between them, he didn’t tell him then about the pills, but he thought
about it.
 
He thought of Kate in one of the boxy rooms somewhere on the second floor, a
row of yellow squares from the outside, lots of open curtains and sick people
in hospital beds, he’s always been unsettled by open curtains and people living
their lives like scenes on stage.
 
It’s disgusting he thinks.
 
Seth was crying.
===============================================================================
 
 
She was standing in the kitchen, the three of them home, she’d gotten up first
and Seth was still sleeping. She poured water for tea and shifted her weight
from leg to leg, skated around the kitchen on her socks, slid all the way to
the fridge then back to the microwave, he’d watched her crouch down to peer at
her reflection in the oven’s glass window.
 
What people do when their alone, while they wait for something, the toaster
spring shot her waffles and she stood back up. The mug is her mother’s.
 
It says MOM on it, he sees it from the couch, in the dark of the unlit living
room during that predawn hour, she didn’t know he’d fallen asleep on the couch
or that she’d woken him up.
 
She’d pushed the mug closer and closer to the counter edge, concentrating on
really seeing it, pushing it. He gets it, the symbolic shit people do when
someone dies to get on with grief, but it was Kate and she drank her tea and
ate her waffles and put the MOM mug in the sink.
 
The dish board was full, dry dinner plates, she’d sat up on the counter, head
on her knees, head turned to watch the backyard sunrise, she put a foot out,
swept it along, the dishes shatter apart, pieces all across the kitchen.
 
She sees him then.
 
Seth finds them cleaning the mess.
===============================================================================
 
 
There are final papers to sign, the second day of her mother’s wake, Uncle Earl
tries to tell her father it doesn’t matter, not right then. He tries to keep
her father focused but, Kate thinks, that maybe what he needs is the
distraction of keeping appointments.
 
If he runs on fumes he’ll be too tired to crack the seal on a new bottle of
Seagrams 7 and the cheap plastic bottle won’t be hidden somewhere in the bottom
of the recycling.
 
She’s sitting on the staircase, come home to eat and shower and wash her only
black dress after wearing it two days in a row, she’s waiting for the dryer
timer to go off. Her stockings are hanging over the towel rail, they won’t be
dry in time.
 
It feels wrong to go to stand next to her momma in the funeral parlor without
stockings. She doesn’t think it’s proper etiquette. Seth said it didn’t matter,
Richie looked like he didn’t have the emotional distance to tell her she’s
right and not feel bad about being truthful like usual.
 
She’s listening to her father and uncle argue in the kitchen without words, the
angry cadence of everyday sounds, the fridge opening and all the glass
condiments rattling hard, the cabinets banging shut, the coffee pot being
shoved roughly into place, silverware clinking furiously against coffee mugs.
 
“We’re going to bury my wife as a family, a real one.”
 
Her father is going to the bank, to the notary, and Uncle Earl is trying to
convince him that a signature and a stamp on a piece of paper doesn’t make
anything official. He’s right, but he’s wrong too.
 
It had been going on for weeks, her parents trying and never actually making it
to the bank before it closed or forgetting to call the person they wanted to
witness, or the furious preparations for her and Seth going to prom taking up
all the time afterschool and on the weekends. It means something to her dad,
that’s all.
 
They argue for so long that the bank will be closed by the time they get there
and Uncle Earl can’t make his tone sound anything other than firmly pleased.
 
“The business place that does taxes has a notary, they don’t close until six,”
she says after they ignore the way she’s come into the room. She pours coffee,
impossibly tired and wrung out she offers to drive her dad there.
 
Uncle Earl folds and tells her he’ll take her dad. She puts the keys on the
table and gets her dad his jacket. She watched them back out of the driveway,
pull away and keeps watching until the dryer goes off.
===============================================================================
 
 
They sit up through the night, she has a sore throat and a chest cold that
makes it hurt to breath, it didn’t quite rain but it misted all through the
service, it was too cold for her sweater to help.
 
Seth put a blanket over her from behind the couch and Richie sits at her feet
at the other side of the couch, she’s curled up breathing vapor rub but her
throat still feels like she’s swallowed glass.
 
Seth says he needs to go walk for a while.
 
He’s going to see Vanessa but doesn’t want her to think he’s leaving them
because he doesn’t love them or feel bad about what’s happening, he just needs
something to comfort him and he doesn’t want to share his grief.
 
Her father is with Earl, they stayed at the cemetery, now she doesn’t know what
they’re doing.
 
Richie says something uncharacteristic, a lie to make her not worry, not cry.
It’s nice but it’s also stupid.
 
“When you’re an adult you’re expected to be able to grieve on your own, he
won’t be back tonight. I know that.” She tells him. She sits up and he makes
space. She lies on him, selfish and sick and not caring much if he catching it.
 
When she wakes up Seth is pushing at them both, long legs stretched over theirs
at the other end of the couch. She can smell her breath and Richie’s sweat
burning through the last of his deodorant from the day before, Seth smells like
weed and something intimate he’s done with Vanessa.
===============================================================================
 
 
Summer has come and he takes her to the track at night, after ice cream. She
takes her sneakers from the backseat and feels a boldness that comes only from
not-dark-yet summertime nights in empty places that any other time are never so
still.
 
She’s wearing a dress but boldness makes that something flavoring the whole
feeling she’s had all night. He watches, standing in the middle of the track
behind her, cigarette pulled out of his mouth and hanging by his side, other
hand raised like the starting gun and he says bang quietly.
 
She clears the jump, bounces once, not ever as much as she expects on the pad.
Her skirt flipped up and decidedly simple underwear, they have little blue
stars on them.
 
When Richie comes over to stare down at her it makes her guts hot. He doesn’t
say anything, just grins, snorts softly, all smoke and let’s his eyebrows stay
where he’s raised them for a few seconds. She doesn't think about her momma,
she doesn't feel sad.
===============================================================================
 
 
Seth finds her sitting in the center of a circle of her mom’s things, dresses
being packed for the goodwill, all Sunday best, pant suits already boxed away
for her aunt who wanted them. There’s a baby book from her on first year of
life, pictures of her being brought home.
 
There’s an old White Diamonds gift set, soft curlers, costume jewelry, and yarn
balls.
 
She’s got her knees pulled up and her head hanging between them.
 
Seth steps over the outer ring of her mother’s life and puts a hand on her
back, makes circles with his palm over her shoulders and tucks her under his
arm, she’s quiet there’s no crying. He knows it’s because she won’t cry unless
she feels like no one’s going to hold it against her, unless she knows the
people around won’t say anything.
 
Seth can’t not say shit, it doesn’t help her it just makes him feel more able
to help.
 
Kate hugs him and he carries boxes of ceramic figurines downstairs. She smiles
and says thank you but Seth feels her holding back words.
 
***** Chapter 4 *****
Chapter Notes
     Woah, another update, I'm moving and shaking here. Only two more
     chapters left.
The drive down is devoid of Christian rock and afternoon hymns, and Kate is
thankful she’s decided to ride with Seth and Vanessa instead of the bus with
the rest of the humanitarian church effort with its surplus of plastic rosaries
and miniature bibles.
 
Vanessa packed her bag for her, begged, whined, guilted her into going and as
they drive over the border she’s grateful for that too. It's a different sort
of guilt instead of the one she’s been weighted with since the funeral.
 
But, Kate doesn’t tell her or Seth that Richie promised to look after her dad,
make sure he didn’t drink too much while they’re away. He told her he was used
to watering down booze and cleaning up puke and she wasn’t sure if she was
relieved or sad after he said it.
 
Richie doesn’t say things to garner pity, but she’s been raised to pray for
people, the dichotomy is at the core of both of them and every social
transaction they share.
 
At a rest stop, while Seth pumps gas, Vanessa twists around in the front seat
and spiders fingers up her bare knee. Vanessa pinches to get her attention.
 
Kate rubs the red spot, ouches out loud and Vanessa grins, “Soooo…”
 
“What?”
 
“When we get to the hotel, since you love me and since Seth thinks you are the
best little sister ever, and I think that you are the best friend ever, would
it be possible, at some point, for you to maybe distract Kyle, who’s going to
be Seth’s roommate, so he can’t tell anyone that I may or may not be becoming a
woman while I make your brother a man?”
 
“I don’t like Kyle.” She says, realizing, after she’s said it, that it’s really
the only thing she can say, that nothing else is inside of her, no real
admonishment to Seth and Vanessa’s behavior, no real disagreement to what they
plan to do, even though, she realizes, she should, maybe.
 
Because she’s be raised that way, to think sex is something sacred. It is.
 
But why should that mean it isn’t in the situation Vanessa’s laid out to her,
and Kate knows sex depends on so many other things besides vows and white
dresses and promises of forever.
 
Sometimes it must be a promise of then or now and she loses her train of
thought as Vanessa speaks again.
 
“Well, duh. But he likes you.”
 
“Yeah, well. They do checks. Tape on the door so you can’t sneak out. Soooo…”
Kate shrugs, crinkles her nose and gives her a closed mouth grin, total shit-
eater, Kate knows.
 
“Yeeeah, so what if Seth could you know, sneak out.”
 
“Like climb out the window? Hotel windows don’t open. And Kyle would probably
tattle.”
 
“Let’s say he gives Kyle a little tequila-benadryl cocktail.” Vanessa
emphasizes little with a gesture of closely approximated thumb and index
finger.
 
“And where am I supposed to be when he sneaks in and you two are busy becoming
adults?”
 
“Take your iPod and go wait it out in the bathroom. It will be like you aren’t
even there, me and Seth will light candles and play music and it will be really
nice.”
 
“And I’ll sit next to the toilet while you guys get your fuck on.”
 
“‘Get your fuck on’, nice. Didn’t know you knew that word.” Vanessa smiles,
nods to herself, says Fuck. Again, for emphasis.
 
“I know a whole bunch of cool words.”
 
“Bet you do.”
 
Kate doesn’t say anything. Vanessa looks around, like she’s doing it for
effect, like there’s a hidden camera somewhere, “Wonder where you learned
them.”
 
Kate shrugs, “Books.”
 
“For sure,” Vanessa nods her head up and down, lips moving in pushes, pops her
gum, turns back to face forward as Seth is getting into the driver’s seat.
 
As he pulls out of the gas station Vanessa turns to ask him if he knows anyone
who reads a lot of books.
 
“Yeah, there’s this kid I know, buddy holly glasses, six foot monstrous, surly,
bigger bra size than Katie-Kakes in the backseat. Think you’ve met him. Matter
of fact think he came out of the same sac as me. Holy shit, I think his name is
Richard.”
 
Vanessa looks back at her over her shoulder and the angle of the seatbelt
strap, waggles her eyebrows, “That’s what I thought. Kate reads a lot, too.”
 
“What smart children we have dear.”
 
“Yes darling, so smart, so pretty, but they’re at that incorrigible age.”
 
“Seventeen and horny. Hope we don’t catch them playing doctor.”
 
Kate rolls down the window while Vanessa lights up two cigarettes, Kate asks
for one too, “Bitch, I only have one mouth.” Seth takes his from Vanessa with a
laugh, icks over the slick trail on the filter from spit and lipgloss. Kate
waits for a blowjob joke, there isn’t one and, oddly, she’s disappointed.
 
“Here you go, baby girl,” Vanessa says handing Kate back a lit cigarette.
 
She waits until they’re both inhaling, “I bet Richie would make a great
gynecologist.”
 
The reaction she gets is worth the way they repeat the joke afterwards like
they’re the ones who came up with it.
 
Later at the Dew Drop Inn, that sounds cuter than it looks she watches Seth
across the pool with the rest of the boys, sees him swim around like shark
through bloody water, starting to work Kyle into thinking they are best friends
so when the time comes Seth can leave him sleeping off booze and cold medicine
while he loses his virginity with Vanessa.
 
Kate thinks it’s sweet.
 
Vanessa asks if anyone’s tasted her cherry pie.
 
Kate waggles her sunscreen slathered hand over Vanessa’s shoulder, promise ring
intact like her hymen.
 
“Well if sexual prowess translates through genes,” Vanessa pauses to turn on
her cheap pool chair, all plastic straps and rusty metal legs, “you might need
to work at things a little bit. Just saying.”
 
Kate wipes down her arms with excess sunscreen, “I’m gonna tell Seth you called
him a bad lover. As much as we’ve gotten to, you know.”
 
Vanessa lies her head back, turns it and smiles, softly, “I didn’t say that,”
the look on Vanessa face, thoughtful and dreamy makes Kats a little jealous.
There’s a long sigh, “He just needed some help to figure things out.” Vanessa
grin is dirty, like the way she raises her hand and makes a V for her tongue
sit in.
 
“I don’t want to know.”
 
“Well, when you do. I’m here.”
 
“Thanks.”
 
Later at half-past one Kate slinks off to the bathroom with her pillows and a
blanket, sits in the empty tub with her iPod and her unappealingly scant phone
contact list.
 
She types out all the ways of saying hello she knows, finally sends a ‘u awake’
to Richie.
 
It takes three minutes.
 
‘Yeah, how’s mex’
 
‘good, how’s dad?’
 
‘sleeping, earl came’
 
She wants to type ‘Seth’s going to be coming in Vanessa in like thirty seconds’
but she stops herself. Settles for ‘what are u doin?’
 
‘reading’ and then ‘u?’ within seconds of each other.
 
‘waiting to be allowed back into my room’
 
‘what’s wrong with it’
 
‘seth and nessa’
 
‘highfive him for me’
 
‘gross’
 
‘where r u?’
 
‘sitting in the bathtub’
 
‘bath?’
 
‘world’s most uncomfortable bed’
 
‘too bad’
 
‘why’
 
‘was gonna say send pix’
 
‘thought u were the good one, had me fooled’
 
‘same to u’
 
She send him a smile emoticon, wonders what he would do if she sent a picture
of her breasts to him, she isn’t going to, photos are forever, Richie doesn’t
care as to his phone’s exact location the same way Seth does.
 
She shuts her eyes, phone in her lap, turning it end over end on her stomach,
she opens her eyes looking at the black screen and wants to have it vibrate and
light up with an incoming call. It doesn’t.
 
She drops her phone, lazily and it settles against the side of her neck and
shoulder.
 
She lifts her hand over her face, stares at her spread fingers, chipping nail
polish and promise ring.
 
She wonders what it would look like on someone else’s hand, wonders if it would
even fit around one of Richie’s fingers. Decides it might not fit. In the
interim of Vanessa and Seth’s first time she thinks about how little she knows.
 
Sex, boy parts, how they fit, how they feel, things she won’t ask Vanessa
outright but hopes she’ll offer up once Seth is gone.
===============================================================================
 
 
Things have been happening for a long time, and there's a natural course to it
all. Ever since they got from Mexico things have been different like she's made
a decision, like she's still making it. They're home alone, it's not odd, it's
not new but lying across the foot of his bed, off from school, watching him
read she wants things to change and when she sits up he looks up at her.
 
She shuts his book, gently, drops it over the edge of the bed. Her fingers push
at his glasses, leave them at the level of his brow before leaning in and
kissing his cheeks, lower to his jaw, mouth soft and open on the side of his
neck when he tilts, eyes, heavy lidded but open when she pulls back.
 
His hands are still flat on the bed, they move when she looks at them, covering
the sides of her thighs, and her mouth opens, feels warmer everywhere watching
while they move. One goes no further than her hips, fingers curling under the
crenulated waist of her sweatpants, fisting it and she can feel his knuckles,
hot and solid through the thick cotton and fleece, tight at the base of her
spine.
 
She puts gentle finger-tips over the top of his other wrist, the hand smoothing
slowly up the covered inside of her thigh, he dips his head to catch her eyes,
and she nudges with her fingers, nonverbal license to keep his line of thought
on where his hand was going.
 
Fleetingly it pushes between her legs, a palmful of gentle warmth that doesn’t
linger long, fingertips spreading up under her t-shirt, ring finger moving in a
circle to trace the outline of her navel and she stares at her smaller fingers
against his skin, moves them over and in between his that disappear under thin
cotton, the weight of his palm on her breast, nipple on the center of his
lifeline.
 
She sighs and his jaw tightens, his hands curve more firmly on what they’re
holding.
 
Her free hand lowers his glasses back to his eyes.
 
“Do you want me to take them off?”
 
She shakes her head, he doesn’t frown like she expects, just looks at her mouth
and down at the shape of their hands under her shirt.
 
“What do you want me to do?”
 
She shakes her head again, silent for a moment too long but his head doesn’t
arch back in irritation and his hands don’t unclench, she in envious of his
limitless patience sometimes.
 
“Can we just do this?”
 
He doesn’t nod, just waits until finally he swallows and says, “What is this?”
Seeking some sort of clarification she wishes they didn’t need to exchange
words for. She shrugs. Pecking a kiss to his cheek, mumble mouthing words on
his clavicle, “I don’t know, I just wanted to touch you.”
 
"Me?"
 
“Sometimes I feel like,” she breathes, “feel like you really are my brother,
you know?”
 
She doesn’t know if he understands, having someone who’s seen her cry and knows
what she likes to eat for breakfast and how late she sleeps in when there’s no
school or what she’s like when she’s angry, like a sibling would, but not, and
it feels like things are backwards. The understanding and intimacy of their
lives without anything stretching over the line, not really, and now she knows
what an erection feels like against her hip and what someone else’s hand feels
like on her body and she wonders if they were to flip a coin whether the answer
would be heads-wrong or tails-about time.
 
“And if I think about someone, it’s not really a person, ever, just someone,
but sometimes I guess if I try to think about a person instead then you’re the
only one who…you know, ” She can’t say more, cant’ say anything that really
spells out what she’s thinking, it’s mortifying, even with Richie, especially
with Richie.
 
But he kisses her like he understands, and she knows, maybe, he just might. The
nose piece of his glasses digs into her brow and the bridge of her nose but his
tongue is slick and hot in her mouth, and she thought it would be harder to
learn how to kiss, there’s spit on her chin when she pulls back, presses her
hips closer to his. His hand flattens down the back of her sweatpants, feels so
much bigger against the bare skin of her backside, his thumb rubbing heat
against the bottom of her spine.
 
“New Year’s,” he says against her mouth, “I touched you like this.”
 
“You were really drunk.”
 
His grin imprints on her skin, little boy being bad, “Not that drunk.”
 
She wants to remind him that she had to brush his teeth for him.
 
The hand down the back of her pants starts a rotation to the front, knuckles
brushing her mound briefly and she twitches back, just a little, indecision
that he notices, hand coming out from under the fabric to settle on her
waistband again.
 
“Hey Richie?”
 
“What is it?”
 
She takes her hand off of his, puts both against his chest, spiders the out as
far as she can and still finds skin under all ten fingers. His thumb rubs at
her nipple, circles around it, her belly shivers.
 
He inhales heavily and her fingers unsplay themselves, drag down to the waist
of his flannel pajama pants.
 
“You can touch me.” He says.
 
He doesn’t help her beyond lifting his hips, leaves her to make a decision on
whether she wants to cross the line or flip the coin. He shifts when she
reaches down inside his pants, skims against his cock with the back of her hand
and then her fingers, he’s hot against her palm and he breathes through a
barely parted mouth.
 
She isn’t looking until he glances down, glasses slipping, and she pulls his
pants down further, pulling down on the fabric over his thighs. Her hand is
shaking, and she makes a fist to stop him from seeing, she smiles stupidly,
presses her lips together.
 
He looks apprehensive, worried. She shakes her head, pulls herself closer and
lays a hand over where his is still flattened over her chest.
 
Pushing her other palm underneath him from root to tip, feels the leakiness
from the slit over the heel of her hand, smearing on the inside of her wrist,
perfume of sex on her pulse.
 
His bare feet slide up the bed, soles half-covering hers and she takes her
hands off of him long enough to shift her t-shirt up and off. His thumb rubs
over breast, circling the same way hers does over his tip.
 
“You’re turning pink.” He tells her, eyes on her chest.
 
She pulls off his glasses drops them gently off the side off the bed. So she
can kiss him, and so his vision blurs around the edges.
 
His hair comes unstuck in strands, soft but firm under her fingers, combing out
pomade, pulling at the back of his neck and she shifts herself over one well-
muscled thigh. And it’s exciting, easy even. It’s just Richie.
 
And it’s just Richie’s cock in her hand, but suddenly he’s not just Richie,
he’s a boy who she’s touching and it’s something new.
 
He folds his hand around hers, squeezes tighter than she expected anyone would
like. His eyes go heavy and his chest pushes against hers with an exhale. Mouth
soft and open and she touches his mouth with a thumb, pulling it into a snarl.
 
His thigh jostles her, and she’s soaked, fleecy inside of her sweats slick. She
starts a rhythm with her hand that her hips mimic. His mouth opens wide against
the front of her throat, down slowly, and then it’s open on one breast, tongue
flat against the prod of her nipple and she’s surprised by the sensation,
trying to pull back and his hand moved flat between her pinching shoulders,
keeping contact and it’s like playing telephone with cans and a wire,
vibrations all the way down inside of her.
 
He strains, hips starting to jerk. It feels like a flexed muscle in her hand.
Worked out, lurid and he reaches for the corner of the stuck sheet and when
that fails her shirt and tries to pull it over their hands. She pushes at his
efforts with her knee, slips closer and holds him against her belly and when he
twitches, alive and awake under the curl of her fingers she takes a breath
moving in abortive strokes on his thigh.
 
It’s not quite as messy as she thought it would be, warmer than she expected,
and he squirms under her hips, abdomen and legs unclenching and he comes back
down with a hand pressed against her skin where he’s made a mess, fingers
slicking through it and she kisses him hard, he’s unprepared and takes his time
catching up.
 
“Got you messy.” He breathes. She nods. He smiles. “You’re gonna need to get
cleaned up.” Again she nods.
 
He pushes her back hard, tucks himself back under his flannel bottoms, bridges
over her body, shadow and smirk and stays up on one palm over her. He needs to
squint to see her with the fuzziness of uncorrected vision.
 
His fingers make patterns in what’s still painting her skin, it’s getting tacky
and he tells her cum was used as invisible ink by spies during world war two
and beyond. Every man’s an inkwell or something like that, he can’t remember
the exact phrase.
 
He licks, long and filthy from stomach to collar and pulls the waistband of her
pants away from her skin, lets it snap back, does it again.
 
He puts his mouth back over her breast, sucks, working his tongue around,
making marks and she puts hands on his shoulder blades, says, “I like that.”
And her small admission is annunciated by the garage door going up, loud
destructive sound and he swallows, hands bookending her waist, rolls his damp
forehead over her sternum.
 
“Seth’s home.”
 
He takes a long moment to sit back, so long it makes her antsy about how fast
or slow Seth is making his way around to getting upstairs.
 
It’s a few quick jerky moves before she gets her shirt back on and her body out
from under him and off the bed. Richie reaches for her arm, holds her in place
and she can hear Seth on the stairs, Richie is smirking, gives her a once over
that lasts too long and promises ‘later’, she’s too anxious about discovery to
nod properly or give an answer back.
She escapes before Seth gets off the stairs, finishes in her own bed, quickly
and quietly. Richie taps out morse code on the wall.
===============================================================================
 
It’s everything suddenly. It’s all, she tries to find a word and can’t. Then
does, it’s heavy. Richie’s stare follows her, it did before but now it says
something different. She thinks she’s different, she’s seen a boy come, made
one come.
 
Summer time is about laying in the sun and running around the block once dusk
cools things down, about getting buzzed on sweet-tangy-sticky drinks with too
much gin or vodka, church meetings and youth group parties and now it’s like
something out of a shitty PG-13 movie with teenagers having the almost final
summer before adult life takes hold, except the way they stare at each other
doesn’t say make-outs.
 
She can hear him say, “I’m going to eat you out,” even after he actually says
it, even when it doesn’t actually happen, knock on the front door stopping his
hand as it sways between her legs, fingers waving, moving against the inside of
her thighs, under her floral church dress.
 
It’s Uncle Earl at the door, he’s taking her daddy and them out to dinner. It’s
a surprise. She and Richie sit in the back, pick up her daddy at the church,
and she can feel the heat of his thigh against hers for the entire car ride,
the entire dinner, finds herself missing it when they get back home and they
aren’t sitting inches away from each other.
 
His bare foot on her socked one while they watch movies with Seth in the den,
Casino and Goodfellas, his body, big and warm, against her side at the
breakfast counter, all the small touches keep her in a state of animal
awareness. It’s the dog days of summer and she’s dying of more than heat.
 
She touches herself at night and thinks about all the ways they used to talk
about it in youth group without ever actually talking about it.
 
She had a sleepover once, four girls, her and her two best friends who didn’t
go to church, and one girl she saw every Wednesday in the pews, someone she’d
pair up with in class for a project but never interact with except in a
tangential way.
 
In that finished basement that still smelt damp during that sleepover her two
best friends from grade school talked about how they couldn’t do itwith
fingers, that it felt weird, she didn’t know what they were talking about, the
girl from youth group was silent, pretending to be sleeping.
 
‘Oh! You don’t know?’ And there’d been embarrassment without explanation.
 
She gets it now, the words no one says, the natural learning everyone gets on
their own.
 
She touches herself and thinks about Richie. They’ve had all the intimacy built
up over years, in reverse, it’s not derived from attraction, not at first, they
grew up together and she rationalizes the strangeness.
 
They grew up together, watched each other grow up, they didn’t convince
themselves of something that wasn’t there.
 
It happened. They were kids together but they aren’t kids anymore.
===============================================================================
 
 
It’s Sunday morning and she needs to brush her teeth, Richie in the shower,
Seth’s putting on his suit. She knocks first, listens to the ‘come in’ and
shuffles inside still in her pajamas.
 
“It’s me.”
 
“I know,” he says over the spray and then as it shuts off, “you knock
different.”
 
She makes a sound of assent around toothpaste. Only looks at him because he
makes it a point to step out and stand behind her, he’s pink skinned and has
the tan-lines boys get that makes their legs anemically pale compared to their
torsos. Except, now he’s pink assed, kneed, elbowed, like he’s blushing
everywhere. She rinses her mouth, wipes it on the back of her hand.
 
“Need the shower?”
 
“I took one last night.”
 
She pushes a towel from the rack into his hands. He grins, wipes off his
glasses set down on the sink basin, puts them on and then puts a palm between
her legs, she sways and goes up on tiptoes, mouth falling open.
 
His is warm and open on the back of her neck, nosing her hair over her shoulder
and breathing deeply against her nape.
 
“We gotta be ready soon.”
 
“We will be.”
 
“It will take too long.”
 
“I’m going to sneak into your room tonight.”
===============================================================================
 
 
She loses her virginity under the blankets in her own bed late at night while
her daddy sleeps downstairs, while Seth is sleeping the first night of college
away in his dorm room and Richie sucks marks on her skin, in places her clothes
will cover.
 
She makes him go back to his own bed before morning and spends the whole next
morning in bed, stays home from school, and looks at her promise ring.
 
Eventually she takes it off and smiles at the way her finger looks without it.
 
 
 
 
***** Chapter 5 *****
Chapter Notes
     At least one chapter to go, if not two. Enjoy.
 
It takes a while for sex to become the thing she’s built it up to.
 
They do it again, at night in her bed a few days later. She has a better idea
of where her legs are supposed to be and how not to get her hair caught under
his hands. The third time is a few hours before school a week later, Seth's
been gone for two days. She sneaks under his blankets, reaches hands down under
his sweat-pants and strokes.
 
She likes to watch his face, run fingers over the muscles between his hips, the
sides of his thighs, hickeys the patch of skin between shoulder and neck, they
use so many tissues in the clean up her father asks Richie if he would like to
go to the doctor, see if they might have something for his allergies.
 
Richie always looks at her face, pouty and flushed, her insides clutch under
his stare, flutter for a moment but she hasn’t had an orgasm during. Not yet,
anyway.
 
It’s just pressure inside, warmth, the pinch that comes from him moving too
fast or too far too soon and she’ll grimace, he’ll kiss her sloppily, never
waits quite long enough before he moves again.
 
===============================================================================
 
 
“Kate,” his voice with a hitch, “What do you like?”
 
She can’t answer on the spot. It just makes her babble silently, starts a
checklist in her brain that’s blank.
 
“I don’t know.”
 
“Think about it.”
 
She nods mutely, presses fingers against his shoulder blade.
 
===============================================================================
 
He pulls her down in the nest of laundry load comforter and sheets. Her run’s
left her sweat sticky, it’s too warm to be close to another human dose of body
heat. But she squirms, she’s been edgy and he’s been grumpy, no time alone now
that school’s started and senior year is counting down to graduation. Her dad’s
been more awake, more aware, more everywhere in the house all the time. But not
right now.
 
Richie’s undressing her, undressing himself and they sit, panties to shorts,
breasts to chest and her hair is a nuisance once he snaps her hair band into a
long piece of useless elastic.
 
She leans back, ready to let him cover her but his hands hold her tight, coax
her up to her knees, yanking her panties down in increments, stretching them
around her knees, raising one at a time, she kicks them off the ankle they get
stuck around.
 
She pulls on his shoulders.
 
“You should be on top,” she urges. But he doesn’t curve over to cover her, just
nudges up with the bob of his covered erection against her naked cunt.
 
“Want you on top,” he tells her, serious, no pleading, no beg in his voice just
a statement to let her know what he wants. It’s easier for boys she decides, to
say what they want.
 
He stares at her, clear vision through his eyeglass correction. It makes her
newly nervous, his inquisitive eyes. It’s not nighttime, she’s not under
blankets and she presses close so her chest is against his, keeps her hips
pressed tight to his so he can’t see her there either.
 
“I’m sore.”
 
“Don’t be lazy.”
 
His tone is lazy, tone even. She chews the inside of her cheek.
 
“Just fuck me. I want you to.”
 
His fingers are cupping her, thumb slipping between her folds to open her up,
gentle rub on her clit, a press and she’s open mouthed, panting. His fingers
pull away, gentle strands of leaky wetness breaking on his fingerpads.
 
“Fuck me.” His voice is low, rough. It makes her nervous-hot.
 
Her fingers are useless in pulling at his weekend boxer shorts, he doesn’t help
and she scratches the skin of his hips, just a little catch that he temporarily
jerks away from.
 
“That’s it.” He says, quiet, soft, when she’s got a hand around him, goes up on
her knees and gets him where he needs to be, it’s different, almost easy, it
makes her aware of her more than him. Self-absorption centered between her
thighs, and the nudge of her body moving down on him.
 
It feels more like fucking herself for a moment, looking at the same spot
between his clavicles, hair sticking on her chest and shoulders.
 
He stays very still, breathes heavy, watching a part of him disappear inside of
her. She closes her eyes, inhales slowly when he’s almost all the way inside.
He holds the curve of each hip and just waits, she feels him out. Likes it.
 
Her clit and mons fit snug against the hard notch of bone where he’s got
dishwater blonde curls. He’s pulling her hips, up, prompting movement. It feels
like she's knocking on the wall again, she knows she looks more lost, less able
to breathe, than he does.
 
She moves with shallow strokes, unsure and unable to find a real rhythm. She
kisses him before he says whatever he opens his mouth to say. It’s sloppy and
toothy and he dips back for another, groans against the mush of her mouth,
holds hands around her ass and she comes up too fast from simple grind against
him, makes a sound as he slips free but still kept between them, against her
lazy circling hips and damp phantom nudges. He makes a sound too. It makes her
feel bad, like a little girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing.
 
“Sorry.”
 
She holds her hair behind her ears, lets him push back in. Holds his bicep and
the edge of her bed. His smooth up to flatten on her shoulder blades,
“Alright?”
 
“Yeah.” She pants, breathless, he smells like sweat, something a touch acrid,
the way men smell.
 
She moves her legs, her feet trying to find something to flatten on.
 
The side of his thighs and ass she nudges with her toes, knees bruising against
the side of the bedframe, and he moves his legs. They're closer this way, he
breathes and she feels it all the way down her front, they stick together like
tape, it's like falling asleep.
 
And after, “Hey, Katie-kakes.”
 
“What?”
 
“You’ve got a cream filling,” he prods with finger tips.
 
“Don’t,”
 
“Don’t what?”
 
“When you say stuff like that,” her cheek on his throat, hair stuck on his skin
like a scarf.
 
“Like what?”
 
“Dirty stuff.”
 
“You don’t like it.”
 
“It’s just," she thinks, she can't find an appropriate word for the filthy
sentiment, "a lot.”
 
“Of what?”
 
His fingers pet.
 
“…that.”
 
“This?”
 
They wiggle. She feels dirty, the kind of lazy and indulgent dirty that happens
over long vacations from school, it feels animal and when he stretches she has
him roll over onto her, "guess you're not still sore."
 
===============================================================================
 
 
There’s a vague exhale of, “oh, shit.”
 
He’s back on his haunches, repositioned, looking down at her and for a moment
she can’t get a breath. She’s got a hand twisting the open end of his
pillowcase. She breathes out, “yeah.”
 
He smiles, hair mussed, falling in stuck together strands over his forehead,
brows, eyes. He shuffles back, toes in the sheets behind him and pulls a hand
from her hip, licks his thumb and nudges her clit with it in slippery circles,
soft and careful and she needs to close her eyes.
 
“I don’t like that.” She breathes, pushing away his hand and pushing up her
hips to drag against his own. His solitary touches feel like tiny electric
sparks down her legs, it's too raw. Having the sensation dragged out makes her
edgy, uncomfortable. She puts her hand between them and shows him how to rub.
 
He puts his mouth on her, open and hot. His tongue slicks up, it's a different
kind of brutality, in her hand his glasses make a sound in her fist, the creak
of near ruin, she presses a foot to his shoulder, reluctant and pushing, he
holds her thighs wide and barely looks up, his thumb rubbing circle on her
instep. Her face is damp and half the fun is the struggle, he moves her so
easily and with such little force something in her, something unsettling and
amoral, thrills, forces him to hold tighter because it feels better. He
comments on it in ways that make her ears turn red.
 
"You squirm like that I'll have to hold you down next time."
 
She exhales roughly on his throat, hopeful, eager.
===============================================================================
 
Inevitably Seth catches them.
 
None of them react the way she thought she would, Seth’s surly angry silence
following the worst surprise he’s ever had, Richie nonchalance and the way he
keeps moving for a handful of thrusts, 'get out, shut the door', her own shame.
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