Chapter 12

I heard warning in her voice when she told me to tell her everything. I know that sounds silly, considering the circumstances, but I decided to take her at her word and started again, trying to think of how things happened, and in what order.

“We had never kissed,” I said. “We started doing that and it just got worse. Then one night she put her mouth on me ... to find out if she’d puke or not.”

“And, of course, you wanted to know if you’d puke or not if you returned the favor,” said Phoebe.

“I didn’t think I’d puke,” I said, weakly.

“And after that there was nothing else to try except having intercourse,” said Phoebe.

“We were still resisting that,” I insisted. “But Hannah had a friend, and they got drunk one night at a sleepover and the girl talked about all the things she did with her brother.”

“Let me guess. They were having sex.”

“Yes.”

“So it didn’t seem so aberrant for the two of you to have sex.”

I sighed.

“I’ll be honest. Even if we hadn’t known about Janet and Todd, I think we’d still have ended up where we did. I don’t think we used Janet and Todd to rationalize things until after they’d already happened. We got closer and closer ... emotionally.”

“I suppose that doesn’t surprise me, either,” said Phoebe. “I never had a man who listened to me, did only what I wanted him to, cared about my feelings and loved me like that. If I had known when I was sixteen what I know now, I’d have killed to find a man like that. You fell in love, Bob, and so did she. You weren’t supposed to, but you did.”

“I agree,” I said. “I still think of her as my sister, but she’s so much more than that. It’s almost like she’s two different people who inhabit the same body.”

“Believe it or not, but that makes me feel a little better,” said Phoebe.

“What made me feel better was that things happened that were out of our control,” I said.

“Such as?”

“One fourth of July some relatives came to visit and Mom made Hannah move into my room, temporarily. She was supposed to get my bed and they put a cot in there for me.”

“Good grief,” said Phoebe. “Talk about throwing gasoline on a fire.”

“Sort of. Except they didn’t know there was a fire. But something else happened, too.”

“What?”

“While Mom was getting Hannah’s room ready for the guests, she found Hannah’s dildo.”

“Oh my,” sighed Phoebe.

“Yes, and that led to her putting Hannah on the pill.”

“And that,” said Phoebe, “made it easier to go even farther.”

“I went out of order. When they put us in my room together, we got fired up and that’s when she went to get her dildo from her room. The grownups were playing Bridge. That’s when she found out it wasn’t there, but we didn’t know who took it. So that first night we were in my room, she didn’t feel like doing anything. She was too worried about her dildo. We slept together, in the same bed, I mean, but nothing happened. Except I hugged her.”

Phoebe closed her eyes.

“I can imagine that,” said Phoebe. “You were sweet to comfort her.”

“But the next morning when we woke up, I guess she wasn’t as worried. Waking up with somebody naked is really different than just waking up like you have all your life, alone. So we started kissing and actually, the first time my ... penis ... went inside her it was an accident. I mean we didn’t intend for it to go in her, but we were kissing and she was wiggling around and ... it just happened.”

Phoebe stood up and went to the kitchen. When she came back she had a glass of orange juice. Her brow was furrowed. When she sat down she looked at me for a few seconds.

“I didn’t intend to lose my virginity when it happened, either,” she said. “A boy named Rodney did, though. Intend to do it, I mean. I thought we were just fooling around, but he got ... aggressive.”

“Shit,” I said, softly. “He raped you?”

“I can’t honestly say it was rape. I didn’t want him to do it, but I also didn’t try to make him stop. I tell myself I was too scared to resist, but to be honest, that’s probably not true. I was frightened, but I was also, as you call it, fired up.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She tilted her head and examined me.

“You mean that. I think that’s one reason why I feel as strongly about you as I do. You’re compassionate. You care about people and how they feel.”

“I guess,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed for some reason.

She blinked.

“Go on. The first time was an accident.”

“Yeah, and when we went to breakfast we were both terrified that the grownups would know, somehow, what had happened.”

I reached for her orange juice and took a sip, to wet my mouth. Then I realized that I had just shared her glass, without even a how do you do.

“Sorry,” I said. “I should have asked.”

“I’m pretty sure you don’t have cooties,” she said.

I remember smiling, and realizing that it was the first time I’d smiled since she caught me thrusting my prick up into my sister. I went on.

“Anyway, that was the fourth, and we went on a picnic and watched fireworks. That was when Mom got Hannah off on a walk and they talked about the dildo and going on the pill and all that.”

“Let me guess. That night you did it again.” She blinked. “Intentionally.”

“Yeah,” I said. “After that we kind of went crazy.”

Phoebe tilted her head and examined me again.

“You said ‘we’.”

I was confused at her stipulation. It must have showed.

“You said you both went crazy. You didn’t blame it all on her.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Why would I do that?”

“That’s what Rodney did to me. After that first time, every time we went out he wanted to have sex. He was very insistent about it, whether I wanted to or not. In fact there were times when I said we shouldn’t, but he didn’t care. Then, when I got pregnant, he said it was all my fault because I was a slut and couldn’t keep my legs closed.”

“Shit, Phoebe,” I sighed. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. I know now I was a fool. My mother even warned me about him, but I wouldn’t listen. I thought I was in love.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” I said. “We both know how tumultuous puberty is. We run into that every day at school.”

“I appreciate that. I think I did blame myself, at least to some degree. I understood better what happened, later, but you can understand why my perceptions about men might have changed.”

“Of course.”

“Which is why I never let a man get close to me again until I met you.”

I thought I knew where she was going.

“And then I hurt you again. Phoebe I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Oh, I’m fully aware of that,” she said. “And as odd as it may sound, I believe that. That said, though, had it been any woman other than Hannah I caught you with, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But it was Hannah, and something deep inside me demanded that I try to find the meaning in it. I did open up to you, Bob, and I felt so free, so happy. I didn’t want to lose that again.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For giving me a chance to explain, I mean.”

“Don’t thank me,” she said. “Thank your sister. When she told me about her husband being sterile and that they both agreed to have you father her children, I thought I’d faint dead away. But she was so passionate in the telling. She cried and begged me not to just toss you away. She said you needed me and that it was all her fault, that she seduced you and manipulated you.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “Nobody manipulated anybody.”

“I wondered about that,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to hear your side of it. Even as short a time as I’ve known Hannah, I didn’t think she was that kind of woman.”

“Wow. I’m going to kick her butt for saying that,” I said.

“No you’re not.”

Suddenly it seemed we had nothing to talk about, and there was a long, uncomfortable silence. I finally broke it.

“There’s more, I guess. Do you want to hear the rest?”

Phoebe looked around, almost as if she was surveying the room we were in. Finally she looked at me.

“I don’t think so. I think I understand how this happened.”

The question had to be asked.

“So ... what now?”

“I don’t know.”

I sat there. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Phoebe didn’t have that problem.

“Except that you need to get this business with Hannah finished. Then maybe we can decide where to go from there.”

Phoebe had delivered that last comment almost casually, like someone saying, “Oh, and I need to pick up the dry cleaning on the way home.” She said it as she got up and took the orange juice glass back to the kitchen. I heard water running as she rinsed it out.

I examined that comment while she was gone. “Finish” could be interpreted in two ways that I could think of. It either meant finish as in end it where things currently stood or ... incomprehensibly ... finish it by achieving Hannah’s goal of having her second child.

I’ll be honest and admit I didn’t want to have to call Hannah and tell her it was over, and that she’d just have to find some other guy to knock her up, so I could try to salvage my relationship with Phoebe. I didn’t want to ‘finish’ it that way. But it was pretty difficult for me to imagine a scenario in which Phoebe would stand back and let me keep fucking my sister to ‘finish’ it the other way.