Chapter 14

It was obvious she’d done this before. Obvious. It was also obvious it had been for shithead Rodney before he knocked her up. I tried not to think about that and concentrated on how very good she was at it. She explored my penis almost eagerly and handled it as if she’d found a new favorite thing to fondle. I lay back with my head on the backrest of the couch and groaned.

Not only was she good at it, she could tell when I got close. I felt her tense up and stop, freezing as if she was afraid to move lest I spurt in her mouth. I reached to caress her hair, but that was all. Even if this was all I got I counted myself lucky.

Then, suddenly, she was off to the races again, sucking, stroking, and humming as if she was happy.

I got close and she stopped again. This time she didn’t freeze, but gripped my penis with a grip that had steel in it. She waited five or six seconds and then went after it again.

She did that four times before she didn’t stop me again, just sucking as I croaked, groaned, and spewed in her mouth. I heard her swallow once and the vacuum cleaner attached to my penis never flagged. She kept sucking until I was fully soft, and only then did she sit back up.

I watched as she used the back of her hand to wipe her mouth.

“Thank you,” she panted gently. “That was even more different than I hoped it would be.”

“Any time,” I gasped. “Any time at all.”

She laughed, and her face lit up. After all the somber looks that had been on her face these last few months, it was a delight to see her smiling happily.

She licked her lips and swallowed again.

“You taste better than ... him.” She tilted her head. “If I’d have stopped like that when I was doing that for ... him ... he’d have slapped me around.”

I sat up, suddenly angry.

“I will never lay a hand on you that way,” I said, tensely.

“I wanted to believe that,” she said. “Now I know for sure.”

“You have a funny way of proving your hypothesis,” I said.

“I didn’t like doing that for Rodney,” she said.

“You didn’t have to do it for me,” I objected.

“I know, but I wanted to ... to see if it was the same.” She brought her hands to her breasts and squeezed them. “I am delighted that it wasn’t.”

“You still don’t ever have to do it again,” I said.

“That’s what’s so amazing,” she said. “I liked it. No, I enjoyed it. It was completely different. I was thinking of all these things, the past, Hannah, you. But it was so different than anything I felt before that it was like I’d never done it before.”

“Trust me, it didn’t feel like you’d never done it before,” I sighed.

“Rodney was very demanding. I didn’t understand how abusive he was until years later.”

“I’m so sorry, Phoebe,” I said. “No woman should have to endure that.”

Suddenly she burst into tears, sobbing, shaking uncontrollably. I moved to enfold her in my arms, but that was all I could do. She cried like that for a long time and finally settled into hiccupping, more gentle misery.

“H-h-he was killed in a b-b-bar fight,” she moaned.

I squeezed her and she looked up at me with red-rimmed, tear-filled eyes.

“I was glad!“ she gasped. “I hoped he was being tortured by Satan!”

I hugged her harder and kissed the top of her head.

It took another five minutes before I began to feel her relaxing in my arms. She seemed to need to confess, and I wanted her to let it all out.

“It was six months after Chris was born, after Rodney abandoned us. I was miserable. My parents were still angry at me and I had this little baby to take care of and I knew I had to finish school, but it was so hard!”

I gave her a quick squeeze.

“When I found out he was dead I wanted to dance in the streets. And then I realized what kind of person that made me ... to celebrate another human being’s death.”

She clung to me with surprising strength.

“I think it was probably a normal response, considering the circumstances,” I said, hopefully.

She finally sat up and separated from me, leaning against the back of the couch. I made myself look at her face instead of her breasts.

“That’s what my therapist said, too,” she sighed. “My parents put me in therapy when I swallowed half a bottle of aspirin.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad they did.”

She stared at me for half a minute.

“Most men aren’t interested in damaged goods,” she said.

“You’re not damaged goods, Phoebe,” I said, patiently. “Come on. Surely you know that.”

“I guess so,” she said.

“You had a rough go of things for a long time, but that’s all in the past, now,” I said, earnestly. “You’re a great mom and a great teacher.”

She stared at me a few more seconds.

“And I have a great boyfriend.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, smiling.

“I wasn’t sure, but I’m feeling better and better about him,” she said, speaking of me in third person. “At least you can understand why his little scandal might not have seemed as horrifying to me as some others would have thought it.” She blinked several times. “His actions were based on love, instead of anger, intimidation, and domination.”

She leaned closer to me.

“Instead of being repelled, I was fascinated. I wished I could feel love like that.”

“I think you can,” I said, softly.

We were both emotionally drained. Hearing about her nightmare had sapped my strength, just as telling me about it had sapped hers. We sat up and got dressed. For some reason I still don’t understand now, I picked up her clothes and helped her into them. She did the same.

“I’ve never put a man’s clothes on for him before,” she commented.

“Neither have I,” I said.

“I would hope not.” She smiled.

“You know what I meant.”

“Yes. I hope you do that again some day.”

“Well, that would mean we have to take them off, first,” I reminded her.

“Of course,” she said, carelessly. “I have a feeling that’s going to happen many times in the future.”

“Like now?” I asked, only half kidding. I could feel my penis twitch in my pants.

“Like later,” she said, poking me with a stiff finger.

“I’ll be patient,” I vowed.

I finished covering her and she kissed me with a quick peck.

“As I said, your patience will be rewarded.”

“Oh trust me,” I said. “It already has.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, standing back. “I’m not used to that.”

“I hope someday you can’t imagine not being used to it.”

She cocked her head.

“We’ll see.”

I’m sure you don’t want to hear the details of how our physical relationship progressed, and I don’t want this to become boring. If it was already boring then you wouldn’t have read this much of it, and I want the message I’m trying to convey to be heard.

And that message is this: Go for it.

I know that sounds trite, but it needs to be said over and over again, because life bombards us with problems that try to beat us down and make us forget that there can be joy and love in our lives. We get so wrapped up in trying to exhibit this or that set of social skills, or in trying to find the dream job, or in making enough money to buy that thing we think will make us happy, that we forget the best things in life are small, even common.

I’m not saying you have to give all your worldly wealth away and become an ascetic. I suspect some ascetics aren’t happy either. All I’m saying is that you should find someone you love, and who loves you, and concentrate on that. That will bring you contentment, joy, a feeling of self-worth ... happiness.

And yes, I know the concept of “true love” is also trite. But it was made that way by frustrated people who refused to forge a loving bond with someone because they kept thinking, “I can do better.”

Phoebe could have done better. My ‘rap sheet’ as a human being was extensive, literally as long as my arm, if you put the pages end to end. My relationship with Hannah was something the vast majority of women could never have gotten past.

But the hunger in Phoebe’s psyche, the hunger for the kind of love she sensed between Hannah and me, overpowered her rational mind’s objections. That and the fact that she had seen on my face the look of a man deep in love with a woman ... and she wanted a man to look at her like that, too.

Even my relationship with my sister is an example of what I’m talking about. Was it “usual”? Nope. Would anyone else have approved? No one except maybe other brothers and sisters in similar relationships. Was there a real future for us as lovers? Parents? Not really.

Basically there were hundreds of reasons not to fall in love with my sister, or her to fall in love with me. But we went for it. Sure, it was a herky jerky journey, looking something like the shambling gait of a zombie. Including the groans and moans, to milk the analogy. But once we’d tasted that little flavor of love, we went for it anyway. As it turned out, while a life together as a married couple wasn’t in the cards, I did get to have children with her.

We love those children. What’s more important is that Phoebe loves them, too. Their kids and our kids are always thick as thieves at reunions, and exchange a week at each other’s houses each summer.

That’s because Phoebe decided to go for it too ... with me. Damaged me. Oddball me. Incestuous fucker me.

It wasn’t easy. It was a shambling zombie walk, too, though not as long a one.

I’ve never asked her about it, but I had some suspicions for a while that she was punishing me for hurting her with Hannah. While she might have accepted that relationship, or at least the concept of it, that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt her. Like a broken bone, there is pain, followed by gradual, slow healing. If the break is set clean, then maybe nobody can ever tell it was broken, once it knits. Other breaks heal badly, bent, or with constant pain. Lifelong pain.

I said punishing me. Let me explain.

We kept going out. About every third time she’d get a sitter for Chris and spend the night at my house.

She always got naked, and got me naked, too.

She always kissed me hungrily, like a woman in the throes of passion.

And we did everything in the world together.

Except have intercourse.

We could make the 69 for hours and love every minute of it. Her orgasms were accompanied by squeals and gasping giggles. I got the impression she was surprised by each one and delighted to be able to have it. When she decided to make me spurt she was a woman possessed, stroking, sucking, squeezing, whispering things like, “Come on, baby, give Mama a little taste.”

I knew she wasn’t afraid of my penis. What I mean is that when we lay there together, kissing and snuggling, she had no problem with my boner poking between her legs. More than once our gyrations caused the tip of my cock to part her outer labia. All she did was either roll or reach to move it so it wouldn’t go in any deeper, but she kept kissing me.

A skeptic might argue she was trying to frustrate me enough to ask her to marry me, using intercourse as a bargaining chip. But she didn’t act that way. She never said, “I wish we were married so I could feel okay about having sex with you,” or something like that. What she did say, more than once, was simply, “Not yet.” She said nothing about what combination of events might announce when “yet” might arrive.

I’m sure there are people out there saying, “No way. It would be too frustrating to be in that kind of relationship.” But I wasn’t frustrated at all. Not really. I loved being around her, seeing her, getting to touch her. I always got my rocks off, usually more than once a night on ‘those’ nights. I loved being around Chris, too. I liked teaching him things and playing games with him. Life was fun. So I wasn’t frustrated.

Actually, what caused “yet” to arrive was her frustration with things.

I had, by now, uttered the three big ones to Phoebe on more than one occasion: I love you. The first time had been as my prick spurted into her mouth, so maybe that one doesn’t count. Maybe something in my subliminal mind told me that, because the next time was after we’d been cuddling while watching a movie. Phoebe must have had a streak of nudist in her, because being naked with me (on those nights somebody else was taking care of Chris) was pretty normal. We weren’t like a lot of couples who get naked, frolic around, get up and get dressed to eat, and then get naked again to frolic some more. She got rid of the ‘middle man’ and just stayed nude.

That wasn’t why, during a very intense part of the movie, when the viewer’s attention was being demanded by the tenseness of the action, that I turned my head and said, “I love you,” to her. I just felt it well up inside me, so I told her. She gave me the briefest of glances, said, “I know. Thank you,” and gave me the briefest of pecks on the lips before looking back at the screen. Phoebe was a good movie-watcher. If it wasn’t worth watching, she stopped. If it was, she got into it.