Chapter 11

There were questions, but it didn’t get all wild and noisy. It actually took a while for it to sink in that the world had been turned on its head. I know that might sound odd. I mean the world had already turned on its head, several times in fact. It had turned over when we crossed that line and entered incest-land. It had turned on its head again when we were arrested. It had kept rolling when the sting happened and Dad (and then Mom) found out just how much we’d been doing. You know those gymnasts, in the olympics, who flip over and over and over again, all the way across the mat? They land with a solid thud, in perfect balance, or at worst a little wobble. I had never understood how they could do that, why all that flipping didn’t just end in a disorganized heap.

To use another analogy (and thank you for your patience with all these analogies) if you’ve ever been to the American Southwest, you might have seen places where there’s a huge, round boulder, as big as a house, balanced on relatively flat ground, held there by what look like insignificant smaller stones. I’ve seen one where it was held up by only one stone.

Coming back home was when our big rock got balanced, standing precariously there, no longer rolling along.

Mom and Dad had just removed the stone that had halted our boulder’s natural progress, spurred on by gravity.

Of course that analogy breaks down almost immediately. If the balancing stone is removed, the boulder just falls over and lies there. It becomes just another boulder on a flat plane.

That’s not what happened to us. Our lives from that point on were very dynamic.

It was weird. Everything changed ... but nothing changed. I’ll try to explain.

Our daily lives were just as they had always been. We had classes, did homework, completed chores, argued about things, and were just like any normal family.

At night, the house was full of lovers, sharing passion, sleeping together, unwinding from a stressful day.

The sleeping arrangements were very fluid. The girls still had their room. They kept their stuff in their room. Rudy and I had our room. All that was exactly as it had always been. But who slept in the various beds changed on an almost nightly basis.

Sometimes - rarely - everybody slept in their own bed and there was no sex. While the girls were on their periods they usually slept in their own beds, though Tawny just loved sleeping with a man, even if all she did was sleep. Sometimes they just didn’t feel like being intimate, such as when they were angry or sick.

I’ll admit that for Rudy or I not to want sex was rare. That usually only happened when we were either angry, or sick. But we learned very quickly that attentions can be unwanted, and that trying to push things in that situation is both unwise and fruitless.

That said, it became common for me to stay up late watching TV, maybe with one of the girls, snuggling on the couch, and then go to bed to find Rudy lunging into Tawny on his bed, or behind his twin sister, doing it doggy style while he pinched her nipples. Rudy and Val made love sometimes, but I was usually her choice. She became an expert at milking me with those Kegels and she took great delight in sitting on top of me, not moving, as I tried to resist and always failed, eventually groaning as I spurted into her. She liked to lie on top of me when we went to sleep, like she had the first night, that night that changed our lives when our parents realized they had to take away the stone that was balancing the boulder.

It was common for all of us to sleep in the boys’ room. While Dad had been outfitting rooms as children were born, before he made all that money, he got furniture from wherever he could find it cheap. In one case he found a queen bed. It became Val’s because she was the oldest and things just stayed that way. Both Rudy and I had full size beds, as did Sam. Tawny was the only one with a twin.

When all us kids spent part of a Saturday moving Val’s bed to replace mine, our parents never said a word. In fact, I don’t remember any discussion about our sexual practices at all after that morning when they laid out the few rules they laid out.

About that. The girls did all go on birth control pills. Sam wasn’t happy because she gained fifteen pounds, but Mom said she couldn’t have an IUD until she was eighteen, so she started working out to control her weight. None of the girls could stand it when our penises were encased in a condom. We tried fifteen different brands and by the time I went to college I had a drawer full of unused ones.

Rudy didn’t care one way or the other. I think what made Rudy spurt was the idea of making love to one of his sisters, more than the physical sensation. I’ve heard that the majority of an orgasm is mental, rather than physical, so that makes sense. I also think that’s why he could have such a happy sex life even though he never could feel what his sisters practiced, and which always brought me off almost on command. Rudy could cum whether he was wearing a condom or not. As for me, I was a confirmed fan of being bareback.

Val went off to college and Tawny basically moved into my bed. A year made an incredible difference in Tawny’s life. Part of that was because her body matured some more. But her lifestyle also matured her emotionally. She might have been sixteen, but the average stranger would assume she was eighteen or over. Sam just decided one day to move Rudy’s stuff to her room, and Tawny’s stuff to mine, and that’s how things were after that. Tawny was a joyful lover. She exulted in every second of being able to make love. Sam liked to shake things up, which was why she sometimes negotiated with Tawny to switch for a night. They conspired against us guys. Tawny told me about it one night, after I had pinned her to the bed and been rough with her. I did that when I wanted to be in control of my orgasm, and she said she loved being flopped around helplessly.

Anyway, she said that, whenever she was in Rudy’s bed, she always teased him about the fact that Sam was in mine. She said she asked him things like, “I wonder what Bobby’s doing to Sam right now? Do you suppose he has his cock in her, like yours is in me?” She said that always made him crazy, like he was jealous, but not destructively jealous.

As for Sam, I knew what she did to tease me. She suggested that Tawny would end up as one of the two percent of women in which the pill doesn’t work, and that Rudy was probably impregnating her at that very moment. She said Rudy wanted to get Tawny pregnant.

That wasn’t true. I know that because I asked him about it.

But it made me want to get Tawny pregnant ... not immediately ... but before any other man could.

After one year of college, Valerie changed her major to criminal justice. The trial proceedings concerning Tom and Jerry may have had something to do with that. I suspect the fact that Agent Phil Brown asked her out on a date after Tom and Jerry were sentenced had something to do with it, too. He was stationed in St. Louis, Missouri, and flew all the way to Ohio just to take her out to dinner.

They kept going out. There was some tension there, because I went to the same college Val did and we were roommates. We rented the top floor of this tiny, old house that had been a farmhouse at one time, before it was engulfed by the expanding town. It had to be a hundred years old. But it was our home away from home and I spent four years living in it. There were, technically, two bedrooms upstairs, with a tiny bathroom between them. The kitchen and living room were communal to the whole house. There were three bedrooms downstairs. It was surprisingly quiet, except for the occasional party thrown on a Friday or Saturday night. Val and I kept our clothes in different rooms. They were too small to stuff everything we’d brought with us into one of them. But we slept together.

Except when Phil came to see her and take her out. That started out as a once a month thing, and that’s what caused the tension I mentioned in the last paragraph. About the fourth time he came up there, it was clear to me that Val liked him a lot. And he was smitten with her. Anybody could see it.

He’d been coming up twice a month, spending who knows how much money on just sitting and eating with her, or going to a movie or maybe a local concert or whatever, when she asked me if he could stay the night next time he came.

“I really like him, Bobby,” she said, her face flushed.

“We both knew this had to end sometime,” I said.

“I’m not saying it has to end,” she moaned.

“So you want two guys to keep you happy?”

She blinked. She’d always lived a somewhat unorthodox lifestyle, but even she realized how odd this was.

“I don’t think Phil would be too happy about that,” I said.

“He said you two could talk ... next time he comes up.”

Of course Phil knew we shared the upstairs of that house. When Val was ‘entertaining’ him, she didn’t much want to do that on the couch downstairs, when who knows who might wander in and want to watch TV or ‘entertain’ one of their own guests. So she’d invited him up to her room. There was a chair in there, an old wooden one that had probably been a dining room chair half a century ago. Other than that, the bed was the only place to sit.

I left them alone on date nights, of course, but the doors that went from the bathroom to our rooms were always open. And Phil wasn’t an idiot. Phil knew what Tom and Jerry had gotten us to do. He’d seen part of it, and heard the rest in multiple interviews. I’m not an idiot, either. The fact that he went to the lengths he’d been going to, to date my sister convinced me Phil had a kinky side, too.

But I didn’t think he was so kinky that if things got serious with Val, he’d let what I’m sure he thought was going on between us (and which was going on between us) just go happily on. I know I was jealous as hell the first night he stayed over. And that was after we talked about it!

That was an interesting talk. It’s right up there with the strangest conversations I ever had. The night he came up they were going to an opera at the college auditorium, which hosted famous people and acts at the rate of once a month. Some of them were pretty amazing. I went to see Garrison Keillor do a one-man show there, as well as a couple of singing groups and a magic act. Anyway, she was getting all dolled up for it. She had on new undies that made me salivate and was doing some kind of magic to get her hair to stay up on top of her head, with glittering things to hold it there.

“You look delicious,” I commented.

“Good,” she said, intent on her task.

“You can’t go to the opera like that, though,” I said.

She smiled.

“I’m going to wear a dress, silly,” she said.

We heard the doorbell.

“That’s probably him,” she said. “I’m not ready. Go keep him busy.”

“And have our talk,” I said.

Finally, she turned her head and looked at me.

“Please? I really like him, Bobby.”

I wondered if this was how fathers felt when they met the boy their daughter had gotten all excited about. She’d gone out on other dates, of course, but she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend so she didn’t date the same guys more than two or three times. I’d gone out on dates, too, but it was just to have fun and meet people. I got all the sex I wanted at home.

Jeff, one of the downstairs housemates, had already let him in. I shook his hand. He always shook my hand when we met.

“She’s not ready,” I said. “She told me to come keep you busy.”

“Ahh,” he said. He went and sat on the couch. I sat at the other end.

“She’s working on making you weak in the knees,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I feel like a third wheel, here,” I sighed. “She talks to me and she talks to you but you and I never talk to each other.”

“That’s not intentional,” he said.

“I know.” I shrugged. “You come here to see her, not me.”

“That sounds harsh.”

“But it’s true,” I said.

“On the surface,” he said. I waited for him to go on, because it sounded like he intended to. But he just looked at me.