Chapter 8

I’d let myself believe I was a rational man. I was an empiricist and a pragmatist. I wanted a world to make sense, to work, and to be sensible. I didn’t see myself as driven by emotion, or intuition, or passion. I would change my mind when prevented opposing facts. I would value the method that led to the truth as much as the truth itself.

I learned, at least, I wasn’t a violent man. The urge I had to lift the entryway table and throw it into a wall wouldn’t subside. I stepped into the penthouse with Rena at my elbow.

I faced myself today. I loved women, sex, adventure, fun, celebration, position, prestige, respect, and acceptance. I took and I owned and I reshaped an island, a people, a fantasy into my plaything. I wanted freedom, family, and Fuck Island.

Shani Tanner was born Shan-Marie Bourque and was the love of my brother’s life. She was family, she was love, she was amazing.

I had always known I found her beautiful, even when she was chubby and a slave to a sugar filled mochas. She was attractive right down to her core. I judged my own girlfriends after what my brother had miracled into his life. I then woke up from a fugue with some significant fraction of twenty billion dollars and five pregnant mothers of my unborn children.

My anger that morning, maybe it had been past noon, I’d been given references to time but had yet to look at a clock. My anger that morning at seeing my brother disrespecting his wife with a pair of Asian girls had all but wiped away that rational man I endeavoured to be. I had been confused, led, and saturated since this had started. I hadn’t thought. I hadn’t rationalized. I hadn’t calculated.

Shani was on her pregnant knees, on a thick cushion, on a sun-warmed floor. Her head lifted from my brother’s cock, the second time I had seen it since we had pissed side by side in some Godforsaken upstate New York woods wearing cub scout uniforms. He rolled his eyes. Shani stopped smiling before she started. Her head tilted in confusion. Rena poked me under the ribs and walked into the penthouse.

I wanted to break my brother’s nose because his wife was sucking his dick. I felt like I was eight again, he was ten, taking my favorite Ninja Turtle helicopter and playing with it. He had broken that Goddamned helicopter and I had gotten in trouble for calling him a shithead. It remained the greatest injustice of my life.

Shani shouldn’t have been mine. Less so than Rena and that tall brown woman was a lesbian. My heart hammered like a wardrum. I swallowed another tirade.

“Brian, you are not adapting well.” Larry laughed at me. There was something vindictive in him, something amused by my conflict and agony. I respected that.

“I am going to be a dad.” I said like each word was four letters. I didn’t know where they came from but the fear that came with him and been simmering since I’d see Rena walking towards me at the pool.

“Yeah,” he gave a smirk of sympathy. “Not something I ever wanted, but the look works on Shani. Maybe, I could change my mind now.”

“That’ll be a laugh,” Shani snorted above his cock.

“What?” I walked in, he was on a sofa. Rena was on the one at his perpendicular. I unclenched my fists and sat down beside her. Shani’s gaze followed me every step of the way.

“How do you think I felt, seeing my Shani’s lips on another man’s cock?” Larry challenged me as I tried to turn down the glare. I wasn’t successful.

“I did that? In front of you?”

“No,” Shani shook her head. “It was me and Garth at his sixty-first.”

“I shared her with Dad?” I felt angrier. I thought of Olivia. I went pale.

“You,” he accused, “told her to give Dad what would make him happy. It was his birthday, he’d just come out of his dose. I was two days awake, and my still blackout wife is gargling down Dad’s dick while he’s letting the candles go.”

“You remember that, Shani?” Rena probed.

“Bits and pieces,” She shrugged that set the three roundnesses on her trunk moving attractively. “I remember thick white pubic hair my around nose.”

“Thanks.” Larry and I muttered for the visual image.

“I was there. It’s one of my better memories. He said, ‘I don’t need the wish, someone else blow out my candles.’” Rena had a decent dad impression. Not the voice, not at all, the slung back shoulders and the arm on the back of the chair and the eyebrow waggle. Shani was giggling into a cackle. I needed the joke. I leaned over. I kissed Rena. She warmly kissed me back. It was simple, rehearsed, comfortable. I sat up.

“Am I going to have my wife finish this off or are you going to lift your embargo and let me go back to sluts, whores, and bimbos?”

“There’s actually a few prudes you can cornhole. It’s not like we don’t ever get a South American nun or two ditching their vows.” Rena suggested. Larry gave her an impatient scowl.

“What embargo?” I was confused as my brother dragged Shani down to his lap. I shuddered as she slobbered.

“See? She knows she can’t fuck anyone but you, but thanks to Dad’s birthday, we know not everything that’s pleasurable is sex.” Larry looked down and I heard the wet slurp of lips around a cock. I frowned. “Even if it presidential.”

“Do you want your wife back?” I asked against guilt gnawing at my brainstem.

“Don’t you dare!” Popped up Shani and she snarled at me over her shoulder.

“I won’t.” I replied with genuine fear.

“Good,” and she turned back to inhale a cock. I had lost my grip on anger when I looked back to Larry. He pitied me. I could see it. I had done something I considered unforgivable. I had corrupted and perverted our household. He pitied. I wonder if the anger had burned away before I had come to.

“Brian, Shani’s yours, but if she’s the only place for me to get off, most of the protein that ends up being your daughter is going to come right out of my balls.” His tone and tenor were steady, not commanding. The sky was blue. Stars fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements.

“You can fuck any of the sluts on the island,” I waved my hands, “I don’t get it, the girls said I commanded women.”

“And some men, all men that get more than the island dose.” Rena poked me. I pinched my nose as Larry dragged Shani off himself.

“Good!” He announced and stood up with his hard saliva slick dick flicking away droplets. “Those triplets still--”

“They flew out a couple of weeks ago,” Rena replied.

“Damn, I’m going to the Globe. What’s on besides Snow White?”

“Uh, you’d have to ask Mel, but I think it’s X-Men in the comics room.”

“What in the hell?” I asked as Larry flipped me the bird and snapped up his wallet and key card from an end table. Shani rotated on her blowjob cushion.

“Imagine everything you’ve always wanted to do start fucking a chick,” Rena ran her hand over my thigh, “What comes to mind?”

“I dunno, romantic dinner, wine, steak, special night at home?” I started with a rote answer.

“The Strip.” Rena squeezed by my balls as a gesture to get me to continue.

“Just go crazy, girls everywhere, partying?” I didn’t know what I was supposed to be saying. Start fucking? Was this a where question? A when? Or was it a what? Anal? Toys? Kinks? Or what gets me off?

“That’s the Waterfront,” Shani walked over and dropped her cushion on the floor. Rena pulled my knee so that my feet were on either side of it. I lifted my ass and wiggled as Shani pulled down my shorts.

“This then, just quiet day at home with a girl who just wants to be there with me.” I was getting the feeling, and the feedback, that this is what they were asking me.

“Casa de Tanner,” Shani announced as she reached and stroked my cock. Seeing her tan fingers wrapped around my darker flesh startled me. Rena rubbed my shoulder and leaned her head on it. Shani started by licking around my retracted foreskin and up across the bead I produced for her.

I looked down into her smiling face. Her deep brown eyes were alight with reflected joy. Her hair was the semi-twisted halo of brown I remembered. She was still Shani, in ecstasy with me. I felt her lips gliding against the skin of my cock and I slumped back into the sofa. Rena had to reapply her cuddle to my side and her cheek to my shoulder.

“You’ve still more ways to have sex with a beautiful woman, or twelve, in you.”

“I don’t know, I always wanted to just walk in and take a girl. I wanted her to light up and forget everything she was doing and just, Oh my fucking God!”

I interrupted my scattered almost thought as Shani collapsed her cheeks against me. She corkscrewed down and I slipped readily into her throat. She was loud, wet, theatrical. Everything she was doing for me timed like a perfect ballet. Rena’s hand circled slowly on my chest. She tongued my ear as she whispered.

“More of The Strip. That’s where all of the business of the island gets done.”

Shani’s lips came off of me like a wet pop. She nuzzled in close, kissing the curve between my sac and my shaft. She climbed me and stroked me. I closed my eyes. I pictured The Castle. Why The Castle? Was that even about sex or just hedonism? Just excess. I turned, Rena and I met with our noses slipping against each other.

“The excess of it, the food, the spectacle, the energy.”

“Good, the Castle,” Rena agreed. She only pecked my lips. She didn’t want to make out, she wanted me to keep talking. Shani was engulfing me again. I licked across my lips. What was I missing? What did drugged me seek in sex? That wet pop sounded again. My dick was still warm in her spit and the grip of her hand.