Chapter 8

After that, Chrissy and I slept together without fail, every night. In the beginning, if our parents were around, we made somewhat of a big show of going to our own rooms in the evening at different times and doing random stuff with the door open for a while, as if to show that yes, we were definitely going to sleep in our own beds that night, as always, yes sirree. Only after we’d closed our doors and turned off our lights, carefully avoiding doing that at the same time, would I sneak over to Chrissy’s room through the bathroom. For some reason, maybe just because we had slept there the first night, we always ended up in her bed; I don’t remember Chrissy ever once coming over to mine. But I would dutifully muss up the sheets in my own bed, to make it look like I’d slept there, just in case Mom happened to enter during the day. (I’d never acquired the good habit of making my bed in the morning!) As time went on, though, we realized that our parents, true to form, weren’t really paying attention to our evening rituals, or at least, if they noticed anything, they weren’t putting two and two together. And of course at least half the time they weren’t home when we went to bed anyway. Eventually, we didn’t bother with the obfuscation; it got to the point where we’d simply walk into her room, shut the door, and get into bed together.

We didn’t always make love – well, that’s not true; just being together, tending and cultivating the already deep bond between us, we were in a literal sense “making love,” making a kind of love that was new to us: learning how to be lovers after years of being “just” siblings. If we fell into bed exhausted on a school night, asleep in each other’s arms before arousal could spur us on, and then didn’t wake up early enough the next morning, then we’d reluctantly leave the warmth of the bed and our embrace for a bracing shower (Chrissy had begun to appreciate the virtues of showering in the morning) and that didn’t always end up in hanky-panky either, although of course it often did.

No matter – if we, for lack of time or energy, didn’t end up bringing each other to orgasm one morning, I’d nevertheless head to school with the sight and scent of Chrissy fresh, lovely, nude, and if I just had to duck into a stall mid-day to beat my libido into submission, it didn’t prevent me from being ready that night. I often wondered if Chrissy, too, ever masturbated at school or other semi-public places.

She certainly masturbated in private. On more than one occasion, I woke up in the middle of the night (sometimes on a night we had already made love), heard the little squeaks of her excitement, and realized that she was pleasuring herself next to me. Usually when this happened, we were sleeping the way we almost always did, spooning, with my arms around her chest, and I probably could with a single motion, perhaps just by pressing my penis up against her, have escalated things into a lovemaking session, but something in me always told me not to: I didn’t want to spoil the moment. I’d wait until the squeaks turned to low moans and she jerked a few times, then I’d tighten my arms around her and we’d both return to our dreams. But once, I woke to the squeaks and found myself lying on my back, as was Chrissy. Her face was tilted towards me, but her eyes were closed; her legs were slightly apart and she was pleasuring herself with both hands. I lay next to her, took hold of my erect penis, and slowly started stroking. She must have felt it; though we had rolled out of our usual spooning embrace, we were still close enough that our upper arms touched. We lay there, languidly masturbating together, for I don’t know how long; finally, her breathing quickened noticeably, and I sped up accordingly. Our orgasms arrived simultaneously: at the precise moment her legs spasmed, I groaned and came, my semen spurting high into the air, raining down on both of us. She giggled. “I love you, Chrissy.” “I love you, Alex.” She still never qualified those words with “too.” Pleasuring ourselves together like this, each acutely aware of the other, so in tune that not a second separated our finishes had felt impossibly intimate, in a way much more so than making love. I fell asleep musing on how wonderful it was that two people could feel as safe and comfortable with each other as we did.

As Chrissy had surmised, our parents never once showed up at our bedroom doors. Indeed, our life en famille continued much as it always had; our parents, wrapped up as usual in their own concerns most of the time, paid seemingly little attention to our day-to-day activities. Nevertheless, we were exquisitely careful not to do anything that would hint at the utterly changed nature of our relationship. “You. Must. Not. Let. Your. Father. Find. Out.” Mom, I reasoned, probably suspected something was up, but I thought it was important to maintain plausible deniability with her as well. She wouldn’t know for sure that Chrissy and I were now sleeping together every night, although I was under no illusions, after what had happened and our subsequent conversation, that she would be surprised if she did know. But she had surely noticed, and was glad, that Chrissy was back to her old contented, giggly self, in fact appeared happier than she had ever been. To me she often seemed almost transcendently joyful, although my perception of this must have been influenced by the fact that I was suffused with joy myself. I felt like I walking on air much of the time – a little shared smile at the breakfast table, entirely unnoticed by Mom and Dad, would send me into a reverie of contemplation of the morning’s earlier delights.