Chapter 6

It didn’t go very well. Mom took us to the doctor and got us a prescription for the pill. Neither of us was used to taking medicine on a regular basis, and I forgot to take my pills about half the time. Mom checked my packet and saw the extra pills and yelled at me about it. After that, when I forgot to take one, I just flushed it down the toilet so she wouldn’t yell at me. Shannon did the same thing, except she was better about remembering to take hers.

It didn’t matter, though, because neither of us was having sex. Neither of us even wanted to have sex at that point. Not even with Brinn, really. We had gotten used to girl on girl kinds of stuff a long time past. I didn’t detail all that for you before this, because it seemed like it would just lengthen things. But now it becomes important, because it really affected the way we lived through that time that wasn’t happy.

We had talked about stuff, of course. You might remember that Shannon wanted for us to masturbate each other, and the term “lesbian” had come up. When we were both so happy to treat Brinn’s penis like an all day sucker, I think that relieved our fears that any inclination to have fun with a same-gender sibling would result in a problem. At that point in our lives we had thought that it might be possible to “catch” homosexuality by engaging in same sex ... sex. But our interest in Brinn’s penis on an up close and personal basis (as well as our interest in Uncle Bob’s penis from a distance) convinced us both that there was no danger we’d turn into flaming dykes or something like that.

So, during one particularly passionate evening when we were trading off licking and sucking Brinn’s erection, we kissed. And then, when he came, and we tried to each get some of his yummy man-milk in our mouths, we kissed again, rubbing his slippery spend around. It seemed completely normal to lick each other’s lips, which turned into a French kiss that also seemed like it should be an everyday occurrence. It wasn’t - an everyday thing, I mean - but we were both delighted about finding this new way of expressing our love for each other. And, over time, those kisses made it seem kind of silly that we didn’t touch each other in other ways. Brinn was an expert at getting us off, but no man could ever understand how to push a woman’s buttons as well as a woman can.

So when Brinn went away and our bed suddenly seemed like it was about an acre big, we didn’t suffer nearly as much as Brinn did, who had to go back to using his own hand.

And that’s why it didn’t go well.

Brinn was frantic, at first. We’d never been separated. We’d always slept in the same bed. It must have been like the first time he left home, and he got homesick, and it was like he could see home, but he couldn’t go home. And I think Mom wasn’t sure we were telling the truth about not having had sex, because she watched us all like a hawk. She invented reasons to be around us. Where before, she and Uncle Bob might have gone into the bedroom for some morning or afternoon delight, now she followed us around, asking what we were doing and if she could help or something. It didn’t help that we tried to help Brinn out, but every time we tried to do something with him, we’d get caught, and things just got worse and worse.

Brinn got surly. Then, when school started back up, he got in a fight the first day. While he was suspended he took the horse and went for a ride all the way to town, and got caught shoplifting.

Mom blamed it on Uncle Bob. And she blamed it on nudism. They stopped touching each other, or cuddling. There was no other bedroom for them to sleep in, but none of the sounds we were so used to hearing came from there any more. They even left the bedroom door open at night.

It didn’t make any sense, and everybody knew it. Brinn didn’t know why he had all these ugly feelings, but it was obvious to me. It was true that Uncle Bob was the one who had slowly awakened in Shannon and me the desire to be intimate with a man. And it was true that, before living with Uncle Bob, we had all worn pajamas to bed. But you can try teaching quantum physics to a five-year-old all day long, and not much is going to happen, because a five-year-old’s brain isn’t quite ready for quantum physics. And what had developed between Brinn and us hadn’t been taught to us by Uncle Bob. Maybe he helped a little, but he didn’t teach us to do that. And I won’t even mention that Mom encouraged him to do some of that.

Us getting interested in sex would have happened anyway. Everybody knew that. Every other kid in the whole world had gotten interested in sex, and had tried it, and the vast majority of them had ended up having as much of it as they could. We were no different. The only difference was that our mother got to see a whole lot more of our introduction to things sexual than most mothers do.

And there were no problems until she tried to interrupt that natural flow of exploration, experimentation, and ... well ... happiness.

What happened was that she lost faith in her own philosophy, and she tried to undo everything. Or at least stop it in its tracks.

And that didn’t go well for Brinn.

He didn’t get in any more fights, and he didn’t get kicked out of school again, but by Christmas break, when grade reports came out, he was failing in three classes and his only other grades were a D and two Cs. He’d always been a straight A student. All of us had. I think it was that grade report that finally got through to Mom. She looked at it and finally realized something horrible had happened.

They spent an hour in his bedroom alone. I don’t know what was said. Neither of them has ever been willing to talk about that. And I don’t think it’s because of what was actually said. I think it’s because, when they came out of that bedroom, the bad time was over. Brinn was crying, but the first thing he did was come hug me, and then he dragged me to Shannon, whose mouth was hanging open. She looked scared, like she thought this meant he was leaving for military school. Did I forget that that was something Mom threatened him with at one point? I guess I forgot. But he scooped her into the hug and said, “I get to come back.”

And he did. He moved his clothes back into our bedroom, and he slept with us that night, and every night after that.

You want to know something weird? That first night he was back, there was no sex. We just held each other. Well ... there was some kissing. I kissed him and Shannon. She kissed him and me. He kissed us both and kept hugging us. But we didn’t touch his penis, even though it was rock hard, and he didn’t touch our pussies, even though they were weeping steadily. And we didn’t touch our own. It was just a night for hugging, I guess.

I think part of that was because it was quiet enough for us to hear Mom crying, and Uncle Bob telling her everything would be fine, and that he loved her. It was very dim, but we were being very quiet. And then, after what seemed like a long time, we heard the noises that told us they were back to normal ... and that their bedroom door was closed again.

Brinn’s grades came back up. He smiled again. Oddly, we weren’t as desperate to engage in the kind of behavior that had so consumed us before the blow-up. Maybe that was because we knew how precious it was, to be able to lovingly suck his penis, or kiss each other with spermy lips. We didn’t take it for granted any more that he would always be there, or that we could have a Brinn-induced orgasm any time we felt like it. And because that was so special, it was a little like we were afraid we could use it all up, somehow. I don’t know. We didn’t actually think much about it back then. We were just so glad to have him back that we were happy just being able to press our naked bodies against his.

Mom still worried. We could tell. She looked haggard, and there were circles under her eyes. But that only lasted for a couple of weeks, until she finally figured out that her change of mind hadn’t resulted in any horrible disaster.

There were, however, some lasting effects. They are sad, in some ways, but as with every cloud, there developed what I like to think of as a silver lining. Of course I have to tell you about the cloud first.

I have also never talked with Mom about this period of her life. At least not in detail. All she’s ever said about it was that she was a fool, and that she didn’t trust herself, which caused her to make some stupid decisions. Personally, I think she looked at the three of us and tried to imagine our future. And that caused her to try to imagine her own future. And, because she couldn’t marry Uncle Bob, she decided she didn’t have a future with Uncle Bob. You’d think that, after seeing what it did to Brinn to be separated from us, she’d tumble to the idea that she might be unhappy being separated from her brother. She had been separated from him before, while he was in college.

But adults are stubborn, sometimes. And she was an adult. So what she did was go looking for a job, because she assumed she couldn’t live with Uncle Bob forever. She told him she was taking up the space that his life mate should be taking up, which sounded good on paper, except that nobody believed it. Especially not us kids. But she got a job as an executive assistant to a guy named Chuck, who was a private detective. And he was a nice enough guy, I suppose. He had a wide smile, and he was friendly. He kept saying there was no way Mom had had us three “grown up” kids, what with the killer figure she still had and all. He was actually the only adult male other than Uncle Bob who we had any contact with, outside of school. We knew men from their involvement in extra curricular activities, but they were mostly from school too, and we never spent much time talking to them.

So it wasn’t odd that we didn’t suspect him of having any ulterior motives. There was something about his eyes I didn’t like, but I figured that was because he kept using them to look at Shannon and me like we were fine chocolate, and he was starving. He complimented us a lot too.

But Mom kept sleeping with Uncle Bob, so everything still seemed normal.

Chuck came to our sixteenth birthday party, which was okay. We wore clothes to school and whenever we went shopping, of course, so when he got invited it just became a clothing not optional situation.

Then Chuck started having her go on stakeouts with him. He said it was to make it look like they were a couple, rather than him sitting alone in a car, watching somebody. He said people don’t pay any attention to a couple, sitting in a car, or a booth or whatever. And sometimes he’d leave her in the car to go do what he called “a sweep,” which was to make sure “everything was okay.” And then one time he said she needed to pose as a hooker at a convention, where he was supposed to do surveillance on some guy who was attending the convention and who was going to cheat on his wife. The idea was that Chuck befriended this guy and while sitting at the bar, my mom was supposed to come up and proposition Chuck. So he accepted, and then, of course they had to find a date for his new friend, which they did by going outside, where there were apparently hookers everywhere. And Chuck said they could use his room, because he had a double, and he was able to get video of the guy fucking a hooker.

Of course he had to get my mother in bed too ... to make it look real.

I know this sounds crazy. I mean my mom was smarter than that. But Chuck told her not to share much with anybody, including her kids and the brother she was living with, and she actually thought she was working for a private detective. He had an office and everything, and he had files and she saw them. And she saw clients. And Chuck was a people person, with the gift of gab. And he complimented her and bought her things. And she bought it all because Chuck was a con man, and he conned her.

You see, Chuck had come up with what he thought of as the ultimate con. He was, in fact, an ex cop. So he knew the streets. And he got his license and he actually did do some private investigator type work. But that was his cover for how he really made his money. And the way he really made his money was as a drug pusher. He had access to all the low-lifes, and spent lots of time with them. Wouldn’t any private eye? And he went to conventions to do surveillance on guys who were away from home, like any private eye would. But what he was really there for was to sell them “recreational aids” as he called them.

And while his reason for hiring my mother was to get into her panties, I think he really did fall in love with her. She’s an easy woman to love. And, of course, she’s really pretty.

Anyway, it got worse. She did sleep with him that night, because she really thought there was something developing there in terms of an honest romance. She’d been working for him for six months by then, and to “celebrate” successful jobs, he’d taken her out to dinner a bunch of times. And of course he’d treated those like dates, but had been the consummate gentleman and all that. He was a con man, after all, and he was trying to sell her on himself. And he did, and that’s why she slept with him at that convention.

And of course he convinced her that he’d fallen madly in love with her “accidentally” while he was boffing her socks off, in the bed next to some guy who was boffing a hooker, and while he was filming that guy. He actually sold that footage to a porn site, by the way. That’s what kind of scumbag Chuck was.

So he kept sleeping with her and I think maybe that’s when he fell in love with her, because he asked her to marry him, and that had nothing to do with his con. He didn’t need a wife. He needed a hot looking girlfriend to divert attention from him while he sold drugs.

But she married him, thinking she was moving on with her life. She also thought she was letting her brother move on with his life. And do you know what I think? Remember that bullshit they used to tell us about “practicing to make babies” so that if Uncle Bob got married he could make a baby with his wife? I think she sublimated that idea, and came to believe it herself, in an odd sort of way. I mean everybody knows that incest is wrong and bad and all that stuff, and she was neck deep in incest, so maybe that was how she coped with that. Personally, I think all that “incest is wrong” crap is just that - crap. But that’s not an argument for now. The point is that my mom bought Chuck’s con and married him.

There was one, tiny little rub. Chuck had all manner of use for a hot, soft, sexy woman in his life. He did not, however, need three teenagers underfoot. Nor did he have three extra bedrooms for us in his two bedroom penthouse apartment. Think it’s odd that my mother didn’t wonder how he could afford a two bedroom penthouse apartment? So do I.

He was too good a con man to just say, “Let’s dump the rug rats, sweet thing.” Instead he spun dreams of building a house where we could all live ... eventually. We would all be together again ... eventually. He just needed time to get everything in order. I think his plan was to procrastinate, or maybe have “financial problems” until we all turned eighteen. Then he’d be able to say, “I tried,” and sigh and all that, but it would be too late, so “the plan” could change.