by Tom Collins
*Oliver*
Sandy’s observation that Brendan and Liam were an impressive sight together was a gross understatement. I’d been drifting, snuggled against Liam’s warm, furry body—neither awake nor sleeping—when I’d heard him talking to himself, or so it’d seemed. Reality had only gotten more surreal when I’d blinked awake to find four large, playful green eyes locked on me, two lanky bodies leaning in toward me, two sexy smiles, and yes, two of those uncut cocks, hanging down and looking smug.
I had no intention of doing it, but my libido flashed on the idea of trying to take both in my mouth. Oh, baby! I swallowed down saliva.
More mind-boggling, was the way the brothers interacted. Stereo didn’t begin to explain it. When Bren stoked his hand (right instead of left) over my cheek in an exact, mirror movement of what Liam had done, then echoed down to the intonation what Liam had called me, I almost freaked.
Which made him back off all worried, exactly as Liam would have.
Liam explained how they saw themselves, and while I got it mentally, I refused it outright emotionally. Brendan might be what Liam would have become with a guitar, but he wasn’t Liam. Liam was Liam and he was mine and I wanted him, not Brendan.
I suppose it was rather like poles. They might both be the same, but my inner compass knew north from south. However magnetic the other pole, I just could not go that way.
Which made it hard to answer when Liam finally asked, “Are you okay with this?”
Not an hour ago, he’d begged me to be selfish and say what I wanted. Shaking inside I had. To my amazement, he hadn’t refused me; he’d agreed to it all. Now he was asking me to accept that he and his twin were, in a way, a package deal. That I love his brother almost as much as I loved him. I didn’t think I was up to the challenge, but there was no refusing. Whatever Liam asked of me was his as best I could give it.
Meeting this challenge would be a lot easier, however, if the two of them would stop referring to me as “theirs.” That was weird and a little disturbing.
“I’m…okay with it. Just, still getting used to you having a twin. Don’t twins usually want to establish their individuality?” I asked.
They shrugged in unison. “Other twins might,” Brendan said, “but we’re not them.”
“No. I can see that.” I licked my lips. Carnal gazes don’t usually daunt me; I’ve elicited plenty and I could give as good as I got. But those two pairs of green eyes staring at me with such depth of unconditional love and affection made me understand why certain animals roll over and offer up their bellies in submission.
Men did not stare at me that way. They lusted for me, but they did not love me.
“Why am I not your type?” I asked abruptly. I hadn’t meant to inquire; it just popped out.
Liam blinked, stunned, frowned, then threw an accusing glare over his shoulder at his brother.
“What?” Brendan went all innocent-like. “All I said was that I didn’t originally think he was our type.”
“What is your type?” I pressed.
“Twinks,” a female voice said from the doorway. Jillian was standing there wearing the “My brother did it” t-shirt, which came down to her knees. She was leaning against the jamb, gazing languidly at our naked bodies like they were a trio of rich desserts and she had an insatiable hankering for sweets.
I didn’t feel any embarrassment; flattered, yes, but a girl’s admiring gaze has never meant anything to me. What sent my cock shrinking up into hiding was that she looked ready to propose a foursome.
*Liam*
“Androgynous twinks,” Jillian further clarified, posing to show off her wonderfully, sexy, ambiguous beauty.
“I don’t know that I would use the word ‘twink,’” I cut in. “After all, that implies someone very young, and age isn’t really an issue of attraction for us…up to a point, that is,” I corrected.
“Androgynous would be a fair call though,” offered Brendan as he held his hand out to Jill, inviting her to join us in our makeshift nest. “I mean, just look at our Jilly; hardly any boobs at all, but she’s got strong shoulders and bold features,” he continued as she settled behind him, while watching Oliver for a reaction.
“But a juicy butt and killer legs…just like you,” I finished, nuzzling behind Oliver’s ear and kissing his jaw.
Oliver had stiffened at my words, and not in a good way. I drew back, taking a breath as I did. Looking over my shoulder, Brendan and I eyed each other, communicating on a level that only appeared telepathic from the outside to people who didn’t understand how much alike we were inside our heads. We had to find the right words here. There were a couple of things bothering him and they both had to be addressed right now. The uncertainty would eat him up otherwise.
“This is something else that’s difficult to explain,” I began. “How about folding these clothes while we make a go of it?”
“Fold clothes?” Bren murmured in mild dismay.
“S’like when Jill needs to polish up the drum set and check on all the instruments…soothing,” I murmured back.
“Ahh, gotcha.”
Oliver frowned, as if he thought we were making fun of him, but I noticed that he’d already pulled out a pillowcase from the pile and was at work turning it into a small, perfect rectangle.
“Firstly,” I began, “I can tell you’re worried that we, including Jill, will want you to go in for group action, or maybe swap out with Bren and me.”
“Mmm,” Jilly murmured, languidly stretching out against Bren. “I can dream.”
Bren poked her quiet. “That couldn’t be further from the truth,” my twin assured Oliver and I felt him begin to relax.
“The ‘secondly,’ ought to make it clear why we have no interest in that,” I said, setting up an opening for Brendan.
“Secondly,” he came in smooth as a Hershey’s bar melting on the tongue, “It bothers you when we refer to the two of you as being ‘our’ Jillybean and ‘our’ O-lover.”
Oliver’s eyes flickered away in confirmation. He grabbed a pair of jeans to fold.
“Mmhmm,” I confirmed, “because it reinforces the idea that we’ll be sharing you two.”
“Which we will,” inserted Brendan.
Ollie’s whisky eyes came up again, fixing on us. Oh, wow. Bren and I, and I think Jill as well, caught our breath. How did Oliver convey that much heat in a look?
“Just not like you’re thinking,” I shot back quickly. “See…” I hesitated, trying to find the right words.
“This is where it gets hard to explain what’s going on in our head,” Brendan offered into my silence.
“Vicarious,” supplied Jillian from her seated position behind my other self.
“Yes!” we both jumped on the word.
“That’s it,” said I.
“Exactly,” said he.
“The two of them would be virtual mutes without me,” she loftily informed Oliver.
“I rather doubt that,” he murmured, working his way though some of my shirts. I’d been worried that Jill joining us might make him even more antsy, but I saw him connecting with her in that moment, especially when she smiled back. Now, if I could just get the same thing to happen between him and Bren.
“Jill is my sister…” I went on, “a super-hot, love-seeing-her-walk-around-naked sister, granted, but still a sister. I touch her all the time, in little ways—like Brendan’s already been doing with you—but the thought of sex, or anything less platonic, is faintly nauseating.”
“You silver-tongued devil, you…” she interjected, her tone as dry as sun-bleached bone. I snickered and Brendan tickled her until her bogus ire broke into giggles.
They quieted as I went on, “I don’t want her because I’ve already got her—”
“Through me,” my other self butted in, “and I don’t really want you,” he emphasized to Oliver, “like you’re thinking—”
“Because he’s already got you through me. Think of it this way, if Bren had chosen
the rainbow crayons, instead of the rainbow xylophone, it would be him who painted all these pictures of you, and him you’d’ve spent so much time making love to this past month,” I concluded.
“No,” Oliver said, pausing in his obsessive folding to gaze directly and only at me this time. “No, Liam. I’m not in your heads and I’ve no way of knowing if I’m right but I think…I think you’d have played different music. Tunes as soaring as your art, while he,” a lift of the chin to Brendan, “would have drawn wingless, fire-breathing dragons rather than ones flying through rainstorms.
“I mean,” he went on, “even if the only difference between the two of you is left and right handedness, that would’ve changed the results, wouldn’t it? I’ve seen how you draw. Sometimes you just reach out and grab a colored pencil, and that decides where the sketch will go. If you reached with your right instead of your left, you’d have gotten very different colors, and probably gone in a different direction with the picture. Right?”
I didn’t know what to say, and neither did Bren. Nothing like this had ever occurred to us.
“Thank you!” Jill blared and, leaning over both of us planted a kiss on Oliver—which would have made me a little jealous except I got to feel her warm breasts pressing against my shoulder through her t-shirt.
“I’ve always wanted to argue with them about that,” she asserted, “but I never found a good way to do it. Next time,” she added, coming back to Bren, “you tell me that I could have been sleeping with Liam, I’m going to remind you of that day I bent over just as you were backing up and bumped my head on the round end of your guitar. If it’d been Liam with his guitar strung for a lefty, I’d have bent over into the tuning pegs and probably lost an eye!”
Oliver, brows still up from the kiss, was nodding. “I think,” he went on, “I think, if Bren had gone for the crayons, then Jill would have been interested in your artistic brother when she joined your band, and I—I think you’d have still been waiting tables that night, even if you’d been writing out music on the napkins rather than doodling pictures. I think you’d still have wanted me when I came through that door. I don’t care if you believe that or not. I do. You’re Liam and you’re the one I want, whether you play music or draw pictures.”
“You’re so right,” Jill said, triumphantly; the traitorous wench, “but it doesn’t change the fact that these two are still going to enjoy us vicariously. What they call ‘sharing’ is them enjoying the thought of the other one being with someone. In your case, it would be Brendan imagining you with Liam. Which I think is kinda weird…I mean, even in their fantasy it’s their other self in there, not them directly…but who’m I to quibble about someone else’s fantasies? Especially when it gets me off too, eh?” she gave him a conspirator’s wink and a lecherous grin.
My head still reeled from the new interpretive spin Oliver had put on Bren and my development. I couldn’t imagine where he got the idea that he couldn’t match wits with me. Filing it away for further consideration at a later date, I pressed on. “Lastly, getting back to the question about individuality—”
“We are individuals,” Bren protested. “I mean, we may like to wear our hair the same way and we share clothes because it means we can have twice as many since we don’t have to duplicate the way some twins do, but I don’t wear his David Bowie shirts…”
“And I don’t wear his Tina Turner shirts,” I tossed in. Oliver blinked at that.
“Don’t ask,” Jill advised.
Bren opened his mouth to defend Tina, and that’s when the dinner bell sounded. My stomach began snarling and chewing on my backbone. Pavlov would’ve been proud of Erin for sure.
*Oliver*
I had no idea how I’d been roped into such a whacked conversation, especially as the one thing I really wanted to ask Liam was how I could be more his type. I was half-way between asking this or wondering aloud about Tina Turner when what sounded like church bells rang through the apartment.
“What the—?”
“Erin got bored and did some cooking,” Liam shook his head. “Whenever he’s ready to serve up he goes to his keyboard and plays that for a dinner bell.”
“And if you don’t want him pissed at you for the rest of the month,” Bren got to his feet and offered Jillian a hand up, “you’d better heed it and eat whatever he’s made, even if you’re not hungry.”
They headed out, I assumed to throw on clothes. Liam had to help me up as my knee was avenging itself for the way I’d treated it during sex and aching something awful.
Worth it, I thought as Liam steadied me. He dug around and helped me back into my almost dry shorts and tee shirt. Then he pulled on the dragon shorts that Brendan had been wearing on stage last Friday night.
I grabbed hold of the waistband of those white cut-offs and dragged him to me before he could leave, right into a kiss. I let my tongue tangle with his, and play off the roof of his mouth before breaking off and asking. “How can I be your type?”
He blinked at me, Adam’s apple bobbing with a gulp. “Keep kissing me like that and you’ll always be my type.”
We stepped out and were hit by the fragrance of chicken sizzling up with onions and peppers. My stomach growled and I felt hungry, really ravenous, for the first time in days.
“All right! Southwestern boxties!” Liam approved, as we stepped into the main area.
There was a spread of condiments and odd-looking tortillas on the bar area between the kitchen and dining/living area. Erin, wrapped in a black apron reading, “Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial,” was busy at work flipping sliced chicken and veggies in a hot skillet.
“Should have put up cameras in your rooms,” he was muttering to Bren and Jill, now dressed and standing at the bar. “Gay, straight, bi, you two have got it all! I could start my own erotic website and, between the pair of you, make a fortune.”
“You’d have to talk to our managers about that,” Bren said, hugging Jill and nodding to me, as if Jill and I were, indeed, partners in some sort of management firm for hot, identical twins.
“Ah!” Erin caught sight of me and his expression went cold, “Good. You’re here.”
Uh-oh.
He shut off the heat from under the frying pan. Liam, reaching for the flatbread, was slapped away with a spatula.
“Hey!” Liam got his knuckles to his lips. “I’m wasting away here!”
“Too fucking bad. Before anyone eats I get to ask one question—” The oil-spattered spatula pointed my way, “What the fuck were you doing in ‘Johnsonville’ on the corner of ‘Bratwurst’ and ‘Kielbasa?’ See—” he went on, coming out of the kitchen. “I don’t know if he—” the spatula went to Liam, “got an explanation or if he was too busy shtuping you—” the deadly spatula returned to me, “to bother, but—considering I took blows for you when he—” back went the spatula to Liam, “got it in that petite brain of his that your honor needed defending—I,” he finally pointed the spatula at himself (was there going to be a test on this?), “think I’m owed one.”
“Loblolly—” Liam said, which might have been a nickname.
“He did what?” I echoed simultaneous.
“On the way to the hospital,” Bren said stepping between us, “When Erin explained where you’d been found that Friday night Liam kinda…went berserker and hit him.”
My stomach dropped and Liam gave me that half-cringe look of his, the one that said he hadn’t wanted me to know about this.
“You hit him?” I blurted. “You were supposed to hit me! Can’t any of you keep it straight who you should be mad at?”
“I can,” Jill volunteered.
“Erin can’t,” Brendan said smugly. “It’s easier for him to be furious at you rather than at Space Oddity.” His tone pretty well stuck its tongue out at his cousin.
Erin flushed, “Shut it, Nutbush. I’ll cue you when I need commentary from the peanut gallery!”
He looked ready to smack the twin with the spa
tula, so I instinctively jerked Bren behind me. “Hey, hey, it’s me you’re pissed with—”
“You don’t tell me how to talk to them!” Erin snarled. “I’ve been watching out for them since they were potty training—”
“Yeah, you were what, four?” Bren threw back, “and not potty trained yourself.”
“Fuck you!”
“Erin, stop it,” Liam tried to move in, “I’m sorry! Don’t make Oliver feel bad about it—”
Oliver already felt bad about it, and about being in the middle of a family feud. Brendan was staying behind me while he sniped at Erin, Liam was trying to explain, and Erin was barking at both Brendan and Liam. I found myself blocking them all from each other, with only one option: ask the girl for help. I looked to Jill.
She caught my silent plea, nodded in agreement, then put two fingers in her mouth and blew a piercing whistle. It shut the boys up instantly.
“Your fajitas are smoking,” was all she said, and just like that, Erin was back in the kitchen, checking on his precious meal. Finding it a little charred but not ruined, he brought over the still sizzling iron pan to the counter.
“Well, come on,” Jill said, grabbing a plate, “I’m hungry.”
The twins glanced at me sheepishly, then helped themselves to the pancake-like “boxties,” which they then filled with savory onions, peppers, chicken and toppings of tomatoes, lettuce and sour cream.
Erin, still fuming, watched us plate up with arms crossed, as if to say that we’d better appreciate his efforts or he’d go right back to having it out with us. When we were settled in the living room, feeding on these odd wraps, he begrudgingly made himself one and joined us. Jill and I took the couch, with Bren seated cross-legged at her feet, and Liam cross-legged at mine. Erin settled on the recliner.
“Before I forget,” Jill broke the thick silence. “Grandmother O’Shaughnessy wants to meet you, for tea, Oliver.”
I froze a bite to my lips, and Liam threw a furious look at Jill for apparently letting some cat out of the bag. Erin, however, snorted and relaxed, which I suppose had been Jill’s reason for throwing that zinger my way.
