Obsession: A Twin Menage Romance

by Stephanie Brother

  It takes my hand a while to click into action to take whatever it is he’s holding.

  “It’s a treasure map”, he says, answering my question for him. “You look like you’re looking for treasure.”

  I nod. “Treasure”, I say, and even that ridiculously short and largely nonsensical response I’m proud of.

  “It’s impossible to find the treasure if you don’t have the map”, he says, and then before disappearing as mysteriously as he appeared, “Just let me know when you’re ready, I can see now probably isn’t a good time.”

  Wait I want to say. Hold on, come here, take me with you, now is a perfect time, but I can barely string enough words together to say instalove either. I watch my treasure hunter disappear into the shadows of the bar and then out of sight altogether, as though without the piece of paper I’m holding, he might not have existed at all.

  “Are you alright?” Alice asks me when I finally emerge. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Better than that”, I say, the cell number burning a hole in my pocket, “I’ve just met the man of my dreams.”

  Chapter Five

  Atop the largest tower in the western hemisphere, a turret that stands so high on its foundations the peak pushes through the clouds like a periscope through water, I sit incarcerated, destined to spend the rest of my life in this one room, two-mile high prison without a single brave soul to save me, my only crime my desire to be loved.

  Okay, that and scrawling all over the walls at the King’s palace with rags soaked in cochineal. On reflection, an orgy scene the size of the bayeux tapestry probably wasn’t the best way to get my point across, but there was no need to send me up here for two hundred years so I’d learn my lesson. People in this town can be so prudish, it’s like they’ve never seen double anal before.

  They can take away my freedom, they can lock me up and throw away the key, they can destroy all of my art materials, but the one thing they can’t do is take away my imagination. The fat king with his sixteen fat wives can go on burning sculptures and portraits until every single last piece of artwork has been decimated, but they’ll never win. As soon as one gets incinerated, two more will pop up in its place. For every imaginative thought they attempt to suppress, a whole army of them will rise up in their wake. And for every erection they try to conceal, every orgasm they try to blame on the work of the devil, every single incredible sexual position they try and deny exists, I’ll be here, in my tiny turret, looking at the moon replace the sun over and over again, working out exactly how I plan to escape.

  They are probably still painting over the cocks at the palace, scrubbing the vaginas out with white spirit, daubing over the tits with pail after pail of new ink. I can almost hear them go at it. A rasping sound of metal on stone, as though the point of a sword might be the only thing powerful enough to defeat obscenity.

  It’s getting louder too. There must be hundreds of the king’s soldiers down there, each tasked with scraping away their own specific section of the wall, so eager to please their eminence with their compliance they don’t dare take a single breath. In fact, the sound is so clear, if I weren’t trapped up here, impossibly high up in this ridiculous tower, I might think the sound was coming from outside.

  I go to the window just to check, peering out as far as I can with the angle it offers me, worried briefly upon seeing nothing that so much solitude might be beginning to affect my brain.

  It’s then that I hear a tap at the door. A tap. A tappity tap. A polite, postman like tap with the knuckle of a curved index finger on the rough wooden face of a meter thick door two miles up into the air.

  Nobody gets past the moat, the crocodiles, the dragons, the oil slicked walls, the spikes, the broken glass, the booby traps, the fire, the jagged edges and the ledge, and nobody taps.

  I’m left with little option. Either I’m going mad or someone really has just got past the moat, killed the crocodiles, tamed the dragons, climbed the oil slicked walls, avoided the spikes, rounded the broken glass, outsmarted the booby traps, jumped the fire, tiptoed around the jagged edges, vaulted the ledge and stood outside the door, raised their hand and tapped politely.

  “Who is it?” I ask.

  “Penny?”

  A voice! A man! A manly voice! My heart leaps into my mouth. It can’t be, it’s impossible, surely not.

  “I’ve come to rescue you”, he says. “I’m sorry I took so long.”

  I don’t know what to say. It’s too impossible for me to comprehend it. “But the moat, the crocodiles-” I begin.

  “Stand away from the door”, he says commandingly.

  I stand as far away from the door as I can, perched up on the window ledge, waiting anxiously to see my prince.

  There is the briefest of pauses before an almighty crunch of wood sends the door exploding into the room. It comes to rest, hanging on it’s hinges like a huge leaf trying its best to weather a storm, while sawdust and sunlight momentarily obscure his form.

  I jump to my feet and prepare myself, while little by little he comes into focus. Strong legs, thick torso, arms like tree trunks and Alice’s face? What the fuck?

  “You’re late”, she says.

  I rub my eyes.

  “Your alarm”, she says.

  I still don’t get it.

  “Work.” she says, as though it’s obvious. “You need to be there like, now.”

  Fuck, shit, dream prince, Alice, work. I need to work. The words come to me as my brain shakes away a subpar six hours of sleep and forces my body into action. I practically leap out of the makeshift bed Alice has made up for me on the floor of her room, something I have vague memories of her doing last night, and move from one side of the room to the other in unorganized panic.

  “I’m going to be late”, I say. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “You were drooling”, Alice says. “Making funny noises.” Her eyes go narrow. “What were you dreaming about?”

  “Nothing”, I lie.

  A second away from seeing my prince and the real world comes crashing down around me like a demolition ball through a sexy house. That’s typical of my luck.

  “I’ve got to go”, I say.

  “Call in sick”, Alice offers, as though the evident solution to my problem.

  I don’t even bother responding to her while I pull my work clothes out of my overnight bag, which I must have had the presence of mind to collect from my car before coming here, and move quickly to get them on me.

  “You going to call him then?” Alice says languidly, one arm hanging over the side of the bed to touch the floor with the tips of her fingers.

  “I’m not going to call in sick”, I remonstrate.

  “Not your disgusting boss”, Alice says. “Your Prince Valiant. You know, if you didn’t make that story up.”

  The memory comes rushing back to me. My treasure hunter and the map to his treasure. I pat my pockets, search my bag, check my other clothes in panic. I can’t find it.

  “Pens”, Alice says lazily.

  I dig my art materials bag out of my purse, my stomach turning over anxiously, and I’m more relieved then I can express when I find it safely stored there.

  “It’s here”, I say excitedly.

  “Go”, Alice orders me. “And then tell me when you’re meeting up with Channing Tatum, I want to know if he’s real or not.”

  I drop the number back into my sharpie bag, drop that bag into my purse, take one look at myself in the mirror, kiss Alice on the forehead and leave. I get half way down the stairs before I have to go back to check under the bed, inside the covers for the pillows, around the bedside cabinet and anywhere else I can’t avoid leaving alone. Finally, I check three times that the number is where it should be.

  “You want me to call them?” Alice says. “To say you’re on your way.”

  I shake my head. “I’ve got to go”, I say, already half way out of the door again, desperate to leave now before I have to return again.
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  On the stairs, I count a fibonacci number for each step, stopping briefly on eight to right a picture frame that hangs wonkily above the banister rail, before rushing to the bottom and out of the front door. I hastily shut it, check it’s locked three times and walk-run to where I’ve parked my car.

  Chapter Six

  My head hurts, my throat is sore, I haven't showered, I haven’t slept anywhere near enough and the last thing I want to do is stand on my feet for eight hours up-selling shit comic books to naive teenagers. My working environment is not laid back, largely because my boss has control issues. He doesn’t trust me to do anything without breathing down my neck like an overweight vulture waiting to pick at the bleached bones of a long dead animal when everyone else has already had their fill. That’s what it feels like to be worn down by someone who feels inadequate and inferior to everyone else.

  I’m at my car in less than ten minutes, which leaves me about fifteen to get across Brooklyn, find a suitable parking space, check the car is locked and get behind the till before the customers start piling in. Two miracles in less than twenty four hours might be pushing it slightly.

  I check the mirrors, the seat, the dials and counters, set the clock, tune the radio, and check out the ghost like reflection staring back at me from the rear view mirror before taking a deep breath and starting the car. I feel like a casualty of war, rising up from the battlefield only to face death again in a different place. A normal, healthy human being that’s just been bitten by a zombie and is pretending for as long as she can that it hasn’t happened and she’s still okay, knowing that at some point she’s going to turn.

  My stomach growls at the thought, reminding me I haven’t had any breakfast.

  I’m never drinking again.

  Alright, I guess there’s no need to be that extreme. I’m never drinking before work again.

  Traffic is ridiculously heavy for this time of the morning on a Saturday, and I find myself unable to get out of second gear until I’m clear of Alice’s neighborhood and up into East New York.

  When it isn’t other cars halting my progress, it’s traffic lights, construction work, an elderly woman at a zebra crossing, cyclists weaving all over the road, or any one of a number of other impossible to make up obstructions. I can’t help but feel like I’m playing Grand Theft Auto but without the immunity to run through them all.

  Half way along Linden Boulevard my time officially runs out and I’m still a good twenty minutes from work, which, you know, would probably still be fine, if there wasn’t steam rising rapidly from the hood of my car.

  For as long as I can I ignore it, I continue to drive, I look elsewhere, I pretend the gauge isn’t running red and I repeat equations back to myself in the hope it’ll go away. It doesn’t go away. The steam continues to spread, the gauge continues to rise, the panic seeps deeper into my body until eventually, as though my car is having some kind of nervous breakdown, it splutters, coughs and comes to a pathetic halt right in the middle of the road, the engine whining out like the death knell of a prize horse culled in its prime.

  No, my car couldn’t possibly make the simple journey across Brooklyn in fifteen minutes, that would be absolutely ridiculous. Of course it makes sense that it would have to turn that simple journey into an obstacle course of the most advanced and challenging level, extend the duration and then collapse only half way through completing it with a seizure, in the middle of the road, with a hundred people staring at me like a rare museum exhibit nobody can believe exists.

  I can’t think for the sound of horns blaring from cars trapped in an ever growing line behind me, and I have absolutely no idea what the hell to do. What do I know about cars? There are dials and counters and lights and levers but when they don’t work as they should, like right now, I obviously have no idea how to fix them. They could be stickers for as much good as they are doing me right now.

  Steam continues to rise from the front of the car, a cacophony of horns refuses to temper its march, and then to add insult to injury as though I really need it right now, someone draws alongside the car and starts to bang angrily with a closed first on my firmly shut driver’s side window.

  Can’t they see both car and driver are having a nervous breakdown? I mean seriously, are people that insensitive?

  “Lady”, the voice says muffled by the glass of the window I refuse to open. “Lady, you’ve got to move your car.”

  This is the last thing I need right now. Hungover, later by the minute for work, and half of the state of New York screaming at me to get out of the way.

  “Lady”, the voice says again, “the car, come on.”

  I feel like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, ready to shoot my way out of here and on to work, except I can’t even work out how to take my hands off the steering wheel and get out of the car.

  When my cell phone rings, I can’t help but scream so loudly the man outside backs away from the car, both hands up in the air passively.

  “I’m calling the police”, I hear him say before disappearing into a crowd of rubberneckers, gathered on the sidewalk to see what’s going on.

  I must look like a monster rising from the deep as I finally prize my hands from the wheel and gather myself together enough to open the car door and begin to face what’s going on.

  Unwashed hair, streams of tears cascading down my face, mouth curled up into a barely concealed snarl, and shaking like an alcoholic struggling through cold turkey, never have I needed rescuing more. But where’s my Prince Valiant to save me now, and, more importantly, would he still love me if he saw me like this?

  There are some people that make getting out of cars look like an olympic sport, others who do it as naturally as walking, and then there’s me, who doesn’t so much step out of the car as ooze out and then manage to get her work skirt caught in some otherwise innocuous piece of metal, tearing a huge streak up the side. Honestly, I have never seen that piece of metal before today and couldn’t even guess what use it might have.

  The upshot is this: In my haste to get out of the car, cell phone in one hand with every intention to answer it, I trip, spill, slip or fall, with as much grace as shit falling out of a sheep’s bum, rip my skirt on something that shouldn’t exist in the first place and land with my hands out to the ground and my ass in the air, thus smashing the screen on my cell phone into smithereens and flashing everyone who happens to be watching a cracking view of my panties, all in one incredibly pathetic motion.

  When I finally gather myself together, crawling a large part of the way to the edge of the sidewalk and gulping heavily, like I might have just escaped the remains of a burning building, a dark shadow begins to loom over me.

  “Miss”, an authoritative voice calls down to me. “Do you need me to call someone for you?”

  Chapter Seven

  With torn skirt held together by safety pins and grease stains all over my hands and face, I make my way through the Saturday morning crowds as quickly as I can, trying my best to appear normal, despite feeling utterly and overwhelmingly pathetic. If I wasn’t already over an hour late, and desperate to get to work to explain the reason for it, I could just as easily collapse to the ground here in a wailing mess of tears and desperation.

  I rationalize this behavior by telling myself that as long as I get to work, Francis will understand.

  Diagnosed with acute engine seizure, my car is currently being loaded onto the back of a tow truck, and will be taken to what I expect is the most expensive garage in the country for emergency repairs. I’ll tell him I had an accident, that I was unavoidably detained, and that despite everything else that’s happened to me this morning, I’ve never lost sight of the most important thing: Getting to work as soon as I can.

  If Francis were a man with more imagination and a lot less cynicism, I might be able to invent a story about being caught in some kind of police chase and then being run off the road by the baddies in the lead car, and even if he knew it weren’t true he might be entertai
ned enough by the telling of it to be a bit more lenient for me being late, but Francis is not that man, and despite being surrounded by comic books in which extraordinary things happen, I think the only extraordinary thing that’s even happened to him is that somehow he managed to convince someone to marry him.

  I turn onto Falcon Drive already out of breath. There is a sweat building up on the back of my neck that’s turning cold against my skin, and I can’t work out whether it’s just the excess alcohol making it’s way out of my body or because I’m literally terrified at what Francis is going to say when I finally arrive, in the state I’m about to arrive in.

  The time for changing my mind has passed. The time for going the way my car has, on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance, a pair of sexy medics attending to my every need, not even a passing thought now, if it ever even was. To be honest, if anyone was going to be called to attend to me, or the part of me that was left after crawling pitifully like a scuttling cockroach from what the mechanic took great pleasure in reminding me was an avoidable mess, it would have been men in the wrong kind of white coats.

  The shop has a full glass windowed front, stencilled with the kind of cut out sticker decorations that large comic book companies provide in exchange for the constant advertising, and it’s through the flowing red cape of Superman that I see him, even more red faced that I expect, eyes narrowed and directed at me like Cyclops’s laser sight, clearly about to explode.

  I gulp, something I never thought anyone actually ever did in real life, flatten down the front of my skirt, which does nothing to alter my appearance apart from transfer some of the grease stains that I still have on my palms into the dark fabric, and then prepare myself as best as I can for the slaughter.

  The tinkle of the bell above the shop door signals my arrival with a low, dribbling sound that perfectly represents my confidence. Behind the desk, his Ramones T-shirt one size too small to fit him well, Francis looks like the boss from a forgotten 80s video game. As is usual at this time on a Saturday, there are several teenagers flicking through comics they will never buy.