by Amanda Wals
* *
Over the next few weeks, I found myself thinking about Amy more and more often. I was pretty torn about it. I mean, we had always cared about each other, even though we didn't spend much time together anymore. But what I was feeling seemed like it was different. I noticed her shape a lot more, and the graceful way that she moved through the house, how her hips swayed when she walked. She was truly a stunning creature. Her long wavy black hair hung past her shoulders and when she had it down, it framed her face beautifully. She had piercing blue eyes, while mine were more of a light brown. She had a high cheekbones and full lips, as well as the most graceful neck I thought I may have ever seen. I found her neck incredibly sexy and couldn't quite explain why. Something about the curve of it. She had a slim, athletic build with average sized breasts that perfectly fit her frame and a beautiful, round ass. I admired her beauty from afar, as stealthily as I could.
I continuously told myself that I was admiring her form from an artist perspective and that it was a natural, understandable attraction. She had, after all, been the muse for the greatest drawing I had ever put to paper. But I also kept thinking I was wrong for finding her sexy. Especially when I found myself contemplating her neck, breasts, thighs, hell... any part of her really. She had started creeping into my fantasies when I would masturbate, which disturbed me a good deal if I allowed myself to think about it. I felt like I should not be allowing myself to indulge these kinds of thoughts. She was my sister, for Christ's sake. But she would continue to sneak into them, regardless of our relation.
I once found myself in her bedroom, when no one was home. I stood in the doorway and smelled the air, which smelled faintly of her. I could catch hints of the perfume that she preferred, one of those pleasantly mild ones that claimed to smell like rain. I walked over to her bed and smelled her pillow, which gave me a stronger sense of the perfume as well as her natural smell. I felt a twitch in my cock as I took a second and third deep inhale of it. That snapped me back to reality enough to exit the room, pondering what the hell my problem was.
Late one Saturday night after work, I was upstairs in my room painting. Amy was out with some friends and our parents were off on some couples retreat. Taking advantage of having the house to myself, I had the stereo blasting an old Cure album loud enough to shake the room. This pleased me a good deal, and I would normally have been making serious progress with the canvas, but it just wasn't coming together tonight. I stared at the gray and blue images in annoyance for a few minutes, trying to figure out how to coax what I wanted from it. It just wasn't happening. I tossed my brush at the water glass in frustration and cursed to myself. Crouching to the ground, I snatched up a tube of black paint and rocked on my heels, glaring at the canvas. I had been wrestling with this same idea for a week now, and restarted multiple times. It was starting to outright piss me off.
"Fuck it." I muttered and squirted a big line of the black paint on the canvas. I grabbed a three inch brush and went to work blacking out the whole thing. I was still blacking out the canvas when the album finished playing and I kept painting in silence for a while when I heard a knock at my doorway.
Slightly startled, I glanced over my shoulder to see Amy in a green blouse and black skirt, leaning against the doorway, holding herself in tears. I dropped my brush on the drop cloth and scurried over to her.
"What's wrong, Amanda?!" I hadn't called her by her proper name in years, and had no idea why I did now.
She hugged me tightly around the waist, and I hugged her back, forgetting I had paint all over my forearms. Jesus, she smelled good. What a time to have that thought. Flashing back briefly on my visit to her bedroom, I was mildly angry with myself.
"That fucking asshole! He slept with Katie!" she cried into my shoulder. "How could he do that?"
"Jeff?" I asked, knowing it was a stupid question as soon as it escaped my lips. She nodded as she continued bawling into my shirt. I felt the dampness of her tears on my chest and was filled with rage. It was crushing me to see her hurting. "Goddamn it, that asshole."
"I just can't believe he did that." she sobbed. "And that whore had pictures of it. She showed them to everyone."
"I'm so sorry, Amy." I kept holding her, wanting to make it better somehow. "It'll be okay."
"I don't see how," she sniffled. "I'm through with him."
"I should fucking hope so!"
I happened to glance down at her blouse and saw black paint smudges all over the back and sides of it, matching my hands.
"Oh shit, Amy! I fucked up your shirt, I'm sorry!" I exclaimed.
She looked down at her shirt, turning it around on her small frame and started chuckling through her tears. "I don't care. It doesn't matter."
There was a pause before she sniffed and hugged me again. "I'm gonna go change. But can I.. would it be okay for me to come back after?"
"Sure, sis. That's fine." I thought a second, then added. "It's gonna smell bad in here for a bit, though. Just warning you. I'm about to use the paint thinner."
"I don't mind." she sadly smiled before she turned and walked out of the room.
I turned on the big fan I kept in the corner and opened the window before breaking out the paint thinner. Working as fast as I could, I cleaned up the brushes and cleaned my hands. I used as little paint thinner as I could and capped the bottle immediately, trying to keep the fumes to a minimum. I had finished cleaning and was coming back from scrubbing my hands with soap trying to kill the smell when she returned. She was clad in my Einsturzende Neubauten shirt and a pair of boxers. Her eyes were still rimmed with tears, but she'd cleaned up her mascara and looked less like an angry raccoon now. Seeing her in the shirt reminded me of the night I'd drawn her sleeping portrait. I felt a strange tightening in my chest at the memory, but shrugged it away.
She tossed the green blouse at me as she flopped on my bed. "You're right, that one's ruined. Use it for a paint rag or something."
"Sorry about that," I genuinely felt guilty.
"I don't care, really. It's not a big deal." She laid back on my bed and put her head on my pillow. The way my t-shirt lay against her, hugging her frame and the way her long, slender legs poked out from beneath it.. it was sexy. She was sexy. And seemed effortless about it. "What are you staring at?"
"What?" I asked, snapping back into focus.
"What are you staring at?" she repeated, glancing down at herself.
"That's my shirt, thief." I replied, feeling like an asshole for ogling her. Even more so for having been caught.
She laughed a little, and said "Oh yeah, it's comfy."
Amy kept staring down at the primitive figure on the front of the shirt for a few more moments, and suddenly trembled a bit. "Adam?"
"Yeah?"
"If you've got that paint off.. I could really use another hug." Tears started up again.
I sat on the edge of the bed and gave her a big, long hug as she cried into my shoulder. I wasn't a violent guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I was really starting to think that a few minutes alone with Jeff and a brick would truly help me feel better about the world.
She clung to me for a few minutes, until she seemed to get it out of her system. She moved from sobbing to just sniffling. I kept quietly reassuring her, until I eventually just shut up and held her. After a while, she released her death grip on me. Her eyes fell on the canvas I had been working on.
"So.." she cleared her throat and wiped at her eyes with the back of a hand, "what's with the painting?"
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"Why are you painting over it?" She motioned to the mostly blacked out rectangle.
"It wasn't working out like I hoped. I've been fighting with it for a while and finally decided to scrap it." I glanced back at the thing, remembering my irritation with it.
"That's a shame." she said, "it's kind of nice."
"Ah... the true measure of successful art. When your sister looks at your efforts and deems it 'kind of nice'" I laughed
.
"Shut up, jackass." she joined me in laughing. "You know what I meant."
She stood and started flipping through a stack of canvasses I had leaning against a wall. As she went through them she started giving her opinions about different ones. I was kind of surprised, because she'd never shown much interest in my stuff, and she made some good observations. But I didn't say anything because I was glad to see her distracted from dickhead. We chatted for several hours about artwork, music, films, her upcoming trip to Rome, pretty much anything except what had her upset to begin with. Several times her voice would crack and her eyes would well up, but I would swiftly move to distract her with something else. It worked most of the time. I was surprised to discover she wasn't as vapid as I'd always assumed my little sister had become when we were in high school. While I'd gotten heavily into music and skateboarding, Amy had become a cheerleader and been involved in all sorts of student activities. We'd just grown apart and I came to perceive her as a stereotype. What an asshole I was, I thought with a small smile.
There eventually came a point where I was midway through a speech about my fondness for Ichikawa's Fires On The Plain when I realized she had fallen asleep. Which, admittedly, was pretty much what I expected to happen when I started rambling about black and white Japanese films to anyone. I was well aware that I was far too much of a film nerd for my own good sometimes. But she had fallen asleep in my bed, damn it. I sighed, turned off the bedroom light and slumped in my office chair, resigned to sleeping at my desk for the night. But I slumped perhaps a little louder than I planned.
"What are you doing?" she groggily asked from the bed.
"Go back to sleep" I replied quietly, "it's fine."
"Bullshit." she mumbled nearly face down on the bed, "come to bed."
"I'm fine, don't sweat it." I put my head down in my folded arms on the desk.
"Don't be ridiculous." she patted the bed.
I didn't know how I felt about this, given my recent fixation on her. But I crawled into bed anyway, to avoid making an argument of it. She gave me a brief, lazy hug and I could feel her bra-less chest press against mine for only a moment. There was a twitch in my pants that I did my level best to ignore. "We used to share a bed all the time when we were little, remember?"
"Yeah, I remember. But that's been like ten years." I replied as I yawned and folded my hands behind my head. She had been quite a bit less shapely in those days, and I had been a lot less aware of my own fondness for the opposite sex. Despite my wariness, we were both asleep within minutes.
In my dream, I was spooning Amy. Her perfect ass pushed up against my groin, my erection rubbing between the cheeks of her ass. I lazily ran my hand along her side and slid it across her ribs in a hug. She puts her hand over mine, holding it between her breasts as she grinds her butt back against me. I can feel her breasts on either side of my wrist, even through the shirt material they are warm and soft. My god, her hair smells amazing. She moans a little as my cock glides along her crack, and I feel like I may blow my load on the spot. I move to slide my hand down her body again, but she holds my hand in place. My fingers slip free and the motion causes me to snap my eyes open.
The fuck are you doing?! my brain screams as I wake up to realize I'm actually spooned up against her in the bed. I fought not to launch from the bed like a rocket, resulting in simply a startled jerk as I moved my pelvis away from hers as swiftly as I could.
"What was that about?" she asks, looking over her shoulder at me with one barely open eye.
"Sorry, I had a nightmare." I exclaimed, trying to restart my heart and praying she hadn't realized that her brother had just been pressing his dick on her ass, asleep or not. I suspected that I looked something like an animal trapped in a hunter's snare, terrified.
"Didn't feel like a nightmare to me." She said, as she gave a long cat like stretch and impishly grinned at me.
"God damn it," I exhaled, wanting to crawl into the crack between the wall and the bed and disappear.
"Oh relax, Adam" she continued, her eyes still laughing at my obvious panic. "It's just human nature. I know you didn't mean anything by it."
"I'm sorry, that was really fucked up of me." I still hadn't fully convinced myself to breathe. "God damn it."
She laughed. And kept laughing.
"Oh!" she gasped "This is gonna be fun."
"What the hell do you me-" I stopped mid-question and was no longer mortified. Panic returned. All of the embarrassed crimson in my face drained to pale white. "Oh no... you wouldn't."
She grinned at me with her most evil grin and sighed, rolling on her back to look up at me playfully, upside down on the bed.
"Yep. Christmas dinner. Thanksgiving at Aunt Linda's. Family reunions. Birthday parties." She had a glint in her eye. "Any time you annoy me, I will just bring up the time we fell asleep in the same bed and you tried to have sex with me in your sleep."
"God damn it." I hung my head. "Move out of the way, I need the space to build up speed when I go out that window."
She laughed merrily. "You are so gonna be my bitch."
Amy let me stew in my personal hell a few moments longer, while she cackled gleefully. Then she put her hand on my arm. I looked up at her and marveled at how amazing she looked with her hair all jumbled and falling in her face from sleeping. "I'm kidding, Adam."
"What?" I looked at her, baffled.
"I'm kidding." she looked serious. "I wouldn't do that. What kind of terrible bitch do you think I am? It was an accident. I get it."
I exhaled a little, not sure I bought it, and still wanting to find that crack between the wall and the bed.
"But, damn, it's funny watching you panic." She beamed at me again. She crawled up to her knees and waddled across the bed to me. She gave me a hug, as I did all I could not to flinch away from her. "Thanks for last night. You really helped me deal."
She gave me a completely sister-like kiss on the cheek and walked out of the room.
"I want my shirt back, damn it!" I called after her. It was all I could come up with to say. How is it that she always gets the better of me? My cheek burned where her lips had touched it and I noticed I could still smell her scent in the room. It was heavenly.
* *
That afternoon I met some friends for lunch at a food court near campus. I was grateful for anything to distract me from thinking about my morning. As I sat munching halfheartedly on something that was sold to me as bourbon chicken and struggled valiantly to taste mediocre, when I spotted Jeff sitting with a couple of friends at a table across the food court.
I should leave this alone, I thought. It's not my business. Amy can deal with her own shit. My mind flashed on her standing in my doorway in tears, looking so destroyed and heartbroken. How I felt so powerless to help her afterwards. That was all it took. That piece of shit needed to hear a speech and I was going to give him one. I was probably about to get my ass kicked, and I knew it. But sometimes, it's worth it, right? Hell if I know. I had never been in a fight in my life. I dropped my fork on the table and walked toward him, feeling the world get smaller with every step. I was just going to yell at him for a minute, tell him how badly he hurt her, but seeing him laughing with his friends just boiled my piss further. Their conversation dropped as I reached the table and Jeff glanced up at me.
"Hey Ad-" he started before I grabbed his head and shoved it into the table with all my might. His face bounced off the table as an asterisk of blood appeared on the table's surface. I barely registered that it had happened. My eyes were unfocused and I was just seeing a blur. I was overwhelmed with rage, not even thinking anymore.
His friends jumped back as I grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head and jerked him upright.
Blood was dripping on his shirt from his nose.
"A piece of advice, you rotted little cunt," I hissed in his ear, "the next time you decide to break a girl's heart by being the complete scumfuck that you are, make sure she's an only child."
He looked up at me with both hands clasped over his bleeding nose. "You broke my nose, you asshole!"
"Really?" I slammed his head into the table again, hearing a satisfying wet crunching sound, and glared at him "If I hear of you going anywhere near Amy again, or hear of you saying one hurtful thing about her, I'll come back and curb stomp your ass. You're lucky I don't rip your fucking dick off right now and feed it to you, shithead."
I jerked him straighter in the chair and stared dead in his eyes with pure rage. He was really pouring blood from his nose now. It came out between his fingers in little crimson streams. He eyes watered unchecked, and his expression, what I could see of it, was total shock and fear.
"Do you understand me? If she gets hurt again by anything even remotely involving you, I will make this look like nothing. I don't care about jail. I don't care about anything that happens after. You will not be around to see it. You got me, fucker?" I was snarling like a caged animal. My mouth was so dry from the adrenaline and anger that I could barely get the words out.
He nodded at me and I could see in his eyes that he believed me. I released him. He leaned forward on table, grabbing a bunch of napkins for the blood streaming down his face. I would have spit on him if I had been able to generate enough spit to do it.
I walked back, trembling, to my table across the now silent food court where my friends, and pretty much everyone else, stared at me in complete disbelief. Hell, I couldn't believe I had done it, either.
"Holy shit! Adam, what the fuck was that?" John asked me, when I got to the table.
"Dickhead cheated on my sister," I replied after taking a big swig of my bottled water, visibly shaken by what I'd just done. A wave of nausea hit me full force and I fought hard not to vomit.
"Damn, man. I've never seen you that mad." He looked at Jeff who was leaving with his friends. There was blood all over the front of Jeff's shirt. "That guy's bigger than you. How did you know you could take him?"
