And Aaron nodded. He was already climbing her body, hovering over her, holding himself up with his hands spread beside her shoulders. He jabbed with his hips and she shushed him gently.
‘Softly now. Slowly. Do you know what a virgin means?’
He didn’t, but he knew how to be gentle when she told him to. He lowered his hips till he was kneeling with his penis pressed against the little wet slit. She reached down and dipped her fingers into herself and spread the juices over the tip of his penis, holding the outer lips open and lifting her hips so that the end of his penis butted up against the tight warm wetness between her legs.
It was impossible. His penis would never fit in there. After several attempts, Aaron felt his cheeks blazing red and he rolled off her and onto his back. His eyes were damp and he rubbed at them crossly with his forearm.
Katherine rolled towards him, pressed her naked body against his flesh and whispered in his ear. ‘A virgin means I have a little flap of skin that must be broken before you can get your penis inside. It is going to hurt me a bit. Everyone says it is “exquisite” when you get over the pain and there’s a man’s penis inside you.’
A man. Aaron felt himself rising to her good opinion of him.
‘“Exquisite”. Isn’t that a lovely word? That’s what I want. I want you to be my first exquisite man, because I love you more than I love anything.’
She climbed on top of him then and eased herself into position. There was so much of her wetness now that he slipped away, across the slickness of her lips. Even this kind of rubbing on the outside was almost too much for him. He wanted to be inside her more than he could have imagined possible.
He saw her holding her breath and scrunching up her eyes and suddenly she was on him and slipping down around him, a gorgeous pained whimper and he was ashamed that inflicting pain on her also increased his excitement. He was a monster. He felt himself giving in to his own capacity for damage and just for a moment he wanted to cause her pain. He wanted to tear that little flap of skin she talked about. To hear her whimper again.
Aaron lifted his hips to meet her and grabbed roughly at her thighs. She made a little sharp noise in the back of her throat and it was done. He felt the tightness slip up over the length of his penis. He was inside her. Inside the body of his sister.
They stayed like that, a perfect fit, one inside the other like Babushka dolls. He knew in that moment that this was where he belonged. He wanted to stay here like this forever.
He had found his home and there would never be another moment as perfect.
She opened her eyes and stared down into his. Her pupils were large with her excitement. She began to rock there, lifting, settling down and the surge of lust was so overwhelming that it was only a matter of five thrusts before he felt the wave crashing over him. He lifted her hips off his and held her above him as his penis shuddered and began to pump out its second gush of seed. They both stared down at the place where the pearly drips arced up and into the new thatch of her darkening hair. When the shuddering was over she lay beside him and parted her thighs and they both looked in awed silence at his juices mingling with her own on the outside of her blood-reddened lips.
Aaron felt like he would never again see anything so completely holy; he had never felt this much devotion in prayer. He bent towards her torn skin and kissed the tender lips and Katherine smiled and wiped the mix of blood and sperm and her own juices from his face. When his lips were clean she kissed him deeply, a curl of tongue, an exchange of spit.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘no one can ever part us.’
‘Blood brothers,’ he said.
And she shook her head. ‘You can’t call me your brother anymore. I am a woman now. I am not your Remus, I am not even your sister now. You know, now I have become your wife.’
Aaron nodded, and the kiss he gave her was a vow; and
when they were forced to pull away from the kiss so that they could breathe once more, their faces were wet with tears. Tears for the death of their brotherly pact. Tears for the birth of a new kind of love.
The bed was warm near Katherine’s body. He slid in between the sheets and inched over next to her. He still found her arousing. The smell of her skin, her hair. Such a familiar aroma, sometimes he mistook the smell of her sweat on a shirt for his own. This was the problem, he supposed. The curse of familiarity. Despite his desire for her it seemed, on the rare occasions when they did make love, that he was reliving a beautiful memory. He struggled to feel the immediacy of the act and, since his last birthday, he had begun to lose his ability to consummate at all.
Katherine assured him that this happens to every man as he trudges into middle age. She had turned forty herself a few years ago and Aaron realised that she was speaking about herself as much as him. At one time her orgasms would rack her body, arching her off the bed as if a giant hook had fallen from the sky. Her teeth would clench, her toes would curl and her hands would make fists around the sheets, tearing them out of the neat hospital corners Aaron had made.
The pulsing of her cunt was the most amazing sign of her shattering delight. He used to feel the clench, the tug of her muscles around his penis or his fingers or his tongue and it would be as if the palpitations might completely swallow
that part of him. It put him in mind of astrological events, of a distant universe caught in the tractor beam of a black star, of planets wheeling around to their own death.
Perhaps it was only these last three years, perhaps it was already five or six; but he thought the force of her orgasms had been diminishing. The dark star almost spent. His own planetary trajectory remained constant in this less volatile environment. He had tested his theory with a finger the last time he felt her orgasm, the gentle palpitations. More like a sleepy infant sucking without intent.
Aaron had pressed his cold stomach onto her warm hip, draped one arm around her and let his fingers rest on the vaguely raised nub of her nipple. He looked up to where the Rubens print hung above them and wondered if now, after all these years, they had finally returned to their original roles suckling at the teat of life together: twinned once more in the manner of a brother and sister.
Aaron was asleep when Katherine returned from her run. He slept away the mornings. Sometimes she would open the door a fraction and wait, damp with sweat, her hair a tangled mess the way she knew he liked it. Aaron disliked the way she combed her hair back for work, clipping it coyly into a chignon at the nape of her neck. He liked her best as she was at this time of day with her cheeks flushed from running, pinched red by the cold morning air. Sometimes, in past years, he would wake suddenly and see her at what he said
was her most radiant. She remembered him reaching for her, the gorgeous eyes heavy-lidded, still weighed down by sleep. And she would risk missing her bus to go to him, their need for each other suddenly reignited.
She waited, hoping, but he did not stir. Katherine sighed. She closed the door with a gentle click and crossed the corridor to the bathroom.
Her morning runs were the one true hour of joy in her life. After her shower she would eat a light breakfast, then drag herself to the library where she would spend the day shelving and shushing and listening to the pointless prattle of the other librarians.
It seemed that everyone else in the world found their neighbours endlessly fascinating. Apparently the distance of a swimming pool from a garden fence was newsworthy, so too a reality TV show about amateur cooks. There were so many of them these days that she could never really tell which show they were speaking about. Yesterday there had been a seemingly endless conversation about the colour of the bathroom cabinet in some television renovation. Would avocado really look good next to aubergine? They might as well have been speaking about a fruit bowl.
Katherine remembered, for a moment, the bedrooms of her and Aaron’s childhood. The light green paint; how they both fought to make sure their rooms were painted the same colour. She remembered the wall that separated their rooms, the sound of Aaron’s fingernails scratching at the barrier that
separated them. The way she would press her breasts against the wall, just as she’d told him she would. The days when they had not yet touched.
She remembered this time with a little thrill of desire. The impossible idea of Aaron’s body pressed against her own. Some nights, she thought she would ignite with the heat of her desire. She would set the sheets on fire and the lime paint would crackle off the wall and if the wall charred between them and disintegrated their bodies would fuse together as if they had been born conjoined, twins that could never be separated.
Katherine dipped her head under the steamy heat of the shower. Aaron always asked her to use the fan, he worried about mould. But she liked the foggy damp that clouded the mirror, softening the lines and creases that had begun to appear. She was getting old. She could see it in her skin. No matter what creams or lotions she used, she could not banish the dry patches, the dark liver spots that had begun to spread on the backs of her hands. The cluster of moles that she had had on her neck since childhood now spread darker and more bulbous, and she wore heavy necklaces with her work clothes to hide behind.
No wonder Aaron spent his mornings asleep in bed, it spared him the clear light of reality. In the evening, when they crossed paths briefly before sleep claimed her, there were things to hide behind. Soft lighting, wine, the crocheted throw rug she pulled over her lap and up to her thickening waist. He sat beside her on the couch. They hugged, but he
did not really look at her. They never fought; they still found things to laugh about, they agreed on movies, literature, art. And yet she felt, as she had before, a growing distance from her brother. Her lover, her husband.
The bathroom door opened so suddenly that Katherine fumbled the soap. It slipped off the rack and bounced off her toes to partially cover the plug hole. Water began to swish over her feet and rise to her ankles.
Katherine felt her heart beat faster. She looked out through the fogged shower curtain and saw the shadow of his naked body towering in the doorway. Aaron was so tall and impressive; more beautiful than any other man she had ever seen. Even after thirty years masquerading as husband and wife she could still catch a glimpse of him and find her breath stolen from her.
‘Hi darl,’ his sleepy voice. A radio voice, she always thought, deep and genuinely warm. ‘Just need to use the loo.’
She listened to the tinkling sound as he stood, leaning with one hand against the wall. She watched the sleepy sway of him, lust and tenderness rising inside her. In their first weeks in the apartment he would wake early like this, to find her in the shower.
She remembered one moment, years ago, with perfect clarity. The sliding back of the shower curtain—a dark blue at the time, with little raised bubbles in the plastic—and Aaron grinning, presenting his nakedness to her like a gift. Her reflex movement as she knelt under the play of water, unable
to control her actions, pushing forward to take his penis in her mouth. Thirsty for him then, parched, as if the only thing that could restore her was the slippery jet of semen that he would eventually pump into her throat. She remembered how he tried to lift her to her feet, frightened, perhaps, that she would drown, wanting to kiss and touch her in return, and how she clung to him, pushing his hands away, pulling his hips closer, happy to feel breathless under the spray, desperate to feel him come into her mouth.
They had been sexual for many years, but the sudden removal of restrictions had opened up a world of play that they had never known before. They made love in the shower, on the couch, on the bathroom floor. He bent her over the kitchen bench when they were making dinner together, lifted her up among the chopped garlic on the counter top. One time he was inspired to put a Lebanese cucumber inside her and eat the whole thing, crunching the crisp flesh till his lips touched her slick wetness. Even then she felt him suck at the vegetable and devour it inch by gradual inch, salty and warm from inside her body, his shameless abandon making her juices flow all the more freely.
They experimented with every possible implement; she came to like the feel of a wooden spoon inside her, the crack of an egg on her pubic bone, the taste of honey on his penis. The bedroom they found especially erotic, playing at husbands and wives under the covers as they once had played doctors and nurses.
Aaron finished and shook off the drops, and she saw his outline through the curtain as he turned to face her. She wanted suddenly for him to come towards her, to pull back the shower curtain and reach for her. Her mouth was dry, the same thirst now as that very first week of freedom. She would swallow him if he would only take a few steps forward, she would grab at his hips and not let him go until she had drunk her fill. She watched as the shadow of him hovered just beyond her reach.
‘Do you need me to pick anything up this afternoon?’
The sudden flatness of her desire dissipating. ‘We need coffee.’
‘Okay. I’ll stop at The Boys.’
‘And anchovies?’
‘And the deli.’
She let the water cascade over her hair. She brought her hands up to her face and wiped the lather from her eyes. When she opened them again the shadow of her brother had disappeared, a creeping cold breeze tickling in from the door he had left ajar.
Katherine leaned against the tiles and closed her eyes tightly. She put her hand between her legs and pressed her fingers onto her clitoris. She imagined Aaron naked, still only vaguely awake, in their bed, his knees pulled up to touch the place where her body heat was still a memory on the sheets.
She slipped her fingers inside herself, remembering a time when he would have been here, eager to do this with
his own hand. The way he would kneel under the spill of water, gazing up at her with his startling blue eyes. She imagined that instead of asking about coffee and anchovies he had stepped over to the shower and pressed the plastic sheet to her breasts. His mouth finding hers, the gorgeous suffocation of plastic forced between her teeth by the press of his tongue, his penis hard, tenting the curtain towards her, his hand reaching around and his fingers burying themselves inside her.