“What do you feel like doing now?” she asked, still lying on her back as I perched on the sill.
“I'd like to run around naked with you in the rain and then fuck in the flowers.”
“They'd be muddy.”
“That would make it better.”
She smiled, considering this. “I'd be scared of the thunder and lightning.”
“You wouldn't have to worry. I've got a lightning rod, and I'd ground you.”
“Grandma would see us and tell.”
“Yeah, the old bitch. Maybe we could drug her.”
“What else can we do?” she said, turning over on her belly and resting on her elbows, forearms flat under her so that her nipples grazed back and forth across them.
“Let's go up in the attic,” I said.
“The attic?”
“Sure. Remember how we used to hide up there when it rained? You can hear the rain pounding right over your head, and it's all warm and dark up there, and there's all kinds of musty old smells.”
“Okay,” she said, swinging around and sitting on the edge of the bed. “Think we should get dressed?”
“What for? Nobody's going to come up there.”
“Just for the fun of it. We could dress up like Tarzan and Jane.”
“Okay, but what can we wear?” I got up and she did too, melting against me.
“What did they have on in your dream?”
“Oh, some kind of leopard skin stuff. You don't have anything like that, do you?”
“I don't think so. Let's go see.” We went into her room and started rummaging through the drawers.
“Here's something,” I said, taking out a handful of her old hair ribbons. I found a long one, an inch wide-yellow, with black polka dots. I tied it around her hips, looping over one strand so it dangled down amid her fuzzy bush.
“There,” I said. “Now you've got to be decent on top too.” I picked out a very narrow black ribbon and turned Sandy around so she faced the mirror. I placed the ribbon right below her nipples, on the smooth, moist, pink flesh of her conical aureoles and tied it very tightly in the back so that it squeezed the lower part of her breasts and forced out even further the strawberry-colored spikes of her nipples.
Flushed at the picture she made in the mirror, Sandy turned on me and took a long scarlet ribbon, moving behind me. She held up my balls with one hand and put the ribbon under them like a sling and drew it around behind me. Folding the ribbon over itself once, she tightened it so that my testicles were pushed upward and outward. Then she moved around in front of me and tied the ends in an elaborate bow around my erected penis, an inch below the head.
“There,” she said, patting her handiwork.
“Merry Christmas,” I said, brushing up against her.
“Come on,” she said, taking my hand, “let's go up in the attic.”
Our bodies bedecked, we tiptoed down the hallway to the attic door and creaked up the worn, withered stairs. The heavy rain pounding on the uninsulated roof had cooled the air up there considerably. The place was a mess of old mementos that brought back-through our sensitive noses first- the whole atmosphere of our nearly forgotten childhood.
Toys, dolls, picturebooks, pillows. Old shoes, old clothes, yellowing comic books and warping, forgotten hit records. A book of snapshots: Sandy on a bear rug with an ass poking up that hardly hinted at the fullness of the one I was caressing and poking a finger into now; me in a short-pants Fauntleroy outfit looking very sophisticated and distinguished save for the gap where my two front teeth should have been; the two of us together, Sandy smiling gleefully into the camera and me smiling adoringly up at her.
The grey light from either end of the attic was dim, but it was enough to see by, and enough to smell by as we moved from trunk to trunk, digging up and fondling the most trivial and worthless objects, each of which was charged with a glowing aura of remembered, or imagined, joy.
One of the trunks was locked, but I pried off the lock with a screwdriver. None of our things were in it. Everything was our mother's, and bore the stamp of her college days-pennants, textbooks, dried-up flowers, love letters. Sandy wanted to read them but I told her it was none of our business. I was about to close the trunk when out of curiosity I took a large, unmarked, sealed envelope from the back. I opened it, found another, slightly smaller envelope, which I opened. It contained a stack of about a dozen eight-by-ten color photos of our mother in the nude, taken when she was perhaps eighteen or nineteen. I blushed crimson with embarrassment and excitement as I looked at them. She was posed at every angle, in all kinds of light, indoors and out. Her body was ravishing, and her face was exquisite. She resembled Sandy a good deal, although she didn't have my sister's catlike sensuality-her mouth wasn't quite as heavy and pouting, her breasts weren't quite as full, her hips were a little slimmer-but I couldn't remember ever having seen a more gorgeous woman.
“My God, she's beautiful,” I said, spreading out the pictures and darting my eyes from one to the other. I couldn't get enough of her. I waited for Sandy to say something and when she didn't I looked to my side. She had disappeared, had walked away and stood with her back to me and her face in her hands. I sprang up to her and encircled her from behind with my arms.
“Sandy, what's the matter?”
“Nothing,” she sobbed. I took her by the shoulders and turned her around with a good deal of difficulty. She still hid her face in her hands. I tried to pull them away as gently and as firmly as I could, but she resisted.
“No! Don't look at me! I'm ugly. She's been telling me that all my life and letting me know it every way she could and now I know it's true. Go look at her! She's beautiful! Let me alone!”
“Sandy, please…”
“Everything we've done today I know you'd have rather done with her, so let…”
“Oh, Jesus, are you wrong!” I pulled her hands away from her face roughly and looked with anger, pain and longing into her big, helpless, tear-stained blue eyes. “This is the only happy day I've had in my life since they busted us up. If you don't believe me I'll drown. Don't look away Sandy, look at me. You're beautiful. I worship you! Everything…” I licked the tears from around her eyes. “I love everything about you, even your tears taste good.” She cracked a smile. “You have the most beautiful face and hair and shoulders and tits and legs and cunt and feet and ass and eyes and everything. She doesn't compare to you. She's cold and skinny and flat-chested and you can't even tell what's behind her eyes. Besides,” I added, “she's too old for me.”
This got a quick laugh and a longer, trusting smile and she bounced back from vain, temperamental fishing-for-compliments female to sexy, friendly, purring feline. She kissed my salty mouth and squeezed her tits against my chest.
“I'm sorry, Terry. I guess all this kid stuff just piled up in me. You must think I'm a jerk.”
“I know how she treated you. She was jealous because we were so close.”
“You'd think I was the kid sister and you the big brother.”
“I grew up today.”
“Even your voice is getting deeper.”
“I guess my hormones got a workout.”
“I love the way your voice is getting, Terry. Read something to me.”
“What?”
“I don't know. Something spooky and scary. To go with the weather.”
I rummaged through a stack of books and found an old edition of Poe. I looked around for Sandy and couldn't find her.
“Where are you?”
“Over here,” she called from the other end of the attic. “In the playpen.”
I walked over toward the sound of her voice and saw her lying in our old playpen, posing on her side like a baby doll, sucking her thumb. Her unbabylike breasts precariously bulged from the confines of the tight black ribbon while the ribbon around her hips had fallen away from the open, inviting pink folds of her fuzz-rimmed sex.
“What are you doing in there?”