Mr Locke smiled in a thin, careful way. “I’ve met Ms Flowers. It will be my deep and abiding pleasure to locate her and hand her the keys to her ah, new Scottish castle.”
“Castle?!”
“Yes, ma’am. Parts are in poor repair, but it’s doing well for a fourteenth-century structure. Do you wish to reconsider ceding ownership to your mother?”
CeeCee looked at me. I shrugged.
Cecilie cleared her throat and sat up straight. “No, when you find her, it’s hers. But a castle? Really? Wow. How? Oh, never mind. Weirdness.”
There was a tiny alarm clock tattooed in green on her inner thigh, with thin, coiled black cables running up from it towards. . I drained my whisky and looked out the window again.
The helicopter had left. My stomach didn’t like me. I didn’t like me. I wanted more whiskey, but Cecilie walked me out of the office, hailed a cab and held my tired head to her shoulder for most of the ride home. I had this doomed, horrible premonition about walking back into the house, but she walked me up, under Mom’s ashes, past her door, past the bathroom, and tucked me in to my nest in the library.
“Sleep it off, Graham. You did good. Thanks for being there, big brother.”
The Cecilie I grew up with would never have said that. I slept. I dreamed. Time passed, as it will.
At some point they took me out to get fitted for a tux. I spilled curry and whisky on it at a strange wake. The whole room was full of fawning strangers and distant cousins who reminded me how their names were spelled. None of the respect for the dead you might expect at a funeral, but none of the raucous reminiscence by actual friends and family a real wake would have. I might have made an inappropriate comment or two. At the point when I tried to start fisticuffs with a guy who could have been Jimmy’s larger twin, my sister’s silent partner cut suddenly between us and steered me into a beige alcove of the bland, “pub-style” chain restaurant in which the whole ill-conceived event occurred.
I stared. “Are you bonking my sister?”
“Absolutely. Are you too blotto to be out in public?”
“Unquestionably. How come you never talk? What’s your name?”
“Pauline.”
“Really?”
“Really. I swear on a stack of original Batman comics.”
“All right then, Mr Pauline. How do we get out of this benighted place? Where’s CeeCee?”
“She’s in her car, waiting with Izzy.”
“Whose car? We’re Gryns. Nobody’d give us a licence!”
Pauline cracked a small smile full of sharp-looking teeth. “They assigned you guys a car, a driver and a bodyguard, but even together they wouldn’t be wide enough to stop that ambulant mountain you were insulting. Come back to the house. All your relatives are gone. . and there’s more whiskey.”
“I see why she likes you, Pauline. Common sense and clear priorities.”
“Naw, it’s probably my good manners and small hands. Step this way.”
The driver didn’t speak, but he got us home in eighteen minutes and his limo smelled of fresh cedar.
I stared out the window, which meant watching the reflection of my sister and her double making out while Pauline stared out the other window. The bodyguard’s name was Fidel. He checked the house from top to bottom and gave us his number before departing. Pauline and the girls skipped upstairs.
I headed to the kitchen in search of liquor. I wished for a Chicago whore and a pot of coffee. The bed creaked. I wished for a less active imagination. It was hard to decide between beer and whiskey, so I chose both. After my first two beers and midway through my first triple shot, Pauline came downstairs. I didn’t stare or fall over, but I did choke a little. Pauline wore combat boots, a grin, and more piercings than I was aware one small body could accommodate. It was oddly embarrassing to be staring at the shaved, multiple-pierced pussy lips of a person I had defaulted to treating as male. I redirected my gaze upwards.
“You’re adjusting to the temperature in Abercrombie?”
“No, I’m cold as fuck, but your sister figured this would get your attention.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you come upstairs, I can get under a blanket with a hot-water bottle and you can get your dick sucked. Again.”
I wondered if conversations before my dad died had made more sense, or if that was just an error of memory.
“You’re down here naked to offer me head on Izzy’s behalf?”
“No, Graham, I’m offering my own mouth, which is reasonable skilled and salivating a little bit at the prospect of being wrapped around your big, juicy meat.”
“What if I turn out to have a soft, tiny wiener?”
“Come upstairs. I’ll work on the softness and I’ll show you how I know it’s not tiny.”
“What if I like how stiff your nipples are right now? What if I’d like some of your mouth right here?”
Pauline knelt and crawled towards me. Crew cut. No visible tattoos. More muscular definition than on any body I had previously seen in real life. Tiny, pointy tits pierced by vertical bars and rings placed horizontally. Big brown eyes. I watched those eyes approach. I looked into those eyes as Pauline quietly, deliberately began to massage my balls through my trousers with a strong tongue. When my sister’s no-longer-quite-so-androgynous companion turned, stood and walked upstairs, I followed.
On the second floor, I got to the door of my sister’s bedroom and hesitated.
“Don’t worry, Graham. Come on in. It’s just you and me.”
“How about we go up to the library?”
“No, I promised to show you how I know your dick size. Besides, my hot water bottle’s in here.”
Pauline sat on the distended rubber bubble and pulled up Gran Amble’s quilt. I thought about personal pronouns. I thought about unzipping my pants and standing on the bed. This last thought carried me to action, and I found myself looking into the cupboard nestled in the crook of my sister’s ceiling while Pauline got energetically to work on my cock. The cupboard housed CeeCee’s volleyball trophies, a stack of my old girlie magazines(!) and two exhaust vents from the adjacent bathroom. One vent curved up and through the roof, one stopped midway to the ceiling and ended. . in a mirror. The water bottle squished and gurgled. The floor creaked. The bed creaked. Pauline sucked back another inch and the bathroom light came on.
“You’re kidding!”
They weren’t. Pauline choked a little. The reflection was inverted, and it took me a second to realize what I was seeing. Their backs were to the bathroom vent, and I had a crazy moment of realizing how hard Izzy and my sister had worked to emphasize their similarities. Even next to each other, the resemblance was striking. CeeCee was bustier and wore more ink. Izzy was more muscular and had a more upright posture, but their hair was identical, their asses were the same generous roundness and their gestures moved at the same even pace as they stripped off each other’s bra. It was obviously a well-rehearsed show. I was watching their regular routine, something they did for money, for strange men. I tried to step away from the vent, but Pauline grabbed my ass and kept me in place, in mouth, in range to see my sister undressing from above. The implications of this view were starting to sink in. Pauline passed me a bottle.
I was not going to think about CeeCee watching me come all over her panties, year after year. I was not going to think about her watching me sitting on the john jerking it to these very same magazines that were now inches from my nose, their pages still stuck together. Whiskey burned my throat on the way down. Pauline’s throat was hot, too. I leaned into the heat. CeeCee grinned up at me. Pauline choked again, and I wondered if I was going to weep or come.