Hiding in My House

[All characters in this story are 18 years of age or older.]

“Thanks. I mean, seriously, S, thank you so much for coming to get me.”

“It is my pleasure,” Seong said… which, obviously, there was no reason for her to say out loud since I could see it in that serene Seong-feels-everything-is-right-with-the-world expression on her face. Seong is one of those people who can smile without their lips changing position, if you know what I’m talking about. It’s like if a string on a guitar is barely a tiny bit out of tune, the noise gets to you even if you don’t have a good musical ear to know why — but then the guitarist twists one little tuning peg by like two degrees, and it sounds great. Something beyond your ability to consciously perceive changes and turns things better. That was a Seong smile, most of the time. Just to make herself even more crystal-clear, she added, “I’m very happy you’re not making the mistake you thought you wanted to make.”

I felt the late-afternoon sky open up even wider above me. Kids were playing in the park, you could hear splashing from the community-center pool where Seong had pulled her petal-blue hatchback into the lot. Under some nearby trees, this family had their dinner all set up on one of the picnic tables.

The world felt wholesome.

“I’m happy too,” I said, tugging the door shut and buckling my seatbelt. “It was super close to being a really giant mistake.”

Seong put the car in reverse, glanced at the backup screen, but then looked at me instead of backing the car out. Her eyes narrowed, curious and amused. “Something is very different with you this evening than when I dropped you off last night.”

“Yeah, whoo.” Last night, I’d just had my life turned to shit by my shitty-ass boyfriend cheating on me with our shitty-ass housemate slut Eddi. But this morning… “You don’t know the half of it, let me tell you.”

She glanced both ways behind us, then watched our progress with the back-up camera as we swung out of the space. “Please, do.”

I thought, Go ahead. If there’s anyone you can tell, it’s Seong. You know you can trust her.

And I did — trust her, that is. But I needed a little more space to let this thing out. Even after four or five hours trying to get my head around it, the reality of having watched my sister boink my dad three different times today had me pretty off-balance.

“Or don’t,” Seong said. “I don’t want to pry, C.”

I could hear a little disappointment in her voice, though. She can tell how big this is, and she may not want to pry, but she wants to believe I’d tell her about something important. Okay… I’ll work up to it slow.

“So…” Neighborly houses passed by on either side, then the big tree-lined avenue out of my subdivision. “All right. I guess first off, the reason I needed you to come get me is, Dad and Kell were asleep when I got in last night, and they didn’t notice I was there when they got up this morning, and I decided I wanted to keep it that way.”

“Your explanation suggests the contours of ancillary facts and considerations much more interesting than the explanation itself.”

“You’re so goddamn nosey, S,” I said, making her laugh. “I’m getting to it. Sheesh.”

Only really, I wasn’t, was I?

On the way down MacArthur Street to the highway, I told her how Dad and Kellie had gotten a security company to put in an alarm system fifteen years after the house was built pre-wired for one. I told her about the installation guy’s smooth and reassuring voice. I told her about the way it would beep whenever an exterior door got opened, so I couldn’t sneak out as long as they were anywhere in the house because they’d hear. At the light before the highway, I told her how I’d had to wait the whole afternoon for them to leave and go to dinner, with only half a bag of cheese puffs from my backpack to survive on.

“You and cheese puffs,” she sighed. Seong is extremely fastidious, and would never sink so low as to get her fingers covered in cheese-puff dandruff. I put one in her mouth for her once and she went wide-eyed over the taste, but later I caught her eating from the bag with chopsticks and I laughed so hard she never touched them again. (At least, not when I’ve been looking.)

I tell you, though, that girl knows how to make a sigh say ten different things the same way she knows how to smile without moving her lips. This one definitely had an eyeroll in it about my obsession with cheesy snacks… but it also had a wistful longing over the fact that she fucking loved cheese puffs but her dignity wouldn’t let her eat them. On top of that, it carried more than a little trademark Seong hyper-suppressed impatience, which told me she knew I was delaying the main point of this conversation, but that she would humor me as long as she could.

And considering I still didn’t feel any braver about it, I went whole-hog taking advantage of her humoring me.

Over the ten-minute highway trip to her part of town, I told her my plan on getting out — to wait until I heard Dad and Kell arm the alarm system and let the door swing shut behind them, then run downstairs and go out the back during the thirty-second delay before the system activated and opening the door would trigger the apocalypse. I also told her how the cheese puffs didn’t last, how I got really thirsty, how I started to really need to pee again well before six o’clock rolled around, which was when my dad and sister had talked about going to dinner. But I did not tell her about opening my laptop again and watching, over and over, the videos I’d taken with my phone. Nor did I tell her the videos even existed, or the things I’d seen my father and sister do while filming them.

(I also did not tell her about peeing in the Gatorade bottle, which happened again late that afternoon. Like I said, she’s way fastidious, and whatever patience she had left for my roundabout description of the day would have been flushed down the toilet by hearing I’d used a plastic bottle to relieve myself in not once but twice.)

I wanted to hear what she had to say about all of it (not the pee bottle), and I knew what she had to say would help me… I guess I just also wanted to know a little more how I felt about all of it before I found out how she felt about it.

“Hey,” I said, an idea popping into my head to let me keep stalling. “Want to hear something funny?”

“Who ever answers that question, ‘No’?”

“Kellie was talking about… about how stupid I was to always let Brandt drag me around to places I didn’t want to go, and she said, ‘You know Chelse, what you really ought to do is…'”

And… full stop.

My sister’s joke didn’t want to leave my lips for some reason. Maybe because I was being dishonest the way I was telling it, since Kellie didn’t say it to me, she said it to Dad. Maybe because Seong deserved better than me stalling the conversation, especially since I did want to tell her about what I’d seen and learned, spying on the two of them.

And maybe because you know Kell was like ninety-five percent serious and hardly joking at all. God, she hates Brandt.

Only was that all? Because Dad had said something too, hadn’t he? Right after she’d suggested I ought to make a move on my best friend, he said to Kell, “You and your thing about Seong again.”

Kellie didn’t just hate Brandt. She wanted me to be happy. And she liked Seong a lot.

Yeah, but later she also said, “Probably there’s nothing there at all.” She thought the idea of the two of us hooking up was funny and hot, that’s all.

Only there was also that thing about Seong being a “freaky beautiful soul” and the only person I hung out with who was good enough for me.

Oh shit. What if she was a hundred percent serious and not joking even a little bit? What if she was just dodging Dad when she said there was probably nothing there? What if she really thought I ought to do that?

And I looked over at Seong and I knew exactly why Kell might have such a thought. If I was wired that way, I couldn’t do much better than a girl like Seong.

Which made my brain do one of those things where it tells you something without you trying to even think about it.

It said, There aren’t any other girls like Seong.

“You know, C, I was very worried about you.” For just a second, because she’s a careful driver, Seong glanced over at me with those dark, empathic eyes. We were driving west and closing in on sundown, and I could see an orange glow from the horizon reflected in her pupils. “And then you called and I felt less worried. And then you got in the car, and suddenly I wasn’t worried at all.” I was hearing her, but I was also thinking, Holy fuck, this is turning into such a beautiful day. Then she went on, “But now I’m wondering if I should worry again.”

Without hesitation, I said, “No. No, definitely I’m way better, and you should not worry.”

“Really? You sound certain, truthfully. But there’s also something out of sorts about you.”

Well, my sister, who by the way is fucking my dad, thinks I ought to hook up with you. And I’m pretty convinced she’s right to be fucking him, so what if she’s right about that too?

“Yeah, out of sorts is for sure on target.”

“So tell me why. If you want to.”

“I do,” I said, and found myself meaning it about both things. “Shit, though I don’t even know what to start with.”

“Whatever you think I can help you with the most.”

Just tell her the ridiculous one.

The Culver Street exit came up, and because Seong dislikes the high overpass between our highway and the next, she took it and stuck to surface streets the rest of the way.

“My sister…” and my Dad, it turns out they’re…

Wait, is that the ridiculous one?

We stopped at a light and she looked over at me. Those impossibly deep eyes — they always just absorbed whatever she was looking at. The sensitive curves of her lips parted, and she spoke. “Yes. Kellie. She said you ought to do something, and you thought it was funny. What did she say?”

I watched the way she formed every word. Seong has a large, sensuous mouth that she usually doesn’t open very wide because she thinks her teeth are too big. So its movements when she talks stay subtle and precise, yet also full and fluid. In a world where my father and sister were lovers, could I kiss those lips? What would that feel like? They would be soft. They would be calm and tender and sweet to taste.

They would be giving.

Why would I think that idea might be a joke?

“I shouldn’t have put it that way,” I told Seong. Oh, shit, I really shouldn’t have put it that way. What if it could really happen, but I started off by saying it for a laugh?

“Kellie is very smart,” she replied, turning to look at the road as the light changed and we moved forward. “I would expect her advice to be good if she meant it.”

“I would too.”

“What’s the other thing?”

“Huh?”

“The thing you’ve been avoiding telling me about and decided to further delay with something amusing your sister said, which wasn’t as funny as you thought because you hadn’t properly considered it in your anxious need to redirect the conversation.”

“Jesus Christ, S. Sometimes I think you’re some kind of mind-reader.”

“Of course I’m not.” We reached another light, but it went green just before we came to a full stop. “If I was, I wouldn’t need to ask. I could spend every moment in your thoughts and know them better than you knew them yourself.”

“Ha. I don’t know if that would be all that hard.”

“Chelsea.”

“Yes?” I looked at her as she made the turn onto a cross-street.

“We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Kellie thinks I should come out as bi and date you.”

The car became very quiet.

“Well?” I asked after a block went by. “Is that a stupid idea, or should I think about it? I mean, assuming you would want to.”

“I…”

“Oh my god, you would want to.”

Her voice, when it came, sounded tight in her throat. “I don’t believe my counsel on this subject would be impartial, Chelsea. We should talk about the other thing.”

“S, why didn’t you tell me?”

She put her blinker on, pulled into a gas-station parking lot that happened to be right where we needed it to be, shifted the car into park, and sat looking straight ahead with both hands in her lap.

“I’m very sensitive,” she said finally. “You know that.”

“Yes. It’s my favorite thing about you.”

She took several quick breaths, then a few slower ones.

“You know that when I feel things, I feel them very strongly.”

I nodded.

“So I didn’t tell you because I treasure your friendship, and it was so obvious to me you did not feel the same as I did, beyond that friendship. If you felt it, I would know, and then I could tell you without risking what you and I share. But you didn’t feel it, and I could tell that too.”

“Well maybe that’s because I’m stupid.”

Her face turned toward me, eyes at the edge of tears but her mouth wry. “I’m not attracted to stupid people.”

“Ugh. That makes one of us.”

That made her laugh. Then she looked at me, and I felt absorbed again.

“I’m not a stupid person. Does your pattern of falling for stupidity mean,” she asked, “that you’re not attracted to me?”

“Um… I didn’t say I was only attracted to stupid people.”

“On so many things, I would adore letting you ramble and banter into the night, C. But right now, I need you to be direct — with yourself, and with me. What are we to do with this idea of Kellie’s, now that you’ve thrown it out in the open? We can’t kick it around like children playing with a ball — I’m relieved that the ball is before us now, but my feet are worn out with two years of pacing. If you are attracted to me, I… need to know.”

Long shadows of the nearby buildings reached the gas station parking lot and deepened enough to bring the fluorescent lights over the pumps on.

“You want me to be direct?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure? Really sure?”

“Yes, C, please.”

“So you’d be mad if I told you the other thing and distracted you from this subject?”

She actually growled a little at that. “You are so frustrating sometimes! I’ve been hoping and wanting to talk to you about this for such a long time — how could I possibly be distracted from it?”

“Yes! Score! I got you rattled and now I’m going to prove you wrong.”

“I’m not — fff. All right, I may be a lit-“She stopped herself and sighed. “No. It’s true, you did. I can’t deny that I’m… rattled right now. But prove me wrong? I sincerely doubt –”

“Kellie and my dad have been fucking for the last five years.”

She stared at me, so I just waited, full of that kind of tingly electric sensation you get when everything is on pause and you think if you breathe something might topple the world.

“Each other, I assume you mean.”

“Yes, Seong. My dad has two adult daughters. He definitely did not discover the act of fucking just five years ago.”

“Well,” she said. But she didn’t follow it with anything right away, just put the car back in gear and put on her blinker. “I’m no longer rattled, but you have proved me wrong. That is a very distracting piece of information.”

Then she pulled back out onto the street and drove us the rest of the way to her folks’ place.

 

# # #

 

Seong’s family lives in an older neighborhood that used to be on the edge of town before urban sprawl swallowed it up in the eighties or nineties. So the houses aren’t mansions or anything, but the lots are really big, and it takes a long time winding through the subdivision to get to her place. Plus, big lots mean long driveways, and even after we got there, Seong could just pull into the front of the driveway with her lights off so I could finish telling her all about my adventures that eye-opening morning without worrying that her family might come out and surprise us.

It took her a bit to compose her first words after getting back on the road from that gas station. But when she did, they were very Seong.

“You seem unsettled, but not disturbed,” she said. “Am I right to conclude a conviction on your part that it is consensual, and perhaps even that you approve?”

“Uh-huh, a hundred percent on the consensual part. I’m a little more wobbly on the approving part… but even that’s mostly because they did it in my room while I hid in the closet, and they ragged on how messy it was the whole time. I mean, that’s pretty nervy of them, right?”

When she didn’t say anything immediately, I repeated myself: “Right?”

We were approaching the turn for her neighborhood at that point, and she very deliberately minded the road. Halfway through the turn, she said, “You have several weaknesses, C, and cleaning up after yourself is, frankly, the worst of them. If you found it inappropriate for them to make use of your private space, I support you. But as for any commentary on the caliber of your housekeeping…”

“I can’t believe you’re betraying me like this.”

She laughed. “Can I assume my treachery surprises you less than finding your father and sister in bed together?”

“Anyway… they were both very eager participants, and… I know them, right? I could hear in their voices, it was normal and… healthy for them. They were totally themselves, except for the having sex part. The same people I’ve known my whole life, fun and caring and happy with each other.”

“Knowing them less than I do you, but knowing you as well as I do, this makes complete sense to me.”

I thought I understood what she meant. She’s met them both several times, and I’ve talked to her about them a lot. But I still felt relieved that she trusted my judgment about whether they ought to be doing… what they were doing.

“So,” she went on, “having established that the situation is neither morally nor emotionally traumatic for you, I require lascivious details.”

“You’re such a perv, Seong.”

“Said the woman who approves of her family’s flagrant incest.”

“Okay, okay. Is there anything you particularly want to hear about first?”

“Is there something you think I would particularly enjoy hearing about?”

I thought for half a second and said, “Kellie’s tits. Oh my god, Seong, I know I’ve told you before how jealous I am of them, but seeing them in action was –”

She laughed. “How did I know this was what you would start with? No, don’t stop, go on.”

A low burn rose up my face. “I mean, it’s not like I’m always talking about them…”

“No, not always. Seriously, C, I do want to hear. Describe them.”

“Okay… if I’m not boring you or anything.” When her eyebrows pinched downward in the Seong equivalent of a scowl, I summoned my image of Kellie back up and quickly went on. “Not huge — you know, you’ve seen her — but the way they hang, naked, and move with her when she moves…”

“I’m picturing breasts in empty space, surging enticingly but without context. Widen my view at least a little, please?”

“Sure. Okay, so, I’m in the upstairs hallway, walking to the bathroom from my room, and her door is open, and there they are.”

“Her breasts?”

I reached over and pushed her shoulder, but the smile she gave me in response made it hard to stay exasperated. “They were doing it right there in her bed — knees for him, hands and knees for her.” (For some reason, Seong dislikes the term “doggy style,” so I avoided it.) “And no, my eyes did not go right for her boobs. But the way they hung there and swayed every time he bumped up against her ass, that stuck with me pretty hard.”

“It does sound novel. What else about them? Besides the movement.”

I thought about it, and that moment swelled in my memory, the soft, swinging curves, the roundness of them. And also… “I guess I’d almost forgotten how dark her nipples are. And they were poking out something fierce, just begging to be touched, maybe pulled at…”

“Did he?”

“Uh, that’s pretty much all I saw before I freaked and got back to my room.”

“Surely not. The picture I have seems significantly incomplete.”

“I mean, as far as him feeling up her nipples, I didn’t see whether he did that. And I couldn’t actually see the… uh… him going in her.”

“Disappointing.”

“Yeah. They were mostly facing away from the door — not the greatest for my view, but lucky for me.”

“It let you stay and watch for a while?”

“Er… I kind of chickened out,” I said, bringing a rueful shake of her head. “Like I said, after a couple seconds, I freaked and scurried away. But holy shit, the little bit I watched…”

Seong looked unimpressed. “You should have warned me that this story was only going to cover a tiny sliver of time.”

“Look, do you like your appetizers small, or so big you’re too stuffed to eat anything after them?”

“Oh,” she said, one eyebrow lifting. “You saw them more than once?”

Instead of answering, I took my phone out and drummed my fingertips on the screen.

“Really?”

“Mm-hmm,” I said, unlocking it and going to that first video.

While the image onscreen slowly panned from darkness to door-frame to the upstairs bathroom of my house, Seong leaned closer. Her shoulder touched mine just as the shower stall came into full view.

“Oh my,” she said.

Despite rising steam and beads of water on the glass of the shower and a weird, tilted angle, it was an eyeful.

And…

This time, maybe the third or fourth time I’d watched it, sparked hotter than anytime since I first shot it — because as soon as those two sinfully conjoined bodies appeared, wet and slick and in motion, the amazing person sitting next to me made this tiny sound in her throat and let her weight fall heavier against my shoulder. And suddenly, I wasn’t just watching my father and my sister coupling passionately in an atmosphere of spray and mist — I was sharing the most intimate, personal experience I’d ever let anyone else know about.

As Dad’s hands glided down his daughter’s slippery ribs to her waist, Seong reached out toward the phone. I thought she meant to take it, so I tilted it and loosened my grip. But instead, her fingers curled around the back of my hand and gently angled my wrist to level the view for her. They stayed there, warm and soft. The very ends of her silky black hair, which normally hung just lower than her jaw, swung a little to tease at my shoulder.

Onscreen, the action rolled out just as I remembered it: the purposeful, powerful thrusts of Dad’s hips, the rush of water down Kellie’s dripping brown locks, their words, their moans… the searing beauty of their lovemaking. Foam and lather mounding up as his hands worked body-wash all over her back. A deep, male growl of pleasure when she swirled her ass to milk him; a purr of feminine satisfaction when she heard him make that sound.

But even having seen and heard it all before, this time the heat and tingling in my panties almost made me squirm. Instead of touching myself, as I had before, now someone else was touching me… just barely, and just the back of my hand, the pressure on my shoulder. Yet I could barely stay focused on the screen, or on the hollow little mish-mash of noise from the phone speaker — their voices, the gush and splash of the shower.

Seong’s breathing, though… faint, mostly even and calm, but catching now and again… it’s like it filled up the whole car with us.

“They’re a marvel, C,” she said quietly.

I turned my head, saw the bright pane of the screen reflected in her endlessly dark irises.

“Uh-huh,” I agreed. I thought about reaching over to brush a knuckle along the porcelain grace of her cheek, but Kellie said something absurd in the video and made her laugh, which made me hesitate just long enough that I became uncertain again. Just watch with her, dummy.

So I did, blissful images of love and lust spilling out of my phone to entrance us, the warmth and peace of friendship or something else seeping into my flesh where Seong and I touched. In front of us, Dad and Kellie merged and surged and eventually powered their way toward climax.

“Ghh — yes — like that –“

“Kells… wow, honey, this pussy is so hot and wet.”

“You know it loves your fat fucking cock in it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Seong’s grip tightened on my phone hand.

“Oh baby… oh, baby, I’m gonna come in you…”

“Yes, Daddy, do it! Shoot my belly full of it — put that hot cream up inside your little girl!”

“Oh, fuck!”

I heard Seong’s mouth fall open as she took in a sudden breath. A shiver ran through her, wobbling our hands, tickling my shoulder again with her hair.

“Pump it in me, pump it in me…”

“God, I’m so close… are you close?”

“Hush and gush, Daddy! Just squirt it and see what happens –“

“Fuck, Kellie!”

“How?” Seong whispered. “How is she so nasty, C? This is incredible.”

“I know, right?” I whispered back, the fire in my chest stoked even higher by an incindiary coal of pride.

And then Dad gave Kell that one huge stroke of ecstasy, and we watched and listened to the two of them cum and cum. When the video ended, Seong cleared her throat and sat up.

“Thank you,” she said. “I did not expect this genre of pornography to have such an effect on me.”

I laughed. “What do you think it did to me?”

Her head turned, and those eyes of hers met mine. “You’ll have to answer that yourself. Isn’t that question the whole reason you showed me?”

“I guess so. Only… the part we just watched didn’t really change things a whole lot.” I paused, thinking it over. “When I saw them in her bed the first time, just those few seconds, that really shook me, S. This part was just… you know, fucking hot. Same with the one I got of them on the couch downstairs.”

“There’s another one?”

I grinned. “Indeed there is. Want to see?”

Her head shook. “Yes but no. You say your first glimpse shook you, but then you watched them two more times and just enjoyed yourself.”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘just.'”

“Fine. Let’s not quibble over syntax. My point is, what changed that let you accept these acts between them? And then what changed again that removed your certainty? Because I felt the tumult in you when you got in the car, and I don’t know that it’s entirely gone.”

“You can probably guess the first answer,” I said. But instead of making her, I went on, “This was the answer to the Camping Trip Mystery.”

“Ahhhh.” I’d told her about that central weirdness in my relationship with Dad and Kell: how I’d bitchily backed out of a family camping trip, and then when they got back, something had changed in them. In fact, I guess I’d told her about it quite a few times, because she put it together almost as quickly as I did. “You think this started on their trip, and their elevated kindness to you since then has been the two of them compensating for having a secret they couldn’t tell you.”

“A hundred percent,” I said. She’s so fucking smart. “If you see any holes in that theory, though, don’t poke at them just yet. Being sure about it is part of what saved my sanity.”

“I would call it a hypothesis rather than a theory, but I believe it is sound. What, then, is the second answer?”

I took a deep breath. “The second answer is actually two answers. Part one is… I think Kellie wants me to join in on it.”

Seong tilted her head in thought for a moment, then nodded. “I’ve observed the two of you together. Even lacking other evidence, I would expect her to take almost any measure to express her love for you. But you are hesitant?”

I nodded. “From what I heard out of them, I don’t think Dad is as sure about it as Kell. That’s the part two of it. And apparently they’ve made themselves some rule that they can’t ever invite me in — I have to be the one to make the first move.”

“Sensible, I think,” she said. “To some extent, any offer to enter into this taboo, especially from someone older and respected, carries an element of coercion.”

“What do you mean?” I felt obliged to defend Dad and Kell, even though Seong didn’t sound disapproving. “Neither of them would ever try to force me to do something I didn’t want. I’m positive of that.”

“Of course not. But unlike an intimate proposition from someone outside your family, the decline of an incestuous invitation, even without revulsion or condemnation being included in that rebuff, could bring lifelong disappointment, conflict, or shame to the person being turned down. How more unfair could a proposal be than to offer a choice between unwanted sexual activity on the one hand, and the possibility of causing familial pain or even estrangement on the other? The bonds of family mean we are less free, in all areas of our lives, to make choices solely based on our own needs.”

“Well, you said that a lot better than I could have,” I told her, “but I guess that’s exactly what I was getting from the two of them. That they wouldn’t want to box me into making a choice I didn’t want to make… maybe one I didn’t even want to know about.”

“The question is,” she said, lifting first her right palm up and then her left, “do you want to make a decision, now that you understand one is available? Or do you want to let the possibility sit waiting for somewhere down the road?”

When she put it that way, the answer was easy, and I felt a rush of relief and gratitude for it.

“Definitely the second,” I said. “I love how our family is. I love it so much. It’d be super-selfish for me to want it to be any better than it is. Why would I risk a change that big, when things are already so good?”

“You wouldn’t.” Her tone rang certain and pragmatic. Her eyes and a little nod of her chin said she’d expected no different from me. “It is not in your spirit to chase moonbeams on mountaintops at the expense of the blessings all around you on solid ground.”

I blinked. “Which is the same reason you never told me how you felt about me.”

Certainty and pragmatism melted out of her expression. Her lips and eyebrows compressed faintly.

“We’re really a lot alike, aren’t we, S?”

Her head went back in a laugh at that — a big one, mouth open wide enough to show the teeth she normally liked to hide. I like her teeth, I thought. I don’t know why she doesn’t.

“Oh, my dear C, we are so, so, so very different in so many ways. I think it’s why I feel so complete around you.”

I didn’t back down, though. “I mean, duh, we’re different too. But in that way, in wanting to preserve things that are beautiful and worth treasuring — we’re practically the same person, don’t you think?”

“Hmm.” She did appear to think about it. And while she did, my stomach growled really loudly. “Oh! C, you haven’t had anything but half a bag of chips all day. I am in no way trying to divert or stall the conversation, but we must go in and get you something to eat.”

Although I hadn’t been aware of how hungry I was until that moment, my appetite suddenly wouldn’t let me argue.

 

# # #

 

Mrs. Song greeted me the minute we walked in the door — which I expected, because that’s how it’s gone every time I visited. Having been there before, I knew the drill.

“Hello, Chelsea Vickers,” she said from the middle of the foyer, where floor tiles set in interlocking rings formed a complex, almost gyroscopic pattern beneath her feet. Ambient rainfall and vibraphone music hung in the air, faint but pervasive thanks to hidden speakers throughout the common areas of the house.

I should be clear: Mrs. Song is fucking crazy. I mean, a complete freak who makes David Bowie look like the model of consistency in fashion style. Today, she’d formed her hair into a single, high-cresting wave that curved up from the right side of her head and back down just below her left ear, the color fading from blue at the roots to aquamarine at the ends. I’m not even going to describe the jacket she had on over a pure red skirt that maybe would better be called a really low-hanging sash.

As I processed her outfit and asymmetric makeup, she raised both her eyebrows and a single finger.

That was my cue to say the first rule of Song house: “I will hurt no one while I am here.”

A second finger popped up instantly.

“I understand and accept that no one will be hurt when I choose to leave.”

And just like that, the fierce formality of her pose and the expressionless challenge on her face vanished, and she hurried over with a beaming smile to hug me.

“I was so glad when Seong told me you’d be coming over,” she said. “The house needs an aura like yours if I’m to convince the marble I’m negotiating of its need to adopt certain involutions.”

“Mother,” Seong said, “Chelsea hasn’t eaten today and is very hungry.”

“Yes!” From the flare of her eyes, you’d think she’d just opened a chest full of pirate treasure. “Carl has made Korean food, and as Korean food, it’s terrible, but the delicious disparity entertains me, and I don’t care that much for Korean food in the first place. You must try it. Hasten!”

With that, she spun and almost flew off through the yonic archway that led from the foyer to the living room, where I found myself dodging and twisting through a maze of bizarre abstract sculptures that hadn’t been there the last time I visited.

“These are my attempt to capture certain ineffables from the television program ‘Hoarders,'” she explained. “I discovered it only recently — such a testament to the malleability of human perception!”

Boom. I’d been looking at and squeezing past these strange, looming constructions of laquered paper, the colors all peaceful pastels, blurring together so I couldn’t quite make heads or tails of what any of it might represent. But that two-sentence explanation turned the sculptures into dreamy heaps of newspaper, monuments built of meticulously stacked shoeboxes, rolling, pastoral hills that showed hints of hems and buttons and zippers if you looked close. Piles of squalor blurred into a surface of serenity.

“The experiment,” she went on, ducking through an off-kilter simulacrum of a clothes rack, “is to see if we grow used to a catastrophe of refuse, so long as our eyes see it in halcyon visions and not as grotesque detritus.”

“The answer is ‘no,'” Seong said from behind me. “Mercifully, I have been away at school through most of this imagining, and Mother says it will be gone by Thanksgiving break.”

Maybe it’s starting to become obvious why Seong is as weird as she is?

Past the clothes rack, we reached the kitchen, an island of relative normalcy with almost no sculpture and a long, sturdy oaken dining table surrounded by alternating cyan and magenta chairs. There, Mrs. Song stayed only long enough to get my verdict on her husband Carl’s Korean food (which turned out to be Korean/Jamaican/Pakistani fusion, with no authentic elements of the three that I could detect).

“It sort of reminds me,” I said while chewing (because the Songs put a lot more stock in conversation than in etiquette), “of my dad’s Hot Dog Lasagna. I don’t mean it tastes like it, just that it shouldn’t work but it does.”

“Carl will be pleased,” she said. Then she looked at her daughter. “Seong, unless Chelsea Vickers wants to delve for the living-room couch beneath the grand hoarding experiment, she’ll need to stay with you in your room. Mind Rule Number Seven, obviously.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Good. I’ll be in my workshop for several hours now taking advantage of this improvement to our home’s aura.”

With a smile at me and a nod of her outrageous tsunami of hair, she left through the sliding glass door, and we watched her wind her way through the garden of bizarre statues in the backyard.

Seong got up from the table and tipped her head toward the hallway. I picked up my bowl and backpack and followed her to her room.

“What’s Rule Number Seven?” I asked along the way.

“It’s immaterial at the moment.” Once inside, and with the door closed behind us, she said, “Shall we resume working through your disorienting family situation?”

If she’d asked me before we left the kitchen, I might have said yes. But the omnipresent vibraphone sussurrus went mute with the click of the latch, and suddenly I felt secluded with her in her own private space.

“I think your mom’s sculptures and outfit kind of put my disorientation in perspective,” I said, looking about at the calm, sea-green walls, which Mrs. Song had long ago painted with waves much more peaceful than the one she’d made of her hair. “I mean, what I saw this morning kind of flipped my world on its head, but even on its head, it’s still pretty recognizable. I think I can let the whole thing sit for a while. Maybe… let’s talk about the other issue?”

Her lips tightened a bit, and she gestured to the bed. “Certainly. Sit and finish eating, and we can discuss.”

The soft light of the room came from a shaded lamp, washing across a bedside table and Seong’s crisply made aubergine sheets. I sat carefully so as not to spill any of my food. She remained standing, her fingers laced together and her hands hanging loosely, palm-outward, below her waist.

“So,” she said. “Your sister has set this thing before us. Before you, really, because I have lived with it a very long –”

“I think I’d like to try, Seong.”

She took a deep breath. “I am conflicted. I could… feel you going that way in the car, and my heart would not stop racing. But you’re not coming at this subject on its own, or on your own.”

I shrugged a little to acknowledge that, but it seemed like she had more to say, so I took another bite of rice and mysterious vegetables and clashing polyethnic spices. Seong wrung her hands and watched me for a moment.

“You have had three disquieting shocks in a very short space,” she explained. “The end of your relationship with Brandt. The revelation of intimacy between your father and sister. And now the possibility of a change in how we see one another. How can I be sure the first two do not impel you toward a wrong decision about the third? How can I feel that I would not be taking advantage of a rebound from your breakup, or confusion over the whole nature of your family’s structure?”

“Okay, duh, why does this not surprise me?” She looked puzzled but also super-tense, so I took another bite and talked with my mouth full just to be as casual as possible. “You know, S, as hard as this may be for you to believe because of who you are and how you are, maybe what you want is important too. Maybe if you’ve been dying to hook up with me ever since we met, it’s because you’re smart as fuck and your heart always pulls you toward what’s right and good and beautiful. So maybe you should trust that and just say, ‘Okay, what the hell, let’s go for it.'”

She laughed. “Oh, C. Do you really think that sounds at all like something I would say?”

“No,” I said, shoveling the last of her father’s weird food into my mouth and putting the bowl down on the nightstand. “Just because it’s something you should say doesn’t make it something you would say.” I leaned over to where I’d put my backpack down and unzipped it. “Which means we both know you’re going to worry back and forth over what you ought to do, and most likely nothing I say will make that process go any faster.”

“Are you suggesting you don’t even want to talk about it?”

“Nope,” I said. I tugged my laptop out of the backpack and held it up. “I’m flat-out saying I’m not going to talk about it. So if you don’t want to come over here and make out with me, the other choice I’m giving you is, come over here and let’s watch my next home movie of Dad and Kell incesting the hell out of each other.”

“You know I despise procrastination,” she said. “I’m not sure I can put off a genuine moral dilemma with prurient distractions.”

I opened the laptop and patted the bed next to me. “Aren’t all moral dilemmas a form of procrastination anyway? Trust me, you’ll pretty quickly get over the fact that I’m distracting you once I start this video up.”

 

# # #

 

So we watched my second porno, Dad and Kellie on the Couch. Seong sat next to me on the edge of her bed, close enough that our knees and shoulders touched, with her hand holding the left side of the screen, mine holding the right, and the keyboard half on each of our laps. I kind of had to fight against looping my arm around behind her waist.

The video started off with Dad dropping his naked ass onto the couch at Kellie’s feet, which she’d stretched out about three-quarters of the way across the sofa from where she lounged at one end.

“Look at them,” Seong said. “So nonchalant about their nakedness, their nearness. This is obviously completely normal to them.”

“Well,” I said, “not so normal that they’d leave the blinds open for it.”

She laughed, then let out an, “ooh,” as my sister slithered from the couch down to the floor to kneel right between my father’s legs.

“Were they saying something just then?” Seong asked. “It’s very difficult to hear. Oh! My goodness.”

We’d just gotten to the part where I’d zoomed in. Kell’s hand gripped Dad’s wanky bit, fattening and then straightening it to point right at her boobs. Which, like I’ve said, were amazing.

“Please don’t be offended, C, but I understand now why you’re so jealous of those. The curves… the perfect size, those abruptly jutting nipples — wait! Go back, they’re definitely talking now.” She reached across to bump up the volume as I scrubbed back a second or two.

Too far away and on the other side of a bannister, Kellie said, “Something something something, for a guy old enough something something my father.” Dad’s response was even less audible. Those full lips of Seong’s pouted, then pursed as the screen showed my sister lean forward and put her mouth around the cock that had lent us each half our genes.

Dad’s next words came out plenty loud enough to hear: “Ah! Oh — oh yes –“

Next to me, Seong put a hand up to the bare hollow at the base of her throat. It stayed there through the whole next five or six minutes of masterful incest blowjob unfolding onscreen. I could hear the pace of her breathing change a couple of times.

“I did not think amateurs gave such… vigorous head,” she said at one point when Kellie really got going.

“She’s a talent,” I agreed. The feel of Seong’s thigh along mine made the action less mesmerizing for its own sake yet somehow even more arousing than the other times I’d watched.

“That far down on it!” she exclaimed a moment later. “She can’t be breathing with it in so deep. How long…”

“Just keep watching,” I said.

She did, and she did, and she did, until finally she said, “I would black out.”

About that same second, Kell came up off Dad’s dripping hard-on gasping, her mouth wide to drag in the breath she’d been denying herself. Dad caressed her cheek and said something below the threshold of the microphone.

“He’s telling her to be careful not to choke herself,” I explained. “Now she’s laughing at him.”

“I have eyes, dear C,” she said. “I can see a laugh perfectly w–”

We’d gotten to the part where Kell straddled Dad’s lap.

“Unbelievable. This is — wait, what’s happening to the camera?”

“Sorry, I was trying to adjust the zoom a little better.”

“You do not have a career in this,” she said, which I laughed at. “Although your father and sister certainly do well on their end of the lens. If I didn’t know better, I’d say this part was a deliberate tease to the audience. His cock. It’s pointed right there. She’s all but on it. How long is she going to wait to take him in?”

“They were kind of… talking a bit here.”

Seong looked over at me — I guess because she heard some of the emotion in my voice. “Do you want to pause this and tell me about it?”

I smiled, maybe a little weakly, but I didn’t have to fake anything when I responded, “No… it’s fixing to get really good here in a second.”

When I tapped the screen, she nodded and turned back to watch.

 

# # #

 

Afterward, we talked a little. First, I told her about that stretch right before Kell sank down onto Dad’s cock — how the parts she couldn’t hear were them talking about how lucky they were, and how that had made them turn and look offscreen toward the fireplace and the picture of my mother above it.

“It’s a rare gift,” Seong said quietly, after I described that moment and my reaction, “to have been through such a loss and still see the good fortune in your world.”

“Yes,” I said. We sat as we had throughout the video — side-by-side, legs just touching, close enough to embrace or kiss but not doing it. The laptop had been set aside. “But I really am very lucky. To have them, and to have you. Have you gotten any closer to figuring out if I’m going to have you as more than my best friend?”

She nudged me with her knee. “Closer, yes. Decided? No. But you are really sure you want to?”

I nodded. “Maybe it’s a terrible idea and doomed to absolute disaster, but you’re such a wonderful person, Seong. I don’t think anybody can be as wonderful as you are, really. Which I think means, part of how wonderful I think you are must be a sign of how completely I adore you.”

“So… the proof of our romantic potential is the fact that you think you’ve deluded yourself into mis-perceiving me as superior to my actual qualities?”

“Yes, that’s exactly right. It sounds worse when you say it that way, but I’m sticking by my guns.”

She laughed. “With every word, you give me more to ponder. We should brush our teeth and get to bed, so that I may lie restless next to you in absolute vacillation over your ability to make folly sound like wisdom.”

And minutes after that, we lay together in the dark beneath her covers, not touching, not talking… I think both of us just listening to each other breathe, trying to get our heads around what those breaths meant to us. I closed my eyes a couple of times.

The last of those times, a breezy dream crossed through my mind, gently, from one side to the other, so quick and subtle that I woke from it almost without realizing I’d been asleep. Seong’s breathing still sounded slow and easy beside me. Nothing had changed, except… where my hand lay at my side, palm down, it sensed a whisper-light pressure along one knuckle of its pinkie.

Seong’s finger, barely in contact with mine.

How long has that been there? I wondered. Did she move her hand closer on purpose? Did one of us just shift in our sleep?

Is she awake now?

Her little finger, my little finger. Motionless. Maybe an inch or less of faint conjunction.

I had slipped unconscious, and this had happened. And now I was wide, wide awake.

Time gets weird when you wake up in the middle of the night, right? I mean, sometimes your eyes pop open and your brain won’t stop and you look at the clock and want to fall back asleep and you try and try and try your ass off and then you look at the time again and it’s ten minutes later. Other times, you’re okay being awake and there’s something you want to think about and you see you’ve got hours before morning and you’re good with that and before you know it, the alarm’s going off.

I have no idea how long I stayed in that exact position, with my whole nervous system crowded into I guess a knuckle’s worth of skin, just because maybe it was on purpose and maybe this was the first time she’d touched me and meant it that way. I didn’t want to say anything, I didn’t want to move in case I woke her up and learned it was nothing, an accident, unintended.

But eventually, it came to me: What if she’s lying there thinking the same thing?

As slowly as I’ve ever done anything in my life, I turned my hand in place — steadily, carefully, so my ring finger replaced my pinkie against her skin, and then my middle finger, and then the pointer — until the back of my hand relaxed onto the mattress, and one knuckle of my index finger found its place at our point of connection, and the ball of my thumb landed in the tiny crook where her hand met her wrist.

Her breathing didn’t change during any of this. She said nothing. But even at the halfway point, I knew she was awake. And when my movement stopped, her smallest finger, and then its neighbor, crept across the borders of my two largest ones, and her wrist lifted just enough for her to clear my thumb, and she slipped her hand into mine.

In the deep night quiet of her house, I found my ears ringing like a chorus of angels had just broken loose.

Three of Seong’s fingertips nested themselves in the nooks where my fingers lay against one another, just above the top border of my palm. The fourth traced along the far edge. Her cupped palm had come down flush with those creases in my wrist, its hollow curving up and over the heel of my hand. She felt like air, like a warm summer mist, encompassing my skin without weight. I spread my fingers a little and let hers fall through them.

A thousand percent, I could have stayed like that all the way through till morning and been amazed the whole time.

But a few minutes into it, I felt a trembling where my girlfriend’s hand held mine — and then I heard a tiny sniffle, and I realized she was crying.

“Seong, what’s wrong?” I curled my fingers to interlock them more fully with hers, squeezing her hand. She squeezed back.

Her voice came out tight, pitched unevenly higher than normal. “I am so happy right now, my C,” she said. “But scared.”

“Why?”

Another sniffle… or maybe just a breath of a laugh.

“You make bad dating choices.” That bit came out a lot more solid and sure. “And when you end things with someone, you never want to see them again. I don’t know that I could bear that outcome.”

“Well… I do make bad dating choices. Can’t really argue with that.”

“I was not offering it up for debate.”

“Haha. But the other part you’re wrong about.”

She shifted, and I sensed that her head had turned, so I turned mine as well and found her face a bare silhouette in the dark. “It’s been your pattern so far,” she said, “since I’ve known you.”

I thought back about the relationships I’d been in at college, I guess an average of one a semester, Brandt being longer than most. I could see why she’d gotten the wrong impression.

“No,” I said, thinking about how to explain it. “Everybody you’ve seen me date… I ended things with them because I never wanted to see them again. Not the other way around. I’ll always want to see you again, S, even if this part doesn’t work out.”

A sigh went out of her, and the quiver left her hand.

“That’s good. I believe you.”

Her thumb eased against mine, ginger and delicate. Her index finger, tucked between my own and the middle finger next to it, snuggled further, its tip exploring the tendons at the back of my hand.

“Chelsea, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

She relaxed her fingers and slipped them free of mine — not to take her hand away, but to glide her touch down along my palm, her palm down beyond my wrist. She drew a circle in the middle of my hand with one gentle nail. “Why do you call me ‘S’?”

“Uh… because you call me ‘C’?”

“Ah. I thought you might think that.” One and then the next and then the next, she tapped her fingertips against my palm, then rubbed her wrist up against mine, then back down the tender skin of my inner forearm.

“What else would I think?” Considering that you’re making it really hard to think at all right now…

“That I’m not using your initial — I’m just shortening your name to ‘Sea,’ like the ocean. You are like the ocean to me.”

As if to demonstrate, she ebbed her fingers out of my palm, lay them in a loose grasp about my wrist, then ran that grasp along my tingling flesh almost to the elbow before flowing back to her starting point.

I think I coughed a little at the shock that ran through me from that caress. But the ocean thing? “I don’t know about that… the ocean is all salty and full of crabs and weeds.”

“The ocean is deep. It glides near and then moves back.” Again her touch moved along my arm, a midnight wave over sighing sands. “It is constant, but can brew storms upon itself. When I walk near it, its sound is soft and comforting.”

There are people, lots of them, who wait their whole lifetimes and never get to hear anyone say that kind of thing to them, you know? So I couldn’t help it — I had to put my other hand over my mouth to keep from either blubbering like a baby or lunging over to kiss her. In the dark while I lay there and shook, Seong’s fingers traced serpentine courses up my forearm, spiralled their way to the center of my palm, rode up to mate themselves each to my matching one — then contracted to a point right at my wrist, where her fingertips flowered open, then closed, then open, then closed.

“So,” she said, “we are dating now? Yes?”

“Uh-huh,” I managed to squeak through the fingers I’d put across my lips.

“Good.” Her fingertips continued to spider open and shut upon my skin — now moving up into my palm to pulse there, now descending to write tingling circles along my arm. “It relieves me, at last, that I am no longer a bi-virgin.”

I laughed, which thankfully broke me loose from those overwhelming emotions.”Me too, but I’m not sure we can call our bi-cherries popped before we actually have sex, can we?”

I thought I was being funny, but Seong’s fingers stopped dead in mid-stroke along each side of my wrist. Her breathing stopped too — for just a second — before she spoke.

“This doesn’t feel like making love to you?”

I found my eyes blinking really fast all of a sudden. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears.

“Wow. Oh my god, Seong, wow.”

She let her breath out again, and her hand returned to its sweeps and soft windings.

“I was scared again for a moment,” she said. “I thought I’d misunderstood where we lay.”

“No, you were right,” I said, amazed at how true it was. Her fingers slid into place parallel to mine, then her hand lifted at the wrist until only our fingertips touched. “I just would have called this foreplay until you said that.”

“No…” Her wrist tipped back and forth, rotating the intricate whorls of her prints so lightly their textures rang line by line against a million sensitive nerves through which I felt them. “… ‘foreplay’ would require something to come after it. This is all we are doing tonight.”

I had just started to shift my hand in time to hers when my brain caught up to those words and said, What?

“What?” my mouth echoed, like it was on a half-second delay.

“You know my rule about sex.”

“Uh… yes, but… seriously?” She’s got to be joking. “No sex on the first date?”

“Yes.” Pinkie, ring finger, middle finger, thumb — she lifted each one up, then drew the point of her index finger down along mine, joint by joint. “I could break my own rule with someone who deserved it the way you do. But Mother also has a rule — no sex in the house on days of the month divisible by seven.”

Right. Sure. Rule Seven that she thought she’d better warn Seong to follow. Damn, I guess Mrs. Song caught a vibe I didn’t know we were giving off.

“That’s an oddly specific and arbitrary seeming rule to have,” I said.

“Yes. You have to love that about Mother, don’t you?”

“Haha, I guess I do.”

Her finger curled in on itself. I felt the flat of her nail visit each of the long bones in my palm where they met the creased roots of my fingers.

“I could break my own rule, by itself. And I could break my mother’s rule, out of passion. She would forgive that. But to break them both at once feels… unlucky.”

“Okay,” I said, starting again to move my hand with hers. “Only I’m confused. I thought we were already having sex, according to you.”

“Making love.”

“Now who’s quibbling over syntax?” That made her laugh. “Anyway, point is, that spot on my wrist where you just put your fingertips is really buying the idea that we’re totally going at it right now.”

Another laugh. It felt like a gift, to be able to make her do that so easily.

“Like you, Mother wouldn’t consider this sex.” As she spoke, I brought my fingers up in the shape of a cup. Her hand closed and rolled within it. “I am skirting the edge of many definitions and restrictions at the moment, I know. But it feels right.”

“It does feel right. You’re so fucking weird, Seong.”

Another laugh, giving me the same rush as if I’d found the richest vein in a goldmine.

“I enjoy your compliments,” she said.

Our hands flowed together like a spill of honey.

“You know,” I said, playing now, not really making any argument at all, “technically, we didn’t go on an actual date tonight. So if we did more than this, you’d only be breaking your mom’s rule, not your own.”

“I do not feel in technicalities.”

“Well then… kissing doesn’t count as sex, does it?”

“The way I would do it to you right now? Yes. Absolutely.”

A clarity in her voice seeped into me, into my belly and my thighs. I might as well have lowered myself into some steaming, thickly mineralized hot spring.

“You’re no fun,” I complained. “And what you’re doing with your hand there is making me so horny.”

“I am fun. You can touch yourself if you need to. I’d like that.”

Before I could even think, the fingers of my free hand slid down my stomach and tried to slip beneath my panties’ waistband. I pretty much barely stopped them in time.

“I think… I should wait,” I said. Her fingers continued patiently illuminating volumes of poetry across my skin. She didn’t ask me anything, but I still felt I had to explain. “I don’t want the first time I come with you to be just me. I want to be able to make you come too.”

“My sweet little Sea,” she said, with a sigh that was part laugh and part worship. “You have given me so many orgasms. This would be entirely fair.”

“Oh, would it, now,” I replied. “So you’ve been masturbating over me quite a while, hmm?”

“Since the second night after we met.”

A little thrill ran through me at that, which she must have felt through the pressure of our palms together. “Well,” I said, “at least it wasn’t the first night.”

“I have that rule, remember?”

“Haha, right.”

More handsing. I let my fingers tangle up in hers, then tickle their way free until only our thumbs touched, like figure-skaters holding each other one-handed while their bodies circled the single point of their connection.

“So…” she asked after a bit, “where is your other hand right now?”

“I think I still want to wait.”

“Good.”Her voice had a satisfied tone to it. “I’d like that, too.”

The heat between my legs complained about not getting its way, but that confirmation from Seong shored up any doubts about the decision. I lay there a while feeling my underwear get damp as her hand and mine explored each other’s contours, softnesses, solidities.

“I guess I’ll have to find something else to call you besides ‘S,'” I said after a bit. “It sounds really lame now that I know you’re saying ‘Sea.'”