Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts (18 page)

Jacob’s gotten to his feet.

“What?” I say. “Why’d you do that?”

“Nothing.” He takes a step back. “It’s late. I’m going to take off.” Behind him, the scene on the TV changes. The main guy is working out at a gym now, straining to lift more weight than seems physically possible; he’s swearing as he strains to raise the barbell, but the curse words are bleeped out with such deliberate clumsiness that every
fuck
is emphasized rather than obscured.

My eyes flit back and forth from the screen to Jacob’s face, which looks slightly sinister in the flickering TV light.

He says “bye” and turns.

“Wait, why are you going?” I jump up and stumble over my own feet. I grab onto the sofa arm to steady myself. “The show’s just getting good.”

“I think I can manage to tear myself away. Don’t forget to check in on your dad now and then.”

“Wait. A second ago, you were settling in to watch TV with me. What happened?”

He averts his face. “Nothing.”

“He says ‘nothing,’ but he doesn’t mean it.”

A pause, then, “You know. You deliberately say things…” He trails off. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry I said Dad wasn’t your father. I was just joking.” But the apology seems absurd—Dad
isn’t
his father.

 Plus it just seems to annoy him more. “Really, Keats? That was a joke? Which part was supposed to be funny? The part about how my own father’s dead or the part about how I’m so pathetic and needy that I’m trying to steal yours?”

“I’m sorry,” I say again. I want to get him to turn his face back toward me, to smile his good ol’ Jacob smile at me the way he always does and not be so angry. I don’t like having Jacob angry at me. It feels wrong. I’m allowed to be annoyed at him and to needle him and bug him and ignore him, but he has to be nice to me. That’s just how it works with us. “I had too much wine—I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

“It’s not just tonight. You say stuff like that all the time. For some reason you seem to think it’s okay to say really mean things to me. I know you get tense around your family, so I try to give you the benefit of the doubt most of the time, but tonight”—he gestures forlornly at the empty living room—“your family’s not even here.”

“I know.” I move closer to him so I can put a consoling hand on his arm. “And you’re right: I do say mean things to you sometimes. I don’t know why.”

Even with his face turned away from me, I can see a corner of his mouth. It tugs upward in a failed attempt at a smile. “I guess I just annoy you.”

I’m horrified by the very idea. Jacob doesn’t annoy me. He couldn’t annoy anyone. I slide my hand up his arm to reassure him. “No, you don’t. I swear you don’t. You don’t annoy me. I like you, Jacob. I always have.” And just to prove my point, I rise up on tiptoe and give him a friendly little kiss on his cheek.

He doesn’t react, and I’m worried he didn’t feel it so I repeat the kiss, only a little closer to that visible corner of his mouth. Then I say, “I just like to tease you, that’s all.” It makes sense to me. Siblings tease each other, right? And Jacob and I have this brother/sister thing going on. His head rises ever so slightly, and that allows me to press my lips right on the edge of his mouth, where his lips carve into his cheeks.

 “Keats,” he says hoarsely, only it comes out as more of a question, more like “Keats?”

I make a soothing noise and slide my hand up along his shoulder. He’s so much slighter than Tom. Tom works out a lot, and his shoulders are so wide they feel like they go on forever when I try to reach around them. But Jacob’s thin, and my arm easily twines around his other shoulder.

“I don’t want you to feel bad,” I say. “Or to be mad at me.”

I can always get Jacob to do what I want him to do. He scolds me sometimes and gets frustrated, but in the end he always does pretty much what I want. And right now I want him not to feel bad and also to like me again.

I press myself against his arm and rise up to give him another sisterly peck. Right before I do, he shifts a little toward me like he’s about to say something, and that makes the kiss land almost on the center of his mouth.

“What are you doing?” he whispers in that same low, guttural voice. I can’t read his expression. It’s too dark in the room, and I’m having trouble focusing my eyes, and anyway he won’t really look at me.

“I’m just trying to make you feel better,” I explain. “It’s the least you can do for someone when you hurt their feelings. Hurt his feelings. That’s what my mother would say. She corrects people’s grammar all the time. Not yours so much, though—you don’t make grammatical mistakes. I really admire that about you.” Just to prove how much I admire that, I kiss him on the lips again lightly. “I…Really…Do…” I punctuate each word with another little kiss.

It’s kind of hypnotizing kissing him like that, and it’s not like he’s moving away or pushing me off or anything. He’s just letting me do it.

He shakes his head silently, warily, but he still doesn’t pull away.

“Now come on back over here,” I say and kind of tug him by the waist back toward the sofa. “You’ve had too much wine and shouldn’t drive yet.”

“
I’ve
had too much wine?” he says, but he lets me drag him back. I reach the sofa and pull him down with me so we fall in a tangle on the sofa together. We wriggle until we’re side by side, and then I curl up against him again, only even closer this time, my arms going back around his shoulders, my face right next to his.

“Look,” I say, nodding toward the TV. “They’re at the beach. Who goes to the beach at night?” He obediently watches the show, and I steal the opportunity to nip gently at his ear. You know. In fun. Playfully. Because we’re pals.

His next breath is more of a shudder.

The woman and the guy on the reality show start making out again.

“They look like they’re having a good time,” I point out and flick my tongue lightly at the top of his ear. “I guess she likes him better than she likes the other guy. She seems to.”

“I think,” Jacob says in a very low voice, “that he should get as far away from her as he can. She’s trouble.”

“You are an enemy to love.” I can feel warmth coming off of his neck, so I nuzzle down into it. In a friendly way.

Something snaps in Jacob. He rears up in his seat and turns on me, and all of a sudden, he’s pushing me down on the sofa, and his weight is falling on top of me, his mouth is searching out mine, his hands are grabbing my arms and pinning them up over my head, and I can’t tell if he’s angry or not. All I know is that I’m aroused, and he’s aroused, and I don’t really think of him like he’s a brother, not really at all, not anymore.

11.

I
’m twenty-five years old. I’ve only ever slept with one man, which maybe isn’t such a remarkable fact. Lots of twenty-five-year-old girls have probably only slept with one guy.

Well, some anyway.

But I’ve also only ever kissed one guy on the lips.

Only one guy’s hand has ever crept under my top, down my jeans, cupped me anywhere, nestled under my hair, held my jaw and pulled my mouth open to his, stroked me, touched me, entered me, felt me, known me.

Until now.

I think about that briefly, about how the only other guy who’s ever touched me is Tom, the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with, but the transient
Should I think about this more?
moment quickly disappears in a rush of other sensations. Jacob feels so foreign on top of me, so new and different. It’s exciting. I want to think about
that
. I’m wild with curiosity, each new type of contact making me wonder what the next will feel like.

Tom’s lips are thick. When he kisses me, I feel like my mouth is losing some kind of war with his. He sucks at my lips, absorbs them, surrounds them. Jacob’s kisses are completely different. As wild as his sudden attack on me was, the kisses that follow are gentle and tentative. I feel like I should give him some encouragement, so I tongue his mouth open, and that seems to give him the confidence to use his own tongue, which I like, so I respond with even more enthusiasm…and things just keep building from there.

I’m warm with Jacob on top of me, but his weight—so much less than Tom’s—isn’t nearly so heavy as the alcoholic lethargy that’s making my eyelids droop and my limbs swoon into the sofa. My arms, my legs, my neck, my feet, my captive hands—they’re all quiet for now, but my mouth is wide awake, and my breasts and hips are eagerly arching up toward him. I don’t feel like I’m in control of those parts of my body. They’re doing what they want.

I’m not sure I’m in control of anything at this moment. Maybe I started this, but now Jacob’s taken the lead, and he’s surprisingly strong for someone so slender. He’s still got my arms pinned, and his legs are lying along the whole length of mine so I can’t move those, either.

I’m fine not being in control. I like it.

He rises up a fraction of an inch and then lets his thighs settle back on me; my hips rise up to grind against his, and even though we both still have our jeans on, he groans. It’s an animalistic sound, not consciously formed, not knowingly uttered. The sound of it unhinges me, and I make my own involuntary noise, low in my throat.

It’s like we’re having a dialogue on some basic, animalistic level, and it’s almost funny—it
is
funny—but I have no desire to laugh, not when he’s so deathly earnest, not when I’m so desperately aroused.

He finally releases my arms and rolls sideways—but only so he can unbutton my top. I leave my arms where they are, like I’m being held up by an invisible mugger. Jacob shoves aside the fabric of my now-unbuttoned shirt and buries his face in my chest, rubbing his cheeks and mouth across and then down. The soft cups of my demi bra put up a poor defense, easily yielding to his inquisitive nose, his seeking tongue, his hungry lips. I shudder, arch my back, close my eyes, give over to the pleasure his mouth is giving me.

Then he stops. I open my eyes. He’s hovering, up on his elbow, gazing at me, eyes dark and unfocused. “Keats,” he says in that strange, unfamiliar voice. “What do you want?”

I don’t exactly understand the question. I think it’s pretty clear what I want at this particular moment, but since he seems confused, I say soothingly, “ ’S okay. I have an IUD.”

The male libido is a thing of mystery to me, and even though I don’t think I’ve said anything particularly seductive, Jacob gives another helpless groan and lowers himself back onto me, covering my mouth with his.

I finally lower my arms, but only so I can wrap them tightly around his body. My legs reach up around him, too, and we roll back and forth for a minute like that, our bodies so tight against each other that I can feel the sharp bones at his hips and the hardness between them.

Then he takes his mouth away from mine, lifts his body up, pulls blindly at his belt and button and zipper. Underneath him, I’m squirming, doing the same thing (minus the belt, I don’t wear one) trying to shimmy my jeans down, only he’s in the way—we’re both in each other’s way, the sofa’s too small for us to get undressed there—so he rolls completely off of me and onto his feet for a moment and steps out of his pants while I stay on the sofa and shove mine the rest of the way off.

In the dim light, I get a quick glance at him, just enough to see how swollen and excited he is—which makes me breathe in sharply—and then he’s back on top of me. I wonder if he snuck a peek when I did and what he thought and feel a very brief moment of fear that my stomach’s too round, my legs too pale, my hips too wide—but there’s nothing turned off about the way he’s gripping my shoulders, nudging my knees aside, pressing his hot mouth against mine, and burying himself deep inside of me with a long, shuddering sigh.

* * *

I’m so excited that I come almost instantly. And then I come again. The violence of his thrusts, the feel of him inside of me, the way his body aligns with mine—the newness of it all arouses me like nothing has in the past few years, not since the early months right after I lost my virginity and could trace the growth of my pleasure every time Tom and I had sex—pleasure tinged with wonder at the strange novelty of it all.

And now it’s new and wondrous again.

I hope my dad is asleep because I can’t seem to control the noises I’m making. Jacob is quieter than I am, his face closed and intense. At the end, he does cry out, but it’s a muted, careful cry. Still, the sound of it gives me one last whole-body thrill. I arch up into his final thrust, and then we both collapse down, his weight on mine.

We catch our breath like that, but after a minute or two, he shifts sideways, slipping out of me. He burrows his head into the space next to mine but doesn’t say anything. His arm is across my exposed chest, his bare legs curled up across mine.

I don’t say anything, either, content just to lie there, not moving. When I close my eyes, I feel the sofa tilt and spin under me.

Jacob murmurs something I don’t catch. I make a
huh?
sound, but he doesn’t repeat it and so I just smile politely, my eyes still closed. My head reels. I focus on the spinning sensation for a while. My body feels spent in a good way, floaty and on fire at the same time. I know I should probably run to the bathroom and clean myself up, but Jacob’s legs are across mine, and that makes it hard to move, so I sleepily give in to the inertia.

Maybe I doze. Maybe I’m just drifting. It’s hard to know. Some time definitely passes. I don’t think either of us is actually asleep, but we’re lying there quietly, our breathing regular, our thoughts taking their own paths.

I start to feel uncomfortable.

At first I think it’s a physical thing, and I squirm, trying to find a better position. Jacob says, “Sorry.” He wiggles around until he can slide off the sofa and onto his feet. He reaches for his pants. I avert my eyes and pull a cushion over my lap and drag the pieces of my shirt back over my chest.

“Be right back,” he says and heads toward the hallway. To use the bathroom, I assume. Or maybe to check on my dad. That would be like him.

I have the sofa to myself. I move around, trying to get more comfortable. I can’t find a position that works. The uncomfortable feeling grows.