The Legend of the Ditto Twins (23 page)

I nodded.
I looked at Clark. He nodded.

"I
thought so. Well, gentlemen, let me tell you, there's nothing like fucking.
Nothing on God's green earth. Anyway, on graduation night, we decided it was
high time we found out what all the shouting was about. The problem was who'd
go first. We flipped a coin. No, not a coin—one of our swimming medals.
Yeah..." He chuckled. "I lost—or won—depending on how you look at it.
Jay fucked the
bejesus
out of me."

"Did
it hurt?" I asked before I realized I'd said it.

"Like
a motherfucker—for about two minutes. But by God, I was bound and determined
not to let him know, bound and determined to give him the ride of his life,
bound and determined to make the magic perfect. Within minutes, the pain was
gone, and I was on the same fuckin cloud he was. Talk about bonding! And when
we shifted gears... same fuckin thing all over again. I could see, clear as
day, this was gonna be the way we'd spend the rest of our life."

"Then
why's he in Berlin?" I asked.

"Good
question. Good fuckin question. A week after graduation, Jay and I were out in
the garage, supposedly simonizing the Corvette, but actually fucking our brains
out, when we looked up to see our big sister standing there, staring at us like
she was facing the Apocalypse."

"Mom,"
we gasped in unison.

"I've
only got one fuckin sister."

"Oh,
my God. What..."

"...did
you do?"

Clay's
magical laugh again. "Not a damned thing. Didn't move. Jay balls deep in
my ass, me with my heels to heaven. Didn't even try to cover up or run. Just
froze. But not our big sister. She was all business. She shook a finger at us
as if she was scolding a pair of puppies who'd pissed on her carpet." He
mimicked her. "'For shame!' Go get cleaned up. Now. Get dressed. Move.
We'll discuss this later.' But she never mentioned it again."

"Sounds
like Mom," I said.

"Hasn't
changed in forty years. Y'know, she'd always mothered us, right from the start.
Our own Mama always had other things to do. Oh, yes, Sissy learned to change
our diapers at a very early age, nursed us through whooping cough and measles,
practically lived at the hospital after the car accident."

"What
car accident? She never told us about..."

"A
lot of things she never told you. Yeah, Jay and I were biking home from the
movies one afternoon. A drunk driver ran a red light and fuckin' took us out.
We went flying, our bikes didn't. Mangled beyond repair." He chuckled.
"We survived. And recuperated and went on with our lives. Still, that
brush with death scared the hell out of me. But not Jay. He bounced back and
was ready to pick up right where we'd left off. I wasn't. See, we should have
been killed instantly. I kept wondering, why we hadn't been."

"It
was a natural reaction, don't you think?" I said.

Clay
shrugged. "That was when your mother began her campaign. Devious bitch. I
was so fuckin vulnerable. She kept telling me there must have been a reason God
spared me. Kept telling me I had to make something of my life. Kept fixing me
up with dates. It wasn't long before I'd touched a woman's breast for the first
time. It was an interesting change of pace." He smiled guiltily. "Jay
was closer to the far end of the Kinsey scale, I was closer to the middle, I
guess. Anyway, he put up with my shit for a year. Waited for me. And waited.
Till one day he just got on a plane, and I didn't hear from him for another
whole fuckin' year. One day, a letter came, asking me to join him in
Berlin."

"Did
you go?" I asked.

Clay
shook his head. "By that time, your mother had convinced me that I was
'normal,' that my adolescent fling with Jay had just been a fuckin' aberration.
Misguided brotherly love. A phase. A blip." He chuckled bitterly.
"The love of my life was a fuckin blip? Jesus!" He shook his head.
"Then I knocked up Lily's mother. And... the years passed."

I got up
off the concrete and went over to sit by Clark. He didn't move away, but he
didn't touch me.

"Don't
fuck up like I did. Don't let the gay thing destroy you. Don't let the brother
thing destroy you. Don't let Sissy destroy you. Or you'll regret it the rest of
your life. What you've got, unless I miss my guess, is a lot more important
than what the
fuckin
' neighbors' say!!"

I nodded.
Clark didn't.

"You
know, when I was in the hospital a year ago, I had a lot of time to think. And you
know what I thought about most? That car accident. Was it really a warning?
Same with the heart attack. Was that really a warning, too? Or
maybe..
. was it
a second chance? Y'know, we should both be six feet under by now. But we're
not."

"'We'?"

Clay took
a piece of stationery from his wallet and carefully unfolded it. "This is
a letter I got from some lawyer in Berlin a year ago. Jay had a coronary the
same day I did."

After dinner,
I took a shower. Clark didn't join me. But when I came back into the bedroom, a
towel wrapped around my waist, he was sitting on the bed, totally naked. As if
the last few days had never happened, he looked up.

"You're
gonna fuck me tonight, aren't you?" His words were completely
matter-of-fact, hardly a question at all.

I nodded
and dropped the towel. "And you're going to fuck me."

After a
long, tender kiss, I could barely speak. "I was so scared you
'd
never let me touch you again."

My brother
shrugged. "I tried. But... I'd rather be in love
with
you than in love
without
you. I'm
so sorry. Oh, Mark, I'm so sorry."

"Ditto."
I began to run my fingertips over his flesh, as if to reassure myself that he
was actually back. "What are we gonna do?"

"Keep
going. Just like always."

"Thank
God."

Reflexively,
we reached for each other's erection, not so much as an in
vitation to foreplay but as assurance that things were back
to normal, at least normal for us.

"Only...
no one must ever know." Clark was very firm.

"Clay
and Lily already do."

"That's
okay, they're family. But no one else. You've got to trust me on this one. We
really could be arrested."

I grinned
with relief. "Do you think they'd let us share the same cell?"

"Dammit,
Mark, be serious! I'm not kidding. Let's just accept the fact that we're
perverts—but only for each other."

"Are
you sure you're not being paranoid?"

"Look
at this." He produced a newspaper open to the entertainment page.
"Guess what? The Hudson Twins' toothpaste contract has been
cancelled."

"No
shit!"

He
pointed. "A whole article about it. And a picture."

I took
the paper from him. "Does it say why?"

He shook
his head. "No, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it
out."

"But...
we're not famous. Nobody cares what we do."

"Dad
and Mom do. If they ever..." He groaned. "Mark, it'd kill Dad. Mom,
too, probably."

"Nah."
I tossed the paper aside. "She'd just start trying to fix us up with every
girl in town."

"That's
not funny."

"No,
it isn't." Now it was my turn to be firm. "Look what she did to Clay
and Jay. She won't be dog happy till she marries one of us off and gets herself
a grandchild. Well, she's not gonna do that to me. I'm not Clay. I've never
been the least bit into boobs."

"Me
either. I just couldn't figure out why I wasn't hot for boobs. That's when... I
began to realize I was gay."

I winced.
"You really think you are?"

Clark
nodded. "And so are you." His familiar grin lit up his face.
"Here, let me prove it to you."

We reached
our first simultaneous orgasm of the evening manually. It was almost as
good—and better in some ways, because of the hiatus—than the very first time.

"You're
probably right," I admitted as we lay there afterwards. "We're sure
as hell not straight."

Clark
sighed. "I guess now we'll never be models."

"Models?
What are you talking about?"

"Remember
that day we were gonna run away from home?" He poked me gently.

"Oh,
yeah. Well, I guess if you're a pervert, it's just too dangerous to be
famous." I snickered. "Unless we become porn stars."

Clark
snorted. "Shit. That'd give the folks a pretty good idea of what we do in
bed, wouldn't it?"

"Pretty
much," I giggled.

"Damn
shame. We'd be... breathtaking."

"Legendary.
Come here!" I pulled him close.

We
reached our second simultaneous orgasm of the evening orally. It was, if I do
say so myself, better than the one half an hour earlier. While we were
recuperating, it was Clark who finally broke the silence.

"We're
not gonna flip a coin, are we?"

I shook
my head. "Let's just let things happen. It doesn't really matter to me who
goes first. Does it to you?"

Now it
was my brother’s turn to shake his head. "I want you inside me. I want me
inside of you."

We
snuffed out our cigarettes and melted together. The kissing was transcendental,
the manual manipulation more so. Soon, we found our mouths full of each other
and
rockhard
enough to forget we had already come
twice in the last hour. It wasn't long before we were urging our adventurous
tongues from dicks to balls to sphincters. Anilingus seemed as natural as
everything else we'd done. But it was also a truly amazing first for us, and
within seconds we both suddenly stopped.

"Close.
Very close," I whispered.

"Me,
too. Better..."

“...slow
down or we'll..."

“...never
get to the fucking."

"Cigarette?"

Still
lying in a sixty-nine position, we stopped to have another Marlboro but
continued fondling each other. As we smoked and chatted, mostly about the
future, our fingers began to move south and explore each other's one last
virgin orifice. Our conversation continued as casually as if we were fully
clothed, except for an occasional grunt, moan, or groan. But when I leaned over
him to put out my cigarette, he shifted slightly, lifted his legs, and wrapped
them around the small of my back. I pivoted slightly, and began to kiss him.
Sometime during that first kiss, I penetrated him.

I watched
him as it happened. As I eased into Clark, an inch at a time, his big blue eyes
floated from pain to amazement to comfort to ecstasy. Soon he was pulling me
into him until I could go no deeper, till I was as much a part of him as I
could ever be. For the first time I truly understood what people meant when
they described fucking as the act of becoming one person. Anyway, that's the
way it was with us. At last. Clark and I had become a single entity again, for
the first time since the original egg split prenatally.