This story is the third part of my A Long Time Coming series. As it is, this story is parallel to the first two so you don't need to be familiar with them before reading this. I am planning future installments where both plotlines converge.
Particular thanks to those readers who took the time to write kind words in the comments to the earlier stories. The requests for this plotline have been heard so I bumped this one up in the series queue.
We must have been a sight, walking down the concourse in the airport. A blonde, curvy, goth girl walking alongside a tall, muscular, sun worshipper making their way to catch their flight.
My name is Simone Bowman. I am eighteen years old, a freshman at Arizona State, and the lead singer of a goth metal band just on the verge of going pro. I was dressed in a simple little black dress and a black half jacket contrasting with my pale skin. It was simple because Goth and TSA scanners do not get along. The palette of my make up was just a shade too dark for convention. My hair was its natural honey blonde since I had decided to wash out the temporary color I was using out of respect for my grandmother's funeral earlier that day.
Robbie was the boy walking next to me. He looked like a bronzed god compared to the alabaster I worked hard to maintain. He was wearing one of his Phoenix YMCA Lifeguard t-shirts and blue jeans. Neither did anything to conceal the broad shoulders and narrow waist he had earned from hundreds of miles swum in his years of competitive swimming.
An idea occurred to me then. I reached out and took his hand in mine. He looked at me a little surprised, but smiled and gave a squeeze in return. If he was surprised at that...
A few steps later I stopped. I didn't let go of his hand so he stopped too. He turned to look at me. I grinned at him evilly as I stepped into him, wrapped my arms around his shoulders, pulled his face to mine, and kissed him passionately. He was surprised for a second, then started to kiss me back.
The thing about Robbie was that he prided himself on thinking quickly, reacting with exactly the right course of action at a moment's notice. It took his brain a few seconds to catch up this time, seconds I very thoroughly enjoyed. Too bad he eventually arrived at the stick-in-the-mud option.
"Simone, what the hell are you doing?" he asked quietly.
"What?" I asked innocently, not releasing my arms from around his shoulders, "Who says a hot goth chick can't share a public display of affection with her jock boyfriend?" I leaned in to whisper the next part into his ear. "Especially in a place where no one knows he's her brother."
Another thing about Robbie was that he had one hell of a poker face. Nobody can read him, except for me and Mom. Yeah, yeah, I know, "twin telepathy". The real reason was that we had never kept secrets from one another, and I knew the whole catalog of what he was feeling compared to the tiny ticks he did let through. I had to pay attention for it to work, but compared to Robbie everyone else was an open book. Wasn't always fun, I figured out Mom was lying about Santa Claus when I was six. Okay, so I kept that one secret from him for a couple of years.
Anyway, being able to read Robbie was how I knew to prepare myself for him making the correct decision to kiss me again. And he did so thoroughly. I could not imagine the thrill of feeling his tongue dancing with mine ever fading.
"Get a fucking room, there are kids around here!" snapped some annoying busybody walking by. I didn't give a fuck that we were making a scene. Having the freedom to make a scene without it becoming a scandal was frankly intoxicating. We broke the kiss but stayed nose to nose and enjoyed a quiet laugh together. Then we continued our way to the gate with our arms around one another's waist.
I couldn't tell you exactly when I fell in love with my brother. Even as kids we never developed the type of adversarial relationship you hear about with other siblings. We were a gang of two all the way back.
You wouldn't know by looking at me now but I was painfully shy when I was little. What? Big bad goth metal singer was shy? Hell yes, and stage fright still threatened to take me down every time. I was the type of shy that drew bullies like bees to honey. Robbie, though, was always there to get in the face of anyone who tried to pick on me. He did so calmly, though. He never showed fear or anger, just the calm, "Leave her alone" spoken evenly at a conversational tone. Bullies didn't know what to make of him as he never gave anything back to them. Thank god we were always in the same grade or else I would have been defenseless at some very bad moments.
When we were five years old Robbie was in a bad car accident with our Dad. I remember racing into the hospital with Mom and finding a bandaged Robbie in the emergency room watching the doctors and nurses work. I remember him saying he needed to be calm and brave and Mom telling him that she was there and she would be calm and brave for him then. That was when he started crying and it had stuck with me since then just how much hurt he could hide behind his calmness. A lot of people mistake his calm as him not having emotions, but they are full of shit.
The last such instance of someone making that mistake was at the high school graduation party we were at just four months ago. Both Robbie and I had had brief relationships during high school. Nothing ever too serious. At the time I was unattached and he was dating Monica who decided that the party, in front of everyone, would be a good time to break up with him. She just laid it out publicly that she thought he was a robot for all the emotions he showed. To everyone else he was doing a fine impression of a robot, but I saw that little bulge at his jaw, and the tiny crease at the corner of his eye. That bitch had hurt my brother and I got in her face and let her have it.
"How fucking dare you do this to him in front of everyone?!" I screamed.
"Oh, I think it proves my point that Robbie the Robot needs his sister to come in and do the stunt emotions for him!"
"Not worth it, Simone," said Robbie. "And if you want some emotion from me, Monica, then I'll just say that you kiss as if your tongue is a dead fish and your breath is only marginally less foul. Let's go home, Simone."
That got a chorus of "Oh!" and "Damn!" and left Monica gaping like said dead fish. I was tremendously impressed with my brother right then.
We were almost out the door when Monica finally managed to come up with a return. "Bye, Jamie! Bye, Cersei! Have fun tonight!"
That weak reply only merited me turning around and giving her the double bird. It was far from the first time I'd heard a comment like that. I, and I imagined every set of boy/girl twins out there, had come to detest that show. These days everyone looks at you as if they're wondering if you're doing the dirty with your sibling.
The party had been big enough that we had had to park a block away. At one point Robbie quietly chuckled.
"You really let her have it back there," I said.
"So did you. Whatever happened to my shy little sister?"
"That wasn't Simone, that was Stage Bitch Lead Singer back there."
"No," he said, "that was the Simone
I
know, Stage Bitch couldn't do it unless you already had it."
He said that with an odd timbre in his voice. I asked him to stop under a street light. He turned and looked me in the eye. I gasped at what I saw and said we should get to the car.
We drove home in silence. What I saw in his eyes was something I hadn't realized I had wanted to see for years. When we arrived at our house he turned off the car and we sat in silence for a minute. I turned in my seat, bringing my left leg under so I could kneel on my seat. Neither of us said anything, we just leaned toward one another until our lips met and we kissed.
I don't know exactly when I had fallen in love with Robbie, but that was the moment when I knew that I was in love with him.
We were taking a red eye flight back home after the funeral. Grammy Jessica had died suddenly of a stroke two weeks before. We had gone out a week ago to help our Mom, Dana, arrange for the funeral and start packing up Grammy's belongings. Pops had died in a work accident five years previously, and I could tell that not having been there with Grammy ate Mom up some. It seemed like there a lot of things left unsaid between them. We visited Grammy and Pops only a couple of times a year since Mom and Dad had moved halfway across the country to Phoenix before we were born. I remembered one trip when Robbie and I were eleven when Mom and Grammy had an argument and we left early. We didn't go back for a whole year. I asked Mom what the argument was about a few times over the years but she refused to talk about it. Her brother David, Mom's twin if you could believe it, would be there to help her the next day and the rest of the week.
I should tell you about my Mom here. Her name is Dana, she's forty-one years old, and is about the best mother Robbie and I could have asked for. The first thing I remember about her were the beautiful lullabies she would sing to us. She was once a singer, years of lessons but eventually decided that she didn't want to dedicate her life to "maybe making it to the next level". She went with Dad when he got a job offer in Phoenix where she put her accounting degree (of all things) to use doing the books of music venues and bands.
Mom had held up strong for us when she had caught Dad cheating when we were ten. He had turned into a stranger over the year before. I knew he lied so many times to Mom, but I was too young to really understand what was happening. She filed for a divorce and told him to get out. Dad went crazy at that. He left at first but kept coming back to the house, pounding on the door, in the middle of the night, screaming obscenities. That was when we met Uncle David for the first time. He was taking a vacation from the Army and came to visit for a few days and "just so happened" to be there for one of Dad's visits. David stepped outside and spoke quietly with Dad. Dad started loud, quieted down, and eventually walked away. Whatever Uncle David said to Dad caused him to leave in a hurry and I haven't laid eyes on my father since. Good riddance.
Back in normal life, Mom was always singing along to the radio and at one point I just started singing along with her. When I was eight I asked for singing lessons, which given my near crippling shyness was a huge deal. Singing proved to be the key to my shell. Mom knew some coaches and got me lessons with Jane who's been my coach ever since. I wanted to sing like Mom did, which is very melodic with the ability to belt up to operatic projection. Like I said, Mom was good. And she was especially good in that she never went Stage Mommy, never acted like I was her second chance to be a star. Okay, there was the first time she heard me do a scream in a performance. I swear she would have leapt up and tackled me off that stage if Jane hadn't been there to hold her down and assure her that I was doing it safely.
Anyway, the unfortunate part of Mom is that she had always run her accounting business from home. By the time Robbie and I discovered that we wanted to be lovers we had already decided that living at home and driving to campus would be a good way to keep our debt down. Not that we would have been much more free on campus, plenty of our friends and classmates were going to the state university as well so we wouldn't be able to pull off that we weren't brother and sister for long. Where there had been the summer break, there was Mom at home, sometimes with clients in her office.
In short: we haven't had any privacy with which to consummate. Neither of us had had a good First Time. I wanted nothing more than to make love with Robbie, but it had to be making love for
our
first time. I would not have it be a hurried hump while Mom was out on an errand, not a cramped fuck in a car (a fuel efficient car just isn't going to cut it with Robbie being six-two).
Not that we haven't been intimate, stealing moments where we could to pleasure each other. My favorite was sucking him off while Mom had a client in her office. This singer at least could use her control of her throat for more than just melody. Hearing Robbie struggle to stay quiet while he burst into my mouth was sweet music to my ears, but I knew that hearing him scream my name for mercy would be even better.
