My goodness, but it's fun to write about Natalie Cross! I've done other stories with the scheming Natalie, though I haven't published most of them because they're too dark. But I'm submitting this on a dare, in a category I've never really thought about, and as part of the Valentine's Contest no less! Make sure you read all the excellent entries and vote on your favorites.
* * *
"Man, I'm wicked bored." I batted aimlessly at the buttons on the sleek little black remote, forcing the TV through the same seven hundred goddamn channels I'd been shuffling through over the past five hours or so. "Bored as fuck," I added unnecessarily.
A spiteful glance from the other end of the couch, my sister doing her nails, her eyes rolling like ball bearings. She paused a moment, those big dark eyes of hers boring into me. Christ, she sure can use those eyes. "All the porn starts on channel 528," she pointed out with her usual razor-snipped voice.
Please. What, did she think I didn't know that? She'd only moved back in a couple weeks ago; I'd never left. I wondered, not for the first time, whether Mom and Dad knew I'd been accessing the porn. Times had changed; long gone were the nudie magazine stashes when I was a kid, then the secret DVD freeze-frames of the sex scenes from
The Name of the Rose
, where Christian Slater is getting fucked by that weird Italian peasant bitch. I'd gotten lots of enjoyment out of that as a kid; it was one of the only movies Dad had with a sex scene. I should be able to get my whacking material from the internet, of course, but these days I can't afford a decent data plan for my phone, and my tablet came from work. Too risky.
So, yeah. Back to Dad's TV. The more things change... I was sitting these days in the same room, jerking it to my Dad's fucking TV, just like middle school. A different TV, obviously: newer, bigger, with a sharper picture. But in a way, I was still that same pimple-ridden kid, still splattering myself in his den.
That precise little voice came back from the other end of the couch: Natalie wasn't done talking, apparently. "I'm glad he went for the 70-inch, instead of the 65. Pornstar dicks look hot in HD." She hadn't looked up from her nails, and I sighed. It was a very, very Natalie-esque comment. "Bigger's always better," she mused.
"You're a sick little bitch, Natalie." I didn't mean it as an insult, though, not really. Natalie Cross is many things, but above all she's honest. You know exactly what you get with her, no bullshit. I tried to be the same way around her; it seemed safest. She could be dangerous if she got pissed at you.
"What?" She shrugged, bony shoulders under her long thin shirt. "Size matters, brother dear, no matter what the girls are always telling you."
"Fuck you," I advised, but again I didn't mean it. She was annoying, but I'll admit it was kind of weirdly fun to have her around again. If nothing else, it gave my parents another target for their pitiful little whiny moans, the ones that went like this:
Oh, Bart, why don't you get a decent job? Why can't you move out and get a place of your own? Why can't you go back to college?
Shit. Like it wasn't bad enough they'd saddled me with a name like Bartholomew; now they were bitching about my life choices?
It all rang a little hollow, since they never did kick me out. I knew my parents were pussies when they let me stay there, rent-free, for years. Now I had Natalie to deflect some of the disappointment, and in spades too: twenty-two, and now out of a job for fucking her boss' husband. Again; she'd done the same thing before, down at Stacey's Hairworks, but Mom and Dad didn't know about that one. They just knew she'd left there, and that the place had been firebombed a week later. The cops had been around. The parentals had to assume she'd done it, but they weren't going to stand up to her either. They'd been skittish around her ever since the DUI, what, three years ago? So yeah, I was living large now that Natalie was around to soak up all the parental shame.
But there was something else. Natalie and I, we've always been similar. Not that I've thrown Molotov cocktails through a hair-salon window while coked out of my skull, mind, but I'm talking about a deeper level. We sort of see the world the same way. She's like a female version of me, which only freaks me out because our sister Nicole is so different.
"I overheard Mom and Dad the other day," Nat was saying. It would have sounded casual, but she never did anything casually. She was sitting now with her slender legs drawn up beneath her whiplike body, studying her nails, and even in faded tights and an old shirt she still had that same drab, lazy sexiness she'd always had. It wasn't something I'd ever been able to ignore. Sure, she was my sister, but ever since she'd turned eighteen all my friends had spent all their time telling me they wanted to fuck her. So I'd kind of had to face reality: Natalie was a sexpot. She scowled at some brushmarks she'd left on her thumbnail. "They're pissed about your love life."
I shrugged, stabbing viciously at the remote. "
I'm
pissed about my love life." I was, too. I finally had a girlfriend, a really good one, one that could help me get ahead, but what was the use? It was Valentine's Day, and she was someplace else, while I sat here on a couch with my sister. I frowned. "What did they say?"
She smiled thinly at me. It's hard to say why my friends still thought she was such a smokeshow. I mean, she's pretty and all, but she'd been a lot hotter a few years ago. "Something about how she's so cute, and sweet, and how she smells really nice." She paused. "I don't want to meet her, if all that shit's true. She sounds uninteresting."
"She's going to be a doctor," I marveled. I still couldn't believe I was dating a medical student.
Natalie scowled. "Is she Indian or Chinese?"
"Jesus, you racist bitch." She was laughing, that mocking laugh that seemed to be her default response to just about everything. "No wonder people don't like you." A hockey game fizzled into life onscreen. "Ah. Excellent." Not really; the score was 6-2. This game would hold my interest for three minutes, maybe four. I sighed and threw the remote across the couch at Natalie. "Here. You drive." As an afterthought, I added, "She's Korean. Or Japanese." I really didn't know. But she was cute, and sweet, and she smelled nice, and she could afford to buy me dinner. No good in bed, though.
"Wow. She's like a one-woman United Nations." Natalie looked down at the remote as if it had offended her. "I just did my nails, moron. I can't touch that thing for another five minutes, at least." She tossed her head sideways toward the TV. "Seriously, just put on porn. You're going to do it later, anyway."
I lolled my head back, amused. "They're right upstairs, Nat."
"Come on. They're old." She settled into the cushion, her hands raised carefully. "They'll be asleep by now. Besides, you're twenty-five. They know you're not a virgin." She blinked. "Don't they?"
I smirked at her, more than a little nastily. "We're not all like you, Nat. We don't all whore ourselves around the neighborhood, getting fired and shit." She stuck her tongue out at me, an old old gesture of hers, and then went for an even older one as she curled four fingers carefully, leaving just the middle one up in the air. "Cute."
"Fuck you." She sniffed. "I guess they might think you're a virgin, after all," she mused. "I mean, it's Valentine's and your woman's not putting out for you? What's up with that shit?"
Now it was my turn. "Fuck you, too. I'm not the only one sitting here watching hockey and waiting for some privacy so I can whack it." She knew I did it; sex wasn't the kind of thing Natalie and I were squeamish about. That's why we kept Nicole around, so that we could shock her. Natalie sniffed and tossed her short dark hair.
"Don't fool yourself. If I wanted to get off, I'd get off. And I don't give a shit who's in the room, either." I glanced over, sure she was telling the truth. Natalie had an unfortunate history of public sex, though I'd never really seen any of it. People still told the story of that Halloween party where she'd ended up with one of the guests upstairs, getting loudly banged. I hadn't noticed, of course; I'd had two of her friends bouncing on my cock that night. But she'd tried to suck his dick in the living room first, according to my boy Jeff, and plenty of people had seen that.
So I had no doubt she meant what she said. But she needed to be mocked; it was my brotherly duty. "Dream on, Nat. Although, if you ask nicely, I'd be happy to leave so that you can do your business.
She looked at me squarely with a funny smirk, and then she blew casually on her nails. She buffed them against the shirt where it crossed her tits. "Well," she said quietly, elaborate in her carelessness, "since my nails are dry now..." She looked over at me then with a curiously dead expression in her eyes, the usual Natalie look of challenge mixed with indifference, and then she threw one foot up over the back of the couch with the other one planted on Mom's beige carpet. With her legs splayed out that way, she settled her head against the armrest and reached languidly down to push a finger and her tights into her overused little crevice of a pussy.
She didn't even have to look. She knew precisely where it would be, the little pervert.
I raised an eyebrow. This kind of thing was vintage Natalie; she'd always enjoyed using her body to get a rise out of people, and I was no exception. I'd lost count of the number of times she'd flashed her skinny bare ass at me, often accompanied by two middle fingers and, sometimes, by a friend or two. I usually just came back with a one-liner, though she'd never tried this particular move before. She stared me down, her finger lazy as it pushed into her, and I made myself look for effect, a long pause while I thought of the right response.
Ah. I had it.
"Natalie," I drawled, raising my eyes back to hers, "you could at least have worn panties, you dirty little skank."