Epilogue

[Author's Note: This is the

epilogue

of an ongoing saga of a young woman uncovering the mystery of her family's past. This chapter contains

all

major spoilers

for those who have not read earlier chapters.

This chapter has

very little sex

, and is provided here as a "Thank you" for those dedicated readers who found themselves invested in Shannon's adventures and desire to know what happened to the characters.

Otherwise, please enjoy.]

Epilogue

Life was not exactly happily ever after, but no story ever truly is.

I slowly started to move my things in with my father and enrolled in a local college close to his condo. The summer was spent traveling back and forth between my mother's house and my father's condo, but like everything else I had planned the amount of time carefully to ensure that suspicions weren't raised. I suppose I had become quite the schemer in my own right.

After graduation, Andrew selected a university on the other side of the country from his parents. We had grown close during the previous months as he had helped me practice with various toys and dildos, but I think he got a little unnerved by my 'need' for ever-increasing sizes to penetrate me.

He never had any idea of my ultimate goal, of course, but he began to think that he wasn't good enough for me. I didn't know how to help him with his self-esteem issues, though, because he - correctly, as it turned out - concluded that he wouldn't be able to compete. The larger the insertion, the less confident he felt in his ability to satisfy me.

I felt like I owed him, though, and ultimately I did figure out a way to help him. The week before graduation, a girl in my class came up to me and asked if Andrew was my boyfriend. I didn't know her very well, as we didn't share any classes. When I told her that Andrew and I were friends with great benefits but that he didn't belong to me, she looked confused.

"Do you like him?" I asked, knowing full well what her answer would be.

She blushed. I leaned in conspiratorially. "He's an incredible lover," I said, not lying. "He can do things to you that will blow your mind."

She was intrigued. "Like what?"

"I'd be happy to tell you," I said, teasing her. "But, then again, I'm not sure if it's a good idea. Andrew's kind of got a lot to give, and if you're not the right girl I don't want to get his hopes up, you know? I mean, he's not my boyfriend or anything, but I don't want to see him hurt."

"Well, what's the right kind of girl?" she asked. I smiled. She was hooked.

The last time I had sex with Andrew, I had helped him ease his cock into her ass. I felt like I was passing the baton to her, both literally and figuratively. I rubbed and licked her clit while he took his time fucking her, until she came over my face. It turned out that girls really liked the tongue stud as much as the boys did.

It was my first threesome, but with all the sexual activity I had experienced in the previous three months it felt like a mere extension of my growing considerable repertoire. I straddled him while she knelt before me and ate me out to several mind-blowing orgasms. By this point, I knew I was multi-orgasmic and she was a very fast learner.

Andrew had been such a frequent lover by that point that I knew he had been getting close, so I lifted her chin so that she could pay attention to me. "Do you mind," I asked, breathlessly, "if he comes in my pussy one last time?"

She nodded, realizing that by asking her permission - and letting her know that it was the last time - Andrew was then officially "hers." She went back to attacking my clit once more. For a newbie, she was actually really good. Not Tracy-level, of course, but once again - enthusiasm over experience.

As he came inside me, my mind flashed back to the moment in the bathroom stall and how he had filled the condom instead of my pussy. One final orgasm hit me as I felt him spray my insides, but it was nowhere near as strong as the others. I wondered if it was more of a nostalgic orgasm more than anything else.

I felt him soften and finally fall out of me, and I just watched her take him in her mouth and then finish cleaning up the come that dribbled onto my pussy lips. The moment had a bittersweet twinge to it, a feeling of transition. I had enjoyed Andrew's company and friendship, but inside I had already moved on. This felt like the perfect way to leave him in good hands.

After we both came down from our coital bliss, I stood up and left the two of them in each other's arms. I felt a slight pang of remorse that I'd not have him to play with any more, but I'd needed to wean myself from him anyway. I hadn't told my father about Andrew at all and was beginning to feel like I was cheating, even though Andrew and I had been lovers for far, far longer than my father and I had been.

That still felt strange to think about.

Father

.

Lover

. We had been estranged for years, barely connecting at anything other than a mostly superficial level. It took Tracy, of all people, to reveal the sacrifices he had made for me. It also was thanks to her that I discovered the latent need to get to know my father. In a strange way, I felt that I should at least feel grateful to her for that, even if the way she went about it was nothing short of pure evil.

So many wasted years. So much time that could have been better for getting to know him. How much of it had I wasted because he had deliberately tried to keep us at arm's length? Just because I didn't know what was going on? It was water under the bridge, but I couldn't help but play my little "what if" games.

At the end of the day, I found it hard to truly fault him even though the consequences had been devastating. My father had thought that he was doing what was best and what was fair to both me

and

Simone, but in the process had isolated himself to the damage being done. He thought he was doing the right thing, which opened the door for Tracy to manipulate all of us.

All of us.

The rest of us

. The tentacles of that Kraken seemed to reach through space and time, and the impact went far beyond just me, my father, and Simone. It also reached back to Zoey, Christine, and my own poor mother.

Ah, my mother. Just thinking about how much my mother had suffered at the hands of Tracy's schemes brought me to tears on more than one occasion. Here was a woman who - through no fault of her own - had given up her career, her livelihood, and her dreams. She had raised me as her own child rather than let me fall into an orphanage or break up my father's relationship with his other daughter.

I couldn't even begin to fathom her own personal sacrifice.

On one particular depressing evening before I had taken my revenge, I was struggling to keep up my motivation for my revenge plot. Tracy had been a nightmare. I had to ask permission from her whenever I wanted to spend alone-time with my father. She wouldn't even consider allowing me to visit him without her there.

My mother picked up on my mood, and tried to get me to talk about it. Of course, I couldn't tell her why. So on top of everything else, I had to keep lying to her about what was happening. It was all bearing down on me, and the fatigue was starting to take its toll. If it weren't for the fact that Andrew was fucking me pretty much every day after school, I think I would have gone completely insane. Or given up. Or both.

"Is Simone still being a bully at school?" my mother asked me, trying to get me to open up.

Tracy had promised to keep Simone off my back which had worked - for about a month. Simone had started to ramp up the torture again, though, and Tracy would drop hints during my rare visits with my father that she not only knew about it, but hadn't done anything to prevent it and wasn't going to.

For example, Simone

did

actually plant little dicks in my locker, and I found that she had gotten a few of the students to put them in my backpack as well. She would then make jokes about "little Richards" when she knew I was in earshot. The very next time I was at my father's house, Tracy "spontaneously" decided to play

Good Golly Miss Molly

by, of course, Little Richard.

I didn't know how to answer my mother's question without opening up a can of worms, though, so I just shrugged.

"Zoey and I used to fight all the time," my mother said. It took me a second to understand her shift in the conversation, until I realized that she was making a connection between her relationship with

her

sister and me with -

shudder -

mine. I still hadn't come to terms that I was

related

to that cunt.

My mother rarely brought up Zoey after that day when the shit hit the fan at school. I couldn't tell if she was just used to not talking about it, or if it was still too painful a topic. Nevertheless, it was such a rare moment that I decided to see how much she would tell me.

As it turned out, quite a lot.

"Why?" I asked. She had asked me to help her with the dishes and the rote, repetitive movements actually seemed appealing. I picked up a dish to dry immediately after she had rinsed it and put it in the rack.

"I think she didn't really know what she wanted in life," my mother said, looking at the dishes in the sink rather than look at me. I think she found it easier to talk about it that way. "She thought that life was easier for me than it was for her."

"Was it?" I asked.

My mother sighed. "I suppose so," she said. "I think she got tired of being teased that we didn't look alike."

I didn't understand. "What do you mean?" I asked. "Why would that matter?"

"She got a lot of teasing at school," my mom said. "When we were little, people wouldn't believe her when she told them we were fraternity twins."

I nearly dropped the glass I was drying. "Wait, you and Zoey were

twins

?" This piece of news was so surprising that I didn't even bother correcting her that the word was

fraternal

. Her malapropisms were legendary.

She nodded. "Yes," she said. "Born eight minutes apart. It always bothered her, and I guess I didn't help things much."

I was still trying to get my head wrapped around this. "What do you mean?" I repeated myself.

Her face fell as she remembered. "You are an only child," she said, and then realized what she said and waved away the situation with Simone with her hand, ignoring it. "So you don't know what it's like to have a sister you bicker and fight with.

"Zoey was an angry girl. Even when she was little, everything was a competition for her. Because we were twins, people would assume that we wanted to share everything. But that wasn't Zoey's style.

"She hated the fact that very little of what she had was actually

hers

," my mother explained. "And she hated the fact that she couldn't do what I could do."

"Like what?" I asked.

"Oh, like dancing," she answered immediately. "Dancing was my thing. Zoey was all elbows and knees, and couldn't get choreography or even really some of the more basic movements.

"Things really got messy when we became teenagers, though. I started to develop before she did, which made her really, really jealous. People would give me all the attention, and so she would act out and basically be a pain in the ass."

I could tell my mother wanted to use harsher language, but that wasn't really her style.

"What happened?" I asked, taking a dish to dry.

"We fought

all

the time," she said. "I'm afraid I wasn't the best sister, either. I used to get to her by comparing her to looking like a boy because she had no tits."

My mother's eyes suddenly went wide, and then looked at me to see if I was offended. "Oh my god, Shannon, I'm so sorry," she was horrified by what she had said. "I just meant that I was trying to be mean to Zoey, I didn't mean to... oh god."

She turned away, ashamed.

The words

did

sting, but it was only because the thoughts had crossed my mind before only about a gazillion times in my life. "It's okay, Mom," I said. "I know you were just talking about what happened. I know you didn't mean anything by it."

Her face still look strained, but relief began to creep back in.

"So," I prompted. "What

did

happen?"

"It was a long time ago," my mother said, and even though she was washing the dishes as routine, her eyes had a far-away look. "We got into a particularly bad fight when we were about, oh, thirteen or fourteen years old. I don't even remember what it was about, now.

"But the fight itself was pretty bad," she continued. "We both said things that were cruel and painful, the kind of things that once said can never be taken back."

I thought I saw her eyes redden a little, and I put a hand on her arm. "No, it's okay," she promised. She then looked at me and gave me a weak smile. "She said that when we were born the umbrella cord wrapped around my neck and made me stupid. I told her that she may have gotten the brains, but I got all of the looks and the hot body and personality and she got all the scraps left over."

She stopped at that point, taking a moment. I didn't know what to say, and there were no dishes for me to dry, so I just stood there waiting for her to say or do something else.

Suddenly she looked up at the ceiling, and said, "Actually, I guess we were about sixteen or seventeen, because she started hanging out with Tracy a lot right after that," she said. "My parents couldn't stand Tracy, because they could see right through her 'girl-next-door' act. She was a 'bad seed,' they said, but Zoey hung around with her all the time and nothing they said could get her to stop."

My mother resumed washing a dish. "It really didn't matter much to me. I didn't care what Zoey did," she said. "I was going to be a dancer, and Zoey could do whatever she wanted to do for all I care. I didn't think it would ever affect me at all. What she did, she would have to live with."

She let out a single ironic chuckle. I could almost hear her think,

so much for that idea

.

"Tracy convinced Zoey to drop out of school, and had all of these get-rich-quick schemes," she said. "Thing is, they dropped out of school when they only had four or five months left. All they had to do was wait until graduation and they would have had their diploma and then they could do whatever they wanted."

"So why did she?" I asked. "That didn't seem like a smart thing to do."

Her lips turned up in the corner into a sad smile. "She did it to get back at our father," my mother said, casting me a glance. "He wasn't a very delicate man, Shannon. It was obvious who his favorite was."

She looked at me as she handed me the next glass to be dried. "He pushed Zoey to be good in school, but the truth of the matter was that he never really hid the fact that he liked me better.

"When she dropped out of school so close to graduation, he completely flipped out," she said, returning her attention to the sink. "He told her that if she was old enough to not be in school, then she was old enough to be on her own."

"He kicked her out?" I asked, incredulous.

She nodded. "That was fine by her," she said. "Tracy had convinced her that they were going to crash the local country club or yacht club or a gentleman's club - or something like that - and meet a rich gentleman to marry."

"Um, are you sure?" I asked, not sure if I heard that right. "Do you mean, a

strip

club?"

My mother stopped and looked at me. "Do girls strip at country clubs?" She looked thoughtful. "I've never actually been to one."

"No, I mean," I said, then changed my mind. "Never mind. Please go on."

"Anyway, when my father kicked her out, Zoey bummed around with Tracy for a few years," she said. "I had been working in local dance repositories and didn't pay too much attention, but from what I understand she just leeched off of Tracy's friends and got into trouble."

She stopped again, and I simply waited. This time, though, she took a lot longer than she had before and I thought she was going to stop talking altogether. She looked at me, though, and once more shared her sad smile. "The year you were born was when everything happened all at once."

"Our parents died in a car crash," my mother said, something that I already knew. It seemed like a painful memory for my mother, so we didn't talk about it much, but it was the reason why I had never met my grandparents. "But it turned out that my mother had been giving Zoey money behind my father's back.

"After they died, we were each supposed to be given a small inheritance. Not much, really, but it would have been enough to let me live in Paris or New York while I went to school," she said.

"

Would

have?" I asked.

She nodded. "I didn't know it at the time, but Tracy had convinced Zoey to take her share of the money that our parents had left us and use it for the movie she wanted to do," she explained. "Tracy had promised her that as an 'actress,' they would get more acting gigs, as well as all the sex, drugs, and men that she could handle."

"What about your share?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Zoey took some of that too," she admitted, "but all of that went to pay off the medical bills afterwards. So, even if Zoey had survived the pregnancy, I wouldn't have been able to join the dance company anyway."

The pain in my mother's voice was heartbreaking. After all of these years, there was still a lot of resentment for Zoey, not to mention Tracy. I was beginning to get a brief glimpse of why my mother hated

her

so much.

"How..." I began, but then paused as I wasn't sure how to ask the question delicately. "How long after your parents died did Zoey do the movie?"

My mother looked up at the ceiling as if it were a calendar. "Let's see, two... no, three weeks."

"Three

weeks

?" I cried, not believing my ears.

She nodded. "Zoey could be a very cruel girl, Shannon," she said. "She started dressing up in this goth outfit, shaved off most of her hair, and spiked the rest of it up."

I wanted to tell her it was

punk

, not goth, but it didn't seem appropriate.

"She moved back into the house, which I was fine with at first, but then Tracy would start singing, 'Ding Dong The King is Dead,' and Zoey would just laugh," my mother had to put the dish she was holding back into the water. Her hands were shaking.

"I didn't know who I hated more, Zoey or Tracy," she confessed. "But then Zoey got sick and Rod was suddenly in the picture too."

Zoey

got sick

? I thought, then I realized what was happening. My mother knew perfectly well what happened with her sister in the porno. She just couldn't bring herself to use any other phrase to describe it.

"So, Zoey didn't actually know my father?" I asked, trying to deflect the subject a little. "I mean, before the por... movie?"

My mother shook her head, ignoring my slip. "No, not really," she said. "Tracy kept saying that she couldn't wait for Zoey to meet Rod, but she wanted it to be a surprise. I guess it was supposed to look 'real for the cameras' or something like that.

"Of course, I didn't know anything about the movie at the time," she said. "I found out all of this after the fact, when Zoey was rushed to the hospital from internal bleeding."

"Oh," I said, taking a plate from her.

"Apparently your father hurt Zoey during the making of the movie," she said, trying to choose her words carefully. Then, she rushed to add, "Not intentionally, of course, but Zoey was a tiny girl, and..."

She realized she had said more than she intended, so she tried to change the subject. "Well, anyway, about a month later she went back for a checkup and found out she was pregnant. That's when we got the

really

bad news."