Autumn Pt. 01 Ch. 01

Frank drew a deep breath then exhaled. "I haven't heard any arguments about how gay marriage presents a legitimate threat to society, just facetious claims about how old and immutable the institution is." He took a sip of his own Scotch. Slowly. "So while I don't question your ability to draw the distinction, I have doubts as to your willingness."

His grandfather raised his glass in salute. "I hope you go into the private sector after you graduate, because you'll be completely insufferable within a few years otherwise."

"Sorry, I'm still a little confused about why it would matter if the thought of a brother and sister getting it on didn't churn his stomach," Brianna said. Before their grandfather could get a word in, she added, "The Supreme Court didn't say that anyone who gets icked out is headed for re-education camps, despite what you might have heard on Fox News. They said that the equal protection clause prohibits states from providing privileges—"

"Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it," their grandfather interjected.

Brianna scoffed. "Yeah, the right way. Being told that you can't oppress others is not, in fact, its own form of oppression. Nor is it a violation of religious freedom."

Frank gave his cousin a look that was equal parts gratitude and shock. Their grandfather hadn't exactly admitted defeat—not by a long shot—but he'd been about to back off.

"I'm not going to argue a court case with you," their grandfather said in a self-congratulatory tone, because avoiding a legal debate with a practicing attorney obviously took extraordinarily sound judgment. "I just want to hear the two of you admit that you find some things as disgusting as the rest of us do, despite your supposed tolerance."

"You want to know what disgusts me?" Brianna said. "Two things: the way our culture views consent as sorta nice but not a big deal; and the number of people who would deny others pleasure because they don't approve of the means by which it's sought."

Their grandfather scoffed. "Bullshit."

"I'm dead serious," his cousin replied.

"Then prove it."

Brianna and Frank shared a look, as if asking one another if either had any idea what their grandfather meant. When it became clear that they didn't, both shrugged.

Realizing they'd basically just shared a Rom-Com Moment, Frank snorted in amusement. Was it time for an outside force to introduce a contrived obstacle, perhaps in the form of a romantic rival, so they could pull away from each other until something equally implausible brought them back together in the last five minutes of the film?

Did that seem like a joke to Frank because, deep down, he agreed with their grandfather?

No, it didn't. The last thing that imagining him and his cousin as a couple did was disgust him. In fact, Frank suddenly realized that she was quite pretty.

Well, okay, that wasn't exactly news. If nothing else, the way the rest of the world treated her would have made it clear that Brianna was a few standard deviations above the mean. Whenever his cousin posted a new photo to Facebook, guys left the sort of comments on her wall that made everyone else cringe. Even her female friends showered those pics with praise, though Frank supposed that was more obligatory, like the well-wishes one could expect on their birthday if the date wasn't set to private. Either way, he'd always known that she was attractive, in the sense that her facial features conformed well to prevailing standards of beauty, he just hadn't been attracted to her himself. At least not that he'd been aware of.

Frank studied her face out of the corner of his eye. She had a fair complexion that was dappled with freckles, big green eyes, and pouty lips that formed a Cupid's bow. He'd read something once about women with that lip shape having a greater sexual appetite. Frank was more of a brunette guy, but he had to admit that her auburn curls were nicer to look at than the orangish hue more common among redheads. It also complemented her eyes, in the literal sense. Green irises didn't appeal to him any more than blue ones, as they tended to be pale and nearly colorless, but Brianna's were like fresh cut grass.

He even liked that she'd made no effort to combat the frizz her curly hair naturally suffered from. Between that, her lack of makeup, and her Tina Fey glasses, she looked less like the sort of woman who belonged on the cover of Cosmo than one who read The Atlantic.

"How're we supposed to do that?" his cousin demanded to know.

"By kissing each other," their grandfather replied.

Brianna turned to Frank. "Well, a peck on the lips won't kill you."

"No, a real kiss," their grandfather said. "Like you're madly in love. Or madly in lust, at any rate." A triumphant grin appeared. "After all, the whole point you two are trying to make is that there'd be nothing wrong with it if you were, right?"

Actually, that wasn't the point they were trying to make. Their contention was simply that one needn't approve of something to think it should be legal. Frank would love to wake up one morning to discover that his grandfather was capable of seeing two dudes kiss on TV without throwing a fit, but what really mattered to him was whether people insisted on using the power of the state to punish, isolate, and oppress those who disgusted them.

"If I was madly in love with him, you wouldn't want to see the way I'd kiss him," Brianna said, making their grandfather roll his eyes. "Maybe you should give us a time limit."

Frank glowered at his cousin. "The heck are you doing?"

"See?" their grandfather said. "His stomach is already heaving."

Well, there were butterflies in it, at any rate.

Frank felt like he was in middle school again, just discovering the concept of romantic attraction. He was nervous and light-headed, excited and euphoric, all at once.

It was his grandfather's fault, too. Had he never heard that if you tell people not to think about pink elephants, that's the first thing they're going to think about?

After studying his face for a moment, Brianna declared that Frank was game. He considered telling her to speak for herself but chose not to.

Because she wasn't wrong.

"Fine. Think you can handle thirty seconds?" Grandpa Dick said.

"Pfft, make it ninety," Brianna replied, sounding like the defiant teenager Frank remembered seeing at holidays a decade or so ago. He was almost surprised at the absence of pink and purple streaks in her hair and the diamond stud she used to wear in one nostril.

"Why do you even want to see that?" Frank asked their grandfather.

"I don't," came the emphatic reply. "I'd be happy for you to admit that you'd sooner vomit than kiss your cousin. What I want is for you to consider the possibility that the nausea you're feeling has meaning; that those of us who stand in awe of our moral intuitions aren't looking for a way to satisfy some authoritarian impulse." Brianna's eyes widened at that. "What?" their grandfather asked. "You think conservatives don't know what liberals say about us when we're not around? I thought your generation knew all about the internet."

"Even if we weren't related, she wouldn't want to kiss me," Frank said. It was a desperate gambit, but someone had to try something. Or maybe he just needed a few seconds to get his breathing back under control. "I mean, I'm a five or a six, at best, and she's like a nine."

Brianna raised an eyebrow at him.

He'd never realized how lush those beauties were. Yes, he'd been aware that she was pretty, but he hadn't studied her face closely to see how many of his quirky boxes she ticked. That was a big one, though. Most guys paid no attention to eyebrows, but if they were too thin or pale, Frank had no interest. Thankfully, though, Brianna's were thick and dark.

Or should he have considered that unfortunate?

Fuck, he had to get his core temperature back down towards to 98.6 degrees. Frank flicked his eyes down to his cousin's slim figure. Her legs were almost shapeless and her chest was flat. Loose as the concert tee she wore over long sleeves was, Frank supposed it was possible that she was hiding a respectable pair of tits, but he remembered all the times she'd complained about her mosquito bites in years past. Frank he hadn't dated many girls, and it wasn't modesty that had led him to say he was only a five or a six, but he'd never held anything less than a D cup in his hands. Perhaps that made him shallow, but it also inoculated him against his cousin's charms, which was more important at the moment.

It wasn't like he was going to get them out of her bra, though. Her plump lips were more relevant for what they had planned. And she'd bragged about being a great kisser at least as often as she'd lamented her mother failing to pass certain genes on to her.

Brianna slapped his arm, jarring him out of his reverie. "How am I not a ten?"

Frank had just gotten done cataloging the ways, if she really wanted to know. Of course, he didn't tell her that. All he said was, "I already rounded up."

His natural inclination was to compliment women he found attractive; to do favors for them and just generally be nice. That shit didn't work, though. For a while, Frank had labored under the illusion that pick-up artists and men's rights activists were wrong to think that women craved bad boys and saw niceness as a sign of insecurity, but then several feminist websites had declared the Nice Guy public enemy number one. Sure, on the surface, the two camps made very different arguments. The latter denounced Nice Guys for feeling entitled to sex, not for being insecure. Some of those same sites had also said, however, that the one redeeming value of Fifty Shades of Gray was that its author understood how guys who "won't take no for an answer" could be so irresistible. It was hard not to conclude that feeling entitled to sex was only a problem if you were the wrong sort of guy. If you were "confident" enough, and happened to have tons of money and great abs, you didn't have to worry about consent—or laws against stalking. In fact, it was better if you didn't. Comments like that basically confirmed most of what PUAs believed.

"Sure you did," Brianna said with a mocking grin.

"I don't care what you'd rate each other," their grandfather said. "No one's asking you to enjoy it. In fact, feel free to admit that you can't go through with it."

By way of response, Brianna slipped down off the railing and positioned herself in front of Frank. With emerald eyes locked on his, she took one hand and placed it on her hip. That sent a bolt of electricity running down Frank's spine. Would it be nice if she was bit thicker there, and elsewhere? Sure. But at the moment, that didn't really matter. The prettiest girl who'd ever spoken to him wanted his hands on her and that was pretty fucking awesome.

Their grandfather leaned forward on the porch swing, placed his whisky glass on the wicker table, tugged the sleeve of his wool sweater back, and looked down at a fancy timepiece. "Ninety seconds," he said. "Not a moment less."

At least, Frank was pretty sure he'd heard that. Brianna had gone up on tiptoes and presented her lips to him, forcing everything else to the edge of his consciousness.

She stopped short of initiating the kiss, though. That was the man's job, after all.

Did he expect any different from her, just because her politics were progressive? She talked a good game about slut-shaming, sex-positivity, and all of that, but so did a lot of women who went on to engage in sensitivity-shaming; who demanded greater respect for consent while swooning over guys who didn't give a shit about it.

Oh, who fucking cared.

Frank could and would complain later about women claiming to understand that gender was a social construct while simultaneously encouraging yet denouncing the worst sort of behavior in men, all without any sense of irony. That was maddening as hell, but also thoroughly unimportant for at least the next ninety seconds.

He swept a lock of curly hair back from his cousin's face then let his fingers rest in an auburn waterfall. With the other hand, Frank slid a thumb under her top layers and started caressing a prominent hip bone. That didn't seem to do much for her, yet neither did Brianna object. So Frank puckered up, tilted his head to the side, leaned in, and...kissed her.

That he'd actually gone through with it, on the first attempt, couldn't have shocked anyone more than it did Frank himself. On some level, he'd been expecting a glorious act of self-sabotage disguised as hesitation or even moral qualms. But that hadn't happened.

Pretty much everything that could go wrong with a first kiss did. Neither could decide whether it was time yet to deploy their tongues, or what to do with their hands. One would speed up or surge forward while the other slowed down or retreated. Then they'd both over-correct in a mirror image of the first exchange. Brianna put her hands on his chest, then dropped them to her sides, then rested them lightly atop his shoulders.

Meanwhile, Frank soon found himself pawing at his cousin's ass through the stiff fabric of her khaki skirt, looking for a handful. When he realized she didn't have enough meat for that, though, he returned his hands to her hips.

The uncoordinated nature of their fumbling only made Frank enjoy things that much more, though. It lent a certain authenticity to the experience. First kisses were supposed to be terrible, except in fiction that was itself terrible. His dick was hard, his heart palpitating, and his disbelief held at bay. The experience was singularly arousing, if only because it was so forbidden yet not good enough to be too-good-to-be-true.

It didn't take them long to get past the awkward stage, though. Their lip movements slowly synchronized and their tongues started to trade jabs like Olympic fencers. Brianna's frustrated grunts and half-swallowed giggles gave way to sensual moans.

He almost started to think that his cousin was enjoying herself, until he realized just how enthusiastic she was pretending to be. At that point, it became clear that Brianna was mocking him. That, or putting on a show for their grandfather. Frank supposed the latter wasn't so bad, but the shame of falling for it wasn't eased by the knowledge that he wasn't the one she'd meant to fool. Whatever her intent, he was a still a dupe.

How could he have let that happen? Frank had never gotten that kind of reaction from a mere kiss—let alone a first kiss. He was pretty good at cunnilingus, if he did say so himself, but there was no reason for Brianna to be so worked up over anything he did while all her clothes were still on. Nor for her to ever find out what he could really do with his tongue.

Few women had, be they blood relatives or not. Frank was not the sort of guy women threw themselves at or had casual sex with. Give him time to form an emotional connection with someone who cared more about a guy's personality and intellect than his looks—or how well he conformed to narrow, hyper-traditionalist conceptions of masculinity—and he might eventually get her into bed, where he very likely would leave a lasting impression, but that wasn't going to happen with his freaking cousin.

Did Frank like the illusion she was creating? Of course. But it was still an illusion.

Wasn't it?

Perhaps he really was rocking her world, if not because he was so great at kissing then because they were violating the greatest sexual taboo. Somehow, Frank told himself, that allowed them to tap into something deep and primal, forbidden and powerful.

Whether it was that or something else, their kiss grew ever more intense and pleasurable. Frank went from sorta believing a lie to wondering how he could ever have doubted his cousin's sincerity. The sounds she made grew more and more desperate, and he braced himself for an imminent orgasm. He just wasn't sure whether it would hers or his.

Frank tried to convince himself that he wasn't experiencing anything special, but it didn't work. In fact, he only seemed to come closer to dying of sensory overload. He couldn't have broken away if his life had depended on it, though. Which he was only so sure it didn't.

Some of that was physical—the feel of his cousin's body pressed against his, writhing and undulating; her fingernails digging into his shoulders; the warmth of her soft lips and nimble tongue. All of Frank's senses were being stimulated, and they'd grown more acute. Brianna's scent, reminiscent of roses, cherries, and apples, filled his nostrils. Whenever his tongue touched her lips, he tasted candy. Her every moan made him shudder.

There was more to it than that, though. Frank wasn't sure how to describe the other dimension, or whether he even believed there was one, but the porch seemed to fall away, leaving them to levitate over an empty abyss. The air itself might have crackled with energy. Waves of warmth radiated out from his core to the tips of his fingers and toes. Or didn't? As soon as one wave died off, a fresh nova formed and sent another after it, leaving euphoria in its wake—except that was only his imagination. The crackling bolts she delivered with her tongue felt more like ecstasy, in its purest form, than electricity. Again, though, that couldn't have happened. Frank even convinced himself that he mirrored his cousin's efforts, filling her with warm euphoria and unleashing the occasional bolt of pure ecstasy. Only such things played no part in their kiss, enjoyable as it was, because they were nonsense.

He'd clearly lost his hold on reality.

The porch was still there. Nothing supernatural was taking place on it. The two of them were simply sharing a perfectly ordinary kiss—one that Frank hoped would never end.

"Time's up," their grandfather said.

The look on Brianna's face afterwards was interesting, to say the least. There was some measure of shame there, Frank thought, but no more than there'd have been if they'd agreed to do a line of shots and she had finished first. She was fretting at her lower lip and had her head turned to the side, but her eyes were locked on his.

A make-or-break moment, then. Play it cool because all the experts said men should never show too much interest? Or assure his cousin that she hadn't made a fool of herself?

Frank had negged her, and while that hadn't exactly blown up in his face, it hadn't really done him any favors either. He'd initiated the kiss in bolder fashion than he'd thought himself capable of, yet had ended up feeling like the butt of a joke shortly thereafter. What did trying to fit other people's definitions of what it meant to be a man get him? Not much of anything, one way or the other. Fuck that shit, then. With a small but sympathetic smile, Frank grabbed his cousin's hand and gave it a squeeze.

To both his surprise and his utter relief, she squeezed back.

"Well, you sure proved something," their grandfather said, struggling to hide his disgust. "What it was, and whether you should be proud of it, I'm not sure, but that was something." With that, he stood, took one last sip of whisky, and went inside.

The moment he left, Brianna pushed hard against Frank's chest, nearly toppling him over the porch rail. If the damn girl had weighed more than a hundred pounds, or if he'd weighed less than two, she might well have done so.

"Sorry," Frank said, making it sound more like an accusation than an apology.

"He's not here anymore," Brianna said as she set about straightening her shirts.

"Really? I hadn't noticed," Frank replied.

His cousin gave him a flat look. "Let's go see what your brothers are up to."

#

After a traditional Harvest Eve dinner, the full five courses, Frank was about ready for a nap. That wasn't because he'd overeaten, though. He had gone back for seconds or even thirds of his favorites—the breaded turkey cutlets with mashed potatoes and herb stuffing had been to die for, and his mother's pumpkin soup was even better than he'd remembered it being. The reason Frank was tempted to go find a couch to lay down on, however, was that he needed a break from his family. He'd been eager to see them when the summer semester had ended, and would miss them terribly after going back in January, but that wasn't for more than a month, and a little Dom could go a long, long way.