Black Sheep

*This is my first time. So please be nice.* I hope you enjoy it!

CHAPTER 1: ISHTAR

Chrissy and I were finally going to Los Angeles so I could meet his family. He was naturally anxious about the whole thing, seeing as they were very likely to be disappointed in his choice for a wife. They were steeped in old money, they had their hands in several political pots, and of late, they had acquired what Chrissy called more than a passing interest in those politics. Theirs was a family of socialite ambition and my nifty little liberal background offered nothing as far as progressing those ambitions went.

My parents had expressed somewhat of a similar feeling when they met Chrissy. But having gone their entire lives with the pride of being the farthest things from bigots, they couldn't bring themselves to say: "He represents the man-machine we've worked our entire hippy lives trying to dismantle." All they did was say (when Chrissy wasn't close enough to hear), "Are you sure he's the man for you? You know there's no need to rush into marriage just because you're twenty-nine, right?"

Of course, I knew that my age wasn't supposed to make me anxious about whether or not any man would ever want to marry me. (It's just that I couldn't exactly explain the entire situation to them. I knew that if I did my parents would definitely state their disapproval of the marriage outright). Most of the time, when they weren't too worried about growing old without grandchildren, my parents knew it too.

But sometimes they allowed the fears of their generation to shine through, slightly threatening that perfect non-bigot image they worked so hard to preserve. Anyway, we were finally going to LA and I wanted to make the best impression on Chrissy's family.

I quickly slid into a white, full-length dress with thin shoulder straps. It was a bit of a tight fit but I figured it was too late to return it to the store. I coiled my curls into a neat heap at the top of my head, put on the fake diamond earrings I borrowed from my mother, and surveyed myself in the mirror.

Overall, I approved of the look. It was dull for my liking, not enough color and far too prissy, I thought. My short stature and lack of curves didn't help, either. But none of that mattered. I just needed to impress Chrissy's parents and siblings. "Babe," I said, walking into the tiny space that was our living area. "What do you think of this dress?"

He lazily looked away from the TV. Some football team was on the way to making some kind of history, or something like that. I didn't really care to tell the truth, sport things were never my thing. "What?" he asked.

"I said: do you think this dress makes me look like a respectable daughter-in-law?"

"You know how, according to movies and TV and most things we watch for that matter, women just want to know if things make them look fat?"

"Yeah?"

"Why can't we ask each other those kinds of easy questions?"

"You want the easy answer?"

"Yeah."

"We don't want to. Now please, does this dress make me look respectable or not?"

"How does a dress make a person look respectable?"

"Well, remember that lingerie set you bought me for your birthday?"

"Yeah."

I shook my head as I said the next part. "I absolutely cannot wear that, it's the very definition of not respectable when I'm meeting my fiancé's parents."

A wide grin appeared on his face. His attention on the game become increasingly limited and his back, which was previously reclined on the couch, was then fully erect. As was that other part of him, I suspected. "This conversation just became far more interesting. We should definitely ask each other these kinds of questions more often." He got up from the couch and started walking towards me.

"No," I said. "If we do this now we're going to be late to the airport." I walked backwards and into the wall.

With his long legs, he quickly reached me and immediately ruffled my hair into the wild mane of curls it usually was. "What does it matter?" he whispered, with his with his tongue already softly assaulting my neck.

"I'm trying to get your parents to like me and being late isn't going to help with..."

I couldn't finish the sentence because his right hand was slowly making its way to the wet place between my thighs. He slid my underwear to the side and gently rubbed my clit with his middle finger. It had to be his middle finger because it was just so big, and he knew how much I loved it when he did that. My hips started grinding against his finger, slowly and silently begging for more. Then, abruptly, he stopped and held my face in his hands.

He looked at me and smiled that annoying little smile of his; it went all the way to his green eyes. I used to think I loved those eyes; that is, when I wasn't as sexually frustrated as I was in that moment.

They were what pulled me to him in the first place. I was standing at the bus stop crying because I had received another rejection letter for a potential thesis supervisor. My car had broken down and I couldn't afford to have it fixed. My hair refused to cooperate. Mrs Williams had just popped out another baby so I wasn't exactly getting any sleep at all. Most importantly, it was one of those days on which I missed my sort-of-ex quite a lot. I felt like the universe was closing in on me that day. Then a pair of eerily familiar-looking green eyes appeared in front of me; their owner asked me if I was okay, and held me as I cried like a child.

That was it, the beginning. Somewhere along the line we had fallen in love and somehow made our way to a point where he thought it was okay to get me wet and then just leave me without cumming.

"You wanted me to stop didn't you?" He was taunting me. What was worse was the he knew exactly what he was doing.

His hands left my face, but he didn't step away from me. He just stood there with his erect cock taunting me too. I almost reached out to touch it but repressed the feeling. If he wanted to play then that was precisely what I was going to do. I placed my hands behind me, flat against the wall and returned his smile. "I never wanted you to start," I taunted back.

"Is that so?"

"That is so."

"So you don't want me to start this?" By 'this', he meant dropping to his knees to hike my left leg over his shoulder. Still intently watching my face, he slowly moved his hands to my hips, where he hooked his fingers into my underwear and started removing it. My cunt was getting wet at a ridiculously fast pace, and I was starting to get the feeling that I was going to lose the game we were playing. It felt like my hips were very eager to betray me because even though I balled my hands into fists so that I couldn't grab his head and guide his tongue to my cunt, they were slowly moving on their own.

He knew he was winning so he smiled even wider. "You don't want me to start this, either?" That time, 'this' meant doing exactly what I wanted him to. He buried his head beneath my dress, and quickly went to work on thoroughly tongue-fucking me.

There were a few times when he stopped to flick my clit with his finger, or to drive that finger deep into my cunt, or simply to torture me with wanting. I gritted my teeth to stop myself from begging him to turn me over and drive in his cock instead. It was so much bigger and never failed to reduce me into a mess of zealous fucking, moaning and uttering every filthy word in the English language. Then suddenly, again, Chrissy abruptly stopped tongue-fucking me.

"Argh!" I screamed.

He laughed. "You have to ask for it, Ishtar," he whispered.

"I'm asking for it."

"What are you asking for?"

"Your dick, Chrissy, I'm asking for your dick."

"Where do you want it?"

"Oh, fuck! Just fuck me, okay. I need your dick inside me. Please."

He quickly rose to his feet. "Turn around and spread your legs," he commanded, and I did as he said. I heard him undo his belt buckle, unzip his pants, and drop them all to the floor. His hard tip caressed my ass cheeks and like the horny little mess I was at that point, I backed into him. "Is this what you want?" he asked, in a whisper.

"Yes. Please."

"Just remember that you asked for it." He grabbed my hips and bent me further forward. With one swift motion, he thrust into me. We both moaned with both relief and ecstasy. He adjusted himself inside me. When he was satisfied he started fucking me. He felt so good inside me. In and out he went, but when he was out I pushed back to feel his full length back inside.

"Is this what you wanted?" he grunted.

"Yes. Oh God, yes. Don't stop. Don't ever stop."

Whenever we fucked, because that's what we were doing, it was always rougher than when we made love. Chrissy once asked me to explain the difference since, as far as he was concerned, both cases included a hard dick sliding in and out of a wet and willing pussy. The difference was very simple. But I couldn't exactly explain it to him. I once did this thing between dating and being-friends-with-benefits with a guy named Linc. I was twenty-two, still a student at NYU, and he was twenty-seven and working as a volunteer at a clinic for rape survivors.

There was a time when I somehow managed to convince myself I was in love with Linc. But see, Linc and I never made love. Not once in the six months that we did our little thing. We always fucked. I even felt like a porn star sometimes. Linc loved every minute of it. He liked nibbling my ear and asking: "Do you want to cum, my little nymph?" He also did this thing with his fingers sometimes...

That kind of shit happened way too often—Chrissy and I would be well on our way to cumming and Linc would suddenly pop into my head. Even when I wasn't trying to think about him, I just did. I immediately felt guilty. "Harder," I said to Chrissy, hoping that he hadn't noticed a drop in my performance.

By the time we were done I completely reeked of him and his cum so we had to take another shower. And while doing that, Chrissy found several reasons to accidentally slip into my cunt. Once he did that he said he had to adjust himself and fuck me all over again. That was it. That was how we ended up an entire day late to our own welcome party.

***

The welcome party was initially planned to be a highly formal affair. But after our unfashionably late entrance, it was demoted into a buffet dinner party of approximately thirty-six people. Chrissy's mother hosted it in their incredibly lavish garden. She looked more like him than I had imagined she would, and she was only slightly shorter than him. Her eyes were green too, but they were shaped differently; his were smaller and when he was angry, they looked sinister.

She seemed like a very nice woman, his mother. She smiled very broadly as she extended her hand and said, "I'm very pleased to meet you, Ishtar. I'm Roselyn."

I shivered a little. I could tell she was already disappointed with my disregard for her time, and that her smile seemed to crack at the corners just a little. Charles—Chrissy's father, looked just as disappointed. Where Roselyn had at least tried to mask her disappointment with overly saccharine smiles and compliments on my hair and outfit, Charles couldn't even be bothered to do that much. It was going to take much more to get him on my side.

Chrissy took it upon himself to be the one who introduced me to every single member of his family. That was the first inkling I had that he hadn't exactly mentioned to them that I'm black. He firmly placed his hand at the small of my back as some kind of way of marking me as someone protected by him.

Speaking to the rest of his family was as interesting as it was unnerving. It was one of those moments where you could actually see someone's curiosity overriding every single emotion they were feeling.

No one was ever outright rude or insensitive; most just asked me what I thought of Obama, which, considering my political apathy, proved to be a point of even greater interest to them. I think they were even willing to forgive mine and Chrissy tardiness just long enough to test what the hell I thought I was doing marrying into the Henshaw family. Needless to say, I think they felt sorry for me; and if I'm right, they started placing bets on how long they thought our marriage was going to last.

It was some time after eight in the evening that I was introduced to Avery—Chrissy's younger sister. She was a candidate corporate lawyer and judging by her sharp style and precise demeanour, something told me she was good at it.

"This is my sister Avery," said Chrissy, pointing at her.

I shook her hand and introduced myself. "Hello, Avery. It's very nice to finally meet you. I'm Ishtar."

"What was that??" Avery asked me.

"Ishtar," Chrissy said on my behalf.

"Does it hold any particular meaning?"

Again, Chrissy was the one to answer Avery's question. "Her parents named her after an Eastern pagan goddess of fertility."

Avery gave a little smile and pointed to me with her champagne glass. "At this rate, I'll be surprised if you talk at all." She smiled again, broadly, with mirth in her eyes, and I knew she was more annoyed with her brother as opposed to being cruel to me. "You're being presumptuous, Christopher," she continued. "We aren't as backwards as you think we are. I'm sure Ishtar is lovely. I think you're the one who's embarrassing her."

"Oh no, Avery, I've seen you people devour Henry's girlfriends. Do you remember what happened to the last one?"

"I must say," I interjected, nudging Chrissy in the ribs before he cut me off again, "the more I hear about Henry, the more interesting he becomes. Where is he, anyway? I thought everyone was already here."

"Probably squandering his inheritance or getting arrested in some third world country for protesting...who knows with Christopher, he's the sort to protest anything, really. Flies dying, rich people...you name it, my bother has protested against it. I can definitely attest that he is the far more interesting brother; so interesting, in fact, that he's only a few scandals away from being the official black sheep of the family. And yes, the pun was fully intended."

"I like your sister, Chrissy..."

She nearly choked on her champagne. Once she recovered from her fit, she asked, "What did you just call him?"

"Chrissy," I said, smiling, knowing full well he was about to instruct her I was the only one allowed to call him that.

"Oh dear, that is so very unfortunate. Oh!" she pointed behind us as she exclaimed. "Look, here comes our beloved Henry."

I heard Henry before I saw him. In a husky voice that was eerily familiar to my ears, he said, "Christopher, I hear you've gone and found some poor girl to throw to the den of wolves that is our family."

That voice only belonged to one person. Hearing it in that moment made me sick to the point of wanting to vomit. It was like one of those moments where, suddenly, you find yourself in a situation you wouldn't have thought remotely possibly only one second ago. It was like someone had suddenly thrust me into a particularly horrific nightmare. And no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't wake up. I closed my eyes and tried to convince myself that I was imagining it. There was no way he was there, just no way. But when I turned around I found him standing there, opening his arms to hug Chrissy. "Hello, little brother," he said to Chrissy.

"I haven't been little in a long time."

"Hey," said Avery, "I'm here too, you know."

"Come here." They huddled into a group hug that I felt I was only experiencing from a shadow somewhere. My insides were quickly turning to acid, and something told me I was sweating like I had never done in my life.

Then Chrissy said, "Here. Let me introduce you to my bride to be." He disentangled himself from the hug and pointed at me. "Henry, this is Ishtar. Ishtar, this is my brother Henry."

He saw me for the first time since he arrived. I saw the huge smile slowly disappear from his face. He must have looked the way I felt just then. With his eyes wide with shock as he simply stared at me, like he had just seen a ghost. It was only after Avery scolded him for being rude that he finally said, "Hello, Ishtar. I'm Henry. I'm pleased to meet you."

With his face straight in front of me, there was no mistaking it. All the work I had done to forget him had been for nothing because there he was, pretending he didn't even know me. Linc. Chrissy's brother was Linc and he was back to turn my life upside down, again.