My Black Sheep Ch. 02

"To Triple-A?"

"Yeah! It could be his big break!"

"Isn't he a little old to be just now getting his big break?" Then Amelia's brows drew inward. "Wait, isn't his Triple-A team... in Indianapolis?"

Shelby's smile thinned, and she didn't nod to confirm until she was looking down at her plate. "Yeah."

"That's like eight hours away. It's still pretty early in the season, right? Would he be going alone, for the rest of the season, or would..."

Shelby licked her lips and shrugged. "It's too early to try and make plans, but... I don't know." Her smile fractured, and she felt her neck bending. In the back of her mind, she could hear the voices of many of her coaches screaming at her that her posture was going to shit, but the weight of it all was coming down on her. "I don't know."

Her brave smile faltered a little more with every second.

"Shel?"

Shelby said, "I think he's cheating on me."

"Are you just now figuring that out?"

"Amelia!"

Her little sister just blinked at her in confusion. "I... I thought..."

Shelby sighed in exasperation and put her face in her hands. "Please don't make me feel any more stupid than I already do, okay?"

Amelia continued to stutter for a few more seconds before hesitantly patting Shelby's shoulder. "Did you find something?"

"I haven't been able to bring myself to look," Shelby said, her voice muffled by her cupped palms. She ran her fingers over her face in mirrored S patterns, from her brow, out around her eyes and in toward the nose, and then down toward her jaw line. "There's a trainer with the team, she does physio. I see them looking at each other sometimes, and... Like it's not just him looking likeoh it's a cute girl. No. She's looking back, and they don't think I know."

Amelia licked her lips, and said, "And... you two? Are you..."

She shook her head. "It's been different since I got pregnant with Ian. He used to..." Shelby paused to swallow, and it felt like all of her confidence left her as she exhaled. "He used to talk about my body, and—"

"Okay," Amelia interrupted.

Shelby nodded reluctantly. "He really likedsingle me.Athletic me.In shape me. I'm not sure he likesmom me at all."

"Okay, fuck him." Her little sister sat up straight and shook her head. "You still look fucking hot."

Those were words straight out of her fantasies, but Shelby was too far gone to hear them. "I'm not, not the way I was. All I hear is that I'm taking too long to slim down, or that I'm like ninety percent tits—"

"Ninety percent tits? What does that even mean? Who s—Didhe say that?"

"His whole family, it's all they can talk about." Her voice took on a deeper tone, head bobbling back and forth as she aped, "Oh, that shirt is fitting you a little tighter than the last time I saw you, eh?And then they laugh. It's all a joke. All the women in his family are twigs. I hate it."

"Aren't they supposed to be big, though? Like, aren't you feedinga human beingwith them? They look right to me."

"But that's the thing! Kelsi won't latch. I can't get her to just drink from my fucking boob, no matter which way I hold her. I've gotta spend all my fucking time eithercarrying her aroundorhandcuffed to a chair pumpingandexpressing for hours." The more she went, the more hysterical she felt. "And-and-and-and... and Ian is having none of it. He hasno patience for my freakouts. Like, he can't wait to tell his father or Gram Gram how bad I'm doing, and how often I'm crying, and then I'm hearing about it from all sides like I don't already know that I'm fucking up. Okay? I know.I know!"

"Shel," Amelia said, "hey, whoa."

"And then, tonight, I get a text from Helen likewellI had no problem putting them to bed. What are you complaining about? And I just... I..."

Her sister was off her chair, with her arms around her, and Shelby cried.

"I'm sorry," she whispered hoarsely, in between sobs. "I know you didn't want to spend your nightconsoling a hormonal whack job—"

"Stop," Amelia said, inthat tone of voice, and Shelby shuddered. She moved, ever so slightly, so that Amelia's arm was laying across her chest, across her swollen breasts, and that was enough. For the moment.

"I missed you," she said.

"I missed you too," Amelia said softly. "Are you okay?"

"He hasn't touched me since... God, it's almost a year at this point."

Amelia stiffened, but recovered quickly and put a bit more of a squeeze into the hug before untangling herself and returning to her chair. As Shelby dabbed at her eyes with her napkin, she was aware of the fact that Amelia was watching her carefully.

"The last time you had sex was when you got pregnant with Kelsi?"

Shelby nodded quickly, and quietly. "I know you never really liked Davie."

"Yeah," Amelia answered. "I've been pretty vocal about that."

"Well, here you go. It's a... a perfectI told you somoment, served up on a silver fucking platter."

She looked down, and had a horrifying moment where she realized she was trying to bait her sister into berating her not only because she felt like she deserved it, but because it would be one more thing she could add to her lengthy list of Amelia-based fantasies: the time she whipped Shelby into a puddle with just her words. But when she looked up, Amelia was staring down and shaking her head.

"Well," Shelby said, sitting up straighter. "Go on."

"It's not fair," she muttered under her breath. "Fuck him.It's not fair."

Shelby blinked in confusion.

"He just... he used you? And now he's done with you? Just because you had the nerve to keep some fat on you for once in your goddamn life? I mean, you were back to your competition weight three weeks after Ian was born,which was fucking insane,and now it's just on to the next hot little thing?" Amelia rocketed to her feet, sending her chair skittering backwards across the floor, and started pacing. "No, okay? Not okay. Not okay."

She paused, after a few seconds, and put her hands to her mouth as she craned her neck around...like it itched. Her mouth was covered, but Shelby knew from the way her cheeks were twitching that Amelia was counting to herself.

When she finally noticed Shelby watching her, she blushed and said, "I'm okay." She wiped the corner of her eye and sat back down. "It kills me that you put your life on hold for that douchecanoe."

Shelby snorted, loudly, atdouchecanoe, which was all the more hilariously embarrassing after all her wet crying.

"I'm serious," Amelia said, though there was the slightest up turn to her tone. "You stopped competing. You stopped giving lessons. You are abadass, and you just..." She paused as the corners of her lips curled upward, and the two of them descended into giggles.

"Douchecanoe?" Shelby said, laughing.

Amelia shook her head, grinning more widely and genuinely than Shelby had seen in a long, long time.

"I've never heard that before!"

"Shel," she said, laying her hand on Shelby's shoulder as her smile faded, "you work at a Babies'R'Us, for fucks sake."

"What's wrong with that?" Shelby whined.

Amelia's grip on her shoulder tightened, and she said, "You areShelby Fucking Laine. Working in retail isn't what you were supposed to do!"

Her smile broke again, good mood evaporating. Pathetically, she added, "I get a lot of Kelsi's stuff cheap."

"Not buying it. No." Amelia stood up, shaking her head, and carried the half-empty Champagne bottle into the kitchen, draining as she went. "No." It clinked loudly as she dropped it into her recycling, and she pulled out the other one. Shelby returned to her dinner, eating small bites, but her eyes were glued on her sister.

Shelby and Amelia were built very similarly. They had the kind of frame that begged to have muscle added to it, although Amelia had never done much with that. Her body was more like the rest of the women in their family, lean if perhaps a bit on the busty side. Amelia was thinner than most, owing to her vegetarian diet and her tendency to fall into artistic inspiration, sometimes forgetting to eat for days at a time. Her arms had a lean muscular look, but she'd never possessed the same level of raw strength.

And so it was, with a huff, that Amelia handed her the second bottle of Champagne, cork still firmly in place. Shelby smiled and wrenched it free, barely needing to apply herself, to which her little sister rolled her eyes in barely-concealed jealousy as she turned to throw the cork away.

On her return, Amelia gave her a flat look. "I don't care," she said, and after a pause, added, "but... your makeup looks like shit."

"Oh," Shelby said, smearing the blade of her palm across her cheek. "Okay."

"Ithinkyou'd want me to say something, so...this is me saying something."

Shelby twisted in her chair and grabbed her clutch. "Bathroom's upstairs, right?" she asked, even though she knew full well where it was.

Amelia nodded, tipped up the bottle to drink, and sat down at the table again just as Shelby scurried off.

Most of Amelia's apartment was a single, open air space, with maybe thirty feet of open air above them and maybe a hundred feet across. The kitchen was built into the far side of it from the entrance, and above the kitchen were the bathroom and two bedrooms. Sometimes, Shelby couldn't believe her sister had done all of this. Amelia had bought the building for a song, divided it into five different spaces more or less equal in size to hers, and leased out the others cheap to starving artists she respected. Between those artists and their friends, they'd all come together to create some very pretty fixtures, counters, tables, railings, and the like. Amelia's apartment was sleek and austere, with a lot of brushed steel, but she'd seen one of the other apartments and it looked like Willy Wonka had designed it in the middle of a fever dream.

Shelby had helped build this too in her own way, providing a chunk of the seed money for the down payment. She didn't like to think about what she'd had to do, but she could justify it to herself when Amelia had done so much with it.

Really, all that had mattered at the time was that it got Amelia out from under their father.Thatwas enough.

Shelby was distracted, after a few bouncing steps, by the realization of how heavy and full her breasts were, seemingly, all of a sudden. She'd expressed before she left the house, and that should have been enough, but there was a sadistic link between her mental state and her milk production that she hadn't worked out. She knew it had to be something with hormones, but her hormones never made any damn sense. Whenever she got upset her breasts seemed to fill up like overfull water balloons, with all the added weight and jiggling visual effect.

She found herself wishing she'd brought something to express into but her mind hadn't been on practical matters when she'd gotten ready, hence the pain in her feet and the wet feeling inside the cups of her bra. She'd hadn't had it in her to put pads inside such a beautiful piece of lingerie.

Safely on the landing, she ran her hands inside her dress and felt how full she was.

"Fuck, not now," she whined, recognizing that she was close to a painful level of full. She briefly considered expressing into the sink, but couldn't bring herself to waste that much milk. It was precious, and belonged to Kelsi, and losing any amount more than what dripped out into her clothes was certainly going to make her cry. This was the one thing she could do, and only she could do it. She needed this one thing to feel like she wasn't the failure everyone else seemed to think she was.

She cursed under her breath, wondering how full she could let her breasts become before she'd have to go home. She wasn't sure she'd be able to be brave enough to deliberately set out on this path again. It had been so easy after their father's funeral. That had just happened. No build up. No agonizing. No gutting catharsis. It had been easy. It had been right. It had been...

Shelby came to a stop when she realized she'd walked into the wrong room. She was in the guest bedroom, not the bathroom, and she was about to back out when something glinting caught her eye.

"What the hell?" Shelby whispered, as her eyes widened.

In the corner was a mannequin, which was not too unusual; Amelia had always had weird and eclectic art loitering in her living spaces, but the mannequin was dressed in one of her old competition costumes, and had her collection of gold and silver medals around its neck.

There was more. On the wall next to it was a huge, blown-up picture of Shelby on the beam in full stretch. It was hung, neat and straight, and in a frame. There was a shelf with trophies loaded on it. All of her trophies, she thought. Shelby stepped towards the display, mesmerized. There was a pile of small boxes next to the display, but she ignored them for the moment, stepping forward in awe.

She had thought all of this stuff was in storage somewhere. Ithad been down in the family basement, but her life had been so busy that she hadn't even wondered what had happened to all of it after dad passed and mom sold the house.

The leotard and the medals all seemed like a lifetime ago. She looked down at the picture of herself, and her hand traced over the glossy fabric of the costume all the way up to the cold medals. The familiar touch made her stomach surge a little. She felt the shadow of all her achievements passing over her, likewho she waspassing judgment onwho she'd become.

There was a small table under the shelves, and on it lay an open folder of clippings: mostly from their hometown newspaper celebrating 'local athlete Shelby Laine', though there were some collegiate articles as well as the one time her name had been mentioned in a Sports Illustrated.

The collection felt as if it was made of lead, and before she knew it she was collapsing onto the guest bed in the middle of the room with it in her lap.

It was a shrine to her, a shrine that had once been her father's but was now, inexplicably, Amelia's. If that was the how, then what was the why? Why would Amelia have done this? Kept all this? She'd clearly intervened, and done so in secret to keep it from Shelby, but why?

She thought of the pieces of Amelia's art that decorated her own house. She thought of the times that looking at them had made her feel comfort, and sometimes feel an almost incurable sexual excitement. A poor proxy for the woman herself, but any port in a storm. Shelby found herself wondering if Amelia did the same. Did Amelia come in here to think of her? Did she ever touch herself, the way Shelby did?

With her heart soaring and her aches and pains subsiding, she flicked through the clippings, remembering how she had been, and that people had been sufficiently proud of her to find, cut out, and then keep these clippings.

She whispered, "Shelby Fucking Laine," remembering how those words had sounded when she'd been tied to the tree. She shifted slightly, pressing her thighs together, and it was enough for the scrapbook to fall from her lap to the floor.

"Dammit," Shelby hissed, hoping she hadn't made enough noise to tip Amelia off that she wasn't in the bathroom fixing her makeup. She craned her neck, staring at the open door and trying to tune her senses into the distance, but all seemed quiet downstairs.

She bent down, one hand pressed to her chest to keep from falling out of her dress, and saw that the manilla folder had fallen next to an open box just under the edge of the bed. It had something shiny in it. Everyone had always told her that she'd had to be part cat to be so agile, but the metaphor definitely extended to her curiosity.

It was full of her leotards, all of them. Or, at least, most of them. She would never have been able to work out how many she'd had over the course of her career anyway.

The top one had a black body with lace effect sleeves. Junior year of high school, second half of the season, after the stitching in an orange-and-blue number had started to come undone along the shoulder. The one under that was of much greater interest; it was her favorite, bright baby pink body with shoulders of shiny black fabric. Sophomore year at Penn, when she'd placed at the state finals. Pink had always been her favorite color, as much as black had been to Amelia, but it wasn't just the color or the fond memories of those competitions. That leotard had always made her feel powerful in a sort of magical way; like a deity who had decided to bless the mortals of this plane with her mere presence.

She lifted it out and held it up. It looked so small now, but that was not surprising; leotards always did. She remembered how her husband, then-boyfriend, had been totally convinced that it wouldn't fit her when she'd first modeled it for him. She replayed that memory, holding the costume up and remembering the gasps of awe, and replaced her husband with Amelia in that memory. It was Amelia that gasped as it pulled into place, Amelia that pushed her onto the bed, anddefinitelyAmelia between whose legs she later spent twenty minutes worshipping.

Shelby bit her lip hard. She tried to imagine what Amelia would say if she saw her in the costume, coming down the stairs with the medals on. That might work to break the ice, and get her over the hump confidence-wise. She would be the goddess again, the goddess that Amelia loved and had seduced and forever made hers. She glanced at the picture, the trophies, the mannequin. The whole world spun.

"Fucking hell," she said, grunting as she stood up, untied the dress, and shrugged it off. Her cincher and expensive panties were next to hit the floor. The bra would stay on for now, but only as a practicality. Getting the leotard on would be tough enough without contending with her two overfilled milk sacks flopping everywhere and getting in the way. Her once-perfect tits now went almost all the way to her navel. Eventually the bra would come off under the costume; it would be more than tight enough to hold them in place.Shelby Fucking Lainenever wore anything under leotards. She took a deep breath, stepped into the costume, and pulled it up.

She knew she was in trouble when it resisted being pulled up over her thighs, but she'd never been a quitter so she kept pulling, kept struggling. Kept wiggling. Heaving. Stretching.

She'd just gotten it over her hips when Amelia found her, crying hysterically, a couple minutes later.

"Okay," her sister said softly, sliding in behind her and slipping an arm around her shoulder. "Ooookay." They collapsed to the ground together, leaning against the side of the bed.

"I'm sorry," Shelby groaned. "I don't know what happened!"

"It's okay." Amelia reached back, pulled the blanket off the guest bed, and wrapped it around her. "There we go."

"I came in here"— she paused to sniff —"by accident, and then I started looking around, and-and-and I saw all these old things of mine, and just..." She tried to wipe her nose with the back of her hand, and couldn't get her throat to stop feeling so tight.

"Jesus," Amelia said, cursing under her breath, and wrapped both arms around Shelby in a massive hug.

After a minute of trying to catch her breath, Shelby slumped into her arms and said, "I think tonight was a bad night to come face to face with who I used to be."

"That's..." Amelia laughed morbidly, and buried her face in Shelby's shoulder. "My God, woman. Who youused t..." She moved back onto her knees, sat on her heels, and shook her head. "I'm sorry you found all this shit like this. I... I should have told you it was up here. Mom was gonna get rid of it, and I—"