Nazanin

I might have peeked at what she was scratching.

"Just. Trust me. Your big sissy has a pretty cool plan in the works." She waved an assuring hand, her non-scratching hand, as she kept her eyes glued to the road. "It'll all make sense by the end. And hey. Don't forget you still need to figure out where you want us to go."

"Wait," I said, pressing at my temples now, "your plan starts with a shaman?"

Presently, the itchiest of Naz's bug bites was on her abdomen, but scratching at it through the glossy fabric only seemed to make it worse. She briefly tried reaching up into her skirt and through the bottom of her top, past her stomach-casually revealing the shapely, shadowy entirety of her white cotton panties-but her dress was too trimly tailored to grant the access she needed.

She braked at a four-way intersection in the middle of nowhere, or in what might as well have been the abyss. She put the camper in park. She unbuckled her seatbelt.

"Sorry, but I can't with this anymore," she shuddered, and started fiddling with the buttons on the back of her dress. "Can you p-please-?" She turned so I could access them.

"Can I-?"

"I'm dying inside this thing!" she thrashed, scratching riotously at her frontside through the slick, striped fabric. "I need this off. Now. Please."

"You're just going to-?"

"Leeeoooo," she groaned. "Don't make this weird. You've seen me in a bra before!"

"Okay!" I cowed. "Whatever."

I started fumbling with my sister's dress's pearly buttons, helping her go topless one un-looping at a time. I was hoping these pearls would have somehow deformed or fused with their loops since the last time I had helped her with them. They had not. They opened so easily.

"Oh gahhh-awwd," she moaned as the fresh night air breathed onto her bug-bitten skin.

"Okay," I said after the last button.

"FREEDOM!" she cried and yanked first one slim arm out and then the other, wrenched the entire top off of her frontside, and scrunched it down into her lap.

My sister was wearing a tan bra just paler than her skin. She had little dime-sized swellings here and there on her collar, stomach, back, shoulders, and neck.

"Jesus," I muttered. "How'd you even get so many?"

"Did you seriously not get a single bug bite, you fucking fuck?" Her fingernails made noisy, furious work of these newly exposed bug-bites.

But she threw me for a loop when she shoved a couple fingers into the left cup of her bra and scratched with heady purpose inside, as if I wasn't still watching. She moaned with complex relief. Then she peeked inside the bra.

She reached up and turned on the cabin light. She pulled her bra cup away from her breast, then she reached in and pinched up a couple fingers' worth of boob flesh. She studied the sweaty, reddened stippling of her areola.

I stayed: so casual.

So I could see my sister's naked breast? What. So it was perfectly boob-shaped? Sure. So she was inadvertently stimulating her nipple so that the cute little tannish nubbin was beginning to harden and protrude?

I swallowed.

Naz glanced at my noise. She met my gaze, her fingers still pinching and holding her boob out in the glow of the overhead light.

"It itches," she grimaced.

"Is there a bug bite?" I asked dumbly, as if I hadn't just watched her.

"It feels like it," she said, inspecting a little more self-consciously this time. "But I can't tell where it actually is on my nipple. I've never been bitten on my fucking tit before."

And then just like that, she abruptly let go of her boob fat, fixed the cup back into place, and gave both boobs a little lift and squeeze-together inside her bra.

"Right," she cleared her throat. "I can figure this out later." She reached up again and shut off the cabin light. "Sorry I showed you my tit."

Then at last, Naz shifted out of park and drove our camper through the intersection, and we resumed our trip through the void. When we got back on the highway, the windows came back down.

I couldn't help it now. I had accidentally disabled whatever Westermarckian security system was supposed to keep little brothers from having any interest in their sisters' private parts. I stole endless furtive glances at my sister's bare skin in the dark.

The very round shapes her bra made of her little breasts bulged, pulled the straps slightly away from her chest, created thin gaps along the soft rundown from her clavicles to the tops of her boobs. Her sweat-damp tummy creased into little brown rolls as she sat slightly forward. She had her skirt pushed all the way up so that she could continue to scratch idly between her thighs.

Around this time, I nearly forgot it even happened, but we drove past what looked like a man walking on the side of the road. He was marching like he had someplace to be in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Up close, he looked like absolute hell. We blew right past him.

"Where you goin', guy?" I muttered beneath the ruckus of the wind.

My sister's white underwear was practically glow-in-the-dark. The cotton fabric simply hugged her pussy. I could see from just how smoothly it lay against her pelvis that she was either trimmed or shaved. I very slowly, stealthily, rubbed my aching cock in the dark.

Chapter 8

Later that night, on my pullout bed, I could not get to sleep. I needed to orgasm. I squinted into the inky black at Naz's end of the camper.

I considered going to the bathroom to masturbate, get it out of my system so I could sleep, but I dreaded the light in there. It was bright yellow with a milky plastic covering forever filled with bugs. And the toilet had a smell to it that was so clean it circled all the way back around to nasty. The shower was cramped and icky. I could not imagine masturbating in the bathroom.

I got up, went in, and pulled my briefs down. I was momentarily blinded by the buzzing light behind the bug-filled plastic above the mirror. No matter. I started jerking my cock over the open toilet. The smell was sour. Equal parts septic and immaculate. I tried breathing through my mouth. I forced myself to think horny thoughts: white cotton, brown boobs, itchy nipples.

Someone knocked.

"Y-yeah?" I choked, frozen.

No answer.

"Naz?" I rasped, my throat spitless.

It was the wee hours of the morning. I was only jerking off so that I could go back to sleep. Why was I being accosted at this hour? I had rights. I pulled my briefs back up. I scowled at myself in the mirror. I yanked open the door.

It was Jules.

"Oh, what's up?" I asked, a little embarrassed.

He looked beat. Worse than last I'd seen him. He was staring at the floor of the camper, stringy hair dangling over his face.

"Can't sleep?" I asked, trying to get a word out of him.

I couldn't always get him to open up. I know he didn't mean to hurt my feelings, but he could make me feel like the worst brother in the world sometimes.

He did finally look at me. Gosh. He looked like absolute hell. He wagged his finger at me.

"Need to talk?" I tried again.

He answered tearfully, wailingly, his voice practically saline.

"You look tired," I agreed.

He craned his head toward the back of the camper, maybe nervous Naz might be spying on us.

"She's asleep," I promised. You could hear her snoring.

But then just like that he turned and walked off her direction, disappearing into the dark of the narrow hallway.

"Hey," I called quietly, "she's sleeping!"

I admit, this abandonment stung. Was I not good enough? Had he hoped to find her in the bathroom?

"Don't say I didn't warn you!" I whisper-shouted.

But sometimes there was just no helping him.

Miffed, a little guilty, and no longer horny, I laid back down.

The next morning, we ate microwave oatmeal out of plastic bowls with McDonald's characters on them. Naz was on her phone, scritching under her glasses at a bug bite near the corner of her eye. She was barefoot, braless, in yoga shorts and a tiny bedtime t-shirt that dangled off her breasts and left her midriff exposed. I could locate her nipples through the old, thin cotton of her shirt. I knew what was under there. This killed me.

Just as I finished this thought, Naz reached under her shirt, and began pinching and scratching drily again at the itch on her nipple.

She wasn't looking up, so as she scratched away I simply observed the way the t-shirt tugged almost imperceptibly at the soft fat of her other breastt, not jiggling it, just cutely, minutely deforming it.

Naz glanced up at me, fixed her glasses on her nose. I looked down. I leafed through the drawings I'd gotten done so far. One of them caught my sister's eye.

"Hey, whoa," she said. "Go back to that one."

I flipped back to the page she'd seen: a figure all in shadow wagging its finger at me.

"Just a sketch," I drummed my fingers self-consciously on the page, "not a fully formed idea."

"It's ..." she began to say, pondering. She didn't finish her sentence. Instead, she gave me a curious look and spooned herself another bite of oatmeal.

"It's?"

Granted, I wasn't personally fond of this drawing. It made me feel something that I was uncomfortable naming in broad daylight. But I valued Naz's blunt input.

"Who is it supposed to be?" she asked, turning the sketchbook so she could see it better. She took her glasses off for a second and brought her nose right down to the page, to the face of the figure.

"Nobody," I mumbled. "Just drew it from my head."

"Hnm," she chewed thoughtfully.

"Am I doing any better?" I asked.

"It's a step in the right direction," she put her glasses back on and spun the drawing back around to me.

I must have given her a pleading look. She toed affectionately at me under the table and gave me a thin smile. "Keep it up, Bro."

She got up and cleaned her bowl in the sink.

And now I was staring at her again. Her small shirt revealed twin pelvic dimples at the base of her back. Her ass in yoga shorts was soft and bulbous, and frankly unsisterly.

Naz turned back around. I pretended to be staring into space that just happened to be her direction.

She leaned against the counter toweling her hands dry, and gave me a thoughtful smirk. She folded the dish towel in her hands as she challenged me to be the first to break the silence. Was this an awkward silence, all of a sudden? Why?

"So-o-o," I cleared my throat. "Where we going today?"

"Honestly, I kinda feel like ... just," she took in a lovely, chest-filling breath and sighed, stretching, "hanging out? I don't know. The heat last night was torture for my bug bites. I'm digging the A/C today. The cool air helps."

"Um," I gave her body an accidental glance, "you want to just stay parked then?"

She pointed her folded and now rolled up dish towel out the window behind me. I turned and looked. We had driven north out of Nebraska and had made it to a campground outside Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

"I don't ..." I muttered. I looked back at Naz. "What am I supposed to be looking at?"

"Exactly," she set the towel down at the back of the counter, in the precise place it always went. It was weird how neat she kept Cy's camper. It wasn't like her.

"You want to stay here and do nothing?"

"Well," she shrugged. "Maybe not nothing."

"So," I gulped, struggling with the prospect of having to cohabitate face-to-face with my sister's body for any stretch of hours in broad daylight. Sitting facing parallel up in the cabin, focused on the road, it was much easier to hide my desperate arousal. "Um, alright, what do you want to do?"

"What do you want to do?" she asked back, matching my spoiled dispassion, if a little exaggeratedly. "You seem to keep forgetting this is our road trip."

"I don't know," I groaned. "I suppose we could draw?"

She frowned and tilted her head. A loose curl fell across her face. She poofed at it.

"You only have one sketchpad."

"Oh, well. Scratch that idea," I surrendered immediately. I could have torn some paper out for her, loaned her however much she wanted, but I could tell she wasn't interested.

"Buuut," she took a step toward me, "what if I posed for you? And you drew me while we talked or something?"

"Um," I waited for any sign that she was fucking with me. My eyes might have darted, of their own terrible volition, to the slender dip of her bare navel. I could draw that? "Okay?" I finally asked.

"Great. One sec," she held up a finger, and then popped into the bathroom.

She exited a minute later having evidently put her contacts back in, and was playing now with a big chompy hair clip. She turned and posed before the mirror on the outside of the bathroom door. She swept her ample black curls into a bun of sorts, then secured this with the clip. She pat-patted to test the bun, then smoldered at herself.

"Yes ma'am. I'm feeling drawable."

"Uhhm, I don't know that I'll actually be able to. Like. Draw you."

I meant this. It was hard to capture the likeness of someone you knew well, especially someone you had known your whole life. And doubly especially a sibling who might react poorly to being portrayed the way I couldn't not see my sister.

"Who cares?" she slid a hand into the back of her yoga shorts and scratched at a bug-bite on the bottom of her right butt cheek. "You want the practice. I want to hang out."

I looked politely away as her hand wandered around to the front of her yoga shorts.

I waited for her to sit back down across from me, but after she finished scratching herself she just continued to stand there and stare at me like she needed directions.

"Well?" she stuck her hands out, miming a doll waiting to be posed.

"You want to sit down?" I gestured at the seat across from me.

"No?" She gave me a look. "Don't you need to be able to see me to draw me?"

"Ahhm," I shifted a little uncomfortably in the booth. "You want me to draw-?"

"Me," she nodded, and pointed at her body.

"Got it," I blushed. "Then, um, how about we put you over here?" I pointed to the pullout.

"Your bed?"

"Is that alright?"

"Not the best smelling place in the world," she sighed, lifting a knee onto it and testing its springiness. "But it will do. Where are you sitting?"

"I'll figure something out."

I dug around and found a collapsible lawn chair in the closet. I set it up across from her. I sat and opened my drawing pad in my lap. It was an awkward angle to draw on. I tried crossing a leg. The pad wobbled.

Naz poured us each a cup of coffee. She handed me mine, which I sipped appreciatively before slotting it into the mesh cup holder of my chair. She brought hers with her to the pullout.

"I'll try not to spill," she promised. She laid her back against the wall and rested her head against the window. She brought one knee up as an elbow rest, and left her other knee down to function as a cup rest. She held her coffee carefully on the side of her knee.

"This is actually a little dumber than it looks," she chuckled, referring to the way she had to hold her arm out to keep her coffee balanced.

"Maybe just hold it wherever, then?" I suggested. I was starting to feel sort of powerful in my little director's chair. "You'll want to be comfortable."

Naz shrugged and brought the coffee down into her crotch. There it steamed. She seemed to consider this.

"Well, but then you can't see-," she shifted the cup just slightly to the side so that her puffy spandex vulva was visible again.

"Ah, yes, so important that we get your genitals," I feigned pomposity.

"Paramount. They're my best feature," she mugged, then laughed at her own ridiculousness.

The sunlight behind her head made her twirly raven hair, which I typically thought of as black, glow a bright, root beer brown. Perhaps noticing me staring, she brought one self-conscious hand up to her head, and tried to tame her everlasting frizz.

"Whoa, wait. Hold that pose," I ordered suddenly, pointing my pencil at her.

She snorted at the cliche, but obeyed.

I immediately began to sketch.

The first lines on a page were always the nearly invisible kind, as my hand wagged at gestural arcs and angles, at impressions of curvature, junction, and tilt. This phase was crucial, as it laid out the foundational feel of the pose she was modeling. Rule-based anatomical shapes would fall into place later phases.

"So," Naz spoke carefully, trying not to move too much. "Want to guess where we're going next?"

"Not really," I answered honestly. "Just promise me it's not another shaman."

"Someday you'll thank me for that. But no. Want a hint?"

"Sure." I picked up another pencil, one with a softer, darker lead. It was time to start making decisions, as Mr. Ross would have put it.

"Think somebody sexy."

"Uh," I blinked at my sister's teasing gaze, her sensuous pose, all of her backlit in morning sunlight. "Can I get a better hint than that?"

"Think somebody sexy who ..." she narrowed her gaze, "you have a crush on."

Naz's shapely brown legs were so casually, confidently spread apart, her tiny, pornographic yoga shorts eagerly conveying all aspects of the lune-shaped geometry of her sex.

"I am a nineteen year old boy," I muttered helplessly. "I need a better hint than that."

"Think ... somebody sexy who you've had a terrible, painful crush on your whole life."

She couldn't be talking about herself, right? I hadn't given myself away? She was letting me freely, unabashedly, if not quite unself-consciously stare at the soft squishy contours of her pussy.

"... maybe think Valentine's Day...?"

"Shan!" I blurted. "God, it's Shan," I said again, bursting with mingled relief and embarrassment.

If yoh must know, Shan had soured me on the whole stupid concept of Valentine's Day.

"We're going to see her?"

"Ding-ding-ding," Naz smirked.

"Where at?"

"At her summer internship."

I nodded maybe too happily. Shan was awful news. We got along well, of course, always had, but then that was the problem for me, wasn't it.

"How is Shan?" I asked, swallowing my discomfort, and returning my focus to the safety of my drawing. I began smearing in some basic swaths of shadow using a tortillon. "Where's she interning?"

"She's up in Montana for the summer."

I couldn't help pausing to make whatever face this news made me make.

"Don't hate," Naz defended. "Montana is supposed to be breathtaking."

"Right. Montana. Well," I shrugged. "I'm starting to see how important it is that I pick someplace cool for the end of the trip."

"Oh, buzz off," Naz scoffed. "You get to see your precious Shan."

"That is nice, I guess. Hey, is she single right now?" I asked jokingly. I knew the answer.

"If you're curious if she might finally have lost her marbles and come around to the idea of dating you, the answer remains unchanged: stay away from my best friend, you miserable cretin."

I grabbed the kneadable eraser. It was cold. I started softening it, stretching it, looping it back into itself in my fingers. I needed it doughy.

"Oh my god," Naz growled out of nowhere.

"What?"

"Itch. ITCH. BAD."

"Shit, where?" I shot up, setting my things on the kitchenette counter. We were in the zone enough by this point that it was simply understood: if she needed an itch scratched, then I was her fingernails. Naz was a committed model. I would need to remember to praise her later.

"UHHM," she gulped, swallowing the agony of not actively scratching the itch herself, "LEFT THIGH."