Quid Pro Quo

God, it felt good! It had been so long since I'd gotten to pleasure myself. My dorm at school didn't have housemothers and proctors who actually came around to make sure we were sleeping with our arms outside the covers, but it was a living memory; it didn't happen now because there was a war on and people had other things to think about—and I had roommates who slept lightly. It had to be a very quick and sneaky affair.

Slowly at first. We couldn't always measure our time together in hours; often we just got minutes. But when we did get time, there were times he liked to start out that way, just a little bit too slow, and he'd tease me along moving not quite in sync until I frankly admitted I was in pain for it and begged him to let me ride, and when I did, he'd lie back and watch me move until I'd stroked to a finish and finished him along with me.

Moving on my own, I discovered an angle to come in at that just drove me crazy—a delicious itchy place deep inside, up near the top somewhere. A feeling of nearly unbearable tightness and suspense. Sometimes when Dennis was holding me bent over by the hips and thrusting into me from behind like the animal he sometimes could be, he found it, but tended to change the angle just a tad too soon…God damn this felt good! I forgot about even fantasy. What I was doing felt good in itself. I pumped and rocked, my thighs tensed, my heels digging into the bed, my head pressed back into the pillow, giving it to myself good. I wished I could show him what I was doing—then he'd really know how to work me! Then suddenly it all started coming together. I strummed a finger on the hard ridge of my clitoris, and over the edge I went.

I felt like I was imploding. I trembled and gasped as my belly muscles tensed and my toes curled almost to the point of cramping. I wanted to shout, to growl and roar like a beast. Maybe I did make some noise; I hardly knew now where I was or what was going on. The world consisted of the part of me convulsing around the cucumber and under my hand.

Spent, I let my head roll to one side, feeling the contractions ebb out of me like distancing rumbles of thunder after a storm. When I did, I looked out the corner of my eye and saw someone standing in the door of my room.

Oh murder. Oh woe. Oh shit!

There not five feet away from me, stood Adam, his mouth open in what would have been a brain-wiped expression except that his eyes were blazing wide, more focused than I'd ever seen them in all his life.

He had a hand gripping his cock through his running shorts, not, I think, out of a desire to participate but because it had dealt him a monstrous betrayal, and he just wanted to keep it under control before it went and did something worse. His nostrils dilated; he took a deep, catching breath, and his throat worked; he'd always had a nose like a hound, and the air between us was heavy and humid with my scent.

Oh, why hadn't I locked the door?

My shock and fear and embarrassment found its most immediate expression in anger.

"You twisted little fuck!" I screamed. "OUT!" And for good measure, I picked up the book and hurled it at him. Emotion spoiled my aim, and I forgot to aim high; instead of hitting him in the head like I'd intended, it struck him in the chest. He let go of himself and caught the book. His dark eyebrows rose halfway up his forehead as he looked at the title. Then he looked at me. I had withdrawn the cucumber and pulled my thighs together. At sight of the cuke, he briefly put his hand over his eyes.

"Jesus!" he said. "I suppose I should be thankful you threw the book at me." Then he said, "Don't you know, you're not supposed to play with your food?"

He turned on his heel to leave the room and ran smack into Mom, who had been there who knew how long. And behind her, Dad, his eyes, not wide with shock, but squinting a little, as if what he was seeing was blasting them. What else could go wrong?

Mom said, "Adam. Mary Alexandra. What is the meaning of this?"

"It was an accident!" came out of us simultaneously, just like in the days when we'd be chasing each other through the house with make-believe swords and lances and a picture fell off the wall.

"An accident," Dad said. "Lord, I'd like to think so. Mary Alexandra, get decent, for Christ's sake. You two go sit out on the porch; your mother and I need to talk."

Even though it was still hot, it now seemed cold—I know I felt that way. We stood out there feeling even more frightened and miserable than we had the day we'd accidentally opened the door to Mrs. Sanderson's stock trailer and the half a dozen shoats had escaped and found their way into the town hall. Or the day that Louise Menoch caught me and her son Luther playing doctor at their house.

Smoking a cigarette seemed like an excellent idea. Mom hated my smoking, and I always had to do it outside, but I was in enough trouble as it was. And I was outside. I lit up a Lucky. I extended the pack to Adam, in case he would have changed his mind about the soothing qualities of nicotine. He hadn't.

"Thanks but no thanks, sis," he said. "I don't think it'll help."

I had gone through three of them when the door opened and my father came out onto the porch.

"Your mother will talk to you now," he said. We came into the house. He went into the kitchen and said something to Mom we didn't catch; then, I heard him say, "Don't give them any of that hellfire stuff, Marie. I don't believe in it and I won't have it. I think they've scared each other out of a year's growth, anyway." He went off to replace the tractor part which had occasioned his trip into town.

Mom was waiting for us in the kitchen. She motioned us to sit at either end of the oilcloth-covered table in the middle of the room, while she stood in a position of doom and judgment in front of the stove.

"You say it was an accident," she said. "I'm trying to figure out where the 'accident' part came in. I don't guess it was what you were doing, Mary Alexandra. I guess the accident was you barging into her room, Adam—care to tell me why you didn't do the gentlemanly thing and duck right back out?"

"I forgot." He sat with his head bowed, looking down at his clasped hands in front of him.

"This is a very serious thing that happened today," Mom said. "I just hardly know where to look, but that's nothing compared to your father. He's very upset; why he's left me to talk to you about this. I'm concerned with the state of your souls, but since I haven't been able to make you go to confession or Mass for two years, I'm not going to require you now."

I hated to think of the penances we'd have to do if we did.

"But—here's what you're to do. You're to go through the first five books of the Bible and make note of all the references to your sin—"

"Jesus, Mom!" Adam protested. "I didn't plan to spend my entire leave reading the Bible! It's going to work out to the whole Old Testament. Everybody in the Bible was married to their half-sister—"

I ducked my head to cover a smile. Oh, yes, and Lot.

"I am aware that," Mom said acerbically. "Therefore, the references to Mosaic law will do. You can get started this evening. Son, you get on out of here; Mary Alexandra, I want to talk to you alone."

I gathered I was still in trouble. I hadn't been called Mary Alexandra that many times in a single day since before I'd left for college.

Mom dropped into the chair that Adam had vacated, and sat regarding me silently for a couple of minutes. Her narrow face, which my brother had inherited, was creased with worry and her hazel eyes looked weary and old.

"I've always been proud of the way you looked out for your little brother," she said. "You always tried your best to protect him. I never thought he might need protecting from you."

"I never meant this to happen," I said. "Do you think I meant it to happen?"

"It never did before, has it?"

"No, Mom! Not like that. He—a long while back he, he sort of caught me with—with Dennis. I had to explain to him that Dennis wasn't hurting me…we talked. There were things he needed to know and I told him."

"I wish you'd hurry up and marry Dennis already," Mom said.

"I plan to."

"Don't wait too long. I hope you know how lucky you are that he's after you like he is. Most girls who think they can be a law unto themselves end up having to leave town and go where nobody knows them in order to marry anybody. And that brings me to what I want to say. You must know that your brother isn't exactly like—like other men. I think he'll be able to look after himself, make a living, but it's possible he might not ever marry."

"He needs to get out of Koenigsburg," I said.

"Even then," she said. "Zandra, there's a streak of odd in this family yea wide; and your father seems to think it might have come from—somewhere up the line, family members being too close to each other. I don't know if that's the reason, but why take chances? It's anathema anyway. I've always been worried about the two of you, the way you've always been so close. I know you've got hot blood; you came by it honestly, from both sides. It's another thing we've got; nothing wrong with it, as long as it expresses itself through—proper channels. A lot of parents wouldn't let a daughter be as free as we've let you be, because that's not the thing that your father's worried about. He's afraid that if your brother doesn't find anybody, and he gets too lonely…I know how much you love him; you'll want to help him, and—Zandra, promise me that you two won't ever turn to each other! After today, don't think we won't be looking out, but after your father and I are gone…promise me!"

"Mom! That's never occurred to me, and I don't think it's occurred to him!"

"Promise me."

"I do not believe we are having this conversation! Is anybody else's family having this conversation?"

"Other people's families are not at issue here," Mom said. "Just ours. Is there anything that would prevent you from keeping a promise like this? Is there any reason you would not wish to?"

"Of course not! All right, all right, I promise! God, Mom!"

And that is how I spent much of my semester break and my brother spent his leave. Sometimes we served our sentence sitting at opposite ends of the kitchen table, shooting each other the occasional dirty look. For the next day or two, I felt too unsettled and diminished and abashed to think about sex very much, which was quite unusual for me.

I wanted to talk with him about what had happened, but at the same time I was afraid to. And, in fact what had happened? I thought of the way Mom always referred to him as my little brother, even though he was taller than Gene and Gene was the youngest of all of us. But Gene was more self-sufficient…not vulnerable the way Adam was. I wondered if something about today would end up warping him for life.

There is always stuff to do on a farm, and I swear, it was like they saved scutwork up for us—we could have been doing missionary work in Timbuktu for five years, and when we came back for a visit, besides the daily grind, there were always fence posts to be reset or weeding in the garden or the chicken coop to be cleaned out—always something.

As a matter of fact, a day before Adam was supposed to get on the train to report for his overseas duty, I had to do just that last thing. It needed doing, and Mom swore by chicken litter—she said there was nothing like it for conditioning a garden. After I was through with the stinking, miserable job, I washed my hands at the pump and went into the barn to replace the tools I'd used. While I was in there, I went looking for the pot of hand lotion that we kept as part of the agricultural worker's first line of defense against the sandpaper hands that would announce our station in life and put off our dance partners, and while I saw the Bag Balm in its usual place, the lotion was missing.

I knew where it was—my brother had taken it up into the hayloft. It was something both he and Gene did, at various times, going up into the hayloft to at times to daydream, but more often to jack off. I'd known about that, of course—I'd picked up the info here and there, from books and conversations with friends, and the merest inadvertent sightings of the boys. What I hadn't known was that they used the hand lotion, and I was outraged. My dad laughed for over five minutes, and even my mother, who tried so hard to maintain order and rectitude in the family, could not hide a smile.

"That's disgusting!" I'd yowled. "How am I expected to use this after they've been in it? Get 'em their own!"

That was what Mom and Dad had done, except that the solution did not work perfectly; they were always going and using theirs up or misplacing it somewhere, and then they'd carry off the family supply, just the way they borrowed my eyebrow tweezers to hold tiny parts while putting model airplanes together and Dad took Mom's funnel and used it to pour oil or gasoline into.

It figured, I thought; lubricant for their extracurricular activities was figured into the household budget and I caught hell.

A devilish smile curved my lips as I very slowly and stealthily mounted the ladder leading up to the hayloft, taking care not to tread in the middle of the third rung, which creaked. At the same time I remembered what my mother had said-- don't think we won't be looking out—and I realized that if I got caught this time I would probably get written out of the family Bible.

But I was reasonably sure they were not looking out right at this time and this was something that had started before the promise had been made.

He owed me this one.

I ghosted up the ladder, feeling like a spirit made of heated air.

Hay is itchy prickly stuff, and I am always amazed when I read about people getting even part-naked and love-wrestling around in it. Over the years, a couple of horse blankets had found their way up there, and because it was hot in the loft, he had stripped down. A shaft of westering, dust-moted light coming in through the upper door lit the planes and angles of his body—wiry, sinewy arms, long, stringy-muscled runner's legs, the wide bony rack of his shoulders, the sharp curves and points of his collarbones, his ribs and fleshless belly. It glimmered on the fairness of his normally unexposed skin and in his body hair, with that iridescence you sometimes saw in dark hair.

I had seen him working shirtless in the field and I'd seen him in his track suit, but I had not seen him totally naked since he'd been a little boy. He'd changed.

I'd duly made note of what I'd learned from that time with Luther, and I'd had fleeting glimpses of the penises of the men in the family—three of them, in good health, and only one bathroom in the house, how would I not? I'd seen all of them padding to the bathroom in the wee hours of the morning with morning boners, and they'd all presented fairly startling profiles.

God, he was big! There was no way he had any more than Dennis, but he was so much thinner than Dennis that what he had seemed…not quite real. But it was real all right, he had it in the grip of his right fist and I could hear the sound his lubed hand made sliding up and down on the shaft from where I was. His strong, slender neck was extended, his head thrown back; his face was intent, transcendent, the mouth drawn tight in concentration. His eyes were shut; I wondered what he was seeing behind his eyelids.

I didn't want to know. I watched his face go through the expressions I had seen on it when he doing any kind of hard physical work—every movement of his mouth or his eyebrows; it was almost as fascinating as what he was doing with his hands.

He had been sitting with his legs parted and folded under him, and now he leaned back on his left hand so he could rise with his hips—the better to get that necessary tension in his quadriceps that meant that he gathering himself to finish. It occurred to me that there was beauty in his thin, gold-limned body; his utterly absorbed face, even in the act he was performing. I had read that some pagan faiths believed that the gods had created the stars and the worlds and peopled them this way. I was seeing Adam as no one else might ever see him.

He was handling himself roughly and frantically, his hand almost a blur, his body tensed. It should not have been possible, but I seemed to see all of him and everything at once: the second all coherent thought abandoned his face; as his balls drew up and prepared to release their payload; the pistoning movement of his cock in his fist; the look of agonic bliss as his orgasm caught and took him over.

His first spurts flew incredibly far, into the hay somewhere; the rest fell in pearlescent streams over his hand. It was time for me to get out of Dodge. I was back down the ladder and out of the barn in nothing flat, my mind and body ablaze with what I had seen. I took off running. I've heard of a runner's high. Adam says he has had it. I've also heard, less frequently, of a runner's orgasm. It happened to me, just that one time. It didn't seem to count; it was bound up with the wild tenderness and sense of beauty I'd felt, looking at him. I arrived back at the house, winded. I leaned against one of the posts that held up the porch, listening to the sound of my breathing, still hearing the sound of his, as sharp as blade against stone. My body echoed and clanged. The scent of earth filled me. From within the house, I heard the crackle and tinny music from the radio. Out in the distance, the cows started making their leisurely way home, and my father, out on the tractor, turned it to start coming home, too. And time resumed its normal forward motion around me.

The next day we all took Adam into town to catch the train. He was dressed up in his uniform, looking natty and heroic, with his duffel bag beside him; we waited at the stop behind the general store for the train to come around the bend and puff and screech to a stop.

We all hugged and kissed him good-bye. Seconds before he stepped aboard, he said to me in a low voice, "I'm sorry I scared you like that, Sis."

"It's all right, Goofy," I said. "I'm sorry I called you a bad name." Then he swung his duffel aboard and climbed in after it. It would be a while before the train took off, but we did not stay around for that. Those running-alongside-the-train farewells work so much better when you have a long platform. Better yet, in the movies.

When I got home and went to my room to change out of the dress Mom had made me put on to go to town in, I saw that my pillow was not as I had left it on my bed. I lifted it up, and there was a half-burnt altar candle, obviously lifted from the sacristy at Our Lady of Sorrows. It had a piece of paper wrapped around it.

"Dear Sis," it read, in my brother's angular handwriting, "Maybe this will keep you out of the garden." I sat down on the bed and laughed until I cried.

The day after that, Dennis came back from Oklahoma, and we made up for all of our lost time.

That all happened more years ago than I care to think about. I married Dennis right out of college and went to work for Dr. Muldaur and eventually took over his practice. Our tribe has increased like Abou Ben Adhem's. Adam failed to justify Mom's worries about him; he married out of college—his wife was knocked up—later was widowed, and married again. I got along fine with both his wives, women with knockout figures and ten times as much education as he deserved. And he has had twice as many kids as either Gene or I, three daughters—one of whom is my favorite niece in the entire world—and a son. The boy was as odd a child as his dad had been; they diagnosed him with some kind of PDD thing and he keeps a team of neuropsychologists, behaviorists, and I don't know what all else, in yacht payments. Adam worked in avionics down in Houston for many years, retired, and now operates a wholesale rose growing business on his share of the land the folks left us.