The Art of War Pt. 01

Ollie looked nothing like his sister. People usually didn't believe they were big brother and kid sister, with only a year between them. He had pale, steel-grey eyes to her liquid brown, and dark, almost black, curly hair to her gold-shot, caramel brunette, and no facial features in common with either his mother or his sister. All he shared with his sister was the charmingly quizzical expression that was such a family trait.

He was at least six feet tall, with a lean, defined, powerfully athletic build honed by years of competitive swimming, weight-training, and now his latest sporting obsessions, Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts. Izzy was about six inches shorter than he was, almost exactly the same height as their mother; when Carol Bartlett walked down the street with her daughter, people who didn't know them would have sworn they were sisters, once they tore their eyes and thoughts away from those elegant figures and the mouth-watering feast of taut, quivering buttocks, that is, and yanked their brains back up past their belt-buckles.

Part 2: If you want my help, convince me:

As he watched her, secretly admiring her long, smooth legs in her short skirt as she stalked up and down the room, Izzy cooled down, having worked her way through the alphabet to dredge up names she could call her older brother. Ollie waited patiently for her to run out of things to call him and get to the reason for her being there, although he suspected he already knew. Unless she wanted something, Izzy usually steered clear of him; she knew only too well what he thought of her friends, and her taste in men, and so avoided confrontations with him.

Ollie had, meanwhile, pretty much given up on trying to convince his sister that the latest flavour of the month was usually a sweet-talking, rancid scumbag, and had defaulted to his backup position: when she inevitably found out what a clingy, wannabe bad-guy piece of human effluent her latest boyfriend was, she'd come to Ollie to get him off her back, he and his MMA pals would make said scumbag and his friends regret the day they'd been born, and then the cycle would repeat.

He mourned the fact that she never seemed to learn, and it hurt him, because he knew what she was going through, and it was all so unnecessary; if there was some way that he could make her see him and what she meant to him, she'd never have to go through what she continually put herself ever again, because he'd always be there to protect her, love her, and make it right for her.

But Izzy didn't know, or didn't swing that way, or just didn't care enough to work it out, and so he waited glumly to see what had happened this time; for her to be here meant she had something on her mind, and eventually the single cog in her head she seemed to use for rational thinking out of that whole sharp, finely-tuned mind he knew she had, would remember its job, mesh itself once more, and clue him in.

So he waited, his face impassive, while she hurled increasingly lurid and unlikely, yet oddly half-hearted, accusations at him as she slowly ran out of steam.

"OK Skanky, are we all done now?" he enquired, raising an eyebrow at her quick flash of anger at the name.

"Don't call me that, you body-waxed man-shagger!" she retorted hotly, and with that, honour was satisfied, hostilities were over, and the truce had been signalled. Izzy sat down on the bed, and Ollie took the chair, raising a "Really?" eyebrow at the damp patch, and getting a weak, embarrassed grin in return.

"Now, tell me, Iz; just why did you feel the need to come in here and rub one out? I'm sure you have more than enough wanking-space in your own room?"

Izzy frowned at him.

"It wasn't like that, and stop saying that! You're just saying that to make me feel embarrassed, so cut it out!"

Ollie inclined his head slightly and raised an eyebrow at her, his invitation to keep going, so she plunged on.

"I came in here to ask for your help. Yes, I know, I must be crazy, or ill, but there it is; I need your help, OK, are you happy now?" she pouted, her lip thrust out in a manner Ollie found almost unbearably sexy; for a brief second he toyed with the idea of just grabbing her and kissing her, biting that adorable lip, and playing it by ear from there, but Mr. Rational rescued him, telling him that would be a stupendously bad idea; if he tried it, he knew Izzy would probably scream the house down like a fucking banshee, and he'd be kicked out of the house forever.

So he leaned back in the chair instead, staring at the ceiling, anything to take his gaze off the vision perched on the end of his bed with that unbearably sexy expression on her face.

"What do you want from me this time, Iz? More of the same? Because your little favours have a way of turning into bloody great big problems."

Izzy opened her mouth to object, but Ollie held his hand up for silence.

"Please Iz, before you bother to deny it, cast your mind back to those psychos you dated; let's see now, first there was 'Greggie'; I had to beat the shit out of him just for being Greggie. Then there was 'Brucie'. What a fun-filled, psychotic bag of Aussie-outback serial-killer charm he was; throwing him through a shop window and down that escalator was a public service."

He rested his elbows on the armrests and steepled his finger in front of him, looking away into the distance.

"Then there was Glenroy, such an all-round, mum-loving, church-going nice guy he was, according to you, but then he and his wannabe-Yardie pals slipped you a roofie and had you all set up for a gangbang snuff movie when we found you. He's lucky he's still alive after Moxie finished with him; as I recall, he smashed his throat and scalped him when he ripped that stupid Afro weave off his head; I hear he had to have his trachea rebuilt, and they had to use skin off his arse to graft onto his head; word on the street is he looked like a cross between an old alligator handbag and a failed lab experiment when they'd finished with him!"

Ollie grinned mirthlessly.

"Last I heard, when they deported him, Jamaica turned around and re-deported him to Angola; seems he lied to everyone about where he was really from, and now he's in jail in Luanda having his arsehole stretched every day by, well, just about everyone, actually; apparently, smack-heads and drug-pushers are fair game there..."

He paused, his eyes hooded, and his face expressionless.

"And then there was Tommy. Ah yes, Tommy, 'sweet' Tommy, 'rich' Tommy, 'misunderstood' Tommy, spoiled, vicious little dick Tommy. If you remember, last Easter, he abducted you, and threatened to slice you up on a bandsaw because you said 'no' to some four-way action with his mincing, pencil-dick, rich little pansy school-boy friends. I still get a warm glow from the look on his face when he answered the door in his Hugh Hefner robe and I grabbed him by the balls and squeezed. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to hammer a cocktail shaker up someone's arse when you're standing on their face? I think shoving all those ice-cubes and a pint of gin down there and giving him a good shake didn't go down too well, judging by the noises he was making. Still, the ice must have helped take the sting out of it."

Ollie grinned wistfully at the memory.

"Poor little Tommy's wandering around now with a size 9 arse, and a size 19 arsehole; that was a good night's work, and one he'll never forget; the way he walks now, he looks like his legs are on backwards..."

He paused, his faint grin dying away as he rubbed his eyes tiredly.

"And then, out of all the low-life's you could have chosen to hang with, you picked that prize dickhead, greasy little Khadif, with his knock-off Armani suits and fake Rolexes and that pathetic, tricked-out, low-end 3-Series Beamer; don't bother to deny he was a dealer: everyone in Fulham was buying dodgy meth and rocks from him."

He sighed and leaned back in his seat.

"Apparently Khadif wasn't as street-smart as he thought he was, and it was only pure, blind luck you weren't with him the night the Crane brothers caught up with him and had a high-level business discussion about turf; as I remember, all the police ever found were his fingers, most of them, anyway, one of his ears, and some of his teeth, and those were embedded in a tree..."

He blew out tiredly, his eyes slitted, distant.

"Iz, do you know how close you came to just disappearing? Sweetie, I can only bail you out so many times. I can't take on people like the Crane mob; I wouldn't even know how to start; if you'd been there when they grabbed Khadif I don't know what..." he trailed off, biting his lip, stopping himself just in time from blurting out just what she really meant to him.

"Izzy, I keep trying to tell you, but you won't listen, you just keep getting mixed-up with some of the biggest loonies, losers, idiots, dummies, and dopey little chancers. They all end up peeling their faces off the pavement or out of their own arses, and you still don't learn, you just go on to the next one. All the favours you need from me end up with me and my friends unwinding some psycho from you, and someone getting badly hurt. So what, or who, is it this time?"

Izzy stared at him, her eyes huge as he went through the litany of bad choices she'd made. She could hear the note of disappointment, and a tinge of something else, too, in his voice, and, for the first time, it saddened her as she began to realise what she'd been doing, and what he'd been doing for her, and what it had cost him.

"Come on, Izzy, it's late, and I was hoping for a little time to myself, if you get my drift?" he murmured, and this time she heard the barely suppressed frustration in his voice.

"What, Holy Saint Shulagh, Jesus' favourite little sunbeam still holding out, is she?" she grinned acidly, glad to get off the subject of her and her woeful taste in men, and onto Ollie's adventures among the local girls, a subject just as painful and hard to bear.

Listening to him talk about this girl or that was like peeling scabs for her; every time one of his week-long relationships went south she felt like screaming 'What about me? What's so wrong with me? Look at me, damn you!' but of course she never did, because that would for certain ruin whatever little she had with him.

So she listened, grinding her teeth, while he talked about the latest girl who should have been her.

Ollie grinned back ruefully.

"Yeah, Shulagh Devlin's fucking hard work; we get so far, and then...pffft; nothing, her knees stay welded together, and I have a massive case of...well, I guess you know what I have a case of, so if you don't mind..." he trailed off meaningfully as he jerked his thumb at the door.

Izzy ignored the hint; instead she sprawled on his bed and looked thoughtfully at him. Ollie tried looking everywhere but at the bed; the sight of his hot sister sprawled on his bed, in her short skirt, with her long, flawless legs crossed behind her, was threatening to give him a hard-on he really didn't want to explain to her...

"You'll never get anywhere with Unshaggable Shulagh, you do know that, right? She's saving herself for her wedding night; you'd have been better-off taking-on her big sister; the way Bridie Devlin puts it about, they're going to bury her in a Y-shaped coffin. From what I hear, Shulagh's on the new Catholic contraceptive pill; you don't swallow it; you just hold it tightly between your knees. She's stupid, too; I heard her mother tried to put her on the regular pill but every time she stood up, it fell out..."

Ollie grinned even as he grimaced.

"Unfair, Izzy, even from you, and Bridie Devlin? No thanks, the girl's a walking clap-laboratory; she's had every STI known to man, and a few specials she cooked up all by herself; the girl glows in the dark from all those STI's fighting each other. I'd rather lick road-kill..."

He rubbed his temples tiredly as he grinned.

"I think I'll concentrate my efforts on wearing Shulagh down, it just needs a little more finesse..."

Izzy grinned at him, and once again Ollie's hidden self noted just how lovely she was when she let her guard down and her habitual, guarded, wary expression around him disappeared. This evening, however, her guard seemed to be even lower than ever, and he wondered about that.

"You do realise that if you want to fuck her, you're going to need a permission slip from the Vatican, and a written promise that baby Jesus will forgive her afterwards, signed by God in triplicate? Just saying..."

Ollie grinned at that.

"Yeah, I heard that; right now you can't pry her knees apart with a pair of tow-trucks! Who am I kidding? She's never going to give it up; I can see her headstone, eighty years from now; the inscription reads 'Shulagh Devlin: Returned Unopened'..."

Ollie smiled, his good humour restored.

"So tell me, Izzy, now that you've skilfully changed the subject and got my undivided attention, who or what exactly is this problem of yours that only I can help you with?"

Izzy rolled onto her back, gathering her thoughts as she stared at the ceiling.

"Ollie, my problem is Mum. She won't get off my back, she never lets up for even a second, and she won't see anything my way; if I say the sky's blue, she'll say it's something else, then ground me for arguing with her. I can't do anything right, and I'm done with all that shit. It comes down to two choices; move out, now, or fix it so she stays off me permanently. I can't move out; Dad has to pay my fees for uni, but he won't pay for a flat, and I have too many classes and lectures at odd times to get a steady job, so that leaves option two; we fix Mum."

Ollie looked at her in alarm.

"Iz, I hope to fuck you're not suggesting I...hurt Mum, because you can get the fuck out right now...!"

Izzy waved him down.

"No, no, no, you idiot! Just shut up and listen. The way I see it, she's frustrated; she misses Dad, she needs what she had before, and she's not getting it; my room's above their bedroom, and I used to hear them go at it hammer and tongs every night, sometimes all night. I think that's what she's missing and that's what she needs; she goes on dates, she never says what happened, but she always comes home early, in a really foul mood, with a face like a freshly smacked arse, and just lays into me. She's had five years of no wild-thing, and enough's enough. Ollie, I think our mother needs to be ridden like a short-legged fairground donkey: hard and often. She needs to be fucked senseless, and that's where you come in..."

Ollie stared at her in disbelief, unable to believe his sister had said what she'd just said.

"Iz, are you seriously suggesting I...with Mum...for real? Are you out of your fucking mind? Mum? Get the fuck out of here, I've never heard anything so...!

Izzy cut him off.

"Look, either you do it, or I get one of those knuckle-dragging, mental dwarves you hang around with to do it. Did you know, when you're not around, all they talk about is how much of a MILF she is? They go on about how they'd like to fuck her, what they'd do to her, how often, blah-blah-blah, but frankly, if they tried to wipe their arses, nine times out of ten they'd miss, so that leaves you, and I can't believe I'm saying this out loud, the brains of the outfit!" That last dig was purely reflexive, and she regretted it as soon as it was uttered, but Ollie never even noticed it; his attention was elsewhere...

He sat back with a dazed expression on his face, but, Izzy noted, his gaze fixed on her smooth, rounded, unblemished thighs and barely concealed panties under her short skirt.

She grinned slyly as she leaned back and crossed her legs, the soft, silky whisper of skin brushing against skin almost deafening him.

"Mum used to go at it like the night express with Dad, but he's gone, so we need someone to fill the void, so to speak, and while Moxie's built like a bull, he's hung like a hamster; either all that stuff about black guys is just not true, or the steroid abuse has finally got to him. The rest of your mates are all talk; I know the desperate skankzillas they've been with, so I know they're all single-shot, one-and-done spazzes; Mum would suck 'em dry and spit out the bones, which leaves you, matey-boy. Let's face it, Ollie; Mum's been doing without for five years now. Think about it; five whole years. I think she's about ready to fuck doorknobs, and much as I hate the idea, if you do it, and do it right you'll get further than you ever did with Holy Saint Shulagh, Fulham's very own Vestal Virgin, I guarantee it."

Ollie just shook his head, 'No' written all over his face as he stared in shock at his sister, while another part of his mind entirely noted just how hot she looked right now as she laid out her preposterous plan

"So you're saying you'd never even contemplate taking Mum for a ride in the bed-sled?" she insisted, pushing him to say what she wanted to hear.

Ollie's eyes bulged.

"Too fucking right, you're out of your tiny mind, Iz, what the hell have you been smoking..?!"

Izzy smiled triumphantly.

"So, you say never, ever, no chance, not even a glimmer of a chance, not even with those big tits and all that yummy-Mummy hotness begging for, nay, demanding, a good, hard, old-fashioned hot-prodding, you're saying a definite no, that's what you're saying right now, hand on heart, yes?"

Ollie nodded dumbly. Still smiling, Izzy marched over to the computer, jiggled the mouse to take it out of Sleep-mode, clicked on the 'miscellaneous' folder, then clicked again on one of the Mother/Son porn clips. As the screen lit up with an older woman, almost a perfect double of their mother, enthusiastically fucking a much younger man with a freakishly large penis, Izzy pointed dramatically at the screen.

"So, Ollie, if you've never, ever thought about it before, what's this?"

Ollie gulped, flushing beet-red as his guilty fantasies played on screen, telling Izzy all she needed to know. He slumped back in his chair, guilt, embarrassment, defeat, and...something else flickering across his face.

"Look, Iz, I didn't...that's not...that's not Mum, it's just some porn-star woman who coincidentally, and purely by chance, happens to look like her..." he blustered, trailing off as he listened to just how weak and implausible his excuses sounded. Izzy grinned happily, that slight edge of malice still there in her grin.

"So, big brother, let's negotiate; you do as I ask, and let's face it, deep down in that grimy little coal-shed you call a soul, this is something you'd give your right arm for. You get to do nasty things to our hottie Mum, I burst in and find her busily bouncing on the bedsnake with you, go "Ah-haaa, gotcha, you dirty cow!" and voilà, I get that frustrated bitch off my back forever; who loses? After all, it's not like I'm going to tell anyone, although she won't know that! Think about it; Mum gets to feed that thing of yours into her juice-box, and I've seen your cock, by the way, congratulations, she'll be begging for more; you get your end away, repeatedly, you can forget late-night Snickers Bars and wanking over Shulagh Devlin, and I get some fucking peace and normality at last!"

Her eyes narrowed threateningly.

"The alternative, brother dearest, is I show her that video. Don't worry, I already have a copy. Then we'll see how long Prince Ollie gets to swan around in this house like Ollie the untouchable! Do we have a deal?"

Ollie's eyes narrowed too, real anger simmering inside him at his sister's threats, and Izzy quailed at the sight, at what he must be thinking of her, but stood firm.

"If you dare..." he managed to get out before she cut him off.

"Oh yes, I very much dare! Let's just call Mum in here and see what she says, shall we?" she taunted, motioning towards the closed door. Ollie stood his ground, but when her hand was actually on the doorknob, his nerve failed him.