The Tale of the Too Close Twins

Shane for his part was sipping orange juice while looking directly at his sister's ass, and it was hard to draw any other conclusion than that he was perving on Karen's bum, her panties and the shape of her feminine hygiene protection. As soon as the twins heard me approach, Karen immediately straightened up so fast she looked like she might throw her back out, and Shane within a split second was on one of the kitchen stools, as though he was trying to hide something, perhaps a bulge at the front of his boxer shorts?

The brother and sister greeted me cheerfully, a little too cheerfully, as though they were trying too hard to make things seem normal and that I hadn't seen something I shouldn't have. I just played along, not giving anything away, and we all got dressed for work, all of us having a morning shift at the department story.

Outside the persistent drizzle had died down, and Karen and Shane approached me. "Andrew, we just need to take the dog for his walk," Karen said. "You know while the rain has died down."

"He's going crazy for his walk," Shane observed. "We'll be about ten minutes or so."

This was true about the dog. The Jones family had a blue heeler, and he was pacing up and down while whining and barking until he got his walk.

"Okay, have fun," I said, as Karen put the excited dog on his leash and left the house with her brother, leaving me alone in the living room. I would have gone with them, but the dog had some funny hang-ups, and one of these was that while any four members of the Jones family was allowed to walk him, nobody else was allowed to accompany them on the walk, this making the dog very upset. So I stayed back until the twins returned and we all caught the bus to work.

Again, the thoughts of something been amiss with my friends and their relationship as brother and sister continued plaguing my mind to the point it was becoming an obsession. In something similar to an out-of-body experience, I found myself going out the back door and onto the patio, and opened the wheelie bin, looking inside at the empty cardboard toilet roll tube that contained Karen's used sanitary pad.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was dumpster-diving, extricating the cardboard tube from the wheelie bin and extricating Karen's pad, which she had rolled into a cylinder face down to stuff into the tube. The pad's adhesive underside stuck to my fingers as I unrolled it, and I found that Karen had placed three other objects in the tube as well.

These were the peel-back strip from her new pad and two wet wipes she had used to wash herself after she finished on the toilet. Without being too gross and giving away too much information, it was obvious by the staining patterns on the wipes which one Karen had used to wash her front bottom and which one she had used to wash her back bottom.

I stared at Karen's period pad, amazed at how much blood there was on the soft white stay-dry cover and within the absorbent filling. She certainly had a heavy flow during her monthlies that was for sure. And again before my conscience could stop me, I lifted the napkin to my nose and sniffed the red blood-stains, the musty feminine smells from between Karen's legs of pussy and period going up my nostrils and into my brain, giving me an instant hard-on. I sniffed the rear of the pad where it would have made contact with Karen's anus when she was wearing it.

So busy was I enjoying the stains from Karen's pussy on her used feminine hygiene product and getting high on the smell of vagina that it was only the sight of another pussy - this one a feline pussy in the form of the Jones family's black and white tuxedo cat - glaring accusingly at me with yellow eyes out of the laundry window that broke me out of my trance.

Suddenly, I was furious and disgusted by myself and my erection instantly subsided. What the hell was I doing, what sort of sick pervert was I, getting my rocks off sniffing the dirty period pad of any girl, much less my best friend's twin sister who in turn was my best female friend and secret crush? Talk about a breach of her privacy. Some friend I was.

Repulsed by my own behavior, I hastily returned the pad, peel-back strip and Karen's soiled wet wipes to the empty cardboard tube, threw it back in the bin, and rushed back inside, washing my hands after handling objects no doubt filled with bacteria.

The cat again stared at me, letting know with her eyes that if she could speak English, she would tattle on me to her owners. My conscience was also giving me hell. True, something didn't seem quite right about Shane and Karen. But I didn't know the full story with them. I did know the full story about myself, and that was that I was a pervert who went around smelling the soiled period pads of a female friend he cared deeply for.

*

Over the next few months, I found myself thinking about two things. One, no more sniffing period pads and being a perve; and two, the hope that Karen's oddly failed date with Gareth and my peculiar observations of the twins when I spent the Friday night/Saturday morning at their house were just random events and not a sign of something more sinister beneath the surface.

I was successful about the first goal and didn't do anything wrong with Karen or any other girl. But as for Shane and Karen? Well the events of Karen's date and the sleepover were just two in a long line of strange incidents with the twins that made them seem even weirder and me convinced that something funny was going on.

There wasn't one big incident that proved beyond any shadow of doubt that Shane and Karen were up to no good as brother and sister. It was just a whole lot of small things. Sometimes I would ponder if it was me looking for things and misinterpreting innocent events I witnessed? But no, if anything I was looking for normal events to convince myself that my friends were a normal brother and sister with a normal relationship who were part of a normal nuclear family - mother, father, son and daughter along with the cat and dog - where nothing remotely odd ever happened.

The school swimming carnival was a good example. Shane was clearly interested in his sister's fine barefoot figure in her bikini. With her nice midriff with a flat tummy and cute naval on display, the wet fabric showed the shape of Karen's ample young breasts and her nipples at the top. Her bikini bottoms were no different and one could see the shape of Karen's front bottom and her back bottom in the garment, the outline of her vulva very clear.

For her part, Karen seemed no less interested in her twin brother's fine masculine figure in his own swimwear, his firm chest with curls of light brown hair a testament to his fitness. But Karen looked here much less than she looked at her brother's crotch, his manhood covered only by a pair of black speedo bathers, the shape of Shane's penis and testicles clear in the fabric and showing what a well-endowed young man he was.

And when Shane won a backstroke event, his sister's overly enthusiastic reaction in cheering him on during the race and her elation at his victory was more like that of a girlfriend than a sister. A few weeks after this strange fan-girl reaction to Shane's swimming victory, I got to see that this was not one sided, when Karen was playing netball.

A talented netballer in wing attack position, Karen was dominant in this game against another local high school team, Shane and I along with other spectators watching from the sidelines. However, while understandable that Shane would cheer on the school netball team in which his sister was playing, his attention was so intently on Karen that it was more than a little creepy. It was like Shane could not see the other six netball players from our team nor the opposing team and that the only thing that held his focus was his sister.

I'd heard of parents getting overly involved in their kids' sporting matches before - ugly parent syndrome - but ugly sibling syndrome? Was that something that even existed?

Things just got stranger and stranger. At the school formal for Year 11 and Year 12 held at a city hotel neither Shane nor Karen had a date - well neither did I - but sort of went together. Karen wore a pretty lilac dress, matching the color of Shane's bow tie and cumber band exactly and Shane escorted Karen in like they were boyfriend and girlfriend rather than brother and sister.

The two rarely left each other's side during the night - I saw them gazing into each other's eyes on more than one occasion - not to mention Shane sneaking sly glances down the front of his sister's frock at her ample cleavage. They even danced together - not slow dancing obviously as this might have attracted attention - but regardless at the school formal the only people the twins danced with were each other.

Shane and Karen's creepy behavior at the formal got me thinking about how one rarely saw one twin without the other. They would only go out in a group of boys and girls together, and even when they did one was reluctant to leave the other's side. Like at the movies when we went as a group, Shane and Karen sat next to each other. They would sit next to each other whenever we ate out, even grabbing a snack at the shopping center food court or a fast food outlet. How could I have missed this before?

More and more things began to mess with my mind. For one of the girl's in our group's 18th birthday we went to a karaoke venue in Newtown, and Shane and Karen sang a love song together. It didn't have overtly sexual lyrics thankfully, nor did they hold hands or stare into each other's eyes, but regardless it was a romantic song that a brother and sister should probably not be singing together.

The lack of dating interest of the good-looking Jones siblings filled my brain so much it turned to a fixation and then an obsession. I also began to notice jealousy from one twin when an outsider flirted with the other. We went to a football game at the Sydney Cricket Ground in Moore Park and a guy about our age was trying to flirt with and make a move on Karen. Karen clearly wasn't interested, but it was noticeable that Shane was not impressed. Not like a brother protecting his sister from unwanted attention, but more like some random guy was flirting with and trying to get into his girlfriend's panties, rather than his sister's panties.

It was a similar story at Bondi Beach one afternoon, when a young woman attached herself to handsome Shane, sparing no effort in trying to seduce him. In fact so full on was she that if a guy had behaved like that with a girl, then he might have to do a bit of explaining to the police, and to a judge as to why he should not be subject to a restraining order. One could tell Karen was seriously pissed, like Shane was her husband and some home-wrecker was trying to steal away her husband. Jealousy rather than concern was her main emotion.

Even though the three of us were still as good friends as we had ever been and they were never impolite, sometimes I now felt the adage 'two's company, three's a crowd' when we spent time together as a trio. It was like I was intruding on my best friend's time with his girlfriend, rather than his twin sister.

All of this was becoming quite distracting for me, not really good when I had to study so hard for my HSC to get the high grades needed for acceptance into university and the veterinary medicine course. Plus it caused physical distractions too. At Manly Beach I saw Shane and Karen purchase one ice-cream and eat it together, one twin holding the cone up to their sibling's mouth to take a lick, and then the other doing the same. So distracted was I by this that I wasn't looking where I was going and walked into one of the many Norfolk Island Pines that lined the Manly beachfront. And given the massive size of these trees, it was a pretty big thing not to see!

Then there was the school trip for Geography, to Watson's Bay in Sydney's exclusive Eastern Suburbs. There were plenty of interesting things to see here, the city skyline and the Harbour Bridge in the distance across the sparkling blue waters, and the magnificent cliffs and rock formations that formed the Gap and the southern side of Sydney Heads, ocean-going craft heading out into the Pacific.

As the field trip came to a close, I happened to notice Shane and Karen standing at one of the look-outs admiring the view of the cliffs. They turned to walk back and get on the bus to go back to high school and it must have been a subconscious thing, because their hands joined, and they were actually holding hands.

Shane and Karen must have realized their mistake because the brother and sister only held hands for two seconds at most before they quickly pulled away from each other, looking around nervously to see if anyone else had seen. I had already turned away so they didn't suspect me, but as the bus returned to the city through the Waverley area before driving across the Harbour Bridge to return to the Northern Suburbs, I just couldn't get the image out of my mind. Their instinct was to hold hands, how often did they do this when alone and nobody else was watching.

Other days however there was nothing strange at all to see, and Shane and Karen behaved like the way a normal pair of 18-year-old twin siblings would interact. Like on the Saturday of the Easter long weekend, when I went with Shane and Karen and their parents to see their relatives in Newcastle, and we all then went up the Hunter region's coast to Port Stephens for a barbeque lunch near Nelson Bay.

Shane and Karen were perfectly fine around their relatives, and were fun-loving teenagers to their younger cousins, playing beach cricket and other games with them. A perfectly normal day out. It was these days where I would question myself more than others. Was this all in my mind? Perhaps the stress of my final year's study load was getting to me, making me see things that just weren't there? Did I perhaps have an undiagnosed mental illness, like schizophrenia?. Nobody else seemed to notice anything odd among our other friends, although even if they did, they would be in the same boat as me. How could anyone realistically talk about suspicions that a brother and sister might be too close for comfort, especially given the lack of hard evidence? Once one said something, one could never take it back either, which was another good reason to say nothing.

My parents often commented to me how much they liked Shane and Karen, how responsible and nice they were, and what good taste I had in friends. I think this was a barely concealed dig at my older brother and his awful choice in friends throughout his life which continued to the present date.

Just recently a panic-stricken Kevin had awoken us in the middle of the night begging for money. Apparently Kevin had recently drunkenly reversed his uninsured crappy car into the car belonging to one of his mates' older brother, a big guy who looked like a gorilla. And a man with the same levels of tolerance for suffering fools as a gorilla so it seemed. He had taken to stalking my brother and sending him threatening notes every day with decreasing numbers upon them, indicating the number of days remaining before he beat the shit out of Kevin for damaging the car and failing to come up with the cash to repair it.

I thought getting his ass kicked might do my cretin of a brother some good, but Kevin was the least of my problems. Everything with Shane and Karen was so distracting. One Saturday morning I caught the train into the city to attend a seminar for students interested in studying to be vets. The location of the seminar was near Hyde Park, but I was so consumed with my thoughts of my best friend and his twin sister on whom my crush still lingered that I didn't look where I was going and took one wrong turn then another and another.

Before I knew it, I was in a shady area between Surry Hills and Redfern in the city's south, only the sound of some rappers performing up the street with their huge radios breaking me out of my own world, miles from where I should have been. Hurrying away, I hated to think how many busy roads I had crossed without looking on my way here.

Whenever Shane and Karen behaved normally for a few days in a row, I would think that my observations had been products of my own imagination and things would go back to the way they had been before. But this was never the case, and inevitably something odd would happen between the brother and sister and send me back to square one.

Even things that seemed fine before now seemed creepy, like the twin telepathy. I had been impressed by Shane and Karen's accuracy with predicting which playing card the other was holding. One night their parents had a party, and got their son and daughter to impress their guests, this time with a street directory of Sydney and the regional towns of New South Wales where one twin would point on the map to a location and the other twin, their back turned would guess where the other was indicating.

This time Karen would accurately guess that her brother was standing on the banks of the river in Parramatta, and Shane would guess that his sister was pointing to the giant ram statue in Goulburn. Shane would guess correctly that Karen was pointing to Newtown's main street, while Karen was quite correct that Shane was indicating the Bankstown area.

Again like with the cards, when the twins were not accurate they were usually close. For example when Karen indicated Cronulla on the map, Shane said she was at Coogee, which wasn't too bad given both were beachside suburbs starting with C. Then when Shane chose Kings Cross on the map, Karen guessed Kingsford, again very close in name. Then when Karen was indicating The Rocks on the map, Shane guessed his sister was in Woolloomooloo, an adjacent inner-city suburb.

In the past I would have been impressed, but having seen just what Shane and Karen could be like, their telepathic ways were now un-nerving. If they could do this for a fun party game, what telepathic messages could the twins exchange about their secret and hidden desires?

But I didn't need to speculate on this, there were plenty of other things to see that shouldn't be happening. On the observation of deck of the Sydney Tower one afternoon, Shane looked to be enjoying the spectacular views of Goat Island, the Bridge, Circular Quay and Sydney's iconic ferries heading to and from Taronga Zoo and Manly, but in reality he was enjoying the view of his twin sister's bum - Karen's rear end looking pretty good in her tight stone-washed denim jeans.

It was a case of rinse and repeat at a lookout in Katoomba another day. While seeming to be admiring the iconic Three Sisters rock formations among the vast forests of eucalypts that made the Blue Mountains, Shane really seemed to be loving the sight of Karen bending over to tie her sneakers, and showing the shape of her bottom through her shorts, her panty lines visible through the fabric.

Then there were the many strange incidents with Karen's underwear, which soon became too many to count and recall accurately. One afternoon we got off the bus after school, me walking home one way and the twins the other to their own house. I turned to look in their direction, and noticed that Karen's left bra strap had slipped down onto her upper arm.

Shane also must have noticed, as he reached across and fixed his sister's bra for her, pushing it back under the cover of her school dress. I could only shake my head. Surely what Shane should have done if he noticed that his sister's bra was showing was to tell her so she could fix it herself?

Then there was the small matter of Karen's panties. I enjoyed it one day in Pitt Street when Karen made the mistake of wearing a short loose skirt on a warm but windy day, and a gust of breeze got under the hem and lifted it up to show everyone she was wearing light blue knickers that day. It was normal for me to like seeing this due to my crush on Karen and that we shared no DNA - but not nearly so normal for Karen's brother to enjoy the same thing.