Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (19 page)

We both know that I’m not going anywhere.

TWINS

Ed Falco

“I
T WAS LATE, BUT
I
WASN’T SLEEPING
.
I was in bed, just lying there. My house is beautiful … well, lovely is probably a better word. It’s small and tastefully decorated. The furnishings are largely antiques, and the atmosphere is rustic—but the paintings on the walls are all Cezanne and Matisse, my favorites. Of course, reproductions. I’m not rich. I live alone. I’ve always lived alone.

“The only problem with the house is the noise at night, the incessant creaking and moaning, the way wind gets in the cracks and moans like someone in agony. I can’t sleep for all the noise, but if I’m honest with myself, I never could sleep. I just turned forty. No. Not even as a child.”

Zelda turns her attention momentarily away from the poorly maintained road that winds through the hills between Benwood and Sutton, towns with a total population of under five hundred. It’s raining, and the only sound in the car is the soft, incessant metronome of windshield wipers. She pulls her fingers through the graying and matted fall of her hair, and she looks alongside her, to the passenger seat.

“There was a noise, I may have dozed off, it’s possible, I don’t know. There was a sound of some kind, and I went out into the hallway. I looked down the stairs, over the banister, and there was a light on in the kitchen. She was always quiet, Annie. I always was taken by it, her being so quiet. I don’t remember hearing anyone come in, and it’s impossible to take two steps in that house without a floorboard creaking, so I would have heard if someone came in, but I heard a noise, and the lights, and I was thinking I may have dozed off and someone might be in the house.

“I had told her I never wanted to see her again, and it had been a long time, a few years, so this time I thought maybe it was something different, someone in the house, but I hadn’t heard anyone come in and I would have heard.

“Did I say we were twins? We were twins. If anyone saw us together they couldn’t help noticing. She’s beautiful. We’re identical twins, but she always knew how to do her hair just perfect, and makeup and all that. She has a talent. We look the same, but we’re not. Annie was always as she is, and then people said I talked enough for a dozen kids.”

Zelda looks alongside her. “I guess that’s still true. I guess I do talk a lot, but it’s always made me feel better. No matter what’s going on if I let myself talk talk talk pretty soon it’s better. But, anyway, Annie’s difficult to explain. I mean, not in terms of looks—just look at me, that’s how she looks—but there was always something different about her, not just that she was quieter, but something in her eyes. I think she’s smarter than me, and, in a way, more beautiful, even though, actually, physically, we look the same. It’s a quality she has like silence, like she’s silence walking, still and calm and especially beautiful. I guess I’ve always, really, admired her—loved her. I guess it’s only fair to say it. I know the things that happened in the past should never have happened, but there’s no use kidding myself, I wanted to, and, anyway, I’m who I am now and Annie’s who she is.”

For a while, Zelda is quiet, her attention on the rain-soaked road, where tree limbs weighted down with water and beaten by hard rain droop so low they threaten to block the way. She slows the car to a crawl, and her expression darkens.

“We were eleven,” she says, her eyes locked on the road, “or maybe twelve. I still don’t like talking about all this, but maybe it’s the best thing now. We must have been twelve because I had already been changing for a while, growing up. Anyway, there was a full moon because I could see clearly in the room even though the lights were out. I remember I had been looking out the window at the stars when she came in and I pretended to be asleep, but I watched her while she undressed. She took off her clothes the same, but instead of leaving her panties on and putting on her pajamas, she took off her panties too and lay down on the bed. When she lay down she looked over at me to make sure I was sleeping, but I had my head hidden in the crook of my arm and my eyes open just enough so I could look out through my eyelashes. But, anyway, it was odd because I guess I knew what she was doing, but I didn’t really know.

“We used to play dolls. We used to play house. Day and night we played together, but that night was the first time it was different and somehow I knew it, knew it all, though I didn’t know I knew a thing. I was quiet and I watched as she touched herself soft with one hand on her breast and the other pushing between her legs, inside her. I watched her for a long time, till her breath and her body and her hands started going faster.

“Then I said
Annie
, and I remember how angry she looked when she stopped and glared at me through the shadows. But if it had been angry alone, I think I would have been angry too, because I remember feeling scared, though I didn’t know why. She looked hurt, as she looks just before she begins to cry. I went and sat next to her, and she put her head in my lap and she did cry.

“We lived in one of the oldest houses in Providence, then. Mom taught at the college. The house was an old Victorian, with gables and closed-off and locked rooms, and sometimes we heard people walking in the attic clear as you can hear me speaking right now. When I sat alongside Annie that night, I can still remember how she looked then with sweat moistening her back, and all her muscles and skin hard and shining in the light from the windows. I touched her back to comfort her, stroking down her spine and not stopping at her waist but stroking her thighs with my fingers, my palms touching the softer skin, and I felt it in my heart beating fast when she stopped sobbing and her breathing changed again.

“I remember touching the back of her calf, high, by the fold of skin close to the dark hair and heat and wetness at the center, and how her body went tight fast, but I don’t remember thinking, just my hand reaching and touching—and that’s the thing about it, about what happens between me and Annie. I’m doing whatever it is, but it’s just exactly like she’s willing me to do it somehow that’s, I don’t know, it’s difficult to explain, but it’s always as if I’m doing it and I want to do it, but it’s as if she’s somehow making me know what it is I want to do.

“I touched her there and she looked up and asked me if I ever did it, and I said no, and she said she hadn’t either, that this was the first time. I asked her how she knew what to do and she said someone had told her to touch herself there and there and she pointed.

“I remember when she pointed, how the nipples on her breasts stood up long like little fingers and I could feel them growing too beneath the top of my pajamas and rubbing against the cotton.

“When I asked her how it felt she said she couldn’t explain it, but it was like something warm and urgent growing. I said,
Is it here where you touch
, touching her there, and her breath changed again and she said
yes
and the
yes
was breathy.

“I touched her there more and watched her breasts, her body, like a string pulled tight. I kept watching her nipples, the way they jutted out so long, the way they made me feel, and I reached up under the cotton to feel myself and they were long, too, and I remember being surprised because they felt so fat, and a little scared because it was like there was suddenly a new part of my body.

“When I unbuttoned the top of my pajamas and was looking down at them and with my other hand touching them, Annie shuddered like a sudden chill and I saw her watching me, the way I was touching.

“Then we took off my bottoms and panties and she did it for me, and then it was, I think, the first time that I ever really saw it, or, at least, that the seeing of it made me feel that way, that we looked so exactly the same—like there were two of me, or two of her, lying there on the bed like that touching, like one of us was an image in a mirror.

“The feeling was like I’m the only one who could tell the difference, who could know for sure that I’m me, and not the same person as her, and then even my knowing gets confused. It was that feeling, and then I shuddered like Annie, the way Annie does.”

Zelda turns again to the passenger seat, and her voice is softer, throatier. Outside the rain is still coming down hard, but there are open fields on both sides of the car, and she can see the road more clearly in the beams of the headlights.

“It’s terrible,” she says, “the things we did.” She says this flatly, a statement of fact, and then is quiet a long time before she goes on. “That’s the least of it,” she says. “That was just the first time. The things we’ve done with each other … If this is too troubling, I could stop. I could stop right here. I don’t have to go on.”

Again she pauses. The car is crawling along the empty road, going a few miles per hour. On either side of the blacktop, fencing is wrapped in weeds. Rain slams into the pitted roadway and splashes up in a crazy dance.

“She was in the kitchen,” she says. “I didn’t hear her come in. I was awake because I couldn’t sleep. I heard a noise and when I went out into the hallway and looked down over the banister, I saw a light in the kitchen. I must have known. I said
Annie
and then she was there, in the kitchen. She was looking in the fridge, just as if she might have been sleeping in another room and had awakened hungry in the night.

“I said her name again when I saw her and I heard in my own voice a mixture of sadness and relief, a mixture of happiness and regret, and it was the sound of my own voice that made me step back and take my coat from the hall tree, and then I held the coat folded over my arm by the front door and watched her a moment longer.

“She was wearing a nightgown that I could see through. I thought for a moment she might say something, but she’s always been so quiet. It was hard to stop looking at her. She’s like the silence in a dark room at night. I can always feel she’s there first. It’s been like that since I was a child, and we played tea party in the big house while Mom was shut up in her study working on some book or another, and Annie and I would play tea party or dress up back then when we were children, before.

“I must have felt her even before the noise, which was probably why I lay awake in the first place, but it had been years and probably I didn’t want to let myself know what I knew all along. I could feel it. I had been getting along well. I had been starting to feel like I might, without her, I might … There’s a man in town who works at the library. We talked the day before and I could tell he was interested. I’d been thinking about him. So. I might have known. I probably did know.

“Sometimes she puts things inside me. Sometimes she—” Zelda touches the back of the passenger seat. She runs her hand along the fabric gently, a caress. “The things she makes me do to her,” she whispers. “The things she makes me want to do to her,” she says, and then she closes her eyes a moment.

The car is hardly moving. Her foot is off the gas pedal, and the car is rolling along the road, toward her house, where a dim yellowish light is clear against the windows of the front door. The light is so dim, she knows it must be the light from the refrigerator, and she imagines Annie still standing there, where she left her, one hand holding the open refrigerator door, her body shining out from under her gown, that look on her face, that hungry look as Zelda backed away and then went out the front door.

She imagines that Annie hasn’t moved. What can time mean to her? What can a few hours driving around in the rain matter?

Zelda pulls into the driveway and gets out of the car in the rain and then the light disappears from the front door and she’s standing alone in the sudden darkness. She waits a moment as her eyes adjust. She was soaked as soon as she stepped out of the car, so that doesn’t matter. She follows the familiar brick path to her porch.

Once she’s inside the house, inside the front door, she waits, water puddling at her feet. A light comes on in her bedroom, the door swings open, and then Annie is standing at the top of the stairs. She looks annoyed. She looks angry. She’s upset because Zelda has kept her waiting, but Zelda thinks,
What can time mean to you, Annie?

Annie is quiet. She’s like silence in a woman’s body, in Zelda’s body. Behind Annie, the door to Zelda’s bedroom closes and then the house is dark again and Annie has disappeared, but Zelda knows where she is. She knows where she’s waiting. Zelda takes off her sopping clothes and hangs them on the hall tree. She climbs the stairs.