I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them; reading the words.
Cassie, I’ve missed you so much. Will see you soon.
3 guys attacking. Two white, one Hispanic. You hit panic button, I called Jack who was at Wendell Place outlets (retro clothes store). You near car, dragged into rear alley.
Love you so much. H x
Next to the kiss was the imprint of a real kiss; that crinkled lip-shaped impression of the tissue being pressed to someone’s lips. Helena’s lips.
I folded the note tightly in my fist, then opened it and read it again. Mom must have told Helena about the police officer visiting me, and what I’d said to her. She must have stolen in during the night, or when I was asleep, and left me the message. Writing it in her lipstick, so I could rub it off. Always the clever girl.
I pressed the lip-impression to my own lips, closing my eyes as the tissue touched me, willing the kiss from my sister to be real.
I rubbed out the message, but tore out and kept the lip-imprint. I was still an impressionable teenager in love, after all.
That morning, I spoke properly for the first time, asking the nurses for some orange juice. There was some professional delight from the staff there, but concern when I said I wanted to go home that day. I called mom from my cell phone, and told her (in a still croaky voice) that I was checking out and coming home. Mom said she’d pick me up in an hours’ time.
Before that happened, I got another visit from Officer Payton. She strained at her bedside manner again, and said she wanted to check a few facts, now that I could talk. She sat on the chair by my bed and I injected the details Helena had left for me into the story. Officer Payton made a few grunting noises, as though what I had said suddenly made more sense, and asked me a few more. I tried to concentrate of embellishing the details Helena provided (without wildly exaggerating), but found myself constantly distracted by Officer Payton’s enormous breasts. I suddenly had a yearning to see them unsaddled from her regulation police bra. To feel the weight of them in my hand. It was an odd feeling on a number of levels. I’d never had such urges for anyone other than my sister before now. I didn’t particularly find Officer Payton (I convinced myself she would have to have a solid, sturdy name like Sandra, Tess, or Gaby). Besides, it was embarrassing to find yourself staring at a woman’s breasts only two feet away from you.
Eventually, Officer Payton seemed satisfied that she wasn’t going to get any more details from me and stood up.
“Thank you, ma’am.” she said, standing formally, but in an upright way that made her breasts strain forward.
“I don’t even know your name.” I said, shaking her hand as she prepared to leave.
“Chris.” she said, smiling awkwardly and turning to leave. I nodded, feeling that that was somehow right.
Officer Payton stopped for a moment by the door and turned back to me.
“Short for Cristabel” she added, before leaving.
Wow, I thought. Just goes to show.
**
Mom was a bundle of fluster and excitement when she came to see me. Over my underwear, I put on a loose summer dress mom had brought with her, and a pair of sandals. Mom must have been in a hurry, because when she turned up, she was wearing jeans for just about the first time I’d seen in almost a year. She looked good in them; much younger, and her legs were still long and slim.
She hugged me gingerly, patting down the sides of my hair and kissing my cheek; smiling at me and admonishing me for trying to be too active. Then she helped me to check out of the hospital and we got back into her car and went home.
“I’m afraid Aunt Maddy had to go back home.” said mom as she drove through some terrible later afternoon traffic. “I guess after everything, you would have wanted to say goodbye. At least to Jack. After what he did.”
I had been prepared for something like that; some prompt that I should recognise Jack as my saviour. But even with that knowledge, it took an effort to smile and say;
“I know, mom. I’ll send a card.”
“You do that, sweetie.” said mom, nodding. “You might want to send him a trinket or something too. Something personal that he won’t forget.”
I brightened at this, smiling more openly at the idea of sending Jack a very special memento of his time here with me, Helena and mom.
Mom parked up in the driveway and insisted – insisted – on helping me up to the house. As though I’d recently been paralysed or something. To be honest, though, I was dead, dead tired. All I wanted to do was crawl into my bed and have mom dote on me for an indeterminate number of hours. I wasn’t to be fully disappointed.
Helena had not come home from some class or other at college, mom explained. My heart sank a little, but I was secretly pleased too. Pleased that I would get some rest and try to look a little better for her when I saw her. Somehow, even though I knew it was silly, I wanted to look my best for her.
Mom also insisted on fixing me a light meal and a drink while I went up stairs to lie down. But, by the time she had brought the tray up to my bedroom, I was fast asleep under the covers.
**
When I awoke, it was dark, but still early enough for activity to be heard on the street outside. I took a long, measured breath, feeling the air rush in past my bruised throat. As I breathed, I took in a full lung full of the scent of my own bed sheets; a warm, comforting scent that made me feel at home. There was another scent too. I turned my head.
“Hey sis.” said Helena. She was sitting by the side of my bed, perched on the edge of my chair, her knees touching the bed and her hands clasped together between them. She looked dreadful, like someone who hadn’t slept in a week. I stared at her for a moment; searching those deep green eyes of her, visually tracing the line of her jaw, the rise of her cheekbone, the smooth grace of her nose.
“Why didn’t you come to see me?” I whispered.
Helena attempted a nervous smile, saying;
“I wanted to. I really did. But I couldn’t trust myself. I couldn’t- Oh Cassie, do you forgive me? I couldn’t bear not to be with you and not hold you and kiss you. And- and I didn’t want to upset that. I didn’t want to ruin what we have for each other. I’m so sorry!”
I reached over and pulled out her hand from between her legs.
“I just missed you” I said quietly. We held each other’s hands for a moment, feeling the soft texture of each other’s skin. “Come here.” I said, tipping my head. Helena leaned forward to kiss me and, when she did, I felt stars swimming beneath my closed eyelids. Her lips were dry and I wasted no time in setting that right. But I was still quite fragile, and didn’t want things to get out of hand. Helena must have sensed this too, because her kisses weren’t urgent, passionate things. Just tender expressions of her love.
She got onto her knees by my bed and we held each other for a while.
“What happened with Jack?” I said, laying back down to give us some space. “What happened about him and mom?”
“I’ll tell you all about it.” said Helena.
And she did. Mom, like I would have done, had fallen for the classic blackmailer’s trap; promising more and more things to satisfy someone who held something on them. In this case, it was a video, an old VHS cassette that Jack had somehow got hold of from over twenty years ago. Where he had got it from was a mystery. And how he had found it was also unknown. He had simply told Helena that he’d been fooling around on some chatrooms on the internet, and came across it (Helena suspected he had an inkling from Aunt Maddy, then actively chased it up). Anyway, the upshot of it was, Jack had a video, initially taken from an old hand-held cine-cam, or a hot blonde dancer stripping in a men’s bar.
The hot blonde was, of course, mom.
Helena retrieved the VHS copy Jack had brought with him to blackmail mom, and reassured Jack that any infringement to our rules to him; anything at all, and the video of him ass- and gag-fucked by a gay porn star would be well circulated. When Aunt Maddy, Jack and Rachel left, Helena had the hard part of talking about it with mom.
Lena didn’t talk too much about that conversation, but said that she told mom what Jack had said to her about the tape. Mom had nearly had a heart attack there and then, and had refused to talk about it. But Helena had persisted, saying that Jack had given her the tape, which she had destroyed, and that she’d got Jack to promise that nothing of its sort would ever happen again. Mom didn’t give details about what she’d done to satisfy Jack, but had told Helena that it was “more than you’d expect from an aunt and her nephew.”
At the end of a very long and painful conversation, Helena and mom had found a new strength, and confidence in each other. Mom got Helena to promise she would not mention it to me or anyone else, as she didn’t want me to think of her as a pervert.
We both smiled at the irony of that part.
And, despite that, Helena had not entirely kept her word at all. She had not destroyed the tape.
“So…. Do you want to watch it?” she said to me.
I thought about this. Did I really want to see a younger version of my mom, stripping off in a seedy club, oozing sex from every pore? Helena and I had a strange, beautiful and irreplaceable incestuous relationship, but I had no such feelings for mom. But was that because I had always seen her in that light? Given my feelings for Helena, would I feel different if I saw my mom in the prime of her youth; gyrating erotically round a pole, or up a catwalk? Could I, in that circumstance, find myself attracted to my mom?
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