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Every once in a while, Dennis likes to take inventory. Sexually speaking, that is.
He starts at the beginning ―or, not quite. The Ms. Klinsky stuff he doesn’t like to dwell on. He was inexperienced, it was embarrassing. It’s whatever. That part can be skipped without much fuss.
So, the first step is to pick up his book of memoirs. Then he alternates between it and his sex tapes, reliving specific encounters chronologically. No escapade is without its recording, or at the very least a detailed, highly erotic recollection of the events. He likes to think he’s probably the person with the most well-documented sex life to ever walk the earth.
Although, increasingly often throughout the years, he gets to the end and has the whole experience soured by a latent, disquieting feeling of inaccuracy. Not from any flourish he may have added to a story or two. Those are there to enhance the narrative of it all. No, what he’s talking about started out as a sneaky suspicion in the back of his mind, that over time grew to be a looming, ever-present idea.
Put bluntly: he’s not sure that he’s never fucked his twin sister. And, to be fair, isn’t that the best anyone can hope for? He can’t say for sure he hasn’t slept with her, but he also can’t say that about, say, Jennifer Aniston. If you have every hour of your life accounted for, you’re not doing life right, in his opinion.
But still. Sometimes he feels like he’s missing something, just beyond the fuzzy margins of his memory.
1.
After going on the first crack bender of his life, he wakes up on Dee’s couch, feeling fucking awful. It’s like every hangover he’s ever had put together. His muscles are sore as hell, he’s covered in freezing cold sweat and it feels like every sound coming out of Dee’s mouth is an icepick plunging straight between his eyes. Overall, not worth it. So not worth it.
In the bathroom, and to his irritation, he finds his underwear stuck to his skin. Beneath the disgust that flares out, he has to take a second to appreciate the fact that he could even get it up in the state he must’ve been in. He wasn’t even aware that crack could induce wet dreams as a side effect, but well, he sure is now.
Once he’s taken care of that mess as best he can, he focuses on his reflection. He looks about as bad as he feels. The bags under his eyes are a bruised shade of purple and reach halfway down his cheeks. His hair is messy and grimy with god knows what substance. But the cherry on top of this deplorable sundae is the dry traces of lipstick he finds on his mouth. He gets closer to the mirror to study it, but there’s no doubt. It’s that garish pink Dee likes to wear. Bubblegum Babe or some other bullshit.
He stares at himself, bewildered. Eventually he reaches the simplest explanation: high as a kite, he saw it fit to put lipstick on. Whatever. It wouldn’t be the first time. He’s done weirder things while stone cold sober.
(In the recesses of his memory:
They’re pacing around the living room. They’re making plans. He’s gonna make so much money as a veterinarian. He’s gonna live in a fancy fucking house, bigger and better than their parents’, and Dennis will you let me live with you and sure, like when we were kids, except this time we can do whatever we want and you’re so nice, Dennis, and she holds his hand and brings it to her mouth and kisses it, and then his forehead and his cheek and stay still and then his mouth.
And he understands so clearly then. She’s never getting away from him. She can fantasize about her future as a celebrity all she wants but it doesn’t matter. There’s not an ounce of talent in her body, god bless her, and even if they get away from the others she’ll still have to live off of him and that’s alright, that’s perfect. He’s such a good brother.
They stumble onto the couch and she wraps her legs around his thigh and starts rocking against him and it’s dull and it’s awful and his jeans are so stiff but it only makes the final release so much sweeter.)
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When he thinks about the point of origin of this… fixation he has, he thinks it might come down to a fantasy. An involuntary fantasy, mind you.
It just so happens that he likes thin, blonde girls. And, well. Sometimes, when he holds them down to fuck them, it’s Dee’s face that crosses his mind, black rivulets of mascara running down her cheeks even as she clenches around him. Even as she wants him just as badly.
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2.
It’s not until the day after he and Dee show up on TV, dancing in adult diapers, that he thinks to check his phone gallery.
There’s one video he doesn’t remember taking, which means it must have taken place after they took the ecstasy those girls gave them. He hits play with a frown. Dee’s in frame, inside a toilet stall, he thinks. She starts by giving the camera a flirty wink and whirling around in her dress.
“There you go, baby girl,” the sound of his own tinny, compressed voice startles him.
Dee holds up what he thinks are the diapers, doing her best impression of a ring girl.
“You gonna put that on?” he hears himself say, and something about his tone makes his skin crawl.
Dee nods with a smile. She sneaks a hand behind her back, probably to get the zipper, and starts pulling down her dress, exposing her bra straps, until it gets to a point where she can’t reach anymore.
“Help me out, will you,” she says in a low voice.
The camera pans down and the video ends.
Dennis rewatches it for the better part of an hour. It gives him a weird feeling, like a movie promising to show him a mangled corpse only to cut away when the white sheet’s about to come off. He thinks a long while about what to do with it. In the end, he copies the video to some remote folder in his computer and deletes it from his phone.
(His hands are splayed wide on her bare back, the zipper bites his fingers as he drags it down. She shimmies the dress off and leans into him for support as she steps out of it. He’s hyperfocused on the contrast of her black bra against the pale skin, so he doesn’t notice she’s pulling at his shirt until a button pops off.
“I love this shirt,” he grumbles, then snaps her bra in retaliation.
She shoves him and his back hits the stall door. They’re slapping and smacking each other, bodies overheated under the poor lighting, and his shirt is off and she’s unbuckling his belt and suddenly the girls outside start yelling to hurry up and change, and what’s taking them so long?)
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Then there’s the other fantasy. The one that only comes when he’s so far gone that he doesn’t give a fuck what it takes as long as he gets to come. In it, she ties his hands behind his back and covers his mouth, a little too tightly and a little too close to his nose for air to flow freely, and the lack of oxygen makes him dizzy and weak and incapable of fighting her off as she climbs on top of him and rides him, never sparing a single thought for his pleasure.
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3.
The morning after the costume party at Paddy’s, there’s only bits and pieces of the night floating in his brain.
He opens his memoirs almost by reflex, then hesitates. He has the vague idea that he had sex, but he remembers too little of the encounter to make it worth recording. Were feathers involved, somehow? He shuts the book and heads for the bar.
(When the peacock lady drags him into the back office, he congratulates himself on switching costumes with Charlie. Let him be Luigi. Charm and charisma are qualities he has in abundance, but sometimes he has to let that pretty face do all the talking. You can’t argue with results.
Case in point: the girl crashes her mouth against his, a little too enthusiastic for his taste, but it gets him going anyway. There’s an air of familiarity to her that has him wondering if he’s hooked up with her before. He decides he doesn’t want to find out. That’s what the mask is all about, after all. The thrill.
When he detaches his lips from hers and trails down her neck, ready to do that trick he learned that makes women squirm ―in a good way or a bad way, he’s never cared to check― he’s greeted by the scent of some cheap perfume he’s smelled a thousand times before. Her dry, split-ended blonde her gets in his mouth. He’s painfully, desperately hard.
He looks up to find that her mask has gone askew. Fingers trembling, he places it back over her features and lets her pull him into her.)
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Maybe it can all be traced back to that conversation they had with their dad, the last time they ever truly had a father. When he opened with “it’s kind of disturbing” and Frank eyed them both warily, before promptly accusing them of sleeping together.
What he remembers most clearly is the feeling of his blood going cold as he rushed to deny it. Which made no sense to him because he wasn’t lying and even if he was, that had long since lost its thrill.
Then Frank brought it up yet again, a decade later, if only as a ploy to win their current game of Chardee MacDennis, and it almost fucking worked. At the very least it succeeded in getting his hand off Dee. It was maddening, he would’ve done anything to shut him up.
But as much as it startled him both times, it never exactly shocked him. No, because he’d heard something like that before. From their mother.
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4.
Frank thinks it’s 2006 and Dennis allows himself to think that maybe, finally, this will be the time. It’s been ten years. It’s been a lifetime. But if they can pull it off, they can both escape for good.
When he realizes they did crack again, he can only manage to be marginally disappointed in them. His obligatory inspection of himself gets put off for as long as he can because he already knows he looks like shit.
Nothing seems to be amiss until his shirt comes off that night. All day he’s felt a stinging pain across his shoulders, and five seconds into his daily assessment of his abs, he notices the angry red lines on his skin. He traces them with the pad of a finger. They’re scratches, that much is obvious.
The sting of them gets more demanding now that he’s paying attention to it, but it’s particularly bad on one side. Upon closer examination he sees them: tiny, bloody dents in two semicircles. A human bite mark.
He doesn’t need a detective to tell him what he already knows: it’s Dee’s. He’d recognize those teeth anywhere, they were constantly etched on him during their childhood. It even gave him an infection once. Even now he could find the faded lines of it if he looked at his arm close enough.
“If they have to cut my arm off, I’m taking yours,” he’d said to her when he was prescribed the antibiotics. She’d only stuck her tongue out.
He wonders what happened the previous night, how was it that things devolved into an actual physical fight. The last time she went into enough of a rage to mark him up they were teenagers, but that’s neither here nor there. They’ve always had a hair trigger.
What he remembers is:
They put on Gone Til November and fill two glasses of wine. Things get derailed for a little bit, but he gets them back on track. Sure, she’s a terrible actress and he might like animal skins a little too much, but they’ve always been accepting of each other’s minor flaws. He’s not going bald, though.
A few drinks in she drags him by the hand and forces him to dance to an old song from their childhood, a dance routine they perfected at eight years old and that they inevitably go over every few years. Halfway through it occurs to him that, once money is no longer a problem for them, he wouldn’t mind doing this more often. Sure, he sees his sister every day and he can barely stand it as it is, but things get much uglier when there’s always some scheme they’re failing to pull off, or when the others’ stupidity balloons into unsuspected proportions, or when the shame of this sorry life they’ve been leading on their (ex) father’s dime overwhelms them.
And it’s not like Dee’s a genius. Far from it, she never seems to do anything right, no matter how clear or explicit Dennis is with his instructions. But if he had to pick someone to have a conversation with, if any of their brains is worth a damn in that fucking bar of theirs, it’s his sister’s.
The choreography ends and she sways against him, nearly sends them both tumbling down with those uncoordinated limbs of hers.
“Y-you know what would be fun right now?” she says.
“What?”
She gets real close to him, presses her wet, sticky mouth against his ear.
“Doing crack.”
The hair on his nape stands on end, but there’s a pleasant echo to it. He finds himself nodding.
“You’re right. You’re absolutely right, Dee,” he fumbles for his phone, figuring he must still have their dealer’s number stored somewhere. “You know, you have some good ideas every now and then.”
“Thank you! I know.”
They crack open a beer to wait for their dealer’s reply and that’s when everything goes black in his mind.
(An hour and half a rock of crack later:
“You don’t have to worry about the acting thing,” he declares, resting his head on her thigh, the rest of him splayed out on the floor.
“What do you mean?” she coughs. Her hand comes up to brush his hair back, though she nearly jabs him in the eye.
“Forget all about that. You don’t need it. I’ll make enough money for both of us. Plus, you’re way too fucking lazy to ever actually work.”
“But I want a nice place and cool clothes and a home cinema too, Dennis,” she whines.
“I’ll get you all that. I can get you anything. You won’t have to do a single thing.”
Her fingers come down in an attempt at an actual caress. Her thumb trails down the bridge of his nose, over his top lip. Her eyes are unfocused.
“You would really do that for me?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
She smiles. And it might be the weird angle or the drugs or the late hour or the soul-deep fatigue in Dennis, but it’s the prettiest she’s ever looked.
“You do love me, right Dee?”
Her lips twist like she’s trying not to laugh. It sets him on edge, makes him burn all over.
“Dee?”
She kisses him without a word.)
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Barbara didn’t say it too many times, and to Dennis it was only an overheard comment from the next room over, one that somehow got permanently ingrained in his psyche.
Their mother made it a habit of watching Dee walk out of Dennis’ room at four in the morning, after an hour of listening to him sob about… well, most times he couldn’t even tell.
“What on earth were you doing with your brother, Deandra? Am I supposed to give him a rape whistle in case he ends up alone in a room with you?”
There was a second of silence, as if Dee was too insulted for words, before she broke out stammering and yelling. Back in his bed, Dennis pulled his covers over his head and tried not to think about the heat in his face, or the stupid dreams he’d sometimes have.
Afterwards, Dee wouldn’t meet his eyes for a couple days.
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+1
Maybe, deep down, on some level, he knows it all comes back to this one night.
They’re sixteen and it’s three a.m. and they have the whole big, empty house to themselves. It’s a school night so Dennis should be hours deep in his beauty sleep, but he’s been tossing and turning and it just won’t come.
Then he hears the wooden floor creaking outside his room and thinks ah. That’s why.
He waits a couple of minutes, just to ensure he’ll catch her in some illicit activity, then sneaks down the hall, much more gracefully than Dee could ever hope to achieve. There’s a dull glow coming from the living room, and he lets it guide him downstairs. He finds his sister lying across the couch, back against the armrest and lips wrapped around a bottle of their mother’s gin.
He clears his throat and in his best imitation of Barbara’s voice says:
“Evening, Deandra.”
Dee startles hard enough for a few drops to land on the front of her pajamas. Upon seeing him, she takes a cushion and hurls it at his face. It hits the wall beside him harmlessly. He snorts a laugh.
“What do you want?” she asks, with easy, obvious exasperation.
“Those gargantuan footsteps of yours won’t let me sleep.”
She flips him off. He makes his way towards her with a magnanimous gesture.
“Easy, now. You wouldn’t want me going to mother dearest to tattle on you, would you?”
“You dirty snitch,” she spits out, but lets him shove her legs off the couch to make room for himself.
He holds out a hand, nodding towards the bottle. She eyes him suspiciously.
“How do I know you won’t rat me out anyway?”
“If she notices it’s gone, I’ll blame it on the maid. I promise.”
She ponders this for a second, then grants him the bottle. It’s a new maid anyway, nobody’s too fond of her. He takes a long swig. It takes him a commendable effort not to grimace.
He’s about to ask her what she’s doing up, annoyed that she’s not the one making conversation, when he notices a tricolor cord around her neck, partly hidden beneath her top. Even though he recognizes it immediately, he hooks a finger into it and brings it out to get a better look.
“Jesus, what are you doing with that?”
It’s a third-place medal from a beauty pageant, several years old. The only bronze she’s ever won among an ocean of participation prices in her bottom drawer. She stopped competing sometime in the past couple of years, claiming she realized how stupid and weird it was, but he knows the real reason. The older she got, the more her competitors started to resemble actual supermodels, and the more the gap between her and them widened to pathetic proportions.
“Nothing,” she snaps, smacking his hand away. “Just drop it.”
“Dee, this is sad even for you. If you’re gonna dwell on past semi-victories, they should be five years old at most,” he says between gulps.
“Oh, fuck you,” she wrenches the bottle back. “What have you ever accomplished anyway?”
His mind goes blank for a second. The alcohol must already be going to his head.
“I haven’t seriously tried anything yet. Believe me, you’ll know when I do.”
“Right. I’m sure your mugshot will be all over the news.”
“Very funny.”
“I can practically hear the interviews. ‘Yeah, we all knew he was a psychopath. He used to dissect animals in the school playground.’”
“No, I imagine it being more like ‘Reynolds, Reynolds… as in Dee Reynolds? The dick biter?”
She nearly chokes.
“God, the dick biter thing! I still don’t get where that came―”
Something must show on his face because she stops dead in her tracks and stares, her expression growing increasingly outraged. He gulps down some more gin.
“Did you spread that rumor?”
She smacks him all over and it hurts, but he’s laughing too hard to dodge her.
“How do you even start that rumor about your own sister?” her words are slurring together just a little. “Like, what did you say your source was?”
“Uh…” he straightens up, tries to think, but the world tilts to one side, informing him that he’s officially tipsy. “Nobody asked for one. They mostly took me at face value.”
“What, like it was first-hand information?”
“I mean…”
“Ugh,” she groans. “That is the sort of shit they’d bring up in interviews, Dennis.”
“Come on, don’t even worry about it. I’m not going to jail,” he lowers his tone with a corny wink. “I’m not getting caught.”
A smile tugs at her lips.
“You’re right. And they’re not gonna remember any stupid rumor about me. They’ll be too busy watching me on TV.”
“Oof, a TV actor?” he grimaces. Leave it to Dee to daydream wrong.
“Well, no, no. Like, after a bunch of movies. As a guest star.”
“Mhm, alright.”
“Yeah, and whenever mom and dad call, I won’t pick up the phone,” her gaze trails away from him, like she’s no longer on their parents’ couch with her knees digging into Dennis’ hip, but in a hotel suite, or a luxurious penthouse.
It feels like a pit gaping open in his stomach. Suddenly, all he can think about is fragile little birds and the feeling of their desperate flutters against hands cupped around them.
“They won’t even know where I live,” she keeps going. “Not them, or Fatty Magoo, or even Bill fucking Ponderosa when he crawls back to me like ‘remember me, Dee? We went to high school together’ and I’ll just say no,” she takes a quick sip, then shrugs. “Either that or I’ll just marry rich.”
Dennis shakes his head, as if to banish the haze of alcohol or the icky feeling he has, or both. It doesn't work. He can always count on Dee to sour his mood.
“You’ll answer my calls, though, right?”
She finally, mercifully looks back at him. Purses her lips. Something like panic swells in his chest and it’s so fucking stupid. She’s a talentless hack anyway, and if someone is gonna be begging the other for scraps of attention, that’ll be her.
“I don’t know, Dennis,” there’s a dark quality to her tone that he doesn’t like at all. “You’ve been a lousy brother, spreading such nasty rumors about me…”
He splutters. His mouth feels like it’s full of cotton.
“Which for all I know are true, anyway.”
“The only dick I’ve ever bitten is your- you.”
He can see in her face that she wishes desperately for him to ignore her misspeaking. He leans closer to her with a shark-like grin.
“I’m sorry, what was that?”
“Fucking whatever. You probably don’t even know how to get a girl off.”
It’s such low-hanging fruit, and he should just ignore her, he knows that. But.
“Fuck around and find out, Sweet Dee.”
He doesn’t know why he said it. He doesn’t even know if he meant it. If he really tries, he can almost believe that it was a reflex, an automated response that didn’t bother to check who the receiver was.
Her eyes widen. He hadn’t realized how close their faces were until now. She eyes the half-empty bottle that’s hanging on to his fingers for dear life.
“How drunk are you?” she asks.
“Very. You?”
“I’d say about the same.”
A pause. She licks her lips. His blood sings under his skin.
And then all he knows is:
the taste of their mother’s gin on her tongue, the warm skin under her top, the drag of her nails down his neck, the thud of the remaining cushions landing on the ground. Her face white as a sheet and her elbow against his chest when she shoves him away, a hand pressed to her mouth as she rushes into the nearest bathroom and retches.
The realization that he’s not drunk enough to forget about all this sinks in his stomach like a stone. He considers the rest of the bottle, then tells himself he'd prefer not to die of alcohol poisoning tonight.
Ignoring her groans, he staggers his way back to his bed and waits until it’s time for school. She stays home sick and doesn’t leave her room for the whole day.
For years, he stares at her and wonders if she remembers any of it. Sometimes he’ll swear she doesn’t, her eyes meeting his with the blissful blankness of the oblivious.
Other times, the reflective gleam of recognition tells him she knows exactly what he’s thinking about.