The plump and pleasing girlish backside was the first that Herbert-a reserved youth even then-had ever seen quite nude. It had remained for a mere “kid,” for the young sister who was the only one to know that he had a playful, roguish side, to enchant the stony, motionless flesh, in which a fast-beating heart and vivid, intent eyes were the only sign of life. But that heart and those eyes did not remain the sole fleshly signs of vitality amid his enchantment, for the sex of the eighteen-year-old sprang now into excited tension.
It cannot be doubted that the plump and pretty brunette had continued to pose thus above the eyes of Herbert for purposes related to the transformations that had recently occurred in that adolescent body. If she had managed the willful indecency of leaving her combination unbuttoned between her legs, drooping in all-revealing festoons, it was because she desired-desired licentiously, proudly, naively, almost innocently in a way-to acquaint him silently with evidence that she was no longer a child, to be held in playful, loving lightness and to be laughed at like a child. No, she was a woman now, or becoming one, as much a woman as he was a man-maybe more so. And of the very decorative and now quite thick and dark and gratifying little beard which her lower belly harbored Edith wished him to take entire visual cognizance.
Maybe that would show him that she was not to be asked curiously why he failed to see her dolls about her, perhaps that would reveal that the jocular indignities to which he subjected her in other respects were entirely out of place now. If she looked interestedly from their runabout at some good-looking boy or gazed soulfully at the picture of a handsome actor in a magazine, she wished to hear no more of his ringing laughter. She had a right to show interest in men without being made the object of unseemly mirth, hadn’t she, since she was a young woman?
It was in some such way that Edith had appraised the impulses which led her to a very indecent and a very lovely display of herself. For, although trembling and reddened as she prepared and launched her unseemly little plot-a plot which seemed to her absolute proof against any accusation of evil intent, since she would be “unaware” of her exposure. And although shaking with strange sensations now as she parted her naked thighs deliberately above his upturned eyes, still she did not comprehend the extent to which she was moved in all this by the exhibitionistic impulse which is not uncommon even among maidens of her tender years.
Herbert gasped audibly as he caught sight of the even more secret beauties which the parting of the nude thighs surrendered to his inspection. Inwardly he blessed the thinness of the muslin gown for the welcome light which it admitted. It showed him clearly now not only a dark and triangular patch of curls upon the base of a belly of alabaster but the even more exquisite view of a delicate line of tender rose just below the dainty growth.
Hearing him gasp, Edith flushed the deeper and trembled the more violently. She tried to ask him, in a surprised tone, what was the matter with him but she could only gurgle and choke. She knew now that he could see not only her new fledged beard but also the more shameful but older possession of her frame. She did not mind that in her present mood. Let him see her all, then, see just how his sister was built!
The girl thrilled to her exposure and to his agitation now with a thrill greater than any expected or yet felt from her transgression. It was a thrill which localized itself so clearly that she knew the rosy cleft of her secret person loved to be seen by him thus, since it throbbed with pleasure. Nervously, she contrived to part her legs even more-and, with an upward reach which enabled her to slip the wire of the picture over its waiting hook, she so posed that Herbert could see both fore and aft at once. With the brief and opened undergarment fluttering out from her person, the boy saw her naked body to the small of the back in the rear and to the navel’s indentation in front.
And it was now that Edith had her first lesson in the underlying capacity of her brother to pass from calm to tempest most startlingly, the first of the lessons which later made her bite her pretty lips in a silent, amused denial when her dear brother’s “shyness so great that it renders him indifferent to girls” was mentioned to her by feminine colonists at Michigan Dunes.
For she heard the boy’s teeth grind hard, she heard his breath come hoarsely, as she just managed to hang the picture, but very much awry. Yet it was well that she had transferred its weight from her extended arms just when she did, for the flimsy ladder was shaking under the male hands’ wavering clasp upon it. Already unsteady on her daringly exposed legs, Edith gave a startled cry, then a shriek, and came toppling, sliding down into the upthrust arms of Herbert.
Later-a good while later-she accused him of having deliberately shaken her off her perch. He denied this with some heat, acquitting himself, genuinely enough, of any such deliberate intent. Perhaps he did not realize to what extent the sudden flames which took his senses as he studied the girlish nudities just above his head had induced an involuntary neglect of his role of “ladder-steadier.” In any event, his hands were quickly extended toward the round, silk-clad knees of Edith as she fell, and his wiry arms prevented the fall from being serious.
Her plump legs slipped through his fingers, and the bewildered Edith, catching him about the neck in her instinct to grasp at safety, found that it was naked rump and bare thighs that her brother’s hands sustained now. “Not hurt, are you, Edith?” he whispered hoarsely.
He had her in his arms now, clear of the ladder which had toppled with her, but still his hands held her convulsively by the nakedness which her short skirt shrouded almost entirely now.
“No, no-no, Herbie-oh-let me down-can’t you see how you are holding me! It’s-terrible!” wailed the still-startled miss.
“I think you’re bruised here and there. I think I feel bruises-where you were scraped by the ladder,” he said thickly.
And his one arm, the left one, supported all her weight now. His right hand strayed, strayed to the bare and plump and velvet buttocks. It roamed to the girl’s belly beneath the combination. It drifted to the beard which she had so proudly and with such childish lechery shown him. Its fingers sought an even more intimate sanctuary now, and upon the hand lying between her naked legs Edith squeezed those legs in panting shame, and in a vast and mounting agitation too.
“Herbert, Herbert-Herbie!” she stammered. “Don’t touch me like that!”
“Bruises-and maybe splinters” he went on mutteringly. “I must find out. Perhaps we should have the doctor in to see you”
“Herbie, Herbie-why are you laying me on the carpet? Oh-please-don’t uncover m-me!”
Edith was pleading tremulously in a dying voice and with dazed eyes. She wrestled a little in a nervous panic for an instant. She lay panting, with hands upon her eyes, then gave herself up to the investigations which he wished, for her resistance had merely resulted in making his fingers sink into her soft flesh.
In a silence which the rasping breathing of both youngsters alone disturbed, Herbert stripped his sister’s two garments upward, peeling her from the knees of both gown and unbuttoned combination.
Edith wailed softly as she found herself naked from navel to stockings. Through her fingers she peered at the brick-red, excited face and the glistening dark eyes of her brother. She managed to see her own nakedness in the effort to view it with his eyes; The distinct thrill which shot through her nerves as she saw him scanning her glossy, dusky little genital beard and felt his fingers touch it tremulously was pleasant one to the agitated maiden despite her re-awakened shame.
His breath, as he knelt to lean above her and bent his dark head, was hot upon her belly. “I have to see, Edith-I just have to see!” he was muttering. “Don’t squeeze your legs together that way. There may be bruises on the insides. You must let me see! Oh God, how perfectly darling. I can see a little of the rosy part-spread your thighs!” And he kissed her ardently, eagerly, on the navel pit and on the hirsute, plump mound of her sex.
Overawed by his fierce and uncontrolled excitement-licentiously moved, too, in all her girlhood-Edith gave him his way-all of his way. She allowed her white thighs to be pried apart. She lay, quiet but trembling, under eyes that flamed upon her sexual sanctity and fingers that caressed it.
Every few instants her quavering murmur arose as she tried to pretend an altogether nonexistent reason for her exposure and her yielding. “There are no bruises, are there, Herbie?” she would gasp.
“I can’t be certain yet. Wait, let me make sure,” the boy would answer with equal disingenuousness.
He rolled her over, the memory of that full-flushed bottom prevailing for the moment even over his delight in the mystic cleft of her girlhood. With a little moan of shame, Edith flaccidly allowed him to manipulate her at his will. He stripped her to the armpits in the rear. His hands and his dark eyes were hot upon the mounds which had so fascinated him earlier.
And then, all pretence of anything save boyish passion for these young charms fleeing, Herbert sank tremulous lips to kiss ardently the round, full, silken buttocks and the plump, naked thighs. And Edith, clawing the thick carpet in her sensual excitement, forbade him nothing.
The spell which held them was shattered by the distant sound of a closing door. Instantly the two youngsters were upon their feet, fearing the entrance of the maid, whose duty it was at this hour to clean these rooms. As the intruder delayed, the girl and the boy faced each other, she with eyes downcast and shapely body quivering, he with face as red as hers, but with eyes that seemed to presage another plunge toward her now covered person.
“Go away, Herbie!” Edith panted, as he drew stealthily nearer again. “Somebody is coming-and besides you shouldn’t have done that. You shamed me terribly with your kisses and all! Go away!”
“Not until you forgive me, for I couldn’t help it-you were so very lovely!” he breathed, with arm about her. “And you must tell me that I may see you-see your body again when there is a chance.”
“Never, never!” cried his sister. “There-I’ll kiss you and forgive. But oh, you scared me, you were so wild and savage, I hardly knew you!”
“Oh!” Herbert groaned. “Your little beard is so cute and lovely-and that tiny gash-and your big white bottom! Listen, Edith, I’ll go, but just lift up your clothes for the tiniest second and let me see once more.”
“I will not-indeed I will not!” she whimpered nervously. “It was very bad what you did, and Annabelle may come in any second.”
That this anguished prophecy was on the verge of fulfillment became clear as the maid’s voice, humming a fragment of a song, was heard in the corridor. And the boy reluctantly departed from his sister’s private quarters.
Into the very genuine and deep fraternal affection of the boy and girl there had entered now the carnal and sensual tinge which, despite their failure to recognize the fact, was to affect their relations from then on. In truth, this development served only to flavor deliciously the brotherly and sisterly love which had always been deep. Even a hug and a kiss meant something more to them now, and the new hesitancy with which Edith consented to be drawn to her brother’s lap at times-whereas she had been in the jovial habit of casting herself quite unconcernedly upon his knees to pester him-this, too, was a symptom of the unmentioned but unforgotten tie of their dual misdeed:
To Edith’s relief-a delicately sweet young maid at bottom-Herbert became again the quietly mischievous brother with whom she could frolic delightfully. Twice more, nevertheless, the sensual savage within him showed its face for a spell, turning him into the red-faced aggressor who made her shudder with shame and delight and left with her new memories to haunt her dreams.
On one of these occasions, one morning, she ran to him in the breakfast room for their morning kiss. Since they were more prone to snuggle now than before the episode in Edith’s chamber, he held her with head bent backward, after their lips had met, and he teasingly laid his mouth on the snowy softness of her neck beneath her round chin with a view to making the ticklish girl wriggle and protest.
Edith did not fail to struggle and to laugh nervously, especially as her brother’s tongue saluted her little adam’s apple and was drawn along her sensitive skin. The effect of her writhings was to open her shirt-waist upon her full-fleshed, snowy chest and to enable Herbert to discern dimly something which had been hidden from him when he had her upon the floor of her room: the upper slopes of a maidenly bosom.
Wriggling and laughing hysterically, the girl caught sight of his suddenly inflamed face and his intense glowing gaze. Again that hidden savage in her brother was upon her. She caught her breath. She resisted for an instant as stealthy fingers stole to unclasp a button and to delve within her white waist, upon her smooth, warm chest. And then, as he touched her breasts, the maiden collapsed in a soft mutter against his body.
“What-oh-what-are you d-doing, Herbie?” was her low expostulation. “You mustn’t-you mustn’t-dear Herbie!”
But, within the loose little chemise, each of her firm, round breasts knew the warm clasp of his hand in turn-and the rosy dots which crowned each mound stood stiffly against his palm. “Stop, stop-o-o-o-h-stop, Herbie!” sighed Edith, frightened by the tumult in her blood as well as by the red mask of boyish lechery which her brother’s face had become. “That is wicked, you know-and you weren’t ever going to be wicked with me again. And Father and Mother will be down to breakfast any minute!”
“I will carry you away!” he threatened with that gulping, husky whisper which she had once before heard from his lips. “I will carry you off-and strip you-unless you show me these lovely things right away. Father and Mother can wonder all they like why we aren’t at breakfast!”
“Heavens, Herbie! she moaned. “I think I hear Jenkins coming with the coffee. No-he just went into the pantry. Don’t you frighten me when you are like this! If I do what you wish, will you be good?”
The reddened face above her assented with a nod. “Well, but it’s horrible, you know-and you should be ashamed!” she whispered flutteringly.
Hurriedly she opened two more buttons of her shirtwaist. She pushed the tenuous chemise downward and, with what was tantamount to a lascivious innocence, she placed beneath his sparkling eyes the nakedness of her exquisite, plump bosom.
The boy gasped with rapture. Quickly he fingered and then kissed the lovely mounds. And Edith’s eyes, proud at bottom of her recently developed breasts, were dewy and languishing as he caressed her.
This time, too, they leaped apart as a sudden sound reached their drumming ears. It was a footstep on the stairway leading from the floor above. And when their father entered smiling, with morning paper in his hand, they were decorously seated if still rosy of cheeks.
With a certain grim determination, Herbert seemed to take himself in hand after these two incidents. Now nearly twenty, he knew well what these carnal curiosities about his pretty sister tendered, and he himself somewhat feared the animal which he had found to dwell within him. He could not fail to know that Edith was pleased and excited as well as frightened when, in his sudden delirium, he treated her thus indecently. Yet he owed her, he felt, protection both against himself and her own passionate appreciation of his caresses upon her nudity.
Yet a third occasion of the same nature was to bring the brother and sister very close to an irretrievable transgression. Orphaned when Herbert was nineteen and Edith sixteen-and he entering college soon thereafter, while his sister went into an exclusive girls’ school in Chicago-their chances to be isolated together were, perhaps fortunately, rare for a time.
They were respectively twenty and seventeen when they took a vacation trip westward to visit an uncle and aunt in Colorado. On the train Edith had a slight attack of travel sickness the first evening out, and, from his own adjoining compartment, Herbert ministered to her. Despite his sympathy, he relished sensuously her bed-ridden state, her pallor, the weakness and languor which, since she would not have the porter or maid near her bed, gave him the feeling that here his dark-eyed and pretty sister was more nearly his than ever.
Grateful for his solicitude and care and weakened by her passing illness, Edith seemed devoid of the nervous fears of the reappearance of that inner man dwelling in her brother’s lithe body which had startled her twice before into a sort of panic, even while making her senses glow responsively. Leaning upon her pillows, gazing upon him with wide, dark eyes from a face unwontedly pallid, she was indeed the interesting invalid.
Color grew delicately amid her pallor when he suggested just a bit of an alcohol rub for her shoulders and back as a stimulant to banish her weakness. She consented, nevertheless. She leaned forward upon her pillows with a gentle smile, and, clutching her loose-necked nightgown about her bosom, she allowed him to lower it to the waist at the rear.
A back of white satin, with just the least added charm of a healthy rosy glow of the lovely skin, made Herbert catch his breath and grate his white teeth involuntarily. Hearing the sound, Edith looked up in faint alarm. But his face was placid if touched with added color. He smiled down at her and she smiled, somewhat confusedly, back.
“Don’t think you haven’t got a competent nurse, young invalid,” he said. “For you’ve got quite the best there is anywhere, lucky girl!” Admiring the curving waist so thoroughly displayed to his eyes and relishing all this exquisite flesh, he rubbed her shoulders and back with the fluid. Refreshed already, she said as much, looking up at him in gratitude yet quivering somewhat to the friction of his palm and fingers upon her half-denuded person.
Her resistance was only faint when his hand descended to her loins when he drew the nightgown’s fabric away from her rear with his left hand to let his right hand play beneficently farther down. He could now see even the upper portion of the well-remembered and lusciously admired buttocks and the enticing vale between them.
Presently his rubbing hand was upon those mounds. His sister giggled nervously, ashamed to show any consternation or agitation in the face of his matter-of-fact manner and his friendly smiles when she glanced up at him. “It-it’s good we are brother and sister,” she said faintly. “And, even so, what would people think?”
“The last thing in the world for us to worry about!” he assured her heartily.
And his self-control reassured Edith, convinced her that those childish things of which she still thought frequently and ashamedly were far away and gone forever.
Hence his surprise attack in front not only caught her unawares but met with a feeble and gently flushed resistance. “Chest and stomach, or abdomen-I could hardly say belly to an adult girl of seventeen, I suppose-must have their touch of this alcohol,” he observed. “Don’t get nervous, little filly. Let the old doc get at you.”
“But Herbert, I’m so-so very bare!” she murmured. “It makes me nervous. Can you get at me down in front without my actually lowering my nighty any more?”
“Surest thing, you know, old primrose,” he assented.
Upon the smooth chest he worked, and then, his wrist between the warm breasts of his now palpitating sister, he rubbed the silken belly. And each withdrawal of his hand for the purpose of anointing it with the alcohol, and each gentle descent between the heaving naked mounds, made the lovely brunette quiver softly.
Without impatience-and denying even to himself that he felt another madness approaching from the dungeons of his nature-he allowed Edith to hold the folds of her silk nightgown well about her bosom.
But suddenly the girl trembled. She sighed, and her light pallor was suffused by a rosy glow. “Oh-o-o-o-oh-Herbert-careful-p-please!” came her strangled whisper to his ears.
Smiling determinedly, but with his nostrils quivering, he whispered in return: “Wrong number? Excuse it, please. But the darling little pussy is entitled to its share of soothing.”
“Don’t say such things!” she pleaded faintly.
He withdrew his fingers from the silken fur, where they had been delicately rubbing a plump mound. His hand rose and was withdrawn.
Edith breathed a sigh of relief that the torment was over. Her nerves were singing, and a torpor that was vaguely delicious had invaded her body.
He moistened his palm from the bottle of alcohol. “Just a touch on the lovely titties,” he murmured with a smile which passed very well for gay nonchalance.
“Oh-what words you find for-for me-for my body!” she expostulated faintly.
But since there seemed to be so complete a self-control on the part of her once-dangerous brother, she tremblingly allowed him to raise the fabric from her full and very lovely bosom. He gazed in delight, setting his teeth in a still successful attempt to maintain outward composure. “I think you are more wonderful than ever, sweet young sister,” he said. “And who has a better right to know that than I?”
He rubbed her breasts gently. The swoon-like fever of mingled pleasure and shame, in which Edith lay drooping and with closed eyes, was shot now with delicious thrills. She sighed softly, amorously. She thanked fortune that, with years, the animal which had lurked in her brother seemed tamed to a sort of gentleness, that she could trust him now to treat her thus without dreading madness on his part.
He put away the bottle, and fanned the flushed girl as she lay there, still breathing hard. He even jested softly about the vanishing of her pallor. She recovered slowly under his persiflage. She became able to banter back at him, to deny smilingily that she had been as much moved by “a mere rubbing-down” as he pretended to think.
A greater daring and a greater familiarity grew between them. Edith did not resent even his presumption in assuming-quite correctly, as it turned out-to know what maidens of her age harbored, with immense secrecy, in the way of private thoughts.
“If it makes you nervous to have your own brother rub you down, just wait until some strange man strips you to your lovely skin and does far worse things to you than that after you’re married,” he smiled.
“Oh, the nasty things you say, you pest!” observed his sister, flushing and twisting uneasily in her bed. “You would do well to go into your own room now that you’ve got me quite myself again. Besides-“
She looked about dreamily, as if in fear of interlopers who might listen to conferences. “Besides, I shan’t marry. I’ve resolved upon that,” she murmured. “It must be such an altogether upsetting state-at first anyway.”
“Ha-also ha-ha!” he grinned. “When I’ve already seen how you and old Hank Hamilton have fallen for each other, you can tell that to Sweeney! He has three of your photographs on his desk in our suite in college”
“Well, he is rather a dear. But what I said still goes.” she remarked.