Punishment with Kisses Read online

  *

  The first time I witnessed it, the sheer shock of Ash fucking another girl in broad daylight threw me off my chair. My disgust was tangible. It made my skin crawl. Why was my sister so vulgar, so crass? For God sake! How come Ash never learned decorum like the rest of us?

  That wasn’t really fair. I knew she had been taught the rules of polite society. I’d seen Mother in action. So what drove Ash to violate all the tenets of good manners? It was revolting. But I couldn’t turn away. It was like I had to watch. I had to pay silent witness to each surrender, see each woman throw her head back or bite her lip or cry out for more. I’d never made a lover respond with such enthusiasm. I’d never even experienced that kind of passion myself, let alone had that kind of sexual power, to bring a lover to their knees, to have them scream my name or beg for me not to stop.

  I almost wished I could see more through my Peeping Tom glasses. I wanted to know what it was that Ash was actually doing, how her tongue flicked across that woman’s clit, or how her fingers moved inside this other woman, to elicit such joyful responses. I wanted to be closer, to hear the words the women screamed in their moment of ecstasy. I imagined them as vivid verses, poetry that rivaled the love poems whispered by Sappho.

  Watching Ash seemed to evoke the kind of stirring in my loins my college lovers never did. When I realized this, for a moment I was overcome with disgust at myself. What kind of pervert was I? That was my sister, for God sake! I suddenly saw Ash standing before me naked, and the image sapped the sexual arousal I’d been feeling. I threw down the sunglasses and vowed never, ever to watch again. I retreated to my room and my books. I decided to go cold turkey.

  On my second day of detox, I started to feel like there was a physical struggle going on. I had to fight this force that drew me to the sliding glass door that led out to the balcony. I put all my muscles into it, sweating and straining, but my feet were being pulled out from under me. The balcony was a black hole and I was caught in the gravitational pull. I refused to give in. I vowed to ride this all the way through the pain of withdrawal even if it got as bad as Trainspotting. I had to conquer my addiction.

  I realized I wasn’t some kind of incestuous freak. When I watched Ash seduce those women I wasn’t putting myself in their shoes. I didn’t want to do Ash, I wanted to be Ash. When I watched, it was like I was the one down there by the pool, taking those women. I was no longer shy, bookish Megan. I was pleasing those women myself, wielding sexual prowess at seven feet deep. Freed of my moral dilemma, I gave myself permission to retrieve my binoculars and return to my post.

  I realize, from an explicitly psychoanalytic viewpoint, that my voyeurism was a little like scopophilia, and there was something I lost by being a watcher instead of an actor. So it’s not surprising that I eventually was drawn into the fray myself.

  But back then I convinced myself that watching my sister wasn’t that bad of a vice. After all, I wasn’t drinking and driving, or doing drugs, or involving anyone else in my perversion. That made me feel morally superior to Ash and, at that point in my life, I’d do an awful lot to feel superior to Ash in any way. So I told myself I wasn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, I convinced myself I was taking control of my sexuality. I was just imagining my way to erotic power, teaching myself sexual fluency, burrowing out of a prison of frigidity.

  Sometimes I looked down at the naked bodies by the pool and discovered it wasn’t just Ash making love with another woman. There was a whole group of them. Sometimes they were entwined into a ball of indistinguishable limbs, or they would take turns going one-on-one, with Ash kissing and stroking them, lying on the grass, or leading them back into the pool, clutching the sides of the deep end so that the passion wouldn’t pull them under. I watched Ash’s hands wander below the surface and the girls she was with, nay, the women, throw their heads back and open their mouths with silent moans or audible wails, or the same pleading sound that escaped my own lips and caught me off guard.

  I don’t know if Ash knew I was spying on her. She certainly never said so, not that we had a lot of conversations. Every once in a while I thought she was looking right at me, or I imagined she was winking at me, mid coitus, but most of the time I was pretty sure she was too caught up in the moment to be thinking about her twenty-two-year-old kid sister.

  And I tried hard to remain unobtrusive, even more so after Cynthia began spending all of her time by our pool. Cynthia Newkirk was Ash’s best friend, a lithe blonde with long hair and beautiful breasts. I’d first met her several summers earlier. Now I was discovering that Cynthia had a penchant for being topless nearly as often as Ash. Occasionally, Tabitha asked me to take mail from our main house out to the pool house for Ash, and I overheard her and Cynthia talking conquests, comparing sexual notes about their respective prowess.

  It was pretty clear that Ash was the winner in any carnal competition, but I suspect Cynthia was trying to please her by offering as much titillation as possible, while secretly hoping to have Ash hanging on her every word just once, the way Cynthia and everyone else did whenever Ash opened her naturally perfect mouth. I had been forced to wear braces for three years, whereas Ash’s forever-white teeth were straight from the moment they broke through her gums.

  When Ash wasn’t looking at Cynthia, I saw the way Cynthia’s demeanor changed, the way she mooned over Ash like everyone else, absorbing every inch of Ash’s body. Her longing glances lingered and her eyes flashed with jealousy whenever Ash paid attention to anyone else but her.

  Cynthia’s desire was so conspicuous I can still feel the weight of it after all this time. It lurks there like an unfulfilled ghost doomed to wander the grounds until its hunger is satiated. It still lingers in the air around the pool house like a poisonous gas that, heavier than the air around it, clings to the ground years after it was released. When you step through the gaseous cloud, a sickly sweet aroma settles in the back of your gullet and makes you gag. You choke and claw at your throat as the gas robs you of oxygen and knocks you to your knees.

  *

  Poolside, each and every day seemed like Cancun’s spring break, but back inside the main house, things couldn’t have been more different. I could see almost the entire estate from my balcony on the second floor of the east wing. The pool to the left, the gardens to the right, and straight back between two carefully manicured hedges was Ash’s pool house. I could even see inside the pool house as it was only shielded by two large, unencumbered French windowed doors.

  As the summer passed by, I spent most of it in my bedroom, only emerging for a few hours in the morning and evening when I was required to join Father and the stepmonster in the dining room. Relations between Tabitha and me were as chilly as ever. At least she’d never tried to take Mother’s place. But there had been a time, years ago, when Tabitha had tried to develop a relationship with me. She had grown up an only child and had these Pollyanna fantasies about what it’d be like to have sisters. I think that’s why she wanted to be our friend.

  Tabitha and Ash seemed to bond right away. Maybe I was a little jealous. Or maybe it was that way siblings have to differentiate themselves from each other, like if Ash was going to be best friends with Tabitha, then I sure as hell wasn’t. I’m not sure what it was, but I hadn’t wanted a relationship with Tabitha back then, and my utter rejection of her overtures created a sort of permafrost between us and prevented any potential affection from taking root.

  With Ash banished to the pool house and Father staying at the office longer and longer hours, it seemed as though all the warmth had drained from the house. Stepping in from outside was like walking into an industrial grade freezer.

  The house was ridiculously large for four people and their servants, and without Ash, it seemed cavernous and empty. I was always tempted to holler yodels down the long halls and time how long it took for the echoes to return, but it would have required a calendar instead of a stopwatch. I think there’s some kind of mathematical equation for determining the expanse of
an estate with echo technology, like the way you calculate the distance of lightning from the time between a strike and the sound of thunder.

  I’ll never understand why Father moved us out there in the first place. Maybe it was his way of grieving or a desire to protect us girls after Mother died, that had him relocate us to this huge estate in Lake Oswego, a Portland suburb with neither the color nor the potential dangers of the city. Even when all of us were home, most of the rooms in the palatial house remained empty, save for unused furniture shrouded in those protective sheets that make a place particularly haunted and frightening when you’re a tween.

  I remember Ash not being much help in that department. She thought it was hilarious to torment me, and she’d often disappear for hours at a time and then claim she’d been abducted by the ghosts of former residents who were all killed in a bloodbath murder-suicide perpetrated by an insane patriarch.

  Even now, the rooms we used sporadically or merely passed through, like the sitting room, parlor, and formal dining room, remained untouched for weeks or months at a time—except by the maid staff, who were expected to clean every room at least once a week. My room was the size of a small apartment, and I had my own television set and refrigerator. For lunch all I had to do was call down and ask the cook to whip me up a sandwich. Mandated “family dinners”—how can it be a family dinner when Ash wasn’t joining us?—at Casa Caulfield were quiet affairs.

  Father seemed filled with rage when he was home, angrier than I’d ever seen him. Yet he never went out to the pool house and shut Ash down. I don’t think he even attempted to talk with her once after kicking her out of the house. Ash could be annoying, but I don’t understand why he didn’t put his foot down, stop her debauchery, and bring her back inside. It was like he was waiting for her to change completely before he’d even acknowledge she still existed. They were both stubborn as mules and neither was willing to give an inch until the other gave a mile. I didn’t realize it then, but she was begging for structure, not rebelling against it. I’ll never understand why he didn’t provide it.

  Father was stone silent at meals, occasionally grumbling something under his breath that I couldn’t decipher. But Tabitha seemed to understand because the comments usually sent her bursting into tears. I almost started feeling empathy for her. Here Father was pissed at Ash, and it was Tabitha and I having to bear the brunt of his anger. Behind closed doors, he and the stepmonster were fighting constantly. I guess with Ash out of the house they couldn’t pin their anger on her so they were taking it out on each other.

  That’s why I was so surprised that Tabitha started joining Ash by the pool four weeks after I arrived, sunning and drinking and laughing. I’d never gotten along with Father’s child bride, but she and Ash seemed to have some kind of understanding from the get-go. Being so close in age, I suppose they shared a certain perspective about the world. The age difference between Tabitha and Father had always perturbed me. I assumed Tabitha was a gold digger, in the relationship for Father’s money. I never understood what it was about older men that some women found attractive. It always struck me as oddly incestuous wanting to date someone old enough to be your father.

  I guess Ash saw it the other way around, like she felt it was inappropriate for Father to get involved with someone so young. For Ash, Tabitha’s age seemed to make her a victim, someone too naïve to realize she was being used for her body.

  Our different feelings about Tabitha were what first started driving the wedge between Ash and me. I couldn’t forgive her for letting Tabitha take Mother’s place, and Ash seemed to think I was being hypercritical and unfairly biased against Tabitha just because of her age.

  Now they were hanging out together like a couple of best buds, and I couldn’t understand how they could choose each other over Father. Wasn’t that what they were doing? Surely when Father expelled Ash from the house it wasn’t his intent for his wife to join the banished girl poolside. And Ash had always made it clear that she thought it was Father who took advantage of Tabitha, not the other way around.

  I could see that Ash and I were never going to see eye to eye. We may have had moments when we were kids where we acted like friends. Chalk that up to us not knowing any better back then, and taking advantage of the convenience of in-home playmates. It was no longer convenient. There may have been parts of me that longed to be like Ash—or at least to have her self-confidence and sexual prowess, but I could see clearly that the two of us were never going to be friends. We were two very different people who’d been on divergent paths for far too many years to connect now. Otherwise, how could Ash spend that kind of time with Tabitha? Even worse, how could she let Tabitha hang on her words and follow her around like a lap dog, as if she was just another one of Ash’s many lovers?

  That was particularly disturbing.

  Chapter Three

  Ash was suddenly gone. She simply vanished. She was there when I went to sleep, but in the morning she never came out from the pool house. Cynthia and a handful of Ash’s friends continued partying and lounging around the pool, but Ash never appeared. Making an excuse to drop by the cabana, I confirmed she wasn’t there at all. Cynthia wouldn’t—or couldn’t—tell me where she was.

  When I came back inside the house, Tabitha came out of her room, dark rings under her eyes, but a look of excitement on her face, which faded immediately at the sight of me. I wondered whom she was expecting.

  “Oh, Megan,” she said in disappointment. “You surprised me.”

  “Oh, sorry. Have you heard from Ash?” I quizzed, all the while knowing the answer. Tabitha dabbed the corner of her right eye with her pinky, the gentle swipe of her French manicure offsetting cobalt eyes. The motion made her look so delicate and unexpectedly precious, it stopped me in my tracks. That summer was the first time I noticed that Tabitha was a woman, not just a creature I called my stepmonster.

  Tabitha had never been a mother to me. She tried, but by the time she married Father I was already a teen. I wasn’t in the market for a new mother, and all of my adoration was occupied, having been heaped in equal parts upon Ash and Father, with little room for interlopers like Tabitha. In fact, I was threatened by her, this new authority figure that Father had supposedly rescued from poverty like a stray from the pound. I thought she wanted to replace my mother, and I wasn’t willing to be mothered by anyone else, especially not a teenager. So I fought any affection she offered, assuming Father would eventually come to his senses and leave her. And though their marriage seemed rocky and forced at best, they never did split up.

  But Tabitha had a look about her, like she was more a woman trapped than a woman rescued, and I had no idea why in this day and age she would stay married. Sure, there was a pre-nup, but those things don’t always hold up in court and Tabitha was certainly still young and attractive enough to bag another wealthy suitor. If she left now. What was Tabitha holding out for?

  “No. I’m worried about her.” Tabitha broke my thought process with a quietly resigned admission. “Did you ask Cynthia?”

  “Yeah, Cynthia doesn’t know. She’s useless. All of Ash’s moocher friends are fucking useless. They don’t really care about her.”

  Tabitha dabbed at her eyes again and covered her perfect pout with her hand so it looked like she was kissing her own knuckles. The move was self-protective, yet unexpectedly attractive.

  “I know. I’ve told Ash that myself, but she won’t listen.” She tightened the belt around her silk kimono and walked to the French doors, peering out over the pool house and gardens. “Megan, do you love your sister?”

  I turned, half expecting a lecture, when I saw tears streaming down Tabitha’s face. My God, what the hell was going on here? “Of course I do. Why do you ask?”

  She was mum again, her reasoning apparently snuffed out by emotion.

  “Tabitha, is there something you want to tell me?” Had Father thrown Ash out? Had Ash moved without telling me? Was Ash in jail? My mind was racing at this point, all with
disastrous things that could have happened to my sister. As much as I envied her and competed with her, even at twenty-two, Ash was still my life, the person who completed me. Yes, she could still make me feel like a fourteen-year-old—hell, they all could, being home reduced me from a college grad to a sniveling teen all over again—but I couldn’t imagine what I’d do if something had happened to her.

  Her ash blond hair fell in front of her face as Tabitha dropped her head and sank down into a rouge leather armchair. Her lip looked like it was quivering, but there was no sound coming out, not even a breath.

  “Tabitha? Did something happen to Ash?” I demanded, a bit louder this time. She was freaking me out.

  “No, no, no,” she said quietly. “I just wanted to, I just, oh, never mind. Everything’s going to be fine.” With that, she wiped her tears, pushed her hair back, and rose to her feet. The fragile flower I saw moments ago was gone, in its place the woman formerly known as my stepmonster, the bitchy beacon of suburban perfection.

  I was stunned into silence. I couldn’t help but feel torn at the display of emotion. It was as if I was seeing Tabitha—the inner Tabitha—for the first time, and the whole scene left me feeling…conflicted, I guess you could say. At a loss for words, I turned and went back to my room, where I spent the next several hours vacillating between reading—always my safe haven—and e-mailing my college friends. I was hoping a word from people who knew me as an adult would do more than just cheer me; it would add some buoyancy to my day-to-day existence. I wasn’t sure why being home made me revert back to some self-doubting but petulant kid, but it did every time. Father wanted me here now and made it so I was trapped here until I could access my trust fund on my birthday. Who makes an inheritance due at twenty-three? All my friends got their money at twenty-one, or even eighteen. Still, the safety of what I knew and the security of Father’s money trumped any desire I had to venture out on my own without a support system. As soon as my inheritance was accessible, though, I could leave this place and feel whole again.