The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. The events described here are imaginary; the settings and characters are fictitious and are not intended to represent specific places or living persons.
This is the second part of the George and Lisa story, in the Gulf Coast universe -- A Broken Vase was the first part.
I have told versions of this story before in other venues. It took place over fifty years ago, during the height of the Cold War, which explains some anachronisms. George was eight and in the second grade and his sister Lisa was six and in kindergarten. Caring adults had consciously decided not to burden their children with the knowledge of current events, and those kids grew strong lost in their innocent, exploratory, play.
Told in the voice of Lisa:
We were playing hide and seek in the pines with our cousins: Paul, Eva, and Kristin. Paul is David and dad’s older sister Judy’s son. He’s George’s age. Eva is the daughter of the Right Reverend Rene Deveraux and mom’s younger sister Edel, she and Kristin -- who is the daughter of mom’s older sister Sheri and Arthur -- are a year older than me and a year younger than the boys.
Most of the “land” in the parish is really swampland. But the Gulf of Mexico and rivers pushed sand and sediment into berms along their edges. The town of Deveraux, named for one of my maternal ancestors -- Eva is simultaneously a first and a second cousin -- was long and thin stretched out along one of these berms. The backstop of the softball field was directly catty-corner across the intersection from our house.
The field had a short center field due to the presence of one of the few lakes that wasn’t actually a swamp sitting in the middle of a large park. A long grassy area with a sandy beach ran along our street away from our house past the benches along the first base line. That beach was very popular from mid-Spring to mid-Fall when the daytime temperature was around ninety degrees Fahrenheit, with ninety percent humidity -- give or take.
There was a picnic area, a boat ramp, some old shacks and a lot of scrubby pine trees on the opposite side of the park where we preferred to play. There was a beach on a semi-secluded arm of the lake. It was a longer walk, and it wasn’t manicured by the parish like the one across the lake -- facts that made it all the better.
Two turns ago I had been found in my hiding place immediately, but after I found Kristin and she was “it,” George whispered to me that he had found a great spot to hide as he silently took me by the hand. We walked as fast as we could without making a sound. Kristin’s voice trailed off as she audibly counted down to zero. She called: “Ready or not, here I come,” before we got there. But we weren’t cheating, it was just barely in-bounds.
It was a really good hiding spot, an old shed where the front wall had sunk into the earth and the door could not be opened. But the wall in the back was like a fence panel, and it had come loose from the side walls. George could move it enough for both of us to squeeze inside. It was hot inside without any breeze, but adequate light filtered through the many cracks, and we were completely undetectable.
George took his tee-shirt off in the heat and I thought about taking off my jumper, but I didn’t do it right away. He held his finger to his lips as we heard Kristin’s voice and her feet come close. But she never tried the shed’s door or tried to peer inside through the many cracks. She’d probably already determined that the door was unopenable in a previous round. Then the sound of her presence dissipated as she walked away.
“Hot enough?” George asked. He could see that I was sweating.
“And I have to pee,” I said.
“Pee in the corner, over there,” George pointed.
The shed’s floor was partially sunken into the ground at an angle. It had separated from the walls but still held the shed together -- more or less. I saw what he meant. If I peed where he pointed it would run down the slope and out the crack. The shed wouldn’t end up smelling any worse than it already did -- which was pretty bad.
I started to lean on the wall, in order to take my jumper off, and the wall moved.
George took my hand, and we both looked at the wall. It was old and rotten, no longer fastened securely to its mates -- certainly not up to supporting my weight.
“Here, I’ll hold you up,” he said.
George held one of my hands and then the other as I took my jumper and panties off. Then he held my hands to steady me on the uneven floor as I squatted in the corner and relieved myself.
“It’s easier for you,” I said softly.
He shook his head in the affirmative. Then once I had gotten my balance, he stepped to the corner and pulled his penis out.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You went, so I’m going.”
“Because I went?”
“Sorta,” he said, “and because I have to go.”
“Take your shorts off,” I said.
“Why?”
“I had to get undressed to pee.”
“That’s because you are wearing a jumper,” he said.
“You are peeing because I peed.”
“Okay…”
“I had to get undressed, so you have to get undressed too.”
George took his shorts and underwear off. “Do I have to squat too?” he asked.
“No,” I said, smiling.
Then I watched him take two fingers and push his skin back clear of his hole, and I watched him pee. He didn’t get a drop on the shed’s floor, it all went out the crack.
“I didn’t watch you,” he said.
“I don’t have anything to see,” I said. Then pointing to his penis, I added, “I need one of those.”
He smiled.
We heard distant voices, we couldn’t even tell if one was Kristin’s voice, but nothing close. It was really hot in the shed, and neither of us made a move to put our clothes back on. Both of us were naked except for the Converse All-Stars we used to wear.
“You owe me,” George said after a moment.
“Why?”
“You watched me pee. So I get to watch you.”
It was funny, maybe we were just bored. We shared a bathroom and never shut the door. I couldn’t remember us ever watching one another, just being annoyed that we had to wait for the toilet.
“There is nothing to see,” I said.
“How do you know?”
He had a point. “Okay,” I said, “you can look.”
George got on his knees and looked at the slot between my thighs. I was standing with my legs together in the filtered light streaming through the cracks. He couldn’t see anything. He looked a bit more, then he kissed me right there, in the middle of the spot mom called my “Prissy-Dine.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I wanted to. It’s beautiful. It needed a kiss.”
Back then I didn’t think that I was beautiful, I was tall and skinny with lots of freckles. “Gawky” was a frequently used adjective. He said “it” was beautiful, and “it” was a part of me, so he thought that at least a part of me was beautiful. He might even think that other parts of me were beautiful, but I dared not ask.
“You looked, so I get to look too,” I said.
“You watched me pee,” he said.
“And I owe you. When we get home, I will let you watch me pee. But I didn’t get to look at your Willie. I was looking at the pee.”
“You looked at the pee?”
“Yeah, it’s neat, the way you can point it and…”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” he said.
“So, you owe me. Let me see it.”
The light wasn’t any better, but it was just sticking out there. Willie wasn’t erect but it was still easier to examine him than Prissy had been. I touched the folds of his foreskin and the opening at the tip. I looked, and I touched, and eventually just as Geoge had kissed Miss Prissy, I kissed Willie right on the top of his one eye.
“He’s beautiful,” I said.
In the coming months, George showed me how to use just a pit of pressure from two fingers to retract his skin enough to clear the hole or a bit more to uncover the head. As much as I had wanted a penis of my own before, I wanted to touch his in the present.
(Years later when my son was born, a lady from the hospital noticed that I had crossed out several lines on a form they had handed me. “Wouldn’t you like to mutilate your newborn son,” she asked. (Okay, she actually used the word “circumcise,” which is a synonym.) “Do you want me to disembowel you with a spork?” I replied as I held the weapon of opportunity up. As an added benefit, word got around about the “crazy lady.” Hospital staff didn’t talk to me again until I left.)
Eventually we heard Kristin call: “Game Over.” We extracted ourselves from our sauna and got dressed. Walking back, we made a pact between us never to use the shed when the other one of us was “it.” We often hid there together. It was perfect, collapsing on its own in a rainstorm before anyone ever found us there.
We kept our promises to each other, as we always do. We watched each other go pee, which had a certain novelty, and we carefully examined each other’s genitals in the house where we had privacy and adequate light. We weren’t sexual yet. Maybe it was the fact that we were different -- and that our physical parts were complementary -- and we were exploring those differences.
Those examinations explained the mechanics of sex at an age before we were hormonal and desperate to engage in it. That is part of why we are perfect together, being brother-and-sister we already loved one another. We each had the inclination to place our sibling’s needs first, before our own needs. Touching before puberty allowed us to pay attention to our eventual lover’s needs, and what they liked. The lack of hormones made it easy to differentiate needs from wants.
I was touched when Geoge said my “Prissy-Dine” was beautiful. Over time he said that other parts of me were beautiful. So I knew he meant it when he said that all of me was beautiful. It can't be overstated how impactful it was to me that George saw me as beautiful. The rest of the world did not matter. George honestly saw me as beautiful at a time before we were sexual with one another. It wasn’t the hormones talking.
Ever practical, dad had oftentimes said that covering up parts of the human body just drew additional attention to those parts that were covered. He believed that skimpy bathing suits -- to say nothing of lingerie, yoga pants, or “Daisy Dukes” -- were far more “revealing” than nudity. This was certainly the reasoning behind his and mom’s casual acceptance of nudity and semi-nudity at home.
Even though George and I figured out a way to eroticise our genital areas in spite of our parent’s best efforts. Their attempt to make us view every part of our bodies as “normal...” To free us from all of society’s weird hand-ups regarding nudity, gender, and sex was a great benefit... We'd managed to make the parts of our bodies we had to cover outside the house “special,” at least to one another, and to enjoy the process.
It would be years before Willie pushed his way into Prissy, but we had a lot of fun along the way looking, touching, and tasting. Maybe that was the true benefit of not making anything taboo. Not that we would deny our natural instincts to be sexual creatures -- but rather that we would take it slowly, step by step, with someone we trusted and who would always love and respect us as people, not as disembodied parts of people.
It fits into my concept that love can not ever be wrong. That communicating your love in an appropriate way cannot ever be wrong... That physically expressing your love through romantic and sexual acts with an agreeable other person cannot ever be wrong… I have fifty years of evidence supporting this concept.
-- Lisa Ann
For the next story in this series, go to The George and Lisa Story, Part 3 of 8: Games We Played