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Addiction

Chapter Seven

The Discarded

By:

Rufus Quentin

September, 1998

"Severe cranial injury" was all I could think of as I rode on our neighbor's 4-wheeler, clinging to my brother for dear life with my entire body practically wrapped around him. It couldn't possibly get any more redneck than that. That was how low we had to stoop without the Datsun. We had to resort to borrowing an ATV to get around town for basic errands. The one thing everyone in our neighborhood had in common was the fact we all lived on the cusp of poverty, therefore we understood each other's needs, especially the need for transportation, so relying on the generosity of others became a way of life. Nonetheless I could feel the indignity of it down to my bones. Where we grew up these things were a common mode of travel, but usually just for rednecks and their offspring. It wasn't uncommon to see tank-topped teenagers joyriding through traffic on these things, zipping past the identical rows of tiny houses put up during the long gone coal mining boom. By the time we drove by most of them were boarded up. Those who could escape already did. We were still captives there until our general education ended and our automobile was functional again.

Our trailer rattled deafeningly behind us. A number of boxes from our attic were stacked and bungied into place upon it, containing a ton of our mother's junk and some of ours. A load of mixed memories we were more or less willing to part with. I didn't feel so attached to my stuff, given that by senior year I was basically half out the door and ready to liquidate eighteen years' worth of clutter. My mother's stuff was back there too. Even though she never played a role in my life, I didn't have a good feeling about pawning her shit. It was a little bit insulting to have been abandoned along with such junk, but despite its worthlessness, I still felt a bit of empathy to it. I always had a heart for the rejected.

***

We'd raided just about every room in the house, pilfering things we thought we could get away with taking. I felt ready to part with most of my cassette collection, all my VHS tapes, old toys (bonus points if you guessed action figures), my .22, books, and anything else that looked like it might have resale value. We ended up in the attic where we finally worked up the courage to go through the mysterious mountain of boxes that bore our mother's name. We'd played up there as kids, but avoided those boxes as if we somehow instinctively knew they were inhabited by some ghost or hostile spirit. This time we went up armed with pocket knives and tempered imaginations.

"Anything?" Dustin asked as he sorted through an unlabeled box and while I stuck my muzzle in another.

"Just books," I replied, going through a box of nothing but. I picked up each, looked at the cover, and replaced it. They were just old romance novels, bodice rippers, crap. It felt a little painful going through her stuff. I just wanted to burn it all. A lot of it did end up in flames, just not the books. I couldn't bring myself to burn books, even the crappy ones she had a penchant for reading or at least purchasing. Books always felt innocent. I couldn't blame her shortcomings on them, though they may have played a role in her departure, inspiring her with visions of greener pastures and fair-furred muscle men of the South Seas.

"I can't believe our parents used to listen to these records," he said, flashing me the cover art of some flower-layered folk band and another of a naked, but not particularly well built bear playing a saxophone. The cover art conveniently cut off right where his happy trail would have led somewhere interesting.

I rolled my eyes and held up one of the books, one with some damsel in a corset beholding some hunk with a submissive stare.

"I doubt we are going to get more than a dime for any of these. Maybe a buck per box."

"If they'll even take 'em at all. Some of these are moldy."

"Fuck," he said. "No jewelry? No antiques?"

I opened another one to find some moth eaten clothes. "Not yet. If she had jewelry she probably took it with her."

Dustin opened another that looked like it contained kitchen implements, some bulky, colored glassware wrapped in newsprint from the year we were born. "This might sell," he said inspecting some sort of a bowl or dish the practical application of didn't immediately seem obvious. "Whatever it is."

To our surprise the last and largest two boxes contained art supplies. It looked as if she dabbled in everything. We sifted through dried out paints and a few rolled up painting canvases. A portrait of our father was among them, as were thousands of beads, some leather working tools and strips of hide. We did find some jewelry but just brass stuff with glass jewels. It was a veritable crafts shop. "She must have been the creative type," I said, finding more and more that spoke of a person with an artistic side.

"She must have been bored stiff," Dustin said, providing an equally sound explanation, though I still prefer to think of her as an artist having been cursed to have been born in the wrong part of the world, and unfortunate enough to marry, or more likely gotten knocked up by, the wrong guy again and again and again. That played out story was so damn familiar to me it would have surprised me if anything else were the case. If you didn't get out you had two choices. If you were a guy, you got a job which you would work at for two or three years until you were injured enough to qualify for disability. If you were a girl, you would do the same until some guy knocked you up. Then it was just a matter of pushing out enough pups to qualify for government assistance, since one got a check for every kid. Such is life in the mountains.

"Jackpot!" Dustin said in a melodic tone. His excitement carried over to me instantaneously. My ears perked and my muzzle pointed into his box. He pulled a camera out of the darkness, a nice classic Minolta. Another one followed, this time a Cannon. A third made it to the light, a bulky Kodak Polaroid. My brother's paws kept digging through the box, but the box only produced a few boxes of film, some expired developing supplies and a shoe box of negatives. "I think that's it," he said, putting down the three cameras in front of us.

"Two of those are really nice," I said, picking one up and testing to see if it worked. It did. I heard a snap and the mechanical zip as it ratcheted the spool.

"We could make a lot of money off of these," Dustin said, excited.

"Don't you want to keep 'em, I mean they are really good ones. See," I said, holding out the Cannon. "This one even has a Leica lens. These things can cost a couple hundred bucks."

"Which is exactly why we should sell them. They're the only things here that are worth something."

I looked disappointed and put the cameras down. "I guess," I said, and kept unpacking some of the more worthless things from the box.

"Tell you what," Dustin said. "You can keep one of them."

"You sure?" I asked.

"Sure. If they're worth what we think, two of the three might get us enough for the parts I need and some of the service."

My first choice would have been the Cannon, but it was the most valuable of the three. The Minolta was nice too, but when I considered the big picture, I was perhaps choosing between a car and a camera and I knew which one I needed most. "This one," I said, lifting up the Polaroid.

"You sure?"

"Yea," I said, regretting my choice, or at least the common sense I applied to make it. "It's not like I'm a photographer. Barely ever picked up a camera. Doubt I can make one of the nicer ones sing and dance. This one is..." I contemplated the right word, and speaking through clenched fangs, "user friendly."

"It's yours," he said and started packing everything back into the boxes. "Wait. Here. You're gonna need these." He handed me a few unopened packs of Polaroid film which happened to be along with the cameras.

"Thanks," I said, setting my spoils aside.

"Help me take these down," he continued and handed me a big and heavy box.

We took everything down to the driveway where it joined all the things we somewhat suffered to part with. Things went into three piles; sell, keep, and burn. Sadly at the end of the day the burn pile became the largest. Very little was salvageable, aside from the tools, cameras, and some of the better looking collections of arts and crafts equipment. Our keep pile was deliberately small. We had conversations about every piece and talked each other into only keeping a few things. In the end we were satisfied with what we had to sell. It still filled a few boxes and we figured that on a good day, Sam, our pawn-shop guy, would give us a couple of hundred bucks for the lot.

Since it was a weekend we celebrated with a late night mass-burning. As day turned to dusk we built up everything flammable on or near our fire pit. Dustin stole two beers out of the fridge, the maximum amount we could have gotten away with taking unnoticed. I reluctantly accepted and started sipping the vile substance as my brother stoked the flames on the first batch of our mother's stuff. We watched the flames rise, growing as tall as our height, engulfing the moth eaten clothes, magazines, and old frames. Other things found their way onto the fire too, paints, plastic containers, things that any other state would have outlawed burning.

I made my brother stop as he picked up a binder of something he clearly intended to toss onto the flames. "What's that?" I asked.

He opened it and said, "Oh, it's a photo album. Almost burnt this."

"What's in it?"

"Us, maybe?" He took out a flashlight and shone it on the pages. I crowded near him to look for myself.

"That's not us," I said. "I think that's Nate." We saw various photographs of a pup, single and solitary. Some of him in a crib, some on the lawn on which we stood. He looked happy, beaming a careless smile at the lense in nearly every photograph.

"That's gotta be Nate," Dustin confirmed. Other's showed that same puppy around Christmas, in front of a birthday cake, and in the arms of various people including our father, our grandmother and grandfather, and a young female rough collie who looked strikingly similar to me. "That's mom," Dustin pointed out.

I nodded. An uneasy feeling came over me upon seeing this collie, being just a few years older than me.

The pup grew older from page to page, going from crawling and absently staring at the camera to engaged, walking, and smiling. Then another puppy joined him, which must have been Daniel, our second eldest. The pictures spread to tandem lifespans. Nate was riding a tricycle and subsequently getting ready for kindergarten while Danny went through the same ordeals of childhood. Halfway through the album our third eldest Brandon joined them. It was easy to tell him apart from the others, he'd apparently been chubby since birth. Only by the time Brandon joined them, the two older puppies weren't looking as happy as before. Nate cried at his very own birthday party. All three looked solemn around Christmas. Images of mom and dad stopped, aside from a candid shot of them both in a background bickering. The children became the subject toward the end, the photographs more and more constructed, obviously staged, smiles and laughter as if bribed. The last pages showed all three of our older brothers all in a row. All of them seemed unruly, grabbing the fur of another, and squirming all over.

"Where are we?" Dustin said, turning to the last page to where the photos stopped and only blank slots remained.

"I don't know," I said, flipping back, then forward. Only at the tail end of the book, on the last page before the back cover did we find a picture of us, at least that's what we thought it was. "I think that's us," I continued, pointing at that picture, a black and gray swirl of unrecognizable shapes.

"Is that an ultrasound?" Dustin asked.

"I think so."

"Is that really us?"

"I can't read it, but I think so," I said, pausing. "It's hard to tell if it's one or two."

"It's definitely two, look, two craniaii or whatever they're called."

"There are no double "I" plural endings in English, but that's beside the point. I think you're right. Here and here. It's gotta be us."

"Holy fuck, you're not even born yet and you're already butt ugly."

"That's you, you idiot."

"Whatever you say sis, I'd recognize your skull anywhere."

"Good lord," I said, "to think I ever shared a womb with you, you pervert. No wonder we fight so much."

"Can we burn these now? Looking at this kinda creeping me out."

"No!" I said. "These are worth holding on to. I'm sure our brothers would want to see these."

"Can we at least burn that last one?"

"No. It's part of the album."

"I don't want you showing naked photographs of us together to other people," he said, "people might think we're sick in the head."

I chuckled. "Oh lord, if only they knew."

"Hey, that's innocent."

I rolled my eyes, shut the album and held it against my chest. It wasn't so much an archive of my life, but somehow it answered some questions and confirmed certain assumptions. Perhaps it was a catalogue of all the dominoes that fell before I was born, a trail of toppled stones that ended where I stood. "Do you think she left because of us?" I asked Dustin.

He grew serious. His voice taking on the mature, calm, and collected tone I rarely got to hear, but when I heard it, it moved me. "No," he said. "She would have left anyway. If four was too much for her, five would have been too many. Hell, she couldn't even handle three. Either she was not meant to be a mother, or she wasn't meant to be a mother in Shithole, West Virginia. Don't blame yourself, sis."

"I'm not," I said, looking at the flames. I jerked as I felt his paw upon my shoulder and trembled as a shiver ran down my spine. He held it there, squeezing with just enough pressure to feel comforting.

"We made it without her," he said, "no worries."

"We did," I agreed. "Almost."

My brother stepped beside me. His arm slid past the base of my neck and his paw came to rest on my shoulder. I felt his weight lean upon me and his warmth. I wanted to hug him, but I didn't. I didn't have the courage to give it to him. I felt a shiver pass through me, despite the fire's radiance. The touch meant a lot. It was the first time I'd been touched in a long time. It sent my memory racing, trying to recollect the place and time I last felt someone so close. I was disappointed and ashamed knowing it had been so long. I relished in the feeling of someone close to me, of a paw caressing my shoulder, even if it belonged to my brother and nothing would never, should never, come of it. Nonetheless the tenderness spoke volumes. We watched the flames burn together until we'd used up all our fuel and our fire burnt down to embers.

***

I waited for him on the ATV outside "Sam's Gun and Pawn." I hated that place. I hated the "Don't Tread on Me" flags, the racks of guns, and knowing that half the crap in there was parted with to pay a debt or to finance an addiction. Everything about that place seemed sketchy. I sent my brother inside to negotiate. He was better at it anyway. I waited in the sunshine, listening to the whine of cicada, hoping that he would return with a nice fat stack of bills. He was selling off a good bundle of my childhood, my very own history. He'd better come back with top dollar. It took him about a half hour, but he eventually came out. He didn't look that happy. He waved a few bills at me, denoting some success, but I could see from a distance that they were few. He slowly walked toward me, his foot-paws crunching gravel with each step.

"One-hundred and thirty-six dollars," he said, "and fifty-six cents."

"That's it?" I asked.

"That's it."

"For all of it?"

"Yea."

"Even the cameras?"

"He gave me thirty for the Minolta, thirty-five for the Cannon. He says they're actually pretty common cameras. You got forty for the .22. He has a lot of those already, but I talked him into buying it. The rest? Well..." he trailed off.

"...is junk," I completed for him.

He nodded.

"Fuck," I said.

"I did the best I could."

I considered chewing him out, but we'd worked so hard to get passed the childish anger and rivalry. I decided to stay the adult. "I know," I said. "Thanks. It's better than nothing."

"Not enough. Even with yours. Even with the money Nate and Danny sent us."

"We'll just have to keep saving then. Fuck. Wish I had more time so I could pick up a job. School's killing me as it is."

"Talked to Herb," he said.

"What'd he say?"

"Offered me part time. Assistant. Flexible hours around school."

"You're not gonna work here, are you?" I asked, my ears perking more out of concern for my brother than out of any promising portent in my brother's words.

"Considering it," he said.

"Don't get stuck here. This place is awful."

"I'll learn the basics here. It'll give me a leg up when I'm looking for real jobs. Experience is experience."

I stared at him.

"I mean if that whole college thing don't pan through."

"Well," I said, "if you think it's best. Just don't get behind on your studies. We've worked really hard to get you where you are."

"I promise I won't let that slide. It'd be on Fridays and Saturdays when they're busy, then maybe a little more during hunting season."

I stood up, stepped over, and hugged him, a sisterly hug as he deserved, the one I'd been too cowardly to give him the night before. He didn't know what to do at first, as if not expecting it, but then his arms tepidly wrapped around me and returned the favor. I enjoyed that feeling, the feeling of having someone, anyone, close. That closeness, innocent as it needed to be, was something I could get used to.

***

That same afternoon my brother and I had moved to my bedroom. Dustin was sprawled out on my bed. He'd just finished the last of his algebra problems and gotten engrossed in the next chapter of Ivanhoe for his comp lit class. I sat at my desk doing some of my own homework. I felt eager to finish should Dustin ask me to go jogging again. I'd gotten better at it, jogging, not the other implied little practice that went along with it. I wasn't getting winded as quickly and I could make it longer and longer stretches without calling for a break. My progress amazed me. I seemed to make it further and with less effort every time we went out. My brother was doing better himself. He brought home A's and B's on a regular basis. Even his latest algebra test came back as a respectable B-. He might actually make a GPA of 3.0 or higher this semester.

"This isn't so bad," he said, breaking the quiet.

"What?"

"Ivanhoe. It's basically Robin Hood."

"I know. Sir Walter Scott is credited for influencing contemporary depictions of the Robin Hood myth. He's a very important author that got a lot of people interested in their own history and in fact helped give rise to the discipline of history itself. I'm glad you're actually enjoying it."

"It's nice and violent too," he said.

"That too," I said, somewhat disappointed.

"Almost done," he said.

I hummed in affirmation.

"Wanna go for a jog after this?"

I knew it was coming, but hearing the suggestion still made me fidget. I'd been trying not to think about it, but now that it was out in the open the power of suggestion could now exploit my distractibility. "Maybe," I said, "if your work's done right." For Dustin "maybe" always meant "yes, right away sir."

He handed me his Algebra while he kept reading Scott. Of course he'd rushed the job. I didn't cut him any slack. I just sat him down at my desk and stood over his shoulder pointing out why certain answers in his Algebra homework were wrong, and which ones were too sloppy to even read. I made him redo the fuck-ups when he finished reading. Only after he was done and I approved did I let him stand up.

"Gotta change first," I said, slamming closed my own books. I wasn't totally finished but I'd made enough progress to feel okay about playing hooky from my responsibilities.

"Sure," Dustin said, getting up and wandering a circle around my room. He picked up random things and fiddled with them in a way that always irritated me.

"Means I'll need some space," I said, audibly irked.

He hummed and meandered into the far corner of my room and turned his back on me. He continued his practice of playing with my room's decorations, well aware that it made the fur on my back stand on end. I knew Dustin well enough to understand that this was the most privacy I'd get. I turned my back to my brother and unbuckled my cargo shorts and tugged them down my legs, turning a muzzle over my shoulder to make sure he wasn't peaking. Acting quickly I located some recently washed track shorts and slipped those on as fast as possible. I decided to keep my t-shirt on instead of changing into something lighter since my brother didn't need to see me in my sports bra. As if he knew I was done he turned around and continued to go through stuff closer to my bed.

Just as I reached into a drawer and picked out two fresh foot-paw wraps, them being better to run with than either shoes or bare pads, Dustin picked up the camera I'd rescued from mom's boxes. "Have you taken any pictures yet?" My brother asked, inspecting the apparatus. It was an older model with two-tone plastic housing that unfolded as necessary to produce flashes and eject photographs. He lifted the camera up, looked at me through it and took a candid photograph of me sitting on the edge of my bed wrapping the cloth strap around my ankle. I looked up at him just in time to get blinded by the flash. The camera whirred and spit out a white framed instant photograph. "Oh, you still had it loaded," he said, plucking out the developing picture and flipping it in the air.

"No shit," I said, "I haven't taken any. I've only got a few boxes of film. Do they even make that stuff anymore?"

"No clue," he said, closing the camera and gingerly putting it back my shelf, but keeping the photograph.

I finished wrapping both my paws by the time the Polaroid started to develop. "Let me see," I said, snatching it from his paws. We both saw an image of me appear from out of the gray nebula. I squinted as if glaring furtively at the cameraman. My body washed in too bright of light, I was sitting in an awkward position, my paws at work on half-bound left foot.

"That it?" I asked, as it the image seemed to get no clearer. The edges were blurry and the picture itself looked as if it had had been taken of someone else, someone who had my spitting image in the early 70's.

"Eww, you look like mom," he said, grabbing the image from me and taking a closer look. "Needs more bell-bottoms and flower print."

"Don't say that," I said, trying to snatch the image from him again, but he kept it held to his chest. "Burn it," I commanded.

"I'm holding onto this. It's incriminating evidence against you."

"For what? You wouldn't dare show that around."

"What if I would?"

I glared at him all fire and brimstone.

"Relax, sis. I'm not gonna show this to anyone, but I am keeping it."

"Fine," I said, "but let me take one of you to even things out."

"I'll take one myself," he said and took the camera again, "I need to get changed anyway."

He left the room before I could object and returned a few minutes later dressed and with his foot-paws and ankles wrapped in the same way he taught me to do. He handed me another Polaroid with its window still a milky gray, grinning deviously and trying to hold back laughter. "Trust me," he said, "you won't have to worry about me incriminating you as long as you have that."

I looked at the image just as the first clues of what it might be appeared. I saw a torso, my brother apparently, his enviable flat belly and the stripes of his brown fur on his flanks. Then his paw somewhere in his lap, and there, yea, he was holding his sheath. "Oh god, you didn't," I said, looking up at him with an exasperated expression. "That's your junk!" It was a picture of my brother tugging down his sheath enough to expose his cock-tip to the camera.

He broke into laughter and paced around my room, taking a moment to calm down. "You're always looking at it," he said, finding some composure. "You know what they say. Take a picture, it lasts longer."

While he broke into another fit of laughter, I took the occasion and flicked the picture into my waste basket, not all too amused by his little prank.

"Hey," he said, "you might want that."

"Come on. That was gross. What if someone finds that? What will they think?"

"Didn't mean it in a bad way. And who's gonna find it?"

"Dad, for one."

"Dad never comes in here."

"Still." I said, feeling a blush beneath my fur.

"Just trying to do you a favor. Always complaining about your man problems and all. Now come on. Let's get going."

I didn't have time to counter. He was already out the door.

***

"This one's a little hardcore," he said, "be warned." He laid down a magazine with a two page spread of four sequential images. In the largest and most prominent a wolf and wolfess looked hard at work ensuring the future of their species. The male, a fellow of admittedly handsome stock, appeared to have recently forced his knot inside the female. The perspective allowed one to see the wolf's sheath pressed firmly against her sex, leaving no room for doubt that he was indeed balls deep. His mate didn't seem to mind. She was obviously in a fit more of passion than of pain. Sometimes it's hard to tell, but the claws-out hold she had on him seemed to say 'harder'. The fourth and final image in the series must have taken place a half hour or so later. It was a close up of said wolfess' gaping pussy oozing a trickle of her lupine companion's genetic product.

"Eww," I said. "Gross."

Dustin chuckled and said, "One of my favs."

"You like that?"

"Shit yea. It's hard to find cumshots like this. Don't worry. She's probably on the pill though so she's safe."

"Makes me feel sore just looking at her, poor thing." I had followed my brother up the hill despite the fact that he'd just shown me a picture of his sheath. Though I questioned the motivation for him to do so, it was true that if I really wanted to see him fully hard all I had to do was wait for one of our jogs and look to the left. Sure enough a quick glance caught him hard as ever and almost fully knotted, a far cry from the flaccid pink point depicted on Polaroid. I insisted on keeping myself concealed. Sure it was beyond apparent that my paw was down the front of my loosened pants and it wouldn't have taken much imagination to visualize my hood pinched between my fingers as they swept over my pearl, but I took comfort in knowing that my intimate fur wasn't on display like all the men and women in those magazines. I was still too shy for that.

"What do you like, then?" Dustin asked, both his paws in his lap. One made a ring just beneath his knot, the other rubbed pre around his tip.

"You know, the usual."

"Such as?"

I sighed. "I don't need, like, pictures of this." I pointed at the sperm stream coming out of the wolf on the page next to me. "Suggestive is good. Less is more."

"Like that Bull Terrier or those Salukis?"

"Exactly."

"Are you sure you're not just into women?"

"No. I like guys too. Like this one." I pulled forth one of my own magazines and opened it to a page I personally dog-eared, flipping it awkwardly open with the one paw I had free. "See," I said, pointing to a Dalmatian. He was still in underwear but had a fairly nice bulge. His thumb slipped under the elastic and tugged it down an inch or two, showing just a few pubic tufts. "Not many dudes in these magazines though."

"You know, you should take some pictures of yourself."

"Naked?" I asked, almost in disgust. However, I felt a tickle within me I hadn't gotten from fingering, as if that suggestion had crossed a wire somewhere within me and sent a spark against common sense.

"Why not? Huge confidence booster. We could trade a few."

"Fuck no. Dude. I'm your sister!"

"We've already seen each other naked."

"Yea, when we were fucking cubs."

"You can see me right now," he moved his paws away and sure enough got a glimpse of his fully hard canine cock. He tugged his boxers and pants down from his knees to his ankles and raised his paws.

I turned away, "I'm not looking."

"You've seen it. So what? If you're gonna take some pictures take 'em for yourself. Do it as a confidence builder. I think part of your guy problems goes back to you constantly underselling yourself. Maybe you'll see how gorgeous you are in them. And if you want to share 'em with me, then you'll see the world ain't gonna end. I'll just tell ya what I already know."

If I wasn't blushing before my ears and nose would have been red as a beet. It had been years since anyone had called me beautiful. I never even thought of myself as someone who could be called beautiful. It wasn't my priority, but hearing it made me feel a little pulse of euphoria, even if it came from my brother. "I still can't show them to you, even if I do take some. It's wrong. You shouldn't see me like that and I, well, shouldn't see you like that," I said nodding in the direction of his arousal.

"Then why do you keep looking at it?" Dustin said, referring to his hard on.

"Am not!"

"Ya ya are. You're doing it now."

"I'm not fucking looking at your junk!"

"How many times have I had to remind you to look away? If you're curious, you're curious. You've never seen cock before. I understand that much, but it's kind of a distraction."

"Then why do you want pictures of me?" I asked, trying my best to evade a question I really didn't want to answer.

"I want you to take pictures. Should you so chose to show them to me, I'm happy to offer my services as an objective source of constructive feedback," Dustin said, cleverly dodging.

"You're just a pervert." I said.

"As you often like to remind me," he said, proving my point by continuing to jerk himself.

Things went silent after that, silent save for the rather distracting short-winded gasps and the fapping collisions of paw on knot coming immediately to the left of me. I'd given up on feeling the immorality in being privy to the spectacle Dustin put on. I squeezed my paw between my thighs in an effort to hold onto a pleasing little ember, but it too burnt out too soon. Perhaps there were just too many diversions to concentrate. I looked at my brother. He definitely seemed close. In desperation I sent a fingertip into the fevered heat of my vagina in pursuit of that spark and circled through the wetness barely within my body. My paw-pads brushed my smooth and sensitive interior to my own delight. I explored my sex deeper than I'd ever felt before and studied the textures of that virginal passage. That too led to a few wonderful sparks and a curious twitch or two, but nothing beyond that. I tried to go faster and even further, but to no avail. My ears and facial features skewed in shame and desperation while I stared at where my paw worked within my stretched boxers.

Dustin got off before me as usual. A few minutes after our conversation ended he was panting and spurting on himself in the way I'd observed too many times to count. I always felt happy for him when he got off, thinking a vicarious "good for you" as I watched him attain what I'd yet to achieve. I continued to work for mine while my brother lay back and relaxed in that enviable state of post-orgasmic afterglow. My eyes occasionally darted toward his lap and beheld his dripping dongle hanging out blatantly exposed and the puddle of canine spunk slowly sinking into his belly and pubic fur. If I breathed deep I could take in the scent of collie semen.

After a few more tries I found myself growing hopeless. Teasing felt good. I certainly enjoyed it, but the more my fingers slid through my wet folds and played with my hood, the more I kept craving something more, the next step and elevation. Either the sensations would stop entirely, or I'd feel what I mistook for bladder pressure coming back. I'd lay off by the time I felt like I needed to bolt to the next tree. It began to feel like me coming close to the sound barrier in a perfectly made plane, but never breaking through it. Once again, when my paws grew tired and masturbating lost its novelty I faked another orgasm, a pathetic one that had my brother raising an eyebrow with concern as if I'd just broken a leg.

I finished my act replete with my interpretation of orgasmic gyrations and more or less convincing panting. When I dialed it back and regained my composure I noticed Dustin looking at me. I glanced over. He still held his spermy canine cock. He gave his spent manhood a stroke, by no means coincidental. My fingers still rested on my hooded pearl. I let my fingers twitch across the sensitive bump. The ensuing sensation startled me, being far more effective than the desperate self-torment of a moment earlier. My gaze darted off into the forest then slowly crept back to the phallus in my siblings grasp as if by some gradual magnetic pull. I saw him give his pink-red length a few more strokes with no obvious intention to get off again. There it was; my brother's hard-on, knot and all. My fingers performed another quasi-voluntary flick and again that frustratingly effective electric shock clenched some internal musculature. My fingers hesitated over my pussy as I contemplated giving myself some more mysterious revs to see if I couldn't indeed get this engine started.

I made the mistake of looking up, of following my brother's torso up to his chest. I noticed his muzzle pointing at me. His eyes were clearly focused on the spot my wrist disappeared beneath my underpants, looking precisely at my fly for any motion beneath. We looked at each other, both of us knew what we were guilty of. We couldn't fault each other for it. It showed on our expressions. The timidity, the shame, and the ambivalence, Dustin owned it. I decided to own it too.

"I think we need to set up some ground rules if we're gonna keep doing this," I said, slowly removing my paw from my boxers. I felt beyond turned on, beyond ready, beyond influenced by the scents of cunt and cum to the degree it scared me. I felt all the nerves in my body curse me as I left my sex to cool.

"If you need to scrub the no peeking rule, I'm cool with that. If you need the visuals, you need the visuals. I understand," Dustin said.

"That's not what I meant," I said.

"Then what?"

I hadn't thought that far ahead. "We shouldn't even be doing this."

"Don't have to."

"I want to. If we do, there need to be limits."

"Agreed," Dustin said.

"No touching," I said. "Ever."

"I promise."

"No telling anyone else about what's happening up here, to anyone, ever, forever."

"Dude, I though this is what we already agreed."

"I know. I'm just restating it."

"So it's okay to look now?"

"Fuck no," I said.

"But it's happening."

"I guess so. I guess it's hard to enforce. Now that you're talking about wanting pictures. Fuck."

"It's all up to you. Any other rules?"

"If you're gonna look, be kind okay. I'm not perfect," I said. "I don't know what's worse, the fact that someone is seeing me like this, or that that person is you."

"I think you know the answer," Dustin said, cleaning himself of his previous emissions. He got up before I could retort and rattled his pants back up his legs.

I did the same, more self conscious than ever. "No touching," I repeated. "Or else we're done doing stuff up here."

"Fine, fine, fine," my brother said, shaking the leaves out of his shirt. "Thought this was all obvious."

"I know how you are with rules," I said, quickly disguising my residual arousal and tugging my jeans up in place.

"Hey, how often have you been bending them since we started doing this? I only call you out on it a third of the time. Fuck, I can only hope you actually get off one of these days. I've just been assuming you're a little too pent up and acting weird because of it. Man, if I couldn't cum, I'd probably indiscriminately hump every living thing too."

"I just got off," I shouted out loud enough to startle a flock of birds and stumbled to my feet.

Dustin looked at me. I could tell he had a wise crack on the tip of his tongue, but he wisely swallowed it. He couldn't help but shake his head, which was bad enough. A water bottle flew just over his ear-tips as my response. Damn that asshole.

***

I called first shower as soon as we walked through the door. Every step on the way home made me feel the fact that I was still aroused. This became my lot, a near persistent state of being turned on. It haunted me in dreams, distracted me in school, and made me go through my underwear supply faster than I could keep up. I walked into the bathroom, shut and locked the door, turned on the water and sat on the pot to catch my breath. I put my paws over my face and took in my own intimate scents lingering on them. This was starting to become too much.

I undid my foot-paw wraps, took off my clothes, but before I stepped into the steam heat I looked into the partially fogged up mirror. I saw myself naked, cupped my breasts, pinched the thin little layer of fat around my waist, and leaned in for a closer look. Was I beautiful? Was it just Dustin's lack of vocabulary mislabeling me? The word beautiful didn't resonate with me. Beautiful was never really what I went for. The idea that I could and should be attractive wasn't introduced to me until puberty, and I only participated in that ideology enough to fit in. Beautiful was girly, and girly wasn't exactly what I wanted to be. What was beautiful then?

I took my shower and washed the pervasive scents off of me. When I came out and dried myself off I no longer felt arousal, just clean. I collected my musky clothes, clutched them under my arm, and darted across the hall toward my room wrapped in a towel. I kept thinking about my brother's words as I dried off and brushed myself fluffy again. I remembered my brother's photograph and reluctantly rescued it from the waste basket. It was just a picture of his sheath and dark-pink point of his cock. It honestly didn't do anything for me. It was childish more than anything, but I decided to keep it, stuffing it with other important mementos in a little tin lock-box I kept in my nightstand.

I looked at my camera again and then at myself. I stood up, dropped my towel, and stepped across the room in the bare to pick it up. It felt risky being in my room naked for too long. My brother or father could come in any moment. I would have to be quick. I fiddled with the setting on the apparatus and found a timer function. I propped it on a book near my shelf and lay on the bed in one of the pin-up poses I learned, one I liked, one that didn't show slit or breasts.

The camera clicked and spat out a white framed photograph. I set the camera again and took another. This one was a face up pose that showed off my breasts. I took a third of myself relaxed and sprawled out on my bed in a pose I invented, one that would definitely include some pubic tufts. A fourth and fifth followed with poses I'd deemed most natural, most un-rehearsed, as if someone did indeed walk in on me and saw me as they shouldn't. I quickly got dressed in my PJs after the last one and put all five on my desk, and waited for them to finish developing. One after the other my naked body appeared out of the gray. They weren't as detailed as I thought they would be, but they came out well enough, all with that retro haze as if some savvy photographer used the Vaseline trick on the lens. They may not have been porn quality, but I was proud of them. They did indeed give me a bit of a confidence boost, but could I show them to my brother? Was that even right?

***

I paced restlessly through my room. My tail swished behind me as if possessed. I'd promised myself I'd sleep on it. Sleep on it I did; fucking twice. I still thought it was a bad Idea. I sat down on my bed beside my nightstand and opened the drawer. There they were. The stack of Polaroid cards depicting my naked body. I took them into my paws and shuffled through them one last time. They weren't pornographic, at least by my brother's standards, though one did show a bit of blurry slit and tail-hole. I sifted through the small stack twice and narrowed my options down to two choices; burn 'em, or give 'em to Dustin.

We'd just come back from another run, another disappointing one for me at least. That little itch of dissatisfaction still resided in my lower belly. I knew making a decision informed by that sick residual craving could be fatal. Nonetheless I let that urge guide me to my desk where I kept my envelopes and I permitted it to slip in those few photographs. A quick dash of my canine tongue sealed the wordless letter. My wrapped foot-paws carried me from my room and down the hall, to the sound of a June Carter & Johnny Cash duet playing on Dustin's radio. As I took those final steps down the hall I fiercely debated giving them to my brother. I'd contemplated the morality of it and knew it conflicted with certain innate understandings of right and wrong. I knew it would be immoral for him to see them, as grainy as they were. No brother should ever come across photos of his sister like the ones I made. Despite better knowledge I seriously toyed with the idea, not to tease him, but as an act of confession. The photographs show a person, the person I was at their most bare, and their most vulnerable. I wanted to trust him with them, no more, no less.

I knocked on his door. The music turned down and seconds later Dustin faced me just a few feet away.

"Hey," I said without having planned any further dialogue.

"Hey Alex," he said, looking at me more or less perplexed, given the fact we'd done his homework and we had no further business with each other.

I produced the envelope and its taboo contents. "Here," I said with a waiver in my voice and a stern as death expression. "These are for you." I handed him the envelope. "But whatever you do promise me you'll show no one else any of these. Hide them when you get the chance. And don't! Please don't open them while I'm around! Do it when you're alone. Promise me."

"I promise," he said, taking the envelope from me. I watched with concern as he carelessly tossed the envelope onto his bed. I vehemently considering asking for them back, but what was done was done. "What is it?" he continued.

"You'll see when you're alone. Promise me one more time."

"I promise, I promise," again letting his accent become noticeable.

"Alright then, please, keep those to yourself," I said, and turned back down the hall.

"That's it?" Dustin asked.

"Yea," I said, blushing too much to turn around and risk getting seen so embarrassed.

What I had done sank in the heaviest as soon as I sat down on my bed. I was willing to surmise that my brother already had the photographs in his paws. It may or may not have surprised him to find five polaroids of his sister in the nude. It couldn't have taken him more than a second to determine they were of me. He probably flipped through one after the other until he made it through the small stack and then shuffled again from the beginning, choosing his favorites the third appraisal. I could almost see a smirk of cunning accomplishment grow across his muzzle. I believed that at that very moment my brother knew what I looked like naked. I knew what he looked like and now he'd seen me. That thought stayed with me throughout the day, comprising a refreshing sense of scandalous exhilaration. I walked through the house, down the halls of my very own home, past photographs of him and I in various phases of childhood and adolescence, past Brandon and my father. None of them knew what my brother knew about me, and that felt eerily satisfying.