Arrested Development fanfic
Title: What Happens in the Summertime (I think we've established that I fail at titles and only use them at all to conform to fanfic-society as I know it.)
Author: Dizzy
Pairing: Michael/Lindsay
Rating: R refrains from making painful pirate joke out of pure nerves
Word count: 3355
Warnings: Um. Incest? Read the fic and decide for yourself.
Author's Note: Post-season three. Written for the bluthcest ficathon. First Arrested Development fic. Feedback- positive AND constructive- greatly appreciated.
Prompt: No one seemed to notice that she often slept in Michael's button-ups. (I changed it to button-downs because that's always the word I've heard.)
Lindsay was on top, and Tobias just lay there.
Clad in an old button-down shirt of Michael’s, Lindsay looked down dispassionately at the man she was straddling. He had a vague smile on his face and his eyes were glancing off to the side. His hands rested loosely on her rotating hips and he appeared relaxed. Lindsay stifled her instinctive groan of disgust. This was sex with her husband.
Lindsay closed her eyes as she rolled her hips steadily into Tobias’s. Unbidden, images of Michael swarmed to the forefront of her mind. She inhaled deeply and his scent rose up from the material around her shoulders and crept into her nostrils. She pressed her palms against her ears to block out Tobias’s damn silence, and her own light pants seemed to echo in her skull; with sight cut off, sound thus restricted, and smell deliriously intoxicated, it suddenly could have been Michael there, Michael’s hands on her hips, Michael’s abdomen between her knees, Michael’s penis nestled inside her.
Tobias stirred underneath her, and she opened her eyes and removed her hands from her ears. “You know,” he said brightly, “with the scent that shirt is radiating, it almost seems like I’m making love to your brother!”
I wasn’t getting the impression that YOU were making love to anyone, Lindsay did not say. Instead, she closed her eyes again in frustration and let herself be carried off into the wash of sensations she’d been focused on before the interruption. Her head dropped back and her lips parted. Pressing her pelvis forward more insistently, she felt her muscles tensing and her breaths becoming more labored. Flashes of brown hair and grey eyes and strong arms flicked across her mind’s eye like a strobe light, and with a sharp thrust and a loud cry of “Michael,” she came, her eyes still firmly squeezed shut.
Gradually Lindsay’s heart rate slowed to normal and her body relaxed. Slowly she opened her eyes and shifted her gaze to the concrete, real human being on the bed. She felt like cringing but forced her face to remain passive. Tobias shook his head at her. “So, a little revenge for my sexual faux pas of bringing up your brother in bed, I daresay? Very funny, Lindsay, a fitting punishment indeed. Well played, well played.” He chuckled jovially. Lindsay’s impulse to cringe doubled and she pushed up and off of him onto her knees before swinging one leg over his body and getting off the bed, leaving him motionless and erect.
“Lindsay, that’s not very courteous,” Tobias called, unmoving. Lindsay did not turn around but stalked into the bathroom, hurling a tub of Vaseline at the bed and slamming the door behind her.
--
Barring Tobias’s comment that night, no one seemed to notice that she often slept in Michael’s button-downs.
--
With the majority of the Bluth males missing and the disappearance of the voice of reason the family had gotten used to defying, the share-selling frenzy had calmed somewhat. Lindsay, for reasons she couldn’t fully explain, had decided not to sell just yet; even less explicably, she had lost all drive to divorce Tobias as quickly as possible. It seemed that Michael’s presence had acted as a driving force in her life, whether she was acting against or in keeping with his wishes; now that he had vanished, Lindsay found herself gripped by a restless lethargy.
Her incident with Michael became something she would rather not think about. It caused her a faint uneasy embarrassment to remember it; not, as any informed observer might have expected, because of what had actually transpired in his bedroom (she had, they had gone to greater extremes before), but because she couldn’t shake a nagging sense (even though she knew of any number of motivations Michael had to leave) that she had scared him away. As unsettling were the implications of his having taken her advances seriously enough to necessitate his flight, as though he hadn’t trusted himself to react properly if he stuck around.
The plan had been crazy, bold, and absurd. It was obvious to her, now, that she really hadn’t thought it out. At all. Her mother had given her direct confirmation of Stan Sitwell’s words, she had driven around for several hours in a state of lightheadedness she chose to define as euphoria, and then she had arrived home and followed through on a sudden impulse to down a half bottle of vodka. Somewhere in there, it had seemed all of a sudden a brilliant idea to marry Michael. A short while later she’d been straddling him, clutching the front of his shirt in her fists and drawling that he’d always found her attractive, while he had looked startled and frantically pushed her away from his body.
--
When they were fourteen (seventeen), Michael and Lindsay had practiced their kissing technique on one another. It was awkward at first, then less so, as lips had eventually parted against each other, and they had told themselves they were getting excellent practice for the real thing.
Then had come the day, with her bedroom door locked and music blaring loudly, when they had decided, through cautious half-sentences and mumbles of “only if you want to”-type phrases, to practice the next step; namely, Michael would perfect his breast-touching skills and Lindsay, her being-touched skills. They had stepped together into a kiss (a familiar movement by then), she had guided his hand gently to its target, and it had all been going nicely until Lindsay had become aware of the hard press of something into her thigh the same time that Michael had become aware of the tightening of his jeans. They had broken apart as one, and Michael had looked startled, and within a week both had revealed to their parents that their dream for the remainder of the summer was to go to single-gender sleepaway camps.
Autumn had brought high school; it brought honors classes for Michael and parties for Lindsay. She had thrown herself into the pursuit of upperclassmen boyfriends; he had become transfixed by Sally Sitwell and had spent time making mental lists of all the ways she differed from his sister, starting with the precise distinction between their hair colors. Life had proceeded, and the post-junior high summer had never been referenced again.
--
Lindsay thought about the summer she’d turned fourteen (seventeen) as she reflected on her encounter with Michael; she could swear the startled expression in his eyes that night was identical to the one worn by a fourteen year old boy who had just realized fully the fact that he was feeling up his sister.
--
Michael was all for staying the summer in Cabo (they had to return for George Michael’s junior year of high school, naturally) and seeing who had noticed their absence by the time they returned two months later.
George Senior was enjoying his first real taste of freedom in three years and expressed no desire to return to the old O.C. (“Don’t call it that,” Michael told him, and never asked his father’s opinion on the matter again.)
George Michael managed to slip into town, where he was unable to locate the post office; strangely, he did discover a telegram office and sent a message to Maeby:
MICHAEL GEORGEMICHAEL POPPOP FINE. IN CABO FOR SUMMER. MISS YOU. GEORGEMICHAEL.
--
Lindsay found George Michael’s telegram, which Maeby had not bothered to inform her of, the week before she finally successfully fucked her husband (“successfully” here being defined as “intercourse took place”). She tore it in half, threw out the pieces, and moved Michael’s shirts to her closet. Cabo, for Christ’s sake.
--
Two days after Lindsay found the telegram, the following exchange took place:
“Tobias, why are you wearing my nightgown?”
“It’s remarkably soft and satiny. I haven’t slept this well in goodness knows how long! Drat, who keeps drinking my soy milk?”
Lindsay moved her nightgowns to Tobias’s closet and decided to put Michael’s shirts to some good use.
--
In all honesty, Lindsay was mildly uneasy about the way she’d lost control that night with Tobias (after a dozen times thinking through it, she still had to catch herself as, each time, she nearly labeled it ‘that night with Michael’) and, more specifically, the manner in which said control had been lost.
It wasn’t that Michael was her brother- she was adopted, she reminded herself, and it wasn’t her fault the shirts smelled like him, anyway- and it certainly wasn’t that she was married to someone else. No, what unnerved Lindsay was the intensity of emotion she had experienced as her brother rose unbidden before her mind’s eye while she spurred herself forward to sexual climax.
When Michael had run off she’d felt foolish and vulnerable about having proposed to him. And she wasn’t going to kid herself that it was anything other than a pang of longing for him that made her adopt his shirts after learning that he would be absent another eight weeks. And yet it was only after that one night that all had seemed to come together: she missed him, and with a heavy yearning she couldn’t quite define.
It was Michael. She had always needed him. They all had; the thing was, he had needed her right back.
--
In mid-July, Lindsay turned forty.
--
In August, Lindsay and Tobias got officially divorced.
For the record, it wasn’t because Lindsay wanted to make sure she was completely unattached when Michael came home.
--
Michael came back on the first day of September.
Lindsay heard the door slam from the kitchen and she knew, she knew it was him.
He went upstairs. She heard the creaking and ran around the corner in time to see his back and the bag dragging from his left hand as he rounded the corner, and then she followed him. He went straight to his room and opened his closet, dropping the bag inside. Then, instead of closing the door, he stood there, looking.
“Lindsay, why are all my shirts missing?”
She jumped. Looking around, she caught sight of his face in the mirror on the inside of the closet door. He still didn’t turn around, and she almost gasped aloud as she met his gaze unexpectedly. She stared at the reflection of his eyes and stood stock still.
“Lindsay?”
“I missed you.” She blinked. Of all the things she could have said to him after two months.
He finally turned, and this time she did gasp as she looked directly into his real eyes. Before she had time to talk herself out of it she half ran, half vaulted across the short distance between them and grasped his shirt in her hands, just as she’d done the night before he left.
She kissed him.
It took three seconds for Michael’s brain to process what was happening and two more for him to gain enough muscle control to push her away.
“Lindsay!”
“I’m adopted!” she said quickly, loudly. After two months of repeating it in her head, it was a relief for it to finally come out of her mouth for the first time since Michael had left her. “We’re not really siblings.”
“Yes we are, Lindsay, we’re brother and sister; I’m not going to make dumb excuses for the fact that I’m attracted to you.”
There it was again, that ‘you’re my sister no matter what,’ just like on the boat, and god, of course, it hadn’t been a sentimental affirmation of brotherly love; it was a mantra designed to convince. And who the hell did he think he was convincing, anyway?
“Dumb excuses- like the fact that we’re not related?” Lindsay let her frustration propel her even as a part of her brain registered that Michael had just told her he was attracted to her. “It’s not an excuse, Michael, it’s a fucking fact!”
“Dammit, Lindsay-”
“MICHAEL!” she screamed, cutting him off. She turned on her heel, blonde curls flying over her shoulder, and strode across the hall to her room. Michael ran after her. She wrenched open her closet door. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He wasn’t supposed to yell at her, not after he left. She grabbed a handful of shirts and ripped them from their hangers. Whirling around, she flung them at Michael.
“Here are your goddamn shirts! I took them because I missed you, okay, because you fucking took off for Cabo and didn’t say a word, I had to find a telegram from your son to my daughter to know where you were and that you were okay! I slept in your fucking shirts and they smelled like you and then I called your name and I got a divorce and you were in fucking Cabo. Do you have any idea of the mental turmoil you put me through?”
“Mental- Lindsay, I’ve been in Mexico for two months!”
“EXACTLY!” she screamed, and out of pure anger she kissed him again, and this time he kissed back, nails digging into her scalp, hips pushing her backward until her back slammed into the closet door with a crack, and then they were fourteen again: her hand grabbed his and yanked upward and plastered his palm to her breast.
Lindsay’s heart was pounding Michael, Michael, Michael as she kissed him with ferocious determination. It was like a direct jump from fourteen to now, picking up where they’d left off, pressing play on a tape that had been paused for twenty-three years, just waiting for the push of a single button to start again. Only it was as though someone had also turned the volume all the way up and hit fast forward; at fourteen they had been cautious, exploratory; now they moved in tandem with a desperation that overwhelmed both of them.
Michael’s fingers wrapped around her wrists and the pressure of his body against hers let up; now he was pulling her in the opposite direction, away from the closet, towards the bed. He fell backwards onto it with a thump. Lindsay, still tethered by his hands, landed on top of him, breathless. She’d barely had time to adjust before Michael had rolled her underneath him with a dexterity she found impressive.
Pinned down by Michael’s weight, Lindsay found herself marveling at how damn good it felt to be physical with a man who was actually engaged in the activity. And, she realized, Michael knew this; he knew she’d been missing that feeling and now he was giving it to her. Lindsay felt a glowing warmth spread through her at how wonderfully, thoughtfully, chivalrously Michael Michael was, always, even when trapped in the dangerous intensity that characterized their current situation.
All at once everything slowed down: the urgency left their bodies and instead their actions took on a slow, heavy quality. Each small movement rang with magnified importance; his finger dragging down her side, her long blink, the accidental bump of their noses; her hands under his shirt resting on his back, his left hand massaging her neck and his right stroking her thigh through a thin layer of cotton; her deep, highly audible breaths, his occasional growls of effort or appreciation. The singing of a zipper and the pop of snap-buttons, the whisper of material sliding over skin and the snap of elastic hummed through the quiet.
Lindsay had a coherent thought.
“Where’s George Michael?” she murmured against Michael’s lips.
“He went straight to the banana stand.”
(George Michael had gone straight to Tantamount Studios to look for Maeby.)
“Good.” Lindsay went back to work removing Michael’s shirt, tracing ever inch of skin lightly with her fingernails along the way, taking her time as he struggled with the button on the inner lining of her waistband.
Once all clothing had been discarded, Lindsay smiled devilishly and scooted out from under Michael, wriggling her way under the covers. From there, things picked up pace somewhat. Giggles and pants gave way to deep moans and involuntary cries; the covers bounced and tossed, giving the impression of stormy waters.
Suddenly Michael pulled back. “You said you got divorced?”
She laughed raggedly. “Adultery worse than incest, Michael?” (She liked that, actually. Fidelity over conventionality.)
“You’re adopted,” he panted, and his lips crashed back down to hers.
There were no more words for a long while.
--
Afterwards, there was a smudged black line across the wall behind the bed running level to the top of the headboard.
--
“Is this going to happen again?”
Michael turned onto his side and saw Lindsay lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. The sheet was drawn up to her chest, and her hands fiddled with it. Her hair was splayed across the pillow beneath her.
“Is it?” Michael responded.
“I guess before we know if it’s going to happen again, we should figure out exactly what it was.”
“Well,” Michael said reflectively, “It was fucking.”
Lindsay snorted involuntarily. “Yeah, I guess. But wasn’t it something else, too?” She turned to face him and propped herself on her elbow. “I’m not being sentimental,” she pressed, “I mean- don’t you know what I mean? It was something else.”
Michael looked at her for a moment. “I know.”
“It was like…”
“A completion.”
“Mm.”
“If it was a completion, then shouldn’t it by definition not happen again?”
“Well. Not unless you want-” Lindsay cut herself off, shaking her head. “Maybe it’s a completion and a beginning. Oh god, I sound like a fucking romance novel.”
“We just had sex,” Michael stated. Lindsay stared at him. “I felt like one of us just needed to say that. It needed to be heard aloud.”
Lindsay started to laugh. “Oh my god, can you imagine what people are going to say about this? We are so fucked!”
“Obviously you don’t want this to be a one-time thing.”
Lindsay stopped laughing. “What makes you say that?”
“If it was just this once, there would be no reason to tell anyone. You wouldn’t want to. You’re thinking about the consequences of bringing this out into the open. You’re laughing about it. The defense mechanisms have already started working for you, Lindsay, you’re preparing yourself for a fight. That means this isn’t over for you.”
She stopped laughing. “No, it’s not,” she agreed quietly. “I can’t fight with you, Michael, and then fuck you, and then go back to thinking up ways to meet a guy the next day. That doesn’t work for me.”
“It doesn’t work for me, either. Lindsay. It’s crazy to think that just because you’re adopted we’re suddenly different people, just a man and a woman who can make love or go out together. Or get married.”
Lindsay closed her eyes. “You’re still thinking about what happened? Before you left?”
“It hasn’t left my mind for two months.”
There was a pause.
“I think we should tell my son first.”
Lindsay opened her eyes. “So does this mean…”
“I don’t know what we are anymore, Lindsay. I don’t know how to think about you. As a sister, or as some girl I grew up with, the first person I made out with, the last person I had sex with, just someone I love… I don’t know. But I’m never going to figure it out if we shove this under the rug and never talk about it again, the way we did when we were fourteen. And I want to figure it out.”
“So do I.”
“Okay. So we tell George Michael. Of course, this means I can’t say a thing to him about Maeby ever again.”
Lindsay laughed. “I wouldn’t worry too much about them, Michael.”
“I won’t be able to anymore. My mind is going to be pretty occupied wrapping itself around the fact that I just did my sister.”
“I’m adopted!” Lindsay smacked him with a pillow.
Michael ducked out of the way. “I think we’ll be using that phrase a lot from now on. I’d better get used to it.” Then he grabbed his own pillow and got ready to fight.
Author: Dizzy
Pairing: Michael/Lindsay
Rating: R refrains from making painful pirate joke out of pure nerves
Word count: 3355
Warnings: Um. Incest? Read the fic and decide for yourself.
Author's Note: Post-season three. Written for the bluthcest ficathon. First Arrested Development fic. Feedback- positive AND constructive- greatly appreciated.
Prompt: No one seemed to notice that she often slept in Michael's button-ups. (I changed it to button-downs because that's always the word I've heard.)
Lindsay was on top, and Tobias just lay there.
Clad in an old button-down shirt of Michael’s, Lindsay looked down dispassionately at the man she was straddling. He had a vague smile on his face and his eyes were glancing off to the side. His hands rested loosely on her rotating hips and he appeared relaxed. Lindsay stifled her instinctive groan of disgust. This was sex with her husband.
Lindsay closed her eyes as she rolled her hips steadily into Tobias’s. Unbidden, images of Michael swarmed to the forefront of her mind. She inhaled deeply and his scent rose up from the material around her shoulders and crept into her nostrils. She pressed her palms against her ears to block out Tobias’s damn silence, and her own light pants seemed to echo in her skull; with sight cut off, sound thus restricted, and smell deliriously intoxicated, it suddenly could have been Michael there, Michael’s hands on her hips, Michael’s abdomen between her knees, Michael’s penis nestled inside her.
Tobias stirred underneath her, and she opened her eyes and removed her hands from her ears. “You know,” he said brightly, “with the scent that shirt is radiating, it almost seems like I’m making love to your brother!”
I wasn’t getting the impression that YOU were making love to anyone, Lindsay did not say. Instead, she closed her eyes again in frustration and let herself be carried off into the wash of sensations she’d been focused on before the interruption. Her head dropped back and her lips parted. Pressing her pelvis forward more insistently, she felt her muscles tensing and her breaths becoming more labored. Flashes of brown hair and grey eyes and strong arms flicked across her mind’s eye like a strobe light, and with a sharp thrust and a loud cry of “Michael,” she came, her eyes still firmly squeezed shut.
Gradually Lindsay’s heart rate slowed to normal and her body relaxed. Slowly she opened her eyes and shifted her gaze to the concrete, real human being on the bed. She felt like cringing but forced her face to remain passive. Tobias shook his head at her. “So, a little revenge for my sexual faux pas of bringing up your brother in bed, I daresay? Very funny, Lindsay, a fitting punishment indeed. Well played, well played.” He chuckled jovially. Lindsay’s impulse to cringe doubled and she pushed up and off of him onto her knees before swinging one leg over his body and getting off the bed, leaving him motionless and erect.
“Lindsay, that’s not very courteous,” Tobias called, unmoving. Lindsay did not turn around but stalked into the bathroom, hurling a tub of Vaseline at the bed and slamming the door behind her.
--
Barring Tobias’s comment that night, no one seemed to notice that she often slept in Michael’s button-downs.
--
With the majority of the Bluth males missing and the disappearance of the voice of reason the family had gotten used to defying, the share-selling frenzy had calmed somewhat. Lindsay, for reasons she couldn’t fully explain, had decided not to sell just yet; even less explicably, she had lost all drive to divorce Tobias as quickly as possible. It seemed that Michael’s presence had acted as a driving force in her life, whether she was acting against or in keeping with his wishes; now that he had vanished, Lindsay found herself gripped by a restless lethargy.
Her incident with Michael became something she would rather not think about. It caused her a faint uneasy embarrassment to remember it; not, as any informed observer might have expected, because of what had actually transpired in his bedroom (she had, they had gone to greater extremes before), but because she couldn’t shake a nagging sense (even though she knew of any number of motivations Michael had to leave) that she had scared him away. As unsettling were the implications of his having taken her advances seriously enough to necessitate his flight, as though he hadn’t trusted himself to react properly if he stuck around.
The plan had been crazy, bold, and absurd. It was obvious to her, now, that she really hadn’t thought it out. At all. Her mother had given her direct confirmation of Stan Sitwell’s words, she had driven around for several hours in a state of lightheadedness she chose to define as euphoria, and then she had arrived home and followed through on a sudden impulse to down a half bottle of vodka. Somewhere in there, it had seemed all of a sudden a brilliant idea to marry Michael. A short while later she’d been straddling him, clutching the front of his shirt in her fists and drawling that he’d always found her attractive, while he had looked startled and frantically pushed her away from his body.
--
When they were fourteen (seventeen), Michael and Lindsay had practiced their kissing technique on one another. It was awkward at first, then less so, as lips had eventually parted against each other, and they had told themselves they were getting excellent practice for the real thing.
Then had come the day, with her bedroom door locked and music blaring loudly, when they had decided, through cautious half-sentences and mumbles of “only if you want to”-type phrases, to practice the next step; namely, Michael would perfect his breast-touching skills and Lindsay, her being-touched skills. They had stepped together into a kiss (a familiar movement by then), she had guided his hand gently to its target, and it had all been going nicely until Lindsay had become aware of the hard press of something into her thigh the same time that Michael had become aware of the tightening of his jeans. They had broken apart as one, and Michael had looked startled, and within a week both had revealed to their parents that their dream for the remainder of the summer was to go to single-gender sleepaway camps.
Autumn had brought high school; it brought honors classes for Michael and parties for Lindsay. She had thrown herself into the pursuit of upperclassmen boyfriends; he had become transfixed by Sally Sitwell and had spent time making mental lists of all the ways she differed from his sister, starting with the precise distinction between their hair colors. Life had proceeded, and the post-junior high summer had never been referenced again.
--
Lindsay thought about the summer she’d turned fourteen (seventeen) as she reflected on her encounter with Michael; she could swear the startled expression in his eyes that night was identical to the one worn by a fourteen year old boy who had just realized fully the fact that he was feeling up his sister.
--
Michael was all for staying the summer in Cabo (they had to return for George Michael’s junior year of high school, naturally) and seeing who had noticed their absence by the time they returned two months later.
George Senior was enjoying his first real taste of freedom in three years and expressed no desire to return to the old O.C. (“Don’t call it that,” Michael told him, and never asked his father’s opinion on the matter again.)
George Michael managed to slip into town, where he was unable to locate the post office; strangely, he did discover a telegram office and sent a message to Maeby:
MICHAEL GEORGEMICHAEL POPPOP FINE. IN CABO FOR SUMMER. MISS YOU. GEORGEMICHAEL.
--
Lindsay found George Michael’s telegram, which Maeby had not bothered to inform her of, the week before she finally successfully fucked her husband (“successfully” here being defined as “intercourse took place”). She tore it in half, threw out the pieces, and moved Michael’s shirts to her closet. Cabo, for Christ’s sake.
--
Two days after Lindsay found the telegram, the following exchange took place:
“Tobias, why are you wearing my nightgown?”
“It’s remarkably soft and satiny. I haven’t slept this well in goodness knows how long! Drat, who keeps drinking my soy milk?”
Lindsay moved her nightgowns to Tobias’s closet and decided to put Michael’s shirts to some good use.
--
In all honesty, Lindsay was mildly uneasy about the way she’d lost control that night with Tobias (after a dozen times thinking through it, she still had to catch herself as, each time, she nearly labeled it ‘that night with Michael’) and, more specifically, the manner in which said control had been lost.
It wasn’t that Michael was her brother- she was adopted, she reminded herself, and it wasn’t her fault the shirts smelled like him, anyway- and it certainly wasn’t that she was married to someone else. No, what unnerved Lindsay was the intensity of emotion she had experienced as her brother rose unbidden before her mind’s eye while she spurred herself forward to sexual climax.
When Michael had run off she’d felt foolish and vulnerable about having proposed to him. And she wasn’t going to kid herself that it was anything other than a pang of longing for him that made her adopt his shirts after learning that he would be absent another eight weeks. And yet it was only after that one night that all had seemed to come together: she missed him, and with a heavy yearning she couldn’t quite define.
It was Michael. She had always needed him. They all had; the thing was, he had needed her right back.
--
In mid-July, Lindsay turned forty.
--
In August, Lindsay and Tobias got officially divorced.
For the record, it wasn’t because Lindsay wanted to make sure she was completely unattached when Michael came home.
--
Michael came back on the first day of September.
Lindsay heard the door slam from the kitchen and she knew, she knew it was him.
He went upstairs. She heard the creaking and ran around the corner in time to see his back and the bag dragging from his left hand as he rounded the corner, and then she followed him. He went straight to his room and opened his closet, dropping the bag inside. Then, instead of closing the door, he stood there, looking.
“Lindsay, why are all my shirts missing?”
She jumped. Looking around, she caught sight of his face in the mirror on the inside of the closet door. He still didn’t turn around, and she almost gasped aloud as she met his gaze unexpectedly. She stared at the reflection of his eyes and stood stock still.
“Lindsay?”
“I missed you.” She blinked. Of all the things she could have said to him after two months.
He finally turned, and this time she did gasp as she looked directly into his real eyes. Before she had time to talk herself out of it she half ran, half vaulted across the short distance between them and grasped his shirt in her hands, just as she’d done the night before he left.
She kissed him.
It took three seconds for Michael’s brain to process what was happening and two more for him to gain enough muscle control to push her away.
“Lindsay!”
“I’m adopted!” she said quickly, loudly. After two months of repeating it in her head, it was a relief for it to finally come out of her mouth for the first time since Michael had left her. “We’re not really siblings.”
“Yes we are, Lindsay, we’re brother and sister; I’m not going to make dumb excuses for the fact that I’m attracted to you.”
There it was again, that ‘you’re my sister no matter what,’ just like on the boat, and god, of course, it hadn’t been a sentimental affirmation of brotherly love; it was a mantra designed to convince. And who the hell did he think he was convincing, anyway?
“Dumb excuses- like the fact that we’re not related?” Lindsay let her frustration propel her even as a part of her brain registered that Michael had just told her he was attracted to her. “It’s not an excuse, Michael, it’s a fucking fact!”
“Dammit, Lindsay-”
“MICHAEL!” she screamed, cutting him off. She turned on her heel, blonde curls flying over her shoulder, and strode across the hall to her room. Michael ran after her. She wrenched open her closet door. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He wasn’t supposed to yell at her, not after he left. She grabbed a handful of shirts and ripped them from their hangers. Whirling around, she flung them at Michael.
“Here are your goddamn shirts! I took them because I missed you, okay, because you fucking took off for Cabo and didn’t say a word, I had to find a telegram from your son to my daughter to know where you were and that you were okay! I slept in your fucking shirts and they smelled like you and then I called your name and I got a divorce and you were in fucking Cabo. Do you have any idea of the mental turmoil you put me through?”
“Mental- Lindsay, I’ve been in Mexico for two months!”
“EXACTLY!” she screamed, and out of pure anger she kissed him again, and this time he kissed back, nails digging into her scalp, hips pushing her backward until her back slammed into the closet door with a crack, and then they were fourteen again: her hand grabbed his and yanked upward and plastered his palm to her breast.
Lindsay’s heart was pounding Michael, Michael, Michael as she kissed him with ferocious determination. It was like a direct jump from fourteen to now, picking up where they’d left off, pressing play on a tape that had been paused for twenty-three years, just waiting for the push of a single button to start again. Only it was as though someone had also turned the volume all the way up and hit fast forward; at fourteen they had been cautious, exploratory; now they moved in tandem with a desperation that overwhelmed both of them.
Michael’s fingers wrapped around her wrists and the pressure of his body against hers let up; now he was pulling her in the opposite direction, away from the closet, towards the bed. He fell backwards onto it with a thump. Lindsay, still tethered by his hands, landed on top of him, breathless. She’d barely had time to adjust before Michael had rolled her underneath him with a dexterity she found impressive.
Pinned down by Michael’s weight, Lindsay found herself marveling at how damn good it felt to be physical with a man who was actually engaged in the activity. And, she realized, Michael knew this; he knew she’d been missing that feeling and now he was giving it to her. Lindsay felt a glowing warmth spread through her at how wonderfully, thoughtfully, chivalrously Michael Michael was, always, even when trapped in the dangerous intensity that characterized their current situation.
All at once everything slowed down: the urgency left their bodies and instead their actions took on a slow, heavy quality. Each small movement rang with magnified importance; his finger dragging down her side, her long blink, the accidental bump of their noses; her hands under his shirt resting on his back, his left hand massaging her neck and his right stroking her thigh through a thin layer of cotton; her deep, highly audible breaths, his occasional growls of effort or appreciation. The singing of a zipper and the pop of snap-buttons, the whisper of material sliding over skin and the snap of elastic hummed through the quiet.
Lindsay had a coherent thought.
“Where’s George Michael?” she murmured against Michael’s lips.
“He went straight to the banana stand.”
(George Michael had gone straight to Tantamount Studios to look for Maeby.)
“Good.” Lindsay went back to work removing Michael’s shirt, tracing ever inch of skin lightly with her fingernails along the way, taking her time as he struggled with the button on the inner lining of her waistband.
Once all clothing had been discarded, Lindsay smiled devilishly and scooted out from under Michael, wriggling her way under the covers. From there, things picked up pace somewhat. Giggles and pants gave way to deep moans and involuntary cries; the covers bounced and tossed, giving the impression of stormy waters.
Suddenly Michael pulled back. “You said you got divorced?”
She laughed raggedly. “Adultery worse than incest, Michael?” (She liked that, actually. Fidelity over conventionality.)
“You’re adopted,” he panted, and his lips crashed back down to hers.
There were no more words for a long while.
--
Afterwards, there was a smudged black line across the wall behind the bed running level to the top of the headboard.
--
“Is this going to happen again?”
Michael turned onto his side and saw Lindsay lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. The sheet was drawn up to her chest, and her hands fiddled with it. Her hair was splayed across the pillow beneath her.
“Is it?” Michael responded.
“I guess before we know if it’s going to happen again, we should figure out exactly what it was.”
“Well,” Michael said reflectively, “It was fucking.”
Lindsay snorted involuntarily. “Yeah, I guess. But wasn’t it something else, too?” She turned to face him and propped herself on her elbow. “I’m not being sentimental,” she pressed, “I mean- don’t you know what I mean? It was something else.”
Michael looked at her for a moment. “I know.”
“It was like…”
“A completion.”
“Mm.”
“If it was a completion, then shouldn’t it by definition not happen again?”
“Well. Not unless you want-” Lindsay cut herself off, shaking her head. “Maybe it’s a completion and a beginning. Oh god, I sound like a fucking romance novel.”
“We just had sex,” Michael stated. Lindsay stared at him. “I felt like one of us just needed to say that. It needed to be heard aloud.”
Lindsay started to laugh. “Oh my god, can you imagine what people are going to say about this? We are so fucked!”
“Obviously you don’t want this to be a one-time thing.”
Lindsay stopped laughing. “What makes you say that?”
“If it was just this once, there would be no reason to tell anyone. You wouldn’t want to. You’re thinking about the consequences of bringing this out into the open. You’re laughing about it. The defense mechanisms have already started working for you, Lindsay, you’re preparing yourself for a fight. That means this isn’t over for you.”
She stopped laughing. “No, it’s not,” she agreed quietly. “I can’t fight with you, Michael, and then fuck you, and then go back to thinking up ways to meet a guy the next day. That doesn’t work for me.”
“It doesn’t work for me, either. Lindsay. It’s crazy to think that just because you’re adopted we’re suddenly different people, just a man and a woman who can make love or go out together. Or get married.”
Lindsay closed her eyes. “You’re still thinking about what happened? Before you left?”
“It hasn’t left my mind for two months.”
There was a pause.
“I think we should tell my son first.”
Lindsay opened her eyes. “So does this mean…”
“I don’t know what we are anymore, Lindsay. I don’t know how to think about you. As a sister, or as some girl I grew up with, the first person I made out with, the last person I had sex with, just someone I love… I don’t know. But I’m never going to figure it out if we shove this under the rug and never talk about it again, the way we did when we were fourteen. And I want to figure it out.”
“So do I.”
“Okay. So we tell George Michael. Of course, this means I can’t say a thing to him about Maeby ever again.”
Lindsay laughed. “I wouldn’t worry too much about them, Michael.”
“I won’t be able to anymore. My mind is going to be pretty occupied wrapping itself around the fact that I just did my sister.”
“I’m adopted!” Lindsay smacked him with a pillow.
Michael ducked out of the way. “I think we’ll be using that phrase a lot from now on. I’d better get used to it.” Then he grabbed his own pillow and got ready to fight.