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submission notes:
(1) This draft contains uses of
bold
and
italic
text.
Ingrid (Part 1 of 2)
by burgwad
(1)
Note
: All characters in this story are at least 18 years old.
(2)
Substance Use Warning
: This story contains significant amounts of recreational drug use (marijuana, LSD, alcohol). This author only condones recreational drug use when practiced in safety and moderation with trusted friends or family. Readers whose values or beliefs clash with this position have been respectfully warned.
(3)
Specific Thanks
to a handful of Literotica and r/incest contributors whose writing I have lovingly and non-consensually pilfered for inspiration: Dave_LG, lovecraft68, onehitwanda, Spector_Dugan, and Xarth. Stylistic nods to their works are threaded into this one with deliberate intent to flatter and allude. Readers who enjoy my work are encouraged to seek out and gorge on their vastly superior output.
Chapter One, Part One of Two
Ingrid will be here tomorrow. Will's little sister.
Will stands at the door of the room he's loaning her. He sips hot coffee. The scope of the mess is such that he has to kind of stand and glower at it for a minute.
Ingrid had, in preparation for going to Paris, learned barely a word of French, but had eagerly stopped showering and shaving. Mom had tried to tell her Parisian women shower and shave just as often as American women. But Ingrid insisted on the change regardless. She argued that if even if it turns out Parisian girls shave, then she was content to be the exotic American who doesn't.
The new body hair and smell had been an abrupt change and drawn Will's attention to his younger sister's new age in ways stranger and more graphic than anybody had prepared him for.
Whenever she sat next to him on the couch with her arms hooked behind her head, Ingrid's pits had kind of looked and smelled like his. She had let him feel them once, in fact--well, made him--and he hadn't hated it. Her underarm was cute. It had been coarse like his but softer, slightly blonder, and stinky like his but different, fresher somehow, like the ozone smell of fresh rain. He'd sort of liked the way her BO smelled. But he had told her she stunk, of course. She had thrashed him.
He never wanted to sound creepy. They were just close siblings. They understood each other, and cohabitated well. She could stretch her feet onto his lap and make a small quick face at him that made it okay. She could tuck her toes under his thighs. She could tickle his scruffy chin with her clammy toes if he nodded off. Her dancer's toes were strangely intelligent, capable little digits.
A lone bean-shaped spot of floor is bare, where Will sometimes stands when he composes. He is standing in it now, for some reason, appraising the mess from inside the mess. Everywhere, audio cables lay looped and tangled about foot pedals, synthesizers, recording equipment, everything but speakers. Will's music room's ruckus feeds entirely into a pair of well-loved over-ear cans dangling presently from the doorknob over yonder. Lately, even those have been quiet though. Will just hasn't had it in him.
Pieces of laundry, mostly his, dress the mess haphazardly.
And all over, like an animal has been in here, lay beaten, stepped-on, fucked-on scraps of paper scrawled with half-formed song ideas. Will's eye happens to land on "--love you like a dog loves chocolate," peeking out from beneath a crisp, stinky sock. He winces at it. It makes him feel down on himself when he writes bad lyrics.
Ingrid can't see this mess.
And he still needs to hang up these blackout curtains. She'll need sleep when she gets here from the other side of the world. He glowers at these curtains, too. He sips his coffee.
The monster's dormant brain and skull, Will's computer desk, is more trouble today than furniture. His old desk chair frowns at him beside it, learned helplessness pounded into its seat. Is he really going to clean up today? Does he mean it?
This whole mess makes Will worry about things he can't even really name. The word "metastasis" occurs to him, seems to approximate it. He scans the chaos for his notebook. Either to write in it or to get rid of it.
Anyway. About Ingrid going to France. A few years ago, a dance school in Paris had gone out of its way to invite his goofy little sister to come study in its prestigious halls instead of going back to boring old American college. Will and Ingrid's parents had argued ferociously about it. It was going to cost a fortune. There would be no way to monitor her behavior. There were legitimate reasons to worry about her safety.
But Ingrid was someone who mere normal people, Mom and Dad included, were helpless to oblige, and she adamantly wished to go. Sure enough, the tuition cost triggered a seismic shift in family finances that sent Mom and Dad's hitherto gradually declining marriage into full nosedive. Dad went awful. Mom just kind of lost her get-up and go.
For Will, the absence of his sister stung quietly at first, but then louder and louder as weeks went by, until one day it knocked the ear cans right off his head. He had stood in the bean-shaped spot of floor, the piece he'd been working on looping in the phones around his neck, and wept. He had lost the urge to create. Trying after that became what felt like wasted time.
It wasn't that his sister had been his muse, per se, but he was beginning to understand that she had been inspiring to him in some indirect way. If he had a word for it, he'd have a word for it.
For the first few months after she left, Will would dream that she was still at home but hiding, tiptoeing about, sneaking around just out of sight, or letting him glimpse a flicker of hair before slipping away again, and all the while rehearsing gibberish that in his dream had stood in for French. Her voice in the dreams was always so convincing, like she was really there. But he just couldn't ever see her.