(Foreword: I wish to apologize to regular readers for the mix up in the order my stories are posted. WARNING: This installment contains depictions that readers may find offensive.)
I was excited to be going home for my oldest stepbrother's wedding, only because of his month-long junket from that invidious job he held as an emissary to South East Asia. Invidious because one time, Mishka almost perished under boulders when terrorist declarations in the form of a napalm evening were made a few hundred feet from the embassy where he worked. And because, most of the time, maintaining political détente meant he was encouraged to practice compulsory courtesies toward his hosts to prevent unsuitable consequences that the opposite attitudes might produce. My beloved stepbrother's job was a hypocritical one, and I often wished he would return to a respectable occupation.
Long before I boarded the plane for my homeland, the excitement of soon being with Mishka had prevailed to open up a closet full of symbolic sentiments for me, mostly to dangle before me the possibility that I might come to a happily spanked end after all these months. For being spanked had always been an important factor of my boyhood affection for my half brother.
So imagine my disappointment to discover, at the airport, that Mish had not come to meet me.
"He's in rehearsal," Kishern explained, helping me with my single LV luggage. Having lived five years in New York in the minimalist nineties, I had developed a taste for everything that was antithetical to excess.
In spite of myself, I nodded and smiled at Kishern.
Besides, Kishern would not have understood even if I had expressed my disappointment. I hadn't wanted to attend Mish's wedding. And if not for Bryce, my lover's, relentless persuasion, my preference for a life of defiance toward family and rituals would have held sway. So I was unhappy that my stepbrother could have been so callous.
While Kishern attempted to soften the impact of Mishka's neglect, I carried on an internal debate: Mish's receiving me would have been acknowledgement of the concession I had made on principle to attend his wedding. On the other hand, my hope of an acknowledgement would have tainted an otherwise sacrificial deed.
"Classic Catch-22, darling." I couldn't dismiss Bryce's unassailable erudition, though it was muddying the matter.
"Anyway, Mish will be visiting for supper this evening," my father's second heir continued to explain to me. "He and Yazmin. You'll get to see him then."
'Visiting', I thought sadly: only a year ago, Mishka was a fixture in my father's house, as permanent as taxidermy. How the idea that from now on Mish would only be a mere visitor hurt.
For all that had been professed about Asian constrictions, my family and I engaged in hugs and kisses for close to an hour. The frequency and value of the exchanges escalated each time I proffered to one of them an American 'Made-in-Taiwan' gift that half emptied out my LV luggage.
Of course, it went without saying that any child's return to the fold after long absence was always able to add to the charm of family life. For although by ranking I was on the bottom of the family totem pole, today I was temporarily appropriated the position of an heir apparent born with agency. The pampering included being happily usurped of my share of the household chores by all my nephews and nieces.
I played my coddling for all it was worth. Right after I had unpacked and freshened up, with Nurse's help, I stripped to my skimpy Freudian prop for a dip in the family pool that, seeing it, could always fire off remembrances of my adolescent milestones. Indeed, I had swum in a few high school championships, and my sole trophy in the living room mantel, a gold medal strung by a fraying blue and white striped ribbon, was testament of my one-time mastery of nature's most venerated element.
While the sky was darkening over the vintage dome of my village's wintry atmosphere, I made a calculated observation of the hour. I had no sooner made seemly speculations along the lines of Mishka's ETA at Father's house, than was reimbursed of the privilege of my well-timed calculations.
Mishka's fingers curled under my elbow, and in one succinct move, he had heaved me out of the pool. I was sorry, however, that this was not the fraternal reunion scene I had hoped for or imagined. I had imagined being scooped up into his arms or flying into them.
Nevertheless, Mish pulled me into his bosom, and for five minutes, nose bones, nice-smelling sweater, skin, flesh, beta-endorphins and parlare merged and collided on a confluence of revisited emotions. First Brother always did have nice man-scent as far back as I could remember.
But whenever there existed close family debenture, there was inevitably a collision of values and ethics. Mishka's fingers lifted away my locks that I'd let grow to my waist like a bride's cathedral train. All because Bryce said that long hair made me look less _s_e_x_ually ambiguous.
"What's with the Cher impersonation?" Mish asked.
"Don't start, Mish," I replied, "I've never had much success with men, looking neither a boy nor a girl. Bryce likes it anyway."
The supper bell sounded importunately to remove the yoke of needing to sustain a boorish conversation with my best-loved half brother.
Supper time was a perfect moment of déjà vu and satori: the kiddies' table had expanded to two; and where once it was occupied by the youngest members of my immediate family, it was now filled with a new generation of offspring who, by osmosis or observation, knew what they could expect if they misbehaved.
Even so, in my father's house, one could always count on somebody misbehaving.
A shriek, followed by falling alabaster goblets, swiftly conducted my Christian half brother, Kishern, to his son.
"All right, young man," Kishern ordered, "it's the slipper for you. Go up to the guest chamber, and take all your clothes off. This means everything, including your underwear, and go lie face down on the bed. And you had better wait as long as it takes me to come to you, otherwise, it's double dose of the punishment I intend to give you."
It felt like I was in my boyhood all over again. Only the principals were different. I watched Kishern's son drag himself up the stairs as if his energies were taxed.
"All of you are welcome to watch Adreon get his spanking," Kishern invited while supper resumed.
"Han wouldn't miss it for the world," Mishka opined, winking at me whilst drawing snickers from the others.
But Mish was quite wrong. Although Adreon's spanking would certainly make a fascinating tale for my growing anthology of CP stories, I had more pressing matters to think about than about a fourteen-year-old, who surely was going to regard my intrusive presence at his spanking about as important as that of a message-carrying pigeon. It would humiliate him, and he would be justifiably concerned about whether the information of his punishment was going to be in my safe custody.
Besides, Adreon's focus, during his chastisement by his father, ought to be on the prescribed purpose of his spanking, and not directed at my gratuitous presence.
We were tired, and Mishka's wedding the next day was going to be a windy and elaborate affair, so the family retired for the night early. Most of the male side of the family was also quite inebriated and my siblings almost fell over one another falling up the stairs.
I heard Kishern put his sobbing son to bed as I retired to my own bedchamber. Being the only male still sober and wide awake, I stayed up to put the finishing touches to 'Will-o'-the-wisp 2'. Besides, I'd had trouble sleeping for weeks now owing to the oppressive questions I had consigned to memory since receiving news of my stepbrother's marriage. Among them, where did I stand with Mishka? What did I mean to him now that he belonged to Yazmin?
I knew my insomnia was soon going to confine me to a valetudinary life unless I found a release valve for the pain of my oppression. It behooved me to pay First Brother a visit this night itself.
I could barely make out the outline of Mish's body lying prone on his bed. I turned on the light to see him better and in the hope that that would awaken him. But he slept through that, as well as through the noises I made deliberately clearing my throat, coughing aloud and calling out his name. Mish was obviously in deep REM sleep.
I then sat for a while on the winged chair, contemplating my sleeping Valkyrie. Another hour would pass. Forsaking my lonely place on the chair, I approached Mish and lifted up his comforter. As though by spontaneous requirement, I let the comforter fall onto the carpet. Mish stirred momentarily. I waited with delirious hopes that he would awaken, but he had only turned over to his side.
With the comforter removed, my stepbrother's nakedness was exposed to me. And he was so wondrously created that I found his exposed anus and gonad exceedingly inviting. I flirted with the idea of raping my brother.
Heeding my id's urgings to do exactly that, I climbed up First Brother's bed, stretching out my body behind his backside. I dug my hand into my pajama pants and started to rub my penis, making it long and hard.
Shortly after, I inched my tool toward Mish's buttocks, rubbing myself up and down his crack. I shut my eyes to savor the moment only to have it intruded upon by a stinging blow placed dangerously on the back of my head.
"Yazmin?" I cried out, seeing stars while I looked up at my sister-in-law. At this time, I heard her lungs emit a quiet but virulent curse.
"Pervert, faggot," she hissed and then left my head railing again with another swipe, this time to my left facial cheek. I barely saw her about to strike me again but, fortunately, my stepbrother had risen and was holding her hand back.
"All right, that's more than enough," my half brother said to his wife, while I tried to find my escape from the tyranny of her quick hands. I pulled up my pants and clambered to safety in the corner of the bedchamber while Mish continued to admonish his woman.
"You're going to find, Yazmin, that I would never lay a hand on you to strike you," he pursued. "Even in my house, I would not lay a hand on you. So I will appreciate your remembering that you are a guest in Papa's house and shall conduct yourself appropriately. I don't ever want to see you lay even a finger on our brother in that violent manner again. And he has a name, and it's Han, and you'd do well to remember to call him that also."
"Do you have any idea what YOUR brother was doing? If I hadn't arrived...." Yazmin protested.
"OUR brother has done nothing," Mish replied about the time the scene before me was assuming a somewhat surreal quality. "Even if you hadn't arrived, Han would not have done anything."
At those words, I sent my own head plunging into my hands in shame and remorse. I didn't deserve my brother's defending me. I found myself trembling over having been caught red-handed and wondering what in heaven's name had possessed me to commit the abomination on my own half brother.
"Your own brother was committing an abomination while you were sleeping," Yazmin said, echoing my self-deprecating accusation. "He ought to be cast into the sea."
"You're mistaken. Han has done nothing wrong," Mish repeated. "Now leave us, please. I said leave us, please."
My head still buried in my palms, I heard the door close quietly and footfalls approaching me.
Before my stepbrother could say or do anything, I started pleading for forgiveness. "I'm very sorry. Please, Mish, please tell Yazmin that I'm really very sorry."
"No need," First Brother said, "you're already adequately punished by Yazmin, though that was not her right to do. Now, please, get up."
Mishka's mood and tone, though characteristically civil, suggested that I was in a lot of trouble. Mish must be consumed with desires to punish me, but he was too angry, and that frightened me. I studied his naked feet to buy time, feeling as if I was cemented to the floor.
"Han, look at me when I'm talking to you," Mish said, raising his voice, not so much to impose his superiority and cast a slur on my autonomy, as to superimpose a better form of behavior in me than his first order had inspired. "I asked you to get up."
Now, what could Mish do to me that I hadn't already done to myself? Worst came to the worst, he himself would throw me into the village well. So I meekly rose on my weakened ankles.
Mish gripped my wrist and led me to the bed. As soon as he had sat us down, I threw myself on his shoulders and went on to mouth off another string of mindless drivel, which, I hoped, would pass for more acceptable apology than the first. I haven't been myself lately; sorry, sorry, sorry, I mumbled against Mishka's flesh.
But far removed from sincere or coherent, the drivel came up sounding no better than a paltry subdivision of an excuse for my despicable behavior. Mishka certainly felt that way, too.
"What the hell were you thinking?" he had started scolding me. "Have you forgotten what the penalty for incest and sodomy is here? Why did you want to risk your life, and risk what you mean to me, all for just a second of pleasure? Can you please tell me, Han? Why?"
"Because," I answered, weeping, "I love you. I've always loved you. And you've always known that. I had wanted to come here tonight to ask you, for the very last time before you married Yazmin, to make love to me.
"It wasn't planned, Mish, I swear. But you were naked, and asleep, and...."
"And what, Han," Mish persuaded, with some tenderness this time.
"And I wanted to take you," I whispered. "I wanted to enter you."
So, of course, now that I had risked everything by foisting my cards on this elegant object of my adolescent desire, I only wanted to die from shame. And it was too late for denials and pretenses.
But rather than shaking his head or forefinger at my uncultivated hucksterism, as would have been the common mentality, Mishka sighed, saying: "Yes, I know you did. I wanted to see how far you'd go. I'd have stopped you myself if Yazmin hadn't walked in."
Suddenly my stepbrother looked sad, as if some terrible knowledge was weighing down on his unusually compassionate heart, in spite of all that I was putting him through.
"It's my fault," he said gently. "I started it all. I know, and it's also what you've always felt all this time: I started it because I had loved you first, and told you so. The things I said, the things I did, the way I behaved, especially our pseudo_s_e_x_ual experiments when you were a pre-teen – I don't for a moment blame you for feeling that I was the one who first led you on. It wasn't that I had lied, but you were too young and impressionable, and I had been careless with the words I had used.
"And it was only years later that I realized the impression my words had made on you. By then, I was honored to be loved so deeply by you, and you were always so fragile, that I couldn't do or say anything to reverse the damage. I thought the years would mature you and you'd understand on your own: Han, it's a brother's love I always felt and still feel for you. You have to know this."
My stepbrother extended his arms to hold my shoulders as if he expected me to fall apart. And by now crestfallen and mortified, I didn't want to stay to hear anymore. I felt as if my mind had been put through a search warrant, so I rose and fled.
But Mish had followed me to my bedchamber. He found me huddled in the pitch darkness in a corner.
"I know what I did to you was terribly, terribly wrong," Mish continued, holding my shoulders tightly as if fearful I was going to run away again. "Forgive me, milksop. I have hurt you terribly. I was already an adult but you were just a child. I was supposed to be protecting your innocence, not exploiting it."
Mish suddenly grasped my forearm and yanked me up.
"You've suffered enough on my account," he explained on our way to the bed. "It's too late to undo the way you feel, but I can make you happy. I want you always to be happy."
My half brother stopped us beside my bed, and without offering a premise or warning, proceeded to remove all my bedclothes. I was stripped of my pajama shirt first, and afterward my pajama pants. Mishka expertly untied the cord in its waistband and, loosening the top, let the pants fall easily down my hips. Next, he gripped the top of my underwear and then rolled my underwear down to maneuver it clear of my groin and private parts.
Recognizing the facts under the aura of being undressed, I was overcome with extreme joy to be ushered in this way back to my adolescence. Without doubt, Mish and I were, each in his own way, demonstrating behaviors that attested to our individual understanding of the subtleties of our context.
Mishka sat down on the bed when I was made as completely naked as he was, and then he gathered my penis and testicles into his palm. My penis extended slightly in his grip and while my face flushed, he spun me around.
I felt Mish prise apart my buttock cheeks, squeezing the flesh with his fingers so earnestly that I yelped and winced a few times. But I couldn't see what his interest in this area of my private terrain was. While Mish made me wait, my back turned to him, I felt my anus pucker senselessly as if to protect itself from danger. Mish held my cheeks apart, spreading open and exposing my anus to himself. I felt my sphincter straining to pucker and conceal my dunghole while Mish fervently held my cheeks apart. The moment was so erotic that I spied my own pre-cum weeping from the slit of my tool. This despite the fact that my half brother never once touched my anus. A little later, he swung me back round.
And then suddenly and swiftly, he brought me down upon his lap. Mishka's penis was already hard under me as I spied him picking up my slippers. Indeed, just as I had feared, it had been First Brother's intention all along to spank me.
I clutched his ankles fiercely to endure the spanking to come. This turned out to be long and extremely harsh, drawing tears that stung my eyes as painfully as the slipper was stinging my bottom.
By the time Mish was finished with my spanking, I had spurted a little cum on his lap, almost threatening the lush eyelet bedspread under us. First Brother lifted me up and let my head fall upon his shoulder. I wept, my head in torment from trying to decipher the lesson in my spanking. For there had always been a clearly defined context to all my past spankings: for purpose of correction, punishment, _s_e_x_ual play, atonement, reward or motivation, my spanking had always been derivative, rather than after the fact, of the circumstance that had called for it.
So what was this all about?
"As long as you want it," Mish explained, as if to have anticipated my puzzlement, "I'm here for you. I cannot make love to you, so don't ever ask again, but you'll always be my boy, whatever your age and needs, and whenever I feel you want to be spanked, I'll give you a spanking. Count on it."
Mish's explanation wasn't extraordinary or difficult to follow. I had made no reply – there never was any need for one from a boy – for Mish had not asked for one. Instead he had turned me over to the bed to attend to my post-spanking needs.
But even as I started drifting off to sleep under the comfort of Mishka's soothing my spanked and reddened buttocks, I couldn't ignore the extraordinary meaning of his promise – the emotional income he had pledged to furnish me for the rest of my life. Nor could I ignore the spirit of romance of being always Mishka's boy. I couldn't help smiling to myself as the implications of my stepbrother's promise sank into me slowly.
For you see, learned reader, securing Mishka's love, that had seemed so elusive, had, for a long time, been an attempt to make my life imitate my art. Now that his love had become reality, it meant so much more: it was the fulcrum on which my desires were at long last balanced with fulfillment.
I belonged to Mishka.
Je benirai la vie.
THE END
(Copyright, JRK, January, 1998. This revised version is copyright, August, 2000.)