Out and in-laws

Look: it’s not like you aren’t trying.

“Besides,” Seulgi goads, inches away from your lips. “You love the step shit, don’t you?”

And between her hot breath on your mouth, taste fresh on your tongue, and the unholy squelch her cunt makes every time she comes back down on your hips, you’re fucked. 

Seulgi has you by your pelvis, pretzeled against one of those stupid neo-modern loveseats that’s more art installation than it is functional furniture. Her knees dig on both sides of your hips into berber fleece, pinning you back into memory foam, rocking her up and down your shaft. Together, you’re a mess of dark hair, spit, and sweat – ears tingling, hormones on overdrive, and well into fucking each other’s brains out.

“Shut up, Seulgi,” you grit, bucking into her pussy. Your hands curl into the small of her back, picking up the rhythm in her hole – in attempt to pry her open, in attempt to mark her from the inside. 

“Fuck,” she whines in the upbeats – a moment of weakness, a flicker in her character from just how raw you’re going at it – before: “Look at you. You’re so fucking gross.” Her fingers splay across the sides of your chest, cascade of chocolate hair shrouds you in makeshift confessional, sealing you off from the outside world, like a full-fledged exorcism, like a hydraulic press choking the truth out of you. It’s sex for sacrilegious sake, a seance with spunk in your mouth, Seulgi at her most sinful – all this for the kicker: “You’re this hard for your sister?”

What else could you be?

“Huh?” she exhales, dripping on your cock, grinding your hips together. “You can’t help yourself, right? Want to take me when I’m wearing something skimpy around the house? Turn me over and stuff my pussy when you’re behind me on the stairs?” Her tummy s-curves against your stomach, her cunt taking you again, again, again. And with breath breaking, her turn in confessional: “It’s you I do it for – just for this dick. Roll up my short shorts, walk around in a tight little shirt, bend over all the furniture – just for this dick.”

It’s her specialty, really: taking a premise up to eleven, and then snapping the knob clean off as she dials it up for more. Your bodies are electric against each other: catalytic – how molecules sever, how sparks literally fly when you close the gap between your hips – wanting – how beckoning Seulgi’s hole is for you, how she hisses on the downbeat, whines every time you pull away. 

Except she’d never let you hear that. Staring up into her dark brown eyes, debasing a deity: “You better enjoy it,” she spits. Leaning over on her haunches, dragging your bottom lip in her teeth, breathing into your mouth: “Because this is the last time.” She catches her forehead on yours. “Once we’re really siblings, then you can’t even pretend – I’ll roll my shorts even shorter, wear even less – then: oh, then you’re fucked.” Breath hot in your mouth, fingers carding into your hair: “You wouldn’t dare touch me then. So come on, make this worth it. Come on, come on, you’re so close for me.”

Seulgi’s hips rock over yours – over and over and over and over – she’s cussing, leaking, shaking, breaking; the distance between your bodies wanting, asking, reaching, pulling – and in the height of it all, you give in to her. In conjoined clarity, complete crescendo, codependent climax, you melt into each other – all sticky, all tangled, all fucked.

“Gross fucking brother,” she giggles.

-

The clothes rack needed to go today.

You’d made quick work of the rest of the space: rebranding prehistoric furniture ‘vintage’, auctioning pastel stock pots to fifty-somethings, donating Merriam-Websters several versions stale, but the clothes rack was a doozy. Hoisting styles in between the late nineties and early aughts, it felt like it deserved justice: between the tastefully distressed denim, the timeless cut and sew, and the faded brand names – you weren’t working with anything designer, but the proverbial encapsulation of a previous era of styling, the decade of fashion trends potentially scattered – all of it invited a different approach.

It was a little crazy how many people clicked on Kang Seulgi on Facebook Marketplace.

In one: her hair’s strewn, tastefully mussed into her face as a pool of sunlight gathers at her cheekbone, slender fingers occupying the space just beside her on the ground, flirtatious and faux-editorial for the platinum rings and tiny link bracelet three sizes too big. Just out of frame: a lacey tank top adorned with flower patterns.

In another: Seulgi long and slender, graceful and gawkable as she falls out of view, like her legs go on forever. Fringes of her deep chestnut hair frame sultry bedroom eyes like an anchor, a starting point to the rest of her sprawled against the cupboard, frozen in permanent invitation, as if your gaze spilling over her milky skin meant hers pored over you too. Filling in the space in between: a light linen slip dress toying with summer sunlight like it was fabric, etching out an intimate imagination of the curves in the dress’ shadows.

The clothes rack went altogether – the only item without a bargain.

-

Kang Seulgi has documented most of her post-graduate thoughts in an old iPhone.

Nestled in the Notes app, between random lists of online passwords and oodles of old alt-pop lyrics, is a dissertation’s length masterful weaving of daily journaling and critiques of your character.

You really only know what the device is because of the polaroid of you two trapped in the back of the transparent phone case.

And it’s tempting like cardinal sin: it fills you with a treacherous taboo, an insidious, rascal-y wit that feels like it teeters on a fine line. Curiosity kills the cat that gets caught, you supply, and with how cunningly you charge the long dead battery, how you still know her old password, how conducive it all feels, how it all falls into place – it feels like you deserve it. All to say: it’s probably primordial not to read someone else’s journal, an unwritten agreement that undergirds all personal privacy, but also: under the circumstances, how could you not?

With Seulgi one room over, wrapped up in rifling through larger boxes from college, with you in charge of her older trinkets – photos from childhood, whatever was left over from high school – if there was anything she wanted to hide, she’d swap the order.

It was ordained – it’d help you decide to throw the phone out.

It was nothing – just a quick peek and no more.

It doesn’t take much reading at all for you to regret the entire thing.

Swiping through years of meticulously detailed accounts of the places she couldn’t go, old associations she still made with you long after your breakup – the guilt of the entire ordeal makes your body invert on itself. The weight of an entirely new perspective makes your heart lurch into the pit of your stomach, unreplaced, and your chest feels abyssal. Your head feels like it doubles with pieces that you were just oblivious to, and you are simultaneously weightless and also feel like you become the center of gravity of the entire room. A mass starts to build square at your torso – like what comes after a red dot, like you know the next train is the one that hits you – the tips of your ears burn at a hundred fifty, the temples of your forehead ring like a bell that’s been struck: you viscerally come to terms with the fact that you stomped the shit out of Kang Seulgi’s heart eight years ago, and also that she now stands in the doorway, looking for another box to sort through.

It doesn’t take her long to put two and two together, for her to fan across the spectrum of emotions, for all of it to land on resolute – a calm that looks practiced, settled, earned.

Seulgi gives you this knowing look, one as hardened as it is equally uninterpretable. It’s magnetic, ripping, beckoning – both like she’s waiting for your move and preemptively unbothered at what it will be, it lasts all of two seconds before she turns on her heel, and you know enough to get up and quickly follow.

Truthfully: it’s not the first time you run into this connotation this summer, and most definitely not the last; it’s messy, and much easier to fuck the feelings away-

- so you do.

-

OK: at one point we were all seventeen.

At one point you and Seulgi were unimaginably insufferable, and took every opportunity to show everyone else that – every waking moment attached at the hip, every meme commented on with “us”, every other relationship secondary.

And then at one point it was all over. It wasn’t nice, either: quintessentially sophomoric, scar tissue contingent to growing up, a breakup dragged out over months, cultivated through multiple text chains, and culminating in a very rushed parking lot “it’s not you, it’s me.”

It haunts you for a long time.

A little because three quarters of your friend groups watch it take place not many car spaces over. 

Some more because of how shattered Seulgi looks – eyes glassy, brimming with tears, biting the inside of her cheek to tap into rehearsed determination.

But mostly because it was presumptuous.

There was something about the senior year breakup that felt like birthright: it was quintessentially sophomoric, scar tissue contingent to growing up – it felt like it imposed on itself, like it was the necessary next step to the first big fight. No matter how much you thought you could work through it, how much you and Seulgi felt fatedly different – conventional wisdom (the person in the friend group who doled out life advice and also dated the least) said it wasn’t worth it, so it wasn’t.

Except there aren’t as many cliches about running into your ex the summer you’re both cleaning out old belongings to make space for your new step family.

There were infinitely less cliches about your ex being part of said step family. Trite wisdom didn’t have any premise about railing your step sister.

And as you’re standing across each other at the arch, in the backyard of the townhouse you spent all summer cleaning out, in the backdrop of the priest binding your dad and new stepmother in holy matrimony, in all of the rich connotation of Kang Seulgi taking your last name, she trades you a knowing look.

Bright eyes, a coy smile, the pinkness of a blush skirting across the apples of her cheeks – a look that’s as knowing as it is risqué, impish, whimsical. A look that knows you won’t be able to forget any spot in the house you already took each other in. A look that rubs it in: “Besides, you love the step shit, don’t you?”