I meet myself at a keg party.
Leaning against a counter in an over-bright frat house kitchen, a red Solo cup of the usual half-warm, half-flat, thoroughly-awful beer in hand, listening to my bestie Lydia babble about all the babes in the room as I scan it in pursuit of my own next victim, I see myself. Not in a mirror, though it almost could be, but in a man.
My skin is a shade lighter, his hair a few shades darker, but he could be me with a tan and a wig. Same rangy body, same bony shoulders making hills in the capped sleeves of his t-shirt, same hip bones jutting out from the sagging waistband of his jeans. The aquiline nose—I prefer aquiline to hooked—the heavy eyebrows only barely saved from unibrow-hood by the narrow bridge of that nose, the round bow of his mouth, a feminine oddity in a masculine face. It’s all me.
“Kalin!” Even Lydia’s sharp rap against my stomach can’t break my focus. “You’re not listening.”
“Nope.”
“I was trying to point someone out to you but never mind. He’s gone now anyway.”
“I already found someone.” I nudge her in my twin’s direction. “What do you think?”
“He’s cute.”
“Like me.”
“Sure, you’re cute too.” She’s probably rolling her eyes at me but I can’t bother to check. Academically speaking, I know I’m a good looking guy. I get hit on often enough and I never have any trouble acquiring my target if I find someone worth making the extra effort of pursuit for, but I never realized how absolutely stunning I am.
That mouth, those cheekbones. How could you not want to fuck a face so sharply cut but soft in the one place it matters. I’ve only just laid eyes on him and I’m desperate to bury my cock in him. In me. In us.
“No, he looks like me,” I clarify to Lydia. “We could be twins.”
She turns back to the man I haven’t taken my eyes from and considers. “Kind of.”
“Not kind of. Completely. He’s perfect, he’s gorgeous.”
“He looks just like me and he’s gorgeous,” she repeats mockingly. “Don’t you think that’s a tad narcissistic?”
“I have to talk to him.” I start towards him, drawn helplessly forward, beguiled by the way his teeth flash in a bright smile. Who’s he smiling at?
Lydia yanks on my arm. “Talk to him, sure, but you’re not going over there to—? Kalin!”
Her raised voice catches my target’s attention. He turns from whoever he’s smiling at and the smile drops from his face. There are probably obstacles between us—people, noise, clutter—but I can’t see them as I move towards him, realizing only when we meet somewhere in the middle of the crowded room that he’s moved likewise.
“Who?” His hand floats up to brush across my cheekbone.
“How?” I ask in response. I stand still beneath his physical inspection. I’ve had a few extra moments, so I give him time to verify what I already know—that we’ve been stamped from the same mold.
His fingers catch on my lower lip, testing the fullness I saw mirrored on his face, and I bring my mouth to meet his. His hand slips from the space between us as our tongues trace out our similarities.
“I had no idea I was so beautiful,” he murmurs.
“I know.”
“This is weird,” Lydia’s voice interrupts. “You do kind of look like each other. Maybe you’re related.”
Maybe I should be worried by that possibility, but I’m only worried that he’ll be worried, that he’ll step back from this spaceless intimacy of our mingled breath.
“What’s your name?” another voice demands.
“Kalin MacNeil.” I give my name to the voice, not to him. I almost feel like he doesn’t need to know my name. He already knows so much more.
“MacNeil,” the voice repeats. “He’s a MacKinnon. Brady MacKinnon.”
“So both Scottish,” Lydia says. “They don’t look Scottish.”
“What does Scottish even look like? You’re thinking Irish.”
Neither of us has red hair—that’s what Lydia means, but the voice is right. Red hair belongs to Ireland, not Scotland. Mine is a darkish blond now, deepened from the tawny curls of my childhood, but my skin bears the permanent paleness of a land without much sun. Brady’s hair is a rich chestnut tumble ending just above his shoulders. I stroke a strand of it back behind his ear to see him better. We look good with long hair, perhaps a bit of Braveheart in us after all.
“It is kind of eerie. Anyway …” Lydia tugs on my arm as if I might leave with her.
“You want to get out of here?” I ask Brady. I’m hard and I don’t have to be touching him to know he is too, but I am touching him. Just enough. Our erections push forward against our jeans, meeting in the hair’s breadth of space between us. I wonder if they’ll match, if they’ll be the same length, the same heft, if his will curve just slightly to the right the way mine does at peak hardness.
He doesn’t ask me where I want to go or why. Our eyes have done the explaining for us. We move together for the front door.
“Hey, uh, Brady.”
“Who’s that?” I ask about the kid trailing along with us.
“A friend of mine. Don’t worry about them.”
“But Brady—”
“Later, Iz.” Brady shakes his friend off without a backwards glance.
I’m not sure where we’re headed, even though I made the suggestion to leave. I live with my parents off-campus, a good half hour’s drive with insufficient privacy for what I intend to do with this embodiment of myself. But Brady takes my hand as we step out of the frat house into a crisp September night, and I follow where he leads without question.
My hand tingles where it touches his. In the dark, walking next to each other, I can no longer see our similarities, but I swear I feel my own blood rushing beneath his skin. His hand is the perfect temperature, neither sweaty-hot nor frigid-cold, exactly matched to my own, and his breath whispers in my chest.
When he flicks on the lights to the dorm room he brings me to, I spend about a second verifying it’s a single before my inventory ends. That we won’t be interrupted is all that matters. The ready-to-assemble laminate desk, the ubiquitous bean bag chair in front of a flat screen television, the posters covering nearly every inch of the cinderblock walls—none of that matters. I care only about the bed, a narrow unmade mess of blue sheets and too many pillows.
I back him up to it but stop before I tumble him down on to it. It’ll be easier to see like this, standing up in the harsh light of the overheads. I want to see him that way, in close-up detail, sparing nothing, want to compare our every mirrored point with medical precision.
His breath catches in his throat when I bring my hands to his fly and I feel mine catch at the sight of my own green eyes gone wide, of the lashes fluttering alluringly around them, so long and dark. Brady’s eyes are outlined in black pencil, something I swear I will now forever do. We’re so stunning in our vulnerability.
“Condoms?” His voice is pitched a half-tone higher than my own, but that might be nerves.
“Fuck condoms.” I won’t hurt him. He can’t hurt me.
He nods—relieved, agreeing—and I have to kiss him. With my hands still perched on the button of his fly, I step closer until they’re trapped between us. Our lips meet.
I know how they’ll feel before I touch them—hard around the edges, soft in the middle, bristly on top where the stubble grows so fast, damp in the dip at the center of our bottom lip where saliva pools. Our tongues touch, their nubbly roughness colliding and stroking as we press closer into each other, melding our mouths with our bodies.
The clothes have to come off. I don’t have the patience for removing them and neither does he, but they have to come off so the layers fall, one by one—his shirt, my shirt, his jeans, my jeans. The shoes kicked off and out of our way, the socks ignored in favor of ripping off our shorts. I barely notice that he’s wearing briefs to my boxers. They’re the same shade of royal blue, a blue that matches his sheets. Our favorite color.
Naked, finally, we separate. I step back, then back again, the better to see him from head to toe. “Is that what I look like?”
“If you’re looking at the hottest thing you’ve ever seen, then yes.”
My slender arm bridges the distance between us to run a line across his hip bones, those protruding points I’ve never managed to fill in. Why have I been trying? They’re so beautiful. I want to dip my tongue into the valley between them.
I’m on my knees before I know it, not usually one to go there but today I worship at my own altar. This is my cock—as perfectly mine as I hoped it would be. I suck it between eager lips, relishing the flavor of my own skin, the tang of pre-come that could be mine.
“So pretty.” He thumbs at my bottom lip, and I know he’s seeing our pillowy lips stretched wide by our meaty cock. I can’t wait for my own peek at that sight, but I can’t give up this position either, this up-close view of a trimmed thatch of pubic hair surrounding a plump pair of balls, drawn tight with the insistence of his need.
His cock does curve, like mine, and I lick the head where it tips to the right, my tongue circling it like a hawk stalking its prey before the sudden dive. He gasps when I pounce, a deeper, raspier tone to the moans that follow bringing his voice closer in pitch to my own. He leans over, awkwardly bumping his hard abdomen against the top of my head in an attempt to grab for my cock.
“I want,” he grumbles.
I want that too. How to be touching him and him touching me and it all to be as one?
“Get on that bed.” I push him back until he tumbles down and scurry on top of him, aligning our bodies mouth-to-groin. We curl into each other in a perfect yin-yang, and I feel his hot mouth on my fevered cock for the first time.
He licks a stripe up one side of my shaft, then down the other. “What I wouldn’t give for a mirror up there.”
I turn my eyes up to the ceiling above us, imagining the beauty of that bird’s-eye view. I raise my hand from where it’s crawling back between his legs and snap my fingers. “Video.”
“Genius.” He scrambles to his elbows to watch me fish my phone out of my pants. It takes some MacGyver-level ingenuity, but we manage to rig both our phones into secure vantage points—not quite the bird’s-eye view I imagined but good enough to make an enjoyable souvenir for later perusal.
I rejoin Brady on the bed and waste no time getting his cock back into my mouth. With the rhythm of his mouth on my cock matching the movements of mine on his, it’s like I’m giving myself a blowjob. And I know just what I like. My fingers prowl behind his balls, across his taint, and into the welcoming warmth of his ass. I stroke over his prostate as the electric sensation of having my own prostate stroked buzzes through me.
“Brady?”
“Hmm?”
“We should come, right?”
“Oh God, I want to. So close, Kalin.”
“So fucking close.”
We shut up and suck and that’s all it takes. His release hits the back of my throat as mine pours down his. Our matching groans vibrate around our pulsing dicks. A trickle of come oozes from my lax mouth, but I don’t bother to wipe it clean. I rotate on the bed and let him lick it from me as my tongue seeks out the milky corners of his mouth.
I might normally say something about how hot that was, how hard I came, but with Brady the words aren’t necessary. We shared our orgasms, but there are so many years of our lives we haven’t shared.
Everything spills out of us—the ways we’ve grown up different and the ways we’ve grown up the same. I’m a local, born and raised only miles from the college. Brady came from the next state over. He just arrived on campus a few weeks ago to start his Freshman year, which means we’re a year apart in age. No one would guess it.
“People will think we’re brothers,” Brady says, tracing my lips with an adoring finger.
“Let them,” I answer as I nip at it, careful to catch the flesh gently between my teeth. His finger is long and delicate, like my own, and I would never damage it.
“So this isn’t just tonight, right?” The year’s difference in age shows for a moment in his fear of embracing what we already are to each other.
“This is forever.” I’m not afraid to own it. The bright gift of his answering smile tells me he’s right there with me. “You and me, Brady. If ever two people were made for each other …”
“It’s you and me.”
~~~~~
“We’re not related,” I tell Iz for probably the hundredth time as I stuff my notebook into my backpack. “I mean, we probably are. All Scottish people are related somewhere in history, but we’re not related related.”
“Just saying you should make sure.” Iz trails after me out into the hallway of the building where our Freshman English class is held. “Because it’s weird.”
“It’s not weird.”
“It is weird. Even if you’re not related, it’s weird.”
Secretly, I want me and Kalin to be related. To be long-lost brothers. To be frozen-embryo twins. To be the same person. Iz doesn’t need to know this, but the more we look like each other, the more it turns me on.
We went through our wardrobes together the morning after we met, trying to figure out what we own that matches, so when I see him waiting for me outside the English building, I’m not surprised to find him in a pair of dark blue track pants and a black Star Wars t-shirt. His shirt features Hans and Chewie, whereas I have Luke and Leia, but it’s the closest we can come without blowing all our spending money on new clothes.
“Hello, beautiful.” He kisses me warmly in greeting, the extra confidence of a year of being out on campus apparent in the way he doesn’t even check to see who’s watching. I don’t give a fuck what Iz thinks about me and Kalin being together, but kissing another man in public is new to me.
“I think you should talk to your parents,” Iz insists at my elbow, missing the fact that I’ve totally lost interest in them. “What does it hurt to ask?”
“We should ask,” Kalin agrees.
I can see in his eyes that he hopes, as I do, that there’s something there, something beyond a random similarity. “My parents are coming in for Homecoming.”
“Bring them over.”
And that’s how my parents come to be sitting across from his on a floral-print, wing-back sofa eyeing the two of us with bemused expressions. In the time we’ve known each other, Kalin and I have already grown more similar. I only need to see a gesture of his to know how it looks when I do the same. Our movements grow coordinated, honed by the constant mirror of each other’s presence into their most graceful versions.
“So which one of us is adopted?” I ask, only half-joking. My mother was adopted as a baby. It’s not far-fetched to think I might be too.
“Tell us how we were separated at birth,” Kalin says, looping an arm around my shoulder to bring our faces closer together.
“You do look very similar,” my mom observes.
“Similar,” Kalin protests. He hates when anyone describes us as similar, preferring the term identical, the fucking little pervert. I love it. I love him. I love us.
“I’ve got a video of me pushing you out,” my mother says. “You refused to watch it.” Damn right, I refused to watch it. “And I think I’d know if a second one squirted out at some point. You’re an only child.”
“And unless Brady here is a lot younger than he looks, he wasn’t switched with Trisha at birth,” Kalin’s mother says. Kalin’s sister is only fourteen and is watching us from an upholstered recliner in the corner.
It takes some talking through the genealogy, but it turns out both our fathers’ families are from the same small island in Scotland, “making you definitely related on some level,” my father says. The two men go off to Skype some relative of Kalin’s father who tracks that kind of thing while our mothers eventually figure out that they might be cousins too. Seems that Kalin’s mother’s cousin gave up a baby for adoption the same year my mother got adopted. They go off to phone the possible birth mother and Trisha slips out after them, labeling the whole thing “gay.”
“She’s not wrong about that,” I say, relieved to be alone with Kalin again. “Even if you’re only my second cousin once removed—”
“Twice.”
“Twice removed?”
“No, second cousin once removed twice. On both sides of the family.”
“Ah, right. Even so, it’s still gay.” I take a quick glance over my shoulder at the empty living room before pulling him into a kiss. “I should get my hair cut.”
“I like the way we look with longer hair though.” He drags me over to the mirror that hangs near the entranceway and we admire ourselves in it.
“Funny.”
“What?”
I turn so I’m facing him again. “You look more like me in real life than you do in the mirror.”
We check back and forth a few times before I figure it out. “We’re not identical. We’re mirror images of each other. That’s why other people don’t see it as strongly as we do.”
“I don’t care. I’d rather see you this way anyway.” He rotates me towards him, and I meet his smiling lips with my own. “Hey beautiful, you know what we should do tonight?”
“Why haven’t we yet?”
“Because we’re too fucking impatient. Because as soon as I see your gorgeous naked body, I’m ready to come. But tonight, we’re taking our time with each other. Tonight we’re getting inside each other.”
“Which way?”
“Either, both. Does it matter?”
I shake my head. Either and both sounds good. “So we’re not skeeved out by being sort of related, right? We’re doing this anyway.”
“We were doing it anyway anyway,” Kalin says, no hesitation, “but maybe Lydia and Iz will shut up now.”
Doubtful. Lydia and Iz are thoroughly squicked, but the general population loves gawking at us wrapped around each other in the quad. We’ve already been propositioned more than once. We just laugh and tell them no. Our perversion is only for each other.
Behind me, someone gasps and someone else coughs and I realize I’m standing there snuggling with my boyfriend who’s also my sorta-cousin and I’m not exactly out.
“It’s fine,” my mother says, when we’ve gone through the big reveal of my pansexuality. “But maybe I’ve learned enough for today.” She shakes her newly-discovered cousin’s hand and tells Kalin it was nice to meet him and tows my father the fuck out of there.
Kalin’s parents aren’t surprised by my gender because Kalin came out as pan back in high school, but they’re not happy about our being involved.
“It’s weird,” his mother says with a finality that doesn’t brook argument.
“They’ll get used to it,” Kalin tells me as we drove back to campus. “You know, I’m not sure I can ID as pan anymore. Men, women, non-binary—the hell with all of them. I only want you.”
“I only want you too.” I’ve been combing the ranks of humanity looking for myself. “We need a word for it.”
“Me-sexual?”
“Twinsexual.”
“I like it. We need a name for us too. One name for both of us.”
“Kady?”
“Braylin?”
“Bae,” we say together.
~~~~~
Slick fingers in a slick hole.
His ass is perfect, inside and out—creamy white flesh of bouncy buttocks surrounding a tight, pink pucker. His expression is glorious, a mix of worshipful anticipation and fearful lust as I slip the tip of my cock between the globes of his ass and into the tight ring of his sphincter. I slide in, watching myself accept the intrusion. He sucks in a sharp breath and I hang there—just the tip—enjoying the heat and the squeeze and the sight of our wide eyes as he struggles to adjust to our girth.
“Fuck, we’re big,” he says with a laugh.
“You know it, Bae. Going to fill us up so good.” I lean down and kiss him until he’s soft and easy around me, not wanting either half of our joined bodies to hurt. He sighs out a welcome and I push in deeper. It’s my turn to swear.
“What’s it like?” he asks.
“Like I’m fucking myself.” The body beneath me is my own, the smile that greets me belongs to me. This is how men feel when they push inside me and how I feel pushing inside them all wrapped into one sensation. “How’s it feel to you?”
“Same. Like I’m fucking myself.” A long moan follows his words as my cock strokes over his prostate in a few targeted thrusts. I grin, cocky. I know where to find it. I know exactly how to fuck him, every spot to touch, every move to bust. I know when to take his cock in hand before he even asks. My hand strokes it like it’s my own. His ass strokes my cock likes it’s his. We come together, no other choice.
Come pulses out of his cock in synchronization with my own spasms as I unload deep in his ass. I’m coming, and I’m watching myself come. I’m filling my own hole and coating my own stomach. I’m hearing my moans in stereo—outside and in. Feeling them and causing them and owning them.
I settle on top of him, distributing our weight so we share it equally. My cock softens and come seeps out around it, running down our thighs to pool on the bed beneath us, but I’m not ready to separate yet. I might never be.
“Does it hurt?”
Bae shakes his head. “We fuck ourselves so perfect.”
I can’t wait until it’s my turn to be fucked by us. I know it won’t take us long to recover, but to hurry the process, I play back the video and we snuggle to the sights and sounds of us fucking ourselves, wrapped happily in our own arms.
The END