“And then what happened?” Jessica begged eagerly, her crystalline blue eyes bulging with glee as she laid upon the artfully heart-adorned bedspread, her tiny brother cupped into her hands where she could get the most immediate account from him without interruption.  Practically as soon as Suzanne had pulled back into the garage with her son in his car seat, the little blonde hellion had appeared in the doorway.  She’d unbuckled and whisked her five-inch sibling up and away into the sanctity of her bedroom for a more formal interrogation of his first-ever date before a chuckling Suzanne even had a chance to get out of her own position in the driver’s seat.  Erica, reading a magazine at the kitchen table, had only rolled her eyes at the sight.

                “And… then we bought popcorn,” Peter reported dutifully to his young audience as he relaxed into his sister’s palms.

                “How big was it?  Like, what size?”

                “Small.”

                “Did you eat very much of it?”

                “Uhh, like three pieces.”

                “Did you go sit in your seats then?”

                “Yep.”

                “Did she hold you while you watched the movie, or hold you on her leg?  Or put you in the chair?”

                “Held me.”

                “Is she good at holding you?” the girl pressed sternly, a frown cutely crossing her face.  “She better be good at holding you.”

                “She’s very good at holding me.”

                “Swear?”

                “Swear.”

                “She doesn’t just pick you up, right?  She asks first?”

                “Uh-huh.”

                “Every time?”

                “Every time.”

                “Okay, okay.  So you bought popcorn and sat down and she held you.  Then what happened?”

                “Oh, for God’s sake, Jessie,” the freshman laughed, crossing his legs and resting them comfortably over his little sister’s thumb.  It was an act she was of course more than okay with, as he often suspected it was part of a long-held campaign on her part to make her hands his preferred relaxation destination on the entire globe.  Certainly she’d at least cracked the top ten, as there weren’t many people who were quite as saccharinely accommodating as his younger sibling.  “Isn’t that enough?”

                “No!  I want to hear more!”

                He slapped his forehead, already overwhelmed with the prospect of deciphering the night’s vastly pleasant events for himself, let alone his sister’s bright-eyed consumption.  She was liable to turn just about anything he said into her own personal soap opera to be overthought, inflated, and then discussed at length with a hive of gossipy seventh graders at her school.  As talkative as Erica’s friends could be around the lunch table, the churning rumor mill of the youngest Clark and her peers made those older girls appear as silent wearers of the habit.

                “I… uh, it’s just…” Peter stammered.

                “C’mon, pleeeease?  I want to know everything that happened,” the girl pouted, pulling her lips into a comically curved frown as she leaned in close enough that every wispy exhalation through her nostrils breezed through Peter’s hair.  “Why don’t you want to tell me what happened?”

                “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you!” he snickered defensively, patting his sister’s quivering fingertips for reassurance.  “It just wasn’t a big deal like you’re making it.  Honest.”

                “But it had to be!  You… you went out to the movies!  At night!  Alone!  With a girl!” Jessica reminded him in clamoring succession, as if each of these facts had been forgotten in the brief time since he’d dropped Lisa off and returned to the house.  Evidently she was just as surprised as Peter had been that he’d managed to wrangle his way into getting a non-familial human female to harbor some sort of emotional feeling for him.  Frankly, he couldn’t blame her for the lingering shock.  It was still a bit hard to believe.

                “Yes, I did.  She had eyes and hair and a nose and a face and everything,” Peter commented, causing Jessica to bounce her feet against the baseboard of the bed in frustration, rattling the entire mattress beneath her body.  She drummed her toes against the smooth wooden surface with impatience.

                “You’re kiiiiiiilling me!” she groaned.  The girl caged her fingers in even closer around her sibling, still allowing him to lie in her hand, but she was beginning to roll over from her stomach and onto her back.  Steadily she lifted him up during the transition.  She faced the glitter-crusted ceiling, lofting her hands over her face and holding her fingers such that Peter was able to perch upon their fleshy spires and peer down at his sister’s massive and doe-eyed countenance below.

                “What are you doing?” he snickered, settling in comfortably to his clubhouse composed of his adoring sibling’s fingers.

                “I’m holding you hostage.  You can come down once you’ve told me about your whole entire date with your girlfriend,” Jessica smarmed, grinning cheekily and instantly swallowing the giggle that would’ve given away how deeply she was kidding.

                “She’s not my girlfriend.”

                “Yes she is.  But even if you don’t call her that, you’re still telling me what I want to know if you want me to let you go.”

                “Joke’s on you, Jess, because you made it pretty darn comfy up here,” Peter fired back, cradling his hands behind his head and lounging his whole body further over the smooth planks of Jessica’s probing digits.  He faked a yawn, even closing his eyes to seal the deal.

                “Oh yeah?” she mocked, and suddenly her grip on him was shifting again, just as he knew it would with enough gentle smack-talk.  In a moment she had pinched him around the shins with her thumbs and forefingers, casually letting him slide off the tips of her thumbs and dangle by his feet over the bridge of her nose.  Once she had Peter hung upside down, she tilted her chin a little higher, examining him closer.

                “How about now?” she challenged with a smirk.  The warmth of her breath steamed over his cheeks.

                “This… well, aside from all the blood rushing to my head, it’s still not that bad,” he said, crossing his arms.  “Seriously, this is the best you can throw at me?”

                “Nope!” she said, a chuckle rumbling up from her throat as she pressed her tongue firmly against the inside of her cheek.  “If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m… I’m gonna…”

                “Gonna what?”

                “…I’m gonna swallow you up, Peter,” she warned in a farcically deep voice, which still managed to come off as fairly high pitched due to the thirteen-year-old’s normally flighty vocals.  “Gonna eat you…. right… up.  For dinner.”  She stretched her jaws back open, allowing her sibling a good look at her glistening tonsils down in the black depths.  Saliva gushed from between her gums and down the slick curves of her cheeks, and slowly her tongue slaked its way over her bottom row of teeth, wriggling about as it emerged from the dark cave.

                “Uh-huh.  I don’t think I quite fit your dietary needs.”

                “Yum-yum-yum!  Big brother, just what I wanted!” the girl teased, rubbing her stomach in broad circles with her free hand.  Her tongue swirled once then twice around the perimeter of her lips, applying a fresh layer of gloss.  “You’ll make a peeeerfect snack.”

                “Is that supposed to scare me?” Peter questioned pleasantly as he stared down into the slimy pit of his little sister’s mouth.  He blinked as a few flecks of frothy spittle landed on his face while Jessica’s tongue lashed about, making a real show of winding its way around her plush lips and then squirming back into the wet hovel to gather a fresh coating of sticky moisture.  “Because if it is, it’s definitely working.  It looks and smells like you haven’t flossed in two weeks.”

                Snarling with false disdain, Jessica didn’t try to summon a verbal retort, but instead extended her writhing red muscle all the way out of her mouth.  The proximity to the hot, bud-stippled flesh caused the hairs on Peter’s neck to stand on end.  Breathlessly he watched the undulating landscape of his sister’s soggy tongue approach his head for a taste.  Slurping against the miniature boy’s neck, then, the girl licked deliberately down along his cheek and to his temple, painting a generous coat of her spit across his skin.  All the while he remained perfectly still in her tender grip.

                “Actually, make that three weeks,” Peter corrected after an appropriate pause, smudging away a glob of the gooey gift that had dribbled into his hair.  Jessica only erupted into a flurry of rapidfire giggles as she sucked the offending organ back into its mucky cave between her lips.

                “Is she releasing the kraken again?” Erica’s voice sniped from the doorway as she leaned against its wooden frame with the magazine tucked under one arm.  She stared in pitifully at the goofy display of empty threats taking place on her youngest sibling’s bed.  The sarcasm sopped from her every ironic syllable.  “I thought she only did that game when she was like five years old.  Oh, wait, what am I talking about, she still is…”

                “Go away, Erica.  Peter’s telling me about his date,” Jessica complained loudly, briefly closing off the gaping maw of damp doom she was threatening to plunge her sibling into with all the seriousness of a stand-up comedy hour.

                “I’m sure he is,” Erica grunted, passing back into the hallway and heading for her own bedroom.  “You guys need to get a life.  Like, each of you.”  A slamming door was heard before the last word was even finished projecting out.

                “What does she know about this stuff, anyway?” Jessica chastised quietly, already recollecting her brother into a more secure palm and cupping him into its center.  Her features softened as she rolled back onto her stomach again and kicked her feet up in the air, allowing Peter to sit in her palms like a couch again.  Worry had etched itself indelibly into her angelic face.  “You… don’t mind that I like to play with you a little, do you, Peter?”

                Scoffing with a dismissive snort, the fifteen-year-old patted his sister’s fingers again and even gave a hug to the closest thumb, which gratefully snuggled back around him.

                “Hey, to me, it just looked like you were doing a totally lame job of interrogating me, but whatever you want to call it,” he shrugged.  “No, of course I don’t mind, Jessie.”

                “Good,” she said with some evident relief, a bit of tension releasing in her shoulders.

                “It’s at least an improvement from when we were little,” Peter said mostly under his breath.

                “Yeah, I, uh… well, Mom didn’t really like it when I actually did drop you in there,” Jessica commented wistfully, rolling her baby-blue eyes and clacking her teeth together in memory of the event that was now playing with equal clarity through both of their minds, though from dramatically different perspectives.

                It was pretty hard to forget, at any rate.  Once, in search of a particular pocket doll of hers that Peter had craftily hidden from his young sibling as a prank, she’d entered into a very similar style of investigation by dangling the boy above her melodramatically broadened lips.

                However, when he’d refused to bend to her will and give up the location of his hostage toy, she’d actually gone through with it, releasing the grip on her fingers and allowing him to plop right into a spongy wrestling match with her tongue.  Having entrapped the diminutive child between her cheeks and sucked on him like an organic jawbreaker for several excessively drool-inducing minutes, a horrified Suzanne finally yanked her son from the girl’s jaws and took him away for a weepy warm-water bath.  It was only through some delicately persuasive speechmaking from Peter, insisting everything was in good fun, that the very young Jessica had avoided a severe spanking and subsequent grounding.  The activity had, of course, been aggressively curtailed since then, but the aftermath had brought them oddly closer.

                “Probably not,” Peter agreed at length as he proceeded to use his sister’s spiraled thumbprint to help wipe away the warm spit that still clung to his skin.  She happily helped in this endeavor, even mopping several strands of her golden hair against his face to completely dry the results of her slippery game away.  A few of her luminous stray locks ended up glued to his cheeks after the effort, but the freshman couldn’t have cared less.