Cory and Tilly Part 2: Cracks in the Glass_(1)

Due to popular demand I’ve brought forward the release of Chapter 2 of “Cory and Tilly.” I realise it’s been a while since the first chapter was born, so I have made the decision to split Chapter 2 into two parts. I therefore present to you the first part of Chapter 2. I hope you find this as enjoyable as the first. Apologies in advance for any mistakes, I’m only human. I will change these as I go along.

Hopefully the second part of this chapter will be quicker in production than this one.

Many thanks for all your continued support.

Ian

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Cory and Tilly Part 2: Cracks in the Glass– “It doesn’t matter where we end up, Tilly, so long as we have each other. And you’ll always have me, I promise you that.”

School was going great.

In fact, everything was going great. Things were perfect for what felt like the first time in an entire lifetime for these two broken, flawed teenagers and it was just … wonderful. It was like the sun had finally started shining on the darkness their lives had been consumed by over the last five years, and that warmth that now passed over them was blissful, like some alien sense that tingled the very deepest recesses of their bodies. Tilly woke up that morning smiling, a real, proper, beaming smile and she found herself laughing at nothing in particular as she sat on the edge of her bed plaiting her auburn hair in the soft glow of sunrise. She had smiled more in the past week than she thought she ever had, and she had found that her days were brighter and she was becoming a different person. Even her friends were surprised by how much she had changed recently. Like Cory’s friends, this sudden change had not gone unnoticed but no matter how hard they tried they couldn’t attribute it to a cause. Maybe it was just one of those things?

Tilly finished plaiting and she looked back at her reflection and she smiled again. The diamond pendant hung from her neck and she fingered it delicately. She finally had what she had longed after for so long. The intimacy that she had so desperately craved and the passion and desire that finally went hand in hand with the love and the romance that Cory already gave her. And, in a room on the other side of the hallway, Cory was rising too with a smile as the high school starlet, the boy that could have any girl he wanted, finally had the girl he had dreamt about for so long and, to him, that feeling was just indescribable.

They didn’t copulate like rabbits. They didn’t rip each other’s clothes off whenever they cast eyes over one another. They just were. They were together, and they were contented in mutual, romantic togetherness. The subtle brush of fingertips as they walked together in the street, the longing, lingering kisses whenever he said something beautiful to her in passing, and the surreptitious way they acted as a couple in the face of a society that condoned in the strongest possible sense the togetherness of a brother and sister in that way. They were as smitten as a couple that had lived together for over five decades, and they felt as alive as teenagers who still had the world at their feet. Kinship aside, they were just two fucked up kids in a fucked up world who had found each other. Love is love, whatever shape it manifests itself in, and society will either adapt (as it always does) or it will crumble.

That day was a strange one for Cory and Tilly. Strangely warm, strangely distracting, strangely different from any other day they had ever known. It was Wednesday; nine days after Cory and Tilly had first crossed that fine, unspoken line between siblings and the unknown. That line you’re spent a lifetime told, taught, terrified into avoid crossing. Perhaps it was the relief of the feelings between them finally being out in the open, or perhaps it was the thrill of going somewhere the whole world told you never to even think about going – a mere extension of their kinship. For Cory it was satisfaction to an urge that he knew he could not get anywhere else. A fix to a drug that only Tilly possessed. For Tilly it was something even more, it was a feeling deep inside that told her that this is perhaps what love felt like. She had always wondered about what it would feel like to be in love. She had always wondered what it was love actually was. A feeling, a moment, nothing more and nothing less. And this feeling, the one she felt right in this very moment, was warm and it was perfect. But, a moment, Tilly seldom knew, was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Cory was in Math class when the sun started to set; and he found himself familiarly distracted from his work by the golden sunset which caught the leaves of an old oak tree atop a hill in the distance, showering the classroom in a fiery red haze, which reminded Cory all too much of the passion and beauty of his twin, sitting a floor below in the Science block. It reminded him of her beauty and her elegance and as the ever-deepening sunset consumed the classroom, Tilly consumed Cory’s mind for the rest of the hour. He could taste her on his lips, feel her hands on his skin and as his engorged manhood grew and throbbed in his pants at the thought, he knew only one way to satisfy his need.

“Follow me,” Cory said quickly as he forced his way through the crowds towards Tilly when the bell rang for the final time that day.

“Is something wrong?” Tilly said, heightened nerves, as she made a rushed goodbye to Ellie and her clique of friends.

Cory turned to face her, and it was only through sheer inner willpower that he stopped from kissing her right there and then, in front of the entire school. He had never felt this much urgency before. Subtlety was long-gone in that moment. He looked at her, into her, and their twin connection began working. She knew and she smiled and said she’d been thinking about it all day too. “Where?” she asked and Cory told her of the tree.

Ten minutes later, on that mound atop a beautiful hill where the unabating sun cast a perennial, soft gold hue across its surroundings Cory and Tilly became one as they kissed and touched and made beautiful, endearing love under that old oak tree. As a gentle wind swept across this place, the branches above twisted and extended and danced poetically as the forbidden fruit below gracefully performed the all too familiar dance of life in a passionate, breathless routine, never rushing or bumbling. It was a masterpiece, to which these age-old branches were silent observers, and when they were done they lay there, in the warm afterglow of a beautiful summer tryst, and they were silent, listening to the soft ambiance of nature and the gentle winds that came every so often and life, for these two madly-in-love-siblings would get no better than in that summer evening on that beautiful grassy hill. What they exercised was just another extension of their birth right; that eternal twin-like connection, the psychological link that had now extended to the physical.

They lay under the tree for a while after, fingers locking and twisting, with Tilly’s head on Cory’s chest and she said how beautiful this place was.

“Right? Being here, in this spot, with you. I totally dig this,” Cory said and she smiled.

“I totally dig you.”

She felt the warmth inside from where Cory had filled her with the seed of his love and she relaxed into him. “How did you lose it, Cory,” Tilly asked after a few, silent beats. “Your virginity, I mean. Who was it with?”

Cory shuffled uncomfortably so that he was sat upright against the tree and he looked out across the town. “Ah,” he started, “it was with Autumn Louis last summer while her parents were away. It was cold and rushed and clumsy and I wish I’d waited.” He kissed the top of Tilly’s head gently.

“I hate this,” she said after another couple of beats. “I hate that we have to hide away whenever we want to be together in public like we’re just a couple of freaks. I want to hold your hand so bad, and hug you and kiss you in front of people and I can’t and I hate it.”

“I hate it too, Tilly,” Cory told her. “You’re the envy of every girl and the desire of every boy. I hate not being able to show you off to my friends or take you on a proper date. I hate that when those boys look at you like I can’t walk over to you and grab your waist kiss you in front of them so that they know you’re my girl. I hate that when girls flirt with me I can’t point to you and say “sorry, but I’m with her”. I hate it too, so much.”

He felt her smile and it warmed him. Tilly craned her neck backwards so that she was looking into those eyes of Cory’s and he was sure he could see tears. My girl. Two words that made her entire body tingle and tremble. The words she had longed to hear for so long, as if that somehow made their illicit romance official. She was his girl, and he was her boy.

“Your girl?” she said softly, as if she’d misheard him. “You’ve …. never said that before.”

“My girl,” he repeated, and he leaned in and kissed her gently on the lips. “Now. Always. Forever. And one day, when we’re away from here, we can go some place nobody knows our names and we can be whoever the fuck we want to be and it’s going to be perfect.”

Tilly smiled again and sank back into his body. “Here’s to someday,” she said and he laughed.

They stayed under that tree until the sky went dark, and they hit their favourite takeaway on the way home.


***
One Month Later: The Day of the Game

“Give it,” Cory yelled cross field, bursting past two lurking midfielders on the edge of his penalty area and into space. Lee Harris hit the ball early, sending it skidding across the turf and Cory had to take an extra touch to keep the ball under control. With the extra touch though, a couple of opposition defenders made the few yard run from defence and cornered him near the touchline. Sensing opportunity, Cory deftly knocked the ball through a pair of open legs and skirted past one of the defenders, sending the second the complete opposite way with a perfectly timed elastico.

TJ did not play soccer. He was a football kind of guy and was watching, bored, from the stands. Cory knew he was there, he was always there, but this showboating wasn’t for TJ. Tilly was among the group of girls that had come by to watch the final game of the season, and the trickery was all for her. Forty-two goals, fourteen clear of the second top scorer in the league, had propelled Cory’s team to within a single point of clinching the school’s first state-championship in a decade and nothing was going to stop Cory captaining his team to victory on home turf. He caught Tilly in the corner of his eye and smiled to himself.

“Who do you think it’s for?” TJ asked in Tilly’s direction.

“Who’s what for?”

TJ mocked the skills. “That bullshit.”

Tilly laughed and shrugged and said she did not know. She knew.

Bursting past the second defender, Cory accelerated with immense pace downfield, jumping a further slide challenge from midfield and putting another opposition defender on his ass with some dazzling footwork and a clever feign. Twenty five yards out, Cory saw the ‘keeper off his line and unleashed his right foot, picking out the top corner despite a well attempted save, and he didn’t even have time to flash a wink at Tilly before he was mobbed by his teammates. 3-1 up with five minutes to go, some dogged defending and a last minute tackle later he found him lofted into the air at the sound of the full-time whistle and paraded around the pitch atop the shoulders of Bruce Carter, a goalkeeper built like a brick shithouse. The celebrations were wild, and lasted almost as long as the game itself. The PA announced the date the official presentation ceremony would occur, although nobody listened. With two other teams still to play the result wasn’t officially confirmed, but they were dead rubbers. It was mathematically impossible to beat the now State Champions-elect.