A Christmas Carnal

"I've got two weeks before I have to be back at work," I went on. "Christmas is Wednesday. I don't have to be back until the sixth, so I can spend New Year's Eve, too. Just tell me what you want. Chores, whatever... we can be alone together."

She didn't answer me. She stood up and took off her panties. Now she really did look like a goddess in the firelight. The bare pussy was a surprise, but I guess a lot of women do that these days. I kind of gave her a what the fuck? look.

"I'm a closet nudist, Josh," she smiled. I didn't know if she was teasing or what. She walked over and eased down next to me on my beanbag. "Do you really mean it?" she asked, leaning against me. I was severely distracted by the wonderful feel of her skin but I managed to nod.

"You'll spend time with me? Whatever I want?" she iterated. I nodded again.

She put her arm around my neck and pulled me into a gentle kiss, slower and softer than the one at the diner but still rock-my-socks powerful. And this time, she slipped me just a little bit of tongue. I felt like I'd been plugged into a wall socket.

"I want you to hold me, Josh," she told me, our lips a hairsbreadth apart. "I want you to meld into me. I want so desperately to feel connected again. To feel alive. Can you do that?"

I didn't know. But I sure as hell was going to try. I kissed her back. I ran my hands into her luxurious hair and drew her to me, just as she was doing to me. Our tongues explored each other as our hands did the same, softly caressing each other's face and neck and shoulders and back. I traced the outline of her hip and thigh, reveling in her womanly curves. And not once was I bugged by the thought this is your sister! That would come later.

I became aware that she was tugging at my briefs. I raised my hips to make it easier for her to slip them off, but my built-in clothes hanger was stopping them. Before I could adjust myself to help, she slipped her hand inside the waistband and covered my raging hard-on. That made it easy to divest myself of the briefs. It also drove my libido through the roof. She left her hand there as she rolled into me, our bodies becoming entwined in a most marvelous, intimate feeling I hadn't felt since... I couldn't remember when.

She eased up on the kiss and pulled back a little, putting her head on my shoulder with her leg between mine and my leg and arm wrapped up and over her, holding us close.

"Thank you, Josh," she said softly and I thought I heard a catch in her voice. "I've needed to be held for a long time. And you are perfect for it. You know what I'm feeling."

"That I do, Sher," I told her. "I think I need you as much as you need me."

I felt the tear hit my chest before I heard the sniffle. "Are you okay?" I asked, instinctively holding her closer.

"Yeah," she mumbled into my chest. "Just hold me, okay?"

I wasn't about to do anything else.

* * * * *

Saturday Day

"You feel like getting into a real bed and catching some more sleep?" Sharon asked as I came awake enough to realize we'd been snoozing in each other's arms in front of the fire.

"Sure," I mumbled. "But I'd rather be with you." She chuckled.

"That's what I meant, brother mine," she told me. "Let's take this up to my bed. I'll set the alarm so you can call the rental place and cancel your car."

That sounded like a grand idea to me, so I struggled to disentangle from her and get up, scooping up my clothes as I did. My glass was long empty, but I picked it up to return to the kitchen all the same. Sharon did the same and a little while later we were snuggled under a huge comforter, wrapped in each other's arms again.

"I hope you're not weirded out that I want to be so close to you," she told me softly as we settled in.

"I don't know," I answered honestly. "I've never been in this position. What I do know is that holding you close right now is absolutely the right thing to do. And for some reason, naked is important. I'll apologize in advance for the erection."

"Oh, Josh, don't apologize!" she quickly interjected and she was serious. "I'm flattered! And you're hung, in case nobody's mentioned it. You're exciting to me, and that's probably a part of the feeling alive I want. I don't care about the incest stuff or anything else. Connecting with you is important to me right now, and I'm thanking God every minute that you showed up and are being cooperative."

"Remind me to tell you the rest later."

"Okay, note to self: remind Sharon to tell me the rest later," I smiled, pretending to talk into a dictation machine.

We lay in each other's arms, petting and sometimes kissing, until the tired finally caught up with me and I went out.

* * * * *

I awoke alone and the sunlight was streaming through the curtain lace -- Simon and Garfunkel's Dangling Conversation suddenly ran through my mind -- and I realized I needed to get up and call U-Save. I also realized I'd only borrowed the coffee and the vodka and tonic, and I needed the bathroom. I was sitting on the can, holding my head and wishing for coffee and aspirin, when Sharon knocked.

"Breakfast is up, Brother," she told me through the door.

"I need to call U-Save..." I started to tell her but she cut me off.

"Already done. I called them when they opened, told them I had to rescue you last night and you didn't need the car and to cancel it. They told me there was a $20 cancellation fee and I told them to leave it on your credit card. They were going to give me shit until Jerry realized it was me he was talking to and that, of course, you were my brother. But you're taken care of. Come on down when you're ready."

I grunted something in reply and finished up. Then I headed across the hall to "my" room and fished out a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Suitably attired, I headed downstairs.

Well, maybe not suitably. My sister was eating breakfast in the nude.

"I told you I preferred fewer clothes," she told me as I walked in, forestalling my question. "I'll get dressed before I have to go start chores. There's bacon and eggs, pancakes, butter and syrup, coffee, orange juice, apple juice or milk. Or dry cereal if you want." She waved in the direction of the sideboard.

A hot breakfast sounded great and I heaped up a plate. "So what are we doing today?" I asked as I chowed down.

"You are doing whatever you feel like," she told me and her smile seemed so much brighter this morning. "I'm going to run lifelines and take care of the animals."

"The blizzard's going to be that bad?" I asked. You only ran lines between the buildings if there was a chance of whiteout conditions.

"Yeah, it's going to be that bad," she confirmed. "They're talking eight to ten inches over about six hours, maybe more. Out here, that means we could have drifts to the second floor."

"When's it supposed to start?" I was grateful I wasn't trying to travel in it.

"Late tonight or tomorrow morning," she told me. "Plenty of time to be prepared. It wouldn't be the first time we've lost electricity in a winter storm."

No, it wasn't. I distinctly remembered the first time I experienced that, at the tender age of fourteen. Grandpa considered me an Able-bodied Farmer for the purposes of dealing with it. I got a crash course in the lifelines, filling the oil lamps, setting up the water reserves, stockpiling wood in the basement and so forth. We stuck bedding in the parlor and kept a fire going in the fireplace. When the storm finally did take out the power, Grandpa had all of us camp out in the parlor. For the kids, it was reassuring to have the three adults there and apparently not concerned. Grandpa was a hell of a teacher.

"Let me know what you want me to do," I told Sharon. "I'm here to help, not be lazy."

"Okay, it's a deal," she told me. "You finish up. I'm going to go get dressed. You might want to, too."

I did and we did. Got everything ready for the storm, that is. I got to find out she had three horses, a half-dozen goats, a dozen sheep, a bunch of chickens and was considering getting a milk cow in the Spring. She had them all in the old milking barn. She'd just pulled out all the stanchions, covered the gutters and repartitioned it. It was heated and had its own inside cistern. She had really thought it out.

After lunch she told me she was good for being stocked up, but if I needed something from town, doing the two-hour round trip while it was still clear would be a good idea. I couldn't think of anything I needed, so I took a pass. She showed me how to connect to her home network and hence to the 'Net, in case I needed it for any reason. I thanked her and spent some time dealing with my email.

"You want ham or chicken for dinner?" is how she broke me out of email hell.

"Whatever you want, Sher," I told her. "I'm the one invading your territory. You choose."

"Fine," she told me with a smile. "You're getting whatever I'm serving... and you're going to like it." I wasn't about to disagree.

Saturday Night

Dinner was a baked ham and all the fixings. I was stuffed. Sharon was incredibly good at keeping me upbeat.

"This is what you meant by 'keeping the demons at bay', right?" I asked her as we had some ice cream for dessert. "I mean, your company doesn't give me room to brood. I'm loving it."

"Bingo!" she smiled. "You do the same for me. I would be fairly inebriated by this point if you weren't here to distract me from my self-pity."

"I don't think it's self-pity, Sis," I told her, thinking about it. "Raw cynicism, maybe. I think we've had some really shitty luck in our lives and it's ruined Christmas. But we can be better than that." Just then my phone went off and I realized I had a text message. It was from Miriam.

Where the fuck are you?

That confused me. Pretty piss-poor attitude on her part. I texted her back.

I'm right here. What's up?

Almost immediately I got back, No. WHERE are you?

So I texted back, I'm with Sharon at the farm. Why?

I didn't get anything back. I tried a couple more texts but got no response and my attempt to call her went straight to voicemail. I kind of shrugged it off and told Sharon what was going on. She hadn't a clue, either.

Miriam would usually call me or email me around the holidays, mostly to see if I was suicidal or something. I knew she dealt with her "holiday blues" by immersing herself in her friends. She didn't give herself time to get morose. So she was always in the "guess what I just did?" mode when she'd call and yeah, it was good to hear from her, but it was also annoying. When I wanted to pity-party, the last thing I needed was someone trying to cheer me up. Especially someone a thousand miles away.

Which was one of the reasons for doing things differently this year, including being physically with someone I wanted to be with, and it was turning out in a most amazing way. Maybe not the miracle category, but definitely better than the last decade or so. I figured I'd put up with Miriam's brand of cheerfulness later. Right now I wanted Sharon's version.

"So what's up for tonight?" I asked as I helped wash up.

"Well, normally I'd put on some sappy feel-good romance or Jimmy Stewart's It's A Wonderful Life, and see how big a dent I could make in a bottle of wine," she told me. "But with you here, I'm really tempted to ask you to come to bed again and hold me. Maybe talk about some of the old days, some of the good memories. Maybe get blitzed and fall asleep like that. You felt amazing last night."

"Why don't we do both?" I asked. "Let's have an after-dinner cordial while watching something like Leap Year. Then we can head to bed and hold each other all night long." Sharon sighed heavily.

"Josh, I love the way you think," she murmured. "How did you know I had Leap Year?"

"It's a romantic comedy," I deadpanned. "You're a chick."

"Nice of you to notice," she commented, with a thin bit of sarcasm, as she started rummaging through her DVD collection.

"Oh, yeah, I noticed..." It was my turn to mutter, but she must've caught it because I saw the smirk.

So we poured tumblers of Zinfandel -- I know, a wine, not a cordial -- and watched Amy Adams and Matthew Goode stumble through falling in love. I wasn't about to tell her that the first time I saw it was on a return trip from Puerto Rico and that in the darkened cabin, I got a punch in the arm from the woman sitting next to me who noticed me crying at the end. Of course, she was, too, and we had kind of a laugh over it. Every once in awhile, my romantic side overpowers my cynical side. I try not to let it show, though.

Sharon just curled up to me on the couch and I held her, and for that brief time everything felt right with the world. When the movie was over and we'd both used my shirt to dry our eyes, she quietly refilled our drinks and started upstairs, without a word. She didn't need to say anything. I was right behind her.

It was somewhere after 9pm when we stripped off our clothes and climbed in under the comforter. The wind outside had picked up a little and I could hear the faint sighing through the old house's gingerbread. The sighing I was more interested in, though, was Sharon's. No matter where I petted her, it seemed I could do no wrong. She would sigh and moan into my touch and I was getting seriously excited by it. Not just physically -- I couldn't help that -- but emotionally, too. She just felt so good.

We probably spent a couple of hours like that, just holding and petting each other. I stayed away from her tits and her pussy and she stayed away from my cock. Except for that first time, when she held me to get my briefs off and for a bit after, we didn't try to do anything sexual. The thought was building in me, though, that everything we were doing was sexual. Sensual and intimate and sexual, in our minds. Just not physically explicit. And I had to sit very hard on the idea that real sex with my sister was becoming an attractive obsession. And that it was taboo as all Hell.

"Josh," she asked me quietly, out of the blue, "when was the last time you made love?"

"The flip answer to that, Sher, is the last time I reintroduced myself to my hand," I told her. "But I'm guessing you want a more serious answer than that."

"Yes, if you don't mind..." she confirmed, still quietly.

"Well," I told her, deciding to be truly serious about it, "I don't know that I ever have."

"What?" She was genuinely confused.

"I don't think any of the sex I've had was making love," I iterated. "Making like, maybe. Almost certainly. But not making love." She nestled into me more deeply but didn't say anything.

"My rather sardonic view of life tends to keep people at arm's length," I explained to her silence. "I know it's bitter and cynical, and... like you, most everything I've loved in my life has been ripped away. I wouldn't know how to have a spousal relationship with a woman. Hell, I have a hard time having 'normal' ones. If you're asking when was the last time I had sex with someone other than myself, it's been a bit over six months. An office party, where a pretty young thing from Accounting and I got a bit too looped for our own good and screwed our brains out in the boardroom."

"We didn't know the place had video surveillance. She and I got reprimands but we kept our jobs. One of the reasons I remember it so well."

Sharon snorted a little laugh, then moved to get out of bed. "I need the Ladies', Josh. Would you go get another couple of bottles of wine from the cupboard?"

"A couple of bottles?" I asked, wanting to make sure I heard her right. When she nodded and headed for the bathroom, I headed for the stairs. I got to the kitchen and pulled out a couple more bottles of the Zinfandel, then looked out the window. There were little flurries of snow starting, but the heavy stuff wasn't coming down, yet. I took the wine and the corkscrew back upstairs. She was already in bed.

"Here you go," I offered as I held out the wine. She smiled and took them, putting them on her nightstand. Then she took the corkscrew from me and started opening one. Truth be told, she looked awesome sitting up in bed with the covers just up to her waist. Her woman's figure was exposed and very compelling. Her breasts were impressive, of course, but her sides -- where they ran down to her narrow waist and flared back to her hips -- were like a smooth marble statue. The comforter covered her pussy and legs, but the sides of her ass and everything up was bare. Her hair trailed down in wispy ringlets, framing her curves.

I hurried up and got under the covers to hide my growing erection.

She handed me my rather full tumbler and raised hers, saying "Cheers!" I did the same and we both took a drink, then set the wine aside as we nestled back into each other's arms. Another Simon and Garfunkel song, Wednesday Morning 3am, came into my mind from God knows where. She was soft and she was warm, and she was one of only two people on the planet that I actually loved. Or believed I did.

"Josh?" she asked again in that soft, sexy voice.

"Mm-hmm?" I answered.

"How drunk would you have to be to fuck me?"

What??? Whoa!... WHOA!!!

My pulse and BP headed for the moon. Fuck her??? Wow!... this has to be a test, this has to be a test...

"Why is your heart pounding like a trip-hammer?" she asked before I could answer. Her ear was against my chest and I was sure she knew exactly why my heart was pounding.

"What?" I managed to get out. "I mean, what exactly did you ask?"

"I asked 'why is your heart...'"

"No. No. Before that," I interrupted her. "What did you ask right before that?"

"I asked how drunk you would have to be to fuck me." Okay, that was twice in a row. I wasn't imagining things.

I took a deep breath, held it, then let it out slowly as I tried to marshal my thoughts.

"Why would you ask that?" I was playing for time. The implications were wreaking havoc in my brain.

"Because I love you," she told me gently, "and you love me, and I want to make love, and you said you had to get looped to make that mistake with your co-worker six months ago. I want to know how looped you'd have to be to make the same mistake with me."

Man, did she lay it on the line! How the hell did she know my deepest, darkest secrets just by snuggling up with me?

"Sher, when we were kids, living on Stoner Avenue, and you and I were sharing a bed, what uniquely embarrassing thing happened?" I wanted to know I was dealing with Sharon and not some demon that had decided to possess her.

"You were thirteen, you had a wet dream and you came on my leg," she told me. "No big deal. I tried to tell you it was normal and to just forget about it. You wouldn't. You insisted your eternal soul had been damned because you violated your sister. Why do you ask?"

I waited several seconds while the memories played out. Then I told her, "I had to make sure it was you." She chuckled a little at that one, but went right back to being serious.

"So how looped?" She wasn't going to let it go.

"Sher, you're talking about incest. Actually, you're talking about incestuous intercourse," I tried to point out. "It doesn't matter how badly I want you, once it's done, it can't be undone. I don't think it's possible for me to get looped enough to forget that. I mean, I've already violated you once..."

It hadn't exactly come out the way I wanted it to...

"So you want me badly?" she asked, drawing little figure-8 circles around my nipples. "How about you don't forget it? How about you understand how badly I want you? I know you love me, Josh. I know you always have and always will. Maybe you're my Christmas present come early. I can hope. What I want, Josh, is for us to make slow, sweet love, like we'd been lovers forever. Soulmates. Can you do that for me, Josh?"