A Christmas to Remember

She ran her hand back under the running water and again squirted soap into her palm. Then she slowly wrapped her hand around the shaft and started sliding it up and down. As soon as she had her fingers wrapped around me, she looked at me in the mirror as she started stroking.

"Dee, you can't --" I tried to protest but she shushed me.

"Be quiet." She wasn't washing me. I could tell from the look on her face she was enjoying this. Problem was, so was I. I was also deathly afraid of getting caught.

"Mom --"

"They're asleep already. They can't hear us on the other side of the house anyway. Now be quiet and let me finish getting you clean."

"Dee -- oh, shit, please stop. Stop it now, Dee. I mean it. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Ohhh --" Part of me was deeply embarrassed by how little time it took for me to reach orgasm. She had to wrap her left arm around me to help support me as my knees started to give way. The first two spurts hit the mirror, the third draped itself over the faucet and the remainder ended up on the countertop and Dee's hand. Another part of me couldn't believe what just happened. That was the most intense orgasm I had ever had and the expression on her face was one of the most erotic things I'd ever seen. She had really enjoyed doing that, I could sense how aroused she was from it.

Dee ran her hand back under the faucet again. When she thought I wasn't looking, she licked a spot off the back of her hand before soaping up and thoroughly washing her hands. I was still trying to get my legs to work right as she took the washcloth and cleaned me off once again. While I put underwear on, she cleaned up the mess we made on the mirror and sink, tossing the washcloth in the dirty clothes when she was done.

Before she opened the bathroom door, she gave me a quick hug, "Feel better now?"

I could only nod yes. I also started getting hard again. This wasn't right. Our parents would kill me if they found us doing that. It also brought to the forefront a problem I had been trying to avoid thinking about.

I had an intense physical and emotional attraction to Dee, present long before I got shot. I tried everything I could to hide it. I knew logically that buying her expensive gifts was a giveaway so I bought them for Sami, too. I enjoyed that as well, don't get me wrong. It just didn't give me the same kind of pleasure. The rest of the time, I tried to keep how I felt under wraps.

The problem I now had was determining whether she felt the same way towards me, this was just some form of trauma bonding that was temporary, or it was a one-off thing where she took advantage of an opportunity with no chance of being exposed for it. Seriously, who was I going to tell?

Dee had me lay back down on the bed while she showered and dressed. She was in the bathroom for quite a while. There was something different about this, too. She rarely brought any music with her into the shower but she did today, and it was up loud. When she was younger, she would bring music in with her if it was a new album she was in love with or something like that, but she hadn't done that in years. She also didn't sing along like she used to.

Usually, during the day, she would wear a T-shirt and exercise or yoga shorts. Today, it was just the T-shirt and panties. They appeared to be bikini cut since I saw a lot of ass cheek from time to time when she bent over.

For the remainder of the day, we avoided talking about what happened. She was very helpful, seemingly hovering nearby at all times. I could sort of understand that, I was off all day, partially because of my head and partially because I was too much in my head.

I was feeling tired about 4 in the afternoon so I laid down to take a short nap. Dee was sitting in the little recliner Sami used to watch TV, reading something on her tablet. I set an alarm for about 90 minutes and immediately drifted off to sleep.

I was awakened by Mom shouting, "Diana, what the hell? What did I tell you, dammit?" Dee was lying next to me, curled up against my right side.

"We're just taking a nap, Mom. Jesus, gimme a break." Dee never liked being woken up suddenly. Today was obviously no different.

"Outside, now." You only ignored the Mom voice if you wanted to die. Dee shuffled out and Mom closed the door behind them. They started going at it immediately.

"He fell this morning and I didn't want him falling again." Their voices were fading as they went to the other side of the house.

"In your underwear, Diana? What did I tell you? I said it as plainly as I could, 'not in my house'. You know damn well that he's not well."

"We didn't do anything except take a nap. He was already out when I got in bed."

"Don't try to bullshit me, missy. You have a choice --" The slamming bedroom door cut off the rest of it. I could still hear their voices occasionally and it wasn't a friendly discussion. Dee came back about fifteen minutes later, acting as if nothing had happened. She had put on a pair of yoga shorts and a bra. She threw herself into the recliner and went back to reading.

Dinner was awkward. Mom and Dee glared daggers at each other while Dad and I tried to maintain some sense of normalcy. Mom kept giving me the evil eye up until the time she left for work. All Dad said was, "Don't do anything strenuous, son. Remember, doctor's orders."

As soon as Mom was out the door, Dee did that magical bra removal thing without taking off her shirt and flung it dramatically across the den. Then she stood up, turned her back to me, and dropped her yoga shorts, bending fully at the waist to remove them and slinging them on top of the discarded bra. At least she left her underwear on, thank God. I was hard again just watching her do the bra thing. The sight of her panty-clad ass almost sent me into orbit.

"You're courting disaster, Dee. I don't know what's going on but you might want to consider dialing it back a bit."

"She thinks you're made of glass." That wasn't the impression I was getting but I couldn't hear a lot of the conversations they had, so I decided to take her word for it.

"I think maybe we should --"

"Nope. I'm going to do what I think is best. I'm here, she's not." Dee had this tone when she was pissed and in no mood to discuss it. It was now turned up to eleven so I dropped the subject. I had claimed the recliner so I could stretch out a bit. I was surprised when she came over carrying the remote, wedged herself between me and the arm of the chair, and turned the TV on. I managed to get my right arm around her shoulder and she snuggled in. She started watching some drama series and I dozed throughout the evening. At one point, I woke up and she had her head on my chest and her arm draped across my stomach. I remember nuzzling her hair, she sighed, and I went back to sleep for a while.

Eventually, she got tired and woke me up to go to bed. The previous two nights, she had slept on an air mattress on Sami's floor. Tonight, she helped me into bed and then proceeded to climb in after me.

"You know, the last time we did this didn't end well --" I didn't want a repeat of this afternoon. It made my head hurt and I had enough trouble with that as it was.

"I set my alarm to be up before she gets home." She spooned into my right side, pressing her ass against my hip. My chest still hurt a little too much to sleep on my side just yet so I slept on my back. I had a raging erection and she would have noticed it immediately if I had been able to lay on my side.

"And what if she comes home early? I'm pretty sure she's gonna check on you now." It's not that I didn't want her in bed with me, it just wasn't a good idea with Mom on whatever kick she was on.

"I'll take that risk." I knew arguing with her was pointless, so I shut up.

We lay there silently for a while. I could tell by her breathing that she wasn't asleep. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. "What's going on with you? Why are you acting like this?"

She sighed and shifted position to her other side so she could look at me. "I owe you, Mike. You saved my life and I want to do everything I can to repay you for that. Mom doesn't understand." I could feel her breasts pressing into my arm and her foot sliding up and down my lower leg.

"You don't owe me anything, Dee. Really. I'm worried about you, though. I --" Her eyes flashed and I could tell she was starting to get mad. Really mad.

"You don't re--," she corrected herself quickly, "understand how I feel. You don't know what I went through that night. Don't try to tell me how I should feel. I get enough of that from Mom and I'm sick of it."

She threw her arm across my stomach and kissed my cheek. "Now shut up and go to sleep." Despite my hard-on, I did as I was told. Good thing I did.

The next morning started out normally. I woke up with Dee's alarm, she got up and did her thing in the bathroom, coming out dressed in a T-shirt, bra, and gym shorts. I stayed in bed for a while and then got up. Mom stopped by to check on us while I was in the bathroom getting cleaned up, which I managed to do just fine by myself. The conversation didn't sound all that friendly but at least they weren't yelling at each other.

The doorbell rang about 9:30 and Dad answered it. He came back into the den with a huge box. Unpacking it took a few minutes and when he was finished, Dee was absolutely livid. Holy shit, was she mad.

My mother had ordered security cameras. There was one for the kitchen, two each for the den and the formal living room, and one for Sami's room. There was a master control unit that connected to the internet so that the cameras could be monitored remotely. It took Dad about ninety minutes to hook everything up, download the app to their phones, and configure it. He had mounted the camera in Sami's room so that you could see almost the entire room, including the door to the bathroom.

"Really, Mom? Why not just put one in the goddamn bathroom too? What about his privacy? You gonna sit and watch him go to the bathroom every time?" Dee was worked up, all right.

Mom just looked at her. "Do we need one in the bathroom, Diana? Is that what you're saying? I watch people shower and go to the bathroom all the time, it's nothing I haven't seen before."

Dee practically shouted at her, "What about my privacy?", emphasizing the word "my".

Dad cautioned her, "Diana, that's your mother. Lower your voice, please." He usually stayed out of arguments among the females of the family. Dee was dangerously close to crossing a line and if he hadn't said something, I was about to.

"There's no camera in your room, which is where you belong at night anyway. I'm not stupid, missy. I warned you and you ignored that warning. You made this choice for me." Mom apparently felt it necessary to rub in it a little or she was just in a mood to bait Dee. It worked, either way.

"I can't believe this shit --"

"Diana, enough." It had been a long time since I had heard my father raise his voice. This was his "police voice". Dee immediately shut up.

"Did you think about what Sami --", Dee's voice was calmer and her question was directed at Dad.

"She knows. It will be removed when Mike is back in his own room. As soon as he stops being a fall risk, we'll take it out of there, too." Mom was back to a calmer voice, too.

"What about the other cameras?" I just had to ask. Dee glared at me.

"They are there for your protection, in case you have a problem when nobody's home." Dad didn't really sound all that convincing.

I swear I heard Dee mutter "Bullshit" under her breath. Either nobody else heard it or I was imagining things. With the conversation having come to an uncomfortable and unsatisfying ending, my parents excused themselves to go to bed. Dee sulked the rest of the day. According to the instructions, the hard drive would hold 96 hours of video footage for each camera. For us, that was a whole lot of nothing. I was either in the den or Sami's room, about the only time I was in the kitchen was for family meals.

It took three days for us to find out that my mother was indeed monitoring the cameras. I fell again in the bathroom and less than thirty seconds after Dee opened the bathroom door, Mom was calling Dee's phone to find out what happened. Turns out, they were wired for sound, too. It was a good thing that whatever Dee had to say, she said it out of camera range. Maybe she suspected it but I certainly didn't. That audio thing made me more uncomfortable than the video. I tended to talk in my sleep and sometimes my dreams were, to say the least, inappropriate for a brother to be having about his sister.

One unfortunate side effect of the cameras was that I could no longer engage in self-service except in the bathroom. I couldn't stop thinking about the time she had jerked me off but I couldn't get it done knowing she was sitting on the other side of the bathroom door. If I got up at night to try, Mom was calling me to make sure I was all right and to ask if I needed Dee to help me. Took all the steam right out of me.

As soon as we figured it out, we started texting each other. Apparently, the cameras had a zoom feature built in. I had no idea if my parents ever used it but we knew it existed so we would text from a position where the camera couldn't see our phone screens. It was the only way Dee could vent and that's what I told Mom when she asked why we were texting so much. They refused to discuss what the problem was between the two of them, Sami was no help at all, and Dad just pleaded ignorance.

It was about a month or so later that I realized I was starting to remember more and more details about what happened between the intersection and the hospital. They were just little things here and there, usually just a fleeting vision, part of a song on the radio, a bit of conversation. There were still huge gaps in my memory but at least they were starting to get smaller.

Labor Day weekend was eventful, at least for the guy who shot me. It seems he tried to carjack an off-duty sheriff's deputy and took a 9mm in the leg for his trouble. His car had quit, he was going through withdrawals and he tried to cop a new ride. The detectives found Dee's purse behind the front seat, along with a bunch of other purses. The idiot just took what cash she had in her wallet and never bothered to check the rest of the bag. The ring was at the bottom. Mom didn't seem to be too happy about that and I wasn't sure why that was.

That was also the weekend that Sami came back from Germany. In what was an unforeseen turn of events, the camera that had been in her room went into the upstairs hallway between my room and Dee's room. This did not go over well at all. Dee at least had somebody else to vent about it to and she spent a lot of time in Sami's room when she first got back. I was glad she was back, too. She had a calming influence on both Dee and Mom. Things were still tense, especially about the upstairs camera, but there was a hell of a lot less yelling about it. Dee had been under the impression that they would all be removed when I went back to sleeping upstairs. Apparently not, as long as Mom had a say in it.

As summer progressed to fall, my vision and balance got better, at least to the point where I felt okay leaving the house on my good days. At Mom's insistence, we started slow, just a short walk to the end of the block or a short drive to get burgers or ice cream, progressing to slightly longer trips as Halloween closed in. Halloween itself was uneventful, Mom and Dee seemed to forget their feud for one night, and we all had a good time messing with the kids coming to the door looking for candy.

November brought news that the kid who shot me was going to accept a plea deal. Dee wasn't happy about that and for once, Mom was in total agreement. They wanted the poor bastard drawn, quartered, boiled in oil, and then immolated.

His story wasn't much different than that of many other small town young adults. He had been in Dee's graduating class, which is why she recognized the voice. He had played sports, he had been good enough to start at the high school level but not good enough to get a scholarship. After graduating, he got mixed up with the wrong friends, ended up hooked on meth, and robbed people to support his habit. I was the only one he shot and that was because he recognized us and panicked.

He would end up serving thirty years behind bars but would avoid the attempted murder charge they initially filed. I thought it should have been more but I couldn't actually identify him from a lineup and my testimony wouldn't be much help. They had the video and his admission before he lawyered up. According to Dad, there was no guarantee the admission would hold up in court.

When I asked about the ring, Dad explained that it was evidence until the plea deal was accepted by the judge, and the deadline for filing an appeal passed. It would likely be right around Christmas at the earliest and well after New Year's at the latest.

I was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast one morning when Mom came home. From the look on her face, we were about to have a conversation I wasn't going to like. Not surprisingly, I didn't like it at all.

"What possessed you to buy that ring, Michael?" I hated when she used my full name. It was never a good sign.

"Dee liked it, it looked good when she tried it on, and it fit her perfectly." I elected to stick to the basics.

"That was a lot of money, too much money. Especially for a birthday gift." I had the feeling she wasn't going to let this drop.

"It's not a birthday gift now, it's a Christmas gift." My attempt at humor fell flat. She didn't find that even remotely amusing.

"This isn't a joke, Mike. That's not appropriate for any gift except --", she caught herself before she finished the thought.

"Why isn't it appropriate, Mom? I've bought Dee and Sami things before and there's never been a problem. I buy one ring and it's a federal crime?"

"Because it's not what you bought, it's what you spent on it." Her glare was working its way to the white hot stage.

"It's my money. I earned it. To me, that means I can spend it any way I choose. That was the whole point of getting a job, to have money I could spend as I wanted." I didn't want a fight, I was just trying to present my side of the story.

Mom had a different opinion. "You can't buy things like that for certain people, Michael. It sends the wrong impression."

Oh, shit. It was finally starting to dawn on me what her problem was. She suspected I had feelings for Dee. "Who really cares, Mom? I don't think she's going to run around bragging 'Look at what Mike bought me'. I'm certainly not going to run around telling people how much I spent on it. It's none of their business."

I was concentrating on finishing my breakfast, so her hand slamming down on the table startled the shit out of me. "I fucking care, Michael. I don't like how it looks. You need to start thinking long and hard about where your life is headed, young man. There are some roads that once you start down one, you can't ever go back. You're a smart man, Michael. Think it through, all the way through, before you commit to something you can't take back." With that, she got up and strode out of the kitchen toward the master bedroom.

I had pretty much lost my appetite by then. I scraped what I had left on my plate into the garbage, washed it and the utensils, and put them in the drying rack. The truth was, I had thought it through. I knew I didn't have a future with Dee, she would eventually get over the whole "you saved my life" thing and we would go back to being a regular brother and sister, just like my relationship with Sami. I hadn't met any other women who made me feel like Dee did. Not even close to it. If that was ever going to happen, it wouldn't be in this town.