CWB 5 - More than Just Cousins

"Oh, Stacy," I said, reaching up and caressing her cheek, wiping a tear away. "You're thinking that perhaps, if I hooked up with Carrie, fell for Carrie and married Carrie, and if the three of us continued as we have been - that occasionally, you and me, we'd still be able to hook up? Is that what you're saying? If you can't have me all of the time, at least that way you could occasionally still have me?"

Wiping the tear from her cheek hadn't done any good, her eyes were dripping more now than they had before. She nodded.

"I can see that," I said quietly, nodding my head in understanding. I gave it a few seconds and continued, "I can see a few problems with that though." I didn't make any offer as to what those problems were, just that there were some.

"Like what problems?" Stacy finally asked.

"Just a minute," I said, pulling away and rolling out of the bed. "I've got to go to the bathroom. Be right back." I did go to the toilet, but stopped at my bag, hidden from view of the bed in the closet adjacent to the bath. I retrieved what I wanted, keeping it hidden in my hand.

"What problems?" Stacy repeated as I crawled up next to her on the bed.

"Well, for one - Carrie said she's not interested, at least not while you and I are together."

"She would be though. If I told her so, she'd be interested."

"At least you think so."

"I know so. I know Carrie. She really likes you."

"Maybe. I mean, you did spend quite a bit of the summer in her bed and she's spent quite a bit of time since then in our bed too."

"Haven't you had fun with her?"

"We've had fun with her. The three of us, with you, is more fun than just the two of us though."

"You don't like being with her?"

"We definitely had fun. And she does have magnificent tits, doesn't she?"

"I knew you liked her big boobs. All guys seem to."

"She does like to show them off, too. I don't necessarily just like big tits, though. I actually think some that are a bit smaller are absolutely perfect." I reached over, my fingers finding her nipple, and then my hand cupping her breast as I said this. "Just like these," I said, firmly squeezing her breast and then leaning down to kiss her. She kissed me, and then rolled over.

"I can't talk with you when you do that to me."

"Do what to you?" I asked, pretending that I didn't understand.

"Kiss me. Touch me. Make me want you."

"Oh." I didn't cuddle her to me, just waited a bit and then started up. "So, you've been hoping that Carrie and I would hook up. I'd fall for Carrie, we'd get married, have 2.2 children, live in a house with a white picket fence. You'd go back to school, get your degree, try and find someone else for you to hook up with and marry, and every once in a while you'd get to visit us, or we'd get to visit you, and the three of us could still be lovers? What about your husband? Will this be four of us, or will we hide it from him? Have you thought about that?"

"You make it so complicated."

"Just asking questions." I gave it another pause, and then said, "and there are still the real problems."

"Like what?"

"Like how about the problem that I don't love Carrie? And for god's sake, how about the problem of what I am going to do with this?"

"With what?" Stacy said, and then rolled onto her back to look at me again.

"This." I held it up in my hand.

"What's that?" she said, pushing my hand back just a bit so she could bring her eyes to focus on it.

I didn't answer immediately, just watched as it dawned on her what it might be, her eyes shifting from the ring in my hand to my face, her eyes getting wide. "It's a ring I picked up, an engagement ring for my fiancée, at least when I get one. I don't know, I think it will fit you. Carrie's boobs are bigger than yours, and her hands are larger than yours too. I'd probably have to get it resized for her; I don't think it would fit her at all right now."

She didn't respond to my levity; she didn't laugh at my attempt at humor. My face was soon as wet as hers was, the tears streaming down her face running all over mine as she held me close. It was several minutes before she spoke. "Are you asking me to marry you?"

"Well, I haven't exactly asked yet, and I don't know how we'd ever explain this to anyone else. Maybe Carrie, I guess, but can you imagine telling anyone else about how I asked you to marry me while lying naked in bed with you at a swinger's resort..."

The tears that had been leaking from her eyes now turned into a deluge. It was several moments before she said anything. "I... I can't. We can't... we can't get married, Ricky."

I just let it be for the moment, letting her think about it, before I asked. "And why not?"

She looked at me like I had a hole in my head. How could I ask such a silly question? "Because we're relatives. Because... we're cousins?"

I smiled and wiped another stream of tears from her cheek. "Are you sure?"

"What do you mean, am I sure?" I just looked at her and cocked my head. "Cousins can't get married... Can they?" Her assured statement as she started talking suddenly had a hint of doubt to it. I raised an eyebrow, smiled, and then nodded, indicating that yes, they can.

I watched the shock and wonder cross her face for a few moments, and then rolled over and stood up. Reaching out for her hand, I pulled, urging her to the side of the bed. She got to the edge and swung her legs over. Turning, I pulled a chair over and sat so I could face her.

"You're mistaken. I thought that was the case also, but it turned out I was wrong. I did some research and reading, and it turns out that there are a few states, ours not included, that prohibit cousins from marrying. There are a few countries where it's not allowed either, but in many countries it's actually quite common for cousins to get married."

"First cousins?" I nodded. "In some countries, it's perhaps the most common arrangement, cousins getting married. First cousins, second cousins, first cousins twice removed - it's not uncommon for a variety of reasons."

"But what about... you know... birth defects?"

"The same thing my dad said, something about 3 headed babies or the like. It turns out it's pretty much a myth. It is true that repeated inbreeding can cause problems, just look at the European Royal families, but that's over multiple generations that something like that occurs."

She looked at me with a new wonder in her eyes. I could see her rethinking everything she'd been assuming. When she cocked her head a little bit, I knew she had a question about something. "What?"

"Your dad? You were talking to him about... cousins... marrying?"

"No, not at all. When he figured out you and I were having sex, he made the comment about being careful as we didn't want any three legged babies or something like that, which was what got me to begin to look into it. I printed some stuff out and gave it to him last time we saw them. I don't think he's ever looked anything up on the computer, he still gets a newspaper for God's sake."

I hadn't even thought about the why I'd given that stuff to dad. It wasn't until just that instant, telling Stacy about it, that I realized in my mind, I really had been setting up the groundwork. In sex, it's called foreplay. In movies, or books, it's called foreshadowing and I suddenly realized I'd done exactly that. Even though I hadn't followed my own thoughts through to the end, I realized that I'd known for much longer than I'd admitted, that I wasn't interested in Stacy just being my girlfriend any longer.

"So... you just gave him information on cousins getting married?"

"Pretty much. I didn't even think about it, just that he'd made a stupid comment and I gave him some information to correct his thoughts."

She was quiet for several minutes, I could see the thoughts whirling through her mind, and then - the look. I knew she'd decided on something but didn't know what. "I don't know."

"Don't know what?" I asked, sensing perhaps a tease, perhaps a serious question.

"I once promised myself that I would never marry anyone that I hadn't lived with for at least a year." Ok, so that was serious.

"So, another three months and you'll have been living with me for a year."

"Actually 4. You made me sleep on that damn couch for almost a month."

"Oh. Ok. So, 4 more months."

"And I said I'd never marry anyone while I was in College."

"You graduate in May or in June?"

"May. I think the 14th is the last day of finals"

"So," I started, working out logistics and timelines in my mind, "we could get married in June, in... like 5 months?" I asked feeling my fingers moving as I counted the months on my hand.

"And what if I don't want to wait that long? What's wrong with May 15th?"

Ah, so that's how this was going? "You want to be planning a wedding during your final weeks before graduation?" I knew she hadn't considered that.

"Yeah, good point." I could see her thinking, and reaching over, she took my hand, laid back and pulled me to the bed beside her. "There is that other thing, too."

"Oh," I asked, my hand slipping up and cupping her breast, "and what's that?"

"Well, whoever I marry has got to be the best with his tongue that I've ever had."

"The best, huh?" I said, with a grin, my fingers pinching her nipple, "And would you say that um, maybe, I qualify?"

"Actually, I've been thinking that I should marry Carrie as she's really good with her tongue, but you're welcome to try and convince me otherwise.

~

"How was that?" I asked twenty minutes later as I slithered my body up between her legs and entered her. Between my saliva, and her juices, I slipped right in, her legs wrapping around me.

"Uhmmm, that was pretty nice," she said her hands gripping my ass to help me pleasure her, "But you'll need to stay in practice."

"Oh yeah?" I questioned, slowly sliding in and out of her with my cock, "and how often will I need to practice?"

"Ohhhhh..." she shuddered. "I think... once a day... will make you the best."

"Only... once?" it was my turn to shudder this time, my cock swelling and moments later erupting into my fiancée. Fiancée! I thought; I just fucked the girl I'm going to marry for the very first time. I stopped my motions, panting from the exertion for a moment.

"Well, you're welcome to practice more often if you think you need to. I'll be glad to help whenever you want to practice..."

Collapsing onto my elbows, suspending my upper body above her, I flexed my rapidly shrinking cock inside her. "I love you Stacy."

"I love you too, Ricky."

~

"So, do we tell our parents?" I asked a few hours later as we were headed to the airport.

"Tell our parents, what?" Stacy answered, and once again I could hear the total Imp in her voice.

"About... about us?" I wasn't quite sure what she was getting at. We'd left a little early, going through Cancun to visit the jeweler as the ring didn't quite fit perfectly. They'd sized it, and she'd then been insistent on putting the ring back into the box to fly home.

"What about us?" she asked in her best "Who, me?" innocent voice. I knew she was trying to jerk my chain but wasn't quite sure why.

"About us," I repeated, "... getting married?"

"Oh! Are we getting married?" She looked over at me with a straight face, "I didn't agree to anything like that, did I?"

"Oh, you didn't?" I asked in response. "We didn't have a conversation about cousins getting married, about how you'd have to live with someone for a year before you got married, and how it would have to be after graduation so you had time to plan a wedding..." I glanced up at the driver, unsure whether he spoke enough English to know what I might be talking about and bent over to her ear to whisper. "And how you wouldn't marry me unless I was the best damn fucker at cunnilingus you ever experienced and how I needed to practice every day until the wedding?"

"Well, I remember talking about all of those things, but I just don't remember anyone actually asking me to marry him."

I knew I had. I'd talked about how my papers had eased the surprise for at least my father, and how I'd thought about it after we made love about how that was the first time I'd ever fucked my fiancée, and I remember her asking me if I was asking her to marry her... and I'd said... what had I said? I thought about it and heard myself saying, Well, I haven't exactly asked yet...

"I, uh, I guess I said, 'I haven't exactly asked yet,' didn't I."

"You did."

"Hmmm. I guess I got carried away."

This time it was Stacy who leaned up to me; "you just got excited about doing me again."

"Yeah. I guess." I answered, nodding my head. "So, uh... Stace... What do you say you and me, shall we tie the knot? Ya wanna get hitched?" I tried for my best Humphrey Bogart impersonation. It must not have been very good.

"No."

I was shocked. It didn't come across as a tease, it was her truly saying "no."

"You..." I couldn't finish. "No?"

"No. Certainly not when you ask like that. I mean, I want the whole thing. Witnesses, down on one knee, you're going to have to make me special, before I say yes. I mean, come on Ricky boy, if you're going to make an honest woman of me, you're going to have to do it right, and that is not going to be in the back of the taxi on the way to the airport."

"Shall I have the driver stop?" I asked, pointing at the round-about that we were just heading into. "We can run over onto that center park and everyone can see us then."

"No way, no way," she repeated, "that's not romantic, just pulling over and "doing it". No quickie stuff, you're going to have to put some effort into this. A romantic dinner, maybe on the rooftop with a minstrel serenading us. Maybe a walk in the park, stopping at the center fountain and you drop to one knee. Oh, there are so many possibilities, but just pulling the cab over? No way, you're going to have to do better than that."

Despite having left early, with our stop at the jeweler, we were actually even a little later than I would have liked. The waiting area was crowded, and when I saw two seats together, I guided us straight there, and then told Stacy to give me her passport as we needed to have them checked before we tried to get on. I told her to stay and save the seat and went up to the counter with the passports. It only took a couple of minutes, and I'd barely gotten back and seated when the loudspeaker came on. "Rick and Stacy, party of two, please approach the desk." I looked at Stacy and shrugged that I had no idea what was happening, but picked up my bag and stepped back, indicating that Stacy should lead the way. The gate agent I'd spoken with, unable to hide the smirk on her face, was watching as we stepped forward. The crowd that had already stood to get into the boarding area parted, and Stacy stepped up to the counter. Before she could say who she was, the gate agent said into the speaker, "Stacy, we have a personal message for you from Rick." Looking at the paper I'd written she read it. "It says, Stacy, will you marry me?"

Stacy stopped, shocked, and then realized I wasn't beside her. She turned, finding me on one knee and holding out our engagement ring box, opened for her. I stood just as she leapt into my arms, the waiting crowd cheering and clapping. This time, there were witnesses and no doubt that I'd asked her, and her 'yes' was quite audible.

~

"Mom, Dad, Aunt Nora and Uncle Bob," I began. It was the first weekend in April, luckily April 1st wasn't on the weekend, so they didn't think it was a joke. "Uhm, as you know Stacy has been living at my place since last March, and uhm," I nervously and hesitantly said, inwardly cringing at the explosion that I knew was about to take place. "She's, uh, actually been living with me, almost since the beginning, and we, uhm, have decided to get married." It had been two months since I'd asked her to marry me, and after both of us acknowledging we expected negativity from our mutual parents, we'd finally sucked up our courage and told them we were coming to visit and asked if maybe we could all get together for dinner. It was at Nora and Bob's this time, although dinner was cooking, we didn't want to wait. We asked them to come out to the living room momentarily, and just told them.

"Over my dead body!" was Uncle Bob's almost immediate response.

"Now Bob," Nora said, her hand going out to his arm and gripping it, "let's think about this for a moment."

"What's to think about?" Bob said, turning to his wife, his face red. "They can't get married anyway, they're cousins." Nobody spoke for a moment, and then my dad did.

"Actually... that's not quite true." The way he said it I immediately could see the movie Independence Day where the President said that the government had never captured an alien spacecraft, "Actually Mr. President, that's not entirely accurate." Dad proceeded to reiterate all the things that I had told him, especially that although it wasn't legal some places, it actually was in our state.

"And besides," my mother spoke up, "it's not like it's the first time it's ever happened in our family."

It took me a second to realize what she'd said, I think it took Stacy and Bob and Dad about the same time. "What?" I said, turning to Mom, and realizing that Aunt Nora wasn't surprised by this revelation either.

"Our fathers sister Elaine, your great aunt, married her cousin."

"Aunt Elaine and..." I said aloud, trying to place relations that I barely knew.

"Your Great Uncle Del."

"Uncle Del? Do I know him?" I asked, unable to place the name.

"No, he died on D-day. Elaine married your Uncle Al a few years later." Suddenly idiosyncrasies of names and dates became clear in my mind. Kelly had been born in 1944, but her younger brother and sister, who looked very much alike and nothing like Kelly, hadn't been born until four and five years later but for some reason I knew that Aunt Elaine had gotten married in '48.

It wasn't immediately that Uncle Bob was completely convinced, but over time he came around. It caught Stace and me completely by surprise that Mom and Nora were actually all for it to begin with, and Dad had obviously had time to adjust to the idea (actually more than I did), but at least I wasn't sent out the door with my head on a pole. Before the weekend was done, the date was confirmed, the minister confirmed, the park where we'd be able to keep "social distancing" and still have people attend a wedding was picked, but not confirmed. But now that our mothers were in on it, the planning was almost on autopilot.

I would have thought it couldn't get any better, but when we finally got around to dinner, it did. The phone rang, and Aunt Nora got up and answered. All we heard initially was "Oh Wonderful! Just a minute, they're all right here," and she returned to the table. Putting the phone on speaker, she said "Ok, go ahead."

"Dave just got released from the hospital." It was my sister. Her husband Dave, when he came down with the virus, just kept getting worse. They had finally put him into ICU the second week of January, where he had been on a respirator for 6 weeks. Four weeks previously he'd been released from ICU but had now been released completely.

"How's he doing?"

"Not too bad. Now it's just recovering. They said it might be six months or more before he can go back to work. He had it pretty bad, we weren't sure if he was going to make it for a while."

"We were always sure he'd pull out."

"There were 17 other families here that said the same, but they didn't. Dave was really close to being one of the 446,000 Americans that aren't with us anymore."

It was a sobering statistic, although with the joy of Dave making it and coming home, it livened a bit. The conversation went on for a while, but just about the time everyone was ready to hang up, Stace jumped in. "Hey Ellen?"