Brains & Brawn

John could feel the little tremors, as her pussy clenched around him as he paused once again.

Finally, when he felt the time was right he put his arms around her neck, pulled his upper body off the bar, and kissed her deeply. Only his feet were touching the bar as he once again plunged deeply in and out of her, now for his pleasure. Soon he could hold off no longer and with a low groan, exploded within her.

After a few moments of pure bliss, John realized that he was still holding himself off the bar. He could feel the muscles of her back and shoulders bulging from holding his additional weight. He knew from experience that she could hold him like this for a lot longer if she wanted to, but it had been a long day so he let himself back down onto the bar.

"That was great."

She looked down at him and smiled. "It sure was; just what I needed."

Then looking back up at the windows on the street side of the Pub she laughed and said, "I hope those blackout windows work like they said, otherwise, we just put on quite a show for our neighbors."

Chapter 17

"Do you believe it's been ten years already?"

Katie lay in bed next to John; listening to the just barely-audible noise emanating from the pub below. It felt good to be in bed at a decent hour, holding the man she adored in her arms, knowing that her new partners were taking care of the business. At Tim's suggestion she had taken on two partners, selling them a minority interest in the now highly-successful business. They both had been long-time employees, one a bartender and the other the cook. They now owned forty-eight percent of the business and would be paying her a substantial monthly sum for the next ten years. She had also negotiated a great deal with Tim and his partners for the purchase of the Shannon Rose, with Tim once again supplying the funds needed to buy out his partners.

"Tim, are you sure you are OK with this?"

"Katie, as long as you keep making the payments I'll have all the money I could ever spend. I'll going to enjoy myself, relaxing on my front porch, in my favorite rocking chair, overlooking a very peaceful and green valley. I've had enough of the desert."

John, officially known as John R. Strong, PhD, had cut back on his teaching and was now deeply involved in several NASA-funded projects. His first NASA project had evolved from landing a craft on an asteroid in order to get samples, to landing a craft on an asteroid in order to change its course to avoid an impact with earth. He was also consulting for a private company that had contacted him shortly after his paper had been published on the feasibility of capturing an asteroid for mining purposes.

"Katie, just think of it. Someday we'll be able detour an approaching asteroid, slow down its speed, and park it in an orbit around the moon. Then chunks of it can be shuttled to a mining facility on the surface. When we've removed all the useful minerals from the ore, what is left can be discarded on the surface or sent back into space."

Coming from anybody else she would have laughed and told them they were watching too many reruns of Star Trek, but coming from John it made perfect sense.

Everything in their lives was just about perfect; so you know that's when something catastrophic was about to happen. They got the news on Sunday morning. Margaret had been driving home from church the evening before she still went to the same one she had been going to most of her life. She left the parking lot from a different exit than she normally did. As she drove down the street, she realized that she was on the street that passed by the complex that she used to live in. As she entered the intersection, she saw a car approaching her from the left.

'He's coming awfully fast; doesn't he realize he has a red light.'

It was later determined that, because of the angle of the sun, he probably never saw the red light. He hit the driver's side of her car at approximately forty miles an hour sending her car sideways down the street into the traffic that was stopped coming from the opposite direction. Margaret was brought to the same hospital where she still worked, suffering major head trauma and internal injuries. Word spread quickly throughout the hospital and someone from personnel was able to get a contact number for her daughter Katie.

When Katie and John entered the ICU, they were given the details of the accident and Margaret's prognosis.

"She's had an extreme amount of head trauma. I'm not sure she's going to make it. We've done what we could to alleviate the pressure on her brain, but we can't tell how much damage has already been done."

"Will she regain consciousness?"

"We won't know until it happens. I wish there was more I could tell you, but with this type of head injury we never know."

Katie was devastated. She put her head on John's shoulder and started to sob.

"Katie, John, you both can spend the night here in the hospital if you wish. Your mother is well-loved here and anything we can do for you just ask. If she makes it through the next 24 hours, she has a chance."

They spent the next two days there at the hospital, checking in with the nurses for updates on her condition. Tuesday night the Doctor informed them that they were monitoring brain functions and, although she was not brain dead, she was in a deep coma.

"Please, you two have to go home get some rest. I don't think she's in any immediate danger; there is nothing you can do for her now."

They went home, received comforting support from the Pub staff, and got a bit of sleep. The next morning, Katie insisted that John return to work. She spent a couple of hours working in the Pub's office, trying to catch up and keep her mind off her Mom's condition. As soon as Fran, one of her partners came in, she left the Pub and headed to the hospital. This would be the pattern for the next thirty days.

Although, Margaret's condition had stabilized, and had even improved to a point where she was opening her eyes, the doctor told Katie that he was very concerned that Margaret showed no signs of cognitive functions. He warned that the longer this went on the less of a chance there was that she would ever come out of her vegetative state.

"Katie, there's nothing more we can do for her here; we are going to move her to a long term care facility in Phoenix. I suggest that you encourage family and friends to visit her often. Outside stimuli is often the only way that we get through to patients in her condition. Sit by her bedside, stroke her hand, talk to her, and read to her. It might get her brain functioning more normally again."

Because of her otherwise excellent health, and her brain's ability to run the involuntary functions of her body, breathing on her own, her heart working normally, to everyone who saw her Margaret appeared to be sleeping. Sometimes her eyes would be open but were focused on nothing, unseeing. She had been fitted with a feeding tube and was being given the nutrients she needed to survive.

After several months of taking her normal shift at the Pub and then driving up to Phoenix every few days to spend the night with her Mom reading to her, Katie was reaching the point of exhaustion. One evening, after finishing "Gone with the Wind," Katie just sat on the bed held her hand and talked to her.

"You know Mom, I don't know if I mentioned, John told me a couple of months ago that he was adopted. He told me that his birth parents were killed at the same intersection where your accident occurred and that he was taken from his dying mother's womb. How sad is that?"

If she had been more alert, Katie would have seen the flash of awareness come to her mother's eyes and the single tear that rolled down her cheek. She could not, however, have heard the scream that was echoing in the darkness of her mother's mind,

'Oh my God; what have I done!'

Margaret held on to life for exactly one year after that fateful night. Katie received a call from the facility shortly after her death.

It was eleven o'clock that night when her mobile phone began to vibrate. Katie looked at the caller ID and she knew.

"Yes, this is Katie O'Hara. It's over isn't it? How?" There was a long pause and then Katie said thank you and disconnected the call.

John held her as she let it all come out, all the grief and worry, poured out of her. When she finally calmed down enough to speak she said.

"They really don't know why, she just seemed to shut down as if someone just turned her off. It wasn't a heart attack, there was no sign of distress on her brain monitor. It's as if God said, 'that's enough; you've suffered long enough, and it's time to come home.'"

Chapter 18

After several months of procrastinating, Katie finally decided that it was time to clean out her mother's home. The house was neat and clean, well organized and appeared to be just as she remembered it. The furniture was old, but still in good shape. She decided not to waste time having an estate sale. She called in a company that specialized in buying the contents of houses that were in an estate situation. They gave her a price for the furniture and appliances and other personal items. Katie knew that the price was low but her time was worth more than the difference. She excluded certain items that were keepsakes and agreed to a final clean-out at the end of the week.

She donated her mother's clothing to the Goodwill organization and spent the last two days going through her desk and file cabinet in her home office. As with everything else in her life her files were all neat and well organized. Katie found copies of old tax returns, paid bills, instruction manuals for items she no longer had, several family photo albums and several files of financial account records and a box of old bank statements.

Katie had two empty storage boxes with her. Anything that she was going to keep went into those boxes. Anything that could be thrown out was placed in the garbage cans. She had just gotten to the last of the desk drawers when the clean-out company arrived. Not wanting to hold them up, Katie grabbed the last of the files and a large manila envelope and threw them into the storage boxes. She'd look through them again when she got home.

She took the storage boxes and several pictures from the walls out to her car. She watched as, one by one, all of her mother's possessions were loaded into a truck. Just before they left she inspected the near empty house. They had done a good job; there was no noticeable damage anywhere. The boss brought her a check, had her sign a bill of sale, and it was done. She picked up the large garbage cans from the office and brought them out to the garage, dumping them into the town's rolling garbage bin and then rolled the bin out to the curb for pickup. She asked one of the neighbors to roll the bin behind the house; she would be back next week to get the place ready for sale.

Katie took one last look around, shed a tear, and headed back to Tucson.

Epilog

The house was sold six months later. Because of its size and location they got a decent price for it. Soon Katie and John settled back into their anything-but-normal lifestyles. The storage boxes with her mother's personal effects and papers were put in the basement under the bar and promptly forgotten. It would be almost ten more years before they would be opened again.

John came home one afternoon after giving a presentation of his now highly-prized research on asteroids. As he opened the door to the apartment, he was greeted by a sight that he never got tired of. Katie was on her hands and knees, dressed in her workout shorts and a tee shirt, her still shapely butt swaying back and forth as she reached over to put papers on one of several piles in front of her.

"Katie O'Hara Strong, you get more beautiful every day."

She turned her head towards him, smiled, shook her butt again and said,

"You'll get to see just how beautiful later, up close and personal. Right now I'm busy trying to sort through my mother's papers. I don't know what made me think about them this afternoon; I suddenly remembered that I never did this after she died."

John could see that the contents of both of the boxes had been emptied out onto the living room floor and that Katie was throwing most of it back into one of them. The rest she was placing in piles on the floor in front of her. She appeared to be almost finished.

"I'm going to open a beer; do you want anything?"

"That sounds good; get me one too, thanks."

John was in the kitchen, looking through the cabinets for something to much on, when he heard Katie exclaim, "Oh my GOD!" and call out to him.

"John, did you ever put anything into these cartons; any of your old papers?"

"No, of course not. I don't think I've ever seen those boxes before and I certainly would never have put anything of mine in them."

With a tremor in her voice, she said, "Come here; look at this."

John put the beers down on the floor as he knelt down next to her and looked at what she was showing him.

"This file was in that envelope from my Mom's desk. When I opened it I found old newspaper clippings about an auto accident. I started to read one of them and realized that they were about the accident that killed your birth parents."

He looked at the yellowed newspaper article and realized that he had seen it before. Getting up he ran into the office that they shared and, from his file cabinet, pulled out the old folder that his father had started for him more than forty years ago.

"Katie, I have my folder right here. Why would your Mom have kept a file about that accident?"

"John, it gets worse. You never told me that you had an older sister."

"Yeah, they never found her. The police figured that someone reached into the car and took her out of her car seat before they arrived on the scene."

"John, you still don't get it do you? My mother lived in the apartment complex right there at the scene of the accident."

"No that's impossible; we've seen your birth certificate, you were born the same day that I was."

"That wasn't the only thing in the file. Here's a copy of my birth certificate, and a copy of the application that the hospital sends to the Bureau of Statistics when registering new births. Look who's signature is on the application."

John looked but he already knew the answer.

"John, I'm not only your wife; I'm your sister!"

With that she jumped up and ran out the door of the apartment, down the stairs and onto the street; John in hot pursuit. It was no use trying to catch her; they had traveled a little more than a mile before Katie disappeared into the night. The only thing that John could do was to return to the apartment and wait for her to return.

An hour later John heard a knock at the door. When he opened it, there she stood, totally exhausted, completely drenched with sweat.

"Come in before you pass out in the hall."

He ran to the kitchen and returned with two bottles of water.

"Here, drink these; get yourself undressed and into the shower. We've got to get your temperature back down to normal before you go into shock."

"I'm sorry I ran, I had to get away to think."

"Shhh, no talking now. Get in there, I'll bring you some dry clothes."

John stood in the doorway, making sure she made it safely into the shower. He went to their room, got her a fresh pair of panties, shorts, and a tee shirt, and placed them on the bathroom vanity and returned to the living room.

After twenty minutes, he heard the water stop and the shower curtain get pulled back. Ten minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom, slowly walking towards him, as if, she was unsure of herself and of him.

To John, however, her vulnerability only made her more desirable. At nearly forty-three years of age she looked as good as she had the first time he had ever met her. He stood up, closed the distance between them, took her in his arms, and kissed her tenderly.

When they finally broke their embrace she said, "Oh, John, what are we going to do; I'm your sister."

John steered her to the sofa and after she sat down, took her hands in his and knelt at her feet.

"Katie, you are still the same person that I fell head-over-heels in love with that first day of class; and you're still the same person I woke up next to this morning. I don't care that by all indications you are my sister. For our entire lives we have lived as our parents' only children. The rest of society knows us as man and wife; not by any deception on our parts, but by whom we are, how we've lived, and what we have done together. I am not about to throw that away and neither should you."

"But John, suppose somebody learns the truth?"

"How can they; as far as the State of Arizona is concerned, we were born on the same day, in the same hospital and each had a different mother. The only way someone could find out is if they had all the information that is in that file."

"Why do you think she did what she did?"

"I don't know; maybe she desperately needed to have a child and had no hope of ever having one. Then circumstances presented an opportunity which she took, never truly realizing what she was doing. I like to think that she took you out of that car for your own protection, and once she felt you in her arms she just couldn't help herself. Once she did what she did, there was no turning back and she had the means to completely hide, in plain sight, what she did."

"It's a good thing she died; never knowing.... Oh John, what have I done?"

John got up and sat next to his crying wife.

"Katie what's the matter."

"One night, I told her the story you told me about how you were adopted. It was during one of my visits to the nursing home; after I had finished reading "Gone with the Wind" to her. I just sat there and talked about anything that popped into my head. You don't suppose she understood do you?"

"There's no way of knowing for sure, but I would think she never even knew you were there."

They sat there for a while in silence and then John stood up, "Katie, why don't you go downstairs, get a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses and meet me on the patio by the chimenia. I have a couple of things I have to do up here and I'll come down."

Normally Katie would have asked him questions, but not tonight.

Ten minutes later, John joined her on the patio. The sun had been down for about an hour and the desert air was cool. A light breeze was blowing. John walked over to the chimenia and prepared a fire. After he got the kindling burning, he placed several small logs in the fire box. As they caught on fire, he picked up what looked to Katie like some rolled-up newspaper, placed it in the center of the fire and closed the door.

He stepped back and took a seat next to her, pouring each of them a glass of wine.

"Here's to my beautiful wife; the only woman I will ever love."

They touched glasses, took a sip, and settled back in their chairs, watching the flames dance and the smoke dissipate into the desert night.

The End

*

Thanks for reading. I hoped you enjoyed it.

Your comments are always welcome.

Submissive Romantic