Next of Kin Ch. 01

'Still super easy to read, ain't she?' she whispered to me.

In a low, private voice, and feeling more like an Ashford in the sense that I'd wanted to be than I had all day, I replied: 'Yyyup.'

***

I did not get a lot done, that first day, and I didn't expect that I should have, either.

It was the day of my father's funeral, what was I supposed to do? My sisters and I spent the day in a strange sort of orbit around one another, wishing to be close by while simultaneously having no clue as to what one did for the rest of a day like this one. Anything we tried to do just felt... wrong, either too serious or far too frivolous, given what had already happened. All of our usual haunts failed us, one by one.

We ended up collaborating to unpack our father's room, denuded now of the people that had once occupied it, currently nothing more than a space for sentimental treasures and bittersweet memories. It needed to be done; there were plenty of members of the extended family that should have some trinket or another to remember dad by, the things he had collected and kept close in all his years. Paintings, often achingly beautiful in their construction, were taken off of the walls and wrapped, ready to either be hung up elsewhere, or shipped to those who would value them more. Books- more books, even after the immensity of the office collection- were looked through, boxed up or taken. A box full of jewelery, once belonging to my stepmother and remaining with dad as keepsakes once she passed, went to the sisters. I doubted any of them would wear a single piece from inside, but of any of us, they were the three who would treasure them most.

At Imogen's insistence, echoed by my other two sisters, I kept my father's watch, plated in a pale silver that I assumed to be platinum. It had always looked to me like a knickknack built of metal bones, shining with a dead gloss that made me uncomfortable to see my own reflection in it. The mechanisms still worked fine, but the hands had been set ten minutes fast; dad liked to be early, wherever he went.

By the time we were finished, I found it hard to so much as keep my eyes open, the constant ticking over of my thoughts proving far more exhausting than the manual labor of digging around through my dad's stuff. My bed- the bed I had here, anyway- called to me, and though it was still slightly unfamiliar, stiff in ways that a well used mattress was not, I fell into it gladly. A little late afternoon nap before I cooked the ladies dinner would be just what I needed.

***

I did not wake up alone.

In the crook of my elbow, cheek pressed to my forearm, lay Catherine, still in the depths of sleep herself. It was impossible to tell how long she had been there, but I had slept a few hours and just looking at her was enough to tell that she had not come by recently. I sighed, but not unkindly.

This was the sort of stuff she used to do a lot when we were growing up, a habit that had lingered off and on in her ever since. It was an odd thing, really: my sister, the hardest studier among us all, bookish and analytical to a fault, was a shameless and inveterate cuddler. I couldn't count the number of times I had woken from a nap, or from straight up sleep, only to find her stuck like a limpet to my side. The closeness was not something that bothered me, it had always been kinda nice, but... well, there were sometimes awkward moments.

For example, a certain stiffness that men get just before waking up. Catherine had been doing this my entire teenage years into adulthood.

Sleep makes us all unguarded, and Catherine's supine pose and penchant for comfortable clothes had left her exposed against me; with the top few buttons of her shirt undone the fabric had settled into a deep, cleavage-baring v. The generous curves beneath were on full display, soft, pillowy, and very definitely pressing into my side. If she was wearing a bra, I could not tell, nor did I know whether thinking about that enough to find out would be better or worse.

Her skirt, similarly, would be sufficiently long when she was standing up, but horizontal as she was it left long stretches of pale thigh exposed, one of them crooked a little ways onto my leg. One hand lay near flat on my chest, fingers tensing and relaxing idly, in the grip of whatever dream she was having. And it was clear she was having a vivid one.

Cat tended to have a lot of those.

Of course I could not tell the content from here, but the redness in her cheeks suggested much, more than I wanted, stuck where I was. I didn't want to rouse her, not when she was so deeply under, but there was no way for me to get away without dislodging the blushing woman, without, in fact, physically shouldering her off of me. Without much interest in doing that and having to linger in the shared awkwardness that would inevitably result, I opted instead to simply close my eyes again, hoping to go back to sleep and skirt around the entire issue.

But in the dark behind my eyes, the feeling of my sister's body against me, the sounds that she made, all became far sharper to my senses.

Catherine's breathing held the deep, rhythmic meter of sleep, but a brewing shudder below it suggested much of what she was dreaming about. She pressed close into my side, her thighs squeezing down, rubbing together inasmuch as they could. She clung to me, her body moving slowly but definitely, making unseen shapes that my imagination sparked into far more inappropriate forms.

Cat made a little whimpering sound, and I opened my eyes. My brain was not doing me any favors here.

Not that being able to see her made it any easier to deny what she was dreaming of; my sister's hips rolled against my side in gentle circuits, grinding herself on me without, I hoped, knowing what she was doing. Lips, slightly parted, blew a panting stream of hot breath into the hollow of my shoulder, where her head lay resting, blushing. Beneath her eyelids, Catherine's eyes moved rapidly, darting around whatever dreaming landscape was inside her head. Shivering in her sleep, she nuzzled in, the tip of her nose tracing the side of my neck.

She was close, so close, and I could feel my face beginning to heat up. If there were plenty of reasons to back away from this, from what it began to make me feel just watching her, then the simple, biological imperatives underwriting all of it were more powerful; I was still hard, and it was becoming less a morning wood issue by the second.

And then, under her breath but with unmistakable passion, she said my name.

"Said," is a little bit of an understatement, actually: she moaned my name, slurred it with a low and sleepy desperation that I had never heard her use before. She clutched at my shirt, fingers curling into the fabric, her grip tight and possessive. Her body rolled against mine, slowly at first but with a growing, tidal intensity that paired with the brewing tension in her muscles. My name passed her lips again, a whimper in the low afternoon light that really drove home just how hot and soft she felt against me in that moment. Her chest was now pressed into me, hard enough that I could feel the tightness of her nipples, whether I wanted to or not.

Whatever it was she was dreaming of, it was getting good.

But...

Maybe I breathed in a bit too loudly, or the way that I was going rigid to avoid even the appearance of impropriety had made me a less than satisfactory surface to sleep on, but Catherine began to stir. The process was gradual, but once it had begun nothing was going to stop it, and her lewd little dream slipped away from her by degrees. Her eyes, unfocused and blinking, opened up, and eventually cottoned on to where she was. She stiffened.

'Oh!' Catherine said, perhaps a little more forcefully than she wanted. To her credit she recovered quickly, moving to stretch her long limbs as though nothing were wrong, and she was simply waking up from a nap; it was a lie I was all too happy to help her maintain, right now. As she went about straightening her clothes I could almost be convinced that her motives for doing so were simply ones of propriety, the redness in her face embarrassment at being seen so vulnerable.

It was enough, I supposed, to give her the benefit of the doubt. Something that I was already really very willing to give her.

'Seems like you were having a kind of intense dream,' I said, before immediately beginning to fumble upon realizing that I had not so much skirted the thing I was trying to avoid, as glanced off of it hard enough to leave a dent. 'Hopefully not a nightmare.'

'No, not a nightmare,' Catherine covered her mouth as she yawned, looking away. 'Hey, are you hungry? C-come on, big brother: can you cook for us? You know we've missed it.'

She was up and moving before I could properly respond, but of course, I didn't mind that. If she wasn't waiting for me to come with her, after all, then I had time to adjust my pants and wait for certain things to return to normal before I followed.

And if I could cook, it'd keep me from thinking too hard about what just happened.