Sheltering My Runaway Sister

It took me almost thirty seconds to realise that the young woman standing at my door, dripping with rain, looking like she was half-drowned, was my half-sister. Thirty seconds is not a long time, but when someone is in obvious distress, looking at you expectantly it can feel like forever.

I leaned out my door and looked up and down the street. This was a stranger on my steps and you heard about those things where criminals used pretty girls as bait to invade homes. The street was lit with yellow streetlights, obscured by the driving rain of a summer storm, and I could not see anyone else out there. I looked back at the young woman on my steps.

She could easily have been used as bait. She was six or seven inches shorter than my 5'10. Her hair was auburn, hanging limp, soaked with rainwater, framing a pretty face. She had round cheeks with a sprinkling of freckles across them and the bridge of her nose. Her lips were plump and her green eyes were surrounded by the smears of makeup that the rain had destroyed.

She was wearing very short denim shorts and a white tee-shirt that had become sheer in the rain. It was impossible not to look down at her large, shapely chest and the raised peaks of hard nipples. I noticed a duffle bag at her feet, bulging with its contents. She was very sexy and I almost licked my lips before her next words caused me to look back up at her face.

"Brent!" she had said, her voice almost pleading. "It's me! Bailey! Your sister? Can I come in?"

"Bailey," I said, dumbfounded with my surprise. "Jesus! What are you doing here? And yes. Come in!"

I quickly stepped away from the doorway that I had been blocking with my body and let her step into the foyer of my brownstone.

In my defence I had not seen Bailey in years. I was 22 years older than she was. Bailey was my father's daughter from his second marriage and me and dad were not close. The last time I had been in the same room as him, and Bailey too, I realised, was seven years prior, when I had visited Dad's city for a work conference. I thought back, trying to figure out how old she had been then. Twelve, I was pretty sure. She had just had her birthday and told me all about it. That made her nineteen.

Bailey was pretty much a complete stranger to me. So was my own father, frankly. My mom and dad had been kids when I was born. She was fourteen and he was sixteen. They lived in a small town and, almost predictably, they got stupid and careless and had me.

I had been told by my grandparents (on my mother's side) that they had tried to do the right thing. Dad's parents disowned him, but he moved into my Grandparent's basement with mom and tried to play house.

Looking back after all this time, with the help of plenty of therapy, I could see that they were not mature enough to raise me, but that did not do much to ease my resentment towards them. Within a year of me being born, my dad skipped town and started a life without me or mom. He finished highschool, went to college and got a decent job, all with almost no contact with us.

On the other hand, my mom got bored of being a mother and started going out with friends and partying, leaving me with her parents. Her friend group changed to a bad crowd and before long she had a drug problem.

Most of my childhood memories are gone, or a blur. Apparently that's from the traumas that I experienced. At least that is what my therapists over the years have told me. I do not have a lot of memories of mom, and those that I do mostly consist of her screaming at my grandparents.

Still, they did their best with me, and I was lucky to have them. They were good people, steady and there for me in a world where no one else was. My grandfather was a man I could look up to and emulate. My grandmother was warm and caring, giving me as much love as she could.

I was seven when my mother died of an overdose. I have some memories of the funeral, including seeing my father. I remember being very shy around him. Terrified that he was going to abandon me again if I said the wrong thing. It did not matter. He left again and I did not hear from him until I was a teenager.

Around then I guess he had his life on track and he reached out. We would talk on the phone once or twice a month and he started to send money to my grandparents. He lived in a different city so I only saw him once or twice a year. Still, it was some kind of relationship and I was desperate for it.

I remember his wedding to his new wife. He flew me to see him and I stayed with them in his big house in the suburbs. I was 21 years old and he had me stand up with him as a best man. That week I stayed with him, I saw what it might have been like to grow up with him as my dad. I was not sure I would have preferred it to growing up with my grandparents.

I remembered his wife very well. She was actually my own age, which I thought was crazy, but good for my dad, I guessed. She was very pretty with red hair and bright green eyes. She seemed very quiet and did not speak to me much that week.

I went back to my life and a year later he let me know that he was expecting a child. I was happy for him, I guessed. I hoped that he would do a better job this time. Still, my work and his kept us in different cities and away from one another so, looking back, I realized that I had only met Bailey four times in the 19 years she had been alive.

This would be the fifth, I guessed, looking at her dripping on my floor, just inside my door. No longer a little kid, and obviously in some kind of trouble.

+++++

"Bailey," I asked once more when she had entered, "What are you doing here? Are you ok?"

There was a pool of water forming around her feet in open toed sandals. I noticed that her nails were painted pink. My eyes continued up her legs, a bit short, but shapely, over the denim shorts that were dark blue with the water and across her chest once more. The white tee was so soaked that I could make out her bra perfectly through the now-sheer material. Her breasts were large for her short height, enticing in their youthful fullness. I blinked and quickly looked back up at her face. This was my sister and here I was ogling her like she was some kind of only fans model.

When I looked into her eyes once more I saw that the messy makeup was probably not entirely due to the rain. Her eyes were red and she had been crying. I could see her shoulders shaking and suddenly she burst out into a sob. She threw herself forward and wrapped her arms around my neck.

I was not ready for that and I stiffened for a moment as she pressed herself against me. She was wet and cold, but after a moment, I put my own arms around her in a hug. We stood there in my entryway as she cried against my shoulder. My concern for her obvious distress allowed me to push away the uncomfortable attraction I had felt just moments before.

"It's ok," I said, in my most soothing voice. "We will figure it out."

"It's just," she said between sobs. "My mom, she... I just can't... I had to go, to leave. It was too much. And I had nowhere to go, and then I remembered you. I found your address in Dad's office... I'm sorry. I shouldn't have come. I just didn't know what else to do."

Her words broke into crying again and I held her tight, stroking her wet auburn hair. After a few minutes she stepped away from me, taking deep breaths, regaining some composure.

"I'm so sorry," she said. "I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know why I'm here. I just..." She trailed off and glanced around, looking lost.

"Ok," I said. "First things first. You are soaked. You have got to get out of those clothes." I glanced down at the duffel bag at her feet and the puddle around it. "If you brought clothes in that thing," I said, pointing at it, "They probably aren't any more dry. Why don't you head upstairs. My bedroom is at the end of the hall. I have towels in my bathroom so you can dry off. Grab something to wear out of the closet. Just throw your clothes in a pile and I'll run them through the washer and dryer later. Then you can come back down here and we can talk through this, OK?"

Bailey seemed to take comfort in me taking control of the situation and looked up at me and smiled shyly. This was the first time I had seen her do this and I could not help but respond in kind.

"Thank you, Brent," she said. "This means so much to me. You don't even know."

"It's ok," I told her. "But I'll have to call Dad. Let him know you are here."

When she heard that her eyes widened and she started to shake her head but I raised my hand, forestalling any arguments.

"C'mon," I said. "You know that I am going to have to. But we will talk first. You can tell me what is going on. OK?"

"Ok," Bailey said. "That's fair, I guess. Thank you so much for this." She turned and walked up the stairs.

I took in a deep breath and shook my head, wondering what I had gotten mixed up with. I looked ruefully down at my chest where my white tee shirt was damp from her hugging me. I couldn't go up and change because Bailey was in my room. I shrugged to myself. I guessed I would have to deal with it.

I went into my kitchen and put my kettle on the gas range and pulled out my french press. It might be late in the evening but I suspected that we would need some coffee to get through this.

While I waited for the kettle to boil I picked up the duffel bag she had left in the hall. A small puddle had spread around it. Everything in there would be soaked.

I walked it over to the closet that held my washer and dryer. I opened the bag and found a pile of clothes that had been tossed in. I began to move them into the dryer. There were a couple of tee shirts, a pair of jeans, another pair of shorts. These all got tossed into the machine. I also found several pairs of panties. They looked like white cotton, very boring and simple. I quickly threw those in too, uncomfortable with touching my sister's undergarments. I noticed I did not find a bra.

I could see that she was wearing one earlier, through the wet sheerness of her top, so I guessed she had only brought one? I wasn't sure if that made sense. I was single but had lived with a couple women over the years and remembered them all having several.

I shrugged and shut the dryer, not turning it on yet, waiting for the rest of her wet clothing.

In the bag I also found a small makeup bag and a paperback book. I checked the book over and saw that it was not too water damaged. The pages were curled a bit at the edges, that was all.

I looked at the cover and could not help but smile. It was an old copy of On The Road by Jack Kerouac. I remembered reading that book when I was around her age and the sense of longing for adventure it had instilled in me, like it had for so many young people.

I heard the kettle whistle in the kitchen and I headed that way, dropping the book on the counter before making a strong pot of coffee in the French press.

I had just poured two cups when I heard Bailey on the stairs. I looked up to see her coming down towards me and I couldn't help but lick my lips.

She looked like a different person to the wet girl who had rung my doorbell.

She had dried her hair and must have run my comb through it. It was still damp, but under control. She had washed her face so her makeup was not running any more. She was wearing a blue plaid button up flannel shirt she would have pulled out of my closet and nothing else.

Her bare feet padded down the steps, and I noticed that her toenails nails were painted green. My eyes ran up her bare smooth legs. She was so pale that they almost shone white in the light of the stairway.

The shirt was obviously too big for her, hanging down to her upper thighs. She had buttoned it most of the way up, but it hung open at the top, showing off the space between her breasts and her collarbone. Her breasts were impressive before, under her wet top, but the way they bounced as she defended I could see that she had abandoned the bra. They swung free, but youth kept them firm and pert, despite their obvious fullness.

I shook my head and looked away, groaning silently at myself for looking at my sister in that way. What was wrong with me? She was family and she needed help. The last thing I should be doing was turning into a sudden pervert.

"I made you some coffee," I said when she entered the kitchen. "How do you take it?"

"Milk and very sweet," she said. "Thank you so much! For everything!"

"No worries," I said, trying to reassure her. "You found everything ok?"

"Of course! I hope you don't mind that I took your shirt?"

"Of course not," I said. "Did you need some sweats or something?" I did not mind her having her legs bare, but that was, I supposed, the problem. I liked the look of it too much.

"Oh," she said, looking down and tugging at the bottom of the shirt. This managed to cover slightly more of her thighs but opened the top up a bit wider. "I actually tried a pair on but they were way too big. Is that ok?"

"Of course. Never mind. Here. Have some coffee."

She took the offered cup and wrapped both of her hands around it, pulling it to her lips and inhaling the steam, seeming to be drawing warmth from it.

"Oh god," she said, smiling. "You have no idea how badly I needed this!"

I sat on one of the counter stools at the island in my kitchen and gestured for her to sit on the other. She hopped up and turned to face me.

"Ok," I said. "Let's get it all out there. What are you doing here, Bailey? What is going on?"

She took a deep breath and launched into her story. I asked a couple of questions along the way, but mostly it was her delivering a monologue. It seemed like she was unburdening herself of something she had been holding onto for a while. Her story meandered as she told it but this is the basic structure.

My father, it seemed, had done a much better job with Bailey than he had done with me. He worked a lot but had been there for her growing up. Providing for her, but also being there for her important moments like dance recitals and student teacher days.

Her mother had been more difficult. She had always been erratic and manic. Some of the time she was the perfect version of a suburban mother, other times she was unreliable. Angry and cruel sometimes, depressed and useless at others. Bailey told me that several times a year her mother would crawl into bed and stay there for weeks at a time.

Still, Bailey managed to have a pretty normal childhood. Of course as she became a teen she acted out and rebelled. She went out with friends. Drank, tried drugs, but, according to her, all within acceptable levels. She never let her schoolwork suffer and was on track to get into a decent school.

She had some boyfriends but even those relationships were pretty tame. She stressed that she was just a normal teen doing normal teen things. This, however, seemed to drive her mother crazy.

It seemed like a couple of years before, when Bailey was around 17, her mother had found Jesus and joined a Born Again church. It had been jarring for Bailey since they had raised her in a relatively non-religious household. Once her mother had converted she had gone all in, convincing my father to join the same church.

He always went along with his wife, Bailey said, blindly agreeing with anything she decided. So when she went religious he did too.

Suddenly everything in Bailey's life was turned upside down. The rules all changed and her freedom became non-existent. Of course she rebelled against it, which led to many fights, screaming, and, suddenly corporal punishment from both her mom and my dad.

"Wait," I said, interrupting her, my voice angry. "They were hitting you?"

"Well," she said, looking down, "mom was. She is a slapper. Dad ... well, he never wanted to but Mom would make him spank me while she watched."

"Jesus Christ," I said, disgusted. "And you were seventeen? I'm sorry you went through that."

"It's ok," she said. "Just something that happened I guess."

This went on while Bailey finished high school. Her grades plummeted and she did not get into the schools she wanted. She would push the boundaries and her parents would punish her. With no school she did not leave home. Her mother would not let her get a job so she was trapped in the house.

Of course she would sneak out and see her friends and they would hang out and sometimes party. If she got caught she would get punished. She did not see a way out.

"And then," she said, "about six months ago I met Kevin. He's a pretty nice guy and he seemed to like me a lot. So we started dating. I was sneaking out to see him, or sneaking him into my room almost every night. Then, last week Mom caught him in my room."

She took the last sip from her coffee and placed the cup on the counter and looked down at her knees, ashamed.

"We were fucking," she said. "I thought mom and dad were at a night service but I guess she wasn't feeling well so they came home early."

"That must have been embarrassing," I said, doing my best to avoid imagining Bailey having sex.

"I guess," she said. "But what was really embarrassing was the way she reacted. She was screeching like a fucking cat or something. She dragged him off of me, we were naked and she was slapping me. He grabbed his clothes and ran."

Bailey was tearing up again.

"She called me a slut and a whore, and wouldn't listen to me. He was my first! And I'm nineteen fucking years old! She acted like she caught me in the middle of some kind of gang bang or something!"

This went on for days, she told me, until Bailey had had enough. She decided she needed to leave. She asked Kevin if he would take her in for a bit but he actually broke up with her instead. My sister was going to run away anyway, just try to make it on her own, maybe sleep at a shelter, when she remembered me.

She stole a couple of hundred dollars from her parents and bought a bus ticket and came here. She didn't call me, scared I would turn her away.

"And so now I'm here and you know all about it. Will you help me, Brent? I know you barely know me but I promise I'll be good! I'll do whatever you want. I'll clean and cook and ... please don't send me back!"

She broke down in tears again and I pulled her to me in a hug. She melted against me and sobbed against my chest. I held her there for a good five minutes before she caught her breath.

"Ok," I said, finally after she had calmed down. "I will help you."

Her eyes lit up and she smiled at me.

"Oh my god!!! Thank you!! You won't regret this!" She almost shouted. "I promise!"

I had to smile at her sudden turn around in mood.

"You don't have to cook and clean for me," I said. "I've been doing just fine at that for myself for a long time. If you want to help out that is fine. I can also give you a job, working for me, if you want one. That way you can make some money, save up for your own place, or school if you want."

"Speaking of money," I said, remembering something she had just told me, "how much money did you take from your parents? I'm going to send it back to them."

"Why?" She sneered. "Why should they get any?"

"Because you don't want them to have anything over you. If you want to be free you can't give them any leverage. I'll pay them back and you can pay me back. I'll take it off your paycheck."

She nodded.

"It was three hundred and sixty dollars. What dad had in his wallet."

"Ok," I said. "Why don't you head on up to bed. The spare bedroom is the one beside one upstairs. That can be yours while you are here. I'm going to call Dad and let him know you are here and are going to stay for a bit. Tomorrow I have a full day of meetings and site visits, but I can get free the day after and we can hang out. Maybe go to the mall and go shopping for some clothes for you. You didn't bring much."