Taking Dani's Place

Dani was safe for tonight. Safe at Vickie’s house, and she would never again be at any sort of risk from Rich. Joanna would make sure of that. Nothing would frighten Rich more than the prospect of jail. He’d put away too many criminals. She had few illusions about how well a lawyer would fare in a prison setting.

Shedding the soiled nightie and wishing she could shed her soiled memories and psyche as easily, Joanna put on a pair of Dani’s drawstring sleep pants and a ribbed tank top that hugged her breasts. She was astonished to be amused by a small but sassy voice inside her that said she certainly didn’t have to worry about getting older, not if she could pass for eighteen.

At last she thought that she might actually be able to sleep. She had just closed her eyes when she heard stealthy steps, and the door cracked open again.

So, this was how he wanted it? All right, he was going to be in for the biggest damned surprise …

“Dani? Psst. Dani, is everything okay?”

It wasn’t Rich. Joanna lay there, perplexed. “Kyle?”

She could not recall the last time he’d even been on the second floor. Or exchanged more than the most fleeting of conversations with his sister. Kyle and Dani, a year apart in age, had been inseparable until grade school, then tormented each other in the best traditions of sibling rivalry, then generally just ignored each other once they’d reached their teens.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Joanna said, but her voice quavered. The genuine concern in his tone … and here she hadn’t thought that her kids cared about each other.

“No, you aren’t,” he said, and now there was anger, too, a fuming angry frustration. He came in and shut the door. “He got to you, didn’t he? That lowlife prick. I knew he was up to something. I had this feeling. I should have … aw, shit. Dani, I’m sorry.”

“You … you knew?”

“I’ve seen the way he’s been looking at you. I thought he wouldn’t dare, you know, that he’d be too scared Mom would find out. Damn it!”

“Kyle …”

“It’s my fault. If I hadn’t moved down to the damn basement, he never would have tried. Did he hurt you?”

“No,” she said.

He sat heavily on the side of the bed and ran his hands through his hair. His shoulders slumped. “I’ll kill him.”

Joanna sat up, very conscious of the delicacy of the situation. She wouldn’t have credited Kyle with being so perceptive, so caring. He was ten times more so than she’d been, that was for sure. While she hated letting him think that his sister had suffered at the hands of their stepfather, she didn’t know what he’d do if she revealed her deception to him. Best, maybe, to let him go on thinking he was talking to Dani. She’d be sure to explain all to her daughter, and hopefully they could all get through this with poor, dear Kyle none the wiser.

“I’m okay, Kyle,” she said. “He didn’t hurt me.”

“Did he, you know, go all the way?”

“No!” she said. “No, of course not.”

“Maybe you should sleep downstairs,” he said. “In case that sack of shit tries again. I’d never forgive myself, Dani. What’s a big brother for if he can’t even protect his sister?”

At this, Kyle put his arm around her. Joanna couldn’t remember the last time her son had hugged her, and the tenderness in the gesture nearly brought her to tears. She let her head lean on his chest, thinking all the while that he’d close himself off forever if he found out the truth. He’d never trust her, or Dani, or any of them ever again.

“You’re a great brother,” she said. “I don’t think Rich will try anything else. I think he got it out of his system.”

“I dunno,” Kyle said. “A guy like him, you know how he is. It’s all a big power trip. A high. Like our real dad, sort of.”

“He’s nothing like --” Joanna had to catch it quick to say ‘our’ instead of ‘your.’ “—our real dad!”

“Risk taker. Maybe our real dad put it all into his stunts. The skydiving and bull riding and everything. Always more extreme. Rich is the same way, except it’s what he can get away with. He waited until Mom was out of town, but what if next time he thinks it’d be a kick to try with her in the next room? What then, Dani, huh?”

She was aghast to think that Kyle had that kind of impression of Evan, but knew that Dani’s memories of Evan were even fewer than Kyle’s own, so didn’t argue.

“I don’t think he will,” she said instead. “I’m going to college, remember?”

“How could I forget? I wish you weren’t, but now I guess it really is for the best. Getting you away from him, I mean. That’s got to be worth how much I’m gonna miss you.”

“Oh, Kyle,” she said. “That’s so sweet.”

“It’s true, Dani.” He hugged her against him. Joanna couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable, but tried not to show it.

But then, shocking her into immobility, he kissed her. Not on the cheek or on the forehead, but on the lips. And not a brotherly peck, either. It was a deep, wet kiss, and when her surprised mouth fell open, his tongue plunged inside.

When it broke, she tried to pull away but his arms were still around her. “Kyle … um …”

“I want you to know that it doesn’t matter to me, Dani. It doesn’t change things. You know, between us. Whatever he did to you. I don’t blame you for it. I don’t want it to get in the way of what we have.”

Joanna felt like she’d been dunked into ice water.

“You’re so special to me,” Kyle went on, as she sat there frozen in his arms. “These past few months … I know Mom worries about me, about why I’ve never moved out and gotten a place of my own. How could I explain it to her? I guess now that you’re really going to go, I’ll have to. It would hurt to be here all the time and have you be so far away. I’ll visit you, though.” He laughed a little. “Hey, maybe I’ll see if I can get into the same school. We could share an apartment, maybe.”

The bottom had dropped out of the universe. All order and reason blown apart like dust. The enormity of what he was saying left Joanna dumbstruck.

Kyle … and Dani? No. No, she had to be misunderstanding him. It just couldn’t be. Rich, that was bad enough! But … Kyle?

His hand on her breast left no room for doubt. He touched her gently, lovingly, with none of the tentativeness that might have suggested it was for the first time.

“You know I love you, Dani,” he breathed, cradling her breast. “I always have. And I know you love me, too.”

How long? Dear God, how long had this been going on? She couldn’t believe it, but couldn’t deny it! Another secret, aworse secret, going on under her very nose?

She had to stop him, stop this, put an end to it before it all went too far and too terribly wrong.

“Please, Kyle, no,” she said, her voice shaking so that she nearly couldn’t get the words out.

“It might be our last chance,” he said, caressing both breasts now, and nuzzling into the warm hollow of her throat. “I want to make it better, Dani. After what he did, let me make it better. Let me do what you like. Let me make you happy.”

Her mind spun. If she told him now, it would shatter the entire family. But if she didn’t tell him, if she kept playing at being Dani … where would that lead? She couldn’t! Not with her own son!

He guided her hand to his lap, settling it onto the bulge in his fleecy sweatpants. Quite a respectable bulge, as it happened, and an utterly unbidden heat rushed over her.

No! How could she even be thinking it? With Kyle? With her son?

But what would it do to him if she rejected him? If ‘Dani’, whom he loved, pushed him away? It would destroy him!

“Just the way you like it,” he promised in a murmur against her neck, and he took her earlobe between his lips and suckled at it.

Her indrawn breath was tremulous from a mix of horror and shameful desire. Beneath the hand she had been too stunned to move from his lap, the stony thickness of him twitched and swelled.

“Kyle …”

“Have to be quiet, though, with him right down the hall,” Kevin whispered. “Unless you want to try sneaking down to my room.”

“We better not,” she said, meaning that they’d better not even do this at all, but he evidently thought that she meant something else. He climbed beneath the covers with her, their bodies pressed close in the narrow confines of the single bed.

He pulled up her tank top and rested his head between her breasts. Joanna was struck with a new worry – Kyleknew Dani’s body! From much more personal experience than Rich’s surreptitious spying! What if he noticed? What then?

“You feel so soft,” he said, stroking her. “So good, Dani.”

The hell of it was that he felt good, too … that the warmth of him against her, and the urgent push of his loins on her hip stirred feelings she hated and craved at the same time. Her sensible mind screamed out in protest, telling her how very wrong this was, the worst possible thing she could do, the very utmost in taboos. Herson! This was herson!

But oh, his mouth on her breasts was heavenly. Her hips bucked of their own accord when he skimmed his fingers over the flannel pajama pants and plucked at the drawstring.

She could not seem to get enough air. Her breath was a quick, shallow panting, and small mewls came from her throat. Kyle loosened the drawstring and then his hand was on her, touching her, so light, so gentle. And she was hot, she was wet, she found herself wanting him to probe deeper. To slide his fingers into her.

No. No, she had to stop this!

“What if he catches us?” she whispered, frantic to stop him, desperate for him to continue.

“What’s he going to do? Him of all people? Forget him, Dani. This is about us.”

Kyle became a strange humpbacked shape, writhing beneath the blankets as he divested her of the pajama pants, and himself of his tee shirt and fleecy sweats. Her legs and feet felt his hairy thighs, and the dangling weight of his balls, and the stiffness of his cock. She tried to twitch away, tried to bring her knees together, but he had already flung the discarded clothes out from beneath the blankets and hunkered down between her legs. He kissed the inside of her thigh, and ran his tongue in a long licking stroke up to her groin.

“Oh, no, no, Kyle, don’t,” Joanna pleaded.

“The way you like it, Dani, I promise,” he said, and fastened his mouth to her. His tongue swirled and delved.

Joanna bit down hard on her lip as the sensation – the unbelievable, unexpectedly wonderful sensation – coursed through her. Again, that voice in her mind shouted in panic that this was Kyle, this was herson, she was committing the worst kind of incest … but that voice was drowned out by rising passion. She wantonly spread her legs and raised herself to him, clutching at his hair, tossing her head from side to side on Dani’s pillow.

She came almost at once, and with such overpowering force that she nearly lost consciousness. By the time her dizzied thoughts regained some semblance of coherence, Kyle was already poised above her and she felt the tip of his cock nudging her.

“Ready, Dani?”

“Yes,” she heard herself say. “God, yes.” And without knowing she was going to, her hand encircled him and guided him in.

He groaned and sank slowly onto her, into her, burying his length. He was big, bigger than Rich, and that entering thrust seemed to go on forever. At last he was fully inside, their loins sealed together, his weight upon her and his cock throbbing in time with his pulse.

Joanna held to his sweat-slick shoulders, looked up into his familiar face – a stranger’s face now – and saw his eyes half-lidded with pleasure. He withdrew with the same slow care, her flesh clasping at him, and drove forward strongly again.

“Oh, Kyle!”

“God, Dani, you’re so hot, so hot,” he said. “I love fucking you. Do you love it? Tell me how you love it!”

“I … I love it,” she said, knowing it to be true as he moved above her with a quickening pace.

She was going to come again, soon, soon and hard, a climax that would make the previous one look like nothing. The feel of him, the fullness, the sliding thick heat pumping and pumping, and she was swept up, thrown, tumbled by the onslaught, and it was all she could do with the last of her sense to keep from shrieking aloud.

Kyle rocked and strained and thrust, faster now, faster, and Joanna gripped his sides with her thighs and his ass with her hands and helped urge him deeper. She thought she might just explode, might just die, and it was exquisite.

As he began to quake, too, and to convulse within her as his cock surged with gush after gush, Joanna blacked out from the sheer ecstasy and knew no more.

Awareness returned an unknown stretch of time later. She first realized that she was alone, and that she ached all over as if she’d run a marathon. Her body was clammy with cooled perspiration. Her loins felt pleasantly abused, sticky with the residue of spent passion. Every bone, every muscle felt wrung out and exhausted, but at the same time incredibly refreshed.

Her eyes fluttered open to see Dani’s room in the bright light of day. She took a long breath, and let it out in a sigh that seemed to come from her very toes.

Now was the moment of guilt, of hateful shame and self-disgust. She had fucked her son, and had enjoyed it like she’d enjoyed no man since Evan.

That hadn’t been part of the plan. None of that had been part of the plan. She’d intended only to catch Rich, and keep him away from Dani. To save her daughter. Her daughter, who might have been an innocent victim of her stepfather’s lusts, but was a willing participant in her brother’s.

The door opened. Joanna swung toward it, belatedly realized that she should have dived beneath the blankets, and saw Kyle standing there.

“Morning, Mom,” he said evenly.

Her jaw dropped. She stammered, but nothing sensible emerged.

“Rich is gone,” he continued, leaning against the doorframe. “I told him that I knew what he was up to with ‘Dani’ --” Here, Kyle actually made the little quote-marks with the first two fingers of each hand, “—and that I’d tell you, I’d tell the cops, I’d tell the whole world about it if he didn’t pack up his shit and get out.”

“Kyle … you …”

“And that if he tried anything tricky, I’d beat the hell out of him.” Kyle grinned. “I’ve been waiting a long time to tell him that.”

“You … youknew?” she cried.

“About this?” He waved at her unkempt mess of short blonde hair, and his grin widened. “Yeah.”

“But you and Dani --”

“Never happened,” he replied. “No way. You really think I’ve stayed around because of her? Jeez, Mom, she’s not my type. But I saw my chance to get to you, and I took it. I knew you’d have to go along with it if you thought all that bullshit about me and Dani was true. Looks like it worked.”

She stared at him.

“So, don’t worry,” Kyle said. “Rich is history, and he’s willing to pay through the nose to keep me quiet about what happened last night. Dani’ll be off to college in a couple of days. Then, Mom … well, then it’s just going to be you and me.”

He tipped his forefinger to his forehead and then at her in a kind of salute, winked, and sauntered out. She heard him whistling as he went down the stairs.

Alone in her daughter’s bedroom, Joanna began to cry.

**

The End