-present-[date=2006]
She lifted her head up, looking at me with a fear-stricken face and sobbed "But I've never been unfaithful Rob. Never! You are and always have been, the only man I have ever loved and ever had sex with in almost twenty years. This can't be true! It just cannot. The test has to be wrong Robert, it has to be!"
Yet here was scientific proof that I had not fathered my?...our?...her son?
"....... Robert, I swear to God that I would never betray you with another man......."
-flashback-[date=1997]-Charles POV-
Charles fucking an unresponsive Megan. He had to use lube on his cock to get it into her dry vagina. Only half-way in, overexcited, he ejaculated and from his premature orgasm sagged down on her unmoving body. Finally he pulled out of her and then sat back looking dumbly as his semen dripped out of her.
When he heard her moan and looked at her eyes glazed from the drug, the face of his sister-in-law Megan, his brother's wife. His brother Robert's wife! Charles scrambled backward away from his latest victim in horror at what he had just done. Falling off the bed with a loud thump and tangle of his still drink impaired limbs.
He crawled across the floor to a chair and used it to pull himself to his feet. Then braced, he stood there dumbly staring away from the bed. If he didn't look at the bed, what he had just done wasn't real and he could ignore the guilt beating at his stupefied conscience for this sordid crime.
Finally he lurched his way to the loo and took a piss. He wet a facecloth to wipe the lube and semen off his shriveled penis. Then in a drunken panic, he realized that he needed to cover up the evidence of his rape of Megan.
He staggered back to the bed. Using the cloth to wipe up the mess of lube and semen he'd left smeared across her vulva and down her bum crack to the sheet below. Trying to wipe up as much as he could see. He avoided thinking about staying to monitor her breathing.
Ignoring the possibility that the drug he slipped her could have a deleterious effect on her heart or respiration. Drunken logic claims that what you can pretend is not real, never really happened.
He tossed a blanket over her, so he did not have to look at her naked body anymore. It was difficult coordinating getting dressed. Finally he managed, the effort sobering him a little. He started crying and berating himself for what he'd done.
"You stupid fucker! You useless, evil asshole. You call yourself a man? You're just an animal! Only an animal would rape his own sister. Fucking betray your own brother. I hate you! I hate you so damn much, I think I'm about to spit blood!"
Carefully Charles made his way down the hotel hallway to the elevator. While sagging against the elevator railing he started to sob, then forced himself to be silent as he stiffly marched through the almost empty lobby out through the post-midnight darkness and into the ugly lighting of the carpark.
After wandering up and down the rows of cars, while muttering incoherent insults against himself, he finally found his sportscar. He sat in it for at least half an hour, his head against the steering wheel as he cried out loud in self-pity. His wracking guilt and his burning hatred towards himself for how badly he has fucked up his life.
After wiping his eyes and blowing his nose a couple of times on an old rag. He started up the car, slowly backed out of the slot and with drunken exactitude drove out of the carpark, down the street to the on ramp, then accelerated his way onto the Highway.
His mind was a raging mess of confused images of the women he had fucked, the women he had raped and the two women he had loved. Now the two women he hated. He failed to notice that he was continuously pressing down the accelerator and was tearing along, automatically weaving through the moderate traffic.
Soon he was going more then 150kph and tears were dimming his vision as he drove screaming his self-hatred at the world........
"It was a few days later that we learned of the death of my brother, in a collision with a removers lorry outside Oxford. Eventually, the coroners inquiry would blame Charles for being too intoxicated to safely drive."
"I suspect he was feeling guilty for betraying me, his brother. Maybe for raping you, Meg. I would hope that he was still capable of a guilty conscience! From the police reports he had been driving like a madman. He may even have deliberately chosen to die violently."
Megan shocked, sobbed "Oh God! I don't want to think of him as a suicide, Rob!"
"No more then I do Meg.....I, I try to accept the coroner's decision that it was an accident."
[date=2006]
"I think it is important to supply some the missing pieces of this puzzle. Why I eventually became suspicious about the circumstances of Byron's conception.......After Charlie's death, when I would run into someone who had known him during those last couple of years.......My bother and I were not identical twins but we shared many superficial similarities in appearance.......They would flare up in anger if they assumed that I was Charlie. It turns out that not all of his sexual conquests had been consensual. At least two women had made claims that he must have used a date-rape drug on them."
[date=2002?] - Robert's POV during second confrontation -
Accepting that my drivers license showed that I was not my younger sibling. In a bitter voice, she asked as I put my wallet away.
"I can see that you cared for your brother. I assume you did not know of his crimes?"
The look on my face, she hissed as she realized I had known something. Hastily, I blurted out as she glared her fury at me.
"Wait, No! Not how you mean! Please. Allow me to explain. I did not suspect my brother Charlie was a rapist until, oh, about two, two and a half years ago. A woman I did not recognize, who must have been another of his victims. I never even learned her name. Just as you mistook me for my brother, she accosted me over near Fleet Street."
"Without warning, this unknown woman was screaming at me in the street. It was such a shock. I didn't know how to respond. I just stood there dumbly, trying to understand why this woman, this stranger, was making such a public spectacle of herself. The only word I could clearly hear was 'Charley'. I did not comprehend the rest of her words until later and I'd had the time to think about them."
"Hearing that name, of my dead brother, why would she be yelling his name at me? I think that is what kept me rooted there and not walk away. Finally, after an endless minute of loud ranting, she just ran off and disappeared."
"I had to go and have a stiff drink. While I sitting in a nearby pub, my hands shaking in fear and anger I suppose. I tried to sort out what all she was screaming at me. Finally I realized that she thought I was my dead brother Charles and was accusing me, him! of drugging and raping her."
This second woman, still with an angry suspicious look on her face, nodded for me to continue my explanation.
"Honestly. That was the very first inclination I had that something sordid, some very bad act may have been committed by my brother. Now here you are, to confirm that whatever he did, he did more then once! I am grateful that at least you allowed me to prove my identity and didn't just assault me."
"I sincerely beg your pardon if I seem rather self-absorbed but you are the proof, the confirmation I have been dreading to hear. That the brother I loved had been a monster. This is like stepping on a long buried land-mine from a forgotten war and setting it off without any warning."
Her unresolved anger was obviously directed at me. I was the only available target of the rage she had carried for all these years. I wanted to help her to direct her hatred outward, instead of continuing to be held within to poison her life.
"The closest thing to closure I can offer you is this, that Charles died horribly. Trapped and crushed and burned alive in the wreckage of his sportscar. And he died alone, without any hope of begging forgiveness for his sins."
She silently glared at me, obviously judging the sincerity of my words. Abruptly she stood up and then walked out the Coffee Shop door and was gone. I could not decide what words of apology could suffice and I would suspect she did not want to hear such meaningless platitudes of pretentious sympathy.
I just sat there and silently cursed my brother for endowing me with such a tarnished legacy.
-present-[date=2006]
I gently hugged my wife and in little more then a whisper continued "That, my dear Meg, is my hypothesis about what happened to you that night. Charles must have spiked your wine or champagne. When you fogged out, he took advantage of the party crowd and confusion to lead you back to your hotel room. There he took advantage of you."
"He raped you and accidentally fathered Byron. The family at the party and the hotel people all assumed that he was me. Especially when I showed up that next morning without my luggage, as it had gotten delayed in transfer for some reason."
Twisting around on my lap to face me. Meg had a look of suspicious anger on her face while she demanded an answer "God damn you Robert! Why haven't you ever explained this to me? Fucking Hell, I am the boy's mother. I do have an interest in the conception of my own children!"
Good thing I was holding tightly onto her hands or in her frustration, she would probably have lashed out at me.
I can't remember the last time Meg was angry enough to use obscenities or strike at me except in playfulness.
