After the massive story arc that was A Boy Who... this is just a one-off piece, but I've been promising it for ages. It's a little bit slow moving sometimes but it puts flesh on the bones of Rayne's dark past and his complicated family relationships. It also introduces his big sister, Skye properly, for the first time. For anyone who hasn't read these stories before, a WARNING... there is some homo-erotic content. If you don't like that kind of thing, don't read it. If you do read it and you still don't like it, don't complain to me. If you do read it and you do like it, don't take or reproduce it without my permission or I will have to KILL YOU. Enjoy!
*
THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE:
Sentience filtered back gradually into Rayne Wilde's slender, prone, nineteen year old body, swathed in the moist caress of warm, rumpled bedding and last night's sweaty clothes. The first creeping hint of silvery grey pre-dawn light woke a slow, dull, insidious throbbing behind his eyes that warned of worse torment to come if he tried any sudden moves.
Rayne came to his senses far too abruptly, his head filled with a miasma of remembered scenes and sounds. Laughter that was too loud, music that was too awful, champagne... Christ, how he hated champagne! He had tried to avoid it, but crammed between the bride to be and her impending mother in law, with no direct escape route to the bar, he had been at their mercy for much of the previous evening. He was not sure which was worse, watching dad escape with the men in search of proper booze or being forced to sit it out, measuring the correct level of response between smiling but saying nothing and being 'delightfully urban and quirky' as his sister's new family so tactfully put it.
He had seen the warning light that went on behind Skye's narrow, emerald eyes each time he considered opening his mouth. Putting a litre and a half of Bollinger in there had not been the game plan but every time he looked as if he was about to make a sweeping statement she filled his glass again and he found himself left with no option.
Jack's kin were nice enough people, but he was utterly bewildered by them. The acid he had dropped earlier in the evening did not exactly help in that respect. It was like communicating with aliens. They prattled on about sheep tics, turnip blight and inheritance tax and a hundred thousand other things he had never once considered in his short, colourful life and he found himself trapped behind a tall, fluted glass with a look of increasing confusion on his face. It was precious little comfort that Skye seemed just as much out of her depth as he was.
Rayne half turned now, trying to move his face away from the encroaching light. Bad move! His teeth felt as if they were staging a break out through the sides of his face. He was not sure whether to be sick or just to die and get it over with. When he forced his eyes open again the room was dancing up and down like an ancient porn video with the tracking shot to hell. His view was filled with jiggling nipples, full and brown with wide, dark areolas, on a pair of small, pert, perfect tits. Rayne tilted his head, wondering if he had dreamed of taking them in his mouth last night, sucking on them greedily before he collapsed into darkness and the champagne did its worst.
A lot of things about the day before were slotting into place now with sickening certainty. As Skye Ann sprawled, half naked beside him, her breasts spilling out of the rumpled lace of her black nightie, which in turn was rucked up over the prominent swell of her pale, pregnant belly, he started to put together the trail which had led him here.
***
His sister was getting married. It had taken long enough for this information to sink in, which was not actually very long at all, just a little over five weeks in fact from her making the initial announcement to this fateful morning. Jack Barnes came from a good, solid, land-owning Dorset family. He was the only son of the head of a wealthy farming clan, who met Skye at a party in Cirencester about seven months ago. She had been dragged along by friends from University who thought the evening out would do her good. He was celebrating his best friend's 30th birthday. Skye helped him to celebrate well into the night.
He already had a fiancée. Skye had heard all about their three year courtship, and the vow of chastity he had made to Annabel; how they would not have sex before they were married and how much he respected her, as he fucked Skye urgently on a hotel bed at three in the morning. When mutual friends reported gleefully on her increasingly gravid state some three or four months later, to her amazement Jack did the honourable thing and proposed. Skye had been reluctant at first. She presumed that he was only being decent and a firm but polite 'no thanks' would be enough to dissuade him. In that she had been proven wrong. Jack wooed her determinedly, and when he brought her to Dorset to see the familial home and meet his parents, things began to click into place for the girl from the wrong side of the Dymchurch tracks. She was too far along to get rid of the baby, and in truth she had no desire to go through another abortion. She had been too young the last time and was just twenty-one now, with a fine arts degree virtually under her belt. The chance at a good marriage like this might never come her way again, she reasoned.
Rayne was not so sure. Her brother had always been protective of her when they were little and now they were grown up he was no different. No, in truth he was worse. Since their childhood he had loved her without reserve. He shared everything with her. She knew nearly all his secrets and he hers. They had their childhood spats, like all siblings, but no one affected him so deeply as Skye. Since Rayne turned sixteen their relationship had changed. More recently their attachment had grown beyond the simple platonic affection of brother and sister into a deep empathic bond that showed no signs of breaking. The scars of their shared past drew them together and held them close.
***
He was starting to remember. When they returned to the house last night, Rayne had stumbled back to the room he was sharing with Dad. Skye had charged him with ensuring that their father made it up the aisle to give her away. Preferably without embarrassing her in front of everyone! Jack was staying in a hotel in Dorchester with friends, as it was considered bad luck for him to see the bride on the morning of their wedding. It would certainly have caused ructions if he could see her at the moment, Rayne considered, shaking his head then abandoning the gesture as a very bad move indeed. He felt as though his brain was melting and trying to trickle out through his ears.
He was trying to put together exactly how and when he had come to be in his sister's bed last night. That part was still hazy. He remembered trying to get Dad to lie down, which had not been easy as their old man's liver was processing at least three-quarters of a bottle of Bushmills. He seemed determined to sing like a wounded tomcat at the top of his lungs until someone came to put him out of his misery. The only way to get him to sleep was to lie down beside him and pretend to nod off, the way one would with a small child. That worked for a little while, but had left Rayne with a particularly disturbing memory, one in which he woke to find his paralytic father kneeling over him with his pants undone murmuring; "Ahh Lily, I love ye. I really do!"
Rayne had fled into the darkness of the huge, rambling house and somehow his homing instinct led him to Skye Ann's bedroom door. She opened it, wrapped in a long, black silk dressing gown and wearing an expression of tolerant disgust. Too exhausted for arguments, she pulled her younger sibling into the room and collapsed onto the bed with him. And there he had slept, finally, sucking on the stiffness of her comforting teats like a child at his mother's breast.
So here he was the morning after, lying beside her, his hand still curled between her pale, slim thighs, gazing at the familiar curve of her tits and the novel swell of her fecund belly. She was so beautiful; her eyes lightly closed in a false, enchanted sleep; pale, heart-shaped face framed by her dishevelled ebony bangs; long lashes fluttering restlessly on her cheeks. Skye had always been so slender. For much of her youth she had a lean, boyish frame and tiny breasts, which she hated. At five foot six and a half inches in his socks he was slightly taller than she was now, but it had not always been so. For most of his life she had been his Big Sister literally and metaphorically.
They were united by the darkness of the secret they had shared. After the break up of their parents' marriage they were swept away by their mother to her sister's home in Romney where their Uncle Brian proceeded to erase their innocence. When Skye fled the nest, pregnant for the first time to one of his frequent, illicit coverings, the dirty bastard turned to her younger brother for release. Alone and terrified, Rayne kept his uncle's shameful secret for almost two years until he could bear the horror of it no longer. The resultant nightmare ripped the family apart and was dragged through the courts and the press for months afterwards. It sent their mother to her grave and drove their father deeper into the bottle. The only positive thing to come out of it was that it finally brought Skye back to him, after an absence of nearly three years.
She had returned older and wiser, the night before his sixteenth birthday. That night she shared his bed, holding him the way mum used to, and bringing him an innocent comfort he had not believed possible. Since then he had been devoted to her happiness. Their intimacy grew stronger with every month that passed. Although they denied the feelings that burned in them initially, it became impossible to keep such passions buried. His love for her increased emotionally and physically until he could not keep himself from entering her when they lay together in each other's arms. Nor did she try to stop him. As they tumbled from youth into young adulthood they became lovers and neither wanted it any other way.
