All characters in sexual situations are 18 or older. Thanks for reading!
Just to be sure, Nick spent another lovely day with his mother, got his father out of the house with Alyson and Chris, and made his move in the basement again. Just like the today before today, it was a magical hour or so of making out. As they locked lips, he thought it wouldn't be so bad if he had to kiss her every day for the rest of his life to break each day's loop. But the next day was Sunday again. It seemed kissing her only worked the one time. Its loop-breaking magic had vanished.
Nick put a plan together. First, he walked to his room and masturbated furiously to appease his horribly swollen, purple balls. After he came enough, he went and knocked on Alyson's door. It took his sister a few minutes to open up. She looked at him bleary eyed, her brown hair sticking out all over the place. She wore a t-shirt that came down just below her hips. Nick tried not to look at her long, bare legs. Instead, he focused on how ridiculous her sleepy face looked.
"You look ridiculous." Nick smiled at her.
"Did you wake me up just to say stupid things? Wait ..." She scratched at her belly and collected her thoughts. "It's Sunday. Does that mean ...? You kissed Mom and it worked. Was it gross?" She quickly checked down the hall to make sure her parents weren't around. Then she roughly pulled her brother into her room and closed the door. "Well?" She turned and trotted back to bed.
"It worked, and it was super gross." Nick watched the back of her messy head and did not look at the perfect curve below the hem of her shirt where her thighs met her butt. He'd never look at that. She was his big sister, after all. He watched her climb into bed, pull the covers back up, and stare at him expectantly. He sat at the foot of the bed and filled her in. Despite having told a different version of his sister all of this before, he sort of enjoyed the deposition. Even with her making disgusted faces at him while he told her about the kissing.
"Let me get this straight, you've made out with our strait-laced mother three times now?" Alyson sat up in bed, the covers now around her waist, staring at her brother with eyebrows raised. "Holy shit, Little Brother." Apparently getting a million tries at something meant you could pull off the impossible. Alyson was impressed.
"Anyhoo." Nick felt a little flushed. He wished he could tell his sister that he'd actually liked those make-out sessions, but that secret would go with him to the grave. "So, now you're up to date. I'm stuck on Sunday, and I'd like to figure out how to get out. Can I have a look at your puzzle again?"
"Sure, you can. But you killed it when you moved it around." Alyson threw the covers back, got out of bed, and kneeled next to her desk with her back to her brother.
Nick quickly looked away. She obviously wasn't aware that she had exposed her white panties.
"Here it is." She fished it out her bag. One of the six sides of the cube lit up with cuneiform, the other sides were still dead and dark. "Wait, it's changed." She stood up and turned toward him, examining the puzzle as she moved it slowly in her hands.
"What is it?" Nick sat forward, his body vibrating with expectation. He just knew it was going to tell him how to break the loop. "Does it say something? Can you read it?"
"I think it's in some sort of weird dialect. I can't read it." She tossed the cube over to her brother and watched him catch it and inspect it. "Maybe Chris can read it. He's the real expert on Sumerian conloco dialects. "But he's still at school. Maybe I should call him?"
"Don't bother. He'll be here later today to surprise you. He's bringing a bouquet of bachelor buttons." Nick stared at the cube. He tried to twist it like a Rubik's cube, like he did on that first Saturday, but it didn't move.
"Flowers? Oh, that's nice. Chris is such a romantic." Alyson smiled and rummaged in her closet for some yoga pants. She pulled them on.
"Yeah, he's a real Romeo." Nick thought Romeo was a sleaze for macking on the much younger Juliet. And he thought Chris was sorta gross, too, for picking up his sister at work and turning on all that smug, hipster charm. But Nick wasn't going to say anything about it. "Let's show him the cube when he gets here."
~~
"I don't understand." Chris sat in his fiancée's parents' living room and looked at the cube in his hands. Alyson sat beside him, her hand pleasantly on his thigh. Her eighteen-year-old brother watched them closely from an armchair. "Last I saw, the puzzle was full of symbols and when you picked it up the whole thing glowed. The symbols are all gone, and there's permanently illuminated writing on one face? What's going on?"
"We'll explain later." Nick had no plans of explaining to him ever and hoped Alyson shared the sentiment. "Can you read the writing?"
"Sure. It's a script used chiefly in Bit Bunakki around 3,500 B.C.E." Chris fished out his glasses and put them on to get a better look. "It says,
the god Enki congratulates you ... but one needs more than a graze ... a woman has given you well-being ... return the same.
"
"That's it?" Nick scrunched up his mouth and bit his lip.
