This story follows immediately after the events of A Long Time Coming
It wasn't the house we had grown up in. My parents had decided to downsize shortly after I had left home for college. And that hadn't been long after the fight that saw my twin brother thrown out of the house and enlisting in the army.
My name is Dana Bowman (nee Smith), and I'm a forty-one year old divorced mother of two eighteen year-olds, sole proprietor of a successful accounting consultancy, and perhaps the happiest woman on the face of the earth. I was so happy because I had at just that moment done something that I had once dreamt of but had given up hope of ever doing: I had just woken up, naked, in the arms of my brother David after making love with him the night before.
The previous day had been a veritable storm of emotions. I had been enraged, guilt-ridden, sobbing, and laughing. Oh, the laughing.
I have always had a habit of letting my emotions go racing ahead to the worst possible scenario. I have a good therapist who had taught me strategies to cut off the panic spirals as they are starting, but the revelations I discovered yesterday blew me well past those techniques.
When we were kids David was always there to derail the spiral with a joke or just an absurd observation. I didn't know how he did it, but there were times when he'd have me busting a gut almost before I knew I was spiraling. Yeah, yeah, I know, "twin telepathy". We were sixteen when I figured it out. When David gave me his attention, it was like he was taking in every last detail of me, my posture, my voice, my face. My eyes. When we made eye contact in those moments I knew he understood me and accepted me no matter what.
That was when I fell in love with him.
Then yesterday I let him know about the spiral I lived in that had been getting deeper and deeper for the past twenty-three years. It started because I had wanted him to see me as a woman and not just his sister. It progressed when I chose to defy our parents who knew exactly what I was up to, the confrontation with mom that led to mom slapping me, which lead to the fist fight between dad and David that ended with David kicked out of the house, and then David joining the army the next day. Then he was off to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. And then he almost died.
David looked me right in my eyes and told me that everyone could have made different decisions that night. Mom could have chosen differently, Dad could have chosen differently. And without missing a beat he made this complete left field observation that he could have chosen to join the navy. I needed a beat at the non-sequitur, but it was that beat that broke the spiral and gave me the greatest laugh that I have ever had since that night.
And it answered questions I had feared finding the answers to. Had the army and the war changed him beyond recognition?
Could
my David come back to me? First he made me laugh, and then he kissed me.
I deliberately cut over the the next part of last night.
They
didn't get to intrude on my happiness right then. Ultimately David swept me up in his arms and carried me to the bedroom. He eagerly took the opportunity to taste my pussy when he pulled my jeans off of me, but I needed him in me more than I had ever needed a man before. I gave myself, he took me, and it was more wonderful than I ever imagined.
At the end he had picked me up off the bed and held me against him as we reached our climax. The thrill of being wrapped up in that strength was something else entirely. It felt so good that I decided that it would be my new thing. God dammit, we were forty-one years old and we were going to have to work to stay in good enough shape to keep that going.
I'm not a small woman, five foot eight. A friend recently described me as "Victoria Beckham if she wore band tees and jeans". David is about six two and very fit, which makes sense as how he had retired from the army not even a week before. The power with which he moved me was so damn sexy.
I sat up slightly to look at his face. He was leaner than when we were eighteen, his skin reflected lots of time in the sun. He was just now showing some five o'clock shadow.
No doubt about it, my brother was an absolute hunk.
I let my eyes roam down his body. The tan on his face ended at his collar. He wasn't pale, just that it was clear he didn't make sunbathing a hobby. He looked strong in a way that said function was first, appearance would take care of itself. He had a little body hair, a brush across his pecs and some trailing down his abdomen to disappear under the sheet.
A wicked idea came to mind. I sat up and licked my lips in anticipation of waking him up in a very pleasant manner. I pinched the edge of the sheet and drew it back.
My plan derailed when he was revealed to the light. Seeing the scars on his arm from the bomb that almost killed him had given me pause, but now I saw how his leg had taken the most damage. There were long, pale ropes where I imagined shrapnel had cut him open. There were short, precise incisions that must have been surgeries to do fine repairs. And there were two places that had to be the skin grafts he had told me of over some of our online conversations. They looked strange, almost literally like patches used to repair an old doll.
An odd feeling settled on me. I couldn't name it until I reached out my hand to feel the graft's texture. I was getting tears in my eyes again.
David's hand came down and lightly rested on mine. I looked up to see his open eyes. He reached up and wiped away the tear that had started to roll down my cheek.
"Hey, I'm alive," he said, "I'm home."
"I know. That's not what this is," I said as I wiped away another tear. "It's gratitude. It's this, they're from someone or some people who chose to donate, they helped save you and I don't know who to thank."
"That's the one point where my list is incomplete. I have a list of everyone who helped me get back on my feet after that engagement. It starts with Omar Hernandez, our medic who pulled me back to cover despite the fire we were taking, and ends with Sylvia Olenrud, my physical therapist at Walter Reed who was a bigger sadist than my sergeant back at basic. Omar is a fireman paramedic in Florida currently and Sylvia is now a retired sadist keeping the details of her past secret from her grandkids. The skin donors are still anonymous behind the tissue bank's confidentiality."
"You keep in touch with them, Omar and Sylvia?"
"Facebook is a hell of an invention. I never posted much myself but I replied to other people's news as often as I could."
That made sense, given how our interactions had gone over the years.
"In fact," he said, "let me tell you some stories about some of the people who replied to my retirement announcement. Why don't you hand me my fatigues?"
"You mean the cargo pants?"
"Show some respect for the uniform, please."
I reached over the side of the bed to grab his pants, and my brat of a brother took the opportunity to slap my ass.
"Hey! Talk about respect why don't you?" I accused, my ire undercut by the silly grin on my face. "Sleep with a girl once and you're getting all presumptuous." I threw the pants at him. They flew well given the weight of all of the stuff I hadn't given him the time to remove from the pockets last night.
He pulled the pants off of his face to find me just inches away. A hungry look entered his eyes, one I was certain matched my own. I gave him a slow kiss on the lips. He put his hands on my shoulders, slightly pushing me away but with a firm grip that I wasn't going anywhere. His hands slid down my arms and his eyes danced as if he was trying to see all of me at once. Our hands met and glided past one another with a sensual caress of fingertips across palms.
He next touched my thighs. I wanted him to turn inward, but the jerk teased me when only his thumbs came close to where I needed his fingers the most. He instead felt over my hips and around my butt. He pulled me against him and I slid against his cock. I reached up and tried to take handfuls of his hair but found myself cursing his short haircut. I settled for holding his face in my hands and kissing him thoroughly.
He pushed me away again with his hands firmly around my waist. His thumbs lingered by the tattoos on the lower part of my belly, then he drew his hands up my sides. I straightened my posture, pulling my shoulders back to present my breasts to him. I wasn't sure how they compared to his hands, but I was anxious to find out.
His eyes traveled all over me. I swam everyday (thanks to living in Phoenix), and did Pilates three times a week. I was proud of my body and loved the way David was drinking me in with his eyes. Still, I needed more. I put my hands over his and slid them up until they covered my breasts. Oh, his hands were perfect, just the right size and his calluses scraped my nipples in a way no other lover ever had. He then wrapped his arms around me and began to worship my tits with his lips and tongue. I gasped and held him by the back of his head. I might have been smothering him, but his tightened grip around me let me know he was quite happy right where he was.
