John rubbed his eyes, the words of the book in his lap blearing a little. He looked up at the clock. It was nine o'clock p.m. and his wife lay peacefully beneath her crisp white sheets, her curly chestnut hair spread out on the pillow like a halo around her face. It looked like she was sleeping, but it had been almost a year since the car crash last Christmas that left her little better than a breathing corpse.
The doctors were hopeful at first, saying there was every chance for her to awaken at any given moment. But as the weeks stretched into months, John's hopes slowly faded until he could hardly bear to look at her face, searching for a twitch, or a tremble, or a flicker of a sign of consciousness. Even if she awoke, the doctors said there was no way of telling how the brain damage was going to affect her.
John stood up, ran his hand through his ash blond hair and walked to the hospital room door. The nurses were going on their rounds and had left the station empty. They all knew him by now and would often let him stay past visiting hours, leaving him alone with his wife so that they could spend their time together in private. He closed the door and went back to sit by the bed, holding her hand.
They had been married for only a few years when the accident happened. Amanda was divorced and brought two children with her when she moved in with John. Her first husband was over twenty years her senior. She was nineteen when they married and became pregnant within the first month. After she had the twins, the sex became practically non-existent. Amanda said her husband had told her that he felt wrong about "befouling" the mother of his children. She would often joke, saying that by having a girl and a boy in one shot, she was killing two birds with one stone, because Lord knows she wasn't getting any opportunities to have more.
When she met John, he was five years younger than she. Later on, Amanda admitted that she felt a little guilty about seeing a younger man. But right from the start, it all just seemed right. It was an odd coincidence, but he and Amanda had irises of the exact same shade of light, caramel brown, so that whenever he looked at her, it was as if he were looking into his own eyes. They had a similar sense of humor, loved to hike, could talk for hours about philosophy and politics, sometimes arguing when their opinions differed, but always able to reconcile in the end. And the sex was fantastic. After years of suppressing her sexuality, John was exactly what she needed. He unlocked her inhibitions and allowed her to explore things she never would have thought of doing before. Their first couple of months together, they could hardly tear themselves from the bedroom. She became vibrant with her newfound sexual freedom.
*****
It was by accident that John discovered the only way he knew to reach his wife through her perpetual slumber. He could no longer have those all night conversations with her, he could no longer see her laughing as she made breakfast, or hold her as she cried when they watched those romantic films she loved so much. But one day, performing the most routine of tasks, he thought he heard her sigh.
He was changing her clothes, switching her plain, white, cotton panties for a fresh pair, and as he tugged them down over her hips, reaching under her to raise her buttocks, a small, drawn-out breath seemed to escape from her. At first, John thought she was awake, and he looked up excitedly, but her eyes were still closed and her face was unresponsive. Tentatively, he ran his hand over her hips, down over her thighs. It was unmistakable this time: she sucked in her breath and slowly let it go. He paused for just a moment and looked up to make sure the room door was closed. He brushed his hand over the shadow of hair between her thighs, and again, Amanda's sigh set his heart pounding.
John stood there quietly. "What now?" he thought.
He had a vague sensation that what he wanted to do was probably wrong, but the possibility of reconnecting with his wife, of reaching her through the constant darkness and silence that separated them now, quieted any protests he may have had in his head.
*****
He moved Amanda's sheets and draped her legs over either side of the bed. Her softly furred pussy lay open before him. The folds were a dusty rose color and slightly parted. John rested his hand over the mound and began to softly stroke the outside of her slit with his thumb, up and down. Amanda sighed again. The lips of her pussy moistened, and John increased the pressure of his thumb, sliding between the folds to find her clit. It was swollen, and he could feel his cock hardening in response to her obvious arousal.
Walking around to the bottom of the bed, he pulled her body down so that her ass rested on the edge of the bed. He dragged the chair around and sat so that her sex was level with his face. John continued to lightly run his thumb over her clit, circling it the way that he remembered she liked it. She sighed again, and he hooked his thumbs on either side of her pussy lips and spread them apart so that he could look at her glistening folds. He had always loved looking at her pussy when she was aroused, telling her to be quiet when she would protest in embarrassment, and he loved looking at it now.
He leaned forward and flicked his tongue over the little erect bud peeking out at him. The muscles of her thighs twitched. He stuck his tongue out a little more and gave her a long, slow lick from the bottom of her pussy all the way to the top, pausing to swirl around her clit with the tip of his tongue. He could hear her breathing getting faster. Burying his face in between her thighs, he began to flutter his tongue against her and then sucking at the pink flesh. He slid his fingertips up under his chin, probing the slippery folds, and pressed a finger, then two into her warm, wet cunt.
When John looked up, her face was still a blank and her body was lax and unmoving. But her chest was rising and falling, her breaths coming faster than usual, though she didn't made a sound. He watched as he finger fucked her, pressing up and into her, finding that one spot that he knew she loved. John wished that she could respond the way she had before, writhing and moaning beneath him, arching her hips up to meet his hand every time her thrust his fingers deeper inside her, begging for him to lick her, to fuck her just before… and here it was now, her stomach tightened and John felt a deluge of hot cum shooting from her, wetting his hand and wrist, and dripping down onto the bed sheets. He furiously pumped his arm, stabbing into her pussy until the last of the warm, clear fluid squirted from her. But he knew it still wasn't over. Latching his mouth onto her pussy again, John furiously circled his tongue over her clit, lapping up the cum that lingered on her lips, his fingers still buried deep inside her, no longer pumping in and out, but applying a rhythmic pressure that caused the bud he was licking to swell in time to his fingers. He could feel the trembling inside her, and he increased the pressure of his fingers and the flickering of his tongue. Finally, when he felt the first hard spasm of her orgasm, he drew his fingers out and quickly plunged them in again, fucking her in time to the waves that rippled through her pussy until they slowly, quietly ebbed away.
*****
Six months after his discovery, John looked at her now. His cock was straining at his pants just thinking about the taste of her pussy, but he didn't dare pull it out. In all this time, he never once fucked Amanda for fear of a nurse or a doctor unexpectedly walking in on them. He could easily pull her hospital gown down and say that he had moved his wife to readjust her sheets or pillows, but it would be much more difficult to explain why he was shoving his dick back in his pants. He sighed and squeezed her hand with the tiniest hope in the back of his mind that she might squeeze back. Nothing.
There was a click at the door and the late night nurse walked in. She was scribbling something onto a clipboard. When she looked up and saw John, she smiled.
"Mr. Lawson! I didn't expect you to be here this late tonight. Shouldn't you be home getting ready for Thanksgiving tomorrow?"
"Hey, Jess." John moved the novel he had been reading over the bulge in his pants, silently willing his erection to fade. "I was just going to get ready to leave actually. How're things going?"
She shrugged and stuck the pen she had been writing with into her bun of blonde hair. "All right. Same old, same old, I guess. You know how it is."
Satisfied that his arousal had ebbed enough to escape notice, John stood up to pull on his jacket. He noticed that the nipples of Jess's ample bosom were poking through the top of her scrubs, creating hard little dents in the cloth. "So did you just start your shift?"
"Yeah, I got in a few minutes ago. It's pretty chilly out there. Make sure you bundle up."
"Yes, Nurse Jess." John rolled his eyes and they chuckled together, comfortable in each other's presence.
John had stayed late into the night at the hospital long enough to have built a rapport with the young nurse. At times, he had a feeling she suspected what he was doing with Amanda. There was one time when he thought he heard the door click while his face was buried between his wife's thighs, but when he looked up, it was still closed. Afterwards, when he left, she nodded at him, but couldn't seem to meet his eyes.
John glanced down at his watch. "Well, I better get going. I promised the kids that I would be back home to do some Thanksgiving shopping, and you know how I hate to disappoint. It was good bumping into you though."
"Same here." Jess pulled the pen from her hair and walked around Amanda's bed to the clicking and beeping machinery that surrounded her. "Get home safe. Say hi to Maddy and Chris for me."
*****
Maddy and Chris were Amanda's children. When John came into their lives, they were fourteen years old. Maddy was a frizzy-haired redhead with arms and legs that constantly seemed to be getting tangled up and in her way. She was taller than the other children in her class and painfully self-conscious about how she towered over her friends. Chris was sullen and introverted. He barely spoke, always seemed to need a haircut and would often duck his head to hide behind his long dark bangs.
They resented his presence at first, as John suspected they would, thinking he was there to take their mother from them. But he wanted to prove them wrong. He wanted them to know that he respected them and accepted them as important people in both Amanda's and his own life. After a year of dating, and he went to her children first to ask for their permission to marry their mother. Maddy delighted in helping him pick out the engagement ring, and Chris, young as he was, stood in as John's best man. After the accident, they became even closer, supporting each other through the doctors and hospitals. Maddy especially found solace in John's company, reminiscing about her mother when she was younger, and hiding her face in his shoulder when she couldn't speak past the tears.
*****
When John got home from the hospital, it was almost ten o'clock. He could hear the TV in the living room and Maddy's voice chatting on the phone.
"I think my step dad's home. Hey, is that you John?"
"Yep." The kids had never called him "Dad" and John had never insisted on it. He felt that if that was going to happen, it ought to come naturally. Besides, having them call him by name created a sense of comfortable informality that he rather enjoyed. "If you still want to get to the supermarket, you better finish up on the phone soon."
He walked into the kitchen, took off his jacket and hung it over a chair. While he poured himself a glass of apple juice, Maddy walked in and gave him a quick hug. Over the fours years John had known her, she had gradually filled out and was no longer the lanky teenager she used to be. Her grey shorts revealed legs that were supple and smooth, while her pink tank top covered a set of perky round breasts.
"Hey, you're home kind of late." She was tying her curly red hair up into a ponytail. Her raised arms stretched the tank top tight across her chest, catching under the swell of her breasts and lifting them. "How's mom doing?"
John's eyes flickered down for a fraction of a second and then refocused on her green eyes. God, his mind was going down roads he wished it wouldn't. "She's doing well. I was reading to her for a while and kind of lost track of time. So, how was school?"
