by Abbey Foxx
“I guess that’s me too.”
I know Landon’s looking at me even before I turn to him and catch his gaze.
“Well, that’s just me and you then, Sis.”
I point to his door.
“That is you right there, and this is me right here, Bro.”
“I’m not ready to go to bed yet.”
“Tough.”
“Come on, you can get all cozy, I’ll read you a bedtime story.”
“You know how to read?”
“Monopoly?”
“Bed.”
“Poker?”
“Landon!”
“Jeez, alright, I’m going.”
Just four more days to go. Four more days of pretending that I don’t want something and beginning to realize more and more I desperately do.
Landon pisses quietly against the porcelain. He cleans his teeth, washes his face, clicks out the light and disappears into his room.
A paper thin wall separates his bed from mine, and I’ve never felt more strongly that I wished for all the world that it didn’t.
Four.
Tilly
I am asleep for what must be three hours at the very most. When I’m woken, firstly by the noise of Marvin shuffling slowly across the living room floor, and then secondly and unequivocally by the sound of him vomiting fiercely into the toilet bowl, I’m lifted out of a dream about Landon. I’m at one of his games, amongst all of the technical staff at the edge of the field, cheering him on from the sidelines. There is nothing that indicates it, but I know we are married. The whole world knows it too - Landon and I have become a famous couple in the unexplainable confines of dream reality - and not only does the whole world know who we are, they approve of our union. They like us. They know it makes sense that we are together, despite the differences in our personalities and the fact that we are step siblings. We are a power couple.
I try as much as I can to get back to it, not only because I need the sleep anyway, but because I was actually really enjoying myself for once, but when Mom clicks on the light without a second thought, and the real Landon comes out of his bedroom in nothing but his boxer shorts to see what’s going on, I know my chance has passed. It’s not a sexual dream unfortunately, far from it actually, but it’s so vivid, that when I see Landon standing there at the foot of my bed, I can’t help but think for a passing moment that he’s about to get on into it.
It takes me a while to shake the sleep from my body and gather myself to what’s going on. It’s the middle of the night and Marvin’s condition has clearly not improved. If anything, it’s worsened.
I count three fierce bouts of vomiting, each one more violent than the one that precedes it, after which he returns to the living room shuffling in his inimitable way, takes refuge in his favorite arm chair and looks like he’s about to die. I’m not kidding, this is serious, Marvin looks so pale we can almost see all the way through him.
I sit up. I can’t stand up quite yet because I’ve slept in my panties, and I know they are probably wet.
“Mom?”
Mom looks concerned.
“Does anyone else feel sick?”
I shake my head sincerely, while Landon is too busy keeping an eye on his dad to respond. For a guy that smiles more than Cam Newton, it seems weird to see him looking so worried.
“We’ve got to take him to the hospital.”
Is it wrong of me to be looking at Landon’s ass right now? I mean, this is clearly a hugely inappropriate moment to take advantage of a crisis situation, but it is such a fantastic ass I can hardly help myself. The other side is clearly pretty incredible too, but everyone knows how much attention that part of The Donkey gets. So much so, in fact, that people forget about how good the reverse side is too.
Marvin is just about managing to wave his arm in negation to the idea.
“That’s not necessary. I just need-.”
He’s too far gone to be able to finish his sentence. The large breaths he has to take in between his words demonstrate the difficulties he’s having in communicating. Something clearly isn’t right. I’ve not seen him like this before, and if this is food poisoning it’s definitely much more serious than I’ve ever seen. This isn’t just a bit of an upset tummy, this is full on projectile vomiting, clammy skin and losing comprehension. Landon is right. See? This is what being in the middle of nowhere does to your health. This is what happens when you don’t have a cell phone signal. I’m just glad it’s not me, or that infuriatingly sexy stepbrother of mine.
“I think we’ve got to take him to the hospital. Can you drive him, Landon?”
“No, hospital”, Marvin manages to groan out.
What the hell is it with men and hospitals? My real dad was the same. Never went to the doctors unless he was literally on death’s bed, and even then he had to be forced to go. Marvin isn’t exactly an alpha male, but in this respect he’s demonstrating it. He refused all types of medication last night, even though he was clearly in pain, he’s woken up at one am to be sick again and he’s trying to convince himself it will pass. Maybe it will, but it’ll pass a lot quicker if he knows how to treat it.
“Where is the nearest hospital?”
“I think I’m going to be sick again.”
“I have no idea.”
“You see, if we had an internet connection, or a cell phone signal, we could find out.”
“That’s not helping, Tilly.”
“I’ll take him back towards the city, it shouldn’t be too long before we pick up a signal out that way.”
Mom gets Marvin a bucket, into which he retches but doesn’t puke. This is absolutely disgusting. How can I go from dream of a lifetime, which might be the best moment so far of the vacation, to nightmare reality, which is clearly the worst, in less than a heartbeat? How can I go through another night without getting a decent night’s sleep?
Poor Marvin. Maybe it would have been better if it had been Landon. I wouldn’t have minded seeing him knocked down a peg or two, and it might have made the vacation a little easier to get through without having to go through such a constant emotional roller coaster. I don’t think I would have liked seeing him puke though. The only good thing about this happening is that it might mean we get to head back to the city a lot earlier than I’d previously thought. If Marvin is out of action, how can we carry on the big family vacation without a stepdad?
Landon goes back to his room to get dressed, which gives me a quick window of opportunity to pull on my sweatpants and see just how bad Marvin is. I get him a glass of water which he barely wets his lips with, and check his temperature. He’s burning up and his skin feels so clammy he could have just come out of the shower. My expert analysis: get him to a doctor as soon as possible.
“I really just need-.”
Again Marvin can’t finish his sentence.
Mom packs a little bag while Landon gets the car ready. I feel completely useless watching all of this happen, still half asleep, not entirely sure if there is anything I can do to be more helpful.
“Will you be alright here?”
Great. First in the middle of nowhere with my brand new family, now in the middle of nowhere on my own. At least I might be able to get some sleep in I suppose.
“How long will you be?”
“I don’t know, it depends where the hospital is.”
“Is he going to be alright? He looks awful.”
“I hope so, darling. It’s not like Marvin to be sick. I expect it’s just food poisoning, but you never know. It’s good to get these things checked out. I expect it’s nothing.”
She may expect it’s nothing but she doesn’t look all that convinced. I’ve seen Mom worried before, and I don’t like it.
Marvin is still trying to resist while Landon lifts him out of the chair and carries him towards the car.
“Drive safely”, I say, but Landon is far too preoccupied to respond to me. He doesn’t even say something funny or ironic or tell me to make sure I g
et the breakfast ready for when they get back, or the jacuzzi, or pump up every single one of his footballs so he can put me at the end of the garden and aim them at me. I wouldn’t even mind that, but all he does it make sure his dad is strapped into the front seat, before he gets in behind the wheel himself. No goodbye kiss, no i’ll be back to be with you soon, no nothing. Not even after that dream I had.
“Don’t wait up for us”, Mom says, before kissing me and jumping into the back seat of Landon’s posh looking 4x4. A minute later they’ve disappeared into the darkness of the night, and I’m left on my own.
This whole thing has happened so fast. From Marvin waking me up to Landon getting them all into the car, no more than thirty minutes could have passed by. It feels weird. It feels absolutely unreal, and even more so because I’m lacking sleep so much. What I need is a day and a half of sleep without waking up, and if I dream about Landon again, that asshole, even better.
It’s one forty seven am. I shut the door, head back into the living room, flop down on the sofa that is usually Landon’s domain and realize with slowly dawning horror that I am completely trapped until someone comes back to rescue me. We are at least an hour’s walk from the main road, and, yeah, there may be a car here, but I don’t know how to drive. Even if I did get to the highway, there’s no telling how long it would take for me to find civilization and it’s likely I’d just die on the way from exhaustion anyway. What happens if I suddenly start getting sick and need Landon to nurse me better? What happens if I begin puking my guts up and need rapid extraction?
Seriously. They could have taken me with them. I mean, what exactly is it I need to look after here anyway? It’s nice of them to not want to worry me, but if this is the beginning of an outbreak, they might have just signed my death warrant.
I’m exaggerating, of course. I hate hospitals as much as Marvin probably does, and I should probably just go back to bed and forget about it, but I’m wide awake now and too worried about what might be happening to Marvin to do so. Plus my bed is an absolute atrocity. It’s obviously the reason I haven’t been sleeping well. Just looking at it gives me a headache.
While he’s out, and is likely to be out for some time, I decide to drag my mattress back into Landon’s bedroom, only I don’t put it back on the bed frame I took it from. In a moment of ingenious clarity, I lay it on top of Landon’s bed, thus creating a mattress of luxurious double thickness. Landon’s bed smells of him and being here makes me feel incredibly naughty. I shouldn’t be here, but because of that it’s turning me on.
My intention is to spend a couple of hours here and then drag my mattress back into the living room before he has a chance to get back. I could just put it back on the other bed and sleep there, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing I’ve given in and come grovelling back to the room in his absence. A couple of hours of incredible sleep in this double strength mattress amongst Landon’s sweet and sexy aroma is going to be worth two whole nights under the dining table.
It doesn’t take long before I’m feeling sleepy again. Protected by my growing confidence - if I’m going to be back in my own room before they come back, what does it matter? - I decide to remove my sweatpants.
A small, skin tight T-shirt to cover my tits, which, by the way, are anything but tiny, through which I can feel my nipples budding the more I think about him, and panties, just panties and certainly not granny panties. The rest is Landon. He was here only an hour ago and the duvet is still warm from his body heat. I pull it up to my neck, wrap it around my body and imagine that he’s here with me.
It isn’t much longer before I feel sleep tugging at me like a heavy weight, my fingers already dipped below the waistband of my panties and pressed snugly in against my pussy.
Landon
I have never seen Dad like this. I have to say I was deep into one hell of a surprising dream when the old man decided to mess things up for me and pull me right out of it. I guess that’s just pay back for the years I did the same when I was a baby. At least he didn’t puke on me. He got close to puking in the car, but at that point there was nothing left but salt and air. He’d even stopped complaining about where we were taking him.
It took thirty minutes to get a signal for the GPS, another hour or so to get him to the hospital, which isn’t so much a hospital anyway as some kind of emergency clinic out in the middle of nowhere, in a town with a name I can’t even pronounce. It’s so provincial, they don’t even recognize me here. We might as well be in another country.
They’ve got Dad on a drip inside just to get his fluids back up, while Rachel and I wait for news of what it is that’s happening. The doctors don’t seem all that concerned, but they don’t seem to know much about what it is that’s wrong with him either.
I was tempted to take him directly to a better hospital back in the city, but Rachel wanted to have someone see him straight away, so it made sense to come here. If it gets serious, I’ll have him relocated, but until we know more, we can’t really do anything but leave him here and wait.
Dad never gets sick, so I don’t reckon it’s going to be anything serious anyway. When they sort out his dehydration and get the test results back I reckon they’ll just tell us it’s either something he ate or because he spent too much time in the backyard under the sun.
He’s already embarrassed that we’ve brought him here, thinking he’s doing nothing else but wasting people’s time, so he’ll probably be mortified when we find out it’s nothing more than that. I’m looking forward to seeing the look on his pasty green face.
Rachel seems to be pretty concerned, so I try my best to make her feel better by telling her stuff that she probably won’t already know about Dad, and I think it works. I knew Dad was in love with this woman, but up until now I hadn’t realized how much Rachel was in love with him. It’s funny how it takes some kind of mini crisis to realize that. I think it’s the look you can’t avoid giving when you think about what might happen if that person wasn’t around any more.
That obviously isn’t going to happen, and I make sure she knows that. Dad is too much of a pain in the ass to have something so innocuous be all that serious for him.
When I’ve dealt with Rachel’s concerns, and we have nothing left to do but wait, I go over that dream again and again, trying to restore it back to its perfection, trying to make sure I never forget it. It’s already losing its glossy sheen, and in the event that nothing like that happens again, either in the dream world or for real, I don’t want to forget it completely.
The way that she looked at me, the deepness of the emotion that I felt when she did, or because she did, the way I could almost taste her. Shit man, that’s scary and beautiful all at the same time, and I cannot begin to explain what it does to my dick. Real life has sometimes never seemed as clear as that, and I would do absolutely anything in my power to experience it again.
I even try to get back to that same dream right there in the hospital, my head rested into my sweater and propped up against the wall. I swear I’m halfway there too, when the doctor picks that moment to come out to give us an update.
“What does more tests mean exactly?”
I can tell by the tone of her voice that Rachel is skeptical.
“We just want to keep him in today and possibly tonight for observation, that’s all.”
“Observation?”
“Exactly.”
“Looking for what exactly?”
“Well I’m afraid that’s something we don’t know at the moment. That’s why we are doing the tests.”
Rachel is not convinced and nor am I. It all seems a little vague to me. Dad’s sleeping so we can’t ask his opinion, but as far as I’m concerned, if he needs to stay in anywhere, I want it to be somewhere that has a reputation, a proper department and some of the best medical staff the country can offer. Even if it’s only a bout of food poisoning, I’m happy to pay for it. I can probably even get this covered on my insurance plan, but even if I can�
�t, money’s no issue to me. We only came here in the first place because it was quick, and now we know that Dad’s condition isn’t immediately life threatening, we can decide to move him elsewhere if we want to.
It’s almost day break. I’ve had a couple of hours sleep at the very most, and I can feel sleep dragging me back down. The last thing I want to do is drive into New York, but I also don’t feel all that comfortable about leaving him here. Whatever happens here, someone will have to go back and pick up Tilly, or at least tell her what’s going on. Whatever we decide to do with Dad, Rachel doesn’t want to leave him on his own.
“You go back, I’ll stay here with Marvin until we know what’s going on. I don’t want you to have your vacation ruined because of something silly.”
“It’s your vacation much more than it is mine, Rachel. What about getting him to a better hospital?”
“I’m not sure if that’s necessary, plus it might be bad to move him.”
“I can get a private ambulance to take you both to a hospital in the city with the best doctors in America. They probably don’t know what the hell they are doing here, and they might even be waiting for the good doctors to come on shift. It’s not exactly overrun.”
“And what happens to you and the rest of the vacation?”
“I’ll head back and pick up Tilly, and we can decide what to do when you find out about Dad. We can always do it another time.”
“There’s no reason why you and Tilly can’t stay there yourselves anyway.”
Tilly and I, on our own, in the middle of nowhere. Why is this kind of temptation put in front of me, with my career on the line, if I can’t hold myself back?
“Nor any reason why you can’t rejoin us when you find out what’s going on.”
You know, save me from myself, or catch your daughter and your step-son fucking. Whichever suits you.
“I am worried about him you know.”
“Me too. I’d feel more comfortable knowing he was somewhere serious as well.”
“How long do you think it would take to arrange a private ambulance?”
