In The Grace of Liars

"Uh, you know, I'm not sure. Here, you check," I said as I tossed her the keys. "I'm gonna start getting boxes out of the Jeep."

I made two trips in and out of the house, depositing boxes against the wall by the front door as I did so before Andi had any luck with the lock on the liquor cabinet.

"Haha!" Andi said. "Success!"

"You got it open?" I asked.

"Yep. You joining me for a drink?"

"Uh. Yeah, I guess."

"I don't know about you Chris, but it's been a hell of a long day for me."

"You got that right." Indeed, it had been a long day. From the Collin fiasco to my tight lipped Aunt and my old friend that was holding out on me -- a drink was surely in order.

"So what, are we getting drunk?" I asked.

"Why not?" She held up two bottles of whiskey. "Jimmy or Evan? Or did you want something a little easier on the palate?" she asked, smiling. God, she was beautiful, holding those bottles up, one on either side of her, almost touching her shoulders and framing her breasts with amber colored alcoholic flourishes.

"Chris?" she asked and I realized I was staring at her. "Jimmy?" she swirled the liquid in the Jim Beam bottle. "Or Evan?" swirling the Evan Williams on the other side.

"Is there any wine in there? I don't know if I can do whiskey tonight. We still have to drive home anyway."

"Why? There's a bed and a bathroom here. We finally got into this liquor cabinet, and I would remind you that from now on, when you say things like 'drive home', you'll be talking about coming here."

It struck me then that she was absolutely right. "Yeah, fuck it. You're right. But you pick the poison, I don't really care which it is."

###

Andi and I sat at the snack-bar, just like when we were kids only this time instead of Kool-Aid we were drinking something a little stronger. Memories came flooding back as we sat in that old house, smelling the smells and seeing all the old pictures on the walls. We must have spent an hour or more walking down memory lane, laughing and enjoying each others company. By then we were both buzzing along quite nicely and I was doing my level best to keep my eyes from fixating for too long on Andi's girl parts -- and failing about as often as I was succeeding.

"Chris?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"Earlier today? With Collin," she started. I flinched at hearing his name. I didn't like the guy but I was starting to wonder if that was because he was a douche bag or if it was because I knew that Andi had slept with him. The fact that I was possibly getting jealous of some other guy being with my cousin wasn't lost on me and that too left a sour taste in my mouth.

"Yeah, what about it?"

Andi swirled her drink as she searched for the words. "All day, I've been thinking about when you kissed me."

"When I kissed YOU?" I asked. "The way I remember it I didn't kiss you. You kissed ME."

"Well, that's true. But Chris, I've kissed lots of guys. And of all the guys I've kissed, I don't ever remember it being like that. I may have started it, but you definitely finished it."

My face flushed. I was both a little embarrassed for being called out on it and relieved that I wasn't the only one that felt it.

"It was amazing," she said.

I couldn't disagree with her. "Yeah. I felt the same way. How weird is that?"

"Is it weird?" she asked.

"Andi, you're my cousin. How's it not weird?"

"Wait, hold on. You've been checking me out since you got here, but you think it was weird that we kissed?"

"Well, what do you expect Andi? You aren't exactly modest you know? And the way we've been talking to each other -- I mean the things we've been talking about -- they aren't really the kinds of things that make me think of puppies and unicorns."

That made her laugh. "Puppies and unicorns? So should I cover up?" she asked, making a show of being modest, covering her chest with one arm and draping the other across her lap as if it would hide her bare legs.

That was the last thing I wanted! "No, I'm not saying that."

"So you do like to look at me."

"Well... yeah!" I sputtered, "Shit Andi, I'm a guy and you're... you know..." I knew that answer wouldn't fly though.

"What?" she asked. "I'm what?"

"You're... sexy. OK? Happy? My cousin is sexy." That took a lot out of me. I drained the little bit of whiskey that I had left in my glass and looked for the bottle. Andi had it cradled between her breasts, hugging it to her as if it were a teddy bear to give her comfort.

Andi suddenly turned smug. She sat back in her chair and sipped her drink, handing me the bottle as she did. "My cousin is sexy," she said, finally.

"That's what I said. And yes, it's weird."

"I wasn't repeating you. I was saying that MY cousin is sexy."

I looked over at her and suddenly I wanted to tear her clothes off. I wanted to touch her in all the warm places that I knew I shouldn't touch her. I wanted to feel her flesh give beneath my hands and gather up all of her softness and roll in it. But that's not what I said out loud.

"You think I'm sexy?" I asked, more than a little surprised. I figured she was just having fun with all the teasing she was doing. I had no idea that she was actually attracted to me.

"Mad sexy, cousin."

"And you don't think that's weird?" I asked.

"Maybe a little. But it's never stopped me from thinking it."

I shot her an inquisitive look. "How long have you been thinking it?"

Andi looked thoughtful for a moment. "I may tell you that one day. But it's not going to be today."

Things got quiet for a moment and I realized how awkward I felt. I wasn't usually this clumsy with women but this was new ground and I didn't quite know what to say. Andi, mercifully broke the silence.

"Chris?"

"Yeah," I said, thankful that we were talking again.

"Did you like kissing me?" she asked.

"Yes," I answered without hesitation.

"Would you like to do it again?"

"Yes."

Andi got up from her chair and sat on my lap, straddling my torso with her legs. She leaned in close to me and put her lips to mine and I was sent to a place of bliss. The softness of her lips pulled me in as the warmth of her tongue slipped between my lips and into my mouth. I could feel her body against me, her butt on my thighs and her breasts pushing against my chest.

I put my hands on her waist and felt her body, her ribs, her back. My cock was crushed beneath her and getting harder and harder with each passing second that her lips were against mine. The sensation was gloriously agonizing. I grew bolder, palming her butt and feeling her breasts in my hands, seeking out her nipples through her bra and rolling my palms over them. Every time I moved my hands or touched her in a new place, her kiss and her embrace became stronger and more urgent.

I knew that I shouldn't. I knew that we shouldn't be doing this. But she was beautiful and I was just a man. She made it very clear that this was what she wanted and despite the fact that I still wasn't sure if this was the right thing to do, I knew damn well that this was what I wanted. I had always needed Andi as a friend but now I needed her in a very different way -- a very primal and animal way.

Andi pulled her mouth away from mine and I saw her shirt briefly cover her face and then fly away behind her. I immediately put my hands on her chest, still covered by her bra but only for a few more seconds and then that too was ripped away. I leaned back to admire her. She had an amazing chest. Her breasts weren't large but they were perfectly shaped. They were stunning. Those nipples that teased me so mercilessly just a few nights before through her t-shirt were here in front of me now and begging to be touched and pinched and suckled.

Andi watched me as I studied her. "What's the matter?" she asked, suddenly self conscious.

"They're as beautiful as the rest of you," I said as I reached up to hold them.

Andi smiled and kissed me as I felt her breasts and then pulled away and replaced her mouth with her nipple. I sucked it into my mouth and played my tongue across it. Andi moaned in pleasure as I dragged my teeth gently over the apex of her nipple. My cock was leaking precum into my pants as I gently sucked and pulled on her with my mouth. I savored the suppleness of her skin, the delicate texture of her nipple, the feeling of her breast against my lips as she cradled the back of my head, rocking her hips against my hardness.

"Lets go to the bedroom," she said.

I hated to stop but she was right. We could only go so far on this stool and I had every intention of going as far as she would let me. Something inside me had changed. It wasn't just lust but it wasn't exactly love. It was something that had been bubbling under the surface since she kissed me at her front door. Something caged up in the back of my mind. She had opened the cage and it was out there now, in the open, and it wasn't going back in without a fight.

She backed off of my lap, glancing down as she did so to admire the damp bulge in my jeans. I followed her through the kitchen to the doorway of the master bedroom where she turned around and again pressed her lips to mine. I moaned when her hand reached down and squeezed my hard cock through my pants. Still kissing her, I began pushing her back, quickly cocking one eye open to make sure the bed wasn't too far away. It wasn't, so I kept walking her backwards, guiding her around the foot board, intending on pushing her down onto the bed.

But just a few feet before we got there, she fell. And she took me with her. I guessed she tripped on something, walking backwards like she was and I was the only thing she had to hang on to. It was a miracle that her head missed the wooden nightstand at the side of the bed. I wasn't so lucky though and cracked my head squarely on it as I fell on top of her.

Andi, not realizing that I had hurt myself burst into laughter. "What the fuck!" she said from underneath me, still laughing. I rolled off her and put my hand to my head which was already throbbing from the pain.

"Oh, shit, Chris! Are you OK?" she asked.

"Ah... yeah. I'll live. Maybe." I said when I found my voice again. I pressed my hand to my head to feel for damage. "What about you? You alright?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Landed on my butt pretty hard but that's what it's there for, I guess."

"What happened? Did I run you into something?"

"I don't know, I think I tripped on something. What's that, over there?" she asked, pointing.

Slowly I sat up and looked on the floor next to the bed. "You tripped on your purse?" I asked as I spotted it in the pathway.

"That's not my purse."

"It's not?"

"Seriously, Chris? Does that look like something I'd carry around?" she asked.

I looked at the purse again. It looked vaguely familiar. I knew I had seen it before, but if it wasn't Andi's then how could that be? As I grabbed it from the floor a puff of dust rose from it. Like everything else in this house that wasn't covered up for the last six years, it had accumulated it's share. I opened it and dug around briefly for a wallet that I knew must be there. I found it and pulled it out, opening the catch and flipping it open to look at the clear-window id holder.

Sitting there, still on the floor, my mouth went dry and I instantly sobered as I stared at my mother's face looking back at me from her drivers license.

###

I put the wallet back into my mother's purse and stood up -- too quickly. The knot that was forming on my forehead throbbed and I leaned on the wall for support as the room spun around me. Maybe it was the alcohol or maybe it was the bump on the head but I wasn't steady and the wall behind me was my best chance to stay on my feet.

"You, OK?" Andi asked, crossing her arms across her bare breasts in a sudden display of modesty.

"Yeah, I just need a minute."

Our little tryst was called to a halt, at least for a while. Seeing my mothers face evoked feelings of shame in me for what we were doing. Shame that up until this point, I managed to bury with the help of some alcohol and an unhealthy dose of lust for my cousin.

Looking around the room, I realized that it was probably best that we didn't make it to the bed. Unlike the rest of the house, the furniture here -- which is to say, the bed in this room, had not been covered with a sheet to keep the dust off. What's more, the bed looked as if it had been left unmade and forgotten all together when the house was locked up six years ago. It wasn't just unmade though; the bed cover and sheets were strewn about the bed as if... well, let me just be honest. I've seen beds that have been slept in and beds that have been fucked in and this one definitely resembled the latter more than the former.

With the bed in the state of disarray that it was in, and the sudden discovery of my mothers purse sitting next to it, I started to try to put the pieces together.

"C'mon, lets get you sitting down."

"Hang on," I said as I spotted something out of place among the mess of sheets. Reaching down, I pushed the sheet aside and picked up an opened prescription bottle, several pills dropping from the open end as I did so.

"It's my mother's," I said, more to myself than to Andi.

"What is it?" she asked.

"It's her heart medication."

I bent down and retrieved her purse from the floor. When I came back up, my head started swimming again and I wobbled a bit, still unsteady on my feet. I reached out to hold Andi's bare shoulder for support. She put her hand over mine, forgetting her modesty for a moment.

"Chris, you really need to sit down."

"Yeah, you're right," I said as I let her lead me back into the kitchen.

I sat on the bar stool and turned the bottle over in my hand as I turned the rest of it over in my head. Andi disappeared from my view for a moment, then reappeared wearing her shirt. Even with the pain in my head and the confusion of the past few minutes, I couldn't help but notice that she hadn't bothered with her bra.

"What are you thinking?" she asked, sitting down on the seat next to me.

"I don't know, but I think it's pretty obvious that someone's been lying to me about how Mom died."

"How do you figure that?" she asked.

"Andi, Mom died in a drunk driving accident."

"I know, but what makes you think that someone's lied to you?"

I lifted her purse off the counter and presented it to Andi, "When you go somewhere in the car, do you leave your purse behind?"

Andi thought about it for a moment before replying. "Yeah, actually sometimes I do. It depends on where I'm going. There's plenty of reasons I'd leave my purse at home."

I reached into the purse and pulled out a key ring. "But how would she be driving without these?" I asked, jingling the keys in the air.

"Maybe someone else was driving?" she suggested.

"Fine. If someone else was driving, and her keys and purse are here, then where is her car?"

Andi didn't have an answer for that. I think it must have dawned on us both at the same time. We had been here for over an hour but in that time we had only just discovered Mom's purse because we hadn't been anywhere in the house except for the kitchen and living room. As one, we both looked over to the doorway under the stairs.

I got up from my seat and walked to the door. I spun the knob and walked through it, brushing my hand along the wall in the dark garage to flip the light switch on. There, in the center of the room, under a thick layer of dust sat my mother's black BMW. The tires were low on air and the gleam of the clear-coated black paint was muted and dulled by the dust, but it was definitely her car.

"So someone else was driving," Andi said from behind me.

I turned around to face her. "Andi, do you ever remember anyone telling you that? Because I don't." Now that I thought about it, no one had really told me anything about the circumstances surrounding my mother's death. 'She died in a drunk driving accident.' That's all I ever got from them. Being sixteen at the time, I didn't think to ask any questions. My Mom just died, why would I? I was angry. Not with Andi, but with the rest of our family. Angry at Aunt Janice, Aunt Marjorie, Uncle Dave. And Jesse too -- he obviously knew something about all this that he wasn't telling me. They had all let me believe something that wasn't true. At best they let me make assumptions and didn't bother to correct them. They deceived me and I wanted to know why.

"So lets say for the sake of argument that the drunk driving story is true, and she was riding with someone and they got in a wreck."

"OK," Andi said.

"So, who was she riding with? Did they die in the accident too? Why did she bring them here when she was supposed to be out of town on business?"

Andi shook her head, "I don't know Chris. This is all news to me too." She was as bewildered as I was, but also clearly upset. I could tell she wanted to help me, but looking back I can see how futile that effort would have been. She knew it too.

###

We slept on the couches that night. Andi suggested that we could go check the upstairs bedrooms to see if they had dust covers on them but I wasn't in the mood for any more surprises that I might find. I was having a hard enough time with what I had already learned and so elected to stop exploring the place and stick to a room that I knew was safe. I wanted answers but it was too late to start making phone calls.

The next day Andi and I made a few more trips to her place to move boxes. During one of the trips I took advantage of the driving time to call up Aunt M. I was still angry but not nearly like the night before. The physical effort of moving, along with having time to cool off had put some slack in my sails. I decided I wouldn't push Aunt Marjorie for information, but I had to talk to her. Anything she could give me would be better than what I had.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Aunt M," I said.

"Hello Chris. Are you and Andi getting settled in at the Camp?" she asked. Her tone was even and cautious.

"Well, we're moving boxes over there from her place right now."

"Good, I'm glad the place is finally going to be useful to someone." she said.

"Aunt M. you were right."

"Right about what, dear?"

"When you said to me that you didn't know if I'd find answers there or just more questions."

"Hmm. So you're calling me to see if I can answer your questions, are you?" she asked.

"Well. Yes. To start with, I'd like to know why -"

"Chris, please, honey. I -"

"Aunt M, no. I need to know what happened to my mom. You all told me one thing but you didn't give me the whole story. I have a right to know."

There was a long moment of silence before she replied.

"Chris - " her voice was broken and cracking -- she was obviously crying, "please don't do this sweetheart. I can't, dear. Please don't ask me to go through all this again."

"Aunt M, I'm sorry. I don't mean to upset you. I just want to know what happened."

A moment passed before she spoke again, still sobbing. "We never lied to you Christopher. The night your mother died she was in a drunk driving accident. That's the truth. The rest doesn't matter."

"It matters to me, Aunt Marjorie."

"Chris, you need to let this go. You're going to cause a lot of pain if you keep pushing this. You already have, but you didn't know. There's no way you could know."

"Aunt M -"

"No, listen to me Chris. I love you. I always have loved you. You're like the son I never had. But don't call me about this again, and don't call you're Aunt Janice about it. You'll get as much from her as you've gotten from me. Your mothers death was harder on her than it was on anyone else -- maybe harder than it was on you, so leave her alone. Do you understand?"

"Aunt M, I -"

"No sir. I said, do you understand?" she chastised.

Humbled, as if I were still a child. I loved my Aunt M. and still felt that I deserved to know what happened, but it was clearly something very painful to her and I didn't have the heart, or enough disregard for her dignity to push her any farther than I already had.