The Runaway Niece

This piece is a little slower: it takes a couple pages to get into the thick of the eroticism. If you don't want a slow-burn, turn back or skip ahead. You have my horniest sympathies. For those who stay, your thoughts and ratings are greatly appreciated. Xx.

———

The Runaway Niece

For a while Kerry doesn't even register that someone is knocking. His bed is too comfortable to consider the outside world, and the hour is too early to expect visitors, so he stays buried in his pillow with his cold feet folded up underneath his weight. The knocking might be a broken drainpipe, or the garage door unlatching itself again, or that family of wild rabbits who take him as a fool.

It is only once the sound takes on a rather hysterical rhythm that he sits up. This is no rabbit. Someone is at the front door.

Kerry parts his bedside curtain to peer through the rain. The world had been suspended in a state of calm all week, like a snowglobe, but now the storm has hit in full force. Trees tilt on their axes. Raindrops are like skiers on his window. From this vantage point he can't get a good view of the doorstep.

The visitor seems unlikely to stop knocking. Deciding there's nothing for it, Kerry pulls on his socks, wraps up in his dressing gown, and heads downstairs. When he steps into the hallway, he stops and stares at the front door. Skeletal hands are silhouetted on its frosted glass window. They are knocking with their palms, rattling the door in its hinges.

Kerry approaches the door silently. He stops a foot from the threshold. The hands at the window freeze, fingers splayed on the glass.

"Hello?" It's a girl's voice. "Hello, did I see someone?"

Kerry tightens the cord of his dressing gown. He leans in. "Who is it?"

"Is this Kerry? Does Kerry still live here?" The hands slide an inch or so down the door's window, as though from exhaustion. "I swear to

fucking

God, did he move? If he fucking moved—"

"Who is it?"

A pause. The girl's hands vanish. "Is this Kerry?"

He hears her slump her weight against the door. There's a plea in her tone. The hall is cold.

"Yes," Kerry says finally. "It's Kerry. Now, tell me—"

"Kerry, it's Iona. Let me in or I will freeze to death on your doorstep." The girl's voice breaks. She throws her weight against the door. "Come on. They'll lock you up for negligence or something. Just open. The

door

." Another thud. "

Fuck

."

And Kerry opens the door. The girl almost topples inside. He catches her fall, recoiling at the cold of her flesh. She is sodden-wet. Her clothes and hair drip all over the threshold. The cuffs of his dressing gown dampen. The girl slams the door shut. For a while there is silence but for her shallow breathing. A steady

pink-plink

as she drips onto his floor.

"You took your sweet time," she tells him. "Is your back going? Struggling out of bed?"

"Hold on." Kerry tears his eyes from her face. Her features are soft in the half-light, like those of an old photo. He fumbles for the lightswitch behind the coat rack. "There."

The hallway is illuminated. They stare at one another.

Iona's soaked clothes cling to her like wet fur. Her hair is red, down to her shoulders. It criss-crosses her face in stray strands. A smattering of freckles. Hazel eyes. She is his niece.

He reaches over her shoulder to lock the door. "Iona?"

"Kerry."

"Iona..." A beat passes. A thousand raindrops, and he exhales. "What's going on?"

"I don't know. It's really quite awkward, you know?" Iona raises her arms, which are weighed by soaked clothing. "I thought you'd let me in. Some food maybe. But no, I guess we'll stand here by the door till the storm blows over and fucking Itsy Bitsy Spider comes out. That's cool too."

"Iona, you know what I mean. It's three in the morning." Kerry lays a knuckle against her icy cheek. "Why are you here?"

"I just am." Iona plucks his hand from the air, gives his fingers a smart pinch, and holds on tight. She says, "Please let me stay."

For the first time since he let her in, Kerry hears that note of urgency in her voice again. Iona's pale lips teeter towards a frown. It is the same stern expression she used to wear as a child when Kerry babysat her. That was twelve years ago. Now her fingernails bore into his hand.

"Okay. Just—okay." Kerry nods. He ushers her down the hall. "A hot shower, maybe? Towels are in the bottom drawer."

He guides her to the bathroom, then goes upstairs to find her a change of clothes. The house rattles in the wind, cold seeps up from between floorboards, window panes straining their brackets; and the rain streaks its windows like hail. Kerry tracks an old towel up and down the hallway till the floor is quite dry. He brings a pot of milk to the stove and stirs cocoa through. The trick, he always used to tell Iona, is to heat the milk so slowly it doesn't realise what's happening till it's too late. Then it won't curdle. She used to scold him and say milk wasn't alive.

Kerry adds sugar, vanilla, and a pinch of chilli. Iona emerges from her shower after some fifteen minutes with her soggy clothes in a bundle, one towel tight in a turban around her hair and another around her middle. She leaves silent, damp footprints on the floorboards.

"Is this the

Iona special

, then?" she asks, standing on the other side of the kitchen bench and eyeing the pot of hot chocolate. "I can smell the chilli."

"Just a smidge, don't worry." Kerry gives a little salute with two fingers. He fills two mugs to their rims with drink. "Oh—here. Chuck your clothes in the laundry, I'll get them clean tomorrow." He takes the bundle from her arms.

Iona gives a mock curtsy. "Ta."

"The spare room is set up for you," Kerry says. He deposits her clothes in the laundry. "It's across from mine upstairs, when you want to sleep."

"Yeah. I remember it."

He returns to the kitchen and gives her one of the hot chocolates. "Right, well... cheers."

They clink mugs. The drink is rich and thick as ice cream. Iona adjusts her towels and goes to sit on the couch, looking out over the paddocks through the living room sliding doors. There isn't much to see in the dark, but there is a certain satisfaction in the way the wind rolls all the way over the hills to buffet the house while they sit comfortably inside. Defying the cold bite of nature with hot drinks in their hands. Iona runs a finger around and around the rim of her mug.

Kerry watches her nervously from the kitchen bench. He doesn't want to press her, but she looks like a ghost—a snarky ghost with all the wit of her human self, but a ghost all the same. He's never seen her in such an anxious state. Her white shoulders glisten from the shower. Several bits of red hair have escaped her towel, falling down her neck at random.

"Iona." Kerry crosses from kitchen to living room. He sits beside her on the couch. "I need you to tell me that you're safe..."

She stares ahead. "I'm safe."

"Did you walk here from London? That's a hell of a distance."

"And I have a hell of a blister." Iona gives a dry smile, still not looking. She takes a deep swig of hot chocolate and sighs. Her eyelids flutter. "Do we have to talk about it tonight?"

Kerry swishes his own hot chocolate around his teeth. He can smell her conditioner. For a long while neither of them speak, and the proximity is enough to constitute company. The paddocks outside roll like black waves. Kerry throws glances to his niece, who sits like a bird in the rain: ruffled, smaller than life, wings pegged in the wet. Her collarbone stands out. She is too pale for a tan line.

Iona raises a hand to bite hard at a nail.

"Hey." Kerry takes her hand and guides it back down. "Save your nails, they're nice. We don't have to talk about it tonight."

Iona smiles. She clings to him.

"Look, I found some more clothes. From Aunt Kath's collection." Kerry gets the pile of fluffy gowns from the kitchen. "I was always her second love, see. Her first was the creature comforts."

"Will we visit Aunt Kath?"

"We'll see after the rain."

Iona heads off to bed with the bundle of gowns. Kerry rinses out their mugs and goes to take a shower himself. The bathroom is still hot and steamed out, but he doesn't mind. The heat is comforting; he savours it till his fingertips wrinkle. Odd as the night's events were, it was pleasant to drink hot chocolate with his niece as he always had in the past.

He is not alone in the storm tonight.

———

Though the spare room is quite comfortable, Iona doesn't get much sleep. Instead, she fishes old paperback novels from a trunk at the foot of her bed and reads them with her feet tucked up under her bum. Pages worn by the oil of a hundred fingerprints. Her room has a marvellous view of the countryside out the rear of the house. When the sun rises to kiss the morning clouds, she thinks she hasn't seen anything so serene as those paddocks and hills in all her life.

Kerry is not yet up when she descends to the living space. Iona takes the time to peruse the house. As she does, she gets the impression that Kerry has been alone for a very long time. His place smells richly of coffee. It could have been a workshop: spare screws scattered like ornaments, everything furnished with wood still coarse to the fingertips, all of it touched by the fragrance of sawdust. The homemade woodwork and rustic edges are charming.

When Kerry emerges from upstairs, he smiles at her. "Up like the sparrows, are you?"

"I found photos of us," Iona says. She picks one up in its frame. "Look—we're sunbathing in the autumn leaves here. By one of the swimming holes, I guess. I'm about ten..."

"Mm, that'll be just downstream." Kerry gestures vaguely out the rear sliding doors. "Coffee?"

"Thanks."

He makes it on the stove with an old pot. Iona stands by the kitchen bench and watches, and for a short while she is hypnotised. Kerry's hands are very gentle. He does everything with such little hurry that Iona forgets what he's making, and starts only to appreciate the

click

and

clack

of the equipment and the various stages of preparation. The dance of metal and fingers. When he sets the finished cup in front of her, she meets his eye, and finds his expression incredibly soft. She smiles.

"Eggs for breakfast, too." Kerry claps his hands. "But first—let's visit Aunt Kath."

They each find a pair of gumboots, then they take their coffees and set out into the expanse of green field behind the house. All that remains of last night's weather are small branches scattered by wind, and the excessive

squelch

of wet grass underfoot. The horizon is clear.

They cross a paddock and veer to the right, alongside a river which cuts the countryside down its torso. Trees and thickets flank its length. Iona remembers wading through this river with uncle Kerry, in gumboots of all different sizes at all different ages. Playing pixies or aliens or werewolves.

"Kath always liked autumn," Kerry says. The river runs high today, swelled by the night's downpour. He goes on, "When the leaves went yellow she said it was a permanent sunset."

Iona likes the autumn leaves too. She breathes deep through her nose.

Kerry stops in his tracks. "There she is. Bless the old fool."

He puts his arm around Iona's shoulders, and they both bow their heads. Aunt Kath's headstone is nestled in the ground beneath an ancient beech tree. It's flecked with autumn leaves and bits of soil. The sun heats the back of their necks. They wipe the headstone clean.

"It's funny, don't you think?" Iona says, as they retrace their steps through the grass. "How the world can hurt us, then we wake up and it's just another Tuesday."

"And the river keeps flowing," Kerry says.

"Yeah." Iona looks up at him. "And the river keeps flowing."

They take a longer route back to the house so as to pass by the vegetable patches and chicken coops. Kerry digs a number of potatoes out from a patch of dirt, plucks tomatoes from their vines, and takes avocados from their trees; and all the while, he speaks to his plants in a low voice as though they are pets. Iona waits outside a mesh fence while he fetches eggs from the chicken coops.

"Poor girls, they survived the apocalypse last night." Kerry eyes his birds. He hops the fence. "Mind, they had shelter. You walked from bloody London."

"I... well." Iona hugs her shoulders. The grass is like the sea in the wind. "I didn't really..."

"No?"

"Not from London, no."

Iona meets his eyes. They're cracked at their edges by a frown.

Kerry took her in even when he didn't understand why she was there. He gave her comforts she didn't deserve. His house is beautiful, the clothes he provided cosy, the countryside lively and green—and beneath it there is the bleating heart of opportunity. He gave her freedom. All at once, she finds herself crying by the chicken coops.

"Hey." Kerry stows the eggs on the grass and closes his arms around her. "Hey, what's happened? I'm listening."

"I didn't come from London." Iona clutches him. "It was... God.

Shit

."

She doesn't know where to start; how to untangle the past few months from the thorns and brambles to explain it all to him. She sees a hundred images in the mud: a car door opening, raised voices, collapsing on a gravel road. Fingers where she didn't want them. Tears, over the dinner table, over a pillow, in the back of a fucking taxi. A thousand numbers to call but none seemed to fit.

Kerry walks her back to the house, sits her down on the couch, and cooks their eggs up. They eat to the sound of knives scraping on plates. Iona flushes scarlet. The egg yolks bleed all over her plate. They run down her throat like honey.

"Iona. Listen." Kerry lays a hand on her shoulder. His touch is like the sun. "Listen. That bed up there, all those books in that crate—they will always be there." His hand drifts in subtle circles on her back. "Every night, however many you need. They will be there."

Iona nods. Kerry leans her onto his shoulder. He kisses her on the top of her head. The contact is very clean. Spring water.

"So, then..." He smiles sadly down at her. "It's not just another Tuesday after all..."

Iona looks at the sky through the window. She wants to look at the sun.

"I just let it happen," she tells him.

———

Kerry is true to his word. Each evening when Iona showers, reads on the couch, or is otherwise occupied, he sneaks up to the spare room to place a vase of flowers on her bedside table. He picks them from a spot by the river. Sometimes he and Iona sit cross-legged on her bedroom floor and discuss all the books in the crate at the foot of her bed. It is a privilege to get lost in a story, and a special privilege to get lost in it again with someone else as company. They talk for hours.

It is only with his niece flitting around all week that he realises the silence he had been living in. It is very noisy to have another body in the house: footsteps creak down the hall, dishes accumulate twice as fast, and the hot water runs thin. They go through eggs and veggies at a rate of knots. The washing line strains under the doubled load of laundry. Several times as he's washing up the kitchen, Kerry finds himself staring out at Aunt Kath's old clothes, back in use. Drying in the breeze.

Iona insists on helping around the house wherever she can. Cooking becomes a joint affair, as does tending to the garden and property. Kerry drives into town a week on from her arrival to buy her a new pair of gumboots, so they can garden together. He presents them as though they're a rite of gardening passage.

And slowly, she opens up to him.

One night, when the sky is clear, they stroll through the paddocks with a bottle of wine. Iona stalks ahead of him. A poke around the attic had turned up several boxes of Kath's old wardrobe, and Iona had luxuriated in the clothes like royalty.

She's dressed in a fur coat and gypsy skirt, and no shoes at all. Her feet slide as she runs and skips on the dark grass. They pass cattle and troughs. Through the ambience of crickets.

"Joints not what they were?" Iona calls back to him. She waves her hands. "Come on, pick it up."

Kerry runs to keep up.

"We walk, my good uncle!" Iona shouts into the dark. "We reach the horizon tonight..."

"Hey." Kerry catches her and wraps an arm around her middle. "We can't walk

too

far."

She wriggles in his grasp. "Oh, we are

walking

, my friend. Onwards."

"Just... rest. I'm an old man."

Iona laughs. She turns on the spot to face him. A gentle breeze plays with her hair.

"Isn't it wonderful, though?" she says. She pokes his nose. "We can walk as long and far as we want and nobody cares. Nobody cares. We're like the birds, Kerry."

He looks down at her, smiles, and takes a swig from the wine bottle. Iona takes it and drinks too. A moment passes under the wind, in which Kerry stares at her and she stares right back. She's stopped trying to break free of his grasp.

Another swig of alcohol. "Are you okay, Iona?"

"I'm wonderful."

"No, but really." Kerry drops his hand from her back. He taps her on the forehead with the tip of the wine bottle. "Are you okay,

really

?"

For a moment her smile dips, then it comes back. "I'm okay."

They share the wine and stroll on without much purpose. Eventually they come to a fence. Neither feels sober enough to scale it, so they follow it blindly until they reach a wooden stile.

"This will do." Kerry sighs and sits down. "No more fucking walking."

Iona stops walking a little clumsily. "No fucking walking?"

"No more fucking walking."

She drops down beside him. They lean against one another. No words. The closeness is enough. Iona's freckles are sharp on her pale face. Strands of her hair flick into Kerry's face. He leans against her and feels the rise of her body as she breathes.

After a long time: "Kerry, I'm not okay."

"No shit, Iona."

"Yeah, no shit?"

"Iona." Kerry clears his throat and points a finger at her. "You turn up like a drowned rat—"

"I'm a rat now?"

"A drowned rat." Kerry tuts. He feels young. "You turn up at three in the morning and you're acting like a crazy bitch and won't explain anything. Did you think you played it off?"

Iona raises her eyebrows. "Obviously

not

. We are not all senile."

"We're both senile. We have alcohol."

"All right." Iona takes the bottle. "Yeah, I'm not okay."

Kerry takes her free hand. Small, warm fingers. "I'm listening," he tells her.

Iona squeezes him back. For a moment as Kerry looks over her freckles and the ridge of her nose, he has to bite back a pang of nostalgia: this is not Kath whose hand he holds. Iona runs a tongue over her teeth and hovers on the precipice of speech for one beat, two three four, then she sighs and looks away. There are tears in her eyes. Glitter in the dark.

"You know, I felt so good when I left school." Iona wipes her eyes with a slender knuckle. "To be an adult. I had my lovely fairytale path ahead." She bites her bottom lip and gives a silly laugh. "Ugh, fuck.

Fuck

. He fucked it up."

"Was this the same boy you were with at Kath's funeral?"

She nods. The fresh air burns. Kerry has to keep still. He doesn't want to stop her from talking, but there is a knot in his throat. The thought of what this boy might have done mixes poorly with the wine in his stomach.

"I can't really explain. I just..." Iona looks around, erratic. As though searching for the right turn of phrase in the night stars. "Every night I would promise myself. Next time I say

no

. Next time I won't let him bully me, but then..." She snaps her fingers. The sound is sharp. "I broke so many promises, Kerry. So many you have no idea."