Their parents had died in a car wreck two years before, shortly after she had gotten married and he had gone off to college. Toni was twenty when it happened, and Mike just eighteen. When all was settled, he went back to campus and she returned to her husband, and life went on.
And now she was alone again.
Her husband, Steve, had left her for another woman. After only two years? She was devastated, and doubted he had ever loved her in the first place. Thank God they hadn't yet started a family (and since it was Steve that had always insisted they wait, she now wondered if he hadn't been planning on leaving her from the start) so she didn't have that complication to make a bad situation worse, but now she had no one. No husband, no child, no parents, just her brother.
And now it seemed that circumstance was campaigning to destroy her even further. Steve had taken her to another city when they wed, and when her parents died they had yet to make a will, so the court considered the house abandoned and had it sold to pay off debts. Their life insurance barely covered the funeral costs. As a stipulation in the divorce, since Toni and Steve had been together so short a time and had no children or real property, no alimony was assigned. It was more of a delayed annulment than a divorce. Consequently, she couldn't afford the apartment she and Steve had shared, so Toni found herself not only alone but homeless.
Instead of trying to go back to her home town (what was there for her now anyway?) she took a smaller place in the town where Mike went to school. That way, she could be reasonably close to the only family she had left. She found a job as secretary in a lawyer's office, and made some new friends but was afraid to let any of them get too close. The only person she really was interested in seeing was her brother.
Mike lived in a dorm on campus, and that was required for the first two years, but his sophomore year was nearly up. He spent as much time with Toni as possible, mostly on weekends, and they talked about him moving in with her at the end of the spring semester. He had a part-time job at the college library, so he'd be able to pay something toward the rent and food. She told him money wasn't the consideration, she just wanted to be near him as much as possible. A week after the end of classes, Mike moved his paltry belongings into her apartment.
It was a three-room walk-up. The main room served as den and kitchen (the appliances and sink hidden behind a drape) and off that was a small bathroom (no tub, just a shower enclosure, toilet, and sink) and a single bedroom. Toni, of course, kept the bedroom. Mike slept on a fold-out couch.
They became inseparable. When not working, they went swimming together at the lake, or went shopping, and would spend Friday nights at one of the taverns near the college, listening to music, drinking, sometimes dancing. Seeing them together, no one would know they were brother and sister, and so anyone who otherwise might have approached one or the other didn't bother. The few hard cases that tried were quickly rebuffed. All Toni and Mike wanted right then was each other.
They took turns cooking and cleaning, and by the time the fall semester started had developed a comfortable domestic routine. Neither had ever been so care-free in their lives. They had no parents telling them what messes they were making of their lives, no spouses with egos to stroke, no cadre of friends trying to point them in this or that direction. It was just the two of them, and life could not have been better.
But then, one cold October night, everything changed.
The weather had taken a sudden wintry dip. Temperatures plummeted, and the predicted rain now fell as a frozen sleet, coating trees and streets in a fine glossy sheen of ice. Mike just barely made it home as the roads started to get bad, and he called Toni at her office to warn her about the conditions. But, before the phone at the other end rang she came in the door. Her boss had sent all the secretaries home early.
She was drenched, however, and went straight to her bedroom to grab some warm clothes. She asked Mike to make some tea while she showered and changed. As the kettle heated up and while he listened to the sound of her under the water, he figured he might as well start supper. Casually, he went toward the bathroom to ask her what her preference was, and saw that in her haste to get under some hot water she had left the bathroom door halfway opened. He could see the frosted glass of the shower stall, with clouds of steam rising above it, and just inside, the hazy form of his sister, naked, arms up as she worked a glob of shampoo into her hair.
His first instinct was to turn away as quickly as possible. With the two of them living together in such close quarters there had been a few times they had accidentally caught each other in various states of undress. That sort of thing had happened even when they were children growing up in their parents' house. But this was the first time he'd seen her totally naked, and even though the view was distorted by the pebbled glass door he could see what an amazing body she had. Mike stood transfixed for a long time, watching as she turned about and rinsed the white foam off her head. It wasn't until she shut off the water that he realized he better move or be caught staring at her. He snapped back to the kitchenette, where the kettle was already screaming its head off.
As he readied the tea he listened to her towel off and dress. She emerged a minute later in an oversized gray sweatshirt and baggy blue sweatpants, with a white turban on her head and soft wool socks on her feet. She came up behind him, and placed a hand palm-first on the middle of his back as she leaned over his shoulder and inhaled the aroma of the dark oriental brew.
"Delightful," she declared, and kissed his cheek briefly.
He gave her a cup and she sipped the hot tea carefully, smiling with her eyes closed as the warm liquid burned a path down her body. He couldn't take his eyes off her, and yet he wasn't really seeing her the way she was, he was seeing her the way she had been in the shower, naked, her smooth skin glistening, her breasts peaked skyward as she lifted her arms overhead to shampoo.
He shook his head and came back to reality.
"What would you like for supper?" he asked. "I'll cook."
"Nothing right away," she said. Outside, a gust of wind slapped waves of sleet against the windows and walls, making her shrink a little. "Maybe some soup later. Come on, I just want to relax for a while."
She guided him to the couch and they sat down. Using a remote, she flicked on the stereo and easy music began to fill the room, pushing back the sounds of the early winter storm. Mike sat at one end of the couch, his feet up on the coffee table, and Toni curled up in a ball at his side, her head on his chest, her feet tucked in beneath her. She sighed as she settled into him.
"I wouldn't be surprised if we lost the electricity," she said.
As if on cue, everything went dark, and the music stopped.
"It's your fault," he told her playfully. "You had to go and say that."
