Vector - Ch. 2

2.

“Hey…  Jane?”  Justin looked over as he turned onto his block.  She was still out like a light.  He reached over and shook her gently and then more forcefully until finally she responded.

“Hmmm?”  She sat up slightly, looking around blearily.  “Wha…?”

“We’re almost home,” Justin informed, a slight edge to his voice.  The moment he had come down from his orgasm, reason and sanity had come flooding back in and he was wracked with guilt.  Now that they were almost back to the house, his wife just inside, full-on panic was setting in as well.

He mentally kicked himself for not thinking of pulling over somewhere earlier and trying to talk to Jane, but now that they were in the neighborhood, he couldn’t stop anywhere without the possibility of the nosy neighbors seeing.  He paused the next house over from his own, thinking to just put the car in park, and his fears were immediately validated by his next door neighbors Kendra and Barry walking out the front door with their golden retriever.

“Hey, champ!”  Barry greeted as they made their way down the front walk.  Normally, he might roll down the window and have a brief superficial chat and surreptitiously check out Barry’s attractive wife, but this certainly wasn’t the moment for it.

Glancing at the passing neighbors and giving a quick, shifty wave, Justin had to settle for pulling into the garage and hoping that Claire wouldn’t hear them arriving and he would be able to get a quick word in with Jane.  He felt sure that she wouldn’t want to upset her sister by talking about what had happened, but then again what had just happened was so completely off the rails that he didn’t want to make any assumptions about anything.

However, he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.  The moment he put the car in the park, Jane blundered out of the car, dazedly walking off toward the door leading to the interior of the house, not bothering to wait for her luggage or even shut the car door behind her.

“Wait–”

Justin swore inwardly, ripping the keys out of the ignition, and hurriedly grabbing Jane’s suitcase out of the trunk and raced in from behind, just in time to see Jane and Claire embracing in the kitchen before his wife held her sister by the shoulders at arms’ length.  Claire gave her younger sister a look-over, wearing a concerned expression.

“Everything ok?”

“I’m fine,” Jane answered dully.  “I’m gonna go lay down…”  Still wearing that disoriented expression, Jane turned away and headed up the stairs.  Claire turned to Justin, her eyebrows raised inquisitively.

“Everything all right?  Did something happen on the ride over?”

Justin felt his eye involuntarily twitch slightly at the question, hoping his wife didn’t notice the tic.  “No,” he replied, trying to sound casual and yet not overly so, as he stood there with Jane’s luggage in hand.  “She’d said it was a crazy day getting over here…”

That seemed honest enough.  He went up after Jane, lugging her suitcase up the stairs to the guest bedroom.  The door was slightly ajar and he peeked his head in to see that she’d indeed gone to lay down, apparently already asleep on the bed.  He left the suitcase just outside of the room in the hallway and headed back downstairs.

***

Justin worried that dinner that evening would be a stressful affair.  Claire suggested getting a pizza, which Justin had dutifully gone out for, fretting the entire time that Jane would wake up while he was out and tell Claire what had happened on the way home from the airport.

He felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck as he walked back into the house, holding the box of pizza and heard both of their voices as he neared the kitchen, but he was immensely relieved to find that his fears were only half-realized; while Jane awake and appeared more responsive than when she’d arrived at their home, it wasn’t by much, and she didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by the events of the car ride, or least not enough to bring it up to her sister.

As the three of them sat at the kitchen table for dinner, Justin chewed his food tensely, watching his wife gently prodding her sister, trying to get her engaged in conversation.

“Are you ok?” Claire asked again, after Jane failed to give more than an unenthusiastic, terse response when asked how work was going.  Justin could see that his wife was vacillating between concern and annoyance, but again, their weird family dynamic made it so that this was the furthest extent that she would ever get to any real confrontation.

“I’m fine,” Jane answered listlessly.

Claire gave Justin a sidelong glance, and he simply shrugged in return, again hoping to come off as the proper mix between casually bewildered and apathetic.  He turned on the television, which Claire ordinarily didn’t care for during dinner, but as it distracted from the awkwardness, she didn’t object just then and he flipped the channel to the local news.

“...total chaos this evening as all ingoing and outgoing flights have been abruptly canceled due to unspecified security concerns, severely disrupting weekend travel plans,” the news reporter was saying.  The screen flashed to an irate traveler.

“We weren’t given any notice at all, they just turned us away and kicked us out of the airport right as we were checking in!  They didn’t re-book us for a different flight, they didn’t help us get a hotel, we’re just stranded!”

The television flashed back to the reporter.  “We’re getting reports now that travelers at the gates were neither allowed to board flights nor exit the airport.  Planes on the tarmac have not been permitted to disembark passengers, sitting for over two hours now…”

“Whoa,” Claire remarked.  “That could’ve been you cooped up at the airport too – you must’ve just missed it!”

“Yeah.” Jane didn’t expand more than that.

Claire gave an exasperated passive-aggressive sigh, which also went unacknowledged.

Justin changed the channel to smooth things over, settling on a sitcom that no one really watched as they ate mostly in uncomfortable silence.  Towards the end of the show however, things grew stranger still, as he rose and began clearing the table.

“Are you done?” he asked, reaching out for his wife’s plate, which held a few uneaten bites that Claire hadn’t touched in awhile.

“Hmmm…?”  She looked up as though she’d been sitting in a stupor, but even now, her brow was creased slightly as though trying to comprehend the meaning of his words.

“Are you all done..?” he repeated, but Claire only looked down at her plate for a few moments before finally answering.

“Ummm..  yea.  Sure..?”  She sounded anything but.

What the hell, Justin thought.  It was… it was like Jane in the car, spacing out.  Now it was both of the sisters sitting there like unreactive lumps.

“You know… I think I’m going to go lay down myself,” Claire muttered, looking as though she were trying to clear her head.  With what seemed like great effort, she rose from her chair and headed upstairs.

Justin looked after her with concern, worried she might tumble down the stairs or something, but once he heard the master bedroom softly shut, he returned to clearing the table, taking Jane’s plate as she sat there unmoving, not appearing to notice. He continued tidying up, giving her an uncomfortable glance as he wiped down the table in front of her, before he turned away, leaving her there as he began doing the dishes.

***

Claire practically fell into the plush pillowtop of her and Justin’s king size bed.  Blearily, she wondered what the hell was wrong with her.  One moment she was sitting there in the kitchen, right as rain, albeit a little worried about how her sister was acting and still wondering if something had happened in the car ride in from the airport.  But then Claire had been just so suddenly sapped of energy that she almost couldn’t hold her head up, thought she might just slide out of her chair onto the floor; excusing herself, she’d barely even made it up the stairs.  And her head… it felt like it was stuffed with cotton, her thoughts coming slow and muddled.

She fumbled with the button of her pants, and her hands didn’t seem to be working properly.  It seemed like an eternity before she was able to work it undone, and then with a vast summoning of her will, she unzipped the pants and laboriously slipped them down her legs, where they bunched around her ankles. Claire clumsily issued a series of weak erratic kicks until finally, mercifully they came off, rolling off the side of the bed.

She climbed under the covers and it felt like heaven to simply lie there, caving in to the exhaustion, allowing her sluggish brain to rest and Claire felt sleep and blissful oblivion just within reach.

Only… something was wrong.  Coupled with her total weariness was, incongruously, a growing sense of restlessness.  At first, it was just the smallest, nearly unnoticeable iota of a sensation, something she felt she could ignore as she drifted off, but it – whatever it was – was increasing.

Claire shifted beneath the sheets, and even that small expenditure of energy seemed a monumentous effort..

Sleep…  she just needed to sleep…

But the feeling was rising within, as it did so, sleep was pushed further away.  Claire let out a weak whimper of frustration.  What was it?  What was this nagging, persistent feeling that wouldn’t allow her to simply rest..?

The gears in Claire’s head turned slowly, laboriously.  Was it… Jane?  Claire was vaguely concerned.  Her sister had been acting weird…  Perhaps Justin had annoyed her, Claire dimly speculated.  She could be very touchy, sometimes…

But Jane liked Justin.  Maybe even too much, Claire’s mind offered, in that meandering way that thoughts take hold in that nebulous place between wakefulness and sleep.  It was a notion that a fully-aware Claire would immediately push away, an insecurity that she would never address in daylight waking hours.  But here, in twilight sleep, there was no such defense…

Her mind drifted and replayed conversations from long ago, years before she and Justin were ever dating, how Jane had asked if Justin were single.  Or even afterwards, when they were together, that small seed of doubt that crept in when Jane would say at a get-together that Justin looked handsome that day…

In waking hours, Claire would stamp out those insecurities.  Justin was with her. He was her man.  She knew how attracted Justin was to her, and generally also drew comfort from the knowledge that she had always been considered the prettier of the two sisters; guilt would accompany that proud, competitive thought, but also confidence and security.

In this state of fatigue, however, Claire’s mind betrayed her.  It pulled up every moment that she’d thought she’d caught Justin sneaking a glance at her sister when he thought no one was looking, occurrences that she felt had increased in frequency ever since Jane had gotten divorced and also gotten into such great shape…

They’d never do that… Claire mentally protested, feebly.  Jane and Justin…  they would never do that to her…  Especially Justin.  That she didn’t completely trust her own sister was another admission buried deep down, only to be examined by her subconscious, but it was her true sentiment nonetheless; Jane could be really scandalous sometimes…

Still, Justin was her man, all hers…  She loved to be in his strong arms.  Loved to feel the weight of him on top of her, between her legs…

What..? Claire tried to make sense of where this only tangentially-related, somewhat lurid thought had come from, but it was too much for her to try and figure out now.  The only realization that occurred to her lethargic brain was that at last she could identify that sensation that kept sleep at bay.

Coupled with her deep, deep exhaustion, was what had now grown to be a desperate feeling of unrelenting arousal.  The combination was tortuous.  She wanted nothing more than to drift away into darkness, except to address that ravenous, gnawing need, which seemed impossible to satiate in her current state.

Somehow, Claire found it within herself to slowly bring an arm up off of the mattress and rest it on her stomach.  Sometime later, she willed her hand to slide downwards, past her navel, into the waistband of her panties, faintly registering how heavily lubricated her sex was and sunk two fingers inside.

This seemed to invigorate her somewhat, allowing her hips to roll up slightly in time with her slow, dreamy ministrations.  A jumble of hazy, disconnected, confused and erotic images played through Claire’s mind all the while.

Herself, laying with… someone…

It had to be Justin...

Yes, it was her husband, their arms and legs intertwined.  Various positions, various places…

There was a satisfying sensation of fulfillment as Claire’s fingers slid deep inside of herself, but there was that need, still yet to be met…

It was definitely Justin, yes…  but wait…

Was she herself even there with him..?  Who…  who was he with..?

Confusion, mixed with a mounting, growing excitement.

He was with…

…with…

…someone…

Claire let out a small moan as her climax washed over her, and then finally sleep took her.