Sheltering My Runaway Sister

It took me almost thirty seconds to realise that the young woman standing at my door, dripping with rain, looking like she was half-drowned, was my half-sister. Thirty seconds is not a long time, but when someone is in obvious distress, looking at you expectantly it can feel like forever.

I leaned out my door and looked up and down the street. This was a stranger on my steps and you heard about those things where criminals used pretty girls as bait to invade homes. The street was lit with yellow streetlights, obscured by the driving rain of a summer storm, and I could not see anyone else out there. I looked back at the young woman on my steps.

She could easily have been used as bait. She was six or seven inches shorter than my 5’10. Her hair was auburn, hanging limp, soaked with rainwater, framing a pretty face. She had round cheeks with a sprinkling of freckles across them and the bridge of her nose. Her lips were plump and her green eyes were surrounded by the smears of makeup that the rain had destroyed.

She was wearing very short denim shorts and a white tee-shirt that had become sheer in the rain. It was impossible not to look down at her large, shapely chest and the raised peaks of hard nipples. I noticed a duffle bag at her feet, bulging with its contents. She was very sexy and I almost licked my lips before her next words caused me to look back up at her face.

“Brent!” she had said, her voice almost pleading. “It’s me! Bailey! Your sister? Can I come in?”

“Bailey,” I said, dumbfounded with my surprise. “Jesus! What are you doing here? And yes. Come in!”

I quickly stepped away from the doorway that I had been blocking with my body and let her step into the foyer of my brownstone.

In my defence I had not seen Bailey in years. I was 22 years older than she was. Bailey was my father’s daughter from his second marriage and me and dad were not close. The last time I had been in the same room as him, and Bailey too, I realised, was seven years prior, when I had visited Dad’s city for a work conference. I thought back, trying to figure out how old she had been then. Twelve, I was pretty sure. She had just had her birthday and told me all about it. That made her nineteen.

Bailey was pretty much a complete stranger to me. So was my own father, frankly. My mom and dad had been kids when I was born. She was fourteen and he was sixteen. They lived in a small town and, almost predictably, they got stupid and careless and had me.

I had been told by my grandparents (on my mother’s side) that they had tried to do the right thing. Dad’s parents disowned him, but he moved into my Grandparent’s basement with mom and tried to play house.

Looking back after all this time, with the help of plenty of therapy, I could see that they were not mature enough to raise me, but that did not do much to ease my resentment towards them. Within a year of me being born, my dad skipped town and started a life without me or mom. He finished highschool, went to college and got a decent job, all with almost no contact with us.

On the other hand, my mom got bored of being a mother and started going out with friends and partying, leaving me with her parents. Her friend group changed to a bad crowd and before long she had a drug problem.

Most of my childhood memories are gone, or a blur. Apparently that’s from the traumas that I experienced. At least that is what my therapists over the years have told me. I do not have a lot of memories of mom, and those that I do mostly consist of her screaming at my grandparents.

Still, they did their best with me, and I was lucky to have them. They were good people, steady and there for me in a world where no one else was. My grandfather was a man I could look up to and emulate. My grandmother was warm and caring, giving me as much love as she could.

I was seven when my mother died of an overdose. I have some memories of the funeral, including seeing my father. I remember being very shy around him. Terrified that he was going to abandon me again if I said the wrong thing. It did not matter. He left again and I did not hear from him until I was a teenager.

Around then I guess he had his life on track and he reached out. We would talk on the phone once or twice a month and he started to send money to my grandparents. He lived in a different city so I only saw him once or twice a year. Still, it was some kind of relationship and I was desperate for it.

I remember his wedding to his new wife. He flew me to see him and I stayed with them in his big house in the suburbs. I was 21 years old and he had me stand up with him as a best man. That week I stayed with him, I saw what it might have been like to grow up with him as my dad. I was not sure I would have preferred it to growing up with my grandparents.

I remembered his wife very well. She was actually my own age, which I thought was crazy, but good for my dad, I guessed. She was very pretty with red hair and bright green eyes. She seemed very quiet and did not speak to me much that week.

I went back to my life and a year later he let me know that he was expecting a child. I was happy for him, I guessed. I hoped that he would do a better job this time. Still, my work and his kept us in different cities and away from one another so, looking back, I realized that I had only met Bailey four times in the 19 years she had been alive.

This would be the fifth, I guessed, looking at her dripping on my floor, just inside my door. No longer a little kid, and obviously in some kind of trouble.

+++++

“Bailey,” I asked once more when she had entered, “What are you doing here? Are you ok?”

There was a pool of water forming around her feet in open toed sandals. I noticed that her nails were painted pink. My eyes continued up her legs, a bit short, but shapely, over the denim shorts that were dark blue with the water and across her chest once more. The white tee was so soaked that I could make out her bra perfectly through the now-sheer material. Her breasts were large for her short height, enticing in their youthful fullness. I blinked and quickly looked back up at her face. This was my sister and here I was ogling her like she was some kind of only fans model.

When I looked into her eyes once more I saw that the messy makeup was probably not entirely due to the rain. Her eyes were red and she had been crying. I could see her shoulders shaking and suddenly she burst out into a sob. She threw herself forward and wrapped her arms around my neck.

I was not ready for that and I stiffened for a moment as she pressed herself against me. She was wet and cold, but after a moment, I put my own arms around her in a hug. We stood there in my entryway as she cried against my shoulder. My concern for her obvious distress allowed me to push away the uncomfortable attraction I had felt just moments before.

“It’s ok,” I said, in my most soothing voice. “We will figure it out.”

“It’s just,” she said between sobs. “My mom, she… I just can’t… I had to go, to leave. It was too much. And I had nowhere to go, and then I remembered you. I found your address in Dad’s office… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. I just didn’t know what else to do.”

Her words broke into crying again and I held her tight, stroking her wet auburn hair. After a few minutes she stepped away from me, taking deep breaths, regaining some composure.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m here. I just…” She trailed off and glanced around, looking lost.

“Ok,” I said. “First things first. You are soaked. You have got to get out of those clothes.” I glanced down at the duffel bag at her feet and the puddle around it. “If you brought clothes in that thing,” I said, pointing at it, “They probably aren’t any more dry. Why don’t you head upstairs. My bedroom is at the end of the hall. I have towels in my bathroom so you can dry off. Grab something to wear out of the closet. Just throw your clothes in a pile and I’ll run them through the washer and dryer later. Then you can come back down here and we can talk through this, OK?”

Bailey seemed to take comfort in me taking control of the situation and looked up at me and smiled shyly. This was the first time I had seen her do this and I could not help but respond in kind.

“Thank you, Brent,” she said. “This means so much to me. You don’t even know.”

“It’s ok,” I told her. “But I’ll have to call Dad. Let him know you are here.”

When she heard that her eyes widened and she started to shake her head but I raised my hand, forestalling any arguments.

“C’mon,” I said. “You know that I am going to have to. But we will talk first. You can tell me what is going on. OK?”

“Ok,” Bailey said. “That’s fair, I guess. Thank you so much for this.” She turned and walked up the stairs.

I took in a deep breath and shook my head, wondering what I had gotten mixed up with. I looked ruefully down at my chest where my white tee shirt was damp from her hugging me. I couldn’t go up and change because Bailey was in my room. I shrugged to myself. I guessed I would have to deal with it.

I went into my kitchen and put my kettle on the gas range and pulled out my french press. It might be late in the evening but I suspected that we would need some coffee to get through this.

While I waited for the kettle to boil I picked up the duffel bag she had left in the hall. A small puddle had spread around it. Everything in there would be soaked.

I walked it over to the closet that held my washer and dryer. I opened the bag and found a pile of clothes that had been tossed in. I began to move them into the dryer. There were a couple of tee shirts, a pair of jeans, another pair of shorts. These all got tossed into the machine. I also found several pairs of panties. They looked like white cotton, very boring and simple. I quickly threw those in too, uncomfortable with touching my sister’s undergarments. I noticed I did not find a bra.

I could see that she was wearing one earlier, through the wet sheerness of her top, so I guessed she had only brought one? I wasn’t sure if that made sense. I was single but had lived with a couple women over the years and remembered them all having several.