His Brother’s Wife
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 14
It was a Friday evening in May when she came to him.
Not in any dramatic way. They had cooked together and eaten and cleaned up and were on the couch the way they were most evenings, her tucked against his side, the city quiet outside the window. She had been reading, or trying to — he had noticed her on the same page for twenty minutes, which on her meant something else was occupying her mind entirely.
She closed the book and set it on the coffee table.
“Josh.”
“Yeah.”
She turned and looked at him with those steady dark eyes and did not say anything for a moment, and he waited.
“I’m ready,” she said.
He looked at her. “You’re sure.”
“I’ve been sure for a week. I was waiting to make sure I was sure.”
He smiled at the very Rebekah logic of it and she smiled back, and then he stood and offered her his hand and she took it and they went to the bedroom.
The lamp was low and warm. Outside, May was doing what May did in Brooklyn — windows open, the smell of the city and something green coming in on the air, the sounds of a Friday night settling into the evening around them.
He took his time.
He had been thinking about this, if he was honest with himself, since the shower — since washing her hair and feeling her go still under his hands and understanding that she had never once in her life been tended to. He had been thinking about how to give her something entirely different from what she had been given before, not efficient, not obligatory, not conducted under a sheet in the dark. Something that began with her face and her eyes and her whole self and moved outward from there.
He started with a kiss.
Long and unhurried, the kind she had learned to lean into rather than hold back from, and she came to him fully — her hands moving up to his face, her body pressing in rather than away. He walked her slowly back to the bed and she sat and he crouched in front of her and took her face in his hands.
“If anything feels wrong —”
“I know.” She covered his hands with hers. “Stop talking and come here.”
He laughed softly and came there.
He undressed her the way he had been learning to undress her — slowly, following each thing he removed with his hands and his mouth, unhurried. He kissed the small tummy she had been self-conscious about and felt her breath catch. He kissed the inside of her wrist, the curve of her shoulder, the base of her throat, and when he got to her ear she made the small sound that meant she had stopped thinking about anything except what was happening to her.
She was not passive.
He had half expected her to be — a young woman raised in a framework where a wife received and did not initiate. But she was curious and attentive and entirely present, her hands moving over him with the same focused attention she brought to everything she decided to understand, asking a quiet question here and there, going toward what she liked when she found it. There was no performance in her. No attempt to seem a certain way or feel a certain thing. She simply was there, fully, in a way that undid him completely.
He took his time with her.
He took a long time, working his way across her body with his hands and his mouth, learning what made her breath change and what made her go still and what made her grip the sheet, and when he found the things that did those things he stayed with them. She had been told her whole life that her body existed for a purpose outside of itself. He intended to demonstrate that it existed for her, entirely and without condition, and that the pleasure of it was not a sin but a gift — the one Proverbs had been talking about all along.
He felt the moment she stopped holding back.
It moved through her like a wave gathering — her breathing going ragged, her whole body tightening, her hands grabbing his arm and holding on as though she needed something to hold onto while the ground shifted beneath her. She made a sound she had never made before in her life, unguarded and real, pulled out of her without her permission, and then the wave crested and broke and she arched up against him and cried out — actually cried out, in the quiet apartment on a Friday evening in May — and shuddered through it with his name on her lips, his name, said the way no one had ever said it before.
He held her through it. He stayed right there, his hand steady on her, until the shuddering slowed and her grip on his arm loosened and her breathing began, gradually, to return to something like normal.
She lay against him afterward with her eyes closed and her chest still rising and falling faster than usual, and neither of them spoke for a long time.
Then she said, in a voice that was not entirely steady, “What was that?”
“That,” he said, “was yours. That has always been yours. Nobody told you.”
She was quiet for a moment, absorbing that.
“I said your name,” she said, sounding faintly astonished at herself.
“You did.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“I know.” He pressed his lips to her temple. “I didn’t mind.”
She fell asleep first.
He lay awake a while longer, her weight against his side, her breathing slow and even, and thought about a white room and his brother’s voice.
Remember who you are. Don’t disappoint me.
He had not.
Not tonight.
Not anymore.
~ ~
It was nearly noon by the time either of them said anything about breakfast.
Rebekah stood at the stove in one of Josh’s undershirts, cracking eggs into a pan with a steadiness that surprised her, because the last time she had done this — really done this, with the table set and the coffee going and the whole ritual of it — she had been a different woman making breakfast for a marriage that wasn’t one yet. This felt like nothing like that. There was no performance in it now, no held breath waiting to be noticed. Josh came up behind her and put his chin on her shoulder and stole a piece of toast off the plate before it was even hers to give, and she swatted his hand away without any real intent to stop him, and the whole exchange felt so ordinary and so entirely new at once that she had to stop for a second and just feel it.
“You’re staring at the eggs like they insulted you,” Josh said, sitting down at the table.
“I’m not staring at the eggs.”
“What are you staring at, then.”
She turned the burner off and looked at him for a long moment before she answered. “I’m trying to figure out how something can feel so different when nothing about the kitchen has changed at all.”
He didn’t have an answer for that, so he just held his hand out across the table, and she came and sat in his lap instead of the empty chair, which was its own kind of answer.
“How do you feel,” he asked, and there was real weight behind the question, not the polite kind.
“Sore,” she admitted, and laughed a little at herself for saying it out loud. “Good sore. I don’t know if that makes sense.”
“It makes sense.”
They sat there a while longer, the eggs going cold and neither of them minding, and then something in her shifted — a boldness she had never once had access to before last night, and now here it was, sitting in her chest like it had always belonged to her.
She took his hand off the table and pressed it flat against her hip, and led him back toward the bedroom without a word, the eggs forgotten entirely.
“Josh.” Her voice caught on something new, once they were back among the sheets. She reached down and guided his hand, then lifted her eyes to his mouth. “Will you make love to me again? Please lick me. I want you to.”