I had come back home to Boulder to help take care of my aging mother. My younger brother, Bobby, had been doing his best to care for Mom, but with his own family to take care of plus trying to work and take of mother at the same time, it was proving more than he could handle.

That night I had been invited over to his house for dinner. Karen, my brother’s wife, had made a pot roast and she was, according to the reports I’d gotten, an excellent cook. So I was looking forward to a good home-cooked meal. I had picked up a bottle of a decent Merlot for us for dinner and headed over to their house.

I knocked on the door of their house and Karen answered the door. Karen was a very pretty young woman. She had a beautiful face, with bright blue eyes and when she smiled, you couldn’t help but smile back. She had soft auburn hair that cascaded in soft curls to the middle of her back.

She had a body that wouldn’t quit, too. Firm high breasts with hard pointy nipples that you just wanted to suck, an ass that would make any bikini-clad Sports Illustrated model envious, and legs that you would kill to have wrapped around you.

I had always thought that Jimmy was lucky to have found such a girl. Myself, I had been involved with a girl who I thought was going to be my forever soulmate, but it didn’t work out.

We found we didn’t want the same things for our future after all and we eventually broke up. It was painful but amicable – neither of us saw a future for us at that point.

I gave Karen the bottle of wine and she smiled and thanked me. Then she took my hand and led me into the living room where Bobby was sitting. “Would you like a drink or something, James?” she asked me.

I saw Bobby with a beer in his hand so I responded “I’ll have whatever the gentleman in the Lay-Z-Boy is having!” Karen giggled at the joke and turned to go get me a beer.

In less than a minute, she came back in with my beer and handed it to me. “Thank you, Karen,” I said and she looked up at me with a feeble smile.

She had no more sat down when my brother said angrily, “Where’s my beer? Get back in there and bring me another beer, too. You want our guest to drink by himself? What kind of hostess are you anyway!”

Karen bounced back up out of the chair and hurried into the kitchen to get Bobby another beer. I looked at him shocked – this isn’t the Bobby I remembered!

“What? She knows better than that! She wants us to have company over but then she doesn’t know the first damn thing about being a good hostess! She is lousy at dinner parties! Hell, she isn’t even much of a wife!” he said, slurring his words a bit.

I could tell he’d had his share of beer and then a couple. Bobby never could hold his liquor and he was a mean drunk. Not fighting mean, just mean-spirited and vicious with his words. He always said things drunk that he’d have to apologize for the next morning.

And sometimes he’d mouth off to the wrong person and get his ass kicked – I don’t know how many bar fights I’d had to back him up in or rescue him from. He’d also spent more than one night in the county drunk tank or jail.

Unfortunately, this time the one he had hurt wasn’t some drunk at the bar. It wasn’t someone who didn’t know him or wouldn’t remember what was said if he did. This time he hurt Karen. Because just as he was finishing his tirade on how lousy she was, Karen came around the corner with his beer hearing his words “Hell, she isn’t even much of a wife!” loud and clear.

Embarrassed beyond words, Karen set the beer down on a small table by the doorway and ran into the bedroom. I sat there slack-jawed as Bobby said “Good riddance!” and laid his head back on his chair and proceeded to nod off into an alcohol-induced slumber.

As soon as I heard him begin snoring (which only took a few moments the way he head was tilted to one side), I got up from my chair and went in to see if I could help Karen.

I walked down the hall until I heard sobbing coming from one room. I softly knocked on the door and the sobbing stopped instantly. A pause and then the door opened just a crack.

“Karen? Can I come in honey?” I asked sweetly.

“I’m a mess. You don’t want to see me,” she said. I pushed the door open slowly peeking around it carefully. Karen was standing in the middle of the room with her back towards me and her face in her hands. I came into the room slowly and came up behind her.

“Karen, sweetheart, are you okay?” I asked, then I gently touched her shoulder and rubbed between her shoulder blades.

My gentle touch and words must have done the trick because she whirled around and buried her face in my chest, sobbing all over again.

“Oh, James! I don’t know what to do! He is so mean anymore! He hates being married and he hates being married to me!” she sobbed. I took her over and sat her on the edge of the bed and then sat next to her with my arm around her shoulders.

“What’s going on Karen? I know I’ve been away in Dallas for a while, but this isn’t the Bobby I grew up with. The Bobby I knew drank and got in fights, but he always was good to the women. He was actually quite a flirt – something else that got him into fights a lot. What happened to change him so much?” I asked.

“I don’t know. We were so happy once. I loved being married to your brother and I thought he was happy too. Things were wonderful at first. Then you moved away and then Mom got sick, and things just spiraled downwards from there.

“He took to drinking more ... sometimes so much I would have to come to get him and bring him home. He got into fights all the time with his drinking. Did you know that he was in the hospital last year because he pissed off some guys at the Dew Drop Inn and they beat the shit out of him and left him in the alley?

“It was the bartender who found him when he went to take out the trash at closing time. He was laying next to the dumpster half dead. He was in the hospital for a week recovering and even longer here at home until he was well enough to go back to work,” she said.

I listened as she told me all about life with Bobby.

“Yeah, that made money tight, with him out of work and the hospital bills. Which meant that there wasn’t money for beer for him. Which pissed him off more. Well, Bobby was going to have his beer, so the money that should have gone to bills instead went to the bars and we fell behind in our bills.

“They cut the cable TV so he couldn’t watch his football and baseball games. ‘No problem’ he said, and he spent even more time at the bar drinking. Then the calls started coming in ... collections agencies began calling all the time.

“It’s gotten to where we are afraid to answer the telephone. We have an answering machine that screens our calls and we have to clear it almost daily because of all the people wanting their money.

“Still Bobby goes to the bars. He says that he deserves to enjoy himself – he works hard and takes care of Mom and me and deserves to have a beer once in a while to relax.

“James, I don’t fault him for that, the man does work hard and does take care of us the best he can. But he doesn’t stop with just a beer once in a while like he says. It’s usually more like a six-pack every day and who knows what he drinks before coming home.

“I’m scared James. I’m scared that one day he won’t come home. Either he will get killed driving drunk, or by someone who won’t leave him half dead by the dumpster. I’m afraid he might find someone else and decide I’m not worth bothering with anymore.

“Or that he will just say the hell with it all and get in the car and drive away and I’ll never hear from him again. Men have been known to just throw it all away and move to someplace else to start over again. And what will happen to me?” she said.

Karen looked down this whole time and I could see tears dripping from her cheeks and staining the pretty dress she was wearing.

“Karen, honey, it will be all right. Bobby is just going through a rough patch right now with Mom and everything. I will have a talk with him tomorrow when he is more lucid ... right now he is passed out in his chair. He won’t be worth a damn until morning,” I said.

“James you are so sweet. You’ve always been sweet to me, even before you went off to Dallas,” she said.

Karen and my brother had been a couple for a few years and I had met her long before I moved to Dallas five years ago. She was with Bobby and watched as my relationship fell apart, helping me to see that is was for the best after all.

To be honest, I was a little jealous that my younger brother had landed such a fine woman as Karen and that I missed out.

“Well Karen it’s not a matter of being sweet, honey, I just don’t like to see you crying. I know my brother has a drinking problem. He has had one for years. We have tried getting him help, but he doesn’t see the need to change. And until he does, he won’t change. People only change when they are so sick and tired of their current situation, that they change it themselves,” I said.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that last sentence would come to be prophesy.

Karen then turned towards me, wrapping her arms around me and gave me a kiss. At first, it was just a “Thank you for being nice,” kind of kiss, and I kissed her back as if to say “Your welcome”.

However, she didn’t pull back after a second or two. In fact, as she continued to kiss me, she moved closer and deepened her kiss. I felt her hand behind my head running her long slender fingers through my hair. I could feel her need as her body trembled against mine.

Without even thinking, I pushed the girl back on the bed so she was laying on her back. I moved so that I was over her and she looked up into my face.

“James...” she whimpered. I knew what she wanted. Because I wanted it too.

I felt like I was back in high school, a fumbling, geeky kid, struggling to learn his way around the female form. My hands roamed all over Karen’s body, exploring her and learning all the curves and valleys I had, to this point, only viewed.

As we kissed and groped each other, our breathing was getting faster by the second. It seemed as if the more we explored, the more there was to explore.

We kissed, long and deep and passionately while her hands were grasping my ass and mine were playing with her breasts. Then we moved our hands and she began stroking my cock through my jeans. I reciprocated by playing with her pussy.

At first, I played with her through the panties separating my fingers from her tender skin, but soon I slipped my hand under the skimpy garment and touched, for the very first time, her neatly trimmed box.

Playing with Karen’s pussy brought gasps and moans from deep within her. Her head moved side to side as I toyed with her pussy, fingering and playing with the lips and rubbing her little clit.

Then came the real finger-fucking which started as I slid two fingers knuckle deep inside her, then spread them to capture her clit between them.

“Oh my god! Oh, James, that feels so good!” moaned Karen. “Please, don’t stop!”

I wasn’t about to stop. I had waited for this moment for far too long to quit now. I continued pumping my fingers in and out of her hungry hole, alternating slow strokes with fast ones, taking my cue from her responses.

Her first orgasm came on fast and hard as I worked her clit and pussy while kissing her neck. She enjoyed the orgasm, grabbing the bedsheets with one hand and clutching a pillow to her chest and biting a corner to cover the screams of pleasure.

I kept on finger-fucking her even through her orgasm – I might not get a chance at another, so I wanted her to remember this one! When she was finally finished cumming, and her twisting and writhing had diminished, she looked up at me, smiling.

“That was amazing, James, wonderful and amazing. I haven’t cum like that in years.”

I was pretty damn proud of myself, knowing I could still bring a girl off so good yet so easily. It was a great feeling knowing I had “the touch” or whatever.

It had been ages since I’d had the pleasure of just playing with a woman like this – most of the girls back in Dallas either just wanted to get me off with a quick blowjob or they wanted to get on with the fucking. Foreplay like this was actually a luxury!

We held each other for a while before Karen said something that completely floored me. I had thought the hand action might be her limit, that she was going to realize what she was doing was wrong and stop us from going any further. But what happened next was something I’ve only seen in those corny, low-budget porno films.

“James, please don’t take this the wrong way, but your brother is a real jerk. I’ve never told anyone this because I wanted to keep the peace in the family, but your brother treats me like shit. What you saw today was a good day, as days with him go.

“He always yells at me, and belittles me; calling me stupid and worthless amongst other less pleasant words, he breaks my things ... special things that he knows mean a lot to me like my mother’s things.

“He’s not at all like you, James. I’ve wanted to leave him several times, but then he sobers up and realizes what he’s done and apologizes. James, I can’t take much more of this.

“I need someone who will treat me right. I deserve better than this, James. I’ve been a good wife to him, and I deserve better” she said, her voice wavering again.

I laid down next to her and took her into my arms, holding my sister-in-law close as she trembled in my arms. I couldn’t tell whether she was shaking because she was near to tears or whether she was shaking because of what we had just done.