Chapter 16

The six months that followed the return from my vacation in Hawaii, were some of the most troubling and trying of my life. It began to seem like nothing I did was ever enough for any of them.

Business was great, and was really the only part of my life I managed to get much real satisfaction from. Leslie was selling everything I'd managed to buy, and all of it at higher prices than I would have gotten if I'd been the one doing the selling. Now that she knew most of the buyers, she seemed to have a real knack of matching up products to potential purchasers. Like I said, the business was the only real bright spot I had going for me.

I'd given Danny his old job back, but, as before, it didn't seem to matter to either him or Kaitlyn how much I was trying to do for them, they always wanted me to do more. They hated it when anyone besides themselves got so much as a single penny of my money.

Things had always disappeared from my storage places. Mostly small things that I was nearly certain Danny was taking to sell to people. Mostly, I'd look the other way, unless he started getting too greedy. When that happened, I'd be forced to step in and give him some kind of a slap on the wrist. Usually, I'd deduct, what I thought of as fair value for whatever he'd stolen, from his weekly check. He'd end up yelling at me, protesting that he hadn't done what I was accusing him of doing, but, in the end, he'd accept my punishment.

Kaitlyn was still calling me, or even worse, coming over to my house to speak with me about whatever happened to be troubling her at the moment. I hadn't been having sex with her ever since back when I first started doing things with Delilah and Bridget. Because of that, Kaitlyn had surrendered one of her most potent bargaining chips with me. She hadn't given up in that regard though, finding plenty of opportunities to try to lure me back to using her body for my pleasure.

Kaitlyn was a very sexy looking woman, as well as a skilled temptress. She also had a willingness to stoop to nearly any level in order to get whatever it was she really wanted. In my case, it was me. She felt like she needed the two of us to be having sex together, in order to maintain some degree of control over my actions towards her and her family. Mostly, I helped them because Danny was my brother, and their three kids were my nephews and my niece.

Having sex with Kaitlyn had always been a very mixed pleasure for me. I felt guilty, knowing that what I did with her was something that hurt my brother. When I was much younger, I felt like it was excusable, because she was always going out behind Danny's back anyway. I thought I may as well help myself to some of what she was spreading out to all the others anyway. When I got older, it was one of the ways I used to punish Danny for those times when he did things that ended up creating problems for himself and the rest of us. I rationalized what I was doing, but in truth, the real reason why I fucked her was to satisfy my own sexual urges. She was convenient, and the most attractive woman I knew who's let me fuck her.

All the while that these problems kept going on with Danny and Kaitlyn, Delilah and Bridget were starting to turn up the pressure on me to help them more in their lives. Delilah had lost her job at the escrow company, shortly after they started having a big slow down in their business. Apparently, Bridget kept demanding that she take anything she could get in the way of work, in order to be able to pay her fair share of their expenses. Finally, being fed up with Bridget's constant complaining about money, Delilah came to me, asking me to let her move back into my house. When she came to me, she'd made it very clear that she was asking just for herself, that she wasn't expecting, and didn't really want, Bridget to be joining us.

When she came over to ask me if she could move back, Delilah told me that she was only asking to be able to stay with me for long enough for her to find another job that paid enough for her to get her own apartment. At the time, about two weeks after I'd gotten back from my vacation, I saw no reason to tell her no. Later that day, she moved all her own things back to the spare guest bedroom that Bridget had used before, when the two of them used to live with me. I thought it a little strange that she didn't put all her things back in my bedroom like she'd done before, but I didn't say anything to her about it.

When Delilah moved back in with me, Leslie and Bridget both got very upset. Leslie didn't say anything, but I could tell she didn't like it that Delilah had moved back into my house. Bridget, on the other hand, said plenty. To me, and to Delilah both. I had to endure many screaming matches between those two women, almost every time that Bridget came over to visit with Delilah. They would talk a lot on the phone, seeming to resolve all their differences, then, after Bridget would come over, either for dinner, or just for a visit with Delilah, the two of them always ended up getting into it about something. Bridget got mad at me because, by giving Delilah a place to live and food to eat, I was making it too easy for her to just sit on her ass and do nothing productive again.

I was having sex with Delilah regularly. She'd come into my bedroom and we'd fuck, but, afterwards, she'd just get up, kiss me good night, then take off for her own bedroom. I could tell that she wasn't too happy to be away from Bridget. After a month of this though, I asked her if she was ever going to get out and start looking for another job. I didn't mind supporting her, but it seemed to me that Bridget was mostly right that it was bad for Delilah to sit around the house doing almost nothing, day after day. She was a young woman, and needed to try to make something of her life.

While all this was going on, Bridget was hitting me up, regularly, for enough money to take up the slack of not having a roommate paying half of the expenses for the apartment. It wasn't that much money, and I could afford to do it, but that wasn't the point. After three straight months of loaning her money to help with the rent, money that wasn't being repaid, I finally just told her no. A week or so after I refused her, Bridget found herself a new roommate. As soon as she did, Delilah got very unhappy about it, certain that Bridget was doing the same thing with her new housemate as she'd done with Delilah when she'd lived with her. Since it was only a one bedroom apartment, I had a pretty good idea that Delilah was correct in her assumptions.

After Bridget got the new roommate, both girls started to ratchet up the level of their screaming and arguing. Neither of them seemed happy about anything.

Then, there was Leslie. Where to begin with her? I've already mentioned that she hated me letting Delilah move back in with me. She stopped accepting my invitations for her to eat with us, and didn't seem willing to even speak to Delilah anymore. When she did speak to her, it was just enough to not seem totally impolite.

Delilah seemed to think Leslie's attitude towards her was hilarious. She knew that Leslie and I had enjoyed more than just a simple working relationship at one time, and she still remembered that Leslie had tried to keep her and Bridget from being able to come over to visit me. She enjoyed rubbing in the fact that she lived upstairs with me, and made plenty of comments to make sure that Leslie knew that she and I were fucking each other. I tried to get her to quit doing that, but she kept it up anyway.

The whole situation placed a lot of strain on my working relationship with Leslie. I knew she was very unhappy with how things were, but I was still very determined to keep our relationship as a Platonic working one. We still talked to each other, usually many times each day. When it was just the two of us talking together, there were no problems between us. If Kaitlyn, Bridget, Delilah or any other woman was around, Leslie would retreat into some kind of a shell, refusing to participate in anything more than the bare minimum necessary to avoid making me upset with her.

It went on this way for months. There was a lot of tensions and emotions, both on and below the surface. As time went by, the toll it was taking on my nerves got to the point where I started dreading whatever might be coming next.

It all started unraveling about six months after my Hawaii vacation was over. Danny went out to a bar and got himself drunk. Nothing unusual in that. When he came home, Kaitlyn accused him of having been with another woman. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. When Danny didn't grovel and beg for forgiveness soon enough to satisfy Kaitlyn, she started screaming at him, and that quickly turned into her throwing pots and pans at him. Danny, still very drunk, neglected to duck out of the way quickly enough to avoid a thrown cast iron skillet, and ended up getting a nasty gash just above his left eye from the handle on the pan. In a panic from seeing all the blood spurting out from the wound, Kaitlyn called 911 for an ambulance.

This time, it was Kaitlyn's turn to be arrested. Danny was taken to the emergency room at the hospital, treated for his cut and then released. I got the call from the hospital to come get him. Bridget was at Danny's trailer after Kaitlyn had phoned her before they took her away, asking her to come over to watch the kids.

Kaitlyn had been arrested at five o'clock in the morning. I went to get Danny, to give him a ride back to his trailer, at ten. When I tried to drop him off at his trailer, at ten thirty, Kaitlyn's mother was there, helping with the kids, and calling all the people she knew to try to see about getting Kaitlyn released on bail. She got into it with Danny, screaming at him and claiming all of this was his fault, and telling him that he'd ruined her daughter's life. Danny, being Danny, started going off on his mother in law, and on what he called the four whores she'd raised up as her daughters. He cited chapter and verse about everything he knew that the four Keller girls had ever gotten up to in their lives.

In Danny's diatribe against the four sisters, Bridget came out as the one with the fewest black marks against her name. She didn't get off completely free, however, as Danny raked her over the coals for everything she and Delilah had ever done to me, calling them both leeches for having milked me for as much as they possibly could. I found Danny's long spiel fascinating, especially when he compared all four sisters, claiming each as having been bed partners of his at one time or another. I'd had no idea that he'd ever nailed Bridget or Claire. All of us had fucked Mona and Kaitlyn at one time or another.

Mona had been my second piece of ass. I was still fourteen, and it had happened about a month after Kaitlyn did it with me that first time. Mona was the oldest, and she was probably twenty eight or nine years old at that time. She came over to the trailer where we were all living at the time. This trailer they were just renting, and it was very small. I slept out on the sofa in the living room, because there was only the one bedroom. This was before Danny and Kaitlyn had any kids. I think Kaitlyn was pregnant with their oldest at the time. Mona was definitely pregnant then, with her second or third kid I think. Mona had driven over to ask her sister for money to buy gas for her car. Of course, Kaitlyn denied having any money, other than what she absolutely needed to buy that night's supper with, then telling her sister that she needed to catch a ride with her to go up to the store.

Mona refused to take her unless Kaitlyn loaned her a couple bucks for gas. Finally, just to stop them both from yelling at each other, I pulled some money out of my front pocket and handed Mona three dollars. I tried to put the rest of my money back in my pocket before either woman noticed how much there was, but both of them had seen there was more left and started asking me about it. Having lived with my brother and his wife for the past three years, I knew enough to know better than to let either of them know I had any money. I'd messed up badly by taking out my roll in front of these two women. I tried to initiate damage control by refusing to answer any questions, and by not taking my money out so they could count how much I had.

When they couldn't get me to show them my money again, they left to go up to the store, and I really thought I'd dodged the bullet. I should have known better. Mona came right back to the trailer after dropping her sister off. She came inside, telling me that she wanted to thank me for loaning her the gas money. Her first thank you was a blow job. She wasn't as talented with that as her sister was, but I knew enough not to mention that to her.

After I came, she asked me to let her borrow twenty dollars, for one week. I told her I couldn't, since I needed all the money I had left to buy these three bikes some guys I knew were selling. They'd gone in together to buy this car from another guy, and they were selling off all their games and toys in order to get enough money to get that car of theirs running again. I remember I had about fifty dollars to my name at the time, and I had agreed to pay them twenty for those three bikes of theirs.

"Loan me the twenty, Jimmy. If you do, I'll let you have something really nice for the interest on it."

"I told you I need all the money I have left, Mona. I told some guys I'd buy some stuff from them later today. I'd loan it to you if I had it, but I don't, so sorry."

Right after that was when she raised up her maternity skirt and pulled down her panties. She was about four or five months pregnant, and was showing pretty well by then. Before I really could react to her, she was pulling down my jeans and rubbing her pussy against my cock, which was already coming back to life. At least when I fucked Mona, I didn't feel all guilty about it like I had those other two times before, after I'd just fucked Kaitlyn.

I ended up loaning Mona that twenty, not knowing how I could keep telling her I couldn't after she'd already paid me the interest. She never did repay any of that money, but she did pay interest on the loan, three or four more times after that first time. I went out and bought those three bikes later that afternoon, selling them over the next two or three days, getting my twenty dollars back, plus another fifteen in profit.

I ended up taking Danny back to my house, afraid that he would get into a fight with Kaitlyn's mom if I didn't. He ended up spending two weeks living at my house before Kaitlyn finally realized she wasn't getting any of his money as long as he was living at my place.

After he left, to move back home with his family, I refused to help either of them with Kaitlyn's legal problem. All she got was a fine, some unsupervised probation and a court order for her to take some classes in anger management. She went back to court later, crying poor mouth to the judge and got her fine suspended. She still had to take those classes though.

All in all, those months of tension got the better of me after awhile. I started getting mad at most of the people around me. I started feeling like all of them were ganging up on me, trying to make my life as miserable as theirs seemed to be. I didn't appreciate being made to feel that way, and so I started pushing back at all of them.

I ended up firing my brother again because of some hateful comments he directed Leslie's way. She had informed me that Danny claimed she had made mistakes about three new sets of tires she said we had in our inventory. I remembered buying those tires from a bankruptcy sale at a tire distributor's warehouse over in Walnut. Danny claimed that Leslie had probably sold them, and then forgotten to scratch them off the list. Leslie called around later and found the place where Danny had taken the tires and sold them.

"Who are you going to take the side of, Jim, me or this fucking twisted up cripple of yours? You know she can get those friends of hers to tell all their lies if she asks them to? I'm your brother, and she's just some bitter little cunt that you should never have taken pity on anyway. Look at her, I just can't believe you'd take her side about this."

I couldn't believe he would spout off about Leslie like he was doing. Usually, despite his many faults, Danny wasn't a mean person. All three of us knew that Danny had stolen those twelve tires, sold them, and then pocketed the money. He'd certainly done the same, or very similar, to me enough times over the years. Leslie wasn't the kind of person who'd try to frame someone else for something like this. I hated what he'd said in front of her. She didn't deserve to have things like that said about her.

"You need to get out of here, Danny. Now! Isn't it bad enough that you get caught stealing from me again? Do you have to try to drag everybody else down to your same level? I'm done with you. No matter what I do for you, it's never enough, is it? You always need to take more than I'm already giving you. You just can't seem to stand the fact that I've got more than you do. I'm finished with that now. Go find someone else who'll put up with all your crap, I'm done."

"I didn't steal those tires, Jim. I swear I didn't."

"Mr. Driscoll has a copy of the receipt that Danny made out to him. You can go over to his place and ask to see it." Leslie spoke up finally. She'd been silent ever since Danny had first started in on her.

"Receipts don't prove anything. I give out receipts all the time. You could have forged that receipt, or else altered a real one, for all we know." Danny wasn't very convincing in his protests. I figured he'd mostly gotten the wind taken out of his sails after I'd fired him. He was just going through the motions now, hoping to maybe salvage something.

"Get out of here, Danny. Leave the truck too. I'm taking the price of those tires, whatever you got for them, out of your final check. Don't go making any fuss, and I won't try to evict you from your trailer. You guys can stay there, but don't come to me for any help with food or space rent anymore, because you won't be getting any from me."

After he finally left, I felt like shit. I wasn't sorry for what I'd done, it needed doing, but still, he and his wife and kids were most of the family I had left on the planet. Anyway, rightly or wrongly, what had just happened left me feeling extremely depressed. I went upstairs to the main part of my house.