Her entire life she has wanted him, and yet has known that wanting him is wrong. But now, now that her husband... Now that she knows that her husband... Now that she knows her husband has been... has been fucking the woman he claimed he thought of as the sister he never had (there, she said it, it is hard to grasp, and even harder to voice), her sense of right and wrong, her definitions of good and bad, moral and immoral, sex and family and siblings are all in constant flux and turmoil and her brother, she and her brother, are all alone side by side, painting the walls of the house they grew up in, redefining the past, preparing their history for sale to the highest bidder and anything and everything is new and different and possible.

Realizing suddenly that she has been painting angrily she stops (because angry painting is neither soothing nor attractive) and stares at her section of the wall which, like her small section of the universe, is not as uniform or unblemished as she would like it. It does not meet her expectations, or satisfy her initial vision, and she wants to cry.

Her brother, sensing that something is wrong, but having no idea exactly what, stops too. He looks at her, takes a step toward her, stops again, unsure, uncomfortable in her stare, intense even through half-welled tears.

He reaches out to hug her, not to touch her sexually as she has guiltily imagined all these years, not to lift her shirt over her head or unfasten her pants or kiss her, just to hug her.

But she is too deep into the grief and the fantasy and the confusion to respond in kind and instead steps into him, grabbing him, pulling his shirt up, wrapping her arms around his naked back, crushing him to her, raising up on tiptoe, her head tilted up to meet his lips coming down, knowing instinctively and correctly that he will be unable to resist, that he will do as she wills him, lifting her shirt and unfastening her pants as he kisses her back, hard and deep and loving, thirty-odd years of frustrated lust bursting out into the open, freed forever and completely uncontainable.

There is only one place this lust can go: to the back of the house, to the room they briefly shared in a space too cramped for living arrangements of any propriety, where she would lie each night feigning sleep well past her bedtime, watching him strip and stand naked in front of the mirror before putting on his pajamas and crawling into his own bed on his own side of the room, the room where she would lie alone, playing with herself, remembering him, long after he had moved away, aching for the naked sight of him, wanting him back, coming to the thought of him, the room where she had fucked her husband, sneaking past her snoring father, trying not to think of her brother as he pounded into her, smiling down at her, his treachery yet unknown.

That room.

So many memories to remember, so many memories to forget, so much history to live, relive, and unlive as they undress each other in a daze, oddly careful and tidy, removing the minutia of their existence from their pockets, arranging keys and cell phones and change and ATM receipts in a neat little row on the otherwise empty bedside table.

It all seems so ordinary, so correct, so inevitable and yet so outside her understandings of convention and normalcy, correctness and morality, that she almost stops, is standing naked, vulnerable, hesitant and torn, in front of a bed with her brother, in that room with her brother, not knowing what she wants, tempted to drag him down with her to pull him into her to pound her mercilessly to rip every last shred of decency from her soul, but about instead, to snap out of it, to tell him no, that siblings don't do such things, that married people don't do such things, to put her clothes back on, and her dignity back on, and go back to painting when her cell phone rings with the tune she has picked for her husband.

She looks at the phone, looks at herself, looks at her brother looks at the bed, sees what her husband has driven her to, picks up the phone, flips the top up, screams "fuck you and your fucking bitch girlfriend" flips the top back down and falls into bed, dragging her brother down with her, guiding him into her, staring up at him as he smiles down at her pounding into her, pounding away the years and the fears and the tears and the anger until she comes and forgets forever.