Chapter 9

Posted: October 29, 2006 - 06:51:58 pm

Brian took a steadying breath and forged bravely ahead.

"Yes, me. I have been in love with Britney since I was twelve. While we were in Orlando, she discovered she felt the same way about me."

It seemed as if dad and I were just spectators, as we watched mom visibly calm herself before speaking again.

"This can't be, Brian, she's your sister. Setting aside the morality of it, it's also against the law."

Brian didn't disagree with her or try to argue with her; instead he asked a question that stopped mom in her tracks.

"If dad had been your brother, would any of that have kept you apart from him?"

Mom thought for a minute, and couldn't refute his logic. I'm not suggesting my parents suddenly jumped on Brian's bandwagon, but at least the conversation became more practical and less emotional. Daddy didn't have much to say about anything and he didn't appear to be upset either. He told me in private later on, that when Brian mentioned mom's love for him, it negated any argument he could fashion. He even went so far as to say that if Brian loved me like mom loved him, I was a lucky woman.

Looking back on this in retrospect, I now realize that the idols were responsible for mom and dad's relatively easy acceptance of our incestuous relationship. The idols had sort of greased the wheels for Brian and I. If not for their supernatural influence over our parents, the outcome could have been quite different.

Brian laid out his plan for us as we picked at our breakfast. It was the first time I'd heard it also, and I have to say it was amazing in its scope. My baby brother had one very smart head on his shoulders and he had evidently inherited mom's organizational skills. His plan would require the cooperation of Nana and Papa Gus, but I didn't really doubt his ability to pull it off. Daddy's parents had passed away years before, so they weren't an issue. My parents were skeptical, but they reluctantly agreed to it. Brian and my relationship was a huge bite for them to digest. I loved my parents even more, because they put our happiness ahead of their discomfort with our relationship.

Our parents allowed me to move into Brian's bedroom. It was wonderful for both of us to wake up to each other in the morning. Brian and I didn't flaunt it in front of mom and dad, but it was hard to hide the fact that we were crazy in love. Mom and I actually became closer as we shared being pregnant together. She was a constant source of information and comfort as I went through morning sickness and weight gain. Brian outdid himself taking care of me; there was nothing too outrageous for me to ask him to do. I'd mention some idle craving and he was off like a shot to make it happen.

My belly didn't become noticeable until right before Christmas break. I did gain a few pounds, but they actually made me look less waifish. Much to Brian's delight, most of the early weight I gained was in my breasts. Since I was never one who wore clothes to school that accented my figure, no one was the wiser about my predicament. I resigned my office in the National Honor Society in favor of someone who would be there all year, and worked my butt off to keep up with my schoolwork. When I walked out of school on the twentieth of December, I had my letter of completion in hand. I also managed to keep my straight 'A' average, scored 1570 on the October SATs, and had been accepted to Iowa State.

I chose Iowa State because it was local and I could live at home. Also, daddy's research facility was part of the school, so he was a full professor in the math department and my tuition was free. I was pre-enrolled at State and had even signed up for two classes for the spring term. I declared Business Management as my major and Criminal Justice as my minor. I planned on law school after I received my degree, but I was hedging my bets by taking management.

I went into labor on April Fools Day but our daughter wasn't born until the next day, April second. My baby was a couple of weeks early but she was beautiful and healthy. Mom, daddy and Brian took turns keeping me company until I was wheeled into the delivery room. I really felt bad for Brian, because he couldn't be in the delivery room. Instead, my very pregnant mother stayed with me. Our Obstetrician joked that she might as well hop on a bed and let him get us both out of the way at once. Funny guy, that Doctor Bernstein, I'm almost positive he forgave me for all the names I called him when he kept nagging me to push.

We named the baby Abigail, after Nana Gustafson. She was a carbon copy of her father, same dark hair and the same beautiful gray-green eyes. It took Abby all of five seconds to wrap Brian around her tiny little finger. Brian took on his duties as a parent eagerly, and proved to be amazingly good at it. Abby was two weeks old when we were all in the hospital again; this time waiting for her grandmother to give birth to her uncle. Mom named our new baby brother Barry Michael Wagner, Junior.

My hyper-organized mom watched both babies while I had classes and Brian was in school. I was able to keep up with my class work, even though I had to miss a few classes around Abby's birth. With only the two classes, I was able to help out mom quite a bit. Brian helped also, of course, and I think he was the babies' favorite adult. Brian could pick up a crying baby and have them laughing and cooing in less than a minute. Brian and daddy both were excellent about getting up in the middle of the night to feed and change Abby and Junior. Brian made sure that we asked Nana Gus for her help too. Nana was crazy about both babies, and would drop everything and drive the forty miles to our house in a New York minute.

Life happily rolled along for our family; before we could blink it was June and Brian and I were out of school for the summer. Brian turned sixteen in May and had his driver's license, so he was able to live at home and drive over to papa's farm to work every day. While working with papa, he put his plan into action. Brian told me that Nana and Papa Gustafson took the news about him and me even better than our parents had. The reason for their acceptance was that they had gone through the same ordeal when they fell in love, because they were first cousins. All this time and we never knew that; it was a heck of a revelation.

Brian's plan for us to spend our lives together openly was simple and clever. The first step was having our grandparents adopt him. By the middle of July, all the adoption paperwork had been completed, signed and submitted to the court. Nana and papa adopting him was simple and straightforward, because mom and dad signed their consent to the adoption agreement. During the second week of August, Brian received his new birth certificate, and legally became Brian Mitchell Gustafson. It was a true testament of our parents love for us, that they allowed him to do that.

When school started again, Brian, Abby and I were all living with nana and papa. All three of us missed the hell out of mom, dad and our baby brother. Moving out to the farm was necessary so that Brian could change schools and so we could avoid being seen by people we both knew. (By the way, by now everyone was calling the baby Mickey, both because his middle name was Michael and because he was conceived at Disney World.) We visited back and forth with our parents at least three times a week.

In the fall, Brian enrolled in the small local high school and signed up for the vocational agriculture program. He was dead serious about becoming a farmer. I started my first full semester at State, with four courses already under my belt, the two I'd taken in the spring and two other I took during the short summer session. I was not planning on taking a full four years to complete my undergraduate degree.

As busy as we both were, Brian and I still made time for each other. Our lovemaking was just as frequent and just as intense as it had been in the beginning. Having Abby did not dampen our ardor, and Brian says I was even more beautiful now than before. I swear, that man sees me through the rosiest of colored glasses, because I'm still too skinny, and my once perky breasts droop a little. I know he means what he says though, because he still gets an erection just standing next to me. I guess I am just as bad, because I still climax every time he does. My female friends at State think that is the weirdest thing they've ever heard, but I know that every one of them secretly wished they had the same thing.

About a year after Brian and I moved out, mom and dad purchased the farm next to my grandparents. I guess they missed us as much as we did them. The property they bought was about half the size of nana and papa's place. It had belonged to what papa derisively called a gentleman farmer, a man who owned a farm not to raise something, but to have something to show off to his city friends. Anyway, except for a shiny new tractor and mower, mom and dad's farm was sans equipment. At the time my parents bought the property, land prices were depressed on acreage so far from town. Still the hundred twenty acres and house went for almost eight hundred thousand dollars, an amount they couldn't have afforded if not for dad's recently signing an eight year contract with the lottery commission.

By the time dad signed the contract, he had the lotto fellows sweating bullets, because he had hit five numbers three times in six months. Dad signed on as a consultant on statistical analysis, for a cool one million dollars. He received three hundred thousand for the first year as soon as he signed, and would receive one hundred K for the next seven years. I think daddy was the first ever mathematician to sign a contract of the sort normally reserved for promising athletes. Daddy's secret to the lotto turned out to have something to do with the weight of the ink used to emboss the numbers on the ping-pong balls together with some almost mystic formula of frequency distribution.

Brian worked out a deal with daddy to lease his arable acreage, then used papa's equipment to farm it at the same time he was working papa's land. Papa was forever bragging that Brian was the hardest working young person he'd ever met. Brian meticulously split what he made farming the extra land equally with daddy and papa. I know he was working for our future, yet I still worried how hard he was driving himself. The only thing that came before work for him was his family.

Our third year together flew by quickly. Suddenly, Brian was eighteen and graduating from high school. I was the proudest person in the gym that night, as his small graduating class received their diplomas. The only thing that took some of the gloss off my happiness for him was when his principal mentioned how disappointed he was that Brian had turned down numerous scholarship offers. It took me a few years to finally assimilate that Brian was intensely happy with what he was doing.

During the second week of July of that year, Brian and I flew to Las Vegas and were married at the Chapel of Love. It was beyond a doubt the happiest day of my life. We honeymooned at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino. We went out a few times during our five-day stay, but mostly we stayed in our room and made love. I gave my wonderful husband my virgin ass on our wedding night. If I thought I was making a sacrifice, Brian disabused me of that notion with his gentleness and attention to pleasing me. Masterful farmer that he was, Brian wrung orgasm after orgasm out of me as he plowed my virgin soil.

When we arrived back in Iowa, we started construction on our house. Brian and I picked a spot midway between our parents and grand parents for our small three-bedroom prairie ranch. Papa and daddy guaranteed the construction loan without blinking, they knew by now that Brian was as good for his word as any adult they'd ever met. We moved into our house in time to celebrate Christmas there. The house was beautiful, thanks mostly to the open floor plan Brian designed, and the gorgeous wood trim he lovingly installed for me. From the minute we moved into it, we could never imagine living anywhere else.

I graduated from Iowa State the following year and immediately started Drake University Law School in Des Moines. Des Moines was actually about ten minutes closer to our house than Ames, where I had been attending State. Law school was a mind-numbing grind that required a lot of memorization and concentration. My home life actually made Law School easier for me, because I had Brian's unwavering support, and I didn't have the distractions the other students suffered. Brian made sure I had plenty of time to study and kept me sated in the bedroom. If the workload started getting to me, he'd drag me into the bedroom and let me vent my frustration orgasmically. He was the man, and more importantly, he was my man.

I should insert here that we didn't just sit around the house all the time talking about the price of soybeans or doing it like bunnies. Brian insisted we have a date night at least once a week, usually on Saturday night. We'd bundle Abby off to either mom or nana, go out somewhere, and let our hair down. Other times we'd attend some cultural events with mom and dad. Brian took me wherever I wanted to go and if I didn't have a preference, he'd come up with something that I invariably loved. Sundays were always family day for all three families. The day usually included church and a midday dinner at nana and papa's house. Our lifestyle wasn't on par with the jet-set's, but we enjoyed ourselves nonetheless.

Abby flourished and grew like a weed. She was a very gifted little girl; she finished Hooked On Phonics and was reading before her fourth birthday. Mickey was just as bright, although he was more shy than Abby. Abby never met a person with whom she couldn't or wouldn't make friends. Brian usually had both kids with him, doing something on the farm for part of the day. Abby and Mickey loved to ride in the enclosed cab of Brian's big John Deere tractor, reading and singing along to the country music on the radio.

One of those country songs led to the naming of the farm and for establishing our place as a local landmark. The song in question was about some guy writing his and this girl's name on a water tower in John Deere green paint. Abby told Brian he should do that for me. Since we didn't have a water tower, Brian climbed up on the roof of the big equipment barn and meticulously lettered:

GUSTAFSON — WAGNER FARMS

LOVE GROWS HERE

The lettering was big, bold, and green; it could be seen from the road between Jefferson and Boone that ran about a quarter of a mile from the farm.

Abby was a talkative five-year-old when I received my JD. I was almost twenty-three and Brian had just turned twenty-one. I finished at the top of my forty-one-person law class, and I received some very nice offers from firms as far away as Sioux City and Cedar Rapids. I quickly eliminated the offers that were further than fifty miles from the farm, and sat down with Brian to consider the rest. Brian surprised me when he took all of the offer sheets out of my hands and sat them aside.

"Before you look through these and start counting money we don't need, Brit, why don't you tell me what your dream job would be," he said.

God love him, in one sentence he brought everything into focus for me. He was right about not needing the money, because his farming operation was successful enough that it was fast becoming the model for profitable small to mid-sized spreads. Brian grew soybeans, corn, sweet clover, and alfalfa of such quality that dairies all over the Midwest clamored for his crops. In addition, he started dabbling in organic farming on a three acre plot near the house. Mom and Nana Gus sold the produce at the weekly farmers market over in Jefferson.

I re-sorted the pile into the positions that interest me, and we went on from there. I finally took a position with the State of Iowa as an environmental lawyer for the Department of Natural Resources. DNR was happy to land a new hire with my credentials, and I lucked out in that I loved the job and was damned good at it. I guess Brian's love of the land had rubbed off on me.

My job was a Civil Service position and not a political appointment, so my only mandate was to prosecute those who violated Iowa's environmental laws. As the new girl, I ended up having to prove myself. I did that by never flinching from any assignment given me. I ended up wading through some nasty places, gathering evidence with the field investigators, even when it wasn't required of me. By the time December rolled around, I had earned my way onto the team.

My new friends and colleagues met Brian for the first time at the department's semi-formal Christmas party. I guess they expected the tall, skinny, four-eyed girl's husband to be some backwoods rube, given that I bragged all the time about him being a farmer. I enjoyed watching their jaws drop when we walked into the room, arm in arm, me in a slinky long black dress, slit up the side to show my long legs, him in a nice charcoal gray suit.

I haven't described Brian since he was fifteen, have I? Let me correct that. Farming agreed with the boy, I guess, because he is six-two and weighs one-ninety now. His face has matured from almost pretty to ruggedly handsome, but it's still those eyes that get you. His eyes are this indescribable hazel color; sometimes they are more gray, sometimes more greenish. When he sets those orbs on you with that quietly intense look of his, women melt and men want to be his friend.

Speaking of friends, I didn't know how many of the women in the department had secretly been dying to be mine, until I brought Brian to the party. Suddenly, I had women friends coming out of the woodwork to be introduced to my hubby. For his part, Brian was polite to them, but he was his usual doting self with me. My stock went through the ceiling after that night.

I liked the people I worked with and for the first time in many years I was comfortable making friends. I sometimes missed people I knew back in Ames, but never enough to want to go back there. My life as introverted Britney Wagner was ancient history. I was becoming firmly established as Mrs. Gustafson and I loved every minute of it.

I guess my story will disappoint some people, especially the doom and gloom crowd, because Brian and I seemed to have had so little to over come to be together. I'm guessing those same people might think our love won't last, because we had it too easy. But in real life, every couple doesn't have to overcome some titanic struggle to be together. For a fortunate few of us, the course of true love does run smooth. So I will continue to live in my happily ever after world with my fabulous husband and my amazing daughter for as long as possible. And at least once a day, I'll thank Mr. Ripley and his funny little statues for making it all possible.

THE END
Joe J & Wet Dream-Girl