Inheritance

It felt like it should be raining, but the sun was high and the sky completely blue. It felt odd. Barbara was by my side, her eyes as puffy as mine. We had just buried her sister. My wife. Angela. Angie. My one true love. I didn't know what I would do, or what would happen to Barbara -- whom not even my wife dared call Barbie.

Barbara was no longer a child, but she wasn't ready to be on her own either. She had lived with us since she was ten, a very long time ago, when her mother had died in a freak car accident. Just like Angela, now. Some drunken idiot had rammed her car with his humongous truck, and after a week in the hospital and several surgeries, Angie had died.

Legally speaking, Barbara was as much of an adult as I was. However, she was still studying and had no skills to support herself with. She would have to stay with me for at least a few years, until she was ready to face the world. She had nobody else, nowhere else to go. In a way, I had inherited her and very little else.

I drove back home, silently, thinking about what awaited us. Now it was just the two of us. Barbara and I, without Angie. As soon as we arrived, Barbara went inside without a word. I realized I hadn't fed the chickens before we left, and walked to the coop, between the house and the woods. It used to be one of Angie's many chores, and I suppose I inherited it, too. Barbara left early in the morning for school and got back in the early evening, while I worked at home. My schedule was more flexible than hers.

When I got inside, Barbara was brushing her hair, something Angie had always done for her. She had loved brushing her sister's long, black hair. Barbara had often said she'd rather cut it short, but Angie admired her sister's hair so much she would always convince her to let it grow. And grow it did. After years of back-and-forth debate about her hair's length, it now reached just below her buttocks. She was too much of a tomboy for such long hair, though. Between brushing sessions with her sister, it was always in tresses or a bun, more often than not under a cap. In aesthetic terms, I understood Angie: Barbara's very black, heavy, and straight hair made her milk-like pale skin glow, as a beautiful frame highlights the beauty of a painting. Her eyes, of a darker shade of blue, were also brought out by her hair, in the rare occasions it was not hidden.

*

She was a very beautiful young lady. She was no Jessica Rabbit, but only a blind man with his hands tied behind his back could mistake her for a boy. Thin, but muscular in a very feminine way, the way she moved always reminded me of a cat.

Of course, the time she spent training in the many martial arts she mastered could help explain her fluid movements, but I had always thought she was good at martial arts because she moved like a cat, much more than the opposite. The few times I went to her competitions -- Angie would always go; did I inherit this obligation, too? --, she looked like a cat among bulldogs. The other girls were always heavier, almost masculine, compared to her. She was tiny, but then her category's weight limit made it almost certain that her competitors were even shorter than her, precisely because they were so heavyset. At least compared to the lithe, half-domesticated little panther whose care I had just inherited.

Anyway, her martial arts exploits were something rather theoretical for me. Now and then, I had seen her kick a few faces and coil her arms and legs around a few opponents, immobilizing them like a serpent killing a hog. Yet, it always happened under the harsh lights of a sports venue, with a referee ready to call her off. Her brain, on the other hand, knew no boundaries. She was scary smart, often sarcastic, and her brain just didn't operate the way normal brains do. I've told Angie I thought she was on the autistic spectrum, but Angie didn't want to hear any of it.

Barbara wasn't mean, psychotic, or anything like that, but it was rather obvious that she saw conventional mores as something akin to the artificial limits of her martial arts competitions. Something necessary for things to work in that time and place, but not a clear-cut and universally valid moral limit. The same way she would certainly not hold her punches or kicks if she thought her life was threatened, she wouldn't think twice about breaking a law if she saw it as nonsense. There were many things she considered nonsense, by the way.

Angie would often sit down with her and spend hours arguing, trying to show her why she should follow this or that rule. It always boiled down to either making her see that the consequences of breaking that rule would be so bad that it wouldn't be worth doing it or showing her that if everybody did it, society as a whole would suffer. "It's forbidden", by itself, meant nothing to her. She had to know why, or she would just ignore it. "Nonsense", she'd say, and few people would be able to convince her otherwise. Her brain was just too sharp. Scary sharp.

I, for one, was scared. I had inherited Angie's role in their perpetual debate, but could I do it? How would I deal with her? Without Angie around, would she listen to me?

Barbara wanted to become a doctor. Perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that she would become a doctor, unless she changed her mind. As she seldom changed her mind about things, it was a matter of time, more than anything, and she'd be a doctor. Money was not the problem. I had sold a couple of start-ups and had made more than enough for a few lifetimes, but I kept working and still made more than enough for our needs. Angie's parents had left her lots of money, too. None of us cared much about money or had expensive tastes, so it was all in the hands of professionals, growing untouched.

That was another thing I'd have to talk about with Barbara. She probably didn't know it, but she was a quite rich young lady, now that her sister had died. She could buy almost anything she wanted. However, I don't know whether there was something she wanted. We lived a simple yet comfortable life, away from everything, the way Angie and I had always liked. Barbara had never complained or asked for expensive stuff, and seemed happy, in her peculiar way, with the way we lived in our small homestead.

Our nearest neighbor was some ten minutes away by car. The nearest town was a small college town, where Barbara studied, half an hour farther down. Our home was the last on the road; after our house, it became a narrow dirt road leading into the back side of a national park. Our house wasn't off the grid, as we had kept the wiring, but we generated all the electricity we used. The mains were our backup. I drove an old diesel 4x4, and Angie had a small Japanese jeep. Which was totaled in the accident that killed her. Barbara would need to buy herself a car. But she couldn't drive, and had never expressed any interest in learning. Well, now she had to. When summer ended, she would need to go to school by herself. Angie always drove her there, but I couldn't do it, not every day.

"Barbara", I called as I closed the door behind me, "could you come here, please?"

She didn't answer. Answering this kind of rhetorical question, for her, was nonsense. She would just come. As I turned on the kettle to make myself some tea, she noiselessly appeared by my side, like a ghost. Or a cat. If I weren't used to the way she moved, as if she didn't disturb the air or touch the ground, I'd have jumped.

She sat at the table and looked at me, waiting. Silently. As usual, she had an oversized t-shirt covering down to her panties, and nothing else. Unusually, she had her hair down, framing her flawless, expressionless face. When my tea was ready, I sat down across the table.

"We have to talk about a few things."

"Like what?"

"Money, cars, and other general practicalities. We have to see what we will do from now on."

She just stared at me, waiting for me to go on.

I went, "Well, first of all, you don't need to worry about money. Not now, nor ever. You are a very rich young lady."

"I know." She caught me by surprise, and I assume it showed. "Angie told me. She told me a lot of things about everything I inherited. Money. Chores. Responsibilities. We spent a whole day at the hospital, going over this stuff. I took notes."

"You will have to go to school by yourself when summer recess is over. You will need to learn how to drive a car, and buy yourself a car you like."

"No, I don't want a car. I will buy one of those new electric bikes, the ones with a motor that helps push the pedals when you go uphill. You don't need a driver's license to ride one like that. We can go to town tomorrow and buy it."

"But what if it rains?"

"I get wet, silly. Still better than having to lug around a sofa and an extra cushioned chair, plus an empty crate, inside a giant tin can on wheels. The world would be a better place if there were no cars."

I knew better than trying to argue with her. Cars, apparently, were firmly inside the "nonsense" category, and I just couldn't muster enough energy to get into that discussion now.

Unexpectedly, she held my hand. This time, I was startled. As far as I could remember, it was the very first time my skin and hers had touched since Angie brought her weird little kid sister to one of our dates to introduce us. She gave me one of her cryptic half-smiles and kept holding my hand.

I stared at her hand, as if I had never seen it. It was a very pale and very feminine hand. Long fingers. Nails trimmed very short, no nail polish (which, of course, was also "nonsense"). Cold to the touch. Not clammy, not too dry; only cold, much colder than I would have expected. My mind drifted, and I remembered the vampire stories I would read when I was her age. I looked up to her face, and she was still smirking, as if it were very funny that I had lost my train of thought. Her eyes were on my face. If it weren't Barbara, I'd say she was staring at me. Being her, I knew she was just paying attention. When she moved in with us, it was unsettling to be the focus of such an unflinching gaze. By now, though, I was used to it, after years of being probed by those two dark-blue lasers.

"Obi", she said.

She had never called me "Obi". Angie was the only one to call me that. My late mother had given me the unfortunate name "Aubrey", after a character in a book she liked. Understandably, nobody called me that, either. Except for Barbara, that is. Everybody else called me by my family name, even my closest friends. And now Aubrey-calling Barbara had just called me "Obi". Just like her sister. Whom we had just buried. It was too much. Tears blurred my vision. Barbara held my hand tighter. I wept. I sobbed. She didn't say a word and simply held my hand tight.

When I recovered, she was still looking at me. Looking inside me. And holding my hand.

"Obi," she said again. "All I have is you. All you have is me. We need one another. You inherited me, and I inherited you. Angie knew it would be hard for both of us. She loved us both and worried about it. About how we'd manage without her. Until now, she could place herself between us, protecting you from me and me from you, but..."

"What do you mean, 'protecting'?"

"Oh, yes. We're both difficult people. We're both annoying as hell. I know it, and you know it. Angie knew us both and knew how to get between us so we didn't annoy one another too much. But she's no longer here. Separation cannot work without a rational mind -- her loving, rational mind -- guiding it. We need to stay together. Therefore, we need to go slowly, very slowly, and learn to live with one another without biting each other's heads off. Until, eventually, we learn to love one another. She talked to me about it."

"Did she tell you to call me 'Obi'?"

"As a matter of fact, yes, she did. And she also said you would freak out when I first did it. She knew you very well, probably better than yourself." She got up and kissed my forehead. "Now go to sleep. You need to sleep off this horrible day."

I suddenly realized that now I was the one holding her hand, and let it go. It was harder to do it than I expected. She smiled -- not smirking anymore --, turned around, and went up the stairs to her room. In the midst of this nightmare, I looked at her as he wafted up the stairs, lithe as a cat. Her hair moved from side to side with each step. Her porcelain legs moved fluidly. She was so beautiful it hurt. I looked at my hand, as if it belonged to someone else. I touched my forehead, where she had planted that unexpected kiss. I could feel it burning, as if her cold lips had been on fire. I was so lost.

*

When I woke up the next day, I heard familiar noises coming from the kitchen. But it couldn't be Angie making us breakfast; it must be Barbara. Angie used to wake up before everybody else in the house and make all of us breakfast. Barbara was always the last to wake up. Yet there she was, in the kitchen, apparently doing what Angie used to do. Another inherited chore?

I got up and prepared to face this brave new world. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, shaved, got some clothes on, and went to the kitchen. Indeed, Barbara had set the table just like her sister used to, but only for two, in what used to be mine and Angie's places. She was making orange juice. A little bit less than Angie would make. Her hair was still down, but she was already dressed to leave: blue jeans, a t-shirt, sneakers. The universal teenager uniform. No cap this time, though.

"Good morning, Obi."

Should I ask her to stop calling me 'Obi'? She said Angie had told her to do so. I didn't know how I felt about it. It was strange.

"Hi, morning bird. Why did you wake up so early?"

"Breakfast won't make itself. I inherited this chore. I have to take care of you, just like you have to take care of me. Gotta get used to it."

As she brought me coffee, just like Angie used to do, she smiled at me. As she passed behind me, she caressed my arm, again just like Angie used to. Should I tell her to stop? Did she think she inherited the chore of caressing my arm and smiling like her sister?

"Gotta go buy myself a bike. Can you drive me there?", she asked as she sat.

I agreed, of course. She was right: I had inherited the chore of driving her, at least this last time. After she buys herself an electric bike, she won't need a driver anymore.

Angie would always read the news on her cellphone while having breakfast. Barbara didn't care about the news, but she'd usually be in her own world, lost in thought during breakfast, at least until the caffeine started working its magic. This time, though, she was looking at me. Staring at me. Through me. Smiling at me, too, as if I were her new pet. She had never paid that much attention to me before. The Barbara I had inherited was very different from the silent and impassive Barbara I was used to.

*

The bike shop was huge and apparently selling briskly. Lots of people around, plenty of different models. The cashiers were busy all the time. I made a mental note to ask my broker whether he had invested in electric bikes. Barbara, meanwhile, was talking to a salesman. As I knew she would, she was talking like an expert about wattage, maximum speed, and batteries. She never went anywhere unprepared, and I could tell she had done her homework on electric bikes. She seemed to know more than the salesman, and in less than twenty minutes, we were outside, fitting a huge box into my old SUV. She wanted to assemble the bike herself. She didn't trust the shop to do as good a job of it. In fact, neither did I. Barbara never over- or underestimated her abilities, and if she said she'd do a better job of it than the shop's pros, she certainly would.

And she did. She plugged the batteries into the charger and spent more than one hour getting the bike the way she had wanted it. Installing optional accessories. Fine-tuning this and that. Adjusting the position of each component until the bike was precisely the way she wanted it. When she finally got it just right, the batteries were fully charged. Typical Barbara. She looked at me with a triumphant smile while she expertly braided her lush black hair and tucked it inside her shirt.

"It's ready. I'll go for a ride. Do you need me to bring you anything?" She pointed to the small basket she had just installed, as if daring me to find something to fill it.

"Nah, just come back in one piece."

In a fluid motion, she kissed my cheek, straddled her new toy, and went down the driveway. When I realized I was admiring her firm butt pressed against the bike's seat, I blushed.

As she rode away, I touched my cheek and started wondering whether I was her new project, her new pet, or even her new toy. Everything was quite unsettling.

I had lost Angie -- we had lost Angie. But at the same time, Barbara was trying to fill part of that void. She wasn't trying to impersonate Angie, or anything that crude. But she was obviously doing her best to perform what she saw as her inherited duties. Among which I apparently counted, by the way. She was trying to make my loss less unbearable by, as she had put it, "taking care of me". Paying attention to me as she had never done, and thus making me pay a different kind of attention to her, too.

The problem was that she couldn't take all of Angie's roles. Angie was my wife. Barbara was a gorgeous young woman who was very definitely not my wife. She had never touched me before, and now she had already kissed my cheek and my forehead. It was all very innocent, but I didn't trust myself to keep it innocent. Perhaps I should talk to her, and somehow try to show her that. Knowing Barbara, I knew she was aware of much more than I. Yet she kept doing it. I didn't know whether I was more unsettled or soothed by that new Barbara.

Lost in thought, I was still there when she rode back, with the bike's basket filled to the brim, grinning from ear to ear. I had never seen her so happy, and so beautiful; if I had known she would have liked so much to ride an electric bike, I would have bought her one much earlier. I smiled back, and she stopped by my side.

Again, she moved so fast and nimbly that I could barely react before she hugged me, still grinning, and planted yet another kiss on my cheek.

"I brought you that bread you like, and some ham, and some cheese. As soon as I adjust the front brake, let's go inside and have our second breakfast, like hobbits."

She took less time to do something to the front wheel than it took me to recover from that hug and that kiss. The places where her breasts had compressed my chest still smoldered.

She grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. I felt like a pet. A beloved pet.

*

Now, one of the problems was that Angie and I were kinky, kinkier than I would admit in public. And I am not talking about hair. For a couple who had never had any interest in porn, wife-sharing, or other assorted popular perversions, we were a lot less vanilla than we would seem.

It had all started when I found out -- we found out -- that dialing up Angie's natural assertiveness turned me on like a light switch. Perhaps because things had worked so well for me in life, being bossed around for the first time since I was a small kid excited me more than anything. Of course, as usual with this kind of thing, it was only the start. She would tie me up to the bed and tease me. A few times, she had even pegged me, biting my back like a dominant dog. On other occasions, when the mood was right, I would be the one to tie her up and tease her.

We were madly in love. Had always been, since we had first met on 7th grade. She had been my only girlfriend, and we had married as soon as I first made some real money and could buy us a home. But behind closed doors, our love took a different, and kinkier, form. She had a safe, hidden in her closet, whose combination she wouldn't let me know. It excited the hell out of me, for I never knew what she would take from that safe when the mood struck. Sometimes a tie-up set. Sometimes some kind of electric stimulator. Blind folds. A gag of some kind. Once, she even took out a literal "fucking machine", as she called it. She tied me up and made me watch while she was ravaged by that thing.