Stepmother Stories

1. Prologue

The house had learned his silences the way a body learns a bruise: not all at once, but by returning to the same tender place until the shape of it became familiar. Linda found him on the couch with the lamp still off and the television muttering to no one. She did not announce herself. She let the floorboards speak for her, slow, so he would not startle.

His shirt had ridden up. A strip of skin showed above the waist of his jeans, warm even from where she stood. She sat. The cushion dipped and rolled him a fraction toward her hip. She pulled the throw from the back of the sofa and spread it over both of them, tucking the edge at his ribs the way she had once tucked a fever, except the fever now was something else and they both knew it.

“You’ve been wound so tight,” she said, voice kept in the register she used for late kitchens and closed doors. “Is there something I can do to make you happy?”

He turned his face into the dark of her shoulder instead of answering. His breath dragged across the open V of her robe. She felt it. She let him feel that she felt it. Her fingers found the nape of his neck, the short hair there damp from a shower taken too fast, and she stroked as if the question had already been settled and only the how remained.

When he kissed her it was not sudden. It arrived the way heat arrives through cloth: a mouth first against the hinge of her jaw, then lower, then her lips parting because she opened them for him. She tasted mint and the faint metallic edge of held-back want. She made a sound into him that was not surprise. Her hand slid from his neck to the front of his jeans and stayed there, palm curved, feeling him thicken against the denim until the shape of him was unmistakable and her own pulse had dropped between her legs.

“Come here,” she murmured, and she did not mean across the room.

She drew the blanket higher so it made a private weather around them. The robe slipped. One breast came free against his cheek; he turned and took the nipple into his mouth with a hunger that made her hips shift on the cushion. She held the back of his head. Not to force. To keep. The wet heat of him there sent a slow clench through her that she did not hide. She worked his fly open with her other hand, careful of the zipper, and wrapped him in her fist. He was already slick at the head. She spread that slickness down him in unhurried strokes, twisting just enough at the crown that his breath broke against her skin.

“That’s it,” she whispered. “Let me.”

He pushed up into her grip. She let him. Then she slid down the couch until her knees met the rug, the blanket sliding with her like a curtain, and took him into her mouth. The first inch was salt and heat. She breathed through her nose and went farther, tongue flat along the underside, one hand still working what she could not yet take. His fingers tangled in her hair and then gentled, as if he had remembered whose mouth this was. She hummed around him. The vibration pulled a sound out of his throat that the television could not cover.

She did not rush the finish. She learned him: the way his thigh jumped when she hollowed her cheeks, the way his hips stuttered when she drew off to lick the ridge and then sank again. Spit gathered at the corners of her lips and ran down to her fist. She used it. When he warned her—her name, cracked—she only held him deeper and swallowed what he gave her, throat working, eyes watering, one hand braced on his shaking knee. The taste of him stayed. She stayed too, mouth soft on him as he softened, kissing the wet length of him as if it were something she was allowed to keep.

Only then did she climb back onto the couch, straddling his thighs, robe open now to the waist. She took his hand and guided it between her legs so he would feel how ready she had become from having him in her mouth. His fingers slipped. She was swollen, slick, the inner lips parting around the pads of his fingers with an audible wetness. She hissed through her teeth and sank down onto two of them, rolling her hips, using him.

“I want you in me,” she said against his mouth. Not a plea. A decision.

She lifted, fitted him, and took him in one slow, stretching slide that made her forehead drop to his. He filled her in increments she could feel as separate pressures—the head, the shaft, the last thick inch that seated him against the place that made her inner muscles flutter and clutch. She stayed there, fully on him, breathing, letting her body accept the possession before she moved. When she did move it was a grind more than a bounce, her clit dragging the coarse hair at his base, her breasts against his chest, her mouth open on his temple.

The couch complained. She did not care. She worked herself on him until the wet sound of it was shameless and steady, until her thighs trembled ...