The stairs creaked under her weight, third from the top, the one she'd been meaning to have fixed since spring. Vivienne counted them without meaning to. Eleven down, eleven up. She'd counted them the night she moved in, when Harry carried her over the threshold and she'd laughed and told him the house smelled like money and old wood, and he'd said that was the smell of forever.
Forever had a draft text on it now.
Her bedroom door stood open. She'd left it that way—locked from the outside was the same as open, in this house. The bed was made, corners squared, the way she'd made it yesterday morning before everything. Before the salon. Before the parking lot. Before the pizza and the locked door and the slap at dawn that still rang in her jaw like a struck bell.
She stood in the doorway and looked at her own room like a stranger's. The dish on the dresser. The ring in it. The bare strip at her nape that she could feel every time she turned her head, a line of cold air where hair used to be.
"An hour," she said out loud, to the empty room. Her voice came back flat. "He said an hour."
She went to the closet and opened it. The camisole hung where she'd left it, black silk on a black hanger, and beside it the mini skirt, and she took them both down and laid them on the bed and stood looking at them the way you look at a bill you can't pay.
She pulled the gray cashmere over her head. Folded it. Placed it on the bed. The jeans came off next, and she stepped out of them and folded those too, because folding was something her hands could do while her mind ran in circles like a dog on a chain.
The camisole went on cold. The silk settled against her skin and she felt every inch of it, the way it skimmed her ribs, the way it caught on her nipples and made them stand up through the fabric before she'd even looked in the mirror. She reached for the skirt and stepped into it and pulled it up over her hips and the hem sat high, high enough that if she bent wrong the whole world would see what Nate had left on her.
She turned to the mirror.
The woman who looked back was not the woman who'd woken up in this bed. The woman who looked back had a bruise on her cheekbone, faded to yellow at the edges, and a bare strip at her nape she'd have to wear her hair down to hide, and a skirt that made her legs look like they belonged to someone younger and less careful. Forty-four years old and dressed like a girl who didn't know better.
"You did this," she told the mirror. "You walked down the stairs. You sat at the table. You let him—"
She stopped. The rest of the sentence sat in her throat like a swallowed stone.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She flinched before she could stop herself, and then she hated herself for flinching, and then she picked it up.
One message. From him.
Downstairs. Now.
She stared at the two words until the screen dimmed. No please. No sweetheart. Just the flat command of a man who'd stopped pretending to ask.
She put the phone in her pocket and went down the stairs, and her bare feet made no sound on the runner, and she counted the steps again anyway. Eleven. Eleven. Eleven.
He was on the couch. Of course he was on the couch—the same couch where he'd held her against his shoulder and fed her popcorn and called it a movie night, the same couch where her whole body had learned to sit still under his arm. He'd taken off the hoodie. Just a black t-shirt now, stretched across those broad shoulders he'd grown into without her noticing, his hair still wet from the shower, dark circles under his eyes like he hadn't slept either.
The TV was on. Some muted thing, a nature documentary, a lioness stalking something through tall grass. He wasn't watching it.
"Took you long enough," he said.
"I was changing. You told me to change."
"I did." His eyes went down her body and back up, slow, unhurried, the way a man reads a page he's already memorized. "Turn around."
"Nate—"
"Turn around, Vivienne."
She turned. The skirt swished against her thighs. She felt his gaze land on the back of her legs and stay there, and she felt the bare strip at her nape go cold under the weight of it, and she heard him breathe out through his nose, slow, satisfied.
"Good," he said. "Now come here."
She came. What else was there to do. She came around the coffee table and stood in front of him and he looked up at her from the couch and there was something in his face she couldn't read—not hunger exactly, something quieter and worse than hunger, something that had been patient for a long time and was finally being fed.
"Harry calls in forty minutes," he said. "You're going to be right here when he does."
"I know. I'll be—"
"On the floor."
She blinked. "What?"
"On the floor. Above me." He patted the rug in front of the couch, between his knees, and the gesture was casual, almost friendly, and that was the worst part. "On all fours. Face the TV."
The room went very quiet. Even the documentary seemed to go quiet, the lioness frozen mid-stalk, and Vivienne stood there with her hands at her sides and her heart doing something ugly in her chest.
"You can't be serious."
"I'm always serious." He leaned back against the cushions and spread his knees a little, making room, and the space between them was the exact size and shape of her. "You're going to get down on your hands and knees over me. Your face at the TV. Your ass over my chest. And you're going to stay there until your husband calls and you answer him like everything's fine."
"That's—" Her mouth was dry. "That's disgusting."
"Is it." He didn't smile. He never smiled when he did this, she'd noticed—he just watched, gray eyes flat and patient, cataloging her. "You've been on your knees for me before. On your stomach. Over my lap. In a car in a parking lot. This is just a different direction."
"In a parking lot because you—"
"Because you ran." His voice didn't rise. It never rose. "And you're not running now. So get down."
She looked at the rug. Worn wool, dark red, the one she'd picked out at a store in the city three years ago because it was the exact color of the wine Harry liked. She'd knelt on it to vacuum it. She'd knelt on it to pick up a dropped earring. She had never once imagined kneeling on it like this, in a skirt that barely covered her, with a nineteen-year-old boy watching her from the couch like she was something he'd ordered online and been waiting weeks to unwrap.
"If I don't," she said, and hated how small it came out.
"Then I send the text." He picked up his phone off the cushion beside him and held it up, screen toward her, and she saw the little draft icon, the unsent message sitting there like a loaded gun on a table. "And Harry comes home to a very different conversation than the one he's about to have."
Forty minutes. Less, now. Thirty-eight. She could hear the clock in the hall ticking, the same clock that had ticked through every dinner, every Christmas, every quiet Sunday of the last six years.
She got down.
Her knees hit the wool and the wool scraped, and she put her hands flat on the rug in front of her and she was suddenly, acutely aware of every inch of her own body—the camisole riding up her back, the skirt riding up her thighs, the cool air of the living room moving across the backs of her legs where the skirt didn't reach. She faced the TV. The lioness was moving again, low in the grass, and Vivienne fixed her eyes on it because looking at anything else meant looking at him.
"Higher," he said.
"What?"
"Your knees. Move them up. You're supposed to be over me, not in front of me."
She moved her knees, shuffling backward on the rug, and then she felt it—his legs, his knees, bracketing hers, and the couch cushion behind her and his body underneath her, and she understood with a lurch what he'd actually meant. She was above him. Her hands were on the rug on one side of him and her knees were on the rug on the other side and her whole body was a bridge over his, and her face was toward the TV and her hips were over his chest and her ass—her ass was directly above his face.
"There," he said, and his voice came from below her, from under her, and it was the strangest thing she'd ever heard, her stepson's voice arriving from a place she couldn't see. "That's better."
Her arms were already shaking. She could feel the tremble running up from her wrists into her shoulders and she locked her elbows to stop it and the locking made it worse. The rug was rough under her palms. The documentary murmured. Somewhere a lioness was doing something violent to something else and she couldn't have said what.
"I can't hold this," she said. "Nate. I can't—my arms."
"You can hold it for thirty-five minutes."
"I can't."
"Then you'll fall on me and I'll catch you." A pause. "Won't that be nice."
She closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids the world was red and dark and she could pretend for one second that she was somewhere else—the kitchen at the old house, the one before Harry, the one with the window over the sink. But the rug scraped her knees and the camisole was cold against her stomach and her arms were already burning, and pretending was a luxury she'd stopped being able to afford somewhere around the second spank in the fitting room.
"Why," she said. It came out before she could stop it. "Why do you—why this. You could just—"
"Just what?"
"Just take what you want and leave me alone."
He was quiet for a moment. Under her, she could feel him breathing—slow, even, the breath moving through his chest and up into her hips through the thin silk of the skirt. She could feel the heat of him. She could feel the shape of him, the broad shoulders she'd watched grow, the solid weight of him on the couch, and she hated that she could feel it, hated that her body was reading his body like a map she hadn't agreed to study.
"Because taking what I want is easy," he said finally. "And I don't want easy. I want you to give it."
"I'm not giving you anything."
"You're on all fours over me on your own rug." His voice was very calm. "You're giving me something."
Her arms shook harder. She wanted to get up. Every muscle in her back and shoulders was screaming at her to get up, to stand, to walk out of this room and lock herself in her bedroom and never come out, and she stayed exactly where she was because thirty-two minutes from now her husband was going to call and she was going to answer, and if she got up now she would answer him from a house where everything was already over.
"Your hands are shaking," he observed.
"I know they're shaking."
"You're doing good, though." And then—his hand. His hand came up and landed on her thigh, just above the knee, palm flat, and she jerked like she'd been shocked, and the jerk nearly took her off balance and she caught herself on her elbows and her face came down close to the rug and she was breathing hard now, breathing into the wool, and the wool smelled like dust and old money and her own fear.
"Don't," she said into the rug.
"Don't what." His hand moved. Slow. Up the back of her thigh, over the hem of the skirt, and the skirt came with it, riding up, and she felt the cool air hit the underside of her ass and she felt him look at it, and the looking was worse than the touching, the looking went through her like a needle.
"Don't look at me like that."
"How am I looking at you."
"Like—" Her voice cracked. "Like you own me."
"I do own you." His hand kept moving, up over the curve of her ass, and she felt the welts under his palm, the raised lines he'd left there yesterday, the one that had broken the skin, and his fingers found them like he was reading braille. "These are mine. This is mine. You're going to be up here over my face while your husband tells you he loves you, and you're going to say it back, and the whole time you're going to know exactly whose hands are on you."
The phone rang.
It was in her pocket, against her hip, and the vibration went through her whole body and she gasped—actually gasped, a small, sharp sound that she heard come out of her own mouth and hated—and her arms locked and her hips jerked and his hand tightened on her ass in response, fingers digging into the soft flesh, and the two things happened at once, the ring and the grip, and she couldn't tell anymore which one had made her gasp.
"There he is," Nate said, from under her.
"Nate—"
"Answer it."
"I can't answer it like this."
"You can." His thumb traced a slow circle on the sorest part of her, and she bit down on the inside of her cheek to keep from making a sound. "You're going to answer it like this. You're going to say hello to your husband. You're going to ask him how the trip is. And the whole time, I'm going to be right here."
The phone rang again. She fumbled it out of her pocket with one shaking hand—she had to take her weight on one elbow to do it and she nearly went down, and his other hand came up and caught her hip and held her steady, and the steadiness was somehow the most obscene thing that had happened all morning.
"Hello," she said. Her voice came out almost normal. She'd spent twenty years learning how to make her voice come out almost normal.
"Viv!" Harry's voice, warm and loud and far away, tinny through the speaker. "There's my girl. How's my girl?"
"I'm—" She closed her eyes. Under her, Nate's hands were moving again, both of them now, one on each cheek, slow and proprietary, spreading her, and she could feel the air where she'd never felt air before, and she could feel him looking, and she pressed her forehead into the rug and tried to make her voice work. "I'm fine. I'm good. How's Singapore?"
"Hot. Humid. The food's incredible, you'd hate it." A laugh. "I miss you. God, I miss you. You have no idea."
"I miss you too."
Nate's thumb pressed, just there, and her whole body flinched, and she made a sound—a tiny one, a breath, but a sound—and she covered it with a cough.
"You okay?" Harry said.
"Fine. Something in my throat." Her arms were going to give out. Her arms were going to give out and she was going to collapse onto her stepson's chest while her husband asked her about the weather, and she was going to die of it. "How—how are the meetings?"
"Long. Boring. The same as always." He was moving somewhere—she could hear it, footsteps, a door—and she pictured him in a hotel room with the curtains open and the city below him, a whole world away, a whole world that had no idea what was happening on the rug in his living room. "Hey, is Nate around? I wanted to ask him about that class he was thinking of dropping."
Nate's hands stopped.
"He's—" She swallowed. "He's out. With friends."
"Friends!" Harry laughed, delighted. "Good for him. He's been such a hermit lately. Tell him I said good for him."
"I'll tell him."
"And Sera? How's my girl?"
"She's fine. She's—she got the internship."
"She did? That's wonderful! Viv, that's wonderful, we'll celebrate when I'm home—"
Under her, Nate shifted. She felt his hips move, felt the hard length of him press up against the underside of her through his jeans, and her whole body went rigid, and her voice stopped in her throat, and she heard Harry say her name, once, twice, from very far away.
"Viv? You still there?"
"Yes." The word came out cracked. "Yes. I'm here. The—the reception. It's bad in this room."
"You're breaking up a little. Listen, I should go, I've got a call with the Frankfurt people in ten. I love you. I'll call again tomorrow before the plane, same time."
"I love you too." She said it. She said it with her stepson's hands on her ass and her stepson's cock pressed up against her and her knees scraped raw on the rug of the house her husband had paid for, and the words came out of her mouth and hung in the air and she felt them land on Nate like a slap.
"Bye, sweetheart."
"Bye."
The line clicked dead. She dropped the phone on the rug and her arms gave out and she came down—not onto him, she caught herself on her forearms, but she came down low and close and she was breathing hard into the wool and she could feel his breath on the inside of her thigh, warm, slow, deliberate.
"That," Nate said, "was the best thing I've ever heard."
"Let me up."
"Not yet." His hand came back, palm flat, and rested on her ass, and she felt the weight of it settle into her like a stamp. "You told him you loved him."
"He's my husband."
"And I'm the one you're over." His thumb moved, a slow stroke along the crease, and she shuddered, and she hated the shudder, she hated that her body had learned this, that somewhere in the last week her body had started answering him before her mind could stop it. "Say it."
"Say what."
"Say you're mine."
"No."
"Say it." His hand lifted and came down—not hard, a tap, but the tap landed on the broken welt and she yelped and her hips bucked and she felt him breathe out, satisfied, beneath her. "Say it or I'll make you say it."
She was shaking. Her whole body was shaking and her arms were raw and her knees were raw and the camisole was stuck to her back with sweat and somewhere above her the lioness had caught whatever she'd been chasing and was doing something to it in the grass, and Vivienne pressed her forehead into the rug and said the words.
"I'm yours."
"Good girl." His hands moved, both of them, slow and thorough, mapping her, and she lay there over him with her face in the rug and let him, because the phone was on the floor beside her and the call was over and tomorrow it would ring again, same time, and she would answer it again, and she already knew—the way you know the shape of a room in the dark—that she would answer it from exactly here.
"Now," he said, and his voice came from under her, from the place she couldn't see, from the mouth she'd been trying not to think about for six years. "Let's see how long you can hold that."
His palm came down flat and hard, the crack of it loud in the quiet room, and Vivienne's whole spine arched like something struck. The pain bloomed up through her hips and out along the tops of her thighs, a bright, spreading heat, and she bit down on the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted copper.
Then his hands were on her, both of them, fingers digging into the soft flesh of her ass and squeezing, spreading her cheeks apart and pushing them back together, kneading her like dough. She could feel every ridge of his fingerprints. She could feel the welts he'd left the day before, the raised lines under his palms, and he found them without looking, pressing his thumbs along them like he was tracing a signature.
"God, I love this ass," he said. His voice came up from under her, muffled and close. "I've been thinking about this ass for years. Before I ever had a reason to. Before I ever had a picture. Just watching you walk up the stairs in front of me. Watching you bend over to pick up a coaster."
She said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse.
He squeezed harder, and the pressure pushed the sore flesh against the bone, and a small sound came out of her before she could stop it—not a word, just air.
"You used to do it on purpose," he said. "You know that? You used to bend over right in front of me and then act like I was the disgusting one for looking."
"I never—"
The slap landed before she finished the sentence. Harder than the first. It caught her right across the broken welt, and the pain was white and total, and she gasped—a raw, open-mouthed gasp that she heard echo off the ceiling—and her hips bucked and her arms nearly went out from under her.
"Please," she got out. "Please, Nate, stop, I can't—"
He slapped her again. Same spot. The sound of it cracked through the room like a starter's pistol, and she sobbed, once, a wet, ugly sound, and then clamped her mouth shut because she could already hear what he'd say if she kept going.
"There it is," he said. "There's the remembering."
His hands settled back on her, both of them, palms flat, and he held her there—just held her, the weight of his hands pinning her hips down, and she could feel the heat of him radiating up through the silk of her skirt and into her belly. She could feel the shape of his shoulders between her knees. She could feel the slow, even rhythm of his breathing moving her whole body, a half-inch up and a half-inch down, like she was a boat on a tide.
Then his head moved.
She felt it before she understood it—the shift of him underneath her, the crown of his skull coming up between her thighs, and his nose brushed the inside of her leg, just above the knee, and every muscle in her body locked at once.
"Nate." Her voice came out thin. "Nate, what are you—"
"Shut up," he said, almost gently, and his hands pushed down on her ass, and she understood then, she understood with a lurch that went through her stomach like a dropped elevator, that he was pulling her down toward him. Her arms had to bend. Her elbows had to give. Her hips had to lower, inch by inch, until her knees were sliding wider on the rug and her face was dropping closer to the wool and she was hovering over his mouth with nothing between them but a strip of black silk.
She whimpered. She couldn't help it. The sound came up out of her throat on its own, high and small, and she heard it and hated it and couldn't stop it.
The slap came fast—not a windup, just his hand lifting off her ass and coming back down, a short, sharp crack that landed on the crease where her thigh met her cheek, and the whimper cut off like a switch had been thrown.
"I told you," he said. "Quiet."
So she was quiet. She lay there over him with her face in the rug and her arms bent and her knees spread, and the tears came anyway, hot and silent, running sideways down her cheeks and into the wool, and she made no sound at all. She'd learned that much. She'd learned it in a fitting room and a parking lot and a kitchen at dawn—that the sounds made it worse, that he fed on the sounds, and the only thing she had left was silence.
His hands were still on her, both of them, cupping her ass and squeezing, and he moved her—not roughly, just steadily—turning her hips a little this way and a little that, arranging her over his face like a man setting a table. She could feel his breath on the inside of her thigh now, warm and damp, moving across the skin in slow pulses. His nose dragged up the length of her leg, tracing the seam where her thigh met her body, and she felt it pass within an inch of her and stop.
Then his lips touched her thigh.
It was soft. That was the horror of it—it was soft, a slow, closed-mouth kiss pressed to the tender skin high on the inside of her leg, and it was gentle in a way nothing he'd done to her had ever been gentle, and her whole body shuddered like a plucked string. His mouth moved up. Another kiss, an inch higher. Another. He was working his way up her thigh in slow increments, kissing her like a man who had all the time in the world, and every kiss brought him closer to the place she was trying to keep him away from with nothing but a scrap of silk.
"Stop," she whispered into the rug. "Nate. Stop, please, let me up—"
His hand came off her ass and slapped down again, and the crack was sharp and final and her words died in her throat.
"You don't get to ask for things," he said. "You get to hold still."
She held still. Her arms were trembling so hard she could see them shake in her peripheral vision, and her knees had gone numb against the wool, and she held still, and he kept kissing his way up her thigh, slower now, deliberate, and she could feel the wet of his mouth on her skin and the scrape of his stubble and the heat of his breath, and she was shaking all over, a fine, constant tremble like a leaf in wind, and she couldn't make it stop.
His nose brushed the crease of her leg. She felt it—the tip of it, cool, tracing the line where her thigh ended and the silk began—and a sound came up her throat and she swallowed it back down, and the swallowing hurt.
Then his mouth found her.
Through the panties. He kissed her through the panties, a slow, open-mouthed kiss pressed right against the silk, and Vivienne's entire body convulsed. Her hips jerked down toward his face before she could stop them, an involuntary lurch, and she heard him breathe out through his nose against her—a slow, satisfied exhale that she felt all the way up into her stomach—and then his hands tightened on her ass and pulled her down harder, holding her there, holding her mouth-to-mouth with him.
"No—" The word came out cracked. "Nate, no, please, I don't—"
He kissed her again through the silk. Longer this time. His lips closed around the shape of her through the fabric and he sucked, gently, and she felt it in her clit like a plucked wire, a bright, awful shock that went up through her belly and into her chest, and she sobbed—a real sob, loud, torn out of her—and her thighs tried to close and couldn't because his shoulders were between them.
"If you want something to focus on," he said, and his voice was thick against her, muffled by silk and flesh, "look at my cock."
She shook her head. She was already shaking it before he finished the sentence, her forehead grinding into the rug, and she said, "No. No, I won't—"
"It's right under you."
"I don't want to look at it."
"It's hard," he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice even though she couldn't see his face, and that was worse than seeing it. "It's been hard since you walked down the stairs. It's been hard since you turned around and showed me the back of your legs. You can look at it or you can keep crying into the rug. Those are the options."
"I hate you."
"Look at it."
"I hate you." She said it again, louder, and the words came out wet and broken and she meant them, she meant every syllable, and she pressed her eyes shut so she wouldn't have to see anything at all. "I hate you, I hate you, I—"
His mouth came down on her again, and the rest of the sentence dissolved.
He kissed her through the silk and this time he didn't stop—he worked his mouth against her in slow, wet strokes, his lips and his tongue pressing the fabric into the shape of her, and Vivienne's body answered before her mind could intervene. Her hips rolled. They rolled down against his mouth, a slow, helpless grind, and she felt her own wetness soaking through the silk and into his lips, and she knew—she knew with a clarity that made her want to die—that he could taste it, that he could feel the heat of it, that her body was writing a confession in a language she couldn't lie in.
She hated him. She hated him and she said so, over and over, into the rug, a litany of it, "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you," and every time she said it he kissed her again and her voice broke in the middle of the word.
His hands moved on her ass, squeezing, spreading, and his kisses turned to licks—long, flat strokes of his tongue up the length of the silk, and she could feel the texture of it through the fabric, the wet drag of him, and she was crying now, really crying, tears running into her mouth and her nose and the wool, and she couldn't stop the sounds anymore, the little gasping sobs that came out of her every time his tongue found the top of the stroke.
Then his teeth caught the silk.
She felt it—the tug, the fabric pulling away from her skin, and then his hands were there, hooking into the waistband and peeling them down, and the cool air of the room hit her bare cunt and she panicked.
"No," she said. "No, Nate, not that, you can't—not directly, please, not skin to—"
The slap came down on her bare ass, skin on skin now, no silk to soften it, and the crack of it was obscene in the quiet room, and she screamed into the rug and her whole body jerked.
"You don't tell me what I can't do," he said. "You don't get to say the word 'can't' to me. Not anymore."
He pulled the panties the rest of the way down her thighs and left them there, a black band around her knees, and she was bare over his face, bare and open and wet, and she could feel the air moving across her and she could feel his breath on her, closer than it had ever been, and she squeezed her eyes shut and waited.
He started at her thigh again. He kissed his way back up from her knee, slow, unhurried, like nothing had happened, like she hadn't just begged him to stop, and she lay there over him and shook and cried and couldn't do a single thing about any of it. His lips climbed her inner thigh. His nose brushed the crease. And then his mouth was on her—directly on her, no silk, nothing between his tongue and her cunt—and Vivienne sobbed like something inside her had broken.
He licked her. One long, slow stroke from her entrance to her clit, flat-tongued and thorough, and her hips bucked down against his face and her hands clawed at the rug and a sound came out of her that she'd never made before, a raw, wounded sound, half sob and half moan, and she heard it and couldn't believe it was hers.
"Stop," she gasped. "Stop, stop, please, Nate, I can't—I can't do this—"
He licked her again. Same stroke, same slowness, and this time his tongue pressed harder at the top and her whole body clenched around nothing, an empty, aching clench, and she felt the wetness run out of her and onto his mouth and she wanted to die, she wanted the floor to open and take her, she wanted anything but this—this slow, patient, merciless attention, this tongue that knew exactly how slow to go.
"You're so wet," he said against her, and the words vibrated through her cunt and she sobbed. "You can hate me all you want. Your pussy doesn't."
"I hate you."
"I know." He licked her again, slow, and her hips rolled down against his mouth on their own, a traitor's movement, and she felt him smile against her. "Say it again."
"I hate you."
He sucked her clit between his lips, gently, and held it, and the sound she made was not a word at all.
His hands stayed on her ass the whole time. He held her there, palms flat on the sore, welted flesh, squeezing and releasing in a slow rhythm that matched his tongue, and every so often—when she got too loud, when she tried to lift her hips away, when a "please" got too close to a real plea—his hand would lift and come down, a short, sharp slap on her bare cheek, and she would jerk and gasp and go quiet again, sobbing in silence into the rug.
She was losing. She could feel it happening—the way her thighs had started to tremble in a different rhythm, the way her breath had gone shallow and fast, the way something was building low in her belly that she did not want, that she refused, that was going to happen anyway. He was going to make her come with his mouth while her husband's ring sat in a dish upstairs and her stepdaughter's car was still in the driveway and the whole house listened.
"Don't," she whispered. "Nate, don't make me—please, don't make me—"
He didn't answer. He just kept going, slower now, longer strokes, his tongue circling her clit and then dragging down and then back up, and his hands kneaded her ass like he was working dough, and she could feel the wet of her own arousal on her thighs and on his chin and she could hear the sounds her body was making, the soft, slick noise of his mouth on her, and it was the loudest thing in the room.
"Look at my cock," he said, from under her. "I told you. You want to whimper, you look at it."
She shook her head into the rug.
"Vivienne."
"No."
His hand cracked down on her ass, harder than before, and she yelped and her eyes flew open, and there it was—right under her, through the denim, the long hard line of him straining up against his jeans, and she saw it and her stomach dropped and her cunt clenched and she squeezed her eyes shut again so fast it hurt.
"There," he said. "You looked."
"I didn't—"
"You did. You saw it. You know what it's going to do to you." His tongue dragged up her again, slow and flat, and her whole body shuddered. "You can pretend you don't. But you saw it, and now you know, and you're going to think about it every time you close your eyes tonight."
She was crying hard now, open-mouthed, silent, tears and spit and wool all mixed together under her face, and her arms had gone past trembling into a fine, constant vibration, and she couldn't have lifted herself off him if she'd wanted to. She was pinned there by her own shaking. She was pinned there by his hands. She was pinned there by the fact that if she moved wrong, she'd come, and if she stayed still, she'd come, and there was no direction left that didn't end in the same place.
He kept licking her. Slow. Patient. He had all the time in the world, and she had none, and he knew it, and she could feel him knowing it in the way his tongue moved—like a man reading a book he'd already read, taking his time over the good parts.
"Please," she said, and it wasn't for him to stop anymore. She didn't know what it was for. "Please."
"Please what."
She didn't answer. She couldn't. His mouth closed over her clit and sucked, and the building thing in her belly crested and broke, and Vivienne came with her face in the rug and her stepson's mouth on her cunt and her husband's name nowhere in her throat, and the sound she made was small and broken and entirely hers.
He didn't stop. He kept going through it, slow and steady, his tongue working her through the aftershocks until she was twitching and oversensitive and sobbing for real, and only then did he pull his mouth away and let her hang there over him, shaking, wrecked, the panties still a black band around her knees.
His hands stayed on her ass. He squeezed once, slow, proprietary, and she felt the sore flesh give under his fingers.
"Good girl," he said, from under her. "Now hold that position. I'm not done looking at it."
He looked at her for a long time. That was the first thing—the looking. Her knees had gone bloodless against the wool and her arms were still braced and he lay there under her with his hands cupped on the sore, welted flesh of her ass, and he looked at what he'd opened up to the air, and she could feel the looking the way you feel sun on the back of your neck. Then he lifted his head the last inch and kissed her.
Soft. One closed-mouth press of his lips to her bare cunt, almost chaste, the way you'd kiss a knuckle, and Vivienne's whole body flinched like a struck animal. Her hips jerked away and his hands brought them back down, unhurried, and he kissed her again—same softness, same slowness—and then he let his head fall back onto the cushion and breathed out through his nose, long and satisfied.
"You taste good," he said.
The words came up from under her. She stared at the television, at the lioness dragging something through the grass, and did not answer, because there was no answer that didn't cost her something.
"I mean it." His thumbs moved along the welts, tracing them, pressing one until she made a sound she couldn't hold in. "I've been imagining it for years. Every time you walked past me in a robe. Every time you bent over the dishwasher. I used to lie in bed and try to guess what you'd taste like." A pause. "I guessed wrong. It's better."
"Let me up."
"In a minute."
He kept touching her. Both hands, slow and thorough, spreading her cheeks and letting them close, kneading the muscle, and every so often his thumb would slide down the crease and stop just short and come back up, and she held herself rigid over him and counted the ceiling, the corner of the rug, the tick of the hall clock. The wetness was cooling on her thighs. She could feel it drying in the open air, tacky and obscene, and she could feel where his mouth had been, the whole shape of it, like a handprint that wouldn't wash off.
"You came," he said.
"Don't."
"You did, though. I felt it. Your whole cunt squeezed on my tongue."
"Shut up."
"That's the third time you've told me to shut up today." His voice was mild. "You're getting brave."
She said nothing. Her jaw was locked so hard her back teeth ached.
"It's all right," he said, and squeezed her once more, and then his hands lifted off her, and the absence of them was its own small shock—the cool air rushing in where his palms had been. "You can go. Crawl off me and sit on the couch."
She didn't move for a second. She didn't believe him. Then her arms, which had been shaking for the better part of twenty minutes, gave her the answer—they folded, and she came down onto her forearms with a gasp, and he caught her hip with one hand to keep her from landing on his face, and she scrambled sideways off him, off the couch, onto the floor, and got her knees under her.
The panties were still a black band around her knees. She reached for them and he said, "Leave them," and she left them, and she crawled. Two feet of rug, past the coffee table, and up onto the couch cushion at the far end, and she sat with her back against the armrest and her knees pressed together and her skirt pulled down as far as it would go, which was not far enough.
She had come. That was the thing she couldn't put down. He had put his mouth on her and she had come, hard, with her face in the rug, and her body had done it without asking her, had done it while she was crying and saying she hated him, had done it as if none of that counted. Twenty-two years of marriage to two men and she had never once felt her own body turn on her like that. It had answered him. It had clenched for him. It had run wet down her thighs for a boy who had spanked her raw in a parking lot and locked her in her own bedroom.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until she saw red.
When she looked up he was standing over her, and she hadn't heard him get up. He'd pulled his jeans straight. He looked down at her the way you look at a chair you're about to sit in, and then he crouched to her level and put two fingers under her chin and tilted her face up.
"Hey," he said. "Look at me."
She looked at him. Gray eyes, flat, no triumph in them at all—that was the worst of it, that he never looked pleased, he only looked patient—and then he tapped her cheek. Twice. Light, quick, the way you'd tap a dog's muzzle, the flat of his fingers barely making contact. It didn't hurt. It wasn't meant to hurt. It was meant to land, and it landed, and she felt the humiliation of it go through her like a swallowed pin.
"There," he said. "That's better."
He straightened and dropped onto the couch beside her, and the whole frame creaked under him, and he stretched his legs out along the coffee table and put one arm up on the back of the couch and left the other one resting along his own thigh. The documentary was still running. Some herd animal was crossing a river now, and the crocodiles were waiting, and he picked up the remote and turned the volume up a notch and settled in like a man home from work.
"Come here," he said, and lifted the arm off the back of the couch. Made a space under it. "Lean on me."
She looked at the space under his arm and she thought about the stairs. Eleven up. The deadbolt that locked from the outside. The draft text sitting in his phone like a lit match in a dry field, and Harry's voice in her ear saying how's my girl, and the call tomorrow, and the plane after that.
She moved. There was no decision in it—her body simply went, the way it had gone down onto the rug, the way it had gone over his lap in the car, the way it had said I'm yours into the wool. She turned and leaned into his side, her shoulder under his arm, her cheek against his chest through the black t-shirt, and his arm came down around her and settled, and she could hear his heart under her ear, slow and steady, and she hated the sound of it with everything she had.
"There we go," he said.
His other hand came up and landed on her head. She flinched—she couldn't stop it—and he didn't react, just began to stroke her hair, slow, from the crown down to the ends, and then back up, and then down again. His fingers found the bare strip at her nape, the shaved underlayer, and traced it, and she felt him trace it, and her eyes burned.
"That's nice," he said quietly. "That came out nice. Dana did good work before you ran."
"Don't."
"Shh." He kept stroking. His thumb moved along the line of her skull where the hair stopped, over and over, like he was petting something he'd bought. "You did well today. You held still. You took it. That's what I wanted."
She said nothing. His heartbeat was in her ear and his hand was in her hair and the crocodiles were taking the herd animal down in the shallows and she could not have said which of those things she hated more.
She jerked her head away.
It was small—just a twist of the neck, out from under his palm—and she regretted it the instant it happened, the way you regret a step off a curb in the dark. His hand stopped. The room got very quiet. He didn't grab her. He didn't raise his voice. He simply took his hand off her hair and brought it back down, flat, against her cheek.
It wasn't hard. It was a slap the way a mother slaps a hand away from a stove, quick and corrective, and it stung, and it was over before she'd finished flinching, and the sting of it sat on her face like a handprint made of heat.
"No," he said. "We're not doing that."
She sat very still. Her cheek burned. Her eyes were wet and she refused to let them spill, and she stared at the muted river on the screen and breathed through her nose until the burn faded.
"I'm not asking much," he said. "I'm not asking you to like it. I'm not even asking you to be nice. I'm asking you to let me touch you when I want to touch you." His hand came back, slower this time, and settled on her head, and she did not move away from it. "See? That's all."
He began to stroke her hair again. From the crown down. Down to the shaved strip. Back up. His thumb found the bare skin at her nape and rested there, warm, and she sat under his arm with her cheek against his chest and let him do it, and the hate in her chest had gone past heat into something cold and settled, something with a floor to it.
She had a husband. She had a husband who was going to call her tomorrow, one last time before he got on the plane, and then he was going to come home—tomorrow evening, later that day, home, into this house, into this living room, and sit on this couch. She thought about that. She thought about Harry walking in the front door with his suitcase and his loud voice and his how's my girl, and she thought about the ring in the dish on her dresser, and she thought about what her face looked like right now, under his son's arm, with his son's hand in her hair.
The front door rattled with the sound of a key in the lock, and Vivienne's body went rigid before her mind caught up. Under his arm. His hand in her hair. The two of them fused together on the couch like something that had grown there.
She was off him before she knew she'd moved. The skirt rode up as she scrambled to the far end of the cushion, and she yanked it down with both hands, her fingers shaking so hard she nearly tore the silk. Nate didn't move. He stayed where he was, one arm still draped along the back of the couch, and watched her with those flat gray eyes, and the slow curl at the corner of his mouth was the most terrifying thing she'd seen all morning.
"Easy," he murmured, low enough that only she could hear it. "She doesn't know anything."
"Sera!" Her voice came out too bright, too high, and she heard it and couldn't fix it. The front door swung open and there she was—honey-blonde ponytail swinging, tennis bracelet glinting, that canvas tote slung over her shoulder, looking like every normal thing in the world. "Hi. You're home early."
"Early?" Sera kicked the door shut behind her and dropped her keys in the dish on the hall table—the same dish, Vivienne thought, the one that held the ring she wasn't wearing. "It's like noon. I'm not early, I'm just—" She stopped in the doorway of the living room, and her face changed.
Vivienne felt it. Felt the weight of Sera's green eyes land on her and stick, felt herself being read like a page in a language she didn't speak. The silence stretched, and in it Vivienne became acutely aware of everything: the camisole riding up her ribs, the skirt that ended halfway down her thighs, the bare strip at her nape that she'd forgotten to hide.
"Change of wardrobe?" Sera said. The words came out light, almost teasing, but there was an edge under them, a question that wasn't a question.
Vivienne smoothed the camisole down. Tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Made herself meet Sera's eyes. "I wanted to try something different." The lie came out smoother than she'd expected. Twenty years of performing composure in every room she entered—it had to be good for something. "You know. New look. For when your father gets home."
Sera's gaze flicked to Nate, then back. Her smile didn't quite reach her eyes. "Dad's coming home?"
"Tomorrow evening." Nate's voice, easy, from the couch. He hadn't moved. He was sprawled there like he'd been watching TV all morning, like nothing had happened, like he hadn't had his mouth on his stepmother's cunt twenty minutes ago. "He called. Said he'd be on the plane."
Sera's face did something complicated—relief, maybe, or something that looked like it. "Good. That's good. The house feels weird when he's gone." She stepped further into the room, and her eyes caught the light from the TV, and then they caught Vivienne's face. "Hey. Are you okay?"
"Fine." Too fast. She felt it come out too fast and tried to slow it down. "I'm fine. Just—long morning. I was in the salon, and the—the chemicals. They always make my eyes water."
"Your cheeks are red." Sera took another step closer, and Vivienne could feel Nate's eyes on her, and she could feel the ghost of his hand on her face, the slap he'd given her when she'd tried to pull away. "Like you've been crying. Or—" Sera's gaze dropped to her cheekbone, to the bruise that had faded to yellow at the edges, and something flickered in her eyes. "What happened to your face?"
"I told you. Cabinet door." She touched her cheekbone, the lie sitting on her tongue like a stone. "I walked into it in the dark. It's fine."
"And the salon made you cry?"
"The chemicals." She could feel Nate watching her. She could feel him enjoying this. "They're strong. I'm sensitive to them."
Sera's mouth tightened. She looked like she wanted to say something else, something sharper, but then her eyes drifted past Vivienne to the television—the new one, the big one, the one that had cost her hidden money—and her face changed again, this time into something genuine.
"Whoa. New TV?" She crossed the room and ran a hand along the edge of the screen, and Vivienne felt the tension in her chest ease a fraction. "This is huge. When did this happen?"
"Yesterday," Nate said. "Viv picked it out."
Vivienne's jaw tightened. "I—yes. I broke the old one."
"It's amazing." Sera turned back to them, and some of the wariness had gone out of her face, replaced by the easy enthusiasm of someone who hadn't had to think about anything harder than where the party was that night. "We should do a movie night. Tonight. Like—popcorn and everything. Dad's not home, but that doesn't mean we can't—" She looked between them, her smile bright, oblivious. "Right? It could be fun."
Vivienne opened her mouth. She didn't know what was going to come out of it. She didn't know what she wanted to come out of it—yes, no, anything that would end this conversation and get Sera out of the room and get her own body somewhere she could think.
But Nate spoke first.
"Sure," he said, and his voice was warm, easy, the voice of a good son, a normal brother. "That sounds good."
His hand found the back of the couch again, and his fingers brushed the nape of her neck—just once, light, a ghost of a touch that Sera couldn't see—and Vivienne sat very still and felt the whole world narrow to that single point of contact.