Darkroom Skinny-Dip Surrender

I never meant for her to find the darkroom that night. I’d built it myself the summer before junior year—blackout curtains, trays, the enlarger Dad never asked about—and it had become the only place in the lake house that felt like mine. Twenty-two, home from college, sharing the same walls with Colette while he was away on another long consulting trip. Gorgeous thirty-eight-year-old Colette, my stepmother, who moved through the house like she owned every breath of air. After everyone else had gone to bed I slipped downstairs in nothing but boxer briefs, thinking the house was asleep. The red safelight was already on when the door whispered open behind me.

She stood there in a thin silk robe the color of champagne, the belt barely knotted, her dark hair loose over one shoulder. I froze with a strip of negatives in my hand. Colette’s eyes dropped to the contact sheets pinned on the line—intimate candid shots of her by the dock, the curve of her breast half-shadowed by a towel, the wet cling of her swimsuit after a swim, the way she’d looked up once and almost caught me. My pulse hammered so hard I thought she’d hear it.

“I’ve known for months, Silas,” she said, voice low and husky, like she’d been holding the words on her tongue. “The way you watch me. The way these prints smell like obsession and stop bath. I found the first ones in May and I… kept quiet.” She stepped closer, silk whispering against bare thighs. “I should have been furious. Instead I got wet every time I thought about you developing them down here in the dark, hard for me.”

I couldn’t speak. She reached past me, fingers brushing the edge of a print where her nipples pressed against thin fabric. Shared forbidden hunger rolled off her in waves. “Your father thinks I come down for wine. I come down to look. To imagine what you’d do if I ever walked in wearing nothing but this robe.”

My mouth went dry. “Colette—”