Leilani's First Time on the Houseboat

I told myself I was only going home to stop bleeding. Twenty-eight years old, a painter with more unfinished canvases than clients, and a breakup that had left my apartment smelling like someone else's cologne. My father was overseas for the summer. The only person who answered when I finally called was Vanessa, his ex-wife, the woman who had been my stepmother from the time I was a teenager until the divorce two years ago. She was forty-one, a corporate lawyer with a voice like cooled steel and a laugh that always arrived a second late, as if she were deciding whether I deserved it. She said the guest cabin on the houseboat was empty. She said the lake was quiet. She said, Come.

I drove up at dusk with one suitcase and a box of paints I knew I wouldn't open. The houseboat sat against a private dock, white and low and expensive, windows already gold. Vanessa met me on the gangway in a silk robe the color of bruised plums, belted loose at the waist. I had seen her in court clothes and in holiday sweaters. I had not seen the long line of her throat like that, or the way the silk clung where she was still damp from a shower. She was taller than I remembered. Or I was just looking.

"Leilani," she said, and my name came out careful. "You look thin."

"Heartbreak diet," I said. It was meant to be a joke. It landed like a confession.

Her eyes moved over me, not unkind, not motherly. They stopped at my mouth, then at the open collar of my shirt, then came back up and stayed. "You're beautiful when you're wrecked," she said. "That's a terrible thing to say. I'm saying it anyway."

Heat climbed my neck. I had felt this before, in flashes I had trained myself not to keep. The summer I turned eighteen she had watched me come up from the lake in a wet T-shirt and gone very still, and I had gone still with her, and neither of us had spoken. I had been an adult. She had been my father's wife. We had both looked away and called it nothing. Standing on her dock at twenty-eight, single and raw, I realized the nothing had been a lie we were both tired of holding.

She took my suitcase without asking and led me through a narrow salon that smelled of cedar and lemon oil. The guest cabin was small and clean, the bed made with white sheets. She set the bag down and didn't leave. The robe had slipped at one shoulder. I could see the strap of nothing. Just skin, collarbone, the beginning of a breast.

"If this is too close," she said, "there's a hotel in town. I won't be offended."

"I want to be here," I said. My voice was steadier than I felt. "I want you to stop pretending you don't know why."

Her breath caught. She smiled, small and dangerous, and retied the robe with fingers that shook once. "Then come out when you're unpacked. The deck. No wine. I want us clear."

I unpacked nothing. I stood in the little cabin with my heart knocking and listened to her bare feet on the wood overhead, and I understood that I had not come home to heal. I had come because some part of me had been waiting, since the week I turned eighteen, for her to stop looking away.

The sky was the color of a peach split open. Vanessa had set two glasses of cold sparkling water on the low table between the deck chairs, lime wheels floating, no bottle anywhere. She had changed into a thinner robe, pale gray silk this time, and she hadn't belied it tightly. When she sat, one knee fell open and the silk rode up her thigh. I sat opposite her and tried to look at the lake. The lake did not have her mouth.

"I used to rehearse this," she said. "In the car. In depositions, God help me. I would think, When she is grown, when she is not my husband's daughter in any living sense, when she looks at me the way she looked at me that summer, I will tell her." She turned the glass in her hands. "You were eighteen. I was thirty-one and married to your father and I wanted you so badly I hated myself for a year. I never touched you. I never would have, not then, not while you were finding your feet. But I fantasized. I still do. About your hands. About the sounds you might make if I put my mouth on you and didn't stop."

The water tasted like metal and citrus. My thighs pressed together under my shorts. "I used to lock the bathroom door," I said, "and think about your mouth. After I turned eighteen. Only after. I told myself it was a phase, then a secret, then a thing I would take to somebody else. I never took it to anybody else. Not really. They didn't have your voice."

She set her glass down. The click was small and final. "Leilani. I am not your mother. I was your stepmother, and I am not even that anymore. I am a woman who wants you, and you are a woman who wants me. If you want this to stay a conversation, we can watch the sun go down and I will keep my hands on this table. If you want more, you have to say it. Out loud. Sober. Looking at me."

I looked at her. Forty-one, elegant even half-undressed, a flush high on her cheekbones, eyes dark and waiting. My chest hurt with how much I wanted her. "I want more," I said. "I want you to kiss me. I want your hands. I am saying yes."

She crossed the space between the chairs like she had been holding herself on a leash. The first kiss was careful, her palm on my jaw, her mouth warm and closed, asking. I opened for her and the careful broke. She tasted like lime and heat. I made a sound I didn't recognize and she answered it, tongue sliding against mine, one hand fisting in my hair, the other spreading over my ribs through my shirt. I grabbed the silk at her waist and pulled her into my lap, and the robe fell open. Her breast filled my hand, heavy, nipple already tight. She gasped into my mouth.

"Inside," she said, breathing hard. "Not the deck. I want a bed and a door and all night. Tell me again."

"Yes," I said against her throat. "Take me inside. Undress me. I want it. I want you."

She stood and offered her hand. I took it. We didn't run. We walked through the salon with our fingers locked, kissing in the doorway, kissing again at the foot of the stairs to the master cabin, both of us laughing once, breathless, because the wanting had been so long and the having was suddenly simple. The bed was wide. The lamps were low. She turned to face me and waited, silk hanging open, body offered, not taken.

"Your turn to choose," she said.

I pushed the robe off her shoulders. It pooled at her feet. She was naked underneath, all warm skin and soft stomach and dark hair between her thighs, breasts full, hips generous. I had imagined a harder body. The real one undid me. "You're perfect," I said, and meant it. She reached for my shirt. I lifted my arms. She peeled it off, then my shorts, then my panties, kneeling to draw them down my legs, looking up at me the whole time so I could see her hunger and stop her if I wanted. I didn't stop her. I stepped out of the last of my clothes and stood there, twenty-eight and shaking and wet, and she rose and kissed me like a woman who had waited thirteen years to be allowed.

"On the bed," she said, voice gone rough. "On your back. I want to taste you. Say it if you want that."

"I want your mouth," I said. "I want you to make me come. Please, Vanessa."

She smiled, wicked and tender, and pressed me down into the sheets.

I went willingly. The mattress took my weight and she followed, kneeling between my thighs, spreading them with warm hands, pausing to kiss the inside of one knee, then higher, then the crease where my leg met my body. She looked up once more. "Still yes?"

"Still yes. Don't be gentle if you don't want to be. Just don't stop unless I say stop."

"I won't stop."

Her mouth closed over me and my back came off the bed. She was not tentative. She licked a long, flat stroke from my entrance to my clit, then settled there, sucking softly, tongue flicking, learning me by the way my hips jumped. Two fingers slid inside, easy because I was soaked, and curled, and I heard myself swear. She hummed, pleased, and the vibration went straight through me. I grabbed the sheets, then her hair, not pushing, just holding on while she worked me open with her mouth and her hand. She knew what she was doing. Of course she did. Forty-one years of living in that body, and a long private education in mine. She sucked my clit in a steady rhythm and fucked me with two fingers, then three, stretching me, thumb rubbing just beside where her tongue was busy, and the pleasure stacked so fast I couldn't track it.

"Vanessa—I'm—"

"Give it to me," she said against my cunt, and sealed her mouth over me again.

I shattered. There is no cleaner word. My thighs clamped around her head and I came with a broken cry, pulsing on her fingers, flooding her tongue, vision whiting at the edges. She didn't pull away. She licked me through it, softer, drawing it out until I was twitching and pushing at her shoulder, oversensitive and laughing and close to tears.

She kissed her way up my stomach, my breasts, my throat, and found my mouth. I tasted myself on her and moaned. "Your turn," I said, still shaking. "I want to taste you. I want to be on you. I want everything."

"Then take it."

We shifted, clumsy and eager, until I was straddling her face and she was under me, and her hips were tilted up so I could reach her. A grinding sixty-nine, her hands on my ass, spreading me, her tongue already back inside my sensitive cunt like she couldn't help herself. I bent and put my mouth on her. She was slick and hot and tasted like salt and skin and want. I sucked her clit the way she had sucked mine, clumsy at first, then surer when she groaned and rocked up into me. One of her fingers, wet from my pussy, pressed at my ass, circling, asking. I pushed back in answer. She slid it in slow, just to the knuckle, and the stretch lit me up all over again. I moaned into her and sucked harder, two fingers of my own pushing into her cunt, fucking her while I licked her clit, grinding my pussy down onto her mouth. She fingered my ass in time with the roll of my hips. The obscene sounds filled the cabin, wet and desperate, both of us past talking except for yes and there and don't stop.

I came again with her finger in my ass and her tongue on my clit, shaking so hard I had to brace a hand on the mattress. She came a moment later, cunt clenching around my fingers, a sharp cry muffled against me, her free hand gripping my thigh hard enough to mark. We rode it out, licking, gasping, unwilling to separate until the aftershocks made us both too raw.

I slid off her and she pulled me up the bed, both of us slick with sweat and each other. For a minute we only breathed. Then she rolled me onto my side and hooked my leg over her hip, and our cunts met, swollen and soaked, and the friction was so immediate I sobbed.

"Trib me," she said, eyes locked on mine. "I want to feel you grind. I want us to come together. Yes?"

"Yes. God, yes."

We scissored hard. There is no pretty way to say it. We locked our legs and rubbed our pussies together, clit to clit, slipping, adjusting, finding the angle where every thrust dragged us both open. Her hand gripped my ass and hauled me closer. I held her shoulder and her breast and rocked, shameless, chasing it. The silk of her remaining composure was gone. She was flushed and wild, hair stuck to her neck, telling me how good I felt, how long she had wanted this, how she was going to make me come on her until I couldn't remember my own name. I gave it back. I told her I had dreamed of her cunt. I told her I was hers for the night if she wanted me. We ground faster, the wet sounds filthy, the bed knocking the wall. Heat coiled low and vicious. I felt her start to shake and I didn't ease off. I pressed harder, circling, and she screamed my name, and the sound of it tipped me over with her. We came locked together, pussies pulsing, juices smearing our thighs, both of us shaking and crying out until the pleasure broke and left us gasping in the wreckage of the sheets.

For a long moment there was only breath and the tick of the boat against the dock. Vanessa gathered me in, kissing my temple, my cheek, the corner of my mouth. I was dazed, satisfied down to my bones, glistening with sweat, her taste still on my tongue. She pulled me into a deep kiss, slow now, thorough, like she was signing her name inside me.

Then she drew back just far enough to see my face. Her smile had changed. Softer, and under it something wicked that made my spent body spark all over again.

"My best friend is coming tomorrow," she said, voice low, almost a purr. "Sophia. She's thirty-five. Bisexual. She knows about you. She's known for months that I wanted this, and she has been very patient."

My eyes widened. Shock first, hot and bright, and under it a fresh throb of arousal I hadn't thought I had left. "Vanessa—"

She kissed me once more, brief, claiming, and whispered against my mouth, "She's been dying to meet you. And I promised her she could have us both."