Selena's First Taste in the Wine Cellar

I am thirty-eight, and I design buildings meant to hold. Steel, glass, the clean lines of other people’s lives. The divorce papers were still warm in the drawer when Lena asked if the guest room was free through her last year of college.

She is twenty-two. A senior, sure of herself in a way I never was at that age. She is my ex-husband’s daughter from the life he had before me. Not my blood. For a few years I answered to stepmother and tried to earn it with packed lunches and late rides and the ordinary work of a house. Victor is gone. What the marriage left me is this too-large place, and her.

I need the date of it on the record, even in a confession I can barely stand to make. I did not want her when she was a child under this roof. Not at seventeen. Not before. The want showed up the autumn she turned eighteen, already gone to college, already a woman who came home for a weekend with a low laugh that sat in my stomach and would not leave. I buried it. I stayed married. I stayed quiet.

Then the marriage ended, and she needed a room, and I said yes.

She moved in on a Sunday with one duffel and a stack of studio books. By the middle of the week we were still on the sofa at midnight, knees a breath apart, the lamp turned down to amber. She teased the silver starting at my temples. I teased the classmate she had already forgotten. Her eyes held my mouth a second too long. I let them. She shifted, and her ankle brushed mine, and neither of us moved it.

I told Sophia because I was coming apart. Sophia is twenty-nine, my best friend, and she has never pretended she does not want women. We sat in her apartment with the windows open, and I spilled it: the glances, the way Lena’s voice dropped when the house went quiet, the heat I kept blaming on loneliness.

Sophia watched me over her cup. “Claire. You are not her mother. You never were, not by blood, and the papers that made you her stepmother are signed. If you both want it, stop punishing yourself for being awake.”

I drove home with my hands tight on the wheel. Lena was on the couch in an old T-shirt and soft pants, bare feet tucked under her, a book open and ignored. She looked up and smiled like she had been waiting to be caught.

The next night I opened a bottle I had been saving and set two glasses on the counter. A tasting, I told her. Nothing serious. She came down in a thin black tank and jeans, hair twisted up, and the kitchen felt smaller than it had at noon.

We were careful with it. A sip, a comment, another sip. I stayed sharp. So did she. I could see it in the way she set her glass down without a wobble, in the clear focus of her eyes when they found mine. The red was bold, all dark fruit and heat, and it stained her mouth. I watched that stain and forgot the next thing I meant to say.

“We’re out of the good one,” I said, too brightly. “There’s another case downstairs.”

“I’ll come.”

The cellar stairs were narrow. I went first, and I felt her behind me the whole way, close enough that her breath touched the back of my neck when the door swung shut. The room was cool, stone and wood, a single bulb throwing a low gold over the racks. Dust and oak and the sweet edge of cork. I found the bottle and turned, and she was right there, not a foot between us, glass still in her hand.

“Let me,” she said.

Our fingers met on the neck of the bottle. She didn’t pull away. Neither did I. The brush was deliberate, slow, her thumb riding the side of my knuckle before she let me have it. I poured a little into her glass, then into mine. We drank. Her eyes stayed on me over the rim.

“Claire.” My name in her mouth did something low and mean to my knees. “I’ve wanted you for years. Since I was eighteen. Not before that. I knew what I was doing when I started looking. I still know.”

The bottle was steady in my hand. My head was clear. The want was not wine. It was her, twenty-two and certain, standing in my cellar and offering me the thing I had been refusing to name.

“I’ve wanted you too,” I said. “Since you turned eighteen. Since you came back a woman and I couldn’t look at you without feeling it. I tried not to. I’m done trying.”

“Then stop standing there.”

I set the bottle on a crate. She set her glass beside it. We both reached at the same time, and the first kiss was not careful. Her mouth was warm and red-stained and open, and she made a sound into mine that I felt in my cunt. I kissed her back harder. Her hands went into my hair. Mine found her waist, then the bare skin under the hem of her tank, and she pressed into my palms like she had been waiting for exactly that.

“Yes,” she said against my mouth. “I want this. I want you. Don’t ask me if I’m sure again.”

“I’m sure,” I said, and I was. Clear-headed. Choosing it. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”

“I won’t.”

We kissed until my lips felt swollen. Her tongue slid against mine, unhurried and filthy, and her thigh pushed between my legs like she already knew how I would break. I got her tank up. No bra. Her breasts filled my hands, nipples tight in the cool air, and she arched into me with a shaky laugh that turned into a moan when I bent and took one into my mouth.

“God, Claire. Downstairs. Here. I don’t care. Touch me.”

I dropped to my knees on the stone. The cold bit through my pants and I didn’t care. She braced a hand on the rack behind her and looked down at me, flushed, mouth open, eyes dark and locked on mine. I undid her jeans. She lifted her hips to help. I dragged them down with her panties, black and already damp at the center, and the sight of her cunt made my own clench so hard I groaned.

“Look at you,” I said. “Soaked. You’ve been like this all night.”

“Longer than that.” Her fingers slid into my hair. “Eat me. I’ve thought about your mouth for years. Do it.”

I did. I pushed her thighs apart and put my mouth on her, and the taste of her hit me like the wine never had. Salt and heat and something sweeter under it. I licked her slow at first, flat tongue from her entrance up to her clit, learning her, and she swore and tightened her grip. Then I stopped being polite. I sucked her clit into my mouth and worked it with my tongue, steady, greedy, while two fingers slid into her and curled. She was tight and dripping, clutching around me, and every time I fucked her with my fingers she pushed down to meet them.

“Fuck. Right there. Don’t you dare stop.”

I didn’t. I tongue-fucked her the way she asked for with her hips, pushing my tongue inside her, then back up to suck that swollen clit while my fingers drove in deep. The wet sound of it filled the cellar. She held my head and rode my mouth, thighs shaking against my ears, voice breaking open.

“Claire. Your mouth. God, your mouth. I’ve wanted this since I was eighteen and I finally get to have it. Harder. Suck me. Make me come on your tongue.”

I sucked harder. I moaned into her so she would feel it. My free hand gripped her ass and pulled her closer, and she came with a sharp cry, cunt pulsing around my fingers, clit throbbing against my tongue, flood of her soaking my chin. I stayed on her through it, licking her through the aftershocks until she tugged my hair and laughed, breathless and wrecked.

“Up,” she said. “My turn. I want you bent over. I want to feel how wet you are for me.”

I stood on unsteady legs. She kissed me, tasting herself, and turned me toward the rack. My palms hit the wood. Bottles clicked softly in their slots. She yanked my pants and panties down to my thighs and slid a hand between my legs, and the sound she made was almost angry with want.

“Jesus, Claire. You’re dripping down your thighs. All this for me?”

“All of it. Finger me. I need it.”

She did. Two fingers, then three, fucking into me from behind, hard and sure, the heel of her hand catching me with every thrust. Her other hand reached around and rubbed my clit in tight circles. I pushed back onto her, shameless, the rack creaking, my voice too loud in the small room.

“Yes. Like that. Don’t be gentle. I’ve wanted your hands on me. I’ve wanted you to fuck me in this house and hear me.”

“I can hear you,” she said against my shoulder, biting there, soft then sharp. “I want more. Come here.”

She pulled her fingers out, slick to the knuckle, and sat back on a low crate, jeans still around her ankles, thigh bare and waiting. “Ride it. Grind on me. I want to watch you come.”

I straddled her thigh and sank down. The pressure on my clit was immediate, perfect, obscene. I held her shoulders and rolled my hips, smearing myself all over her skin, and she watched my face like she was memorizing the ruin of it. Her hands stayed on my ass, guiding me, squeezing, pulling me down harder.

“That’s it,” she said. “Use me. Rub that needy cunt on me until you break. I want it loud. I want to know I did this to you.”

“You did.” I was gasping, grinding, the drag of her thigh against my clit turning my words ragged. “I crave you. Your body. Your mouth. I want to taste you again. I want you in my bed. I want—”

The orgasm hit before I finished. I came hard, shaking, crying out her name, clit pulsing, cunt clenching on nothing while I rode her thigh through it. She held me there and talked me through it, filthy and fond, telling me how good I looked, how wet I was, how long she had wanted to feel me fall apart on her. I shook and kept moving until it edged into too much, and then I slumped against her, forehead to her forehead, both of us breathing like we had run.

“Again,” I said, when I could speak. My hands were already on her, pushing, hungry, nowhere near finished. “Bench. Lie back. I’m not done eating you.”

She laughed, bright and wrecked, and let me guide her toward the low bench against the stone wall. Her jeans were still tangled at her ankles. My pants were halfway down. We were flushed, half-dressed, desperate, her cunt still shining, my mouth already watering for another taste. I had one hand on her hip, ready to put her down and bury my face between her legs, when the sound came from above.

The front door. The unmistakable click of the lock, then the heavy swing of it, and Sophia’s voice carrying down the stairwell, bright and close and utterly uninvited.

“Claire? I brought more wine. I let myself in. Where are you?”

Lena’s eyes went wide. Mine did too. Footsteps crossed the floor over our heads. We stood there in the cool dark, mouths wet, clothes ruined, her taste still on my tongue and my come still slick on her thigh, and neither of us moved. Sophia called my name again, closer to the cellar door, and the want between us did not fade. It sharpened, unfinished, and the steps overhead kept coming.