Only, this time I didn’t feel good afterward. I felt…guilty. I was at the foot of a shrine to my sister, in my stepmother’s dress, in the house of a killer—maybe—and I was feeling jealous and aroused and focusing on having an orgasm? What kind of monster had I become?
I was so aghast at what I had done, what I had become, that I did the only reasonable thing: I demolished the apartment. I took all of my rage out on the furnishings. Nothing would wash away my guilt like showing Tabitha I was on to her, on to them. I slashed the sheets with her scissors, tore up the sofa pillows, and emptied all the dresser drawers. And then I did the most devastating thing: I destroyed the shrine to my sister’s memory. I tore down the photos, threw all the trinkets in the fireplace, and shoved the journals into my bag. I stood there in the middle of the room, knee deep in destruction, and wanted more. I wished I could see Tabitha’s face when she walked in and found what I had done.
But like any artificial high, my demolition-fueled delirium ended abruptly and sent me spiraling into the seven rings of self-deprecation. How could I have done what I did? Where did that violence, that hatred come from?
I thanked all things holy that Tabitha had not been there during my annihilation frenzy, because I feared what I might have done if she’d been in the room. Would Tabitha have ended up in little pieces on the floor, mixed in with the shredded remnants of her loft? Was this the same impetus that had led to my sister’s death?
*
I did not see Tabitha’s face when she discovered what I had done to her loft. We did see each other at dinner not too long after and she was as stone-faced and cordial as ever. Father was as cold and withdrawn. He lectured me about the deficient career choices I had made and the dire economic impact I could expect to harvest from such poor selections. Apparently, Father did not approve of his surviving daughter becoming a journalist, especially not one who regularly wrote about having sex. I had had no idea he even read my column. While he was intent on belittling me, I was feeling rather pleased with myself for having garnered his attention. Who knew that was all it took. Maybe Ash started filming pornos for the same reason. Could she have felt as invisible in this house as I had?
No. I didn’t think so. As Father continued to belabor the point, I pushed my chair closer to Tabitha’s. In doing so, the back of my hand brushed her thigh. A charge of electricity snapped between us like static cling and then was gone. Perhaps I’d imagined it. Tabitha sat prim and proper with perfect posture in her chair as though nothing had happened. Maybe it hadn’t. Or were her cheeks just a little rosier than they’d been a moment before?
“Just how safe are all these…um…” Father struggled for the appropriate couth wording. “These dealings? How safe are they, Megan?”
Having long lost interest in his paternalism, I allowed Father to drone on. I wasn’t about to ease his consternation regarding my column, but the truth of the matter was that my own interest in the subject was waning. I didn’t think I’d be Portland’s adventure slut much longer. My passion was too big to be bridled by this city’s handful of underground erotic adventures. I needed to be a pioneer in a different way, to open up a new sexual frontier. Just how, I didn’t know yet. I imagined Tabitha opening up to me like a desert flower, and it was my turn to blush.
“You don’t want to end up like your sister,” Father concluded.
With that, I came back to the conversation. “You mean dead on the pool house floor? I can’t imagine how that would happen to me, Daddy-O. Don’t you agree, Tabitha?”
I winked at her. I was bolder now, too. I wasn’t just little Megan, peering out a window at my sister’s Sapphic fun. I was the master of my domain and I was the one calling the shots in life now. Tabitha should fear me, because I was on to her little game. Maybe she even wondered why I hadn’t already told the cops about her secret double life. But I was keeping something for myself.
Still, when the color drained from her face, I instantly regretted the flippant way I’d recalled that traumatic night. I didn’t see Father raise his hand. Rather than warning me, the light breeze on my face only confused me. For a millisecond. Until his palm reached my cheek. The slap was so fierce it rattled my fillings loose and knocked my molars akimbo, the way earthquakes displace fence lines. I was sure it left an angry, crimson handprint behind, far outshadowing the pink of my blush.
Tabitha inhaled so sharply it sounded like the door of an airplane being ripped off mid-flight and passengers were being sucked out by the vacuum it created. “Bradford Thomas Caulfield!” She shrieked like an angry mother condemning and errant child. “Apologize!” Tabitha yelled.
“I’m sorry,” I responded automatically.
Tabitha ignored my authentic act of contrition.
“Bradford.” She demanded.
Oh, my God, I realized, looking at the determined set of her jaw, this woman was fucking hot. There was something about courageous women that turned me on. No, not courage. It wasn’t bravery that lead a diminutive female of the species to stand up to my father and demand an apology—it was recklessness, a sheer and utter disregard for one’s personal safety. And I’d never seen anything sexier.
Father did not apologize. He had never once acknowledged personal wrongdoing in all the time I’d known him. When things went so unbelievably wrong that he could no longer ignore them, he always managed to find a convenient patsy to blame it on. I wasn’t even that alarmed by the whole scene. I had changed from the kid who wanted only to please her father and fall under the radar, in my sister’s shadow. I was older and bolder and less interested in making Father—or anyone else for that matter—happy. I left the table with Tabitha still glaring at Father. They would probably fight for hours over the disagreement, but for me it was water off a duck’s back. I needed to get my beauty sleep. I had more spying to do in the morning.
*
Cassandra, who I bored of after a week or two of tumbling and floor exercises, was just embarrassed enough about dipping her pen in the company ink, that she allowed me the freedom to make my own hours at the paper—as long as they were opposite to her own.
So I started working from my home or the coffeehouse nearly as frequently as I made it to the office. That gave me more time to watch Tabitha. The funny thing was, the more I followed her, the more intrigued I was by the woman. She was such an enigma to me. Every day there was something unexpected in her life. Last week, it was Taboo—an adult store where she spent an hour, while I waited for her to leave, keeping tabs on the door from the parking lot across the street. What could a woman do for an hour in an XXX video store? Did she actually watch the films there?
Yesterday, she disappeared into a house on 82nd Avenue that had a giant sign outside announcing it as a business named Honeysuckles, and billing itself as a “lingerie experience for men.” What the hell was Tabitha doing at all these places? I thought my sexuality was aberrant, but hers, well, it made me look like a castoff from Little House on the Prairie.
The more I saw Tabitha in these playlands, the more intrigued I became. I wanted to know Tabitha—not just biblically, but as a person. I wanted to know what brought her to these places, what her fantasies were, and who she wanted to share them with. Just who was this woman? Did my sister find out about her secrets? Was that why she was killed?
Chapter Sixteen
It’s an old adage that often the truth isn’t what we are truly seeking. I was starting to think that might be the case for me. I had been following Tabitha for weeks now and I was noticing that I was feeling as enraptured by her as other women were over my sister. I started inconspicuously following her to stores, cafés, and even to a strip club, although I could never go in to these venues for fear of being caught spying on her. Instead I hunched down behind the wheel of my rental car, eating Doritos and watching. Watching to see how long she was inside and when she did come out whether she was still alone. Tabitha remained alone—going in and coming out.
Soon, watching from afar just wasn’t enoug
h. It was no longer giving me the thrill I’d had when I originally started stalking her. I decided to escalate. I managed to “bump” into her at a few establishments she fraternized, the ones where I could randomly imagine turning up.
To my surprise, Tabitha didn’t seem frightened to see me. Quite the opposite. She seemed genuinely happy to have happened upon me. Usually she’d invite me to lunch or out to the house or just to finish up her shopping with her, the latter of which I did enough times that I was starting to enjoy it.
“Try these!” Tabitha smiled and threw another set of trousers at me.
“Ooo, me likey…” I trailed off. Could this be considered spying? When she had insisted upon tagging along with me and I was enjoying myself this much?
After a few shopping trips turned into lunch, I started thinking of Tabitha not as my stepmonster or even a relative, but more like my friend. Okay, maybe not that close, but maybe the intimacy one would have with a sister’s ex-girlfriend.
Tabitha was charming and sophisticated, but she could also be really goofy and sweet. When she would pull her hair off her neck, sweeping the long blond strands to the side and titling her head just so to the right, I would think about kissing that beautiful smooth neck. The more I got to know Tabitha, the more I couldn’t hate her, and the more I couldn’t imagine her as my sister’s killer.
Still, in these afternoon get-togethers, which had become an almost daily thing, Tabitha never explained nor did I ask about her curious romps in Portland’s sexual underworld. Strip clubs? Porn stores? How could this lovely, soft-spoken woman even venture into places like that, places I was so comfortable with because of my experiences, when she had been saddled with Bradford and the ’burbs since she was nineteen?
Had Ash taken her to these places? Was she revisiting their past? Or were there just…hidden depths?
*
“Megan, would you like to meet me for brunch tomorrow?” Tabitha was hoping to expand our get-togethers to a weekend apparently. “Bradford’s out of town.” She instinctively answered my unspoken question.
“Sure, but if Father’s out of town, would you like to do something tonight instead? You could stay in the city with me and we can do brunch at Old Wives Tales tomorrow.” I wasn’t sure why, but suddenly it was crucial that Tabitha stay the night at my apartment. The thought of an all night gab session was more than appealing. I could truly get to know this lovely woman I had never given the time of day before.
Tabitha paused so long I had to ask if she was still on the line.
“Yes, of course, I’m still here. I’d love to get together tonight. I’ll be there around seven. How’s that?”
“Perfect.”
The rest of the day I primped like a prom queen, first plucking, tweaking, and shaving like I had a big date, and later scouring the apartment for anything that would be off-putting to Tabitha. I wasn’t wholly sure why I was so concerned with making this evening perfect, but a little part of me was honest enough to admit that during the last week I had thought at least a dozen times about kissing Tabitha. That’s it, not fucking her, not capturing her, just kissing her and holding her. I didn’t know what to do about those feelings. Did I dare risk this new friendship and my months of investigation just to be honest about feelings I probably would never act on?
*
Tabitha was ravishing in a winter white mock turtleneck and white wrap skirt. She managed to always look chic enough to have been plucked from the set of a 1940s Hollywood movie. Even better, she came bearing food. I loved that in a woman.
“I hope you still like Thai food. I brought enough to feed us for a week.” It was a casual comment, but something about it foretold how Tabitha felt about me too. We were a “we” at least in the recesses of her mind. How did this all happen? “I mean, it’s enough for us tonight and to feed you all week.”
Her backpedaling did nothing to dissuade me, and I did something I had thought about all week and never in my life imagined I would do. I pulled her close and kissed her, first tentatively, to make sure she didn’t scream and run to Father, and then more assertively because it had been months in the making. I didn’t care who she was married to. I wanted this woman badly.
I started pulling her clothes off, the wrap skirt the first casualty of my lust. Each other piece, a shirt, a bra, French cut panties—of course—all taking me only seconds to shed. I never stopped kissing her for more than a second, and when everything except her perfect gray pumps had been tossed aside like rubbish, I launched us onto the sofa, still never moving my mouth from hers. She protested only once. She was mine.
I stopped thinking about Father or Ash or Shane or Cassandra or the Honeysuckle Lounge. All I could think about was her perfect creamy skin, the pink just inside her lips, the perfect apricot pucker of hers. I started licking and kissing and nibbling every neglected inch of her: the neck, the spot under her breasts, the crook of her elbow, behind her knees, between her pink little toes. By the time my mouth was back up to her thighs, ready to part what was no doubt a perfectly pink little pussy, she was writhing so much I could hardly hold her down. With her back arched, her belly in the air, Tabitha looked like she was doing a yoga pose. Only I was her yogi and the moaning was more than meditative.
I buried my face in her cunt, lapping and licking and even fingering her with the ferocity of a woman unhinged. As much as I wanted her, she needed me. I could tell at that moment that she had been waiting a long time to be fulfilled again. And I wanted to fill her up. She tasted as sweet as she looked and here, in my apartment, naked and oblivious of the world, we were just two women who needed each other.
Her toes curled a little when she came. I know because her feet were up near my face at that point. Flexible girl. I guess that’s what it means to fuck a former cheerleader. Just as I finished she tugged my hair a bit pulling my mouth up toward hers. She had stroked my face while I was going down on her, a simple gesture that spoke words for the level of intimacy we were sharing. This wasn’t just a fuck. She wouldn’t be someone I could kick out when I was done.
The scariest part was that I didn’t think I would want to. But what would that mean for all of us?
Chapter Seventeen
The next morning I awoke before Tabitha and sat next to the window wondering what to make of this sudden change in our relationship. We fucked long and hard last night and talked very little, but as I was falling asleep I felt Tabitha gently stroking my face and staring at me. I wasn’t sure exactly where to go from there, but the realization that I had fucked my stepmother was dawning on me.
“Morning.” Tabitha’s whisper roused me from my musings. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied. “I’m good.”
“We should talk.” Her challenge hung there, unanswered for a moment.
“Was this a one time thing?” I sounded needy, but I honestly needed to know. Was I another experiment or simply a convenient replacement for Ash?
“God, I hope not.” Tabitha laughed, a good throaty, flirty chortle that loosened me up again.
I crawled back in bed with her, gathering her up in my arms and inhaling the scent of her hair.
“I have to tell you something,” she said quietly after we lay there for a long time just holding each other. “I was still a teenager when I married your father. I knew there was something there, but I didn’t know I was gay. I didn’t know really until Ashley told me, and then all the pieces fell into place.”
“Did you love him?” It was an honest query.
“I’m not sure. He flattered me. Nobody had wanted me so badly before, and he courted me like Prince Charming. And I thought he was sort of grieving your mother’s death and had two girls to raise. So I felt compassion and flattered. He’s rich and powerful and he wanted me.”
“So you decided to marry him, even though you weren’t sure?”
“I rebuffed his advances for quite some time. But, yeah, when someone is flying you to Europe and sending you dozens and dozens of ro
ses and throwing money and jewelry your way, it’s hard not to start to look at them differently. I didn’t really know who Bradford was until after we were married.”
“Do you think he loved you?”
“No. He was cruel in bed, always mocking me for being naïve or unimaginative or frigid. And the verbal threats started early. Once Ash opened my eyes, all I could see was how horrible Bradford was to me. By then, I couldn’t stand to have him touch me. Maybe that made me frigid with him. I don’t know.”
I knew that Father didn’t want Tabitha to attend school or have a job, and she was embarrassed about being in that situation in this day and age.
“I was worried about not having the skills to get a job when he did get tired of me,” Tabitha continued flatly.
“But if you divorced him, you’d get half his assets, right?”
“No, we had a pre-nup, Oregon isn’t a community property state, and Bradford always told me that he could hide his assets because he’d rather see me in my grave before I got a penny of his money.”
I didn’t know if he could get away with that, but I did know Father had some very expensive, high-powered attorneys on retainer. Sometimes you didn’t need to be right, you just had to convince your opponent that it would cost them too much to prove you’re wrong. I think that was something Father used to say.
“And then there was Ash and you. All of our friends are your father’s friends, so I didn’t have anyone to confide in. And my parents just wanted me to make things work out. My parents don’t believe in divorce.”
Just when I thought I was starting to understand everything, Tabitha announced, “There’s something I want to show you.” She ran off, disappearing into the front room, and returned with a small crimson tote bag. It made me think of Santa’s magic red bag, and when I reached in I imagined it was full of all the things I’d ever asked for but didn’t get. When I pulled out some lined sheets of paper, I could immediately tell that the scribbled notes were in Ash’s handwriting, and all I wanted to do was drop it back in the bag.
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