Stepmom's Forbidden Desire

Chapter Two

"Hey, stranger." Vivian's own voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect, the practiced brightness of two years spent performing a marriage rather than living inside one.

"Did I wake you?" Richard's voice arrived thin and slightly delayed, the particular flatness of an international line, layered under the hum of what sounded like an airport lounge. She could hear announcements in the background, a boarding call for a city she couldn't place.

"No," she lied, and looked at the guesthouse window across the lawn, the light still burning steady and yellow against the dark. "Just up. Bad dreams."

"You've been having those a lot lately."

She had not realized he'd noticed. That surprised her more than the call itself, and for one disorienting second she felt something close to guilt for a completely different reason, guilt that she'd stopped expecting him to notice anything about her at all, and now that he had, it landed like an accusation.

"It's nothing," she said. "How's Hong Kong?"

"Singapore. I told you that Tuesday."

"Right. Singapore." She sat on the edge of the bed, sheet still wrapped around her, and stared at a water stain on the ceiling she had never noticed before tonight, as though the room itself had rearranged in the last hour and left small evidence behind. "How's the deal going?"

"Slower than I'd like. I might be another week out here." A pause, the sound of a rolling suitcase, footsteps. "Listen, I actually called because I wanted to check on Ethan. Camille left me three messages today. Apparently he's not answering her calls."

Vivian's stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with old, practiced fear, the kind she'd spent a marriage learning to hide.

"He's fine," she said, too quickly, and made herself slow down. "He's been quiet. Understandably. It's only been two weeks."

"Camille thinks he needs to come back to the city. See someone. A therapist, she means, not just mope around a guesthouse feeling sorry for himself."

"He's not moping." The words left her before she'd decided to say them, sharper than she meant, and she heard the small silence on the other end where Richard registered the edge in her voice.

"You've been checking on him," he said. Not a question. Something closer to mild surprise, the tone of a man noting an unexpected but not unwelcome development, the same tone he might use to remark that the stock had gone up.

"Someone should," Vivian said, and hated how true that sounded even now, even knowing everything she knew about what checking on him had turned into.

"That's good of you. I mean it." Richard's voice softened, genuinely, in the way that used to make her believe there was more underneath his distraction than she ever actually found. "He needs someone steady around right now. God knows I can't be there."

The word steady landed in her chest like a stone dropped down a well, and she had to close her eyes against the sudden, dizzying unfairness of it, being called steady by a man whose absence had made her anything but.

"I should let you board," she said.

"Yeah. They're calling my group." A pause, the muffled sound of him moving through a crowd. "Vivian."

"Yes?"

"Thank you. For being there when I can't be."

She said something in response, she wasn't entirely sure what, some automatic arrangement of words that sounded like a wife and meant nothing, and then the line went dead and she sat there in the dark holding a phone that had gone silent, feeling something close to nausea rising slow and cold through her chest.

Thank you for being there when I can't be.

She thought of Ethan's hands shaking against her skin an hour ago and pressed the phone flat against her sternum as though she could physically hold the two truths apart, keep them from touching each other, keep the version of her that answered that call separate from the version of her that had begged a man not to make a sound in this same bed.

She did not sleep. She lay awake instead, watching the ceiling, watching the clock crawl from two toward three toward four, replaying the call in fragments she could not seem to put down. Camille's three unanswered messages. The suggestion of a therapist, of a return to the city, of Ethan's life quietly resuming its old shape somewhere far away from this house. Somewhere in that long unbroken stretch of dark she made a decision she was not proud of and could not undo: she was not going to tell Ethan about the call. Not the part about Camille, not the part about coming back to the city, not the part where Richard had called her steady in a tone that made her want to scream.

She told herself the omission was kindness, that Ethan did not need one more person deciding what was best for him before he had eaten breakfast. She knew, even as she told herself that, that it was not the whole truth. Some smaller, more honest part of her simply did not want to hand him a reason to leave.

Morning arrived the way it always did on the estate, quiet and gold, sunlight sliding low across the lawn and catching in the pool's surface until the whole yard looked briefly, deceptively peaceful. Vivian stood at the kitchen island in a robe she had not bothered to change out of, coffee going cold in her hands, and watched through the window as Ethan crossed the grass toward the main house.

He walked like a man who had also not slept, shoulders loose in a way that read as exhaustion rather than ease, hair still damp from a shower, and when he stepped through the back door and their eyes met across the kitchen, something passed between them that neither of them had words ready for yet.

"Morning," he said, voice rough.

"Morning." She turned to the coffee maker so she would not have to keep looking at him, because looking at him this early, in this light, after last night, felt like standing too close to a fire she had already been burned by once. "There's coffee."

"Thanks." He crossed the kitchen and stood near her, closer than strictly necessary for a man reaching past her for a mug, and she felt the heat of him at her shoulder and had to grip the counter to keep her hands from doing something foolish.

For a moment neither of them moved. The coffee maker hissed and dripped between them, ordinary and absurd, and Vivian became acutely aware of every small sound in the kitchen, the tick of the clock above the stove, the distant hum of the refrigerator, her own breath, which she was suddenly working very hard to keep even. She had spent the last six hours convincing herself that daylight would fix this, that the version of herself standing in a robe with cold coffee would feel nothing like the version who had begged him not to make a sound. She had been wrong. If anything, daylight made it worse, because there was nowhere to hide inside it, no darkness to soften what her body remembered.

She thought about the years she had spent training herself out of wanting things she could not afford, and how thoroughly that training had failed her in the space of a single night. She had built an entire life on the principle that desire was a luxury for people who could not do arithmetic, and here she was now, doing none of it, standing three feet from her husband's son and thinking about nothing except the memory of his hands.

"Richard called," she said, because the silence had gotten too dangerous to stand inside.

Ethan went still beside her. "What did he want?"

"Just checking in." She kept her voice light, kept pouring coffee she did not want, and did not turn to look at him. "Your mother's been trying to reach you."

"I know. I've been avoiding her." A pause. "Did he ask anything else?"

She thought of the word steady and swallowed it whole rather than hand it to him, because some cruelties were not worth repeating even to spare herself the weight of carrying them alone. "No. Nothing else."

Ethan studied her for a long moment, the kind of look that made her feel entirely seen and entirely exposed at once, as though he already knew there was something she was not saying and had decided, for now, to let her keep it.

"Vivian." His voice had dropped low, careful, the tone of a man choosing his next words with more caution than the moment probably required, given they were standing in a bright kitchen in full daylight with nothing but coffee cups between them. "About last night."

Her whole body went rigid.

"I don't regret it," he said, before she could stop him, before she could put up whatever wall she'd spent the last six hours trying to build. "I know I should. I know exactly what it makes me if I don't. But I don't."

The mug trembled slightly in her hand.

"Ethan—"

"You don't have to say anything back." He set his own mug down, untouched, and took a step closer, close enough that she could smell the same soap from last night still clinging faintly to his skin, close enough that every instinct in her body screamed at her to step back and did not obey. "I just needed you to know I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen. Whatever you decide to do about that."

Behind them, the sound of tires crunching gravel broke the moment apart entirely, and Vivian's head snapped toward the window in time to see a car she did not recognize pulling slowly up the long drive toward the house.

"Are you expecting someone?" Ethan asked, already stepping back, already putting careful distance between them the way two people learn to do quickly when survival depends on it.

Vivian's stomach dropped for the second time that morning.

"No," she said. "I'm not expecting anyone at all."