A Mistress To My StepDaddy

Chapter 8: The Web Of Deceit

(Pov Isabelle)

Even at seven in the morning, while my coffee was getting cold on the nightstand, I still had my laptop on bed and was opening my search engine. It is great to me that I can use Google for my research.

I searched for the tattoo artist's name, Dorian Vayne, and spent the next twenty minutes going through everything that showed up; the studio website, two magazine features, and one interview from three years back where he pretty much didn't reveal anything personal during four hundred words.

His i********: was followed by forty, six thousand people, and every post was only his work of tattooing, with different skin and ink, but never his face, a location tagged, and never a comment replied to.

I was doing research about him and found nothing about where he was from, no family, no digital footprint. That was when the studio had opened, and his public record started and stopped.

Initially, I couldn't find deleted accounts, or cached pages, not even a forum post. I kept clicking, kept hoping to find something that had escaped me, and found nothing.

I closed the laptop. The unease I'd gone to bed with, and the empty search results didn't help. You simply don't look like that by accident or become that successful without leaving a trace. You had to work.

:

While I was still mulling over it, my mom's car drove off at ten p.m. I waited for two minutes, and then I went into her room.

Her dresser was the first thing I got into, her scarves, a ceramic dish that held spare buttons and a broken earring back, nothing that was not hers. Next, I opened her closet, the shelf above the rail where she kept things she did not need very often. A shoebox of old birthday cards, another with photographs, mostly pictures of me at different ages. I looked at each one closely and then put them back in their places.

My hand wandered to the cloth, covered box at the very back of the shelf. It was a flat box, about the size of a hardcover book, and I didn't recognize it. As I opened the lid, I experienced a small unpleasant knot and a vague feeling of uneasiness in my stomach.

Inside the box was a neatly folded letter on cream paper, a flower, a little flower which was already going brown on the edges, and a small card with no writing on it.

I carefully unfolded the letter first. The handwriting wasn't my mother's, the letters were very exact and precise so that felt forced rather than usual.

I read it twice. It made me physically feel a tightness in the chest. I detected a link between my mother and Dorian, and that was a few years ago.

I leaned back against the bed frame and sat on the floor. I put my phone down on my lap with the screen face down.

My mother had been alone for four years after the divorce. Two relationships, both of which lasted very short, and both ended quietly. Then six months ago she met Dorian, and three months after that she was engaged. I thought it was a little bit fast at the time, but I just said it was because of her loneliness, that she was ready, and whatever it is a woman would do to have a man by her side.

But how could it be a man that I have had s*x with?

Oh God! It shouldn't be him. Of all the men in the world?

I remembered his face in the hallway that first night. His eyes were full of desire in the very brief moment before he composed himself. I thought he was just shocked. I had thought that we were both surprised and confused to be in this situation. I had thought that he didn't know who I was.

But maybe he did?

Maybe for him, coming into my mom's place was no surprise at all?

The front door opened downstairs and my mother was on her way to her room where I was.

I was standing, looking at myself in the mirror on the wall and after that I went down to meet her.

I finally reached Dorian's place or rather my Stepdaddy's studio. Eeewwwu! I can hardly say it, because my mind keeps going back to that horrible but pleasurable night.

As soon as I came in, I sat in the chair.

The black vinyl chair was cold and it had cracks in the seat. The room was small and smelled like bleach and stale coffee. Dorian walked to a metal tray which was already set for my inking.

Heck, I've come here to get a tattoo, actually I'm getting a tattoo, one that I've been dying to have before my 26th birthday.

He snapped the plastic glove against his skin as he put on his black gloves. I was very uneasy. This man was my mother's husband and now, my stepdad. We had s*x in a hotel room two weeks ago and now also, I found myself in his shop, trying to get myself inked. Isabelle, I hope you're not going crazy already? I thought

"Lean forward, " he ordered.

"Like this, Dad?" I said, looking at him with my cheeks.The word felt like a lie. I knew it for real. It felt like a weight and I saw he stiffened when I said it too, because we already have something going on. But he did not look at my eyes, but kept his professional status.

"Lower and put your head on your knees."

I bent over. The skin on my back was stretched so much that it felt like it might tear. My stepdad, turning on a very bright lamp, was sitting on a stool just behind me. His face was a little bit hidden because of the light. The bright light created a hot feeling on my neck and, at the same time, he sprayed a paper towel with blue liquid and wiped my shoulder.

It was chilly and I could even feel the cold of his touch again, damn it!.

He did it three times, then he reached for a razor. As he was gently removing my tiny hairs by shaving, I could hear the scrape of the razor against my skin, but he spotted me and I was trembling.

"You are trembling, " he said.

"No dad, I am just cold, " I said, holding tightly to his knees.

"Isabelle, I can actually see the involuntary movements of your muscles. You are alright, right?"

"Yes I am, " I said very short and very plainly.

After that, he went ahead and got a piece of paper, pressed it onto my back, held it there, counted to five, and took the paper off.

"Look into the mirror, " he said.

He gave me a little mirror and when I looked into it over my shoulder, I saw a purple figure on my skin. It was a bird with very fierce wings. It was as if the bird was getting shattered. This was the design he wanted to tattoo on me.

"It looks fine, " I said.

"It is merely a paper cut out and the needle is real."

My step dad grabbed the tattooing tool, taking the tip of the instrument dipped in a minuscule container of the black ink, and then stepped on a pedal on the floor to control the operation. The tool started making a buzzing sound. It was very similar to the sound of a rapidly flying honey bee.

"Are you prepared?" he inquired.

"Yes, Dad."

Once more, I uttered it. To myself I wanted to remind and, kind of, mark a completely different status of our relationship by the very word I used to call him. But deep down I, of course, knew that he was not a father but the very man whom I had seen at the hotel.

He barely pressed the needle onto my skin. Awwwn easy daddy! I whined beneath him.

The sting was intense and it was like a hot tooth scraping me. I clutched the sides of the chair and held my breath as he was drawing.

"Breathe Isabelle, " he advised. "If you keep holding your breath, you'll faint.”