Forbidden Desires

Birthday Party

Sunlight was starting to beam through the windows when I heard a knock on the door.

"How was your night, honey?" he asked.

Yes, that's my stepdad; the moment I am around, he gets up early and makes my breakfast, toast bread, and makes fresh coffee all over. I go and hug him from the back, resting my head against him.

"Morning, Daddy.”

My mom was away, so it's just me now; I am on vacation too. I enjoy this rare, peaceful atmosphere. My Dad goes to work during the day, and I am on my own. The nighttime, however, is made of memories. My father comes home after work. We go to the beach to see the waves. Sometimes we end up at a local party, enjoying getting lost in the crowd, or we simply curl up on the couch to watch a movie.

Suddenly, something flickered through my mind. “Daddy, we don't have a puppy anymore,” I said. “So whose blood was on the stairs yesterday, please tell me the truth.”

He looks at me for a few minutes. “It's April Fool.”

“No, Dad,” I said. “If it was, then you could have told me yesterday.”

“I swear, doll.”

I didn't know if I should believe him or not.

Later at Night.

Tonight was different, however. The music was a low humming sound, so much that it vibrated in my bones from my feet up to the roof, and now I felt it on my skin-it had finally synced up with my beating heart. It was my 20th birthday celebration, and there were a hundred people packed inside the house; a blur of laughter and bright neon-colored lights staining the walls in pinks and blues. To everybody else in the room, however, only I was in our tiny piece of space.

I was tucked against him, my hands were placed on his broad shoulders, feeling the firm structure beneath his t-shirt. I had never danced this close with him before, ever this still, that same close anchored in a steady frame. The heat radiating from him was so physical; a thick, intoxicating mass that made my head swim more than the alcohol did.

With every brushing of his thighs against mine, through the thin and silky fabric of my dress, I felt like an electric jolt running straight through to my core; the tingling sensation ignited a fire.

The room was sweltering; the scent of expensive cologne mixed with a salty spray from the windows left open. I couldn’t move. He shifted slightly, his hand around my waist, squeezing in just a fraction tighter, and then, I was pulled more securely into the rigid form of his body.

Outside that bubble was my celebration and the music and the noisy and laughing crowd, a million miles away. He was more than just the guardian in my life who catered to every need; he was the only person I craved for, and the pulse of the raging party. I let the low, vibrating bass and the warmth of his skin consume me.

The air was sucked out of the room. It was replaced with a tangible, electric charge that spun me around, making me feel like I was falling. “What the hell is wrong with me?” My mind spiraled into a dizzying maze of guilt and lust. He was my stepfather, the man who found us on our scrapheap and rescued us.

He had given me a name. And a future. When my own mother couldn't give me a kind word, my logic still failed me. I felt my skin burning where we touched. I felt like I was actually melting into the sharp plane of his body. All my instincts were screaming this wasn't a proper daughter-stepfather reaction at all, and yet I couldn't move.

His hand moved down my back, his fingers spread wide, he leaned down and pinned me in place with his warm, and heavy hand. He yanked me tight into him until there wasn't any space left between us, and I gasped, the sound getting trapped in my throat as I promptly forgot to breathe. I could feel my breasts pushed tight against the ungiving surface of his chest.

The vibration of a beating somewhere inside his chest pounded into my own chest. Either him or me, or both, I suppose. It was loud, rapid, needy, and completely drowned out the booming beat of the party music.

The neon lights swam into stripes of color as he tilted his head down. The shadow from his head and body fell over me, and I was thrown into a dark world of just him. Our lips were barely a hair's width apart, and I could feel the slightest ghost of his breath against my lips. I could already smell him; sandalwood mixed with a musky, masculine, dangerous scent I couldn't identify, but bypassed my brain and went straight to my blood. My eyes shifted from his mouth, an inch away from my own, down to where it opened. The taboo of it was a sting against my senses, but the draw to him was overwhelming. In a split second, there was nothing and no one in the world but the two of us. I felt myself leaning in, my body betraying every principle I lived by and desperately wishing he would take that last inch and kiss me.

I squeezed his shoulders, and the fabric of his shirt tightened under my hands as I held on tight and waited for the collision, my heart was pounding like a captive bird.

The room appeared to be melting around us, the neon signs stretching out to jagged, fractured lines of color that felt as blurred and unfocused as my mind did. I had never been with a man; I had never even looked twice at a man in my life-I had always been the watcher on the sidelines, the phantom who made myself invisible.

But now, I was melting into the one man whom I wasn't supposed to have a want in the world for. I could barely breathe, my throat was constricted and tight, a secret about to bloom there in the light.

“Honey? You're trembling,” he said softly. It was a low, raspy vibration against my ear that sent another wave of warmth through my thighs, almost making my knees buckle. “You alright?”

His words seemed to wash over me like an ice bath and pull me out of the stupor just enough for me to start getting back in touch with reality. I looked up into his dark, intense eyes, but I couldn't seem to find "Uncle Robert," who bought me ice cream and graded my papers somewhere in them; just a man with a suddenly disturbing depth to his eyes.

"Yes, Daddy," I whispered.

The word didn't even feel like mine in the haze of my mind. It came out choked, light-headed, and thick with emotions I didn't want to admit out loud. “I'm... I'm fine.”

But I am not.

His low, rough voice rumbled through my body again, and he exhaled with a long sigh, his breath stuttered a bit, his steps faltered fractionally, then he slowly backed away. The heat seemed to be pulled from my skin where he'd been pressed against it, and the air in the room felt cool where we'd been welded together.

The party continued around us, someone knocked over a glass, a girl laughed manically in a corner, and the music continued to pound, but there was a fracture in me now, wide and unable to be fixed. I watched him as he turned, and his back was an impossible wall between us again, and I realized I had already crossed more than half the line that I shouldn't have even come near. The safe, normal family barrier that Robert had always enforced was gone, replaced by an impossible, frightening fire that threatened to consume everything he had built around himself.