Chapter 3: The Peek
The second shower began with the same silent ritual. The flickering bulb. The chill on the tiles. Towels clutched like shields. Mindy pointed to the wall. Marcus obeyed, pressing his palms flat against the cold, damp ceramic. He heard the rustle of terrycloth, the soft thud of it hitting the hamper. The metallic shriek of the curtain rings.
The water gasped to life.
He kept his eyes squeezed shut, focusing on the hammering of his own heart. But as the steam began to rise, carrying her clean, soapy scent, his resolve thinned. It was just a peek. A fractional turn of his head. A slit of vision over his shoulder.
She was bent slightly, testing the water with her hand. The curve of her spine was a graceful line, water already slicking the skin of her lower back, beading in the dimples above her ass. Her hips flared, and her buttocks were firm, round globes, taut and glistening under the spray. She straightened, and he saw the powerful definition of her obliques, the hint of her abs, the side of her breast as she reached for the shampoo.
A jolt of heat, immediate and ferocious, shot straight to his groin. His cock, which had been soft and unthinking, thickened in an instant, rising against his thigh in a heavy, insistent ache. He turned fully back to the wall, his forehead pressing against the tile. Don’t. Fucking. Don’t. But the image was branded behind his eyelids: the water sluicing through the cleft of her ass, the strong, trained muscle of her body. He was fully, painfully hard now, his erection jutting out, the head swollen and dark, bobbing with the pound of his pulse.
“Soap.”
Her voice, so close, made him jump. He didn’t turn. He reached a hand back blindly, fingers splayed. Instead of the bar, her hand met his, guiding the soap into his palm. The brief contact was electric. As he pulled his arm back, he had to shift his stance, and in doing so, he half-turned.
Her gaze, fixed on the shower wall, dipped. It happened in less than a second. A flicker. A record of the fact. His enormous, hard cock, standing rigid and thick, the vein running along its length pulsing visibly. Her hazel eyes widened a fraction. Her breath hitched, a tiny, almost inaudible catch in the steam.
She said nothing.
She turned back to the water, scrubbing her arms with a frantic, mechanical energy. The silence wasn’t the comfortable, shared absurdity of the first time. This was a pressurized void, filled only with the drumming water and the roaring in his ears. He tried to will his erection away, thinking of baseball stats, of the dirty warehouse floor, of anything cold and gray. It was useless. It throbbed, a shameless flagpole of his transgression.
They finished in a frantic, clumsy pantomime. No more back-to-back contact. They moved like trapped animals, all sharp angles and avoidant twists. When the water shut off, the silence was deafening. She handed him his towel without looking, her arm stiff. He wrapped it around his waist, hiding the evidence, but the knowledge of it hung between them, slick and ugly.
“Four-oh-three,” she said, her voice strangely toneless. She left the bathroom quickly, the door clicking shut behind her.
The night pressed in, hot and close. Mindy lay in her bed, the sheets tangled around her legs. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw it. The thick, ruddy crown. The sheer, veined length of it. It was wrong. It was a biological fact, a simple, animal reaction to stimulus, she tried to tell herself. He was a young man. It didn’t mean anything.
But her own body betrayed her. A low, insistent thrum had taken up residence deep in her belly, a heat that the clinical shower had done nothing to cool. It was shameful. It was undeniable. She stared at the ceiling, the streetlight casting barred shadows through her blinds. Her hand drifted down, over the flat plane of her stomach, beneath the waistband of her cotton shorts. She touched herself, and a bolt of sharp, guilty pleasure made her gasp.
No.
She sat up, swinging her legs out of bed. The wooden floor was cool under her feet. She padded to her closet, to the small lockbox on the high shelf where she kept things from her past life. Things a single mother wasn’t supposed to have. Her fingers fumbled with the combination. The lid opened.
Inside, nestled next to old love letters, was a silicone dildo, a deep purple, substantial in girth and length. She took it out, the material cool and smooth in her hand. She didn’t turn on the light.
Back in bed, she lay on her back, the object held against her chest. The image flooded back, more vivid now in the dark. Not just the sight, but the feel of the steam, the shocking proximity, the sheer maleness of him. Her son. The word echoed, but it was drowned out by a deeper, primal pulse.
She spit into her palm, slicking the head of the dildo. She brought it down, pressing the blunt tip against her clit, circling with a rough, urgent pressure. A whimper escaped her throat. She was already wet, soaked with a guilty, frantic arousal. She guided the toy inside, and it was a stretch, a filling, profound invasion that made her back arch off the mattress.
“Fuck,” she breathed into the dark room.
She fucked herself with it, hard and fast, the base slapping against her flesh. Each thrust drove the image deeper. His tall, lean frame braced against the wall. The flex of his shoulders. The drop of water running down that cock. His cock. She imagined it was that, not silicone—hotter, alive, veined—pushing into her, splitting her open. The filthy fantasy unspooled, fully formed. His hands, those big warehouse hands, gripping her hips, pulling her onto him. The crude, wet sounds of it. Him groaning, “Mom,” not as a title, but as a curse of pleasure.
“Oh, God, Marcus,” she moaned, the name a secret confession to the empty air.
Her hips pistoned, taking the length of the toy, imagining him deeper, harder. The coil in her abdomen tightened to a breaking point. She pinched her nipple roughly with her free hand, pain and pleasure merging. She thought of his eyes, wide with shock and desire, seeing her. Wanting her. It was all it took.
The orgasm ripped through her, violent and silent, a convulsive wave that clenched around the fake shaft inside her. Her thighs trembled. She bit her own wrist to stifle the cry, her body bowing, then collapsing back into the sweaty sheets.
The toy slid out, wet and gleaming in the sliver of streetlight. She lay there, panting, the immediate, brutal pleasure receding, leaving behind a vast, hollow shame that seeped into her bones. The shadows on the ceiling seemed to watch, judging. The distant hum of the street was no longer a promise, but a taunt.
Down the hall, completely unaware, Marcus slept. In her hand, the dildo was still warm.