Chapter 10: The Parolee's Proposition
The parole hearing was a blur of polished oak and hollow arguments. Gus sat stiff-backed between Shawn and Chief Vick, his jaw clenched so tight Shawn thought he might crack a tooth. Marcy Havisham, in a simple blue dress, her hair shorter, her eyes downcast, spoke softly of remorse and rehabilitation, of gardens she’d tended and the child she’d brought into the world. She was a portrait of penitence. The board bought it.
Six weeks later, she was free.
Gus had changed the locks. He’d installed a security system that beeped angrily if a butterfly landed on the window. He’d briefed Lily’s daycare with a photo and strict instructions. But he couldn’t stop time, and he couldn’t miss his quarterly sales summit in Fresno. Which is how Shawn found himself on Gus’s couch on a Tuesday afternoon, building a precarious fort out of couch cushions with a very serious two-year-old.
“This is the battlements,” Shawn explained, tucking a blanket into the crease of the cushions. “This is where we’ll pour the boiling oil on the barbarians, which in this case is anyone who tries to make you eat broccoli.”
Lily nodded, arranging her stuffed otter as captain of the guard. The living room, usually a chaotic shrine to Gus’s fastidiousness, was in a state of happy siege. The beep of the security system being disarmed at the front door was so soft, so routine-sounding, that Shawn assumed it was Gus returning early.
“That was quick, buddy. Forget your nerdy presentation slides?” he called, not looking up from the fort’s architecture.
The voice that answered was not Gus’s.
“No slides. Just an opportunity.”
Shawn’s head snapped up. Marcy stood just inside the doorway, having closed it silently behind her. She wore jeans and a light sweater, looking ordinary, sane. Her eyes went past him, landing on Lily with a hunger so profound it stole the air from the room.
Lily stared, frozen, her small fingers clutching the otter.
“Marcy.” Shawn stood, placing himself between her and the child. “You need to leave. Now. The conditions of your parole—”
“Say I can’t have unsupervised contact,” she finished, her voice calm, almost melodic. “This isn’t unsupervised. You’re here. You’re a witness.” Her gaze finally slid to him. There was a feverish brightness in her eyes, a crack in the carefully constructed calm. “Hello, Shawn.”
“Get out,” he said, his voice low. He reached for his phone in his pocket.
“I’m not here to cause trouble,” she said, taking a slow step forward. Her eyes darted to Lily again. “She’s beautiful. She has his eyes.”
“Marcy, I am not playing. Leave, or I call Chief Vick and you go back to tending fucking petunias in prison.”
She laughed, a dry, rustling sound. “The petunias were a means to an end. Everything is.” She finally looked at him, really looked at him, and her expression shifted. The maternal softening vanished, replaced by something calculating, biological. “I’m not here for custody, Shawn. I’m not here to take her from Gus.”
“Then why are you here?”
“The vanilla extract,” she said, as if it were obvious. “It did something to me. To my system. For two years in that cell, all I could think about was how fertile it made me. How perfect Lily is. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a revelation.” She took another step. The distance between them closed. He could smell a faint, clean scent of soap and something underneath, a sharp, metabolic smell. “I want another one.”
Shawn blinked. “What?”
“A baby. I want to have a baby. My body has been… dreaming of it. Screaming for it.” Her eyes raked over him, dissecting him. “Gus won’t give it to me. He looks at me like I’m a bomb. But you… you were there. You’re part of it. The original… cocktail.”
A cold dread, slick and paralyzing, poured down Shawn’s spine. “You’re insane.”
“I’m optimized,” she corrected. She was close now, too close. “It doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s just biology. You give me what I need. I leave. Gus never has to know.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” Shawn hissed, glancing at Lily, who was watching with wide, confused eyes. “Get the hell out of my face.”
“Or what? You’ll stop me?” Before he could react, her hand shot out. Not to hit him, but to palm him through his jeans. Her touch was clinical, assessing. He flinched back, but she held on, her fingers pressing against the soft fabric. “See? Your body knows. It remembers.”
“Let go of me,” he snarled, batting her hand away.
She didn’t fight. Instead, she dropped to her knees.
Time didn’t slow down; it fractured. This was not happening in Gus’s living room, with a child’s fort three feet away. This was a breach in reality itself. Shawn’s brain, usually a hyperactive engine of observation and connection, short-circuited. He just stared, numb, as her fingers worked his button, his zipper.
“What are you doing?” The question was a stupid, witeless thing, air escaping a punctured lung.
“What’s necessary,” she murmured, pulling his jeans and boxers down over his hips. His cock, soft and inert in the cold shock of the situation, was exposed to the warm, stale air of the room. He was too stunned to move, his limbs locked in place by sheer, monstrous disbelief.
She didn’t hesitate. She took him into her mouth.
Her lips were warm, her tongue a flat, wet pressure against his flaccid flesh. It was not an act of seduction. It was a mechanical process, a priming. She worked him with a horrifying, focused efficiency, her head bobbing, her hand wrapping around the base to pump in rhythm with her mouth. A grotesque, traitorous heat began to bloom in his groin. His body, divorced from his screaming mind, began to respond. Blood flowed, swelling him against the wet insistence of her tongue, the tight seal of her lips.
“Stop,” he choked out. His hands came up, not to push her away, but to hover uselessly in the air, as if touching her would make this more real. He could see the top of her head, the neat part in her hair. He could see over her shoulder to the cushion fort, to Lily, who had turned her back and was now quietly talking to her otter, a toddler’s instinctual retreat from a world gone wrong.
Marcy pulled back, a string of saliva connecting her lip to the head of his cock, now fully, shamefully erect. She looked up at him, her eyes gleaming with a terrible triumph. “There it is,” she breathed. “See? It knows what it’s for.”
She leaned in again, taking him deeper, and this time her throat opened around him. The sensation—hot, tight, violating—jolted through him like a live wire. A stifled groan was ripped from his chest. His hands finally landed on her shoulders, but the push was weak, conflicted. His hips gave a tiny, involuntary jerk forward, sinking himself deeper into that wet heat.
She gagged slightly, pulled back, and then swallowed him down again, deeper, taking him to the root. Her nose pressed into his pubic hair. The obscene sound of her gagging, the wet suction, filled the silent room. It was raw, brutal, and devastatingly effective. Pleasure, acute and horrifying, built in his lower belly, a base chemical reaction overriding every moral circuit.
“Fuck,” he whispered, a curse and a plea.
She released him with a pop, her lips slick and swollen. She stared up at him, panting lightly. “Do it,” she said, her voice ragged. “Fuck a baby into me. Right here. Give me what I’m owed. Breed me, Shawn. Breed me like Gus did last time.”
He tried to resist but she pushed him onto the couch. Before he could react, she was already straddling him.
She landed hard on his lap, her hands shoving his shoulders into the couch cushions, and with one brutal, unerring motion, she guided him inside her. She was already wet, a slick, shocking heat that clenched around him instantly, and the sensation tore a ragged gasp from his throat. His mind shattered into static—this wasn’t happening, but his nerves were on fire, the tight, desperate grip of her body a perverse anchor to a reality he wanted to flee.
“That’s it,” she hissed, her eyes locked on his, her hips beginning a frantic, grinding rhythm. “Give it to me.” Her inner muscles milked him, a ruthless, purposeful suction. Each brutal sink of her body dragged a hot thread of pleasure from his core, coiling it tighter. He was rock-hard, buried to the hilt in a woman who was a living crime scene, and his body, traitorous and base, was responding.
He heard a small, wooden clatter from across the room. Lily had knocked over a block. The sound was a pinprick of light in a dark, drowning depth. “Lily,” he choked out, trying to push Marcy off. “God, stop.”
Marcy didn’t even glance over. She rode him harder, the slap of skin meeting skin a vulgar counterpoint to the quiet children’s music still playing from a speaker in the kitchen. She leaned down, her breath hot and sour against his ear. “She’s fine. She doesn’t understand. This is just biology, Shawn. Let it happen.” Her teeth grazed his earlobe. “Come inside me. Fill me up. I need it.”
Her words were a grotesque catalyst. Shame bile rose in his throat, but beneath it, a deeper, animal pressure built, inevitable as a tide. His hands, which had been braced against her hips, now dug into her flesh, pulling her down onto him with a force that made her cry out. He was fucked, in every sense. He couldn’t stop it.
“You crazy bitch,” he groaned, his hips pistoning upward to meet her frantic strokes. The couch springs squeaked in a furious, ridiculous rhythm. Pleasure, sharp and debilitating, was a wire pulled taut from his balls to the base of his skull. He was going to come. He was going to come inside Marcy Havisham in his best friend’s living room.
He threw his head back, a strangled sound escaping his clenched teeth. His orgasm ripped through him, a violent, despairing surrender. He jerked up into her, pumping his release deep into that clutching, welcoming heat. He spasmed, shuddering, each pulse a wave of nauseating release.
She collapsed atop him, her own body convulsing in a tight, silent climax, her inner walls fluttering around his softening flesh. She panted into his neck, a low, satisfied hum vibrating against his skin. For a long moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the distant, tinny sound of The Wheels on the Bus.
Then, she moved. She pushed herself up, his spent cock slipping wetly from her. She stood, adjusting her jeans with a chilling practicality, as if she’d just completed a transaction. She looked down at him, his pants around his thighs, his chest heaving. A small, serene smile touched her lips.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice perfectly calm. “That was all I needed.”
Shawn could only stare, hollowed out, glued to the couch by his own shame. He watched, paralyzed, as she walked over to the cushion fort. She knelt, staying just outside its entrance. Lily peeked out, clutching her otter.
“You’re a very good girl, Lily,” Marcy said, her voice softening into something almost genuine. “Be good for your daddy.”
She stood, gave Shawn one last, unreadable look, and walked to the door. She let herself out silently. The security system beeped once, signifying the door was armed again.
The silence she left behind was absolute. It was a physical weight. Shawn slowly pulled his jeans up over his sticky flesh, the zipper sound obscenely loud. He looked at Lily. She was staring at the door, her expression blank.
Then, she looked at him.
“Uncle Shawn?” she said, her small voice clear in the quiet. “You have a sad face.”
He couldn’t speak. He just opened his arms. She crawled out of the fort and came to him, letting him lift her onto the couch, away from the damp spot where he’d been violated and had, in the end, participated. He held her, burying his face in her clean hair, trying to smell baby shampoo instead of the lingering scent of sex and ruin.
His phone buzzed on the coffee table. Gus’s name flashed on the screen. The sound was a starting pistol. The real world, with its consequences, came crashing back in. He let it ring, holding Lily tighter, knowing the lie he would now have to tell, and live with, was already taking root inside him, a second, more terrible seed.