Chapter 22: The Carpenter's Workshop
The silence after their children left was a physical presence, thick as the dust motes swirling in the slab of morning sun cutting across the floor. Sandi watched the empty gravel path for a full minute, then turned to Caleb with eyes that were clear and disturbingly calm.
“I want to be used like a tool,” she stated, her voice devoid of the earlier fury. “No conversation. No pretense. Just a function. The carpenter. Leonidas. You’ll walk me to his workshop so I don’t get distracted on the way.”
“Sandi—”
“No,” she cut him off. “Walk with me, or watch me go alone. But I’m going. I want his hands on me. I want to be the cunt he fucks on his workbench because it’s convenient.” She moved to her suitcase, pulling out a sleeveless dress of pale, butter-yellow linen. It was outrageously short and unforgivingly thin. She stepped into it, letting the fabric whisper over her hips, and did not bother with underwear. The outline of her shaven lips was visible through the material when she moved. “Let’s go.”
The walk down the cliff path was conducted in a tense, wordless parade. Sandi walked ahead, the dress clinging to the sweat beading on her lower back. Caleb followed, his gut churning with a resigned dread. As the first whitewashed buildings of the village came into view, Sandi stopped on the outskirts. She bent, slipping off her sandals with deliberate care. From her small bag, she produced the towering, needle-thin stilettos.
The click of them on the cobblestones was a宣告. She walked into the main lane, her stride becoming a deliberate sway, the short dress riding higher. A young fisherman mending nets on a stoop looked up, his eyes widening. Sandi met his gaze and gave a slow, deliberate nod. “Later,” she said, the word a clear promise. He stared, dumbfounded, as she passed.
This was her new calculus. She was a vessel, a convenience, and the knowledge was a drug. It wasn’t demeaning; it was liberation from the exhausting work of being a person. She was simply what she was for: a fuck.
Leonidas’s workshop was a cavern of golden dust at the end of a narrow alley. The door stood open to the heat. Inside, the air hummed with the scent of cedar resin and aged oil. Leonidas himself, a bear of a man with a close-cropped grey beard and arms thick from a lifetime of labor, was planing a long piece of walnut, his back to the door. The rhythmic shush of the tool filled the space.
Sandi entered. She didn’t speak. She walked to the central workbench, its surface scarred and stained with decades of projects. Without a glance at him, she turned, placed her palms flat on the rough wood, and bent forward. She planted her stiletto-heeled feet wide, presenting herself. The thin yellow linen tightened across her upturned ass, rendering the fabric nearly transparent.
The planing stopped. She heard the heavy thud of his boots on the sawdust-strewn floor. He stopped behind her. A calloused, rough hand, warm and dry, settled on the curve of her hip, his thumb digging into the muscle. It was an appraisal, impersonal as checking the grain of wood.
“Your husband sent you?” His voice was a low rumble, devoid of salaciousness.
“No,” she breathed, pushing back slightly against his hand. “I came for myself.”
His other hand hooked into the hem of her dress and pulled it up to her waist, baring her completely. The cool workshop air kissed her skin. He observed her for a beat—the swollen lips, the slight gleam of her readiness. He spat onto his own fingers, a crude, wet sound, and without ceremony smoothed the moisture over her opening.
She was already wet, obscenely so, and her body jumped at the contact, a low moan escaping her as his thick, gnarled fingers pressed and parted her. “Yeah,” he grunted, more to himself, noting her responsiveness. He unbuttoned his trousers, the rasp of the zip loud in the quiet. His cock, when he freed it, was thick and veined, ruddy and already fully hard. He guided himself to her, the broad head nudging against her slickness.
He drove into her with a single, powerful thrust. The impact was stunning, punching the air from her lungs, filling her utterly. She cried out, a sharp, grateful sound. He didn’t wait, setting immediately into a hard, fast, deep rhythm. One hand returned to grip her hip, bone-tight, holding her in place. The other pressed flat between her shoulder blades, pinning her to the bench.
The workshop filled with the sound of it: the wet, rhythmic slap of flesh, her gasping cries, the persistent creak of the heavy bench protesting with every powerful drive of his hips. Sawdust stirred around their feet, clinging to the damp skin of her inner thighs. He fucked her with the focused, efficient intensity of a man completing a task. There was no kiss, no whispered endearment, only the brutal, beautiful mechanics of use.
She came violently, her cunt clamping around his invading length in a series of pulsating spasms that made her vision whiten at the edges. Her cry was raw, guttural, echoing off the high walls. It triggered his own finish. With a final, deep grunt, he buried himself to the hilt and spilled into her, his release hot and copious inside her well-used channel.
He stayed there, lodged within her, for several long moments, his breath hot on her back. Then he pulled out with a soft, wet sound. His seed immediately began to seep out of her, dripping in a warm trickle down her thigh onto the sawdust below. He tucked himself away, zipped up, and picked up a stained rag from the bench, wiping his cock with a few brisk strokes.
“Tell your husband the job is done,” he said, turning his back to her and reaching for his plane once more. The conversation was over. The tool shushed against the wood.
Sandi, legs trembling, pushed herself upright. She let her dress fall, the damp linen sticking to her skin. She walked out on unsteady heels, feeling the slow leak of him inside her with each step. Caleb was waiting in the alley, his face a mask. She took his arm, not for support, but as a claim.
“Back to the cottage,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I’m not done.”
Back in the stone-walled bedroom, she pushed him onto the bed. She was insatiable, a engine stoked but not cooled. She rode him, then demanded he take her from behind, then from the side. She focused on the sensation, consciously stifling her own climaxes, building the need higher. “Don’t let me come yet,” she’d gasp. “Just give me more. Fill me up.” It was a frantic, driving process, sex as accumulation, each of his orgasms inside her another notch on a ledger only she could see.
Finally, spent and slick with sweat, she lay beside him as evening painted the sky purple. He slept, an exhausted collapse. She did not.
She retrieved her laptop, its glow harsh in the darkening room. She typed in precise, clinical search terms. Private swingers clubs. Membership criteria. Discretion assured. Berlin. Amsterdam. London. She read testimonials and studied photo galleries of dimly lit rooms, of anonymous figures and specialized equipment. A calm, focused determination settled over her.
When Caleb stirred hours later, she was still there, the blue light reflecting in her unwavering eyes. He blinked at her. “What are you doing?”
She turned the screen slightly towards him, revealing a sleek, password-protected website for a members-only club in Berlin called Der Keller. The images were suggestive, opulent, and deeply explicit.
“Research,” she said, her tone final, leaving no room for debate. “We’re not going back. We’re going forward. This is just the beginning.” She closed the laptop with a soft click, the sound definitive in the quiet cottage, a door locking shut on the world they had left behind.
The click of the laptop echoed in the stillness. Caleb stared at the closed device, then at her face, finding no trace of the woman who’d once balanced spreadsheets and soccer practice schedules. This was someone else, a strategist surveying new terrain. Dawn arrived as a slow bleed of light at the window. She was already moving, selecting a dress from the wardrobe—a gauzy, pale peach sundress that was more veil than garment. Her nipples and the dark triangle of her shaven pussy were starkly visible through the fabric.
“I made a promise yesterday,” she said, stepping into towering cork-soled wedges that added dangerous height. She didn’t look at him. “The fisherman on the stoop. I told him ‘later’. Later is now.”
“Sandi, wait.”
“You can watch from the cliff if you want,” she said, smoothing the sheer fabric over her hips. “Or don’t. It doesn’t matter.” She walked out into the morning, the dress floating around her, leaving him in the silent cottage with the ghost of Berlin club pages hanging between them.
The dirt path was cool underfoot, but the sun warming her skin felt like an affirmation. She focused on the sensation of the breeze touching her everywhere, the faint, aching reminder of Leonidas’s rough usage, the pleasant emptiness she intended to fill again. She was a promise being kept.
Liam and Chloe huddled on the peeling vinyl seats of the island ferry, their argument exhausted into a numb silence. Flying home from Athens had felt like a surrender. This—returning—felt like a desperate, shared compulsion. They needed context, a reason, anything to make the horrific tableau in the cottage parse into something that made sense. The ferry docked with a shudder. They disembarked, squinting in the harsh port light, anonymous among the tourists.
It was Chloe who saw her first. “Oh God,” she whispered, her hand clawing at Liam’s arm.
Down the main lane, moving with unsettling purpose, was their mother. The peach dress was practically transparent, a fact made obscenely clear by the morning sun behind her. Her high wedges made her legs look endless, her posture erect. She turned down a narrower alley toward the fishing docks. “Where is she going?” Chloe breathed, already starting to follow, pulled by a sick fascination.
“We shouldn’t,” Liam said, but his feet were moving. They kept a distance, their backpacks feeling ludicrously adolescent. They saw Sandi approach a weather-beaten fishing boat, the Kyprida. A man in a stained sweater, the same one from the stoop, looked up from mending a net. He said nothing. Sandi climbed the short gangplank, disappearing into the wheelhouse.
Liam and Chloe broke into a jog, their shoes slapping the cobbles. They reached the boat just as a second man, younger, descended into the wheelhouse from the deck above. A third followed. The small, salt-crusted windows of the wheelhouse were fogged almost immediately. But not before they saw the blur of pale peach fabric being pushed up, saw the shape of a man behind her, saw her head fall back.
Chloe made a small, animal sound and sank onto a nearby bollard, turning her face into her hands. Liam stood frozen, his knuckles white on his backpack strap. He heard the sounds. Not cries of distress, but low, rhythmic grunts of labor, the slap of flesh, a female moan that was unmistakably his mother’s, deep and satisfied. It went on for a long time. He caught fragmented glimpses through a clearer patch of glass: a hand splayed on her back, the curve of her bare ass, a different man taking his turn.
When Sandi emerged, her hair was mussed, the sheer dress damp in patches and clinging even more revealingly to her skin. She descended the gangplank calmly, adjusting the thin straps on her shoulders. She hadn’t taken ten steps before Liam stepped into her path.
Her hazel eyes registered them with a flicker of shock that was instantly smoothed over into a placid, almost formal recognition. “You’re back,” she said, as if greeting them after a trip to the market.
“What the fuck was that?” Liam’s voice was low, shaking.
“A kept promise,” Sandi said. She looked past him to where Chloe wept. “Come. We’ll talk where it’s cool.” She led them, neither apologetic nor ashamed, to Adonis’s taverna. The patio was quiet this early. Adonis looked up, saw Sandi’s state, saw the shattered faces of the teenagers behind her, and understood everything. He gave a slight, solemn nod.
“The back corner, kyria Sandi. Nikolas will bring you coffee.”
Nikolas arrived, his handsome face carefully neutral. “Kafedes?” he asked softly, his eyes on Sandi with a deep, knowing respect that made Liam’s skin crawl.
“Yes, for three,” Sandi said. She sat, the sheer dress settling, not bothering to cross her legs. The evidence of her recent activity was faintly visible on her inner thigh. She waited until the small cups were placed before them. “You want an explanation.”
“We saw you,” Chloe hissed, tear-streaked and furious. “With three… in a boat. How could you?”
Sandi took a slow sip of bitter coffee. “Elena, the woman who first welcomed us here, explained the old ways. This island has always understood a woman’s nature isn’t one thing. The myth of Lamia isn’t about a monster. It’s about hunger. About a power that frightens people who want women quiet and convenient.” She leaned forward. “Your father helped me remember my hunger. He supports this. Fully.”
Liam recoiled. “So he’s just… pimping you out?”
“He’s loving me,” she corrected, her voice sharpening. “In the only way that matters now—by not fencing me in. I had one life. I gave the first half of it to you. Every decision, every dream put on hold, every quiet moment sacrificed for swimming lessons and math homework and your happiness.” She looked at them both, her gaze unflinching. “It was a gift I gave willingly. But that season is over. Now I live for myself. And for him, in the way we’ve chosen.”
Chloe looked horrified. “You’re blaming us?”
“I’m stating a fact,” Sandi said, finishing her coffee. “This is my time. This,” she gestured vaguely at her body, at the taverna, at the sea beyond, “is what it looks like. You can accept that the people who raised you are also complex, sexual beings with desires that don’t fit in your worldview, or you can leave again. But I won’t apologize for finally being alive.”
She stood up, the sheer dress a proclamation. “The cottage is paid for the week. You’re welcome to stay, but you will not question us again.” She walked away, leaving them with the dregs of their coffee and the crumbling outline of their childhood.
Liam watched her go, seeing not a monster, but a stranger operating under a code he couldn’t decipher. He looked at his sister’s broken face, then out at the bright, pitiless sea. The foundation of everything had not just cracked; it had dissolved into salt water. There was nothing solid left to stand on.