Chapter 1: The Reveal Beneath the Robe
The driveway was so clean it looked vacuumed. Tiffany cut the engine of her beat-up Honda Civic, which suddenly felt louder and dirtier than ever, and glared at the perfect white house with its perfect blue shutters and its perfect, stupidly cheerful geraniums.
She hauled her duffel bag out of the passenger seat, the strap of her top slipping deliberately off her shoulder. She didn’t adjust it. Let Grandma Carol have a heart attack right there on the porch. It’d be a more interesting start to the summer.
The front door swung open before she even reached it.
“Tiffany, darling. You’re late.” Grandma Carol stood framed in the doorway, a vision in a pressed lilac cardigan and pearls. Her smile was thin, a mere polite stretching of lips.
“Traffic,” Tiffany grunted, brushing past her into the entryway. It smelled like lemon polish and something floral, probably the ghosts of old ladies. “And it’s Tiff. Nobody says Tiffany.”
“In this house, we use our proper names,” Carol said, closing the door with a soft, definitive click. Her eyes did a quick, dismissive scan of Tiffany’s tiny denim shorts and the sliver of midriff her cropped tank top revealed. Not a flicker. Nothing. Just that infuriating, placid calm.
“Whatever. Which prison cell is mine?” Tiffany asked, dropping her bag on the immaculate hardwood floor with a thud.
“Your room is upstairs, first on the right. I’ve made up the bed with fresh linens.” Carol’s voice was like warm milk. “I expect you to keep it tidy.”
Tiffany rolled her eyes so hard she saw her own brain. “Yeah, yeah. Jesus, it’s like a museum in here.” She gestured at a lace doily under a vase. “Who even buys these anymore?”
“They were my mother’s,” Carol said, her tone not changing a single degree. “Dinner is at six. We’ll have pot roast.”
“Thrilling.” Tiffany flopped onto a stiff, floral-printed sofa in the living room, purposely kicking her feet up on the upholstered arm. She watched her grandmother’s face for a crack, a twitch, anything. “So, what’s the WiFi password? I’ve got, like, three guys waiting for me to send them something.”
She let the implication hang, oily and thick in the sterile air.
Carol simply picked up a feather duster from a side table and began dusting a picture frame that already looked spotless. “The password is ‘NoDevicesAtTheTable.’ All lowercase, no spaces.”
Tiffany snorted. “Cute.” She pulled out her phone, making a show of typing with exaggerated taps. “Gonna tell my friend Chad I arrived. He’s got this massive… personality. Really knows how to treat a girl.”
She peeked over her screen. Carol was now meticulously aligning a set of coasters on the coffee table.
“You know, Grandma,” Tiffany pushed, sitting up, a wicked grin on her face. “I’m not gonna pretend to be some pure little princess for three months. I like what I like. I’m a total slut. I enjoy it. It’s fun. You might want to, I don’t know, lock up your silver or something. The urges get pretty wild.”
Finally, Carol stopped her fussing. She set the duster down and turned to face Tiffany fully. Her expression was unreadable, but there was a new weight in the room, a shift in the air like before a storm.
“Is that so?” Carol said, her voice still quiet, but it had lost its warm milk quality. It was cooler now, flatter. “You think you’re the first young thing to roll through here with an attitude and a desperate itch?”
Tiffany’s confident smirk faltered for a second. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Carol didn’t answer. Instead, she sighed, a sound of profound, theatrical weariness. “Well. The little kitten has declared herself a tiger. Fine.” She untied her frilly apron and folded it neatly over the back of a wingchair. “I suppose it’s time to feed the brat.”
Tiffany opened her mouth to fire back another insult, but the words died.
Grandma Carol wasn’t heading toward the kitchen.
She was walking toward the hallway that led to the basement. And as she walked, her hands went to the waistband of her sensible taupe trousers. She undid the button. She pulled down the zipper.
Tiffany stared, baffled. Was this some senile performance art? Was she about to get a glimpse of horrifying beige granny panties?
What flopped out was not beige cotton.
It was a thick, furious flush of flesh, springing free from the confines of the trousers with an almost audible thwump. It kept coming. And coming.
Tiffany’s brain short-circuited. It was like watching a party trick from a hellish children’s show. It was the length of her entire arm, from shoulder to fingertips, absurdly long, stupidly long, a ludicrous tube of meat that defied physics, anatomy, and basic decency. It swayed heavily between Carol’s knees, then past them, the tip brushing the top of her sensible beige loafers before she casually hefted it in one hand. It was fat, veined, and unreal.
Grandma Carol turned, holding the monstrous thing casually, as if it were a baguette she was about to slice. Her prim expression was gone. In its place was something feral and hungry, her eyes dark and gleaming with a crude, ancient knowledge.
“You want a big one, do you?” Carol’s voice was a low, gravelly thing Tiffany had never heard before. “You dumb little thing. Drooling already. I can see it from here.”
Tiffany’s jaw was unhinged. A thread of genuine spit gleamed on her lower lip. All her rebellion, all her bravado, evaporated, replaced by a single, overwhelming, idiot instinct. Her eyes were glued to the sheer, impossible mass of it. The world shrunk to the space between her grandma’s legs.
She tried to form a word, any word, but all that came out was a soft, choked squeak. Her mind was a white noise of static, except for one clear, bright signal: a dumb, comical grin spreading across her face.
Carol took a step forward, the thing in her hand bouncing with a weight that looked like it could dent the floor. “Well?” she rasped, a predatory smile splitting her face. “Come get your dinner.”