Coach Carol: The Stepdaughter

Book four. Winter. Carol is 43, and Holly is 23. All other characters are above 18.

DISCLAIMER: There's depiction of stepmother-stepdaughter sex, lesbian sex, an age gap, bondage, and strap-on sex in this story. Please be warned.

Eight Figures

The first time Holly saw her stepmother on television, she had a carburetor in her lap.

It was December, the shop was dead, and the set over the parts counter was on a sports channel. A woman's voice came over the crowd noise, calling a linebacker something the network bleeped twice. A camel coat that cost more than the bike on the lift. Auburn hair blown across a face Holly knew, red with fury.

COACH CAROL, said the caption. The most talked-about woman in college football.

Then the game went to commercial, and there she was again: from behind, in black leggings, running up the stadium steps, the camera following her magnificent ass all the way to the top. Manny put down his coffee.

Holly had last seen that face from the back of the field house, thirteen months ago, standing by her father's casket, slapping a crying cheerleader so hard the girl sat down.

On her lunch she opened the link her mother had sent her in October, the one she had never clicked: the white house with the columns, a closet the size of Holly's apartment. Halfway down, one line: the family had reached a settlement and declined to discuss its terms. Under the link, her mother had written: 8 FIGURES BABY. I LOOKED IT UP.

Holly read it four times, then did the arithmetic in grease pencil on the back of a work order. Days at Manny's, and three years of nights behind the bar at the Rail on Speedway. Four hundred and twelve dollars in checking. A '98 Honda with a cracked tank. A room over a laundromat two doors down that smelled of dryer sheets all night.

Her phone went at six. Her mother, whom she had hung up on in October.

"Did you see her?" said Darlene. "Tell me you saw her."

---

Stepmother

They came in January, the week after the bowl game, with a lawyer named Lyle Duffy who wore a suit the color of weak tea. Carol sat at the end of her own lawyer's conference table in cream silk and gray wool with her hands folded, the way she sat in a press conference after a loss.

Darlene did the talking.

She was small and leathery-tanned, with frosted hair and pink acrylic nails that clicked on the table. She had raised that girl alone. He had walked out, married a volleyball player, never sent so much as a birthday card, and now here was the widow on television. Was that fair?

Carol said nothing. Her lawyer, Ellen Marsh, who had handled the settlement, had told her to say nothing, and Carol knew things about the child support that Duffy did not.

So she looked at Holly instead.

Holly had not changed much since the funeral. The hair was bleached almost white now, cropped close at the sides and longer on top, with one long silver extension falling past her eye that she kept pushing back and that kept falling straight back down. A ring through one eyebrow, a stud in her nose, a row of small silver hoops up the curve of each ear, and, though Carol wouldn't find out for weeks, a barbell through her tongue. She sat a chair back from the table with her boots planted and her arms crossed over a leather jacket gone soft at the elbows. Black linework crawled out of the cuff onto the back of her left hand, a snake's head and a peony.

And she had his eyes. Carol had noticed it at the funeral, the first time she had ever laid eyes on her, and noticed it again now with a small hard jolt: narrow and sharp and missing nothing, the eyes he had used to read a defense, on a face otherwise all her own.

She didn't look comfortable, though. Every time her mother spoke, something in Holly's shoulders went tight, and her eyes went to the window.

"Holly," said Carol. "Is this what you want?"

Darlene opened her mouth. Holly got there first.

"What I want, Stepmother," she said, "is for you to stop pretending you care what I want."

She leaned on the word like a thumb on a bruise. Darlene smiled. Duffy looked at his notes.

Carol had been called most things that season, by grown men in headsets, on national television. This one landed low under the ribs.

"Well," she said. "That's not a no."

Holly's eyes came up to hers, gray and furious, and went away again to the window.

---

In the car Darlene was happy, nails clicking on the wheel.

"She's going to fold. Women like that hate a fuss." She lit a cigarette at a red light. "And listen. If she gives us the money, I'll give you ten." She thought about it at the next light. "No. Twenty percent. And I'll never be in your life again. That's a promise. That's what you want, isn't it?"

Holly watched the snow come down on the river.

She had wanted exactly that since she was old enough to sign a lease. Her mother had named the price out loud.

"Okay," she said.

She hated the sound of it so much that she rolled the window down and let the snow in, and kept it down until Darlene screamed at her.

---

Short Ribs

Carol went around the mother.

Ellen did not like it. Carol got the number off the filing anyway, and called. She didn't text. She never had.

It rang five times.

"What."

"It's Carol. Dinner. Just you. I'll cook. Seven."

A long silence on the line. "Why?"

"Because you're living on vending machines at the Extended Stay, and I make very good short ribs."

Another silence. Then Holly hung up.

She came at ten past seven, on foot through the snow from the bus stop, in the leather jacket and nothing warmer. She looked at the staircase from the magazine, and her face went flat.

"Nice," she said. "Is this where you tell me he loved me?"

"No," said Carol. She took the jacket off Holly's shoulders before Holly could stop her, and hung it on the newel post. It was wet through. "I don't think he knew how. Come and eat."

Holly ate two plates fast and hunched, one arm curled around the plate, and was mean all through them. Did Carol keep his ashes on the mantel, or in the closet with the shoes? Carol answered every question as if it were real, which seemed to make it worse. Over the pie, Holly went quiet.

"You slapped that girl," she said, to her plate.

"I did."

"At the funeral. In front of the whole team." Something moved at the corner of her mouth. "Best part of the whole day."

Carol laughed out loud. Holly looked up, startled, and for half a second something nearly happened on her face.

On the Thursday it was the basketball game, the seats behind the bench. Holly turned up in the leather jacket again, and Carol put a black wool beanie and a pair of lined gloves on the seat between them without a word. Holly looked at them for the whole first half. In the second half she put them on, and screamed at the officials until the visiting coach turned around.

In the car afterward she got meaner, and then all at once she stopped.

"What do you want? Seriously. What is this?"

"You looked cold."

Holly stared at her, then turned to her own window and said nothing else all the way to the Extended Stay.

She kept the hat.

---

The Deposition

The last week of January, Ellen's conference room, a court reporter and a video camera on a tripod. Sleet ticked on the glass. Duffy took two hours, Darlene cried twice, beautifully, and Holly sat in a borrowed blazer too big in the shoulders and answered him in single words.

Then it was Ellen's turn. She did not stand up. She opened a box.

He had kept everything. Eighteen years of canceled checks in rubber-banded bundles, one for every fifteenth of every month. Pay to the order of Darlene Pruitt. Memo: H. Some years they were in Carol's own handwriting, because she had kept the household books, and she had never once asked him about the girl they were for.

Ellen slid one check out of a bundle and turned it over.

"Ms. Pruitt. Holly. Do you recognize the signature on the back?"

Holly looked at it.

"That's my mother's."

Darlene had stopped crying. Duffy was leafing through his file as if there might be a page he'd missed.

"There are two hundred and sixteen of these," said Ellen gently. "Did that money reach you?"

Darlene was looking at her daughter with an expression Carol had seen on parents at recruiting visits, the ones who had already spent the scholarship.

"No," said Holly.

Then she kept going. Nobody had asked her to.

"I knew when the checks came because she'd go out on the fifteenth. New boyfriend by the twentieth, electric cut off by the first." Her voice was perfectly steady. Her hands, under the table, were not. "I worked at a car wash from fourteen. I left the day I turned eighteen and she didn't notice for a week." She looked straight at her mother. "She was never a mother to me. She was the woman whose name was on the lease. And she told me if I sat here and said he never paid, I'd get a cut."

Duffy asked for a recess, and never came back from it. By four o'clock the claim was withdrawn.

---

Carol heard them in the parking lot before she saw them.

"... after everything I did for you, you ungrateful little bitch..."

"You didn't do anything for me! That's what I just said, under oath..."

They were by the rental car, a foot apart, both screaming, Darlene's frosted hair coming down in the wet. Carol stood by her own car with her keys in her hand and did not go over. Anything she said would be a match to gas.

Darlene popped the trunk, hauled out a black duffel bag and flung it into the slush at Holly's feet. A boot fell out of it. She backed out so fast she clipped a planter, and was gone up the ramp onto the interstate with the window down, still shouting.

Holly stood in the sleet trying to light a cigarette with hands that shook too much. Carol walked across, put the boot back in the bag and zipped it, and straightened up.

"You can stay with me," she said.

Holly looked at her through the sleet. Her mascara had run. She had his eyes, and they were narrowed to slits.

"Why the fuck would I do that?"

"Because she took the car."

Then Holly threw the cigarette into the slush, picked up the bag, got into Carol's car and sat with it on her knees, staring through the windshield, crying without a sound.

Carol turned the heat all the way up and drove her home.

---

The House

For the first week Holly treated the guest room like a motel: duffel packed, bed made with hospital corners. Once, very late, Carol heard a phone call end with then don't fucking call me.

Carol did not ask. She cooked.

Pot roast on the Sunday. Chicken pie on the Monday. On the Wednesday the short ribs again, and Holly saw the pot, stopped dead and said, "Oh, come on," in a voice that very nearly cracked.

On the second Saturday Carol found her under his truck, the gray Silverado Carol had not driven since the funeral, swearing at it in a steady, affectionate murmur.

"Idler pulley's shot," said Holly, from underneath. "And somebody's been running this on the wrong oil for years."

"That would be him."

By Tuesday it ran sweet. That night Carol got the title out of the file cabinet in his office, signed it over on the kitchen counter, and slid it across with the keys on top.

"I don't drive it," she said, before Holly could say anything. "It should be yours. It should always have been yours."

Holly looked at the paper for a long time: her own name, in Carol's handwriting, under his. Then she folded it in half and put it in the inside pocket of the leather jacket, and didn't say anything at all.

She drove it to a body shop on Route 9 the next morning and came home with a job. The duffel bag was unpacked by the end of the week.

It went like that into February. Holly came home at six with her hands black to the wrists and scrubbed them with the pumice soap Carol had bought without saying so. At night she sat at the other end of the den couch while Carol broke down film, and within two weeks she could spot a disguised blitz before the snap. She had his eyes for it. In return Carol went to Holly's things: roller derby in a converted ice rink, and Holly's friends, a loud warm sprawl of women in flannel and boots from a bar called Dot's she'd found her first Friday in town, who looked at Carol in her camel coat like a swan in a bowling alley.

She liked all of it. She liked buying a second toothbrush, and a green parka Holly called hideous and wore every day. She liked hearing the truck in the drive at six.

In the middle of February, Marcus and Otis were invited to the senior all-star game down on the Gulf, in front of every pro scout in the country, and Carol went to watch them. She asked Holly at breakfast, not expecting a yes. Holly said, "Beach?" and Carol said, "Technically," and Holly packed a bag.

The hotel gave her the room it always gave her now, a corner room with a king bed the size of a small field, because somebody at the front desk had seen the billboard. There was a pullout couch. Holly looked at it, and at the bed, and said nothing, and neither did Carol.

Carol showered before dinner. She was halfway across the room in a pale lace bra that her ample breasts were spilling out of, the plump tops of them swelling soft over the scalloped edge, and full-back lace panties, the kind that covered her whole ass and hid none of it, the lace stretched so thin over each lush cheek that the tan glowed through it, when she felt it: Holly's eyes, from the bed, following her all the way to the bathroom door. She didn't turn around.

She'd forgotten it by the time she came out in a cloud of steam with a towel around her hair and nothing else, the way she had walked out of hotel bathrooms her whole marriage. Holly was sitting up on the bed with the remote in her hand, and the remote stopped.

Carol saw her face. Stunned, for one second, wide open. Then Holly looked away, hard, at the television, at the wall, at anything, her ears going red under the silver.

Carol dressed with her back to her. Neither of them said a word.

That night, in the dark, she could tell from the breathing that Holly wasn't asleep. She was lying at the very edge of the bed, rigid, as far away as the mattress allowed.

"Come here," said Carol.

A long pause. Then the mattress moved, and Holly came across it, stiff, and Carol put an arm over her and drew her in against her side, and held on. For a minute Holly didn't seem to breathe. Then something in her let go all at once. She turned into Carol's shoulder and settled there, and inside five minutes she was asleep.

Carol lay and listened to it.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. Room 1204. We got ice. Otis, with three emoji she didn't want to think about. She reached for it carefully so as not to wake her.

Sorry boys, can't make it over tonight, she typed with one thumb. I'll make it up to y'all when we get back.

She put the phone face down, pulled the blanket up over both of them, and fell asleep beside her.

---

Back home, Carol caught her at it again on a Sunday. She came in from her run and drank a glass of water at the sink and turned around, and Holly was at the kitchen table with her coffee halfway to her mouth, not drinking it. She had been looking, the whole time Carol stood at the sink, at her ass in the black running shorts: at the shelf of it, the shorts ridden up into the cleft and lost, the bottom of each cheek spilling out bare and damp under the hem, the deep crease under each one shifting every time Carol moved her weight from one foot to the other. Now she looked at Carol's legs: the long tanned thighs, damp, still tight, softer than they had been. Up over the bare stomach that had been a set of abs before coaching ate her mornings, to the sports bra, which was losing, as sports bras always did with Carol, the full weight of her double D cups crushed together and up into a deep cleavage gone slick with sweat, a bead of it rolling down between them as Holly watched, and her nipples standing out hard through the damp black from the cold outside.

Holly's gray eyes reached her face, and what was in them was simple: she wanted her, right there, on the kitchen table. She did not look away, or apologize. She took a sip of coffee.

"Good run?" she said.

Carol had been looked at all her life, by brothers' friends and boys down her blouse and men on every sideline, and it had stopped registering years ago, like weather. This registered. She felt it go down the backs of her legs.

"Fine," she said, and went upstairs and stood under the shower with her forehead on the tile.

---

On the Thursday night they were on the couch with the film off and Holly's phone out, because Carol had asked what she did on weekends. Holly scrolled for her. Car shows. A drag night at Dot's. A convention at a hotel by the airport, her first, where some friends from Dot's had talked her into going in costume.

Carol stopped her thumb.

"What's that?"

A seven-foot gray wolf in a hotel lobby, with a lanyard around its neck and a plastic cup of beer, one arm around Holly.

"Oh. That's a furry."

"A what?"

"People who dress up as animals. That's Dev. He's an accountant."

Carol looked at it with real interest. "Are they like werewolves?"

Holly looked at her, and the look went through several things at once. "Why," she said, "would you ask that?"

Carol didn't answer. She got up, went to the den, came back with her Kindle, and put it in Holly's hand open to the library. Moonbound, all five. Claimed by the Alpha. Mated to the Pack, the whole series. Three hundred and eighty titles. Then she took her own phone and found the picture Vivienne had taken in October: Carol in a dark green dress, held off the floor at arm's length by a seven-foot red-bearded Norwegian, laughing, her heels in the air.

"That's Gunnar," she said. "He's who Rurik is. In the books."

Holly looked from the photo to the Kindle to Carol and back. She opened a book at random, read out a sentence about a man's knot in a fine deep growl, and Carol went scarlet to the hairline and snatched it.

"Coach Carol," said Holly, laughing so hard she had to put her head down on her knees. "You're a wolf girl."

"It's romance."

"I didn't say anything."

Carol had more questions. It turned out she had a great many.

"What's a butch?"

"Me." Holly spread her hands. "Boots. Engines. I open the doors."

"And a femme?"

"Girls who'd look at that dress you wore to the funeral and want to borrow it." Holly considered her. "You'd pass. Easily."

"What's a switch?"

"Somebody who likes it both ways. Sometimes on top, sometimes not."

"On top of what?"

Holly put her face in her hands. "Of the other person, Carol."

"What's a top, then? And a bottom?"

"Who's in charge and who isn't. Doesn't have to be about who's on top. Usually is."

"And a brat?"

"A bottom who mouths off on purpose so somebody'll put her in her place." Holly raised her eyebrow, the one with the ring. "You'd know."

Carol opened her mouth, and closed it, and Holly fell over sideways on the couch.

"Why are everybody's nails so short at Dot's?"

Holly held up her own hand, nails filed to nothing, and wiggled two fingers. "Think about it."

Carol thought about it. Then she went red.

When she'd gotten her breath back she looked at Carol again, and the look settled, in the end, on something warm and dangerous.

"Saturday," she said. "I'm taking you shopping."

---

The Shop

The shop was called Velvet Hammer, and it was in a brick storefront between a vape place and a tax preparer on the east side, with purple paint on the windows and a bell over the door. Carol had driven past it for fifteen years.

Holly reached across into the glove box and tossed her a black face mask and a ball cap.

"Wear a mask," she said.

"Holly."

"The staff's very discreet. But you're on a billboard over the interstate. You don't want some paparazzi getting anything."

Carol put on the mask, and the cap, and pulled it low.

Inside it was warm and bright and smelled of leather and vanilla. Glass cases of silicone in every color, laid out on velvet like jewelry. Racks of leather at the back, black and oxblood. Behind the counter, two women: one tall and freckled with red hair in a bun and a septum ring, one small and square in a cut-off coverall with a name tag that said JO.

"Holly," said Jo, delighted. "Back again. Who's this?"

Holly put an arm around Carol's shoulders. It was the first time she had done it. "This," she said, "is my stepmother."

The redhead's eyebrows went up into her hairline. Jo looked at Carol, all five feet ten of her, the camel coat, the auburn blowout, the diamond studs, and then at Holly, and then back, and her face lit up.

"Oh my God," she said. "You're Coach Carol."

So that was that.

They were lovely to her, which was the worst part. The redhead, Bea, had watched the bowl game for the first time in her life just to see Carol scream at the left tackle. Jo asked what Carol was into, in the tone a woman in a shoe store asks your size, and Carol opened her mouth and nothing came out at all.

"She's new," said Holly. "We're browsing."

"She's very new," said Bea, kindly, watching Carol not look at a glass case.

---

The leather was Holly's idea. Bea brought it to the fitting room on a hanger, a corset in black, glossy and stiff as a riding boot, with steel boning and a busk down the front and laces up the back, and a pair of high-waisted black leather shorts to go with it.

"Absolutely not," said Carol.

She tried it on anyway, because Holly was leaning in the fitting room doorway with her arms crossed and her eyebrows up, and Carol had never backed down from that face on a football field.

It took both of them to lace her. Bea pulled; Holly held her by the hips. Carol stood in the mirror in her own black lace bra, which did not go, and the shorts, which were so tight they creaked, and felt the leather close in around her ribs a notch at a time, cold and then warm, until she could not take a full breath and her waist was a shape she had not seen in the mirror since college. It shoved her double D cups up out of the top of it and together, the plump tanned tops of them crowded up under her collarbones close enough to rest a glass on, pressed into one long, deep, shadowed cleavage, with the black lace showing at the edges like a mistake. The leather smelled rich and animal and close. Every time she breathed, it creaked.

Holly did not say anything. She was looking at Carol in the mirror. Not at the mirror; at Carol in it. Her eyes went down the laces, over the leather stretched shining across Carol's gorgeous ass, hugging every inch of it, and stayed there, hungry, and went on to where the shorts cut into the backs of her thighs, and came up again, over the creaking leather, to her pushed-up tits, and stayed there long enough that Carol felt her nipples draw up hard against the lace.

"Huh," said Holly.

"What does huh mean?"

"It means huh." Holly pushed off the doorframe. "Come and see the rest."

---

The rest was a frame.

It stood at the back of the shop beside the leather racks, for display: a tall X of black-lacquered wood bolted to a base, with padded cuffs on short chains at each of the four ends and a little card on an easel that said ST ANDREW'S CROSS, ASK FOR ASSISTANCE. Carol, still laced into the corset, with her parka over her shoulders like a cape, walked up to it and read the card and said, "What on earth is this for?"

Holly picked up one of the padded cuffs and let it swing on its chain.

"Want to see?"

Carol looked at the cuff, and at Holly, and felt her pulse go in her throat.

"Go on," she said.

She turned around and put her back to the X. Holly took her right wrist and lifted it and closed the cuff on it, quick and neat, and the buckle bit. Then the left. Carol laughed, the way you laugh in the dentist's chair. Then Holly crouched and caught her right ankle, and Carol said "Holly" on a breathless laugh, and the ankle cuff closed, and then the other, and Carol was standing spread on the X in the middle of a sex shop on a Saturday afternoon, in leather shorts and a laced corset, with her arms over her head and her parka on the floor.

Holly stepped back and admired her. Then she raised her voice to the whole shop.

"Oh, look," she said. "My step-mo-ther is stuck."

Bea laughed so hard she had to sit down behind the counter. Jo came around with her phone out and said "Can I?", and Carol said "No," in her sideline voice, and Jo put it away, grinning.

Carol pulled at the cuffs. Padded, soft, absolutely solid; the chains clinked. She was scarlet from her ears to the top of the corset. She had screamed at referees in front of sixty thousand people and never felt one tenth of this.

Holly took a riding crop off the wall display, weighed it in her hand, and looked at Carol. Carol didn't say anything.

Holly tapped her with it, lightly, across her leather-clad ass. A clean, crisp smack against the leather, and the cheek under it gave in a soft jiggle, then sprang back against the crop, warm under the leather. Carol shuddered.

Holly met her eyes in the mirror and waited. Carol only looked back at her. So Holly switched cheeks: smack. Then, sensing no resistance at all, she turned the crop and laid the tip of it, lightly, right in the middle, between Carol's legs.

Carol's toned thighs snapped shut so fast the chains rang.

She was also wet.

She knew it the moment she pulled at her wrists. The leather shorts were so tight that there was nowhere for it to go, and it came on all at once, hot and slick, soaking the lace between her legs and making it cling, and when she shifted her weight to ease the cuffs the seam of the shorts pressed up into her and she had to bite her lip. She squirmed. That made it worse. The corset creaked. Every breath she took swelled the soft tops of her tits up over the edge of the leather, aching, and Holly, three feet away with her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket, was watching them with open hunger.

Holly stepped in close. Close enough that Carol could smell her: motor oil under the pumice soap, and leather, and something warm and salty at her throat. She reached up and tucked a strand of auburn hair back behind Carol's ear and let her fingertips trail down the side of Carol's neck and stop on her pulse.

"Oh, stepmother," she said, very low. Not for the shop. For her. "Did you enjoy that?"

Carol looked at her. Gray eyes, his eyes, and a small crooked smile that was entirely Holly's own.

"Yes," she said. "Now get me down before Bea sells tickets."

Holly had the wrists open before she finished the sentence, then crouched for the ankles, her hand flat and warm on the back of Carol's calf, and stood and rubbed each wrist once with her thumb where the buckle had bitten. She did not say anything else. They both knew exactly what Holly had been close enough to smell.

---

Carol did not buy the corset.

She watched in the fitting room mirror as Bea unlaced her and her own body came back, softer at the waist, flushed down the chest, and she said, "No. Thank you. It isn't me."

"It's a little bit you," said Bea.

"It's not the bit I'd wear out." Carol buttoned her blouse. "I know what I look good in."

Holly bought something for herself. Carol saw it go into a black paper bag at the counter: a harness in soft black leather with a silver ring at the front, and, in its box, a cock in smooth dark plum silicone, thick and unveined, with a broad flared head. Holly paid for it in cash and did not look at Carol while she did it, and Carol, who had been looking at nothing else, carried the bag to the truck.

---

That night they were going to Dot's, Holly said in the truck, as if it were the next play on a call sheet.

"Wear what you want," she said, and something in her voice said she knew exactly what Carol would choose.

Carol went upstairs and opened her closet.

It was the closet from the magazine, built in the spring with the settlement and Dana and Michelle's opinions. She went past the denim and the press-conference trousers and took out the midnight silk.

It was the donor-gala dress, the one she had worn when the university president had to be steered away from her by his wife. Deep midnight blue, bias-cut charmeuse with a sheen like oil on water, thin straps and a cowl at the front that fell low into her cleavage and swung open on the supple inner curve of each tanned breast whenever she leaned, fitted so close at the waist and hips that you could not wear anything under it with a line. It fell to her ankles. On the left it was slit to the top of her thigh.

Smoke at the eyes to bring up the blue, a deep red mouth, the diamond line he had given her for their fifteenth. Then she chose what went under it, and took her time over that too.

She came downstairs at nine in heels, a long black wool coat over her arm.

Holly was at the bottom of the stairs in black jeans and a black shirt buttoned to the throat under the leather jacket. She looked at the dress all the way down, to the slit and the long tanned leg in it, and back up to the red mouth, and the corner of her own mouth went up.

"Oh, Carol," she said softly. "They're going to eat you alive."

"Is that a problem?"

Holly held the door for her.

"Not for me," she said.

---

Dot's

Dot's was a long low room under a railroad bridge, with a black tin ceiling, a pool table, a dance floor the size of a boxing ring, and a bar lit red from underneath. It was packed, and hot as a locker room after the steam.

Carol stopped just inside the door.

Leather. Fishnets. Flannel with the sleeves rolled. Buzzcuts and mullets and a woman with a beard of silver glitter. A pair in matching harnesses over nothing at all, dancing. Two women in loosened ties playing pool for money. And in the middle of it Carol Simmons, six foot one in her heels, in floor-length midnight silk and a line of diamonds, like a yacht that had come up the wrong river.

The room noticed. She felt it go over her, a long slow look that started at the door and spread down the bar, and settled, the way looks always settled on Carol, on her ass, and the clinging midnight silk losing the fight with it. She could tell these women wanted to sit on her face, and also for her to smother them with her soaking wet pussy.

"Booth," said Holly into her ear, and steered her to an empty one in the back corner under a red neon sign.

She came back from the bar with two bourbons, and half an hour later with two more. They sat with their backs to the wall and watched the room, and Holly told her who everyone was. The pool sharks. The gray-haired woman who'd captained the bar's softball team for twenty years. The two in harnesses, who'd gotten married at Dot's last spring. Carol laughed more than she had all winter. The bourbon went warm in her stomach.

Then Holly slid out of the booth. "Bathroom. Don't move."

Carol sat in the corner with her second bourbon, under the red neon, and felt for the first time since she was fifteen that she did not know what to do with her hands.

The first one came within a minute.

She was a little older than Carol, maybe, square and gray and handsome, with a ring in one ear and a flannel shirt open over a white tank top, the softball captain, and she slid into the booth beside Carol as if she owned it, and Carol was against the wall with nowhere to go. "Well," she said, looking Carol over from the diamonds to the hem. "Somebody's lost."

"I'm with someone."

"Sure you are, honey." A warm, rough arm went along the back of the booth, and the palm settled on the bare skin of Carol's back, where the dress dipped low, and stayed there. "First time?"

"Is it that obvious?"

"Baby, you're glowing in the dark." The woman's eyes narrowed. "Hang on. You're the leggings. That ass on the stadium steps."

"Oh, God."

"Honey, half this bar has that ad saved."

A second woman slid in on Carol's other side, so that she was boxed in between them. Young, in a fishnet top over a black bra and a pair of leather pants, with a bleached mohawk and a ring through her lip and her eyes winged out in black liner. "Oh, she's gorgeous," she said, to the first woman, as if Carol were a car. "Look at this hair." And she put her hand straight into it, into the blowout, and combed her fingers through it from the root, slow, and Carol's scalp prickled all the way down her neck.

She should have said something. She opened her mouth to say something, and laughed instead, high and flustered, a sound she did not recognize.

The first woman's hand slid down from her back, slow, over the silk, to where Carol's full ass spread against the leather of the bench, and squeezed, greedy, and stayed there, as if she had been waiting since the ad. The mohawk's fingers went on in her hair. A third had come up from somewhere and sat on the edge of the table in front of her, closing off the booth, tall, Black, with a buzzcut and a gold hoop in her nose and a carpenter's forearms, and she did not say anything at all. She simply looked down at the slit in the midnight silk, where it had fallen open over Carol's left leg, and laid her hand on Carol's thigh.

High. Just under the edge of the slit. Her palm was warm and dry. Her thumb moved, once, and found the lace top of Carol's stocking under the silk, and stopped there, and traced the edge of it. Her eyebrows went up.

"Oh, look," she said, low and warm. "She dressed up for us."

"I didn't," said Carol, and that was a lie, and all three of them knew it.

She was the one who walked across a room and put her hand on a thigh, and watched a man go stupid. She had never once stood still and had it done to her. Three strange women had their hands in her hair and on her ass and on the inside of her thigh, and Carol sat there in five thousand dollars of silk and laughed and blushed and let them. Her heart was pounding. Under the dress, the lace between her legs was already damp.

"Where'd you come from, princess?" said the mohawk, very close to her ear.

"She's from my house," said Holly.

She came back through the crowd from the bathroom, and it parted for her. She put her palm down flat on the table, hard. She took the gray woman's wrist off Carol's ass, not roughly, and dropped it. She looked at the mohawk until the hand came out of Carol's hair. She looked at the one with the gold hoop last, and longest, and the hand came away from Carol's thigh, and the silk fell closed over the stocking.

"She's with me," said Holly.

It was not loud. It did not need to be. The three of them slid out of the booth with their hands up and their eyes laughing, and the gray woman said "Lucky girl" to nobody in particular, and the bar closed back over the gap they had left as if nothing had happened.

Holly picked Carol's bourbon up off the table, put it back in her hand, and folded her fingers around it. Then she stood over her at the end of the booth, in the red light, and looked down at her, which nobody had done in a long time.

"Did you like that?" said Holly.

Carol took a sip of the bourbon. It burned all the way down. She looked at Holly over the glass, and felt the corner of her own red mouth curl.

"A little bit," she said.

Holly took the glass out of her hand and put it on the table. She took Carol by the front of the silk, a fistful of it at the cowl, her knuckles pressed into the warm cleft between Carol's tits, pulled her up out of the booth onto her feet, and walked her backwards three steps into the wall beside the cigarette machine, and kissed her.

It was not a question. It was hard and certain and absolutely sure of itself. Holly's mouth opened on hers and her tongue came into Carol's mouth as if it had been there before, with something small and hard on it that clicked against Carol's teeth, and tasted of bourbon and smoke. She let go of the silk. Both her hands went down the back of the dress, where the gray woman's had been, and took Carol's ass, a big soft-over-hard handful of cheek in each that spilled past her fingers, and squeezed hard and pulled her hips off the wall into her. Carol's shoulder blades met the wall. Her head went back against it.

Carol, who had never in her life gone soft in anyone's hands, went soft. All at once. Holly's fingers dug in through the silk, kneading, and her knees went. Her mouth opened under Holly's and stayed open, and her hands came up off the wall and found the lapels of the leather jacket and hung onto them, and a sound came out of her into Holly's mouth that was small and helpless and entirely surprised.

Holly felt it. Carol felt her feel it. Her mouth curved against Carol's.

When she pulled back, they were both breathing hard. Holly's lips were red with Carol's lipstick. She did not wipe it off.

"Get your coat," she said.

---

Eleven Miles

Holly drove. Carol sat beside her in the gray truck with her coat on her knees and the silk pooled on the bench seat and the heater roaring, and neither of them said a word for eleven miles. At a red light on the county road Holly reached across without looking and laid her hand on Carol's thigh, in the slit, right where the woman with the gold hoop had put hers. Then she slid it higher, over the lace top of the stocking and on up the soft, warm, secret skin high on the inside, until her fingertips found the thin side string of Carol's thong at her hip, and rested there, one finger hooked under it. Carol stopped breathing. Then Holly drew her hand back down to the stocking, and left it there until the light changed.

In the front hall, under the chandelier, Holly took the coat from her and hung it on the newel post, the way Carol had once taken Holly's.

"Upstairs," she said, with a tip of her head toward the stairs. "Your room."

Carol went up the stairs in front of her. She felt Holly's eyes on the back of the dress the whole way, on the low dip of it between her shoulder blades and the silk clinging to her round ass and rolling with each cheek in turn as she climbed, showing Holly everything, and Carol knew it, and her legs were not quite steady.

She turned on the lamp by the bed and nothing else. Holly shut the door, took off the leather jacket and dropped it on the chair, and unbuttoned her cuffs and rolled them to the elbow, and came and stood in front of her. Then she stood there for a while and looked.

"Holly..."

"Shh." Holly put one finger on the strap at Carol's left shoulder. "I've been wanting to do this since the stairs."

She pushed the strap off. Then the right. The silk was so fine it did not catch on anything. It slid down Carol's body all at once, like water going down a drain: over the full swell of her breasts, her waist, her hips, a whisper on her thighs, and pooled around her heels in a shining midnight puddle, and Carol stood in the lamplight in what she had chosen to wear under it.

Holly let out a breath.

It was midnight blue, the same as the dress, and nearly not there. A soft bra with no wire and no padding, in silk tulle so fine it was like smoke, cut in a deep plunge that came almost to her navel, so the inner swells of her generous breasts showed bare all the way down, the deep line of her cleavage running nearly to her navel, and the tulle only just held the rest, their weight dragging the smoke-fine stuff taut. Through it her nipples were plain as day: wide, a dusky tan-rose, drawn up hard and dark against the blue. A thong in the same tulle, a little triangle in front with a narrow band of satin at the hip, sheer enough that Holly could see she was bare underneath, smooth from the wax, the cleft of her cunt a soft dark line behind the smoke. And black stockings, sheer, with a deep band of lace at the top of each thigh that held itself up, biting very slightly into the tanned flesh above it, so the skin swelled softly over the edge.

"Turn around," said Holly.

Carol turned around. The thong was a string at the back, nothing else, lost between two bare tanned cheeks pressed close together, and all of it was there for Holly to see: a grown woman's ass, not a girl's, big, round and heavy, the shelf of it starting right under her narrow waist, proud on the muscle the volleyball and the running had packed under the softness, a little softer now than it had been in a swimsuit at twenty-five.

Holly made a low sound in her throat, and Carol didn't have to turn to know what it meant: Carol on her hands and knees, and Holly behind her with what was in the black paper bag, taking her. Carol heard her come up behind her. She felt a fingertip trace the line of the thong, down from the satin at her hip into the crease of her ass, and stop.

"You put this on for Dot's," said Holly, into her shoulder.

"I put it on for me."

"Liar." The finger went on down. "You put it on for the woman who'd find it."

Then Holly's whole palm, flat and warm, on one bare cheek.

"He didn't leave me anything, you know," Holly said behind her, very low. "Not a dime. Not a card. Not a word in the will."

Carol didn't move.

Holly's hand closed on a handful of her.

"Except you," she said. "You're mine now."

She turned Carol back around, by the hips, and put her hands on her.

Not the way men did, straight for her tits as if they were the ball. Holly took her time. She ran the backs of her fingers down Carol's sides, through the tulle, over the ribs, and felt Carol shiver. She traced the plunge of the bra with one fingertip, from the strap down the inner swell of Carol's left breast, across the bare skin between them, up the inside of the right, so lightly that every fine hair on Carol's body stood up. She cupped the left one through the tulle, from underneath, and lifted it, and felt the soft weight of it settle and overflow her palm, and her thumb moved over the hard nipple through the smoke-fine stuff, round, and round, and Carol heard herself breathe in through her teeth.

"Holly. Take it off."

"No." Holly bent her head and put her mouth on the nipple, through the tulle.

Wet heat, through cloth so thin it might as well not have been there. Holly sucked, and the tulle went dark and clung, and her tongue dragged the fine rough mesh across the tip of Carol's nipple in slow circles until Carol's hand went into the white crop of her hair and held on. Then the other one. Then back. When she lifted her head both nipples were standing out through two dark wet rounds of tulle, and Carol's whole chest was flushed, and her knees had begun, very slightly, to shake.

Holly hooked one finger in the center of the plunge, where it met at the bottom, and drew it down and out, and the soft cups came away to either side and Carol's heavy breasts came out of them.

They swung free with a soft bounce and settled, and the cool air found them: full, lush and round, still sitting up at forty-three, a little paler than the rest of her where her volleyball top had been, with a faint blue vein showing at the side of the left, their weight shifting over the bunched tulle with every breath. The nipples were wet from Holly's mouth and dark and drawn up so tight they ached.

Holly looked at them in the lamplight. Then at Carol's face.

"Christ," she said. "I've been trying not to look at that rack since the first fucking dinner."

"You weren't trying very hard."

"No," Holly agreed. She reached behind Carol, unhooked the soft bra and drew it down her arms, and dropped it on the silk at their feet, and pushed her back onto the bed.

---

She did not undress, at first. She knelt up over Carol on the bed in her black jeans and her black shirt with the cuffs rolled and the snake and the peony on the back of her hand, and pressed Carol's wrists into the pillow above her head, and held them there with one hand, not hard.

"Leave them," she said.

Carol left them.

Holly kissed her again, the way she had at the wall, until Carol was gasping into her mouth. Then she went down Carol's body the way she had gone down the dress at the bottom of the stairs, as if she were reading it. Her mouth on Carol's throat, on the diamond line at the base of it, on her collarbone. Her teeth, gently, at the side of one full breast, where it swelled soft against her arm. Her tongue flat around the nipple, and then sucking it into her mouth, hard and wet, with her hand kneading the other, and Carol's back came off the bed and her hands came off the pillow, and Holly stopped. Lifted her head. Waited.

Carol put her hands back.

"Good," said Holly, and went on.

Down her stomach, where the abs had been, and Carol felt her mouth slow on the softness there as if it was the best part. Down to the satin band at her hip, and the tulle triangle, and Holly put her nose to it and breathed in, long and deep, through the cloth.

The tulle was soaked. Carol could feel it, cold and clinging. She had been wet since a stranger's hand had found the lace at her thigh, and wetter since the wall, and now the whole little triangle of smoke-blue was dark and stuck to her and Holly could see straight through it: the smooth bare mound, the lips of her cunt swollen and parted, flushed dark, the shape of her clit pushing against the mesh.

"Look at that," said Holly softly. "Look how wet you are."

She ran one fingertip up the middle of the tulle. Carol's hips jerked off the bed.

Holly did it again, slower. Then again, and this time she pressed, and the wet mesh dragged over Carol's clit with a fine rough scrape that went up her spine and into her teeth, and Holly kept it there, a circling pressure through the cloth, never quite enough, and watched Carol's face while she did it. Carol's hands were fists on the pillow. Her heels were digging into the bed. She could hear it, a soft slick sound under Holly's fingertip, and she could smell herself, sharp and sweet, in the warm room.

"Please," said Carol. She had never said it to anybody in her life.

Holly hooked two fingers in the satin bands at Carol's hips and drew the thong down. Slowly. Over the swell of her thighs, over the black lace of the stockings, over her knees and the long sleek nylon of her shins, and off over the heels she still had on, and dropped it on the floor on top of the silk. She left the stockings. She left the heels. She knelt between Carol's knees and pushed them apart with her palms, wide, and looked.

Carol had been looked at there by men. Men looked at her bare cunt the way they looked at a door they were about to go through. Holly looked at it the way Carol looked at film: as if there were something in it she meant to learn by heart. The waxed lips swollen and slick and parted, darker at the edges, the inner folds flushed deep rose and glistening. Her clit stood out hard at the top of them, out of its hood, aching. A thread of wet ran down from her hole toward the sheet.

"You're so fucking pretty," said Holly, in a voice Carol had not heard from her before. "You know that?"

Then she put her mouth on her.

---

It was not like a man. That was the whole of Carol's first thought, and it went on being the whole of it for a long time. It was not a tongue that went looking for somewhere to go. Holly knew exactly where she was. She laid her tongue flat and broad against the whole of Carol's soaking cunt and dragged it up from her hole to her clit, one long hot wet stroke, and Carol heard a sound come out of herself like something being torn. Then again. Then a third time, and at the top of it, Holly's lips closed around her clit and sucked, softly, and let go.

Carol's hands came off the pillow and went into Holly's hair.

Holly let them stay, this time.

She ate her slowly, and absolutely surely, the way she had driven the truck home, without one wasted motion. Long flat strokes. Then the tip of her tongue, circling the hood, round and round, close and never on it, until Carol was lifting her hips to chase it. Then on it, a soft quick flicker, and something else with it, small and hard and warm: the steel ball of the piercing, rolling over her clit and away and back again, a bright hard point inside all that softness that Carol could feel exactly. Holly pressed it in and dragged it up her slit, then circled with it, round and round, until Carol cried out, and her strong thighs closed around Holly's head and Holly pushed them open again with her palms and held them there, wide, and kept on. The room was full of the sound of it: the wet, the soft sucking, Carol's breath going high and ragged and broken. Holly's breath was hot on her. Her short hair was soft and bristling under Carol's fingers. When Carol looked down the length of her own body she saw her big tits heaving and her stomach trembling and Holly's white head between her black-stockinged thighs, and Holly's gray eyes looking up at her over the mound of her cunt, watching her, and Carol's whole body clenched.

"Holly. Holly, I'm..."

Holly stopped.

She lifted her head. Her mouth and chin were shining. Carol made a sound of pure outrage and Holly laughed, low, and crawled up her body and kissed her, and Carol tasted herself on Holly's mouth, salt and musk and her own sweetness, and moaned into it.

"Not yet," said Holly against her lips. "I'm not done looking at you."

Her hand went down between Carol's legs. Two fingers. She traced the lips, spread them, slid through the wet, dipped into her hole just to the first knuckle, and out, and in, while she kissed her, and Carol's hips rolled up for more.

"Ask me," said Holly.

"Inside. Please. Put them inside me."

Holly pushed two fingers into her.

Slowly, all the way. Carol felt every bit of it. Her cunt opened around them, slick and hot, and clung, and they went on going in, deeper than she expected, two strong rough-skinned fingers with the knuckles of a mechanic, until Holly's palm was flat against her and the heel of it pressed up on her clit. Then Holly curled them.

She found it on the first try: the place on the front wall that Carol had found herself under the covers with the Kindle propped on her knees a thousand times, and maybe two men had ever found on purpose. Holly found it like a light switch in her own house in the dark. She pressed, and stroked, a beckoning drag, and pressed again, and Carol's whole cunt seized around her fingers and her back came up off the bed.

"There," said Holly. "There you are."

She did not hurry. She fucked her with her fingers slow and deep, curling on every stroke, the heel of her hand grinding Carol's clit, and she slid back down the bed and put her mouth on her again over her own knuckles, and sucked while she did it. Everything at once. Carol could not hold any of it. Her hands were in Holly's hair, then fisted in the sheet, then over her own mouth. Her stockinged heels drummed the bed. Her swollen cunt made soft wet sounds around Holly's fingers, louder and wetter with every stroke, and the slick ran down into the crease of her ass, and she could feel it building in her somewhere low and deep, wider than she was used to, slower, not a spike but a tide.

"Holly. Oh God, Holly, please, please don't stop..."

Holly did not stop.

It came up through her like the floor dropping away. Her cunt clamped down on Holly's fingers in long hard pulls and her thighs locked around Holly's head and her whole body arched off the bed, and she heard herself crying out, over and over, in a voice that did not sound like Coach Carol or like anybody she knew. Holly held on. She kept her mouth on her and her fingers in her and rode it with her, soft and steady, all the way through, through a second wave that came in under the first, until Carol was shaking and sobbing and pushing weakly at her head, too much, too much, and only then did Holly lift her mouth and draw her fingers slowly out.

Carol lay there in the lamplight with her heels still on and her stockings still on and a pink mark of Holly's teeth coming up on her soft titflesh, wet to the knees, and could not speak.

Holly crawled up beside her, and lay on her side, and looked at her. She wiped her chin with the back of the tattooed hand, and then, with great care, licked her fingers clean, one and then the other, holding Carol's eyes.

"Hi," said Holly.

Carol laughed. It came out wet. She turned on her side and put both arms around her and held her, hard, fully clothed in her black shirt and her jeans and her boots, against her own bare body, and buried her face in the soft short hair at the side of Holly's neck that smelled of motor oil and pumice soap and Dot's.

"Hi," she said.

They lay like that until Carol's breathing came back. Then Holly sat up and took off Carol's heels, one and then the other, and peeled each stocking down: the lace band rolling off the soft top of her thigh and leaving a faint pink line in the tan, down over the ticklish backs of her knees and her long calves, off her slim ankles and over her toes, painted the same deep red as her mouth. She kissed the high arch of one foot before she set it down. Then Carol's hand went to the top button of the black shirt, and Holly let her undo it. And the next. And the next.

---

Mornings

Under the black shirt Holly was all wiry muscle and ink. A long, lanky, hard body, pale and freckled where Carol was tanned, shoulders and arms roped from engine blocks and tire irons. The snake on her left hand went up her forearm in black linework and around her elbow, through a garden of peonies to the shoulder. A swallow under one collarbone. Small, perky C-cup breasts, pale, freckled, a neat handful each, with flat pink nipples that tightened the moment the air touched them, and a silver bar through the left one that Carol had not known was there. Carol wanted to watch her come. She wanted to be the reason those gray eyes went shut. When Carol touched it, very carefully, with one fingertip, Holly's breath caught and her eyes went half shut, and Carol felt it go through her own body as if it had been done to her.

"Can I," said Carol.

"Yeah," said Holly. "You can."

So Carol gave. She did not know how, and she did not pretend to. Holly took her hand and showed her: two fingers, there, slower, flat, there. Carol learned her the way she had learned film, patient and greedy, and the first time Holly came on her fingers, on her back on Carol's bed with her jeans around one ankle and her ass, all hard muscle, filling the cup of Carol's other hand and clenching in it and her boots still on and her fist knotted in Carol's hair, swearing, Carol felt prouder than she had on the sideline of any win of her life.

---

In the morning Carol woke first and lay looking at her: asleep on her front, the sheet around her hips, the peonies going over her shoulder.

His daughter, a grown woman she had first met at his funeral, on the pillow beside her. It was tangled. She lay there and knew it was tangled, and found that she did not care in the least.

Holly opened one gray eye.

"You're thinking," she said into the pillow. "Stop it."

"I'm making breakfast."

"Good." Holly reached out without lifting her head, found Carol's hip under the sheet, and pulled her back down by it. "In a minute."

---

It went on like that into March. Out of bed, Carol took care of her: short ribs every Wednesday, the truck warmed up in the drive before six, a dentist paid for before Holly could get her wallet out. A front-door key on a ring with a little brass whistle that Holly called the stupidest thing she had ever seen, and never took off. Holly, who had looked after herself since fourteen, let her, and sat at the kitchen table with her feet up and watched Carol cook as if it were television.

And in bed, Holly led. Every time. Across the den couch with the film still running and a linebacker frozen mid-stride on the screen. Against the shower wall with Holly's fingers in her and her mouth at Carol's ear, saying filthy, calm, specific things in that flat low voice until Carol came with her palms flat on the wet tile. Carol learned to wait to be told. She learned that she liked it.

"Stepmother," said Holly, one Sunday, lying across Carol's stomach with her chin on her hands. It came out lazy and pleased, and both of them laughed.

---

The harness came out of its black paper bag on the first Friday in March.

Carol came up late from film and found Holly waiting by the end of the bed in nothing but the harness. The soft black leather sat high on her narrow hips, buckled at each side, with the silver ring at the front, and the cock stood out from it, thick and smooth and dark plum, curved up toward her belly, with the broad flared head catching the lamplight. Holly stood with her hands on her hips and her chin up, her small C cups bare and the pierced nipple tight with the cold, and she looked, for the first time since Carol had known her, slightly shy.

"You were looking at it," said Holly. "At the shop."

"I was," said Carol.

"Get on the bed."

She did not take Carol slowly that night. She had her on her hands and knees in the middle of the bed, still in the ivory silk camisole she had come upstairs in, thin enough to show the dark of her nipples. Holly ran both hands up Carol's sides under it, over the warm skin, and shoved it up to her shoulders, so that Carol's bare tits tumbled free and swung under her, and she knelt up behind her and spread her open with her thumbs and looked, the way she always did. Then she poured lube into her palm and stroked it down the plum cock, root to flare, so Carol could hear it, and set the broad head against her.

"Tell me," said Holly.

"Fuck me," said Carol. "Please. All of it."

Holly pushed into her.

The head went in with a hard sweet stretch that made Carol's mouth fall open, broad and blunt and flared, forcing her lips wide around it, and then the shaft came in after, slow and steady and unrelenting, thick as a man and smooth as glass. The curve dragged along her front wall the whole way in, over the place Holly's fingers knew, and Carol felt every inch of it climb inside her, filling her, opening her, until Holly's hips met her upturned ass and the leather of the harness pressed warm against her and the whole thick cock was buried in her to the ring. Holly stayed there. She leaned over Carol's back and put her mouth to the side of her neck and held still, and let her feel how full she was.

"Okay?" said Holly.

"Move," said Carol, and rocked back hard against the leather.

Holly moved. Long, deep, deliberate strokes, all the way out to the flare and all the way back in to the leather, her hands on Carol's hips, her thighs slapping the backs of Carol's. Her heavy tits swung and slapped together under her with every stroke, her stiff nipples dragging the sheet. The shelf of her ass rippled and bounced where Holly's hips struck it. The wet sound of it filled the room, louder and louder, and the bed knocked on the wall, and Holly reached under her and found her clit with two fingers and rubbed in time with the strokes, and Carol put her face down in the pillow and screamed into it.

"Look at you," said Holly, in that calm low voice, driving into her. "Look at you take it. Coach Carol. On her hands and knees for me."

Carol came twice. The first time with her face in the pillow and her cunt clenching around the thick silicone, gripping it, Holly fucking her straight through it without breaking stride. The second time Holly had peeled the cami off over her head and had her on her back with her long legs over Holly's shoulders, her strong calves tight against Holly's back, and the harness grinding into her, and Holly's own hand working between her legs under the leather, and they came almost together, Holly first, with a sound Carol had never heard from her, high and cracked and open, and Carol a breath behind, her toes curling in the air behind Holly's head. Holly fell forward onto Carol's chest. Carol held her.

Afterward Holly lay with her face pressed into the warm, damp cleavage between Carol's double D cups, breathing her in, and the harness unbuckled and abandoned on the floor, and Carol stroked her hair, the cropped sides of it, the soft longer top, over and over.

"I love you," said Holly, into her skin. Then, immediately, "Shut up. Don't say anything."

Carol didn't. She kept stroking her hair until Holly fell asleep, and then for a long time after.

---

Given

Ellen did not like this either.

"It's irrevocable. She could spend it on a speedboat. She could walk out of your house next week and you'd never see a cent of it again."

"That's the point," said Carol.

Ellen drew up the papers. Carol gave them to Holly on a Wednesday, over the short ribs, and went back to the stove and stirred a pot that did not need stirring. It went very quiet behind her.

"Carol," said Holly. "What the fuck is this."

"It's what should have been yours." Carol did not turn around. "You didn't win it. Nobody's claiming anything. It's from me. And you don't have to stay. That's in there too."

When she turned around, Holly was staring at the number on the second page with his eyes, narrowed, not blinking.

Carol sat down beside her. After a while Holly put the papers down on the table, very carefully, squared to the edge, and turned and put her face into the side of Carol's neck, and Carol put both arms around her and held on.

"I'm still going to call you stepmother," said Holly, muffled.

"I know."

"In public."

"I'd be hurt if you didn't."

Holly laughed against her throat, wet and furious, and did not let go. Carol sat in her own kitchen with her arms full and the short ribs going cold, and snow coming down in the dark outside.

"Take me upstairs," she said into Holly's hair.

Six days later, on a Tuesday, an email came in from a magazine called Aisle. It was signed by a senior vice president, and Carol read the name three times.

---