Father's Discovery Pt. 02

Author's Note

This is Part 2 of Father's Discovery, the alternate-reality branch of Siblings Masked Mixup. Read Part 1 first; this picks up four days after it ends.

Thank you for all the comments on Part 1, including the ones that said it was too dark. It's still dark. But this part is about what happens when nobody can pretend anymore, and there's more humor in it. The humor is dark too.

Fair warning, up front: Part 2 goes cuckold. Someone asks to watch, and gets exactly what he asked for. Everyone in that room chooses to be there, but if watching isn't your thing, this is a good place to step off. No hard feelings.

Content warnings: cuckolding, father/daughter and brother/sister incest, breeding and pregnancy risk, cheating.

Previously: Mark overheard his twins at the family cabin and drove to Portland to end it. It didn't end. Jamie used what he'd seen to keep him quiet, the argument turned into something else, and somewhere in the middle of it Mark blacked out. He left believing he'd done something unforgivable. Alex is flying down Friday, and he doesn't know any of it yet.

"You did what?" Alex said.

"I had sex with Dad," Jamie repeated.

He had one arm out of his jacket. The sleeve was hanging off his wrist and his duffel was on the floor where he'd dropped it, half in the doorway, and he couldn't remember if he was taking off or putting on his jacket.

Friday night. His flight had landed at nine and he'd taken the stairs to her place two at a time, same as every visit for the nine months since Halloween, since a party where neither of them had known whose face was behind the other one's mask. His twin sister had opened the door before he could knock and hugged him hard enough to crack his back, and she'd held on so long he'd laughed into her hair and asked if she missed him. She'd said yes. Then she'd stepped back, looked him in the eye, and said it.

No hello. No sit down. Jamie just blurted the nonsense out, twice now.

"Our dad," Alex said.

"Yes."

"Our dad. Mark."

"Yes, Alex."

"Just checking. We only have the one." He couldn't pick a question. "When? Where? How? Why?"

Jamie had her arms crossed tight and her chin up, which was how she stood when she'd decided to take whatever was coming. Her hands were shaking anyway.

"Monday," she said. "Here." Her eyes went to the couch and came back to him. "On that couch."

He looked at the couch, the same gray one they'd carried up three flights when she moved in, the one he'd fallen asleep on more times than he could count. One of the cushions was turned zipper side up. He noticed it and had no idea yet what it meant.

He settled on off. He hung it on her hook next to her raincoat, lining up the shoulders, which he never did.

"Okay," he said. "Start at the beginning."

She sat on the arm of the couch, not the cushions. He stayed where he was, back against the wall by the door.

"He heard us," she said. "Saturday night. At the cabin."

Not the sentence he'd braced for. It went in sideways. Saturday. Her room at the end of the hall, the headboard knocking the wall, his hand over her mouth half the time and her teeth in the pillowcase the other half. And the fight after, which neither of them had bothered to keep down.

"How much?"

"He said everything."

"The fight?"

"Especially the fight." She rubbed her thumb hard across her knuckles. "He heard me yelling at you. 'I told you to.' He thought you hurt me."

Alex thought about Sunday morning. Dad at the stove in his old cabin sweatshirt like it was any other day, looking at him over the syrup and believing he'd hurt her. Then he'd driven down here and done it himself.

"He made us pancakes," Alex said.

"I know."

"He asked about my job."

"I know, Alex." She said it gently, and that was somehow worse. "He drove down Monday morning and knocked on my door. Said it had to end, and if I didn't end it he'd talk to you, then cut me off, then tell Mom."

Every consequence speech Dad had ever given came in rungs like that, laid out calm so you could see exactly which one you'd end up standing on. Apparently it was the same speech whether you'd missed curfew or were fucking your brother.

"I lied at first," she said. "Told him it was one time, we were drunk. He didn't buy it. He'd seen the photo on your phone."

"The kitchen."

"Yeah." She looked straight at him. "So I used it. What you told me on the dock, that he looked too long and went red. If he went to Mom, he'd have to explain how he knew. I made sure he understood that."

"You blackmailed Dad."

"I leveraged Dad."

"With a picture of your-"

"Yes, Alex."

Back at the cabin it had been a funny story. He'd texted her the second he got out of the kitchen, Dad catching the picture over the dishwater, Dad going red, Dad's little speech about what Mom and his sister would think, and she'd sent back a row of laughing emojis.

I handed her that.

"So you had leverage," he said. "You could've stopped there."

"I could have."

"Why didn't you?"

She was quiet long enough that he heard the fridge kick on in the kitchen.

"Because it was working." She said it to the floor. "I brought up the photo and he got hard. I could see it. So I pressed." A breath. "I touched him."

Alex swallowed. He was very aware of his shoulder blades against the wall.

"Through his jeans first." Her face had gone red to the ears and she was staring hard at the wall over his head. "And then, um. Then not through his jeans."

"Use your words," Alex said. It was what he said to her in bed. It should have horrified him. Mostly he wanted her to keep going, which was a new and terrible thing to learn about himself in his sister's living room.

She covered her face with both hands. "Don't. Oh my god. I'm describing this to you out loud." Muffled, through her fingers: "That was supposed to be it, okay? Get my hand on him, make him part of it, send him home. He can't tell Mom about something he's in."

It was such a Jamie sentence that his chest hurt.

"But it didn't stay that," he said.

"No." She swallowed, and the red came back worse. "I called him Daddy."

He stared at her. "You called our father Daddy."

"Can you not say it back to me?"

"I'm saying it back to you so you know what it sounds like."

"It was on purpose, okay? I hadn't called him that in years and I knew exactly what it would do." She was talking faster now. "Sure enough, things escalated. He spanked me, I goaded him, I pushed him further."

"He spanked you?"

"That's the part you're stuck on?"

"I'm stuck on all of it, Jamie."

"He told me I'd been disrespectful." Her eyes were on her knees. "In the voice. The one that ends arguments. I was wet before the second one even landed."

Her eyes went heavy just saying it, and he caught it.

"Then his fingers." Her hand did something small in the air while she said it, two fingers curling, and she saw him see it and jammed the hand between her knees. "And I told him we shouldn't go any further."

She said it to the window and kept going. Alex knew that move. She'd been skipping pages of herself in front of him her whole life whenever something on them was too hard to say out loud. There was more inside that moment than she was giving him.

You told him to stop. Like you told me to pull out.

He didn't say that. Not yet.

"Did he force you?" he asked, and it came out quieter than he meant it to. He was asking because he had to. He was also, halfway through the question, picturing it: her saying stop, somebody not stopping, him on Saturday and Dad on Monday. It went through him low and warm, and he stayed very still against the wall and hoped it didn't show.

"No."

No hesitation at all. She looked at him while she said it.

"I was into it, Alex. I'm not going to deny it."

"Then what."

It came out flat, and he wanted the answer more than he'd wanted anything all night. She looked at him for a second, and he could tell she'd heard that too.

"Over the arm of the couch. From behind." She was talking to his shoes now. "No words. He just pushed in, and I couldn't breathe. I wasn't ready for how much of him there was. It hurt, and then it didn't, and then he was all the way in and I could feel him somewhere you've never..." She stopped.

"Somewhere I've never what."

"Deep," she said, barely. "Just. Deep."

His hand had closed into a fist against his thigh. He made it open.

"I was talking dirty to him. I was touching myself while he was inside me." Her voice wobbled and she pushed through it. "I said 'I'm cheating on Alex with our dad' out loud. And it made me wetter."

His own name. In her mouth. With their father behind her.

He didn't know what his face was doing, but Jamie was watching it, so it was doing something.

"He got close and I told him I was ovulating," she said. "Then I told him to pull out. Then I begged him. And the whole time I was pushing back on him, holding on." She pressed her lips together. "He came inside me and I came so hard I blacked out."

Monday was day fourteen. He didn't need to ask. He'd been watching that app with her for months.

"You blacked out."

"When I woke up he was gone."

"He just left."

"He didn't say anything. Not that I heard." She lifted one shoulder, a small ugly movement. "I think I said 'not again.' Right before I went under."

Alex heard it the only way he could. Saturday, then Monday. Two men told to pull out, two men who didn't, and he'd been first. He was the reason there'd been an again.

"Has he said anything since?"

She pulled her phone from her back pocket, unlocked it, and held it out. "He took all night to answer." He had to cross the room to take it. He did it without looking at the couch.

Jamie: Dad, we need to talk about what happened.

Dad: I know.

Then, hours later:

Dad: I'm sorry. I need a few days.

The first one had come in at five in the morning on Tuesday, the second hours after that. Alex read them twice. I'm sorry.

"He's sorry," he said.

"For finishing in me, I guess. For walking out without a word."

"Or for the rest of it."

She took the phone back and turned it face down on her knee.

"A few days," she said. "It's been four."

He stayed where he was, against the wall. He couldn't have gone anywhere if he'd tried, and Jamie was still on the arm of the couch.

Our dad.

Through the kitchen doorway he could see two mugs in the dish rack. One of them was the big blue one Dad always grabbed when he came by, because he said the others weren't worth the trouble.

He made himself breathe, and Saturday came back whether he wanted it or not.

He'd been inside her when she said it. Her room at the end of the cabin hallway, the whole place still holding the day's heat. She'd pulled his hips in hard and put her mouth right against his ear.

Come inside me. What, are you chicken?

Here, now, against her wall, his jeans were getting tight. He shifted his weight and it didn't help.

She'd known exactly which button that was. He'd felt it go, the hot stupid drop he got every time she dared him, and he'd stopped being careful. He'd fucked her hard enough that the headboard started knocking and she came with her face crushed into the pillow. Then her voice changed.

That was so good. It's not a safe day though. Remember to pull out.

Saturday had been day twelve and they'd both known it. He'd heard her. That was the part he'd been chewing on all week in Seattle. He hadn't been too far gone to hear. He'd heard every word, and when she said it again, sharper, Alex, you're going to pull out, right, he'd thought about chicken and how wet she still was, and he'd decided not to.

Across the room, Jamie sat with her hands knotted in her lap. He was all the way hard now, his back to her wall and her eyes on him, and he couldn't stop it any more than he'd stopped on Saturday.

She'd come again while he was emptying into her, clenching and furious at once. Then she'd hit him in the chest and the fight had started. She'd dared him and then yelled at him for taking the dare, and when she said she'd just been playing he'd yelled back that she didn't get to have it both ways. And apparently their father had been standing in the hall for every word of it.

On the dock Sunday he'd said he was sorry about a hundred times. She'd cried into his shirt and said she was sorry for the dare, and they'd agreed it was both of them and they'd figure it out together. Monday night he'd been in Seattle sending her heart emojis, How's your Monday going, thinking the worst part was over.

When he looked up, her eyes were on his jeans. Then his face. Then the couch under her, the cushion turned zipper side up. He watched her decide what had done it. He didn't tell her she was wrong.

"You push people past the line," he said. "And then you get off when they cross it."

She didn't argue.

"Saturday you knew what chicken would do to me. You've always known. You pushed me right to the edge and then you said pull out."

"Alex-"

"And Monday you called him Daddy. You bratted him into spanking you. You got way past where anybody could stop, and then you said stop." His voice was going rough and he let it. "Like you told me to pull out."

She flinched like he'd pressed on a bruise.

"You didn't want either of us to stop," he said. "You wanted to see what happened if we didn't."

"That's not-" She caught it. "You don't get to tell me what I wanted."

"Then tell me I'm wrong."

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She looked at the couch, then the window, and finally back at him.

"Yes," she said.

One word, and her chin shook on it.

"And both times it was the hardest you've ever come."

"Yes." Quieter this time. "I just didn't want you to be the one who said it."

He was furious. It sat behind his breastbone, hot and solid, and his hands wanted something to do. She'd cheated on him with their father five days after they sat on the dock and promised each other everything, and he could see the couch at the edge of his vision no matter where he put his eyes.

Under the anger the want hadn't gone anywhere. It had just changed shape. His skin was too warm. His breathing had gone uneven, and it wasn't from yelling, because he hadn't yelled. Every time he tried to think about the couch he got a picture instead of a thought: his sister bent over the arm of it, Dad's hands on her hips, her voice saying his own name while somebody else was inside her.

He hated the picture. His pulse didn't.

Jamie was watching him again, same as when he'd looked up from the wall. She'd had years of practice reading mad Alex and nine months on horny Alex, and right now she was getting both at once. She got up off the arm of the couch, crossed the room, and put her hand flat on his chest.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Alex, I'm so sorry."

Her eyes were wet and her palm was warm through his shirt. She'd seen it and she was giving him a way out of saying it. She was too good at that.

She kissed him. Soft and careful, more question than kiss.

He didn't kiss back. She stayed there anyway, lips just touching his, waiting.

Then he had his hand in the back of her hair and he was kissing her hard, angry, pulling her in by the hip until she could feel him through his jeans. He'd been hard since the wall. There was no blaming it on the kiss, and they both knew it.

She made a small sound against his mouth. It sounded like relief.

He pulled back far enough to see her face. "You're mine," he said.

He'd never said anything like that to her. He didn't know he had it in him.

"Not his," he said. "Mine."

"I know," she whispered. "I'm yours."

"Say it again."

"I'm yours, Alex."

Her whole body answered it. A shiver went through her that he felt all the way down, her fingers twisted in his shirt, and her mouth went soft and slack, her eyes half-closed. He'd never seen her look like that for him. He had seen it ten minutes ago, though, while she was telling him about the voice.

That's the face.

She took his hand and turned toward the bedroom.

"No," he said. "Here."

She stopped. Looked at the couch, then back at him, and he saw her understand.

The cushion was still zipper side up. Now he knew why. He let go of her hand and flipped it back over. There was a pale patch on the gray where she'd scrubbed at something.

"Alex," she said.

"Leave it."

He pulled her shirt over her head. No bra; there never was on Fridays. He got her leggings and underwear down together and she stepped out of them, and that was when he saw her hips.

Four small marks on each side, gone yellow-green at the edges and spaced wider than they should have been. He put his hand over the ones on the left and his fingers didn't line up. Dad's hands were bigger. Dad had held on harder than Alex ever had.

His hand tightened on her hip.

"Turn around," he said. "Hands on the arm."

She did it. She bent over the arm of the couch, right where she'd told him she'd been, and looked back at him over her shoulder.

He'd never spanked her. Nine months and everything they'd tried, and it had never come up, because it wasn't them. He brought his hand down on her ass anyway, hard, and the crack of it was loud in the small apartment. Her ass gave under his palm and bounced back, soft and warm, and the sting went all the way up his wrist. A pink print was already coming up where his fingers had landed. Jamie gasped and rocked forward onto her hands.

"Is that what he did?"

"Yes." She pushed her ass back toward him. "He did it harder."

She's doing it again. Right now. To me.

He did it harder. Three times, fast, and on the last one she moaned with her face half in the cushion, and he could see her thighs shining. He got his jeans open and shoved them down with his boxers and fisted his cock once. Then he put his other hand in her hair, close to the scalp, and pulled her head up and back.

Her mouth fell open. Dad hadn't done that. She'd told him everything Dad did and that wasn't on the list.

Mine.

He pushed into her in one stroke. She was soaked and it was easy and she cried out anyway, and he held her there by the hair and stayed buried and didn't move.

"Did he feel like this?"

"No." Breathless. "Different."

"Different how."

"Thicker. Straight. He went deep and you-" He pulled back and drove in again, angled up, and she lost the end of the sentence. "Oh fuck. There. You go right there."

Thicker. He went harder.

"What did he say to you?" He hadn't decided to ask it. "In the voice."

She turned her face into the cushion. "'You've been disrespectful.'" Low, in a voice that wasn't hers, close enough to Dad's that the back of his neck went hot. "'Hold still and take it.'"

He didn't go harder this time. He slowed down, and he couldn't have said why, except that he wanted to hear it again.

"I'm sorry," she said, broken up by the rhythm. "I'm sorry I let him. I liked it, I'm sorry, I came so hard and I'm sorry."

"Say what you said to him."

She went still under him for half a second.

"Say it."

"I'm cheating on Alex with our dad," she whispered.

His cock jerked inside her and he hated it and he kept going.

"You said my name with his cock in you."

"Yes."

"Now say whose you are."

"Yours. I'm yours, Alex, I'm-"

"Louder."

"I'm yours."

She was pushing back on him now, meeting him, making the same sounds she'd made on Saturday when neither of them cared who heard. He wondered if they were the sounds she'd made on Monday. He knew they were.

"When he told me-" she started, and then she stopped. Just stopped, mid-moan, and pressed her mouth into the cushion.

He heard where she'd stopped. He didn't ask.

He let go of her hair and slowed down, deep and slow, because one thing had been sitting under all of it. "Did you take anything? After."

She turned her head on the cushion so she could see him. "No."

"Why not?"

"I don't know." She closed her eyes. "There's a CVS three blocks away. I didn't go."

He stopped moving. He was still all the way inside her and he could feel her heartbeat around him.

"So if you are..." he said. "It could be his."

"Or yours. Saturday." She opened her eyes. "I don't know, Alex. I won't know for another week and a half."

They stayed like that, her breathing and his, a car going by outside.

"Don't stop," she said.

He pulled out. She made a sound of protest, and then he turned her over onto her back on the cushion, the one with the pale patch.

She brought her knees together. Tight. And looked up at him.

He put his hands on her knees and pushed. She pushed back, thighs locked, not giving him an inch, her eyes on his the whole time. Her breathing had changed.

He understood. Saturday, Monday, and now she was showing him. He leaned his weight into it and forced her knees apart, and she fought him every inch, and she was soaking by the time they opened. Neither of them said a word about it.

He got between her legs and pushed back in, because he wanted to see her face.

"Look at me," he said.

She looked at him.

He fucked her slower like that, with her eyes on his, and it was worse and better than angry. Her hand came up to his jaw and stayed there. He could feel himself getting close, everything piling up at once, the anger and the picture he couldn't get out of his head and her face under him, and he started to pull back.

Her legs came up around his waist and locked at the ankles.

"Don't pull out," she said.

"Jamie."

"Don't. I want you to."

"You might already be-"

"I know." Her heels dug into his back, pulling him in. "I want it to be yours."

He looked at her. It wasn't a dare. There was no chicken in it and nothing he had to prove. She'd just asked. As far as he knew it was the first time she'd ever asked for it straight out.

He let go. He buried himself all the way and came inside her with her legs holding him there, and it went on long enough that he stopped knowing anything else. She came around him a second after. No scream this time, just a long tight shudder from the inside out, her breath catching over and over, her hand going soft on his face.

He dropped his forehead to hers. Neither of them moved.

Later they were still on the couch. He was sitting up and she was curled against his side with her head on his chest, and his cum was leaking out of her onto the cushion and neither of them had done anything about it.

"A week and a half," he said. "Till you can test."

"I know."

"Mom got pregnant with us on the pill."

"Don't," she said.

He didn't. After a while she said, quietly, "He's going to keep needing a few days. Forever, if I let him."

"So wait."

"No." She was looking at nothing, and her voice had the same edge he'd been hearing all night. "I'm calling Mom tomorrow. We're going down for Sunday dinner."

"You're inviting yourself."

"Us."

He looked down at the top of her head.

"He can't avoid me if I'm across the table from him," she said. "I'll find a minute with him."

Classic Jamie. If you wouldn't come to her, she came to you, usually somewhere you couldn't leave. She'd done it to her landlord, two bosses, and him, plenty. Now she was doing it to Dad.

"What are you going to say to him?"

She was quiet for a while. "That it happened once and it's not happening again." She counted it off on his chest with one finger. "That I didn't take anything, and he needs to know that. And that he doesn't get to disappear on me over this. He's still my dad."

"And I just sit there," he said.

"You sit there and eat Mom's pot roast and you don't hit him."

"I wasn't going to hit him."

She tilted her head back and looked at him.

"Probably wasn't," he said.

"Alex. Let me handle Dad." She put her hand flat on his chest again, right where she'd put it before she kissed him. "He's mine to fix."

He'd spent the last hour making her say whose she was.

"Fine," he said. "He's yours."

The words sat wrong in his mouth. She heard it too; he felt her go still against him. Neither of them touched it.

After a while she said it into his chest, so quietly he almost missed it. "I love you. That didn't change."

"I know." He held on. "I love you too."

"We're not okay," he said after a while.

"I know."

"I'm not leaving."

"I know that too."

She fell asleep on him before midnight. He stayed where he was with his arm around her and his eyes on the mural, on the two knotted figures in the middle of all those vines, inside a space that looked too big for them.

Sunday. Mom's table, the good tablecloth, Dad at the head where he always sat. Alex would be right across from him, knowing whose fingers had left those marks on Jamie's hips, and Dad wouldn't know he knew.

He had no idea what he was going to say to him. "Hi, Dad" was as far as he'd gotten.

The hallway at the cabin. Dark. The creaky board under his foot, the one he'd been meaning to fix for three years.

Something from down the hall. Rhythmic. Muffled.

Not again.

Mark kept going. Past the bathroom, his hand catching the doorframe for a second the way it had, past the linen closet, toward the sound. He didn't want to hear it. His body took him anyway.

Jamie's door. Closed but not latched, cracked open maybe an inch. Afternoon light coming through the gap. The sound was her. He knew the sound before he knew whose it was, and then he knew, and his stomach turned over. His hand went to the doorknob without him deciding. There was no reason for it. He pushed the door open.

The couch. The mural. She was bent over the arm of the couch with her yoga pants around her knees, and a man behind her, hands on her hips, fucking her in long slow strokes. The man's back was to the door. Mark knew the shape of that back. The shoulders, the arms, the way the weight sat. He'd seen it in mirrors for fifty-two years.

He was watching himself, in Jamie's apartment, on Jamie's couch.

Her head was turned toward the door, and he could see her face. Eyes half-closed, mouth open, the flush running down her neck. She looked the way Ellen used to look.

"Dad," she said. "Dad, stop."

Clear as anything. Every word. The man who was him didn't stop. His hands tightened on her hips and he pushed deeper, and she made a sound into the cushion, and he did it again. She was wetter than the picture on Alex's phone, and she was saying stop, and his body kept moving, slow and deliberate, like it had all the time in the world.

Mark stood in the doorway. He could feel his own hands at his sides. He could feel his cock, hard, pressing against the front of his boxers.

"Please," she said. "Daddy, please."

The man who was him didn't stop. Mark watched from the doorway and his hand moved without deciding. Through his boxers first. Then inside them. He was stroking himself to the sight of his own body ignoring his daughter, and the horror of it and the heat of it were the same thing and he couldn't tell them apart.

He felt it coming from the base of his spine, standing in the doorway, watching.

"Not again," she was saying into the couch. "Not again, not again."

He came in his hand. In the doorway. Watching himself empty into her from across the room.

He woke with his hand on his cock, wet.

That was the worst part. The window was gray. Saturday. Ellen's side of the bed was empty and still warm, he could hear the coffee maker downstairs, and he lay there with his heart slamming.

That wasn't what happened.

Was it?

He didn't know. That was the whole problem. He had pieces, the same pieces every night, and they didn't fit together.

Her hips under his hands.

Heat.

Wet.

The sound she made when

Then nothing. Then can't hear what she's, and is she, and nothing again. Then her ass from behind, crimson, his handprints on it. Then his cum leaking out of her, and her shoulders shaking, and not again.

Every night his head filled in the blank a different way, and every way was the worst one. Last night's had been the worst yet, because in last night's he'd been both: the man on the couch and the man in the doorway, watching himself and unable to stop and not wanting to.

He lay still until it went down. Then he got up and went downstairs.

Ellen was at the counter with her coffee, and she was smiling for the first time in days.

"Guess who called," she said.

His stomach went cold before she said the name.

"Jamie. She and Alex are coming down tomorrow for dinner. Alex flew in last night, apparently, he's down for the weekend."

Mark stopped in the doorway and looked at his wife.

He'd been reading Ellen's face for twenty-six years. He looked for the tightness at one corner of her mouth, the brightness in her voice that went up half a step too high. Her mouth. Her eyes. Her hand around the mug.

She held out his coffee, already fixed. "Isn't that nice? I haven't had both of them at this table since, God, Easter? The cabin doesn't count. That was the cabin."

Nothing. Her voice was right where it always was. She was already pulling down the recipe box, though she hadn't needed a card for the pot roast in twenty years.

He took the mug. His hand was steady. He watched it be steady and didn't know how.

"Did she say why?" Casual. He'd been practicing casual all week.

"Does she need a reason to see her parents?" Ellen flipped through the cards. "She said she wanted to see you. Specifically." She glanced up, smiling. "I got 'and Mom's pot roast.' So I'm only good for my roast."

She wanted to see you.

"Tomorrow," he said.

"Five o'clock." She found the card she didn't need and propped it against the toaster. "Maybe they'll cheer you up. You've been walking around like somebody died."

Jamie hadn't told her. He was almost sure of that much. Nobody who knew could say somebody died to him and go back to her recipe cards.

The relief lasted as far as the garage.

He took his coffee out there and stood next to the chest freezer. He pulled out his phone to see if Jamie had texted him too. She hadn't. The thread was where he'd left it, her one message and his two, and he scrolled back up to the top of it the way he had every night this week.

Monday night he'd turned it face down on the nightstand and lain next to Ellen without reading it. Around four on Tuesday morning he'd given up, gone into his office, shut the door, and sat there in the dark with the phone in both hands until he turned it back over.

Jamie: Dad, we need to talk about what happened.

That was all of it. He'd built it up so big in his head he'd expected paragraphs. What happened. She couldn't say it either.

He'd typed Jamie I am so sorry and deleted it. Sorry was a word you used for missing a birthday. I don't know what happened to me. Deleted. She knew what happened. She'd been there for all of it. He was the only one who hadn't been. I would never. He'd stared at that one a long time, and then he'd deleted it, because he had. Are you okay. He didn't get to ask her that. He'd deleted it fast, like it was evidence.

In the end he'd sent the only thing he could stand behind.

Mark: I know.

And hours later, when he could make his thumbs work again:

Mark: I'm sorry. I need a few days.

She didn't answer.

He'd cleaned the gutters Tuesday after work, with his phone in his shirt pocket where he'd feel it. Wednesday he'd cleaned them again, because once he was up the ladder his hands had wanted something to do. He'd reorganized the shed. He'd sharpened the mower blade though it hadn't needed it. Every time the phone buzzed he'd stood there a second before he looked. Work. Ellen. The dentist. Never her, and he couldn't tell if what he felt was relief.

At night he'd lain next to Ellen with her arm across his chest, same as every night for twenty-six years, until she was asleep. Then he'd lifted it off and gone down the hall to his office.

By Thursday the few days he'd asked for were up. He'd opened the thread and typed Jamie and looked at it until the screen went dark. Friday night, at his desk, he'd thumbed her name and hung up before it could ring, and sat there hoping it hadn't gone through.

She never called or asked to talk again. The thread just sat there.

And now Jamie had gone around him, straight to Ellen. She was coming to his house, to his table. She'd asked for him specifically, and she was bringing Alex. He could only think of one reason she'd want her brother sitting next to her. They were going to tell Ellen together. He didn't let himself think about how much she'd told Alex.

Ellen doesn't know yet. Tomorrow she will.

Both of them together, over the pot roast. And I'll be sitting right there.

He drank his coffee standing next to the freezer. It had gone cold. He drank it anyway.

That night Ellen reached for him in bed. Her hand started on his chest and drifted lower, taking its time. He could tell what she wanted.

"I'm tired, sorry," he said.

She was quiet. Then she took her hand back and rolled over to face the wall. "You've been tired since the cabin," she said into the dark. "I'm starting to take it personally."

"It's not you."

"I know it's not me. That's what worries me."

He lay in the dark and looked at her back.

Tell her. Before Jamie did it for him. Before Ellen had to hear it over pot roast, from her own kids.

"Ellen."

She stayed facing the wall. "What."

"I have to tell you something." His voice came out wrong. "About Monday."

Now she turned. He could feel her looking at him in the dark, waiting. The second sentence was right there. He'd built it all week. It wouldn't come out of his mouth, because there was no version of it that didn't end the world.

"Mark?"

"I didn't go to work," he said. "Monday. I called in sick and drove around."

It was true, as far as it went. She was quiet for a long time.

"That's not what you were going to say."

He didn't answer.

"Okay," she said finally, and rolled back toward the wall.

A minute later, to the wall: "Love you."

"Love you too." It was the truest thing he'd said all night.

Chicken.

He lay there until her breathing finally evened out, and for a long time after that.

Sunday he was up before Ellen. He did the one thing he'd decided on during the night, quietly, and put it in the trunk of his car. Then he made the coffee.

They pulled in at ten to five. Mark saw them from the front window, where he'd been standing for twenty minutes pretending to fix the blinds.

Jamie got out of the driver's side. Jeans, a green sweater he didn't recognize, hair down. She stood by the car a while without moving toward the house, the way she used to stand at the end of the dock at the cabin before she'd make herself jump. Alex came around the back of the car and said something to her. His hand went to the small of her back for half a second and came away again. Mark had seen it a hundred times. It looked different now.

Then Alex looked up at the window. Right at him.

Mark let go of the blinds.

Ellen beat him to the door. She hugged Jamie first, quick and warm, the hug for the kid who lived an hour away. Then she got to Alex, who'd gotten on a plane for this, and held on: arms all the way around, face pressed to his chest, rocking a little. "Look at you," she said. "You flew all the way down here and you look exhausted. Are they working you to death up there?" She had both hands on his face. Alex went red and said "Mom," and didn't pull away.

Mark stood in the hall. He didn't know where to put his hands, so he put them in his pockets, then took them out again.

Jamie came to him. He hadn't known she would. She walked right up and put her arms around him, the same hug she'd been giving him in this hallway her whole life, and he stood inside it with every muscle locked. She smelled like her shampoo, the same floral stuff Ellen had kept the whole house stocked with when the kids were growing up, and under that, paint.

"Hi, Dad," she said into his shoulder. Then, so low only he could hear it: "Later."

She let go and looked at him. Steady, except she'd caught her bottom lip in her teeth. She'd looked at him the same way across the cabin breakfast table, working out exactly how much he knew. Now he couldn't tell what she was working out.

He'd braced all week for her to flinch when she saw him. She'd hugged him instead, right in front of her mother. For Ellen, he told himself. Whatever she had to say, she'd say it later, where Ellen couldn't hear.

Except a hug for Ellen's benefit would have been quick. She'd held on. And she only bit her lip like that when she was ashamed of something, and he knew what she had to be ashamed of.

He broke first. His eyes went to Alex.

Alex held out his hand. Mark shook it. Alex's grip was hard and dry and over fast. Alex looked at him the way he'd look at a stranger holding a door. Mark had seen his son angry plenty of times. This was worse.

He knows.

"Dad," Alex said.

"Son."

Ellen took the chair next to Alex like she always did and mothered him all through dinner, same as every time he flew in. Her hand on his forearm while she talked. More carrots on his plate without asking. At one point she smoothed his hair back from his forehead, the same thing she used to do to Mark when they were dating, before the kids. Alex went still under her hand, ears red, eyes on his plate, and didn't move until she took it back. Mark couldn't remember when she'd stopped doing that to him. Sooner or later every husband got bumped for a son. He'd heard that one at enough barbecues, and it always got a laugh out of him.

But not tonight. Mark watched it all from somewhere a little outside his own body. He'd been watching everything from there since they pulled in.

Jamie sat across from him. Every time he looked up she was already looking at him, and every time, he looked back down at his plate.

He cut his pot roast into smaller and smaller pieces.

"Oh, before I forget," Ellen said. "Lydia already sent the save-the-date for her Halloween thing. Masks mandatory again, she's very proud of herself. She asked specifically if you two are coming."

Both twins went still. Jamie's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. Alex stared at his plate.

"Maybe," they said at the same time.

Ellen looked from one to the other. "Okay. You two have been weird all night. Did you have a fight?"

"No," they both said, too quick.

"Well, you're acting weird. You're twins. You're supposed to be close."

Alex glanced at Jamie. Jamie glanced back.

"Yeah," Jamie muttered. "She really has no idea."

Ellen laughed. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing, Mom. We're close, I promise," Alex said.

Mark knew exactly what it meant, and exactly how close. He reached for a newspaper that wasn't there and picked up his water glass instead.

This has been going on since October, Jamie had said, standing in her apartment. Lydia's party was in October.

When Ellen passed Jamie the carrots, she caught her fingers and squeezed them without breaking her sentence. Jamie let her, and kept her eyes on her plate until Ellen let go.

He thought he knew why she couldn't look at her mother. She was working up to it. Whatever she'd come here to say, she couldn't say it to Ellen's face.

Ellen got up for the wine and went around the table pouring. When she got to Jamie, Jamie put her hand flat over the top of her glass.

"I'm good, Mom."

Ellen stopped with the bottle tipped. "Since when do you turn down a Malbec?"

"Long week. I've got a headache."

"Hm." Ellen poured Alex's instead and sat back down. "Fine. More for me."

Headache.

Mark's knife had stopped moving. He made it start again.

I didn't wear anything. I don't know if she's on something. I don't know what day it was for her, I don't-

He looked at Jamie's hand resting on the tablecloth next to her empty glass. Then at Alex, who was staring at Jamie, and Jamie was looking at her plate.

They're scared of the same thing I'm scared of.

Saturday. Him. Or Monday.

Me.

"You know," Ellen said, pointing her fork across the table at Jamie, "the last time a woman at this table turned down wine on a Sunday, she ended up with you two. On the pill, no less. Your father nearly passed out in the doctor's office."

"Mom," Jamie said.

"What? It's a good story." Ellen laughed and took a sip. "Never trust the pill. Women in this family, a man looks at us wrong and it's twins. That's my motherly wisdom for the evening."

She always told it exactly like that. Same words, same laugh, the fork pointed the same way, a story she'd told at so many dinners it had worn smooth. Mark had heard it at every dinner party for twenty-five years. He didn't know why tonight he noticed that she never looked at him while she told it.

Ellen's eyes moved between Jamie and him, and then away.

"Dad," Alex said. "Could you pass the potatoes."

The bowl was by Mark's elbow. He picked it up and held it out across the table, and Alex took the other side of it, and for a second neither of them let go. Alex's eyes went to Mark's hand on the bowl and stayed there a beat too long. Then back up, flat and level, the two of them holding the same bowl of potatoes over Ellen's good tablecloth.

Then Alex took it.

"Thanks," he said.

After dinner Mark took the trash out because he needed air. He had the kitchen bag in one hand and the recycling in the other, and he'd just gotten the lid of the can up when the side door opened and Alex came down the steps with the bag from the bathroom.

Alex dropped his bag in. Mark let the lid down.

Alex didn't go back inside.

"You heard us," he said. "Saturday night."

Mark's hand was still on the lid. "Yeah."

"You thought I hurt her."

The porch light buzzed. Somewhere down the street somebody was dragging their own cans to the curb. Mark made himself look at his son.

"I heard her yelling at you. I heard her say 'I told you to', and I thought-"

"I know what you thought." Alex put his hands in his pockets. "Funny, right? You thought I was the one who hurt her."

He went back up the steps, and the screen door bumped shut behind him.

Mark stood there with his hand on the lid.

There wasn't any other way to hear it. You thought I was the one. Meaning you're the one. Meaning I know what you did on Monday, and I'm going to sit at your table and ask you to pass the potatoes and watch you choke on it.

He deserved that. He stood there in the dark and agreed with every word of it.

One down. Later, Jamie had said in the hall. Whatever she had for him, he'd stand there and take all of it. He wouldn't argue and he wouldn't explain. He'd let her finish.

When he came back in Ellen was at the sink scraping plates. "There's mint chip ice cream in the garage freezer," she said without turning around. "Can you get it?"

"I'll help him," Jamie said.

She was already off her stool. Mark looked at Ellen's back, and at Alex at the table, and Alex was looking at nothing. Ellen said, "Thank you, sweetie," and kept scraping, and Jamie walked past him and opened the door to the garage and held it.

He went through it, because there wasn't anything else to do.

Jamie pulled the door shut behind them and leaned back against it. Mark stood in the middle of the concrete, four feet from his daughter, and the freezer hummed.

"We need to talk about Monday," she said.

He'd had all week to plan what he'd say. He was going to let her talk.

Then she didn't. She opened her mouth and closed it again. Her eyes went to the floor, and her ears had gone red, and she rubbed her arm like she was cold. His daughter, trying to find a way to say it to his face.

That was what broke him.

"I'm sorry." His voice cracked on it. "Jamie, I'm so sorry. I don't remember it. I blacked out, I don't- You said we shouldn't go any further. You said you were in love with Alex. And then there's nothing, and then I'm inside you and you're crying and saying not again, and I-" He made himself finish. "I raped you."

Jamie stared at him. Her mouth was actually hanging open. Of everything he'd braced for, he hadn't braced for her to look surprised.

"You what?"

"I raped you," he said again, since she seemed to need him to admit it twice.

"I know there's nothing I can say. I know that. I just need you to know that I know what I-"

"Dad. Stop. Stop." She came off the door with both hands up, like she was stopping traffic. "Say that again. The first part."

"I'm sorry-"

"No. You blacked out?"

It came out sharp, almost angry. He'd take angry. He'd done it to her and he couldn't even remember doing it. She had every right.

"Yeah, I don't remember what happened." He put his hand over his eyes. "I remember your voice and then I remember the end. Pieces. Nothing in between. I don't know what I did to you until the end."

She went very still. He could hear her breathing.

"You went quiet," she said slowly. "In the middle. You'd been talking to me, telling me what to do in that voice, and then you just stopped. No words." She shook her head. "I thought you were choosing not to talk. Like you were making me listen to myself."

He didn't follow. Telling me what to do. Making me listen to myself. She wasn't talking like something had been done to her. She was talking like she'd been waiting for him to say something, and he hadn't.

"I wasn't choosing anything, Jamie. I wasn't there."

"Oh my god." She pressed her hand to her mouth. "Oh my god, Dad. You've been sitting in this house for six days thinking you raped me."

"I packed a bag," he said. "It's in the trunk."

"You packed a bag?"

"I was going to tell your mother tonight, if you didn't beat me to it. After you two left. And then go."

"Go where?"

He hadn't gotten that far.

"I almost told her last night," he said. "In bed. I got as far as 'I have to tell you something about Monday.'"

Jamie actually took a step back. "You almost told Mom you raped me."

"She rolled over to listen."

"Oh my god. What did you say?"

"I chickened out and told her I called in sick and drove around."

She stared at him. Then a laugh came out of her, ugly and helpless, and she slapped her hand over it. "What if you'd gone through with it?" she said through her fingers. "Tomorrow you tell her never mind?"

He hadn't gotten that far either.

Her eyes were wet above her fingers. She wasn't angry anymore. She was horrified, and not at him.

"Dad. You didn't rape me," she said. "Look at me. You didn't."

He looked at her.

"I was into it," she said. "I was talking dirty to you. I was touching myself. I was pushing back on you so hard the couch moved." Her voice shook and she kept going anyway, kept her eyes on his. "I said 'I'm cheating on Alex with our dad' out loud, and it made me wetter, and you didn't hear any of it. Did you?"

She's covering for you. She'd been doing it since she was a kid. The dent in Ellen's bumper. Alex sneaking in two hours past curfew. Whatever got broken in this house, Jamie had a story that made it nobody's fault. That had to be it. He'd heard her crying.

can't hear what she's

is she

Those were the last things he'd thought before he went under. He'd known she was saying something. He just hadn't been able to hear what. Now she was telling him.

"You kept saying not again." His voice didn't sound like his. "At the end. You were crying and saying not again."

She looked at the freezer. Then at the ceiling. "It meant, um." She put her hand over her eyes. "It meant it was happening. Again."

"What was happening?"

"Dad."

Then he understood. Again. She'd come more than once, and he'd missed that too.

"Did I force you?" It came out small. He didn't know anymore which answer he was afraid of.

"No."

She didn't hesitate at all. "Dad. If anybody forced anybody, I forced you."

They both heard it.

"That's not better," he said.

"No," she said. "That's not better."

"You said stop."

"I said we shouldn't go any further. I said it to me, Dad. I said Alex's name because I was about to let you fuck me and I was trying to stop myself." She swallowed. "It didn't work. I didn't want it to work."

"Does Alex know?" he said.

"Everything. I told him Friday." Her chin came up a little, daring him to make something of it. "Almost everything."

Almost. So there was a part of it bad enough she'd kept it from her brother. It had to be something he'd done.

This time she looked down and kept looking down.

"He doesn't know I said that," she said. "About being in love with him. I didn't tell him that part."

The freezer clicked down into a lower hum. He put his hand on the lid because his knees had gone strange.

Relief, first. It hit him in the gut like the flu, and for a second he thought he'd be sick again, same as in the car outside her building. He wasn't. He held on to the freezer and breathed. Six days. He'd packed a bag.

Then the rest of it arrived.

She wanted it.

All week the worst thing he'd ever done was something he couldn't remember. He'd been ready to pay for it. Now there was nothing to pay for, and everything that was left, he remembered fine.

There was a man who'd gotten hard looking at a picture on his son's phone. Who'd stood in a hallway at the cabin, hard, listening to his son fuck his daughter through a door. Who'd driven an hour on Monday telling himself he was going as her father, and who'd come in the shower that night thinking about her.

He'd even told Alex his sister wouldn't want to see a thing like that. He'd been protecting her modesty from her own picture.

All of that was still him. None of it went anywhere just because she'd wanted it too.

"It's still wrong," he said.

"I know it's wrong."

"You're my daughter."

"I know who I am, Dad."

"I don't-" He didn't know how that sentence ended. I don't get to feel better. I don't know what to do with this. "And Alex knows you wanted it."

"He knows." She held his eyes. "He's known since Friday."

So that was what the trash cans had meant. Not I know what you did to her. Something closer to I know what she did with you. He didn't know yet if that was better.

"And Saturday," he said. "The fight. You told him to-"

"Pull out." She held his eyes. "I dared him to come inside me, and then I told him to pull out, and he didn't, and I came. And then I yelled at him for it." A short breath. "Monday I begged you to pull out. You didn't hear that either."

He hadn't.

"I came," she said quietly. "When you came in me, that's when I came. Not after. Because of it. I came so hard I passed out, and when I woke up you were gone."

His body answered anyway. Here, in his own garage, with Ellen ten feet away through a door scraping pot roast off plates, his cock was getting hard because his daughter was telling him she'd come on it. He turned toward the freezer, lifted the lid, and stood there with the cold coming up into his face, staring at the frost on a bag of peas.

"Dad."

"Don't."

"Don't what?" She came around the freezer so he had to look at her. "You keep hunting for some way this is still your fault. Stop. I was there. You weren't. Take my word for it."

He didn't look at her. "I believe you. That's the problem."

She reached past him and shut the lid.

"Then look at me."

He kept his eyes on the dust. She stayed right there. She'd never once in her life let him end an argument by staring at something.

"You get that from your mother," he said.

"I get that from you. You're the one who's never let an argument go in his life."

"I let plenty go."

"Name one."

"I let your mother name you."

"Doesn't count. You argued with a pregnant woman and lost."

And there it was. Him and her, going at it, like every argument they'd ever had across a dinner table, and for half a second it was just that again, the old thing, and she almost smiled and he almost did.

That's my girl.

He caught the thought. This time he didn't kill it.

Then she stopped smiling.

"You weren't there for it," she said. "That isn't fair. To either of us."

He didn't ask her what she meant.

"Mark?" Ellen's voice came through the door, muffled and cheerful. "Did you two get lost? The ice cream isn't going to scoop itself."

Jamie opened the freezer beside him, took out the carton of mint chip, and put it in his hands.

"Bring the ice cream, Dad." She was already at the door. "I'm really craving it now after all that." Then she went back inside.

Mark stood alone in the garage with the cold coming through the cardboard into his palms. The freezer clicked back into its higher hum.

The bag was still in his trunk. He'd take it out tomorrow.

For six days the blank in his memory had been the worst thing he'd ever done. Now it was something he'd missed.

After dinner Ellen hugged them both goodbye on the porch. "Love you guys. Drive safe." Dad was behind her, and when Jamie hugged him, this time he hugged her back. Stiffly, but back. She'd take it.

Alex drove. Jamie had the passenger seat pushed back and her feet on the dash like she'd ridden since she was tall enough to reach.

Alex hadn't said a word since the porch. Jamie had been sitting on it since the garage, and it was killing her. But she wasn't telling him until he asked.

"Long trip for ice cream," he said finally.

"Oh my god. You are not going to believe-"

"In the garage," he said flatly.

It took her a second. "Wait. You think we-" She stared at him. "In the garage? With Mom in the kitchen?"

"You picked up a stranger at Aunt Lydia's with a house full of people downstairs. 'Best anonymous sex of my life.' Your words."

"That stranger was you."

"Jamie, 'best' means there's a ranked list."

"Well... you topped it."

The corner of his mouth twitched. He pressed it flat and checked his mirror. Almost. She'd never been careful about where, or with who, and nobody knew that better than he did. But it hadn't even crossed her mind tonight, and it had crossed his.

"We talked," she said. "Just talked."

He watched the road. "So what did you talk about?"

"Okay." She turned in her seat to face him. "You're going to want both hands on the wheel."

"Jamie."

"Guess what Dad thought happened Monday."

"I'm not guessing."

"Guess."

"You seduced him to get out of trouble. Isn't that what happened?"

"Nope. Well, yes, but there's more."

"He thought he seduced you. With his stern voice that always gets you riled up."

"There's something way juicier than that."

Alex glanced over. She was grinning. She knew it was the wrong face and she couldn't stop.

"He thought he raped me."

The car drifted half a foot toward the shoulder. Alex corrected it.

"He blacked out," she said. "Monday. When he was, when we were... He doesn't remember the sex. He remembers me saying we should stop, and then being inside me at the end, and nothing in between."

Alex opened his mouth but nothing came out.

"He's been sitting in that house for six days thinking that. Then he found out we were coming for dinner, so he packed a bag." It sounded insane out loud. "It's in his trunk right now. He was going to tell Mom everything tonight and leave."

"Everything," Alex said.

The grin was gone. She put both hands over her face. "He almost told her last night. He chickened out and said he called in sick and drove around."

Alex stared at the road. "That's what he went with."

"That's what he went with."

"Mom would've-" He didn't finish.

She knew the rest, and it wasn't only about Dad. Mom would have found out about them too.

Neither of them laughed.

The highway lines ticked past.

"Six days," Alex said.

"He said he needed a few days." She pressed her thumbnail into the seam of her jeans. "I let him have them. I didn't want to face him either. So he sat there all week thinking it, because I was scared."

"You didn't know."

"I should have known. I know him."

They went quiet again. A truck passed them and the car shuddered in the draft.

"He really didn't remember any of it?" Alex said.

He didn't sound horrified. He sounded curious, and she knew exactly what about.

"He stopped talking," she said. "In the middle. He'd been telling me what to do, and then nothing. I thought he was choosing not to speak. Like he was making me listen to myself." She paused. "That wasn't what was happening."

Alex was quiet for a long time.

"So he doesn't know what you said."

"No."

"Any of it."

"None of it."

She didn't tell him about the last thing she'd said in the garage. You weren't there for it. That isn't fair. To either of us. She'd watched it land on Mark's face and she'd walked away before he could answer, because if he'd answered she'd have had to know what she meant by it, and she wasn't ready.

Saying it to Alex would make it a plan. She wasn't calling it that.

She also didn't tell him that she'd said I'm in love with Alex to their father with his fingers inside her, to stop herself from letting it go further, and it hadn't worked. Two secrets now. One for each of them.

Alex shifted in his seat. She caught it from the corner of her eye and didn't say anything about it. He was hard from the image of their father going blank inside her, while she talked to a body that wasn't listening.

His hands stayed tight on the wheel the rest of the way home.

Monday morning she drove him to the airport. He sat with his hand on the door handle.

"So what happens with Dad now?" he said.

"Nothing happens." She looked at him. "I told you it was once."

He looked at the departures sign instead of her. He was quiet for a while.

"Jamie..." He couldn't get it out.

"What?"

"Never mind." He was still looking at the sign. "Later."

He opened his door, and she caught his sleeve.

"Come back Friday," she said. "Not in two weeks. My period is due next week, and if I'm late, I want you here when I take the test. Please."

He looked at her hand on his sleeve. "The six-ten," he said. "I'll be on it."

"Love you," she said.

"Love you more. Six-ten."

The sign over the drop-off lane said KISS & GO. He kissed her a lot longer than the sign intended, until someone behind them leaned on the horn. He grabbed his bag and went in without looking back.

Then she spent ten hours on a scaffold painting a client's wall and came home and painted anyway. Her own mural was changing. She'd started it months ago on her living room wall, two figures tangled in vines and gears. Now a third figure was showing up behind them, mostly shadow, and she couldn't stop making it bigger.

That night he called from Seattle, after eleven.

"Can I ask you something?" he said. "And you let me finish before you hang up."

Something in his voice made her turn off the lamp. "Okay."

She waited.

"When you see him again." He stopped and started over. "If you see him again. I want to be there."

She sat up in bed. "Be there."

"In the room."

Then she got it. "You want to watch me with Dad."

She could hear him breathing on the other end, and his breathing said it.

"Alex." Her voice came out wrong. "You want me to sleep with our father. For you."

She heard him swallow. "Yeah."

"I don't want him. I want you." Her throat had gone tight. "Is this a test? Because if this is a test-"

"It's not a test."

"I told you it was just that one time."

"I know what you told me."

Her hand went to her stomach. "Why?"

"Because you said my name with him inside you." His voice had gone low. "And you said he got somewhere I've never been. I haven't thought about anything else since." A breath. "And I'm done being the one outside the room. The garage. Monday. Both times I was somewhere else."

She thought of that Friday night on her couch, and his face while she talked. She'd seen it and called it something else.

"If I do this," she said, "you can't look at me different after. You can't decide later that it was gross, or that I liked it too much, or-"

"I won't."

"You don't know that."

"I won't."

She lay back down and looked at the ceiling.

"I can't, Alex." It came out steadier than she felt. "He's Dad."

"Then why didn't you go to the CVS?"

She didn't say anything.

"You said you didn't know." His voice was quiet. "Three blocks, Jamie."

She opened her mouth. Nothing she could say out loud came out of it.

The silence went on long enough that she heard him shift on the other end, sheets, the creak of his bed in Seattle.

"I love you," she said finally. It wasn't an answer.

"I love you too," he said.

Tuesday morning there was a text from him, sent at 2:14.

Alex: if you do. don't tell him it was me. i don't want him doing it for me.

Alex: and make him use the voice.

She read it twice and didn't answer.

She counted days. It was day twenty-two, and her period was due in six, give or take. Too early to test, too early to worry, and she worried anyway. Every twinge was a question now: the tenderness in her breasts that could be PMS or could be something else, the low pull in her belly that came and went. She pressed her palm flat against her stomach in bed and felt nothing that told her anything.

Saturday. Alex, day twelve, no pullout. Monday. Dad, day fourteen, no pullout.

She took her hand off her belly.

The app wanted to know if she'd had unprotected sex this cycle. There was a checkbox. It only let her check it once.

That evening she stood in front of the mural with a brush in her hand for an hour and didn't paint anything. You want to watch me with Dad. She'd said it out loud, to make him hear how it sounded. He'd heard. He'd still meant it.

That night on the phone Alex said, "Dad texted me."

Jamie's hand tightened on the phone.

"About what?"

"Nothing big. Sent me an article about some security thing at work. Said he thought of me." Alex paused. "It was normal, Jamie. Just a dad text."

She should have been glad. She was glad. Mostly. She was the one who'd pushed Dad until he finally looked at her, and now Dad was texting Alex about nothing, like any other week, and he hadn't texted her once. It made her jealous, which was stupid, and she hated it. Alex was hers. Dad was supposed to go back to being Dad.

"Good." she said.

After they hung up she opened her thread with Dad. The last message was still his, from a week ago: I'm sorry. I need a few days. She typed something and deleted it. She typed something else and deleted that too.

Jamie: did you take the bag out of your trunk yet

Twenty minutes later:

Mark: No.

Jamie: Dad.

Mark: I'll take it out.

She fell asleep with the phone on her chest.

Wednesday at lunch she called him from the job site, sitting on an overturned bucket with paint drying on her hands. He picked up on the first ring.

They talked about nothing: the Blazers, the gutters, a client of hers who wanted a mural of his own dog.

"What kind of dog?" he said.

"A pug. In a cape."

"Is the pug flying?"

"Dad. Of course the pug is flying."

He laughed, really laughed, and she laughed with him, and for a second it was just her and her dad on the phone. Neither of them said Monday. Neither of them said the garage. Twice she opened her mouth to say what she'd called to say, and twice she asked about the gutters instead.

"Jamie," he said, before they hung up.

"Yeah?"

"Thank you. For telling me." A pause. "Love you."

She'd said it back to him a thousand times without thinking. "Love you too, Dad," she said, and it didn't sound like any of those times.

She hung up before either of them could say anything else, and sat on the bucket until her lunch break was over.

Alex called every night. The calls were short, same as always, except careful. Neither of them brought up Monday night. He didn't ask if she'd done anything about it. She didn't tell him she'd started.

Thursday she texted Mark.

Jamie: Can you come over Friday night?

It took him three hours.

Mark: I don't think that's a good idea.

That night she called him. He picked up on the last ring. She heard the TV in the den, then a door closing.

"Your mother," he said, before she could say anything.

"I know."

"I almost told her, Jamie. I was one sentence away." He was quiet. "And that Monday I wasn't even there. What if it happens again? What if I go and I don't come back?"

"Then I'll pull you back."

He went quiet for so long that she checked the screen.

"Alex," he said.

"Alex is in Seattle."

"Does he know you're asking me this?"

She looked at the mural. "This is mine."

"I need to think," he said, and hung up.

Friday morning Ellen called while Jamie was getting dressed for work.

"Hi, sweetie. I just wanted to say thanks again for coming down. Your father's been so much better this week. Whatever you two talked about in the garage, it worked."

"He just needed to get some things off his chest," Jamie said, and was glad her mother couldn't see her face.

"Off his chest? What did he-" Ellen stopped herself. "No. Never mind. That's between you two." A little laugh. "Well, keep it up. He actually slept through the night last night. First time since the cabin." Ellen paused. "But Alex. Did he seem quiet to you on Sunday? He barely said two words at dinner." Her voice dropped, like someone might overhear. "Is everything all right with that girl he's seeing? Your father says he still won't bring her around. I just hope they're not having a rough patch." Then, softer: "He looked so much like your father, sitting there brooding like that."

"I'm sure they'll be fine," Jamie said. "He's crazy about her."

"Anyway. I'm out tonight, book club and then Susan wants to get drinks after. I told your dad to fend for himself. He'll probably eat cereal over the sink like a bachelor." She laughed. "Love you, sweetie."

"Love you too, Mom."

Ellen laughed, warm and easy, her phone laugh, and hung up. Jamie sat with her face in her hands.

She'd already slept with her mother's husband once, she'd spent all week working up to asking him again, and now she didn't even have Mom as an excuse. Mom would be out all night. She felt sick. Maybe she wouldn't text him. Maybe she'd call Alex and tell him she couldn't.

At noon she sat on the scaffold with her lunch untouched and the thread with Dad open. She typed it and deleted it and typed it again. His flight landed at six-ten. If she didn't pick him up, he'd get a car or a ride, and then it was forty minutes from the airport, if traffic was kind. Seven-thirty, maybe. Maybe later. She held her thumb over the button long enough for the screen to dim, then sent it.

Jamie: Mom's out tonight. If the answer's yes, come at seven. I'll leave the door unlocked either way.

She watched the dots appear and disappear twice. Then:

Mark: Is Alex there?

Jamie: He's in Seattle.

Technically not a lie.

She waited an hour for his reply. Then:

Mark: Okay.

She closed her eyes after she read his reply. She told herself it was for Alex. But Thursday night, listening to her father breathe on the other end of the line, she'd caught herself hoping he'd say yes. And Dad was coming over tonight thinking he was taking something from his son, and she was letting him.

It was for Alex. Definitely for Alex.

Mark knocked at seven on the dot. She'd known he would. He was a man who always showed up on time, even for this.

She opened the door. He was in jeans and a button-down under his old canvas jacket, which meant he'd changed after work, which meant he'd thought about what to wear, which meant he'd been thinking about tonight like she'd been thinking about it.

"Hi, Dad."

"Hi, sweetheart."

He came in, kicked off his shoes, hung his jacket on her hook, and stood in the gap between the kitchen and the living room with his hands at his sides. His eyes went to the couch and came back. He breathed in once through his nose, and she wondered what her apartment smelled like to him now.

"Can I get you something to drink?"

"I'm okay."

"Is the bag still-"

"Yes."

They stood there. The apartment was clean. She'd cleaned it for the first time in a week, and then she'd put a few things back where they'd been, because an apartment that clean would have been performing.

She took the arm of the couch, where she'd been when she told Alex. Mark took the chair across from her, the one Alex never used because he always sat next to her.

Neither of them said anything for a while. Mark looked at his hands. Jamie looked at the clock on the stove. 7:12.

"Monday," he said finally. "Are you on anything? Birth control."

It was the safe-sex talk. She'd gotten it once already, in college, when he found her pill pack and lectured her for twenty minutes about how the pill didn't make her careful, it made her lazy, and she should be using condoms every single time. Now here he was, a week too late, hoping she'd been on the pill.

"No."

He closed his eyes for a second. "Did you take anything after?"

"No."

"Why not?"

She'd been asked this by two men now. She still didn't have the answer that fit in a sentence.

"Because I didn't want to," she said.

He sat with that for a while. "In the garage, you said you wanted it."

"I did want it."

"I've thought about it all week." He was still looking at his hands. "You cover for everybody, Jamie. You always have. If you said it so I could sleep at night-"

"I didn't."

"You would, though. That's what you would do."

"Don't tell me what I would do."

"I know what you'd do." The corner of his mouth went up and came back down. "Your mother's been saying it for twenty-five years. You're me."

"Then you know I don't lie to make people feel better," she said. "I lie to win."

"So listen. I'm the one who asked you here, Dad." Her voice held. "That's not what you do for someone who hurt you."

He looked up at her then.

"Say it," she said. "Say I wanted it."

"You wanted it." It came out rough, like he'd had to drag it up from somewhere.

"And?"

He was quiet so long she thought he wouldn't answer. When he did, he said it to her, not to his hands.

"And I wanted it too."

She watched him hear himself say it.

"Jamie," he said, and his voice had changed. Not the Father Voice. Not yet. The thing that came before it. "What are we doing here."

"I don't know." She looked away.

"Yes you do."

She did. She made herself look back at him.

"Is this for me?" he said. "Because you think I need it. Because you think you owe me after this week-"

"No." It wasn't for him. That much was true.

"Then what."

"I want you here," she said. "Tonight. Not because of Monday. I want you."

He studied her for a long time, like he was waiting for her to take it back. She held his eyes until he stopped waiting.

"This is wrong," he said quietly. "You know that."

"I know."

"Your mother-" He stopped there. He didn't finish it.

She didn't make him.

He stood up and crossed the room slowly, and every step looked like a decision. Not a blackout this time. Mark, choosing. He stopped in front of her, his face level with hers.

"If we do this," he said, "I'm not disappearing again. I'm going to be here. The whole time."

"I know," she said. "I'll keep you here."

His hand came up to her face, thumb along her jaw. The same hand that had spanked her, that had held her hip hard enough to bruise, and now it was on her face like she was made of something that could break.

You weren't there for it. That isn't fair. To either of us.

She kissed him. Not out of desperation, or leverage, or strategy. She kissed her father because she wanted to, and when his mouth opened against hers she felt his whole body give in, the tension going out of his shoulders and his hand sliding into her hair.

She stood up and went down the hall without looking back, pulling her shirt over her head on the way and dropping it. She heard him follow. At the bedroom door she pushed it shut behind them. Then, with her hand still on the knob, she let it drift back open an inch.

He was careful at first, too careful, and she could feel him monitoring himself, checking for the thing that had taken him last time. His hands were on her like he didn't trust them.

She sat on the edge of the bed and leaned back on her hands. "You know I left my door unlocked all day?" she said. "Anybody could have walked in."

His eyes narrowed. He knew exactly what she was doing. She watched him decide to let her.

"You left the door unlocked," he said. Not a question. The same tone he'd used on Monday, right before he put her over his knee. It was calm and knowing and disappointed, and it went through her like current.

She was soaking before he touched her. She hadn't had to ask for the voice. She'd only had to earn it.

"Turn around."

She turned and put her hands on the edge of the bed. He pulled her leggings down and she stepped out of them. His fingers grazed her inner thigh and she felt him go still for a second. She knew why. It was the photo she'd sent to Alex while Dad was three feet away at the kitchen sink. She was as wet now as she'd been in that picture, and his hand on her skin said he knew it.

His hand came down once on her bare ass, light, more sound than sting.

"Unlocked," he said. "All day."

"Anybody could have-"

The second one was harder. She bit her lip on the noise it pulled out of her.

"Anybody," he agreed.

The third was barely a tap. His palm stayed there afterward, warm over the sting, his thumb moving once across the mark. It was the same hand as Monday. It was nothing like Monday.

He buried his face in her neck and breathed in. She used the same shampoo as her mother. She'd never once thought about that until now.

He put his hand flat on her lower back, warm and heavy.

He pushed inside. Neither of them reached for anything. Monday had already happened, and whatever it had done, it had done.

Over her shoulder she could see the bedroom door. Open an inch.

She could feel the difference. Monday had been a body going through motions with nobody home. This was Mark. Every stroke had weight behind it, his breathing rough but controlled, his hands adjusting. He bottomed out and she felt it, that contact Alex never reached, the blunt pressure right against her cervix. Her body remembered it before her brain did.

Alex was going to walk in on this. On her liking it. She'd made him promise he wouldn't look at her different after, and she hadn't known yet how different it was going to feel.

"I can feel you," she said. Not meaning his cock. "You're here."

"I'm here."

Her phone lit up on the nightstand, close enough to read.

Mom: Book club ran short, heading to Susan's. If you talk to your dad tell him to eat something real.

She felt him see it. He stopped, buried all the way in her, and neither of them breathed while the screen stayed lit. It went dark. For a second she could see the two of them reflected in it, small and black and bent over the edge of her bed. The clock beside it said 7:41.

Then he started moving again.

He leaned down, low and close to her ear. "You've been disrespectful."

"I let you in," she managed. "That's very respectful."

His hand tightened on her hip. "Hold still and take it."

She held still, and it undid her anyway. All week she'd told herself that voice would go back to just being Dad's. It wasn't going to. She didn't want it to.

She couldn't move, so the truth came out of her instead.

"I called you Daddy on purpose," she said. "Monday. I knew what it would do."

He drove into her harder. "I know you did."

"I pushed you until you spanked me so you couldn't tell Mom." Her voice was shaking, but she kept going. Each admission was doing something to her body, her pussy clenching around him with every one. "So you'd be in it too. And then I liked it."

"Brat," he said, and the next stroke shoved her forward onto the bed.

"I knew I was ovulating Monday."

He slammed into her once, hard enough to knock the breath out of her, and held there. His hands found her hips, right where the bruises had been. They'd faded days ago. His hands went to the same place anyway.

"I knew what day it was," she said, "and I let you come inside me anyway."

Nothing came back. He started moving again, but his breathing had gone shallow and even, mechanical, the rhythm of somebody who wasn't there anymore. She knew it instantly, because she'd been thinking about it every night since the garage.

She didn't know how much of that he'd heard.

No.

She pulled forward off him. He made a sound. She turned around and grabbed his face with both hands, her palms on his jaw, and she looked straight into whatever was pulling him away. Over his shoulder the door was still open its inch, dark in the gap. She didn't look at it again.

"Stay with me." Not a request. The voice he'd used on her, turned around. "Look at me. Don't you dare leave."

His eyes focused. Slowly. She could see him fighting his way back, his hands coming up to grip her wrists like he needed something to hold onto.

"I'm here," he said. Rough. Barely there.

"Prove it."

He kissed her. Hard, desperate, his hands in her hair, and she pulled him down onto the bed and onto her. He pushed back inside and she wrapped her legs around him, face to face, because she needed to watch his eyes.

"Stay," she said.

"I'm staying."

He was. She could see it, the effort of it, his eyes locked on hers, and he was fucking her slow and deep and he was right there for every stroke.

She started to come. Not the electric front-wall hit Alex gave her. This was the deep thing, behind her navel, the one Mark's cock found because it went straight where Alex curved. The contraction started in her center and rolled outward through her whole body.

The word just came out. Not the weapon she'd used on Monday. Just the name. "Daddy." Small and honest and nothing like the last time she'd said it.

"I know." He was watching her. Present. His face close to hers. "I can feel it."

He can feel it this time.

The thought broke her open. She came with her hands on his face, eyes locked on his, and she felt him let go inside her, the heat flooding her, and this time he was there for every pulse.

Neither of them had heard the front door, or the thump in the hall.

Seven thirty-eight. Alex sat in the rental outside her building with the engine off and his carry-on in the passenger seat.

She hadn't said a word about it since Monday. Not yes. Not no.

He hadn't asked her to pick him up, and she hadn't offered. Neither of them had wanted to decide what tonight was in the arrivals lane. He'd texted her from the gate anyway. landed. She'd read it and hadn't answered, and he'd spent the whole drive from the airport trying to work out what that meant.

He'd asked his sister to sleep with their father. He'd said it out loud, into a phone, on a Monday night. In daylight it sounded like something you'd hear about another family and feel sorry for them.

Twice he'd almost taken it back. Wednesday at lunch he'd sat in his car in the office garage with her name on his screen until his break was over. Thursday night he'd typed forget what i said and looked at it for ten minutes and deleted it, because sending it would have meant admitting he'd said it. Every night on the phone she talked about her client's dog and her mural, and every night he let her.

You can't look at me different after.

He'd said he wouldn't. He'd meant it. And she'd said she couldn't, and he'd believed that too. She'd asked him back for the test, not for this. That was all tonight was.

He told himself that twice and sat in the car a minute longer anyway.

Seven thirty-nine. He got out.

The stairs to her floor, the carry-on in his hand. The third one that squeaked. The hallway that always smelled like somebody's curry. Her door. He got his key out, and then, without knowing why, he tried the knob first.

It turned.

Jamie never left her door unlocked. She'd yelled at him for it twice. Maybe she'd left it for him.

The entry was dark. The living room light was on, and the first thing he saw in it was a pair of men's shoes kicked off by the door, one of them on its side. Brown leather, like Dad's. But Dad lined his shoes up by the door every time, toes together, and gave Alex grief about his sneaker pile every visit. These couldn't be Dad's.

Then whose were they? The sculptor from her art collective, back again? For a second Alex was almost relieved, and then he wasn't, and then he didn't know what he was.

He reached to hang his jacket up.

Dad's jacket was on her hook. Next to her raincoat, on the hook where Alex's always went.

So she'd asked him after all.

He stood there with his own jacket still in his hand and felt himself start to get hard.

Halfway down the hall her shirt lay on the floor, inside out. By the time he stepped over it he was all the way hard.

Then he heard her.

Not words. Breathing, fast and catching. Her bed, the headboard knocking the wall, a sound he knew from his own side of it. And under all of it, low, a man's voice saying something he couldn't make out.

He knew that voice. He'd have known it anywhere. He'd asked for it.

He should have felt sick. All week he'd felt sick enough to almost take it back.

Instead he stood in his sister's hallway with his keys digging into his palm and listened.

Her bedroom door wasn't shut. It stood open an inch, a stripe of lamplight across the hall floor.

Dad had stood outside a door like this at the cabin. Jamie had told him. Now it was Alex in the hall.

His heart was pounding hard enough that he was sure they'd hear it through the door. He put his eye to the gap.

Jamie was bent over the edge of her bed with Dad behind her, his hands on her hips. Alex could see her face in profile, her cheek against the comforter, her eyes shut.

What did I ask her to do?

"Hold still and take it," Dad said.

She held still. Alex watched her do it. She'd never once held still for him.

The carry-on handle slid out of his fingers and hit the floor with a thump. Neither of them looked up.

He should go in. He should push the door open and say her name and end it. He'd asked for exactly this, on the phone, in the dark, and now that it was ten feet away he didn't know if he'd meant a word of it.

He stayed where he was, his pulse so loud in his ears he could barely hear the headboard over it.

She was talking now, low and fast. He caught pieces. Daddy on purpose. So you'd be in it too. And then, so quietly he almost missed it: "I knew I was ovulating Monday."

His hand had found the front of his jeans. He was so hard it hurt, and he hated that too.

Then something changed. Dad was still moving, but wrong, like a machine running down, and Jamie caught it before Alex understood what he was seeing. She twisted off him, turned, and took Dad's face in both hands.

"Stay with me," she said. "Look at me. Don't you dare leave."

Alex had never heard her sound like that. Not even for him. She was fighting for Dad with everything she had, and he stood in her hallway and watched her do it.

Is this what you wanted?

His body answered first.

She pulled Dad down onto the bed with her, face to face, legs wrapped around him, and Alex watched his father come back to her one stroke at a time.

"Daddy."

Small. Not a weapon, not a game. It sounded like it had come out of her without asking first. It went through him like a hand closing on his throat. Then it went lower, and it stayed there.

Dad was coming. Alex could see it in the long shudder down his back, his hips pressed in as deep as they went, and Jamie holding his face like it mattered that he was there for it.

Every question he'd had in the car went quiet.

He wanted her so much his hands shook.

He pushed the door open.

She saw him first. Her eyes came off Dad's face and found his over Dad's shoulder, and she went still, and Dad's head came up and turned.

Alex watched every part of his father stop. Dad's hands came off her hips like she'd burned him.

"Alex-" His voice broke on it. "Alex, I-"

"Don't," Jamie said. Her hand was still on his face. "Don't. Stay."

Alex stayed in the doorway. He'd had all week to decide what he'd say. None of it was what came out.

"Relax, Dad." His own voice came out flat and low and nothing like relaxed. "It was my idea."

Dad turned to Jamie. She held his eyes and didn't look away.

"She's mine," Alex said. "That's why she's doing it."

The breath went out of his father. Then Dad looked at him for a long second, and Alex had never seen that look on him before. Not the one you give a son. Alex didn't know what to do with it, so he didn't do anything. Then Dad looked down at Jamie, longer, and whatever was in his face, it wasn't guilt. His shoulders came down, a man finally setting down a bag. His hands went back to her hips, slowly, asking. Jamie pressed back into them.

Alex looked at her. She looked back. Three people in a room and nobody pretending.

He let the jacket drop to her floor. He left the door open behind him. There was nothing left to hide behind it.

When he looked back, Dad was easing out of her, slow and careful. He sat back on the edge of the bed, breathing hard, and he didn't reach for his clothes and he didn't look at the door. He looked at Alex, and waited.

Jamie didn't close her legs.

She was flushed down to her chest, her hair stuck to her neck, and between her thighs she was wet and open and Dad's come was sliding out of her onto the sheet. She watched him look. She let him.

"Alex," she said. Just his name.

He got his jeans open and knelt on the bed between her knees, and for a second he just looked at her. At what his father had left in her.

Then he pushed in, one stroke, all the way.

It was like nothing he'd ever felt in her. Slick all the way in and hot, softer than she ever was for him and still clenching, and Dad was still in there. His whole body knew it.

"Fuck," he said into her neck.

"I know," she breathed. "I know."

At the edge of the bed Dad made a sound. Not a word. Alex turned his head. Dad was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees and his hand over his mouth, watching where they were joined like he couldn't look anywhere else.

Your turn* to watch**, Dad.*

Alex fucked her hard. Harder than Saturday, harder than anything. Every stroke pushed more of Dad out of her, wet against his thighs, and every stroke he thought mine, mine, mine.

"Slow down," Dad said. His voice was rough. "You'll finish before she does."

Alex stopped dead inside her.

Jamie laughed. It came out of her helpless, her whole body shaking with it around him, and Alex felt his face go hot.

"Are you seriously coaching me right now?"

"I'm just saying."

"Shut up, Dad."

Jamie was still laughing. She took his face in both hands, like she'd held Dad's, and pulled him down. "He's not wrong," she whispered.

"You too?"

"Show him."

So he slowed down. He pulled almost all the way out and sank back in, slow, letting her feel every inch of it, and then he tilted his hips and found it. The angle he always found. The front wall, the place Dad's cock went straight past.

Jamie came up off the mattress. Her nails went into his back and her mouth opened and nothing came out of it at all.

Alex looked over at his father.

Dad had taken his hand off his mouth. His cock was hard again against his thigh, and he wasn't hiding it. He was watching her face, the face she was making for Alex, and he looked like a man who'd just been beaten at his own game.

Alex knew what Dad had on him. Dad went deeper. She'd told him so, that Friday on her couch, and he'd thought about it in Seattle every night since. Dad got all the way in. Alex got her like this.

"See that face?" Alex said. "That one's mine."

Dad let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I see."

Alex kept hitting it. Short and hard and right there, again and again, and Jamie's legs started to shake around him.

"Whose are you?" It came out rough.

She opened her eyes. She looked past him, at Dad on the edge of the bed with his hand around his own cock now, watching. She held their father's eyes while her brother fucked her.

Then she looked back at Alex.

"Yours."

"Say it again."

"Yours. I'm yours, Alex." Her voice broke. "Yours. Yours. Yours."

She came around him with her heels dug into the backs of his thighs, pulling him in, her whole body clamping down, and it dragged him over with her. He buried himself as deep as he could get and came inside her, minutes after their father had, everything he had, and beside them he heard Dad groan like he was feeling it too.

He stayed there. She held on.

"I love you," she said into his neck, so quietly Dad couldn't have heard it.

"I love you too," he said, just as quiet.

Dad was still there on the edge of the bed. Alex lifted his head and looked at him, and Dad looked back, and neither of them said anything, and for once that felt like enough.

He put his hand flat on her stomach without thinking about why.

Down the hall, through the open door, a phone started to ring in the pocket of the jacket on the hook.

None of them got up.

(To be continued.)