My New Stepdad

Mom married him six months ago, and I have spent every single one of those months trying not to feel what I feel.

He's not like my real dad was. He's steady. Quiet. The kind of man who fixes the garbage disposal without being asked and carries the heavy groceries in one trip. He has these big capable hands and this low calm voice, and when something breaks in the house he just looks at it for a minute and then makes it work again. I've caught myself watching those hands more times than I can count.

Last weekend Mom went to visit her sister overnight. Just one night. She kissed his cheek at the door and told us to behave, and we both laughed, and I told myself it would be fine. It was fine. It was completely fine until the storm rolled in around nine and the power flickered and died.

I came downstairs with my phone flashlight and found him in the kitchen, already pulling candles out of the junk drawer like he'd been preparing for this his whole life. We sat at the kitchen table in the candlelight and talked, really talked, for the first time ever. He told me about growing up on a farm, about his first truck, about how nervous he was marrying my mom because he wanted so badly to get it right with me too. My throat got tight. Nobody had ever tried that hard with me.

The candles burned low. The rain hammered the windows. And then the smoke detector in the hallway started chirping, low battery, and he stood up to deal with it, and I followed him, and somehow we ended up standing very close together in the dark hallway while he reached up to twist the detector off the ceiling. His shirt rode up. I saw the line of his stomach, and my mouth went dry.

He came down from the step stool and we were face to face in the dark, closer than we'd ever been. He told me I should get some sleep, but he didn't move. I whispered that I didn't want to sleep, that the storm was too loud, that I was scared. It wasn't entirely a lie. But it wasn't entirely the truth either, and we both knew it. He studied my face for a long moment, and I watched the war play out behind his eyes, the good man fighting the wanting man. The wanting man won.

He cupped my face in those big capable hands, the ones I'd been watching for six months, and kissed me. It was gentle at first, careful, like he was giving me every chance to pull away. I didn't pull away. I melted into him, my hands fisting in his flannel shirt, and the kiss turned deeper, hungrier, until he was backing me down the hallway toward his bedroom, toward the bedroom he shared with my mother, which should have stopped us both cold but somehow made it hotter.

He laid me on the bed and knelt over me, kissing down my throat, and I was trembling, not from fear, from want. He peeled my tank top off slowly, reverently, like unwrapping something precious. When his mouth closed around my nipple I gasped and arched up, and he made this low sound in his chest, almost a growl, that went straight through me.

I told him not to stop, that I'd wanted this since the day he moved in. That undid him. His hands went to my pajama shorts and slid them down, and then his mouth was between my legs, and I had to press my fist to my mouth to stay quiet. He was thorough and unhurried, his tongue working me with the same steady patience he brought to everything he fixed, like I was something precious that deserved his full attention. I came with my whole body shaking, my fingers knotted in the bedsheets that smelled like him.

Then he was above me, his jeans pushed down, and he paused at my entrance, looking into my eyes, giving me one last chance. I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him into me. He filled me completely, stretching me, and I moaned into his shoulder. He moved slow and deep, the bed creaking softly beneath us, his hands cradling my face like I was the most important thing in his world.

He took me apart piece by piece, building me up again and again until I was sobbing his name into the pillow, coming so hard I saw stars. He finished deep inside me with a groan he couldn't hold back, his arms wrapped tight around me like he never wanted to let go.

After, we lay there in the dark listening to the rain, and he held me, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world and the most forbidden thing all at once. Before I slipped back to my room, he kissed my forehead and said this couldn't happen again.

But here's what I know, written here where only this diary will see: the power came back on at dawn, Mom came home at noon, and everything looks normal. He fixed the smoke detector battery. He made pancakes. He is the same steady, quiet man.

Except now, when he hands me something, his fingers linger. When our eyes meet across the dinner table, his go dark. And I know, I know, that the next time Mom goes away, even for one night, he'll be waiting. And so will I.