Mrs. Glist had just come out of the shower. Her hair was wrapped in a towel. Otherwise, she was naked. I stood in the doorway and stared. I stared at her waspy waist and high breasts. I gazed intensely at her broad hips and her sliver of pubic hair, at her long legs and slender neck, and at her deep navel. My eyes were everywhere but hers. She stood still, looking at me, I think. Minutes passed and I kept looking. I had forgotten that I had come into her room hoping to use her bathroom while Lindsey was in the shower. I had some vague awareness that I should turn around, but I was caught in a spell. After an almost interminable time, I heard Lindsey call out my name, “Cathy.” I looked down, shut the door and went back to Lindsey’s room.

I was fifteen at the time. I was terrified what would happen when Mrs. Glist and I met at the breakfast table later that morning. It was almost surreally normal. She gave no indication that I had spent something like five minutes staring at her nakedness. Apparently, neither did I. Lindsey and I went off to the mall and chatted about Robbie, a boy we both had a little crush on.

Lindsey was my best friend and we spend most of our time at her house. It was relatively empty: she was an only child and her family had no pets. Mrs. Glist worked at home, but she spent a lot of time in her office, or out with clients. My house was a fool’s riot dream: I have five siblings, and at that time, we had three very large and excitable dogs. My mother was a stay at home mom who fixed every meal from scratch and made as many of our clothes as we would allow (we weren’t particularly kind about indulging this particular miserliness).

Lindsey and I loved the freedom to hole up in her bedroom and talk freely, play backgammon, or whatever else we wanted to do without a younger brother barging in to show us his science project, or my mom calling up for us to walk one of the dogs.

For me, though, the best part was the relaxed atmosphere. While my home was messy and invasive, it was also surprisingly structured. There was a decorum expected amongst the daily riot. Dinner was always at 6:15 sharp. We had to change out of athletic clothing as soon as we got home. We had to say “please” and “thank you” for everything, as well as “may I.” Our shirts were always properly ironed, if covered in doggy hair.

The Glists were much more casual. Dinner was served whenever it was done, which was as likely to be 9 as 6. Proper clothing was what you were wearing. Manners consisted of “thanks,” “okay” and “I guess.” When Mr. Glist was out of town on business, Mrs. Glist and Lindsey often spent Saturday morning lounging in their bathrobes and had left-over pizza for breakfast (one of the rules in my house was that each food had one—and only one—proper meal; consumption of a dinner food for breakfast was forbidden).

Those occasional Mr. Glist-free Saturdays were my favorites. Lindsey and I would stay up late on Friday night watching scary movies and sleep in as long was we wanted. Sometimes Mrs. Glist had pancakes for us, sometimes we ate cold pizza, sometimes she ordered Chinese food at 11 am and we had hot-and-sour soup and drank cocoa. It was never regimented and never routine.

However, the casual attire meant that on several occasions after that first, I would encounter Mrs. Glist naked, or in a loosely-tied robe while Lindsey was in the shower or otherwise occupied. And I always stared. And stared. Our eyes never met and nothing was said. She would stand like a deer caught in headlights, and I would look at her as if I was witnessing a wonderful and rare celestial event. Only once did Mrs. Glist do anything that might suggest she was an active participant: she shifted her arm slightly—less than an inch—and her robe fell open. I watched as her nipples hardened. I think I had had turned sixteen a few weeks before. She never did anything like that again.

I suppose this sounds as if all of my time in the Glists’ home was sexually charged. It wasn’t. Mr. Glist was rarely out of town, and even on the occasions of his absence, Mrs. Glist and I rarely had such encounters. I think that I saw her nude or nearly so perhaps six or seven times in two years. Most of the time, we behaved entirely normally.

Well, perhaps that isn’t quite honest, either. While I rarely gazed on Mrs. Glist’s rather amazing nude figure, there were other, more frequent times when I found myself looking at her, transfixed. These long gazes always occurred when Lindsey and Mr. Glist were elsewhere. Sometimes, Mrs. Glist would lean over to put something away and I would be looking at her broad hips and toned bottom, then suddenly realize that she had stood up and that I had lost all sense of time. Sometimes, Mrs. Glist would join Lindsey and I in the swimming pool and I would become fixated on her narrow waist until Lindsey splashed me.

At various times, I found myself staring at Mrs. Glist’s bust, her legs, her waist, her bottom, and even the back of her head. I think Lindsey may have suspected I had a crush on her mom, but I didn’t. I didn’t fantasize about her, or even think of her much outside of the staring episodes. I had crushes on boys and even dated a few.

Shortly after I turned seventeen, Lindsey’s parents divorced. The divorce was very amicable, and wasn’t a surprise to me. I always suspected that Mr. and Mrs. Glist were better friends than spouses or intimates. My parents, and the parents of my other friends, seemed to have some degree of physicality about them, but Mr. and Mrs. Glist almost never touched. Mrs. Glist also would note “what a cutie” various actors were when we watched a movie. Mr. Glist seemed resigned that his wife seemed more interested in those pixilated people than himself.

While Lindsey took the divorce much better than I would have imagined I could, she had occasional fits of anger or sorrow and often divulged things I didn’t know about her family. I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked, but I found out that the Glists’ had something of a shotgun marriage when Mrs. Glist had become pregnant with Lindsey at sixteen. In some ways, it explained a lot. Mrs. Glist certainly looked much younger than my parents (who were married at twenty-five, and started having a child every year-and-a-half for the next eight years). They also seemed more youthful in attitude than my other friends’ parents.

After the divorce, I got to know Mr. Glist a lot better. It turns out that he is the most naturally giving person I know. I think he always deferred to Mrs. Glist on parenting while they were married, so we didn’t have a chance to see how funny and caring he was until Lindsey started spending two weeks a month with him. He bought a house just two miles from the old house, so Lindsey could stay in the same school, and took us out to do fun things like horseback riding or hiking whenever I was staying with he and Lindsey.

When Lindsey was with her mom, things became even more casual. Both of them liked to lounge around in their robes, so I caught Mrs. Glist nearly naked more often. I still wasn’t admitting my crush on her, but on some level, I got to the point where I expected to stand and stare at her. When I would stay over on Fridays or Saturdays, we had grown into a shower order: Mrs. Glist, Lindsey, and myself. I always needed to pee once Lindsey got in the shower and found myself in Mrs. Glists’ bedroom door, gazing at her. Sometimes she would have her back to me when I entered and I would be transfixed by the narrowness of her waist and the musculature of her buttocks and legs. Once I found myself placing my hands in the air in front of me as if I was encircling her waist, taking measure of the improbable smallness of Mrs. Glist’s figure. Later in that week, I was studying and suddenly found myself getting a tape measure and calculating how big Mrs. Glist’s waist was. I guessed twenty inches. Mrs. Glist is a tall woman, perhaps five foot nine. My waist at the time was twenty-two inches, and I am thin.

At other times, she would have just come out of the shower, her blonde locks always wrapped in a towel. She would look in my direction, and might turn to face me, but we would never meet each other’s eyes, and never close the distance between us. I don’t think she looked at me while I was looking at her. I think the rules of the game required her to look away. I don’t understand the rules, since what were doing was so obviously forbidden that rules shouldn’t have applied, but we followed them more rigorously than any other rules in that house.

That spring, two things changed. One Saturday, I was once again in Mrs. Glist’s bedroom doorway, looking at her nakedness. I felt my heart beating faster than normal, and breaking the rules, I allowed my gaze to reach up to her face. Her eyes were looking away, towards the mirror. I realized that she was watching my eyes via the mirror, and probably had been all along. Our eyes met in the mirror. After a long time, she turned her head towards me, and our eyes met without the intermediating mirror. Her mouth turned into a soft smile, and then she looked away.

After that, my urinary urgency disappeared. I no longer desperately needed to pee while Lindsey was showering. Instead, I would wake with a fast heartbeat and a pressing anticipation for Lindsey to turn on the shower water so I could return to Mrs. Glist’s room. We went back to the rules, our eyes carefully avoided, but my conscious mind’s denial was beginning to crack.

A few weeks after our eyes met, Mrs. Glist became pregnant. The pregnancy was very hard on Lindsey because her father was the father. While that sounds counterintuitive, that Mr. and Mrs. Glist had had a one-off night of passion that ended in pregnancy gave Lindsey hope that her parents might reconcile. I suppose Lindsey wasn’t handling the divorce as well as I thought, and it was only the possibility of the remarriage that brought out how much she longed for having her parents together.

This possibility was hard on me, too, but for the opposite reason: I was afraid that they might reunite. Before the divorce, a scant five months before, Mr. Glist was Lindsey’s dad. But since then, he had become my substitute dad, the father who actually had time for me. I knew that he would subvert his parenting role to Mrs. Glist were they to reunite. And Mrs. Glist, in our strange way, had become my lover.

No, I didn’t fantasize about her sexually, let alone masturbate to her image. The closest I came to sexual contact was a step in her direction. She was four month pregnant, and had come out of the shower with her back to me. I was studying her form, looking for subtle changes brought by the pregnancy. She turned towards me rather suddenly (part of the rules disallowed her making sudden moves: in fact, except for turning slowly towards me, she was to remain still, as was I), and let out a breath. Or perhaps a moan. I couldn’t be sure, but I felt the desire in it, and the desire in myself. I took a step into the room, but then caught her chin in the top of my vision. It moved slightly to the side and then back. I stepped back and stared at her engorged nipples until I heard the water in Lindsey’s shower stop.

As her pregnancy advanced, the rules changed slightly. She would turn slowly as I stood watching, showing me her growing belly. Sometimes she would run her hand over her budging abdomen, at others, she would just let her arms hand by her sides, motionless.

The pregnancy also brought another change: I could touch Mrs. Glist. Everybody felt they could touch her belly, perhaps even feel for a kick, so I felt no inhibition. Strangely, despite the decided erotic charge that hovered over our relationship, this touching was not charged. It was part of her being a mother-to-be and me being her daughter’s best friend. It was routine, but not obsessive. Lindsey would often feel her mother’s belly with delight, and then place my hand on it when she felt a kick.

Only once did this change, and it was also the only time that something erotic passed between Mrs. Glist and myself in Lindsey’s presence. Lindsey had been listening with her ear for the baby’s heartbeat, and once she found it, placed my ear against Mrs. Glist’s belly. I became suddenly very aware that my face was pressed against the flesh of the woman I stared at regularly. My heart began beating wildly and I started to think about what Mrs. Glist’s skin would taste like. I looked up and saw that Lindsey had turned her back to us. I turned my head slightly and licked Mrs. Glist’s belly, and then kissed it. Then I ran quickly from the room, ostensibly to the bathroom, fearing that I had broken the rules too blatantly. It was also the first time I touched myself intimately after an encounter with Mrs. Glist. I rubbed my belly and found my hands drifting over my breasts. Only with difficulty did I stop myself from masturbating and regained my composure.

I was still in denial about the true nature of my attraction to Mrs. Glist. I would tell myself that I was just intrigued with how the body changes when pregnant, and that Mrs. Glist’s body, always preternaturally shapely, was particularly compelling during this change. And it was true that the changes her body underwent were compelling. Her waist, which was thinner than any woman I’ve known, spread somewhat, but most of the baby’s mass went forward, so that from behind, she still maintained an hourglass figure. If anything, the gains in her bust offset the gains in her waist, giving her more of a Dolly Parton-esque figure than before.

Sometimes I would think about measuring her while I looked at her. My mind carefully placing the tape measure around her waist, her hips, and her bust. My fingers would be shaking in my mind as my fingers caressed her skin, especially as I moved the tape against her enlarging areola. I think I may have starting shaking slightly in real life, too. I could feel the tension starting to manifest itself in me more each time I viewed her nakedness.

In her eighth month of pregnancy, I started having dreams about Mrs. Glist. They started out tame enough. She was usually clothed and we were talking about things that were bothering me in other parts of my life, especially my college decisions. I was going to graduate in another six months, and hadn’t decided on a college. I had applied to enough that I knew I would get in somewhere, but I didn’t know where or what I wanted to do, and that seemed like an unbearable burden. Lindsey and I talked sometimes about going to the same school and being roommates, but she was a better student than I, so I knew that this was just talk. Lindsey would surely get into a top twenty school, while I would get into a lesser program, quite possibly the local state university. That was also worrisome, since I couldn’t imagine living at home once I was out of high school.

So, in my dreams, Mrs. Glist became my college advisor. She helped me weigh the pros and cons, and get right down to what I wanted. But each dream saw her wearing less. After a week of progressively risqué dreams, a nude Mrs. Glist asked me what I really wanted, speaking about schools. I answered with a blush and, “To touch you, I think.” I was very meek, but I was in love with my best friends mother. The next few nights repeat this same dream, more or less. Then, the following Saturday, one which Lindsey was spending with Mr. Glist, I dreamed that I kissed Mrs. Glist’s belly, then pushed her blouse aside and took her nipple in my mouth. I suckled on her until I woke up. I couldn’t get the image of Mrs. Glist’s head thrown back in ecstasy out of my mind, and masturbated furiously to two orgasms before I could get myself together.

After that, my fantasy life turned into the Cathy-Mrs. Glist show. I was masturbating myself to sleep every night with images of Mrs. Glist and myself making love. Often, there was great weirdness involved. I was a suckling baby, or had a penis. Once I worked myself into an incredible wreck imagining I was giving her oral sex and her water broke. I was terribly aroused and ashamed of these fantasies. I was also increasingly paranoid that someone would discover my feelings for Mrs. Glist, especially Lindsey or Mr. Glist. On the other hand, I felt anxious to let Mrs. Glist know. Or rather, break the rule between us that prevented me from being more direct in my desire. I had no doubt that she knew that I was attracted to her—only an idiot wouldn’t figure out that our staring sessions meant something was happening between us—but I didn’t think I could say anything.

I started fantasizing that I began showing myself to her during our ten minutes of intimacy. It would have been easy enough—I always wore a bathrobe around the house, like everyone else, and could have pulled it aside and shown Mrs. Glist my breasts. I could have slipped my hand into my robe and touched myself while she showed me her growing belly. But I understood that I shouldn’t do that. Somehow, the rules of our game dictated that this be a looking session only. Mrs. Glist could enjoy the attention, but wasn’t to take my nudity in, nor was it to become explicitly sexual. When I wasn’t fantasizing or masturbating, I realized that she must justify what would be considered sexually inappropriate behavior by almost any court only by preventing it from going any farther. My attempt to step over the threshold of the doorway was a violation that I must not repeat.

Yet I stood there, the next time I saw her, trembling, almost having to will myself not to disrobe and touch myself. I could feel the moisture between my thighs, and was afraid that Lindsey would smell my arousal. Worse, I could see Mrs. Glist struggle. She wasn’t looking in the mirror; she was looking down or to the side. Her hands stroked her belly more sensuously than before, and briefly cupped her breasts. Then, for the first time, she turned from me.

A week later, Mrs. Glist had her baby.

I couldn’t stay with them for over a month. Lindsey’s father let her stay with her mom during the first two months, understanding how Lindsey wanted to help out. But my parents felt that I would be a burden staying overnight, so I had to keep my visits to an hour or two every few days. There were no opportunities to see Mrs. Glist naked, and I feared that there would never be again.

I was sad for a month, but then I began to feel relieved. Suddenly, I realized I had become obsessed with Mrs. Glist, and to be away from her hypnotic presence was probably a good thing.

I had horrible spring fever, even though it was February. I had gotten accepted to a number of schools and was waiting for the final financial aid notification. High school seemed rather pointless for me, and I just wanted to go have fun. So I blew off a lot of homework and went hiking as much as I could. I even got Mr. Glist to take me horseback riding without Lindsey. I was feeling very ordinary—and good.

Lindsey returned to her two-week parent switch routine. I easily fell back into my old habits of staying most of the weekend with her and whichever parent she was staying with. The first of these periods was with her dad, so there wasn’t any pressure or weirdness. Everything was fine and wonderful with Mr. Glist, and Mrs. Glist’s pregnancy hadn’t changed that. Lindsey was happy because not only were her parents getting along as well as always, but also they spent more time together, so she felt like she lived in a family with two homes. She called her mom’s house the “spring home” and her dad’s the “autumn home,” as if they were wealthy ner-do-wells.

Then Lindsey went back to the “spring home.” I was a nervous wreck for a week. I told everyone I was anxious about financial aid, but I was afraid of what would happen when I was at Mrs. Glist’s in the morning for the first time since her pregnancy—and the first time since she had shown how aroused she was. I tossed and turned with abortive fantasies. I struggled with whether I should avoid going to Mrs. Glint’s bedroom or not. Surely, I shouldn’t, but could I avoid doing so? I knew the baby, Ashley, was staying in Mrs. Glist’s room. Our old habits would be more wrong now. I had to stop.

That morning, I decided to pre-empt the problem by taking the first shower. But Mrs. Glist took the next shower. I brushed my hair out, listening to the water run in Mrs. Glist’s shower. I moisturized my legs as the water pounded against the wall, a constant wail. Then it stopped. Lindsey got up from bed and went into her bathroom, just like always. I heard the water start and walked out of the room. Then I was standing in Mrs. Glist’s bedroom door. She was dressed in a robe. I stopped and stared, unable to control myself. She met my eyes and picked Ashley out of her crib. She sat on the edge of the bed, facing me and pulled her robe aside, revealing her breast. She put Ashley to her breast and I watched as the infant suckled. Then I looked into Mrs. Glist’s eyes. She was trembling slightly. I put my hand under my robe and caressed my breast and nipple.

Mrs. Glist licked her lip and then bit it. I unfastened my robe and let it fall to the floor. She stared at my body and I returned to playing with my breast. I closed my eyes and pulled hard on my nipple. I heard Mrs. Glist gasp. I opened my eyes and saw a look of terror on her face and then realized I didn’t hear water running anymore.