Living in Sin
Copyright© 2025 by Al Steiner
Chapter 16: Tipping the Scales
Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 16: Tipping the Scales - Two single-parent sheriff’s deputies move into a wealthy, uptight neighborhood and accidentally set off a storm of paranoia, lust, and suburban meltdown. As judgmental neighbors spiral, sexually frustrated housewives come calling. Amid threesomes, gossip, and chaos, Scott and Maggie discover their friendship hides something deeper. Darkly funny, raw, and fearless, Living in Sin is a satire of morality, desire, and the lies we live behind picket fences.
Caution: This Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Fa/Fa
Judith Linden parked her Lexus ES in the strip mall lot with the same care she reserved for fine china. No dings, no curb rash, no reason for the gossip mongers in the HOA to suggest she was losing her touch. She stepped out, straightened her linen blazer, and walked toward the Holly Creek HOA post office box with the quiet authority of a woman who had clawed her way to the top of a very small hill.
Six years. Six years of sitting on committees no one else wanted, showing up at bake sales she didn’t care about, memorizing every line of the budget, and making sure the bylaws binder “accidentally” landed in the right hands at just the right time to tilt a vote. Every move calculated. And now she was The President. And presidents handled the mail.
She unlocked the little brass door, opened it, and smiled. A full box. A healthy HOA was a communicative HOA.
Her smile faltered.
Ten letters—two to each board member, including herself. All in identical envelopes, all typed. That smelled like organization. That smelled like trouble.
She took them home, because that’s what she did. Where else would HOA business be handled? Her tidy home office had a paper shredder that was practically a board member in its own right.
At her desk, she slit open one of the two addressed to her.
Margaret Winslow. The admitted lesbian across the street and down two. Requesting—no, demanding—copies of all HOA financial reports and meeting minutes from the past two years. Her third request for such information.
Judith’s lips tightened. The sheer nerve.
She set that letter aside and opened the next. Lena Foxx. The Iranian Muslim. She didn’t even need to read the rest to know it was the same nonsense. She read it anyway. Yes, nearly identical. Clearly the two were in cahoots. Wasn’t that interesting?
The other letters, though technically addressed to Treasurer Darlene Flowers and the three other board members, got the same treatment. Opened. Read. And yes—duplicates.
No part of Judith’s mind entertained the idea that opening mail not addressed to her was wrong. She was the HOA president. She had earned the right to intercept and filter this kind of thing. It was her responsibility.
They were trying to go over her head. Well ... under her head, really, since she was The President and there was no one over her head. But it amounted to the same thing: going behind her back. Trying to get around her perfectly legal responses to these requests. Yes, the bylaws said she had to release the information if asked. But they didn’t say when. And certainly not if the minutes and financial reports contained “confidential” information.
Especially when there was no proof the HOA had even received the letters. None had come registered.
Without hesitation, she stacked all ten into a neat pile and fed them into the shredder. The machine hummed, chewing them into curling ribbons of paper.
She felt no guilt. She wasn’t doing anything wrong—nothing beyond the normal little advantages that came with any elected position. What good was power without perks? Yes, a few of those perks might technically rub against the bylaws, but this was an HOA, not Congress. It wasn’t like she was embezzling money. She’d simply used her position to help out a friend here, smooth something over there. That was part of the game. And part of the game was making sure the board’s business stayed with the board, not handed to two residents with an obvious axe to grind.
What she couldn’t figure out was how Maggie and Lena even knew each other. She’d seen Lena—that Muslim bitch with the pool, courtesy of a husband who made his living importing rugs from other Muslim bitches back in the home country when they weren’t busy breeding terrorists—chatting with Scott Dover a few times while walking that ridiculously goofy dog of hers.
Judith had watched every one of those interactions carefully, just as she watched all public behavior in the neighborhood. At the time, they’d triggered no instincts. Random neighborly chit-chat, she’d thought.
But ... maybe it was time to reevaluate.
Judith went to the living room window—her favorite perch. From here she could command a view of the entire stretch across the street, from communal mailbox to communal mailbox. The cops’ house sat plain as day in her line of sight, though there were no vehicles visible now. There never were. Both parked in the garage and went in that way. Only the kids ever used the front door.
She knew their routine—what routine there was. She knew what time they left for work, and approximately when they got home, though that varied unpredictably except on Friday mornings. On Fridays, after the weird woman in that outrageous relic from the 1960s—still plastered with stickers protesting a war that had ended two decades before Judith was even born—took care of the kids all night, the two cops always came home late.
One day, not long after they’d moved in, Judith had contrived to pass by just after they arrived. She’d greeted them like a neighbor should and caught the smell of beer on both of them. Beer at eight in the morning. They were a couple of drunks.
Nothing happening at that house now. She shifted her gaze to Samantha Belkin’s place, remembering with satisfaction how she’d broken that story for the neighborhood. Samantha and Scott Dover were having an affair. Or at least they had been. For some reason, their meetings suddenly stopped right after she broke the news. Almost like they were pretending they weren’t doing it anymore. She kept a close eye regardless.
Judith craned her head left, bringing Lena’s house into view. That hideous forest green paint with tree-bark trim. That stupid fountain on the front lawn—two naked babies with cupid wings shooting water at each other while holding their bows. A boy cupid and a girl cupid. And they had anatomically correct genitals!
She’d sent an official letter once, telling Lena to remove the offensive decoration or at least put bathing suits on the babies. Lena ignored it. The HOA’s lawyer—whom they kept on retainer, at no small expense—wouldn’t even champion the cause for her. Said it was protected by the First Amendment, even if Judith deemed it obscene. What a waste of HOA money that man was.
Judith remained at her post by the window, the gentle tilt of her head making it look—at least to herself—like she was merely enjoying the view. She wasn’t enjoying it. She was cataloging it.
The neighborhood ticked along like a parade she’d memorized years ago. Michelle strolled to the communal mailbox, rifled through her envelopes before she even shut the little door, and walked back without glancing around. Lorene emerged next, wielding a green watering can and wearing what Judith could only classify as a public nuisance—a bright red Christmas sweater with reindeer cavorting across a snowfield and, worse, a cut that deliberately showcased her obviously fake breasts. Judith’s lips pressed thin. What a slut. No sense of decorum at all.
Movement across the street drew her focus. The garage door at Lena Foxx’s hideous green-and-bark house rumbled upward, and Lena’s car backed into the daylight. Judith’s eyes narrowed. That was a relatively new development—something she’d first noted about three weeks ago. So far, it had happened only three times that she’d witnessed, always around lunchtime.
If the pattern held, Lena would be gone for anywhere from ten minutes to an hour. Probably nothing—unrelated errands, maybe a trip to the store or some little vanity appointment—but a pattern was a pattern. And patterns went on the radar screen. And once something was on the radar, it stayed there until it either disappeared or revealed itself for what it truly was.
She adjusted her stance and settled in for the long watch. Time passed. She took a bathroom break, then poured herself a glass of wine from the box chilling in the refrigerator. Back at her post, she resumed her sweep.
It was just after one when she spotted Scott Dover’s blue pickup turning onto the street. He drove straight into the garage, like always, parking with practiced precision. A moment later, he got out—like always—and reached for the wall-mounted button to close the garage door before stepping into the house. In that brief gap before the door slid shut, Judith noted that Maggie Winslow’s gray sedan was parked inside as well.
She knew Scott hadn’t worked the night before but he would work tonight. Thursday nights were the one shift he and Maggie shared, meaning the hippie in the ridiculous 1960s microbus would be arriving at around six o’clock to take over the children.
Judith made no connection between his arrival and Lena’s return twenty minutes later. The thought that the snooty Iranian bitch might have any involvement with a common cop didn’t even begin to form in her mind. The two existed in separate categories entirely.
She sipped her wine, eyes back on the street.
At exactly 1:30, she heard it—the distinctive cough and rattle of the microbus’s engine. Judith’s gaze sharpened. Sure enough, the battered cream-and-rust relic rolled up the street and eased into its usual parking spot in front of the cops’ house. That was normal. The time was not. Hours ahead of schedule. A definite break in the pattern, and the fact that she could think of no possible reason for it made it a definite blip on the radar.
The driver’s door swung open and the hippie woman stepped out—Birkenstocks over mismatched wool socks, faded boot-cut jeans, and a shapeless knit sweater in red, purple, and mustard. Her reddish-blonde hair was braided in some elaborate, bohemian style—too loose to be neat, too fussy to be accidental—giving her the look of someone who had just come from a craft fair or was on her way to one. She grabbed her faded mandala-print canvas bag from the passenger seat and made her way up the walkway. Without knocking, she let herself into the house, closing the door behind her.
Judith shifted her weight and waited.
Ten minutes passed.
The garage door down the street rose, and Lena Foxx appeared with Ranger walking beside her. Judith immediately noticed the timing—this was not Lena’s usual walking hour. Lena wore jeans, casual sneakers, and a red-and-green sweater. Judith narrowed her eyes. Weren’t those the colors of the flag of Iran? She was pretty sure it was. How culturally insensitive! And here we were, just two weeks from the greatest holiday of them all: the birth of Jesus.
Lena and the dog headed down the driveway toward the sidewalk—and then turned, without hesitation, up the cops’ walkway. Judith blinked. She had not expected that. Lena rang the doorbell, and a moment later the door opened to reveal Scott Dover. Without a word, he stepped aside, and Lena and Ranger went inside. The door shut.
Judith could see no more. She reached for the notebook she kept tucked beside the window and carefully recorded the time, the players, and the sequence. Then she sat back, wineglass in hand, and wondered what it all meant.
She went back to watching.
Inside the house, Lena was clipping Ranger’s harness while Scott checked to make sure his off-duty Glock was secure and well concealed. Mom rummaged through the oversized canvas bag she seemed to take everywhere. It was the final check before what Scott had dubbed “the mission.”
“You’re sure we shouldn’t just take the VW?” Mom asked, looking up. “They know my baby there. It’s part of my brand.”
Scott shook his head. “It’s a perfectly legal marijuana dispensary, not an underground opium den. They’re not going to flag my Tacoma.”
Mom made a faint hmm noise, clearly unconvinced.
The mission was pretty simple: Mom was going to show Lena how to navigate a dispensary. Lena had loved the first gummy enough to ask for more, and Mom, predictably, had decided the moment required a full ceremonial introduction to the “modern cannabis commerce experience.”
The catch was that in this part of the Sacramento Valley, only the City of Heritage allowed recreational dispensaries. And they weren’t down by the riverfront, tucked between the brewery district and the artsy cafés, or out in the tree-lined splendor of the Fabulous 40s. They were in the other Heritage—the one where you locked your doors, kept your head on a swivel, and didn’t linger after dark.
Which was why Scott insisted on going.
“I’m a cop, I’m armed, and we’ll be fine,” he’d told Lena when she hesitated. “Besides, I’m kind of curious how it all works now.”
He couldn’t actually go inside. Dispensaries had to log every customer’s ID, and the last thing he wanted was a permanent digital breadcrumb that Deputy Scott Dover had visited a weed shop. But he could sit in the parking lot with Ranger while Mom walked Lena through the process.
Out in the garage, Scott hit the opener. The big door rumbled upward, sunlight spilling across the hood of his truck. He couldn’t help but wonder if Judith was perched in her window right now, binoculars in hand, trying to piece together what this little field trip meant.
They piled into the Tacoma. Ranger trotted straight to the passenger side, hopped up, and plopped his butt in the seat like he owned it. When Lena tried to coax him into the back, he gave a low, entirely unserious growl that still conveyed the point.
“Guess that settles it,” Scott said, fastening the dog’s seatbelt harness.
Which left Lena and Mom in the backseat. Ranger, victorious, sat tall in the passenger seat, nose to the breeze and tongue hanging out like the happiest wingman in the world.
They got on the freeway at the Gardenville onramp, heading south, toward the city. Traffic was light—midday, middle of the week—and Scott kept the Tacoma in the middle lane, letting the hum of the tires and Ranger’s panting fill the quiet.
Once they passed out of the City of Gardenville and into Heritage County proper, the shift was gradual but unmistakable. Well-kept subdivisions gave way to older tracts where lawns had given up the fight, chain-link fences leaned at odd angles, and faded “For Rent” signs hung in front of houses that had been slapped with fresh paint but still sagged at the edges. The further they went, the more the strip malls looked tired—one too many empty storefronts, one too many dollar stores filling the gaps.
In the backseat, Mom was mid-explanation to Lena about how, back in the 90s, she’d worked as a vet tech. “So if Ranger ever needs his anal glands expressed, I can do it for you,” she offered brightly.
Lena gave a polite smile. “Thank you, but the groomers take care of that. He goes in once a week for a bath, clip, and groom, and every fourth visit someone puts on the glove.”
Mom scoffed. “Gloves just hamper your grip on the glands. You can’t feel what you’re doing.”
“Can we change the subject?” Scott said from the driver’s seat. “Like now?”
Without missing a beat, Mom shifted gears. “Okay, so you have to hear the story about the time my parents went to Woodstock with Tom and Mary Kingsley.”
Lena’s eye widened. “You mean Jake Kingsley’s parents?” she asked. “Caydee Kingsley’s grandparents?”
“That’s right,” Mom said. “They met Tom and Mary at a protest at Heritage State. The pigs came in and tried to break it up, but everyone started chanting ‘Make love, not war!’ right back at them, and the cops gassed everybody. Knocked a few heads with those clubs of theirs. Made some arrests. My mom said they all ended up in the park with tears streaming down their faces and snot pouring out of their noses, Tom with a cut on her forehead from a baton. And then, Mary pulls out a joint. Passed it around like they’d all been friends forever. A week later, they were on the road to Woodstock together.”
Scott kept his eyes on the road. He’d heard the story his entire life, and he still didn’t buy it. Once, he’d tried to get the truth out of Grandma Dover, but by then it had been too late—the dementia had already taken hold, and most of the 1960s and early 70s had been erased from her memory.
Scott took the offramp for El Camino Avenue and turned right, heading west. Within a few blocks, the freeway sound faded, replaced by the low, uneven hum of a neighborhood that never quite slept. They were in The Heights now—the worst ghetto north of Sacramento, pressed right up against Northwood, where he and Maggie worked Adam Watch. The only real difference between the two was political geography.
For whatever reason, back in the dim, dark days of 1960 or so, the rich white men in suits who drew municipal boundaries had decided The Heights was as far as they wanted to annex. The northern chunk was left to the county’s care—or neglect—and christened Northwood. The names sounded different on paper. On the ground, they were the same: tired streets, old grudges, and too many people living on the edge.
El Camino itself was a straight shot west, but every block told a little more of the same story. Faded strip malls sat half-empty, their signage sun-bleached and flaking. Liquor stores had steel bars over the windows. Graffiti tags crept up the sides of pawn shops and convenience marts, layered over each other in a contest no one was winning. Pedestrians moved in small, tight clusters, watching the street the way prey animals watch the brush.
The further west they went, the rougher it looked. Vacant lots were choked with weeds and trash. Chain-link fences leaned inward like they were tired of standing guard. A man in a puffy jacket pushed a shopping cart loaded with black garbage bags; a block later, a woman in pajama pants stood under a bus stop shelter, chain-smoking and staring into the middle distance.
The dispensary stood alone, squatting in what had once been some kind of industrial building—cinder block walls painted a deep forest green, a new roof, and a freshly paved parking lot. WEST SIDE DREAM STATION was splashed across the front in tall white letters. A smaller sign near the entrance announced with pride: Black-Owned and Operated.
The building and its parking lot were ringed in wrought iron fencing. The gate was open since it was business hours but would present a formidable obstacle when locked down for the night. Cameras watched from every corner. A security guard patrolled the lot—white, short, and considerably overweight. He carried an old .38 police special in a hip holster and looked about as intimidating as a night manager at a bowling alley.
Scott pulled into a slot at the far edge of the lot, turning the Tacoma so it faced out toward the street. Quick exit if needed.
“Okay,” he said, putting it in park. “Go do your thing.”
Mom and Lena climbed out, Ranger watching them go with mild interest. They were buzzed into the main entrance and disappeared inside the dispensary.
Scott sat in the Tacoma with Ranger beside him, the dog leaning into the scratches Scott was running along his back. His eyes stayed on the parking lot, occasionally drifting to the security guard making lazy loops between the cars.
Scott didn’t like the idea of people with less firearms training than a cop being allowed to carry a gun as part of their job. Having someone like that behind you in any critical situation was a nightmare scenario. Would they know to keep the good guys out of their line of fire? Would they know not to put their fucking finger on the trigger unless they were about to shoot someone? And that pistol—an old .38 police special—would it even fire if needed? Probably best for all involved if it didn’t.
The guard’s route eventually brought him Scott’s way. Scott caught the movement in his peripheral vision, sighed, and rolled down the window.
“Loitering’s not allowed in the parking lot,” the guard said, resting one hand on the butt of his revolver like he’d just walked off a TV cop show.
“I’m waiting for my mother and her friend,” Scott said evenly. “They’re inside. You know—the two ladies that got out of my truck a few minutes ago and went in?”
The guard squinted, then nodded slowly. “Yeah, I saw that. But loitering’s still not allowed.”
Scott stared at him. “I’m in my vehicle.”
“Yeah,” the guard said, like that somehow proved his point, “but you’re not leaving. You’ll have to pull out and park somewhere else until they’re done. Or go in and join ‘em. As long as you’ve got a driver’s license, they’ll let you in.”
Scott sighed and reached into his back pocket. The guard didn’t even flinch—another red flag in the growing list of reasons this guy had no business carrying a gun. He simply stood there, watching, as Scott’s hand disappeared from view. Into his waistband.
If Scott had been drawing his own pistol, he could’ve put one right between the man’s eyes before he even realized he was under attack. But all he came up with was his badge wallet. He flipped it open and held it up.
“I’m an off-duty cop,” Scott said. “I’m armed, so I can’t go inside because I’m guessing they frown on guns in there, right?”
“That is the policy,” the guard confirmed, with the air of someone who’d just successfully recited a test answer.
“Any chance you can give me a little professional courtesy?” Scott asked, his tone implying they were two brother street crawlers who both knew how the game was played. “Just let me sit here until my nice hippie mother gets her week’s supply of THC gummies and teaches my neighbor how to do the same?”
The guard thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Yeah, I can do that.”
What Scott didn’t count on was that the man’s idea of professional courtesy apparently included spending the next twenty-five minutes standing at his window, recounting his experiences as a security guard at a legal weed place.
None of them were interesting.
Homeless guy tries to use the bathroom? No way. A customer needs to be escorted out because the ATM machine won’t take his card and he’s blaming us? That’s some serious shit. A car alarm goes off in the lot, but it’s a false alarm? Edge-of-your-seat stuff.
Scott sat through it, nodding just enough to keep the stories moving.
Finally, the dispensary door opened and Mom and Lena emerged, acting like best friends who’d just come back from a weekend retreat. Mom had her canvas bag slung over one shoulder, and Lena had that satisfied, “I’ve been shown the ropes” look.
The drive back was quieter at first—El Camino sliding by in reverse order, the scenery shifting from rough to merely worn. But by the time they hit the freeway, Mom was leaning forward between the seats, her canvas bag crumpled in her lap, eyes bright with the sudden memory of another “where were you” moment.
“I was in Santa Cruz when Kurt Cobain died,” she began, as if this was an important cultural milestone Lena needed to understand. “Working part-time at the juice bar in the co-op, studying for my Reiki certification. We had the radio on behind the counter—college station, nothing but deep cuts—and the DJ just stopped talking in the middle of a set. Total dead air for maybe ten seconds. Then he said Kurt was gone. Shot himself. They started playing ‘All Apologies’ on repeat. The customers got really quiet. This one girl in a sunflower dress started crying into her wheatgrass shot. I just ... remember feeling like something big had ended. Like the whole decade had shifted right then.”
Scott had heard the story before. Many times. He glanced at Lena in the rearview—she was listening politely, head tilted.
Mom wasn’t done. “That was before you were born, Scotty. But you remember where you were on 9/11, don’t you?”
Scott kept his eyes on the road. “I remember it well,” he said. “Although ... I don’t know if I can separate what I actually remember from everything I’ve seen about it since. The images, the documentaries, the anniversary specials—it’s like it’s all one memory now.”
Lena’s gaze drifted to the window. “I remember it,” she said quietly. “I was a kid. We were at my private school in the city. One of the teachers told us during morning assembly. They didn’t let us watch the TV coverage—we just saw the adults whispering, looking at each other like they didn’t know what to do next. My parents picked me up early. I remember my mom holding my hand the whole drive home, even when we were stopped at lights.”
The conversation faded after that, replaced by the steady hum of the tires on pavement. The freeway carried them back toward Gardenville, where the air smelled faintly of eucalyptus and the houses regained their lawns.
Scott took the off-ramp, wound through the neighborhood, and pulled into their driveway. The garage door rattled open, swallowing the truck in shadow. As he shifted into park, he couldn’t help but wonder—again—if Judith was watching.
Judith’s eyes tracked the blue Tacoma as it eased into the cops’ driveway. The garage door rumbled up, swallowed the truck, and dropped back down like a curtain on the final act of a play she hadn’t been invited to watch. She sat very still, wineglass hovering at her lips, waiting for someone to reemerge.
No one did.
Well now...
The trio—Scott Dover, the hippie woman in her thrift-store disaster of a sweater, and Lena Foxx, Her Majesty of Hideous Paint and Obscene Fountains—had returned together from ... where? And why was Maggie Winslow not in that truck? The pattern had been broken hours ago, and now the pieces were in a jumble.
Judith swirled her wine, frowning at the pale curl of liquid along the glass. What could tie them together? Scott, who had been having an affair with Samantha Belkin until recently. The hippie woman, who might—just might—be related to Maggie Winslow. (The hair was similar in that unkempt, “I make my own shampoo from lavender and disappointment” way.) And Lena, the snooty Iranian with the terrorist-husband rug business.
What possible errand could involve all three of them?
She reached for her notebook, the familiar weight of it a comfort. Flipping to a clean page, she wrote the date in neat block letters at the top, then began logging:
1:30 p.m. — Hippie woman arrives (EARLY).
1:40 p.m. — Lena arrives with dog, enters house.
1:50 p.m. — All three depart in Scott’s truck (blue Tacoma).
2:45 p.m. — All three return in same truck.
2:46 p.m. — Garage door closes. No one reemerges.
She underlined the last entry twice.
And just to complicate matters—Maggie Winslow had picked up the children today. On a Thursday. That was Scott’s job on Thursdays, unless something was up. Which meant something was up.
Judith set her pen down, staring across the street at the sealed garage like she could will it open. The air in her living room felt thicker, heavier. There had to be a story here. There was always a story. The trick was knowing where to start pulling the thread so the whole thing unraveled in her hands.
She tapped the pen against her notebook, eyes narrowing. Whatever it was, Lena Foxx and Maggie Winslow were connected now.
But why? What was the connection?
Her mind began to sift through possibilities, each one more satisfying than the last. A secret lovers’ triangle? A backroom deal over some shady real estate? Drugs—of course drugs were possible; that hippie woman practically smelled of them. She sipped her wine and let the scenarios bloom like poisonous flowers. Sooner or later, someone would slip, and when they did, Judith Linden would be there to catch every detail.
Christopher and Katie were practically vibrating with energy, eyes locked on Ranger as if he were a brand-new amusement park ride.
“Can we play with him?” Christopher asked.
Lena smiled. “Sure. He loves kids. If you’ve got a ball, he’ll chase it as long as you can keep throwing it.”
Maggie hesitated. “I don’t know ... he’s a big dog to be alone with the kids.”
“They could take a blow torch to Ranger’s face and he’d only grin and lick them in return,” Lena said. “He has no detectable malice.”
Mom had been watching Ranger with a dreamy, almost mystical expression. “I can read his energy,” she announced. “There’s not so much as an ounce of hostility in his soul. Probably because he gets his anal glands expressed on a regular basis.”
Maggie’s mouth twitched like she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or leave the room.
“Nevertheless,” Mom went on, “I’ll go out there with them. I’ll even pick up any little ‘gifts’ he leaves on the lawn. It’s been so long since I’ve had a dog.” She sighed. “The last one we had, when Scotty was a kid, ran away and never came back.”
Scott didn’t say anything, but the memory was firm in his brain—their mean little cocker spaniel, Dallas, who had the bad fortune of arriving in their household during Mom and Dad’s brief but intense vegan phase. They’d refused to give him anything meat-based because of “all the suffering that went into that kibble.” No wonder the dog had bolted; he was probably still out there somewhere, trying to make up for years of protein deficiency.