Chapter 2

Nearing home, my fingers press harder now. I circle my clit through the damp fabric, my breath coming shallow amid the rideshare’s gentle vibrations. The driver glances repeatedly in the rearview mirror, his eyes widening when he realizes that the sexy young girl he picked up at the airport is subtly masturbating in his back seat, but I ignore him. The parallels between Stella’s fire and my own burn too bright for me to stop thinking about them. The forbidden pull that my mother and I shared toward our daddies — finally acted upon when we stopped giving a shit about what other people might think of us — feels like an inherited flame. When the car enters my old neighborhood, my hips shift subtly, pressure building low in my belly. My panties grow stickier, and by the time the driver turns onto the last street, arousal throbs steadily. I smooth my sundress down, thank the poor driver in a flat voice without meeting his eyes, and step into the driveway.

I push the door open without knocking and drop my rucksack on the floor. Peter looks up from his recliner in surprise. Our eyes meet.

He looks wearier than when I last saw him, but the hunger in his stare still pins me in place the way it had when I first became aware that our sexual attraction was mutual. I remember how he used to watch me bend over to pick up laundry — jaw tight, eyes widening — and how I would find myself out of breath and unable to move until something, usually Mom, snapped me out of it. But there is no Stella now to interrupt us, no bothersome footsteps on the stairs to force us out of our shared headspace, so I just stand there, letting him examine me.

In this moment, I recall the subtle hints my mother was always dropping — the way she’d glance at us with a knowing smile when my father and I lingered too long hugging each other goodnight, or how she’d conveniently leave the room during our charged silences, as if she recognized the spark from her own past and chose not to extinguish it. At the time, I thought Mom was blissfully unaware of the goings-on between horny little me and my reluctant daddy; now, after I found her old diary, I believe she knew more about us than we did.

And there’s advice Stella gave fourth-grade me that only makes sense to me now. It happened one day after I had had an argument with one of my ultra-conservative elementary-school teachers about gay rights. After my teacher called my mother in to complain about my non-biblical stance on the issue, Mom took me aside and said, “Being smarter than everyone else means you often see the right thing when no one else does, and arguing with idiots is tiresome ... and sometimes dangerous. It might be better to just let the dumb people be wrong and live your life on your own terms — in secret, if necessary.” At the time, I didn’t understand why she thought I shouldn’t fight loudly for the freedom for a gay person to love whomever they wanted to love. Now I believe she was wisely warning me about a different kind of love shunned by polite society.

I inherited more from Stella than just her Mensa-qualifying intelligence, evocative writing skills, Electra complex, and disdain for the social mores of the proletariat; I look like her, too: a hard face of angular planes attached to a soft, coltish frame (though my skin is caramel-colored rather than milk-chocolate, a result of Peter’s Nordic ancestry), and, my most salient feature, a bubble butt that has drawn the attention of every red-blooded male I’ve crossed paths with since puberty hit and my pelvic broadening began. I know that my father likes to just look at my body — the same way he used to like looking at my mother’s before I usurped her position — so I stand in the doorway for a moment, allowing him to drink in my shape: my small, perky breasts, my big, shapely ass, even fuller now than when I last saw him three months ago, my long legs with their strong thighs and tennis-ball calves. On the pretext of hanging my house key on a hook, I turn slowly, deliberately letting him devour me with his eyes. The thin sundress hides little, and I point my toes to raise my bottom and show off my sun-bronzed legs, rotating like a slow-motion ballet dancer, smiling and waiting for his gaze to rise to my face so that he can notice the fresh pixie cut I know he will like. While I stand there, letting him reacquaint himself with my body, I replay some of our past illicit encounters in my mind, but things are different now, and the guilt that once accompanied those moments has faded, leaving only desire sharpened like a blade during our time apart.