It all started at Rachel’s funeral — or, after, actually, when everybody in the family was crowded into our house — the one I no longer shared with Rachel, but still had Lisa and Suzanne to take care of in. It was just hitting me again that Rachel wasn’t going to be there, again, ever ... Connie, Rachel’s mother, was at the sink, washing dishes. We really didn’t have enough glassware to be supporting the drinking habits of thirty or forty people.

“John, where do these go?” she asked. I stepped over to the sink and peered over her shoulder at the dish she was holding — and suddenly realized that my dozen years of marriage had betrayed me. I had my hand on my mother-in-law’s ass!

“Oops!” I withdrew the hand. “Sorry. Habit.”

Connie eyed me, her eyes merry. “That’s perfectly all right. Frankly, I’ve missed such things since Hugh died.” The humor disappeared while both of us pondered the holes that death had poked in our lives.

“Just leave it on the counter. Frankly, I don’t know – but maybe one of the girls does.” I drew a breath. “Thank you for your help.”

“You’re very welcome, John.”

I nodded and stepped away.

Hugh had been my father-in-law – Rachel’s Dad. Since his death from lung cancer two years before, Connie had been drifting from household to household, going down the list of her four children in between visits to other relatives. Somehow, she hadn’t settled anywhere. There had been rumors of stresses in the families of Rachel’s older brother and sister, and Connie had not lasted six months with either of them. We hadn’t seen it – Rachel was the youngest. Trevor and his wife were next up – and they weren’t looking forward to it. Rachel and I figured we had a year...

Later that evening, with the girls in bed, several of us were sitting up, emptying a bottle of my brandy – not that that bothered me, particularly.

“You’ll have to bring in someone for the girls,” Richard, Rachel’s older brother mused. “Costly.”

“There’s money,” I snapped, waving it off. There was, too. Life insurance and accident insurance from Rachel’s employer, the whole life policy I’d purchased for her, the results of the lawsuit against the drunken bastard who had T-boned Rachel’s SUV ... There was plenty of money. Who cared about that? Rachel was DEAD – why did Richard have to bring up MONEY?

Connie skewered Richard with a look and said, “That’s what family is for. The girls don’t need to be foisted off on strangers. That’s unsettling.” She turned to me. “Why don’t I stay for a bit and help them get through this? Until you can make some other arrangement, anyway.” I sat there, blinking, not having considered it. Into the silence, she added, “After all, I AM their grandmother.”

“Yes...” On the surface, it seemed to be a fine idea – but I had no idea what had gone on in those other households. All I knew was that they’d been happy to have her leave... “Are you sure? I don’t want to disrupt your living arrangements.”

Connie grimaced. “John, I’m a fifth wheel where I am. Inserting myself in the homes of my children has been stressful for them. I have no role in their households – I’m a guest they can’t decently get rid of. They have no privacy. They have to cater to my foibles. Here, at least, I WOULD have a role...”

I wasn’t the only person in the room taken aback by this commentary. It appeared to be blatantly honest – and it was clearly unexpected.

“Let me think on this,” I said. “It’s late. Please, do as you like. I’m ... tired...” I headed off to bed and took a pill to sleep. While I waited for it to take effect, I pondered Connie’s offer.

With Rachel’s death, her link to me was broken – but not her link to my daughters. She WAS their grandmother, and while if I were alone, we would probably have parted company in the near future, perhaps passing cards or whatever for a few years, but not doing anything further, the presence of my daughters guaranteed an ongoing relationship. I was going to need a woman to help them through the storms of puberty and the issues that young women have to deal with – issues that a male really isn’t qualified to assist with. Having Connie stay would seem to be an elegant solution. She would have a household where she felt wanted and needed, my girls would get their care and guidance. I would get some peace of mind. The whole thing seemed to work.

It was Richard who surfaced the flip side, as usual. “Sooner or later, you’ll want to move on,” he said. “A rich widower with two young daughters might be a catch, but one with an older woman in the household won’t be as marketable.”

Richard grated on me regularly, and this was DEFINITELY one of those times!

“I’m sure it will be a week or two before I start looking for Rachel’s replacement!” I snarled.

“Yes, well ... I’m just saying.”

“She’s barely in the ground! I think you’ve said quite enough!” I got up and left the room. I could hear his wife Nola berating him in a stage whisper for his lack of tact as I left, but Richard had none – she couldn’t fix it.

I sometimes wonder if I asked Connie to stay out of anger at Richard...

Things went smoothly, though. Each of us dealt with our grief in our own way. The girls needed a lot of physical reassurance – but both Connie and I could deal with that. A stranger would not have been able to. Household chores – something I dreaded trying to get a handle on — drifted slowly into a different pattern or direction, but it was only a few degrees different than the one Rachel had always taken. Menu planning was perhaps a little different – and there were a few missteps as Connie discovered – sometimes the hard way – my few dislikes. Things were fine, in general – but we were both missing something...

It was sex, of course. Rachel and I had been fairly active, sexually, having sex four or five nights a week. We were trying for Child Number Three and hoping it would be a boy. I missed the activity fairly rapidly, but it was part of missing Rachel. After a couple of weeks, I resumed masturbating, something I could do without issues at night in my room, surfing for porn with a pair of headphones and my laptop. Incredibly satisfying, it wasn’t, but I wasn’t ready to start hunting for Rachel’s replacement. In fact, I wasn’t certain I was going to get there, emotionally. Richard might be able to turn it off and on at will – and I hoped Nola had the tools to deal with it – but I couldn’t just switch horses. Rachel had been my love, my life partner, for over a decade. I couldn’t just change up, like switching channels on a TV.

Connie presented pluses and minuses. It was clear to me that many of Rachel’s habits and attitudes came from her mother. Connie reminded me of Rachel every day. In some ways, it was gratifying, comfortable – as if Rachel was still with us. In others, it as disconcerting. I had to work at avoiding the kind of casual intimacy that Rachel and I had presented each other with on a daily basis, avoiding the casual kisses, the caresses of a body that was almost familiar. Connie and I had always done the ‘family peck’ where one of us kissed the other on the cheek upon arrival for a visit or prior to departure. I slipped up a couple of times, pulling her into a hug and laying one on her before realizing I was screwing up. The casual caress or pat on the ass was even harder to get under control. I was always embarrassed.

Connie never complained. She would smile while I stammered out an apology and tell me it was all fine.

I was slowly getting things under control, however. Mistakes were fewer and further between as we hit the three-month point. Connie had stepped into her role as surrogate mother and pseudo-domestic servant and I was getting my hands under control.

Then came the night when I accidentally invaded Connie’s privacy...

I’d just finished what had become a nightly ritual – the masturbation session. As a result, I needed to take that post-orgasmic leak and clean out the pipe. I hit the bathroom and dealt with it, not flushing the toilet in order to avoid disturbing anyone’s sleep. As I started back up the hall, I heard sounds ... Curiosity led me to reverse direction and follow those sounds. They were coming from ... yes ... the guest room – Connie’s room. The door was open, just a bit...

I think I realized what I was going to see right about the time I actually saw it. The sound was a quiet buzz. I peeked into the room and the first thought that went through my mind was, ‘Of course... ‘ Seeing it, though, was a different matter. I froze there, fascinated.

I wasn’t prepared for it. Rachel and I had never masturbated in each other’s presence. I had virtually given up the practice, having Rachel’s vagina, her mouth – even her ass on occasion – to wrap around my cock more or less whenever the urge struck. If Rachel needed more, she never mentioned it. I was a fairly accomplished rug-muncher and was under the impression that I was a decent lover; Rachel tended to be exhausted after a bout of lovemaking. I never caught her masturbating. I’d seen women masturbating in porn; there seemed to be a continuum where on one end, women got off quickly and wildly, and at the other, the woman would spend fifteen minutes warming up, get what looked like a little pop that caused them to wiggle a bit, and it was all over. I didn’t watch a lot of that stuff – I had more interest in watching a woman react to a fuck.

As a result, I was riveted in place by what I saw!

Connie was nude, lying on her back with her knees up and spread, directing a vibrator over her slit. It was one of those jobs with the protrusion designed to buzz the clitoris with the shaft of the vibrator buried in the vagina – but she wasn’t there yet. I gazed at her, marveling at the familiarity of some of her curves. Connie was pushing fifty, but in many ways, she was recognizable as ‘Rachel plus twenty.’ She was concentrating on what she was doing, her head up, but her eyes closed, grimacing, moving the buzzing machine over her mound. There was a slight sheen of sweat visible at the bottoms of her breasts where they met her chest wall, and a certain liquid component to the buzzing as she oriented it to poke up under her clitoral hood. She was wet. I figured that she’d been at it for a few minutes and probably had at least one orgasm under her belt.

In a few moments, her hips started rolling. She shifted the vibrator around, sliding it up and down the moist pink slot between her fur-fringed nether lips. Some women have this peach thing going where there is a crack there, but the outer labia are pressed tight together and appear to be almost fused closed unless they are highly aroused. Others have a lot of leathery inner labia. Rachel’s pussy was like that – largely neat, but with a prominent clitoral hood and somewhat dangly inner lips. Connie’s pussy resembled Rachel’s in some respects, but it had this raw, used look to it. Puffy and aroused as it was, some men would call it a nasty gash, but to me, it just said, ‘I need a dick – bad!’ The brown, crinkled bung below it hung open a bit, but clamped and reopened as I watched.

Connie re-oriented the vibrator, slipping the tip into her pulsing vaginal opening, and began pumping it, slowly, with one hand, while the other swept fingers over her swollen clitoris. “Yesss ... Yesss...” she hissed. She reached down and shut off the vibrator, but continued to fuck herself with it, rubbing her clit, hunching, humping herself as she drove the plastic phallus halfway into her. Her movements became urgent; she began gasping, “Yes. Fuck me. Fuck me...”

My cock was stone in my underwear, but somehow, I was managing not to touch myself. Something in my head said that would turn this more or less innocent violation of my mother-in-law’s privacy into pure voyeurism. I couldn’t leave, but I could give her that...

Connie’s movements became more urgent. Her nipples stood atop her flattened breasts like a pair of forty-five caliber bullets, her areolas shrunk to wrinkled masses at the bases. Sweat sheened her body in the dim light of her bedside lamp. I watched her wind herself tighter and tighter, gasping, humping, jerking ... I could tell she was close. Having been silent for a while, she began to whisper again, making it clear that she was reaching the final stages and seeing the culmination of her fantasy.

“Yes ... Yes! Yes! Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me, John!” She let out a wail and started bucking frantically, digging her heels into the mattress and jerking her hips as she fucked the plastic phallus, pumping it rapidly inside her!

My eyes bugged! Upon hearing my name, my cock exploded in my underwear without my ever having touched it! I crushed my underwear to my waist in order to limit the mess, hunching over, watching my mother-in-law thrash her way through her orgasm, her head flying back and forth, her legs kicking, her body jerking as the shockwaves of pleasure swept over her. When she settled down a bit, I backed out of there and staggered up the hall, tripping over my feet and smacking into the wall, rushing toward the safety of the bathroom.

With the door locked, I cleaned up the mess in my underwear, rinsing them and tossing them into the laundry hamper, retrieving an older pair to wear out of the room. Then I took a second post-orgasmic leak, mildly embarrassed at how I’d gotten there. At that point, I crept out and went back to bed, only to lie there, re-living what I’d seen and heard.

That Connie was a sexual being was abundantly clear. Watching her masturbate was one of the hottest things I’d ever seen! But the fact that I was the subject of her masturbatory fantasies rocked me even further! What was THAT all about? ‘I must be encouraging her in some way,’ I mused. ‘I’ll need to be more careful.’ Sometime after making that decision, I dropped off.

The next morning at breakfast, Connie asked, while refilling my coffee, “Di I disturb you?”

“Sorry?”

“I heard someone get up in the night.”

“I went to the bathroom,” I replied cautiously. “I stumbled a bit in the hall.” There was NO WAY I was going to say, ‘Yes, I was perving on you masturbating in your bed, fantasizing that it was me fucking you!’ That was light years beyond any admission I was going to make! Besides, my girls were sitting right there!

“That must have been it,” Connie mused, turning away. I was left with the impression that I’d admitted to something, anyway, but there was no follow-up.

My decision not to offer Connie any encouragement proved difficult to implement. The discovery that my mother-in-law was highly sexed – and fantasized about having sex with me – colored things. I’d been more or less under the impression that Connie was beyond such things, sexless and safe. The discovery that menopause hadn’t put sex on the shelf for her, that I had a woman who might actually welcome the idea of sex with me, caused me to react to her as sexy, even while I tried to hold the tensions down. The results were uneven. I tried to keep things formal, while my mind insisted upon evaluating her as a sex partner – and reporting that she passed muster. As a result, I found myself doing typically male appraisals of Connie, ogling her cleavage and other similar foolishness. Things began to approach a situation you find regularly in a work environment, where a decidedly hot female colleague is unattainable due to the fact that you work together. You want her, and obtaining a relationship with her is possible, but you can’t start anything – and, perhaps, neither can she. Connie and I had the complication that we DID have a relationship, of sorts...

Connie noticed – and when she did, she started reacting as any woman who has a man’s attention does. She got confident and started injecting a little sex into things, here and there. Skirts got shorter. Suddenly, there was more cleavage out there. Movements became less wooden – her hips started rolling when she walked, making her ass something for me to watch sway and drool over. She reacted to the other half of the situation, too, clearly realizing that my formality was an effort to avoid a transgression – which meant that she was, indeed, desired.

... And she was...

It crept up on me. I was doing everything that acknowledged her sexuality before I realized what it meant, instinct handling operations without my giving it conscious thought. By the time I realized what it all meant, it was out there, between us – unsaid, but there nonetheless. Unacknowledged, it wasn’t ... It was out there – we just didn’t talk about it.

My girls didn’t care. Daddy loved Mommy and they cuddled and stuff. If Daddy was nice to Grandma Connie, so what? Grandma Connie lived with us ... Mommy was gone – who else could Daddy be nice to, anyway? I got this in pieces from the girls over a couple of week period, without asking for it. Frankly, they were pleased that we were casually intimate with one another and bothered some by the formality I was trying to inject into things. I literally got, “Did Grandma do something wrong?” at one point from Suzanne. I had to explain very carefully that Grandma and I weren’t married and that she might consider my advances to be inappropriate touching.

“Wouldn’t she say so?” Suzanne asked.

Even I figured that we were off the real path, but it was at least a distraction. “She might feel that if she told me so, it would cause problems and I might ask her to leave or something.”

“You wouldn’t, would you?” Suzanne asked, incredulous.

“No. Absolutely not. I would just try to be more careful.”

Stupid me – I forgot how direct children can be. Thirty minutes later, Suzanne flounced into the living room and parked herself on my lap.