My Taboo Life

I sat in a leather chair that cost more than most people made in a month, surrounded by the silence that always seemed so pervasive. That top-floor penthouse was too big for one person, but my late husband Harrison had liked it that way. He liked the space, the echo, and the way his footsteps announced him before he entered a room. Having been dead these past six months, his footsteps had ceased, but the silent space remained.

On the glass table in front of me lay a plain, unmarked manila folder. Inside were forty-seven typed pages and one photograph, for which I paid over thirty-thousand dollars to obtain. I had barely slept in the two days since it had reached me by courier. I reached again for my wine, and again found the glass empty, so I ignored it. My hands were steady. They were always steady.

I flipped open the folder.

The photo was right there on top. I had stared at it at dozens of times already, and I was about to stare at it again. The investigators charged me extra to get this shot of her. Fucking leeches. It was worth it, though.

The woman in the picture had turned eighteen late last year. She had auburn hair that caught the light like copper wire, and skin that freckled in the sun. She was standing in front of a trailer, arms at her sides, wearing cutoff denim shorts and a short white tank top that had gone gray from washing. She wasn’t wearing a bra, so I could see the shape of her small, dark nipples through the fabric. Above the frayed shorts, her cute little innie belly button was waiting. God, she was so fucking beautiful… pretty in a way that made her surroundings look obscene, like a diamond that had been dropped down a sewer.

Her name was Amelia Lynn Dougherty, and she lived in the rundown trailer park called Pine Bluff Estates outside Little Rock, Arkansas. She’d already graduated high school, and worked part-time just down the road as a grocery store cashier. The investigators didn’t find she had any hobbies, but she read books on her breaks or between customers. There was no boyfriend, and no real friends to speak of. Her adoptive parents drank a lot, fought a lot, and for the most part ignored her. All of this was in the report, which I’d read multiple times.

There were also things I knew about Amelia that weren’t in the report.

She was my daughter.

She was also my sister.

I touched the photograph with one finger, tracing the line of her jaw. My finger began to tremble, so I pulled it back and made a fist until the trembling stopped.

Memories flooded back, of when I was thirteen years old. When my father, nearly blackout drunk, had decided one night that I was old enough. I did not think about that night in terms of memory. I thought about it in terms of biology. The sperm entering the egg. The cells dividing. The thing growing inside me that was both my child and my half sibling, sharing my blood and his, a knot of genetics that should never have been tied.

I was living in Texas, and in Texas, even incest was not reason enough to end a pregnancy. I was thirteen, pregnant by my own father, and the law said I had to carry her to term. I was a child being forced to have a child, and no one cared. I was barely fourteen by the time I gave birth, my body barely ready, my hips too narrow, the labor lasting thirty hours that I remembered mostly in flashes of red pain accompanied by my screams.

The state took her away as soon as her cord was cut. I screamed until my throat was raw. They told me it was for the best, that I was too young. They told me she would be sure to go to a good home. I was inconsolable for months, feeling that the most precious thing in the universe had been ripped away from me.

They wouldn’t even let me hold her, and until this picture arrived, I never saw her again. I only saw her for a moment, bloody and screaming, being carried away by hands that were not mine. I memorized what I could: the patch of auburn hair, already visible, the beautiful lips as she cried. The lungs on her seemed strong enough to shake the room.

When I found out months before she would be a girl, I named her in my head. I wanted to call her Hope. The adoptive parents named her Amelia. I only found that out a few weeks ago.

After I recovered from the birth, the foster homes blurred together. I was a problem; a girl who had been raped by her father and had a baby and would not stop screaming and crying about it. I eventually learned to stop screaming. I learned to be quiet… that the system loses track of children if you give it enough chaos to work with.

At fifteen, I ran away for good. I had been Piper Cauthorn since then, a name I saw on a gravestone in a cemetery I passed on a bus. I lived without ID, without real jobs, often letting strange men fuck me just for food. If some fat guy was grunting on top of me, or pushing his slimy cock down my throat, I could just go somewhere else inside my head. What was that compared to the memory of what my own father had done to me? I was a self-emancipated minor from foster care, no family, no ties, no past. I was a ghost wearing a stolen name. A few pimps tried to claim me, but I managed to run away again. I got really good at running away.

I never looked for my mother. When the investigators started looking for my daughter, they soon reported back to me that my mom died of a drug overdose seven years ago. I didn’t ask for that information, but they somehow thought I’d want to know. I still felt nothing. She knew what her husband was doing to me, and still let it happen. Fuck her, I’m glad she’s dead.

My father? I never speak about him. He’s dead to me, erased, and unmentioned. The man who raped me does not exist in my vocabulary. The only part of him I still care about is living in a trailer in Arkansas. Fuck him, too.

I met Harrison Garrett Hartwell when I was twenty, working as a stripper using the name Bambi in a club outside Houston. He was sixty-three and worth over two hundred million dollars in family oil money. He needed someone to take care of him and said I reminded him of his sister who’d died young. I needed someone to make me legitimate and pull me out of the gutter I was headed towards. We married three months after we met.

Yes, I know what it sounds like, but I was a good wife to him. I kept him comfortable, happy, and his balls drained. I kept him breathing for eleven years and I never once cheated on him… at least with another man. You can’t say I didn’t know how my bread was buttered.

When Harrison died, he left me everything. He didn’t have any children to be upset about it at least. Just a few pissed off nieces and nephews that I promptly ignored.

I had already hired the private investigator before my husband passed, looking for her using money Harrison did not know I was spending, searching for the baby who had become a girl who had now become a woman. The investigator found her after a six-month search. He didn’t know why I wanted to find her, since I paid him extra to ask no questions.

I picked up the photograph again.

Amelia Lynn Dougherty. Born October 14th. Adopted by Earl and Darlene Dougherty two days after her birth. They moved to Arkansas when she was two. Her records were sealed, but Harrison’s money opened them again. Her new birth certificate listed the Doughertys as her birth parents. On paper, she was their natural child, and we were strangers.

On paper, we were nothing to each other.

I traced her collarbone in the photograph, then down to the top of her barely revealed cleavage. She was looking at the camera, almost like she knew she was being watched. Her lips were slightly parted, and she looked like she was waiting for something. Maybe for someone.

It’s possible I could have been imagining that last part.

I knew I should put the photograph down, that I should burn it. I knew I should forget I had ever found her, forget she existed, and let her live her life in that trailer park without me poisoning it with my presence. I knew what I was feeling was wrong in ways that had no name, wrong in my blood and my bones and the darkest parts of my mind that I had never let myself examine. I wasn’t a hot mess; I was a fire with money to burn that could scorch entire city blocks.

I did not put the photograph down.

Instead, my other hand moved lower, my fingers sliding under the waistband of my silk pajama pants. I was already wet, and had been since I first opened the folder, and the shame of it made my face burn. I touched myself with two fingers, sliding through my thick patch of pubes, down to where it started getting slick. I used to keep it all shaved when I was a stripper, but Harrison had grown up in the seventies, so he liked a nice, thick bush. He used to say that shaved pussies reminded him too much of a plucked chicken.

If I’m being honest, I kind of enjoy having a thick bush. I like to twirl my fingers in it, which sends tingles all through my overactive slit. I think it makes it more receptive, and those tingles turned to shivers up and down my body as I continued to slide my fingers lower, into my slit. There, I found my clit already swollen and throbbing, like it had been since that photo damn photo had arrived. I was disgusting. I was sick. I was the worst thing a mother or a sister could be, but I could not stop.

Not once in my life have I had a real orgasm with a man. Somewhere in the back of my mind, they turn into my father when they’re on top of me, grunting and pawing at my tits, but never worried about my pleasure. I’ve only ever been able to climax for real when it was another woman, and I started fucking other strippers before I met Harrison. Sure, they were usually only doing it to get their own rocks off, but women at least seemed concerned if I also had orgasms.

Before you start going on about how fucking other women was also cheating on my husband, you should know that he was fully aware of it. He never asked me for a threesome, but there were many times I fucked one of my old stripper friends on our marriage bed, while he sat in a chair and quietly watched. He had no interest in fucking any other woman, but he enjoyed watching me do it.

As I pushed my two fingers deeper into my cunt, I thought about my Amelia in that trailer park, surrounded by people who could not see what she was. I thought about her blood, my blood, our father's blood, running through her veins. I thought about the way she would taste, sweet and coppery, the way her thighs would feel wrapped around my head, the way she would sound when she came, not knowing who I was, not knowing what we were to each other.

I stroked into myself harder, rough and fast, staring at her photograph, at her nipples visible through that thin gray cotton, at the shape of her hips in those cutoff shorts. I imagined clawing her panties off, then my mouth on her, my tongue inside her, my fingers pressing into her while she begged for more. I imagined her calling me Mommy without knowing it was true. I imagined the moment I would tell her, the horror on her face, the way she would try to pull away and all the ways I would try to convince her to stay.

The guilt was a physical thing, a stone in my chest, a sickness in my stomach. I was going to hell. I was already there. I was masturbating to my own daughter, my own sister, the only person in the world who shared my particular stain, and I was so close, so fucking close, and I hated myself, I hated myself, I hated myself.

My latest climax arrived with a cry that tore out of my throat, raw and ugly, my hips bucking against my hand, the photograph clutched in the other. The pleasure was sharp and filthy and wrong… so wrong. I rode it out until I was shaking, until I was empty, until I was nothing but ash and need and the certainty that I would do this again. That I was certain to do even worse.

After, I sat in the leather chair, breathing hard, the photograph still in my dry hand. The quiet, open space remained, with only memories there to keep me company. I was thirty-two years old and I was a widow. I was also a mother… and a sister. I was a woman who had fucked herself looking at a picture of the only family I had left in this world.

I’m sure you curious why. Why would I be so sexually obsessed with a girl I’d never met? Why would I find so much pleasure in touching myself while I looked at that one solitary photograph?

The answer was simple: I had been waiting for her for eighteen years. Not Amelia specifically, but the promise of her, the ghost of the baby they tore from my arms. When I saw that photograph, something broke open in me. It was not just desire… it was recognition. It was the completion of a circuit that had been left open, sparking and dangerous, since I was fourteen years old.

I touched myself to her image because I couldn’t touch her yet, because the need to claim what was mine, what had always been mine, was stronger than shame, stronger than guilt, stronger than any fear of damnation. I was already damned. Every orgasm was a promise, a vow, a claiming. I was marking her as mine in my mind before I ever touched her, before she ever knew my name. I was preparing myself for her.

I stood up on unsteady legs and walked to the bathroom, where I washed my hands. I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was flushed, my eyes too bright, my lips bitten red. I looked like a woman who had just committed a sin against nature. I looked like a woman who was going to commit more.

I walked back to the chair, took a seat, then picked up the photograph again.

I did not call a real estate agent, and I didn’t pack a bag. I sat there, holding her image, and I let the need build up in me again, hot and heavy and undeniable, the need to have her, to claim her, to make her mine in every way that mattered.

I would go to her. I knew I would. But not yet. Not tonight.

Tonight, I would sit inside my too-big penthouse and stare at her picture and hate myself for wanting what I wanted.

Tomorrow, I would start planning how to take it for myself.

I drove through Pine Bluff Estates at ten in the morning in the 2008 Honda Civic I had bought with cash a few days ago in Austin. The air conditioning barely worked and the vinyl seats stuck to the backs of my bare thighs. The early July heat pressed down like a physical weight, with the humidity thick enough to cut with a knife, making my clothes cling to my skin. I had the windows down, and the air that moved across my face smelled of sunbaked asphalt, cut grass, and unemptied garbage containers.

I had the address memorized for weeks now. 147 Cypress Lane. I drove past it once, twice, three times, my heart hammering against my ribs. On the third pass, I saw her.

She came out of the trailer and I heard the door banging shut. A few moments later she was sitting on the swing in the back corner of the porch, the chains squeaking as she moved back and forth. She looked up at my car as I pulled past, but quickly lost interest and opened the book she was holding. I was wearing a scarf around my head and dark sunglasses as a disguise. I pulled over four trailers down and cut the engine. My hands shook as I reached for the binoculars on the passenger seat.

I lifted them to my eyes as I took a deep breath, trying to calm my nerves.

The magnification brought her so close I could see the sweat on her upper lip. She was wearing black spandex shorts, the kind that cyclists wear, so tight they looked painted on. The fabric clung to every curve of her hips and thighs, riding up slightly where her they came together. The material was thin enough that I could see the outline of her underwear, a slight seam, and the suggestion of heat between her legs. Her tank top was pink and thin, damp with perspiration, making it cling to her torso. She was not wearing a bra. Just like in the picture I had, her nipples were hard, visible through the fabric, dark and pressing against the cotton.

She was fanning herself with a paperback book. I wasn’t certain, but I think the title of it was “Southern Heat.” It looked like a trashy romance novel you’d find on the rack in the back of a Dollar General. Her legs were spread slightly on the swing, her thighs parted just enough that I could see the shadow between them at the apex. The spandex was pulled tight across her groin, outlining her lips, showing the slight swell of her mound.

My mouth went dry. I adjusted the focus.

She stopped fanning herself and set the book down beside her on the swing. Her hand moved to her leg and stayed there, resting on her thigh. Slowly, her fingers traced up her inner thigh, pushing against the spandex. She was looking off into the distance, unaware, her eyes half-closed. Her fingers reached the edge of her shorts and stopped, then pushed underneath the tight fabric.

I stopped breathing.

She was touching herself. Right there, on the porch swing, in broad daylight, her hand down her shorts, her hips shifting slightly to give herself better access. I could see the movement of her wrist, the subtle flex of her fingers beneath the spandex. Her head fell back against the swing, her throat exposed, her mouth opening on a sigh I could not hear but could imagine.

I fumbled for the camera, my hands shaking with a need I could barely contain. I raised it to my eye, the viewfinder bringing her even closer, filling my vision until she was all I could see, all I could think about, all I had ever wanted without knowing her name.

She had pulled the spandex and panties to the side with her free hand, exposing herself completely to the empty yard, to the humid air, to my lens. I could see her fingers now, slender and sure, sliding through her folds with a familiarity that made my mouth water, finding her clit with unerring accuracy. She was bare, her cunt pink and glistening in the harsh summer light, the inner lips darker, swollen, peeking out from between her thighs like a secret she kept even from herself. I could see the sheen of her arousal coating her fingers, could imagine the smell of her, musky and young and fertile, filling my lungs until I could taste her.

She circled herself with two fingers, her hips rocking into her hand with a rhythm that spoke of practice, of solitude, of lonely afternoons spent learning her own body. The swing moved with her, swaying gently, carrying her through arcs of pleasure that I witnessed in silence. I watched her thighs spread wider, her heels digging into the porch floor for leverage, her body opening to her own touch with an abandon that made my own cunt clench in sympathetic need.

I pressed the shutter, and the camera made a soft whir, capturing her in that moment of abandon. I took another picture, and another, my finger trembling on the button, my breath coming in shallow gasps that fogged the car windows. She was beautiful, obscene, perfect, and she was mine, my flesh, my blood, my daughter and my sister, the product of my father's violence and my own body's betrayal, and she was also fucking herself not fifty yards from where I sat, unknowingly performing for me, offering me a show I would replay in my mind until the day I died.

I zoomed in tighter, the lens pushing past the limits of decency. Now I could see the individual folds of her labia, the hood of her clit peeking out, the way her fingers pressed and rolled and teased. She was wet, so wet, her arousal making her fingers glide with obscene ease, the motion of her hand growing faster, more desperate, as she chased her peak. It made me want to taste her, to bury my face in that sweetness, to drink from the source of my own bloodline, to claim what had been stolen from me eighteen years ago.

She sped up, her fingers moving faster, her hips bucking off the swing seat, her body seeking more pressure, more friction, more of the building sensation that was clearly cresting inside her. I could see the muscles in her thighs tensing, the definition of her calves, the toes on her bare feet curling and releasing with each stroke. Her free hand moved under her tank top, finding her breast, pinching her nipple through the thin fabric, and I moaned aloud in the car, the sound swallowed by the noise from the engine and the useless air blowing through the vents.

She bit her lower lip, her eyes squeezed shut, her face contorted with the effort of holding back, of building the pleasure higher, of riding the wave to its peak. I could see her stomach muscles contract, could see the flush spreading from her chest to her neck, could see every telltale sign of her impending orgasm as clearly as if I were touching her myself. I captured it all, every frame, my camera's motor drive whirring constantly now, filling up the memory card with images of her face contorted in pleasure, her cunt pulsing around her fingers, her body trembling through the first spasms of release.

She came with a violence that shocked me, her body arching off the swing, her fingers pressed hard against herself, her mouth open in a silent cry that I could almost hear in my imagination, almost taste, almost feel vibrating through my own body. Her hips jerked in staccato rhythm, her thighs clamping around her hand, her toes curling so hard they turned white, and I watched her orgasm ripple through her, watched her lose herself completely to the pleasure she had given herself, watched her be beautiful and broken and perfect in her solitude.

The aftershocks took her slowly, her body twitching, her fingers moving in gentle circles now, soothing the oversensitive flesh, drawing out the last tremors of pleasure. I captured those too, the way she slumped back against the chains, her hand still inside her shorts, her chest heaving with exertion, her skin flushed and glowing with the sheen of sweat and satisfaction. She looked around then, drowsy, sated, her eyes heavy-lidded and unfocused, and I ducked lower in my seat, my heart hammering so hard I thought it would crack my ribs, my own cunt throbbing with a need so intense it bordered on pain.

I almost gave myself relief right there in the car, my hand already under my skirt, my fingers finding my own wetness, so close to matching her rhythm, to imagining it was her touching me, her fingers inside me, her mouth on mine. I barely controlled myself, my teeth digging into my lower lip until I tasted blood, my hands gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white.

Not yet.

Not here.

Not like this.

I watched her extract her hand from her shorts, watched her bring her fingers to her nose, inhaling her own scent with a curiosity that made me smile. Then she licked them clean with a casualness that spoke of solitude, of privacy, of a girl who had never imagined being observed. When she was done, she stretched, catlike, her body still languid with pleasure, and I knew then with absolute certainty that I would have her. Not just watch her. Not just photograph her. I would touch her, taste her, claim her, make her mine in every way that mattered. She was my daughter, my sister, my blood, my origin, and I would consume her, rebuild her, make her into the woman she was meant to be: mine, entirely, forever.

I had seen enough. Hell, I had seen everything. After a few more moments, she sat the book facedown with the pages open on the swing and went inside the trailer.

Cranking the car, I backed out of the driveway I was in then drove to the property management office at the front of the park. I called the number on the sign, spoke to a bored secretary, then offered double the asking price in cash to a very interested manager, but only if we could get it done today.

He said yes almost before I finished making the offer.

I signed the papers as Paige Mitchell, a name I had built from nothing over the past several months. I had a new social security number, new driver's license, and a new history. When it takes nine digits to show your net worth, you can make a lot of shit happen, legality be damned. Paige was twenty-five, a freelance photographer and graphic designer, recently divorced from a controlling husband who had monitored her internet and every other aspect of her life, explaining her lack of digital footprint. I had practiced her backstory until it was automatic.

The trailer was emptied and professionally cleaned by Noon the next day. I hired two men from the hardware store to move in the furniture I had bought at the thrift store that morning, cash again, no records. It was all done while Amelia was at work, since I didn’t want her to know about me yet. The bed was king-sized, and took up almost the entire bedroom in the trailer, and I had splurged on Egyptian cotton sheets that had a thread count so high they felt like you were sliding around on silk.

I had the same men mount a large flatscreen TV on the wall facing the bed, sixty inches and high definition of course. I connected my laptop to it with a cable, tested the display, then adjusted the angle until it filled my vision from where I would lie on the bed.

I unpacked my bags. I had a few sundresses that went in the closet, and a dozen sexy panties and bras that went in a drawer. I didn’t bring too many shoes, but made sure I had sandals, flip-flops, and one set of stripper heels.

One bag held all my toys, and I placed them in the two drawers of the nightstand. The vibrators were high-end, German-made, silent and powerful. I had a wand, a rabbit, and a slim bullet. I arranged them inside the top drawer, within easy reach of the bed. I wanted this room to be comfortable and inviting, a space where she would feel safe when the time came. Nothing scary. Nothing that would frighten her away.

The bottom drawer held some of my other toys, but I’ll tell you about those later. Spoilers, you know.

Then I set up my laptop and downloaded the photographs from the camera.

There were over a hundred images of Amelia in the porch swing. I went through them slowly, one by one, zooming in on the details. The sweat on her upper lip. The flush spreading down her chest. The exact moment her fingers entered her, the way her cunt clung to them, pink and wet and wanting.

I selected them all and turned them into a slideshow. Then I stripped naked and lay down on the bed, on the sheets that felt like water, and pointed the remote at the TV.

The first image appeared on the screen, blown up to nearly life size: Amelia with her hand in her shorts, her face relaxed, unaware. I reached for the wand vibrator and turned it on low, pressing it against my clit, the rumble traveling through me in waves. I started the slideshow, having it advance automatically, image after image of her degradation, her pleasure, her private moment stolen and preserved for my personal use.

I spread my legs wider, watching the TV, watching her pleasure play out in high definition above me. I was so wet it was dripping down my thighs, onto the sheets, making dark spots on the towel I had remembered to put down. I did not care. I turned the vibrator up higher.

The images showed her fingers moving faster, her hips lifting, her mouth opening. I matched my rhythm to hers, pressing the vibrator hard against myself, circling, then pressing directly on my clit, then circling again. The pleasure built in my belly, hot and heavy, a weight that demanded release.

When the image of her orgasm filled the screen, with her body arched and her face contorted, I came so hard I saw stars. My hips bucked off the bed, my cunt clenching around nothing, the vibrator pressed hard against me as I rode out wave after wave of pleasure. I cried out, loud enough that the neighbors probably heard, and I did not care.

After, I lay panting on the soaked towel, the vibrator still buzzing against my thigh, the slideshow cycling through again, Amelia's pleasure was on infinite loop on the TV screen. I watched her come a second time, a third, my body too sensitive to touch but my mind racing ahead, making more plans.

I had the bed. I had the TV. I had the trailer, only three units down from hers, close enough to see her porch from my bedroom window if I angled the blinds just right.

Tomorrow, I would become Paige in truth. I would walk around, holding a paperback book. I would begin the long, slow process of getting to know her, making her love me, making her want me, making her need me as much as I needed her.

Tonight, though, I lay in my new bed in my new life, surrounded