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 opened the folder.

The photograph sat on top. I had stared at it at dozens of times already. 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 young woman in the picture was eighteen years old. 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. With no bra on underneath, I could see the shape of her nipples through the fabric, small and dark against the thin cotton. Her belly button was easily visible over the top of her shorts, and her legs, pale and soft, appeared out of the bottom of the frayed hems. She was absolutely beautiful, pretty in a way that made her surroundings look obscene, like a diamond that had been dropped into 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 worked as a grocery store cashier and read books on her breaks or between customers. She had no boyfriend, and no real friends to speak of. She had adoptive parents who drank and fought and for the most part ignored her. All of it was in the reports in the folder.

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 still 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 had wanted to call her Hope. The adoptive parents named her Amelia. I only found that out a few weeks ago.

After that, 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 informed me that my mom died of a drug overdose seven years ago. I didn’t ask for that information, but they somehow thought it was relevant. I still felt nothing. She knew what her husband was doing to me, and still let it happen. I never speak or even think of my father. He’s dead to me, erased, and unmentioned. The man who raped me does not exist in my vocabulary.

I met Harrison Garett Hartwell when I was twenty, working as a stripper by the name of Bambi at a club outside Houston. He was sixty-three and worth two hundred million dollars in oil money. I reminded him of his sister who had died young, and he needed someone to take care of him. I needed someone to make me legitimate and pull me out of the gutter. 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. I had been looking for her for a year, 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. Moved to Arkansas at age 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. I knew 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.

My 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 the slickness. I used to keep it shaved when I was a stripper, but Harrison had grown up in the seventies, so he liked a nice, thick bush. He said shaved pussies reminded him too much of a plucked chicken.

If I’m being honest, I kind of enjoy having a thick bush myself. I like to twirl my fingers in it, which sends tingles all through my pussy. I think it makes it more receptive 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 an orgasm with a man. Somewhere in the back of my mind, they always 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 multiple 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 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 rubbed 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 could not 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 the fear of damnation. I was already damned. Every orgasm was a promise, a vow, a claiming. I was marking her as mine 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 went back to the chair, and I 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 in my too-big penthouse and look 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 the day before in Dallas. The air conditioning barely worked and the vinyl seats stuck to the backs of my bare thighs. The 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. I raised it to my eye, the viewfinder bringing her even closer, filling my vision.

She had pulled the spandex to the side. I could see her fingers now, sliding through her folds, finding her clit. She was bare, her cunt pink and glistening in the harsh summer light. She circled herself with two fingers, her hips rocking into her hand, the chains of the swing squeaking in rhythm that barely carried over the distance.

I pressed the shutter, and the camera made a soft whir. I took another picture… and another. She was beautiful, obscene, perfect, and she was mine, my flesh, my blood, my daughter and my sister, and she was also fucking herself not fifty yards from where I sat.

She sped up, her fingers moving faster, her hips bucking. I could see the muscles in her thighs tensing, the toes one her bare feet curling. She bit her lower lip, her eyes squeezing shut, and then she was coming, her body arching off the swing, her fingers pressed hard against herself, her mouth open in a silent cry. I captured it all, every frame, her face contorted in pleasure, her cunt pulsing, her body trembling through aftershocks.

She slumped back, her hand still down her shorts, her chest heaving. She looked around, drowsy, sated. I ducked lower in my seat, my heart hammering, my own cunt was throbbing. I almost gave myself some relief right there in the car, but I was able to control myself enough not to.

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 drove to the property management office at the front of the trailer 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 you have millions of dollars in your checking account, you can make a lot of things 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 signature until it was automatic.

The trailer was emptied and 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, but 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 down 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.

But tonight, I lay in my new bed in my new life, surrounded by the tools of my obsession, and I masturbated a second time to stolen images of my daughter, my sister, my flesh and blood. I kept at it until I was raw and empty and ready to be filled again.

The air conditioning in the trailer wheezed and died during the night. The heat pressed in. I did not move to fix it, since I wanted to feel the sweat on my skin, the stickiness, the discomfort. I wanted to remember what she had felt, fanning herself on that porch swing, her hand down her shorts, her body open and wanting.

I fell asleep with the TV still playing, the images burning into my retinas, my cunt throbbing in time with my heartbeat, my mouth dry, my soul damned.

I had never been more satisfied.

Today was the day. I wanted to arrange a fake meet-cute, just like in the movies, and it had to be perfect. I wanted Amelia to like me from the get-go, so I spent days planning what I would do, acting out what I would say.

I dressed carefully that morning, choosing a sundress I had bought specifically for this purpose. It was pale yellow, cotton, with thin straps and a hem that hit mid-thigh. I wore nothing underneath. The neckline dipped low enough to show the swell of my breasts, the inner curves visible when I moved. On my feet I just slipped on simple leather sandals. I looked in the mirror before I left and practiced my smile. Innocent. Helpless. Needing a friend.

I walked to the mailboxes at ten-thirty, timing it based on the schedule I had observed over three days. Amelia checked the mail between ten and eleven, usually after her mother left for her shift at the diner. I stood at the box labeled 144, sorting through junk mail I had addressed to Paige Mitchell, my hands shaking slightly, rehearsing my lines.

I heard the screen door slam three houses down. I did not look up. I waited until I heard footsteps on gravel, then I turned, letting the book in my hand slip from my fingers.

It fell at her feet, just behind her and face up. The Bell Jar, its cover worn, and the pages wrinkled and worn from continuous handling.

She turned and bent to pick it up, and I watched her as my breath hitched. The black spandex shorts were the same ones from yesterday, or another pair just like them, so tight they might as well have been skin. She bent at the waist, not the knees, and the fabric pulled between her legs, outlining her ass cheeks in perfect detail. She didn’t seem to be wearing panties, and I could see the seam of her, the slight swell, the faint outline of her labia where her thighs met. Her ass was round and firm, the muscles flexing as she straightened.