My name's Mark and I'm kind of confused. Not like confused about my sexuality. I mean, I make out with my buddy Aaron sometimes, but that's only when we're stupid drunk and it doesn't really mean anything.

I mean, like, I'm kind of lost.

I'm twenty-two, living at home, and, like, things just kind of happen to me. Like the other day when I was bumming around the Starlight Shopping Plaza, waiting for my dealer to call me back, and some middle-aged dude in a Robin Hood costume rolled up on roller skates and threw a brown paper bag at me and when I looked inside I discovered a mess of blunt guts, but a full cart of Sour Diesel. Or like the other night when I was out walking my dog, Saul Goodman, and some dirtbag in a Fiat caught me in my dome with a tall can of Liquid Death. I don't do anything, but situations find me.

It's not like there's much to stop me from living the high life, but there's nothing really stopping me from falling off the face of the earth either. Ever since I graduated high school, I've been coasting.

My dad's well off enough that he never has to see me. That's what the live-in maid is for.

On any given day, I'm either passed out in my room or out tripping balls with the fellas. Most of the time, I couldn't tell you if I even exist or if I'm just some non-playable character in a video game.

That's how come I'm so lost, see. Because the only person who could confirm I'm not hallucinating is the one person who might be my hallucination.

My dad's second wife, Vivian, lives in the guest house out back ever since the old man developed sleep apnea. Vivian is, like, a fucking ten, bro. Like, truly GOATed in the looks department.

Like me, she's slightly bored, sorta always a little bit stoned by breakfast, and totally out of place in the old man's big empty museum of a house. Vivian's a lot older than me, but she's hotter than any of the baddies I've hooked up with and she's also the only adult in my orbit who occasionally seems to recognize that there's an actual person underneath all my bullshit. Like, she seems more confident that I'm a person than I am, which is massive.

It all happens because I take whatever someone hands me. I'm at a party I didn't really want to attend when this girl I don't know, but who is totally meatriding, holds out this big purple pill and tells me it will “make the night better” and I've already taken two Xan bars and a whiskey chaser and probably smoked too much Blueberry Dream, but I'm feelin' the music and I think, “Why not?”

Massive faux pas on my part. I get about as far as a sloppy toppy in bro's bathroom when I start feeling heat crawling down the back of my skull and my legs start to shake and I can't feel my thumbs, and I'm thinking, Maybe I should call someone. But I'm too zooted to work my phone and I'm having trouble focusing, so I peace out and end up flailing home like something out of a cartoon, and I only get as far as the front door when I black the fuck out.

I remember thinking I shouldn't have mixed shit, but that's not all I remember. I have fragments.

Her hungry eyes, blue-green and sparkling. Her blonde hair falling in ribbons against my chest. A gust of her perfume in my face. A glass of water. Her palm on my forehead. Then on my chest. My shirt on the floor. My hand pressed against her milky breast. Her weight on my lap. A voice telling me, “Right there.” Telling me, “Don't stop.” Her breath on my ear. The taste of cotton candy on her lips. The ceiling fan spinning.

Then... nothing. Except I can't decide whether the memory is real and instead of being horrified by the uncertainty, I'm fascinated by it. Because if it happened, I want it to happen again. And if it didn't, I want to make it happen.

I wake up in the guest bedroom and I'm alone. My shirt is on the bed beside me. My crotch is wet, but when I press my hand to my jeans I realize it's piss and not cum. I feel disappointed, but also curious. Was it the drugs that made me piss myself or something else?

I walk outside and I can see the maid in the kitchen through the picture windows that look out on our backyard, but I don't see Vivian. When I ask the maid where my stepmom is, she shrugs and returns to dusting the quartzite counters.

I head up the stairs and down the hall to the master bedroom and find the bed made and the curtains drawn. The old man's at one of his work things all weekend, but curiously, Vivian did not sleep in the master bed. Interesting, I think. Maybe.

I go back downstairs and fire up the blender. As I start tossing together my hangover cure, I rack my brains for more fragments. Her anatomy comes back to me like the answer to an algebra equation—the natural roundness of her titties, the soft pink color of her areola—soft and pink like the cotton candy on her lips—and the perkiness of those nipples I've stared at through her thin silk nightie more times than I can count.

The only thing I can't remember is what happened, what we did, how I was, how long it lasted. What I do remember stuns me—a rhythm and a pressure, a pressure in my root, a feeling like a water balloon bursting in slow motion, and a sensation like fire coursing through my very core.

Massive, I think. The memory is broken, incomplete, but there's just enough there to drive me. Now, I'm determined to find out what happened and do whatever it takes to make it happen again.

All you need to know about Vivian can be summed up in, like, three words: cheerleader, bookworm, bad ass. I mean, maybe that's not really three words, but it explains why I'm feeling this way.

Vivian is pushing forty, but you'd never know it by looking at her. She's got a body like an Amazon warrior and skin so clean it looks like sweet cream. And her face, those pouting lips that curl up into a Cheshire grin, bordered by smile lines that look like parentheses around her mouth and those arching eyebrows over her smokey eyes—everything about the way she looks at you screams SEX like a blinking neon sign.

And it's not just her body, it's her everything. After she married my old man, she didn't settle into trophy wife bed rotting, she built a remote network to assist at-risk callers.

Vivian was a cheerleader in high school, which explains why her body is tea, but more than that, she's a cheerleader in her everyday life. Even when she's exhausted from dealing with maintenance workers and non-stop calls and yoga classes and keeping the dogs from attacking the neighbors, she never hesitates to coach a friend through dark times. And still she finds time to get a workout in. The woman is a beast.

And she reads. Like, actually reads, doesn't just listen to some audiobook or skim the pages of Cosmo. Vivian reads books without posting photographs of them. And she groks that shit, too. I hear her talking in her monthly book club and she actually gets that shit on a level most critics wouldn't—emotionally, intelligencewise or whatever.

My old man's been with her for three years, but “with” is a strong word. In those three years, I can count on one hand how many times he's taken her out or done anything for her beyond buying her jewelry she didn't ask for and that she probably won't wear.

That's the other thing I clock about Vivian: she's basic. And I don't mean that in a pumpkin spice Yankee Candle sorta way, I mean she's real—no drip, no flex, no need. She's sexy enough where she doesn't gotta wear statement pieces to remind the world she's bangin'.

The old man clocked it from a mile away and after fifty years of high maintenance women, he  snapped her up right quick, knowing he wouldn't have to worry, knowing he wouldn't have to break the bank buying her designer brands, knowing her good samaritan heart and book nerd mind would keep her from stepping out on him.

He takes all of this for granted, which leaves me wondering why she stays with him. Deadass, I don't know what she ever saw in him and if I'm being honest, I don't understand why she likes me either.

Some stepmoms, especially hot ones, would resent a grown-ass man living in the house with them. It's easy to imagine a situation where she'd have wanted her new husband all to herself, wanted the house all to herself. But Vivian isn't like all that. Me and her bonded from the jump, she liked my style and she even watched bad horror movies with me when we were both stoned and trying to hide it from the other person.

Maybe I didn't get all the books Vivian would leave lying around the house, books with big ideas and epic heartbreaks and existential whatevers, but there were times when I tried to read them, tried to understand them and, more often than not, when Vivian would find me loafing on the couch in the den, she'd smile that Cheshire cat smile when she saw me squinting at the page with my mouth hanging just slightly open, mouthing the words and trying to make sense of them. Something told me she appreciated the effort, even if she knew I didn't grok a goddamn word of it.

But all the book knowledge in the world couldn't have prepared me for this—slivers of sex real or made up, fragments of the inside of the guest studio and that mahogany canopy bed, the feeling of its Belgian linens on my damp skin, and the inside of her, the unmistakable sense that I was in Vivian, wrapped in the kind of love only she could give.

She's like performance velvet, I seem to remember thinking. I can hear myself thinking it and I can recall the thump of my head on the tufted headboard, the whir of the ceiling fan, the sway of the hammock by the boxwood hedges. Her smokey eyes boring into me as she seesawed. But nothing else. Nothing I wouldn't already have knocking around inside my head after a wet dream.

It wasn't like I didn't think about Vivian before last night. I started jerking off to thoughts of her about the first time Dad brought her home.

Matter of fact—and this is just between us—but I remember they were drunk and giddy when they came through the door. I mean, of course he was giddy; the lucky motherfucker was with someone who made him feel like the prom king. But they were both sauced from celebrating their engagement and that's when he introduced me to her and I remember Vivian slurring her words—it was the only time I've ever seen her lose control—and she asked me about my birthday and then she smiled and said, “Aquarius, thash the besh shign ever.” And then she excused herself to the first floor bathroom and when she came out from peeing and they headed upstairs, I locked myself in that bathroom and licked the toilet seat.

I know it's gross, but it smelled like her—warm and aromatic like raw honey and Madagascar vanilla and sea salt and peaches—and I had to know how she tasted. The answer: tangy and citrusy like a blood orange sangria.

That's the only thing I remember that tells me I wasn't hallucinating—I remember her smell. She smelled just like she did the first time I met her, except stronger, sweeter, the natural oils of her skin mingling to call out to me, to lure me in, as if I needed any luring.

I feel weird obsessing like this, but I have to know the truth. Because it matters. For the first time in my stupid life, something actually matters. It matters because it's Vivian. Anyone else wouldn't register.

When she gets home from her yoga class, I'm waiting in the den, smoking a bowl beneath the massive textured abstract canvas the old man bought at auction to impress his clients. It's big and dumb and pretentious, just like him.

Vivian strides in with her sweaty shirt clinging to her chest, drinking thirstily from a squeeze bottle of water. She sees me and something tells me she's been rehearsing how to seem casual.

“Hey,” she says. “How are you feeling?”

“I'm here,” I say.

“That's not what I asked.”

This bothers me more than it should.