2

Roxy

I should have turned around the second I saw the light.

I told myself that even as I stood there, my hand hovering an inch from the wood. I would look for a second, just long enough to understand what I was hearing, and then I would leave.

That was the story I told myself.

It lasted only a few seconds.

Through the gap in the door, I saw my mother.

Her face was flushed, her eyes closed, completely lost in whatever was happening inside that room. I had never seen her like that before. A thread of saliva slid from the corner of her mouth.

She wasn’t enduring this. She was drowning in it.

Every part of me told me to turn around, walk back to my room, and bury my head under the pillow until morning made this stop being real.

Watching my mother like this wasn’t just crossing a line. It was crossing a line I could never come back from.

I stayed anyway.

Heat built low in my body until it stopped being bearable. My knees gave out first, folding me down onto the cold floor without deciding to, my eyes still fixed on the gap in the door.

My breathing matched theirs before I noticed it happening. My hands moved on their own, into my top, freeing myself to the cool air, my nipples already aching before I touched them.

I circled my thumbs over them, watching the flex and bunch of Dorian’s back with every thrust, and a sound climbed my throat that I bit down before it could escape.

I slid a hand lower and found myself already soaked.

I wish it were me.

The thought looped inside my head. Ugly, forbidden, and viciously insistent. I wanted to be the one pinned under that rhythm.

My mother’s cries kept time with the wet, rhythmic slap of skin, and underneath it, Dorian’s low groans didn’t sound like a man in love. They sounded like a predator taking inventory of something he already owned.

I added a second finger, then a third, chasing his pace, my vision starting to blur at the edges.

A moan slipped out of me, louder than I meant it to be. I froze. Bit my lip hard enough to taste copper. Silent. I have to be silent.

“Yes, Dorian.” My mother’s voice cracked against the headboard, lost to whatever was happening to her. “Fuck me harder. Please.”

The plea went straight through me. I wanted that, wanted to know what it felt like to be undone the same way she was being undone.

He pulled back for one suspended second, the room going quiet, before slamming in again hard enough to groan the bed frame.

“I’m cumming,” he growled, low enough that I felt it in my sternum more than heard it.

My own release hit a moment later, hard enough that I slumped back against the wall, shaking, gasping at nothing.

Inside the room, the quiet settled. Dorian withdrew, still and powerful in the low light. My mother’s eyes fluttered shut almost instantly, pulled under by exhaustion.

I stayed on the floor another second, catching my breath, watching my own hand in the dark before I made myself move.

That was when I felt it: a prickle at the back of my neck, a weight settling over me that had nothing to do with what I’d just done.

I looked up.

Through the crack in the door, it wasn’t my mother’s eyes on me anymore.

It was his.

I was up and moving before I’d decided to move, bare feet silent on the runner, my pulse a drumbeat in my ears the whole sprint back to my room.

I threw myself inside and shut the door, leaning my full weight against it like wood could undo what had already happened.

There was no lie I could tell myself. No version of this where he hadn’t caught me.

I slid down until I was sitting against the door, arms wrapped around my knees, and let the one thought I couldn’t outrun finally land.

He knows.