All Chapters of I Slept With My Boyfriend’s Dad: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Della’s POV The house came into view before Asher said anything about it, which was somehow worse than if he'd warned me. One second we were on a narrow coastal road with dune grass whipping past the windows, and the next the trees broke open onto glass and cedar and a view of the ocean that looked less like a house and more like something out of a magazine spread titled *How the Other Half Summers.*"Okay," I said. "You undersold this.""I told you it was nice.""You said 'my dad's beach house.' That phrase does not prepare a person for this."Asher laughed, downshifting as the driveway curved up toward a detached garage already holding a car I didn't recognize. "In my defense, I've been coming here since I was a kid. It stops registering as impressive after a while. It's just Dad's house.""Must be nice," I said, and meant it more than I let on."He does well for himself. Tenure track, a couple of consulting things on the side, some investments that apparently panned out better tha

JulianI hadn't slept, not really, not since dinner ended and Asher and Della retreated upstairs and the house went quiet enough that I could hear the ocean through the open window in a way I usually found comforting and tonight found unbearable.I told myself it was nothing. A long day, an unfamiliar house settling in around new voices, the ordinary static of having people under my roof for the first time all season. I gave that explanation a fair chance, lying there in the dark, and it didn't hold up past the first ten minutes, because the truth, when I finally let myself look at it directly, was considerably less comfortable than a restless first night.I'd spent most of dinner watching my son's girlfriend. Not the ordinary vetting a parent does of the person their child brings home. I'd watched the way she laughed, delayed, like she was checking herself before she let it out fully. I'd watched the particular, deliberate way she held eye contact a half-second longer than any conver

JulianI hadn't planned on the blanket.That was the part I kept coming back to afterward, lying awake, trying to locate the exact moment the evening had stopped being a harmless family tradition and become something I was going to have to think carefully about for the rest of the summer. I hadn't engineered it. Asher had dragged the armchair cushion over without asking, the way he'd done since he was young enough that the whole arrangement used to fit around just the two of us, and by the time I registered what was happening, I was already on the couch, already under the same blanket as Della, with six inches of space between us that felt, within minutes, considerably smaller than it should have.I told myself it meant nothing. Proximity wasn't intention. A blanket wasn't a decision. I'd sat through a hundred movie nights on that same couch with a hundred different configurations of family and guests over the years, and none of them had required this specific, deliberate discipline j