“Make me cum?” Her voice was soft and sticky.

It should’ve been so easy to say no- to smile and say goodnight, to go home to my wife as I had promised. But as I looked down on this tangled mess of a girl half my age, red hair chaotic and wild on her pillow, little black strip of an adult dress riding perilously high on impossibly long legs, I made the fatal mistake of hesitating, of thinking twice.

She unfolded from her curled up position, legs stretching out to me, reaching for me. One heel shifted slightly, and her legs teased open just a fraction. And I froze. How did she know to move like this? To move her body in exactly the right way to render me powerless? It was a matter of millimeters; a heel shifted, a shoulder cocked, a smile only suggested. And those eyes… those eyes that flashed blue and brilliant in the light but deepened to a darker, more dangerous shade in the shadows. I saw the flicker between innocent and shameless, watched the one chase the other, watched them blur together into a creature that was as intoxicating as it was harrowing.

I knew if I stayed, I was risking so, so much. But if I left… if I left… I couldn’t process what would happen if I left... My mind turned blank- was it already too late? Maybe there was no leaving, now. Maybe the decision had already been made without me. My feet were rooted to the floor, but somehow I was moving forward, floating closer, failing, falling to my knees on the bed at her feet. One slender, pale foot inched up my thigh, and I knew all was lost.

I took it gently, lifted it to my lips, kissed the cool, smooth skin of her instep, kissed her ankle, kissed the Band-Aid I had just applied above her heel. I kissed my way up the inside of her calf, tasting her skin, inhaling the warmth of her. At her knee, I opened my eyes. She was watching me with those blue, flickering eyes. It was clear she knew the power she had over me. But could she know why? Did she understand how much? Did I?

——-

My phone buzzed loudly on my bedside table. I peeked out of the bathroom door, toothbrush still in my mouth. The clock said 12:24. Why is she texting me past midnight? I looked at Charlotte, who was already in bed, curled up on one side. With any luck, she was already asleep and hadn’t heard the buzz.

Well, finals are over, I thought. Probably out with her friends. Just some drunk text. I’ll check it in the morning.

Three weeks ago, I met a college girl named Maddie at an art show, and the universe turned inside out. In twenty years of marriage, not once had I strayed, nor even truly been tempted to. But five minutes with this mercurial and magnetic redhead cracked open a dusty and forgotten part in my brain, and something new and amazing came alive. Moments later, we were pressed against each other in the storage closet, her tongue in my mouth, her dress above her hips and my hand between her legs.

Two weeks ago, Charlotte learned of our little dalliance, and her reaction was... well, odd. She was angry, obviously. Charlotte is a creature of fire, and for the first day after learning of my infidelity, she burned white-hot, and I honestly believed our marriage could be at an end. But then she came to me. She fucked me. She asked for promises, which I gave. And then she fell silent. It wasn’t punishment, and it didn’t feel like sadness; something was on her mind, and she wasn’t telling me what it was.

So I didn’t see Maddie. I didn’t try to contact her. But I thought of her- god, I thought of little else. My days were filled with imagining what it would be like to be with her, to taste her, to make love to her. My nights were filled with vague and fleeting dreams of red hair and soft lips and pale skin.

Maddie, though, did continue to try to contact me. Texts mostly, and mostly harmless. Blurbs about classes, complaints about professors, goofy selfies in front of a horribly spotty mirror. I kept my replies neutral, noncommittal, trying to stay on the right side of my promises to Charlotte. One text included a dressing room picture of her in a white pleated skirt. “Whaddya think- too short?” it queried, playfully. “Just right,” I replied, all the while screaming on the inside to see it lifted if only an inch higher.

She would bore eventually, I assured myself. A twenty-year-old’s interest in a forty-something married man could never last. Finals were just around the corner and soon she’d be headed home for the summer. So, having already narrowly avoided a catastrophic split in my marriage, I resolved to keep the texts from Charlotte. Let it fizzle, I thought. Let it fade. Let it be a fling- a rare and beautiful stolen moment. Right now, that moment was perfect. So let it stay perfect.

My phone rattled on the table again. I had to get to it, silence it, before it woke Charlotte. I spat in the sink and dropped my toothbrush in its holder before making my way around to my side of the bed. I reached for the phone, but it buzzed again before I could take it. I heard Charlotte roll over in the dark.

“Alan, who is it?” she asked.

I squinted in the bright light of my phone as I sat down on the bed with my back to Charlotte.

She was using punctuation and capital letters. This must be serious.

“Alan? Who’s texting you?”

“It- It’s nothing. Nobody.” A stammered, pathetic answer, but I didn’t know how to lie about it. No one ever texted me, least of all so late at night.

Charlotte sat upright with a jolt. I shut my eyes and sighed quietly. I knew what was coming. “It’s her, isn’t it? Alan?”

“Charlotte, I’m sorry. She says it’s an emergency.” It was hard to type with shaky fingers.

“Her friends ditched her in a rough part of town. She needs a ride.” I stood and grabbed a shirt from the accent chair.

Charlotte switched on her bedside light. “Wait, you’re not thinking of actually going, are you?”

“What am I supposed to do, Charlotte? She’s just a kid.”

“She’s an adult with her own friends, and her own phone, and… and Uber. Why you?” Charlotte’s voice was more incredulous than angry; more desperate than despairing.

“I dunno, Charlotte.” I pulled on a pair of jeans. “If it was anyone else, you wouldn’t even bat an eye.”

"Yeah, well, it’s not anyone else, is it? It’s… her.”

“It’s just a ride, Char. Pick her up, drop her off, and then I’m back home. I promise.”

I snatched up my phone again.

“Please don’t fuck her, Alan.” Charlotte’s eyes were wide and sad. “I’m serious. There’s something about this girl that scares me. I mean, sure: hot twenty-year-old, boring marriage- believe me, I get it. But there’s something else. She’s… dangerous. To us, I mean. She could turn everything upside down without even trying, and that scares me. I’m not sure I want my life upside down. And I’m not sure you do, either.

“Charlotte,” I looked her in the eyes and tried to sound as calm and reassuring as I could. “It’s just a ride.”

She didn’t reply; just hugged her knees to her chest and stared into the shadows.

———

Ten minutes later, the blur of brightly lit shops and restaurants of downtown gave way to the blank, windowless slabs of brick and concrete in the industrial district near the shipyards. What Maddie and her friends had been doing down here was beyond me- probably some new hipster bar or “secret” dance club in an “abandoned” factory. The streets were dirty and deserted, and the sidewalks- where they weren’t blocked with stacks of wooden pallets or forklifts- were completely devoid of life. The only light came from the streetlights, half of which didn’t work.

Jeez, Maddie. I was glad that I hadn’t ignored my phone or let Charlotte talk me out of coming. The situation was clearly dangerous. After a few more blocks of towering warehouses, vacant lots, and nondescript factories, I came to the intersection Maddie had given me. At first, I couldn’t see her, but when I turned, my headlights caught a flash of red hair. She was sitting, head on her knees, on the curb outside a graffitied brick building with rusty garage doors. As I pulled up, she raised her head and gave a tired wave.

I rolled down my window. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just exhausted and a little pissed off.” She struggled to her feet and I almost gasped. I had never seen her like this. She was wearing a tiny, skin-tight black dress with a sheer panel covering a neckline that plunged to just between her breasts. Strappy black heels made her already spindly legs look miles long. She was breathtaking. This was a far cry from the sweet, almost mousy Maddie I had met in the art gallery.

“What on earth are you doing out here?”

She walked around to the passenger side and got in. “Jessica’s idea. ‘Finals are done! Let’s go celebrate!’ I was so tired, all I wanted to do was climb into bed, but she dragged me out here anyway.” She slammed the car door shut. “Then she meets some random guy and wants to go back to his place, so she just leaves me here!” She laid her head back on the headrest, sighed, and looked at me. “I really need a new roommate.”

I heard all this and was able to process it on some level, but when she fell silent, I realized that I had been staring at her legs the entire time. I finally looked up at her. She smiled sweetly at me and said, “Hey, there.” I had been caught.

“Why didn’t you just phone Uber or something?”

“First of all, you don’t phone Uber. It’s an app. Second of all…” She laid her hand on my thigh. “I wanted to see you.”

...just a ride… just a ride…

She told me where her apartment was, and I headed back through downtown toward the main campus. Her eyes were closed- she may have even drifted asleep- but her hand never left my thigh. With every flash of the passing streetlights, I stole glances at the beautiful legs in my passenger seat and conjured up memories of our encounter in the storage closet, of running my hands along her smooth thighs, pushing up the skirt of her little blue sundress. My cock was hard, but I wasn’t too worried about keeping my promise to Charlotte. I mean, the poor kid was exhausted and we were coming up on 2 AM. Nothing was going to happen except me dropping her off and immediately driving back home.

When we got to her place, I pulled the car over, but didn’t bother to put it into park. Maddie opened her eyes and looked around. “Oh, we’re here.”

“As promised.”

“Will you help me get upstairs?”

“Help you? Are you not feeling well or something?”

“Just so tired. Besides, you try climbing stairs in these things.”

I felt a little pang of doubt and worry in the pit of my stomach as I shifted the car into park and turned the key. I could almost feel Charlotte’s withering gaze as I stepped around the car and wrapped one arm around Maddie’s waist. Together, we stumbled up the narrow staircase, where I fully intended to leave her. Just a quick goodbye (maybe a little kiss), and then I’m on my way. She unlocked the door and swung it wide open. Suddenly sure of herself on her towering heels, she walked in and disappeared down a hallway.

I should have closed the door. I should have walked back down the stairs, gotten into my car, and gone home. But as I glanced around Maddie’s apartment, I found myself transfixed.

She lived here.

I switched on the light and took in the pile of shoes by the door, the towering stack of dirty plates on the kitchen counter, the hand-me-down ragged couch, and the collection of clear Starbucks cups on nearly every surface, all filled with varying amounts of disturbingly pink liquid. The air was thick with the unfamiliar scents of a stranger’s house- the pungent tang of the unwashed dishes; the musty, almost acrid smell of old furniture; the cloying, floral-sweet haze of department store incense.

I took it all in, imagining a ghostly image of Maddie walking through the room, polishing her nails on the couch, curled up with a book by the window, washing dishes. I smiled and laughed a little at myself. For all the hours I’d spent imagining her in my arms, it had scarcely crossed my mind to wonder where she lived, how she lived. And now here I was. I closed the front door behind me and followed her down the hallway, taking everything in with a kind of bemused reverence.

Her bedroom was different from the rest of the apartment, marginally cleaner, though still the eclectic hodge-podge of a college student. Maddie was face down on the bed, still clothed, obviously asleep. But my ghostly-imagined Maddie flitted about the room in only a towel, pulling different outfits from the overstuffed closet, tapping away at her laptop on the bed, sitting on the floor in front of that horribly spotted mirror taking selfies, trying too hard to look sexy or serious or silly.

The desk was stacked high with textbooks and papers, and on the bulletin board above it, a random arrangement of photos. Maddie in a bright green bikini surrounded by friends at the beach. Maddie rolling around on a leaf-covered lawn, playing with an enormous brown and white dog. Maddie posing in a high-school graduation robe with a younger, essentially mini version of herself- a kid sister. Maddie in the same robe between a middle-aged couple beaming and squinting in the sunlight. Her parents. Christ, am I older than her parents?!

There was an easel by the window holding another of the nude self-portraits on found-wood similar to the one I’d seen in the gallery just a few weeks ago. With my finger, I traced the wood just outside the lines of her nude figure, so careful not to touch her.

I laughed again as I turned to face the real Maddie. Far from being the poignant pinprick to my mystery-fantasy version of her that it could have been, being here felt exactly right- exactly real. If anything, I was more charmed by the reality of her. For some reason, this alluring young soul had noticed me, had wanted to know me. It wasn’t a myth, and it wasn’t a fantasy. She was real.  When I looked over at the sleeping nymph, too-thick makeup smearing her pillowcase, too-tight party dress riding up the back of her thighs, too-high heels cutting into her ankles, I couldn’t help but smile.

At least I can get these things off. I knelt by the bed and took one ankle in my hand. As gently as I could, I unbuckled the strappy shoe and inched it with some difficulty from her foot. I traced the indentation made by the straps on her ankles, hands aching to move higher, to graze over the warm, smooth skin of her legs to where they disappeared beneath her dress. With a shudder, I let go of her foot and got to work on the other shoe.

There was a little trail of dried blood where one of the straps had bit too deep. I tiptoed to the bathroom and, after an exhaustive search, finally found a box of unopened Band-Aids hiding in a drawer behind five different kinds of hair conditioner. With the corner of a moistened towel, I wiped the blood from the back of her ankle and gently applied the Band-Aid. Unable to resist, I leaned in to place a light kiss just above the bandage.

“Heeeyyyy, you…” Maddie's voice was sleepy and raspy, and still partly muffled by her pillow. “You’re still here.”

I stood up and tried to find her eyes beneath the curtain of red hair. “I’m still here.”

She drowsily rolled onto her back, brushing her hair from her face and blinking her makeup-smeared eyelids a few times, trying to get them to stay open. We stared at each other.

“Make me cum?” Her voice was soft and sticky.

Shit.

——-

I left that penetrating blue gaze, closing my eyes and descending, forgetting to breathe as my cheek grazed the impossible softness of her thigh. My mouth brushed up against her panties and I breathed her in for the first time. The scent of her… the beautiful earthy tang, metallic, feminine and primal… it was a beach on a windy day and a forest after a heavy rain. As I inhaled, she exhaled a long, deep gasp-y breath and threaded her fingers into my hair to pull me harder into her. I shoved her dress up over her hips and reached under her ass to grab her panties. She shifted up, letting me peel the tiny pink thong from her pussy. I pulled it off and threw it on the floor.

I laid down between her legs and kissed her softly, my lips against hers, teasing them apart with my tongue. She whimpered as I pushed into her, probing as deeply as I could before licking, slowly, widely, up to her clit. I lost myself in her cunt, exploring every corner with my tongue, licking up slowly at first, building up speed before slowing again to circle her clit. Her fingers still tugged at my hair, her moans louder and more frequent now. I looked up at her. Her head was thrown back on her pillow, her back arching up as she writhed and squirmed.

I pulled back for a second and looked at her pussy, pink and glistening and perfect. Gently, I ran two of my fingers over the length of it before effortlessly sliding them inside her. I fucked her with my fingers for a few moments before descending again to lick her clit. Her hips began to buck in time with my tongue, so much so that I was having trouble staying near her clit. I used my other arm to gently hold her hips down and slowed my fingers until her hips fell into a slow, circular, sensuous rhythm. I knew she needed to cum- I needed her to cum- but I also wanted to savor her wetness on my face, and revel in the heat of her grip on my fingers.

I could have fucked her like that for hours. She was lost in her own pleasure, and I was lost in her. She opened, and I pushed into her. She folded around me, swallowing me whole only to give me up again, only for me to push into her again.

With a last, slow upward lick, I eased my fingers out of her and her body relaxed. I watched her chest rise and fall as she panted, trying to catch her breath. I shifted her leg up onto my shoulder and leaned forward, opening her up even more.

I let my middle finger, still coated in her wetness, slide down the tiny space below her pussy and trace a tiny circle around the outside of her asshole. She threw her head back again with a sharp, surprised breath. My finger continued to circle her, moistening her with her own wetness, ever so often dipping to the center with just a hint of pressure. One of her hands shot behind her to grip the headboard; the other found her breast and squeezed it hard as she let out a long, low moan through tight lips.

With a little shift, she pushed down against me, and I knew she wanted it inside. I leaned forward and licked at her clit with steady, broad strokes as I slowly pushed my middle finger into her asshole. I let it rest there for a moment, enjoying the sounds of her desperate, panting moans, before letting it slide almost all the way out. The moans turned to a loud wail, which broke into a series of short, punctuated grunts as I pushed back in.

I fucked her ass faster now, and licked her faster still. Her moans got higher and higher and higher until I felt the first telltale clench around my finger. I pushed deep into her ass and stayed there, but continued licking furiously. She came hard, wailing, flailing against the bed, squeezing hard again and again around me until her body sank slowly back down to the bed. Her moans subsided into long, ragged breaths as the spasms slowly, gradually, faded.

I eased out of her and raised myself, panting, to my knees to look down at the delectably disheveled woman on the bed, legs splayed, skin faintly glistening with sweat, bright red hair gloriously tangled, body exposed, vulnerable, open. Breathtaking.

With a deep sigh, she closed her legs and rolled to her side, pulling her knees up to a curl, and almost instantly, she was asleep. I stood, wrapped her up in blankets as best I could and tiptoed from the room.

I left with the taste of Maddie on my lips. Charlotte and I would talk. I didn’t know if we would fight. I didn’t know if she would stay. She said she wanted to keep our world from turning upside down. But our world already was upside down. It had been since Maddie walked into it.