Penny had arranged things with her now ex. They were officially separated, and she had filed for divorce on the grounds of his infidelity; he hadn't contested, and now it was just a few weeks for legal matters to happen. She texted me and asked if she could stay for a few days; I said yes. Well, what else could I say? She arrived in a bustle and immediately hugged and asked for a cup of tea.

"Lord, I tied one on last night," she announced as the kettle was boiling. "I was just in a funk, and the next thing I knew, two bottles of Chablis lay empty in the sink."

"Two? Crumbs," I replied as I got tea bags and mugs ready. "Are you going out? Meeting people?"

"Hell no. How can you top the faeries?"

"Oh, I don't know, I find I actually prefer real people."

"You keep saying the faeries are real. Make your mind up."

"They are real, but they are faeries, not tangible human beings. I prefer humans. They are a pleasant dalliance, but not long-term relationship material."

"Dad's been gone a long time now. Have you thought about remarrying?"

"Would you mind if I did?"

"No, not at all, but have you thought about it?"

"No one has crossed my path that has given me those thoughts. I like my life, and it will take someone very exceptional to fill the void left by your dad, and I have not met that person yet."

"Not even close?"

"No, not even close; a couple of guys that might have been possibilities turned out to be married, and that is not a complication I am prepared to deal with."

"Oh?"

"Okay for sex, but a relationship with me being the other woman? No. If someone comes along, then fine, but I am not looking."

"They say that when you stop looking, someone turns up where you least expect it."

"Do they now? Well, I haven't started looking, so I can't technically have stopped."

I made the tea, and we went and sat in the conservatory. Mik came in.

"Oh, it's you?" How perceptive of him! "I wondered where all the noise was coming from."

"Love you too, Bro," Penny smiled. They do get on, but they do like to tease each other. A lot.

"The kettle's just boiled, Mik, if you want a coffee?" I said. He shook his head and wandered off, waving his hand in a mock farewell.

"Are you thinking of moving, you know, memories and all that?" I asked.

"Hell no, it's my house; he was in it for a while, and now he isn't; it is no big deal."

She leant back in the chair, and I noticed, how could I not, that she was not wearing knickers. Had she followed my lead, I wondered.

"Mik", I yelled, hoping that he would hear me.

A few moments later, he put his head through. "Yes, Mum?"

"I am planning to go to the cottage with Penny. Want to come?"

"Yeah, can do. Things are not really getting anywhere with Debbie, so yeah, a few days away will be cool."

"Okay, well, you and Penny can work out where you are sleeping; there is the choice of the bedroom or the shepherd's hut. We'll go after lunch."

I made us all noodles for lunch, easy and filling, and then packed some clothes and food into the car. Mik sat in the front and Penny in the back, and we set off. As I was driving along the track to the cottage, I noticed it was beginning to show signs of wear, possibly because it was being used a lot more now. I wondered what I should do about it, if anything. I supposed some hardcore stuff or stones, but for a two-mile track, that was going to work out expensive. I would just keep driving slowly to minimise my impact.

We parked up and unpacked, and I put the clothes away. Mik decided that he would use the hut and took a few packs of crisps and cans of coke over, just for midnight provisions. He could come into the cottage for the loo; I had told him that he was not allowed to pee in the beck and also said he should make sure that he had a fully charged torch in the hut, just in case. It gets very dark up here, and tonight was a new moon, so only starlight was available. It was a clear sky too, so very little reflected light from nearby towns would be available.

Penny and Mik were sitting by the beck; I assumed that they would be calling Elvina and Fay soon. I was just generally tidying and vacuuming, trying to keep the place clean. I wondered about getting a robovac; it could do a basic vac each day, even when we weren't here. I then got a bit of a shock. I was just checking the history footage from the security cameras. They record all movement, whether we are here or not and save it to the cloud. I hadn't set up notifications or alerts, simply because I hadn't gotten around to it.

There was a flurry of activity yesterday afternoon. None of us were here yesterday, so I brought up the files, and it was a big and disappointing surprise. Jacob and a blond-haired girl came into the cottage and went up to the main bedroom.

"Are you sure this is okay, Dad?" the blond girl said.

"Yes, Mandy, it is fine; we can use this when Mica isn't around."

Interesting, I never said that to him; I simply agreed that he could keep an eye on the place. So, Mandy is his daughter. She started undoing her blouse, pulled it from her jeans and put it on a chair, and then her bra followed. Nice boobs, D-cup perhaps, and big nipples too. She undid her jeans and pushed them and her knickers down, sat on the side of the bed, and pulled them off, adding them to the pile on the chair. Standing up, she pulled the quilt down as Jacob finished undressing.

The resolution of the camera was not good enough for me to tell if she was shaven bare or trimmed short, which is always difficult with blonds. Mandy lay on the bed, and Jacob lay beside her. He bent across and kissed her, his hand between her legs, fingers sliding along her crease. She had his dick in her hand as she was slowly masturbating him.

Okay, Jacob and his daughter are shagging. I wondered how old she was; she looked late teens or early twenties, but again, the resolution wasn't good enough to be sure. After a few moments, she pushed him away and onto his back and went down on him, her bottom square on the camera, her fanny crease fully visible. The camera angle and her in the way meant I couldn't really see what she was doing, but it really didn't take much of an imagination to know. Her head was bobbing up and down, and his fingers were clutching at my bottom sheet.

After a few minutes, she pulled back and lay down, and they swapped places. Jacob went down on her and presented his arse and tackle to the camera, his balls swinging below his dick, the camera angle making them look pendulous. He had a hand under his face and I could only assume he was fingering his daughter as he licked her. I could hear her grunting as he worked on her, and her fingers were also clutching; her heels were scrabbling on the sheet, and then she screamed, piercingly, almost too much for the microphone as it distorted. Nice one, Jacob.

He rolled to the side of her, and I could see her chest heaving as she gulped in breaths of air. After a few moments, she got to her knees, using her hands to steady herself, and Jacob moved behind her. He used his hand to guide it into her and then started shagging, his balls really swaying back and forth as he moved. The camera was clearly picking up her grunts and gasps and the slaps as he shagged her with some tempo.

Between her gasps, she was calling out 'Yes, Dad, yes' or 'Fuck me, Dad, fuck me'. It was a bit like what I imagined a staged American porno would be like. Never having watched one, I couldn't really be sure. Perhaps this scene was more common in England than I thought. Jacob was moving faster, and it seemed deeper too; Mandy was gasping louder and louder; perhaps her earlier orgasm had left her close to the edge.

"Argh," Jacob grunted and pushed in hard and stopped moving.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Mandy gasped and then screamed, again the sound distorting.

Jacob pulled back and lay on his back, Mandy staying where she was on her hands and knees, audibly gasping, and a dribble of white fell from her fanny onto my bottom sheet. She turned and rolled, lying on her back, her breasts heaving as she gulped in air, Jacob just lying quietly, breathing deeply.

"Bloody hell, Dad," she said after a few minutes. "We need to do this more often. Is it like this with Mum?"

"Let's not bring your mother into this," Jacob said between gasps. He seemed a bit out of breath still; I thought he was fitter than this.

I stopped watching and went and stripped the bottom sheet from the bed, replacing it with a clean one and putting the 'soiled' one in the machine. Wow. What to do – that was the thing. I might just mention that someone seems to have been in the cottage whilst I wasn't there, and perhaps I should lock it and put an alarm in. Leave it at that and see what he says.

I did us baked potatoes for tea. I had microwaved them and then put them in the oven to crisp up. I did a tin of tuna and mayonnaise as the filling. The kids had spent the afternoon by the beck. I didn't spy on them or ask them if they had seen the girls; I just pottered in the house, my head firmly thinking of what I had seen on the security footage. One thing: it confirmed my suspicion that Jacob was married. He never wore a ring when he came to visit, and we had never discussed his home life, and to be fair, he was a pretty good shag. I just don't want the complications of being 'the other woman'.

We sat in the sitting room, Mik playing on his handheld, and Penny and I just generally chatting. She confirmed that she went commando a lot more often now, and like me, she liked the feeling of freedom and how less clammy she got. She also said that word seemed to have somehow gotten around that she was 'single' again and that a few men from her past had mailed or texted her asking after her.

"You know, it is amazing how that happens. I don't know how. It happened a lot after your dad passed. I found it insensitive if I am honest. It wasn't a separation or divorce; I was a widow, and I was grieving."

"How did you respond, Mum?"

"Typically, I send a reply along the lines of, 'I am still in my weeds; my husband has just passed. How do you think I might be feeling?'

"Weeds?"

"Have you not heard that? It is short for 'widow's weeds'. Widows were expected to wear black and only black for a year after their husband died. The word 'weeds' was an old word for 'clothes'. I think it stems back to the Victorian age."

"Wow, no, I knew people wore black, but I didn't know about widow's weeds. I can't use that because I am not a widow; I am an imminent divorcee."

"Ah, well, the old expectations were that a divorcee was ready and ripe for it. I guess that isn't necessarily true."

"It may be, and I wouldn't say no, but I am not seeking it, and if I were wearing knickers, I wouldn't be ripping them off for every man that called."

We laughed; Mik briefly looked up from his game and gave us one of his indecipherable looks. I went and poured us some more wine; Mik just had another can of coke. The evening progressed and more wine was consumed, and at around ten, I declared an end.

"I have had enough; I shall leave you kids to it. I am going up. See you in the morning." There were choruses of 'good night', and I headed up. I am not as young as I was, and we had consumed two bottles of wine between us; I knew when to stop, though. I stripped, washed, cleaned my teeth and crawled into bed. The room wasn't swimming, but my mind was telling me it should be. I fell asleep.

I awoke with a hand cupping my breast, and the dick prodding my back made me think it was Mik; it was pitch black, and I couldn't see anything.

"Mik," I whispered.

"Hush, Mum, you'll wake Penny; she is crashed out downstairs. She had more wine after you went to bed."

I could imagine the head that she would have in the morning. I turned and, using my hands, I found Mik's face and leant forward and kissed him, my lips sliding over his and then my tongue pressing into his mouth, our tongues dancing; in my mind, they were dancing an Argentinian tango.

My hands reached down, and I found his dick, nicely hard and moist at the end. I pulled his skin down with one hand and ran my other fingers over his exposed dickhead. I felt him move away, and then his breath was at my crease, his tongue delving between my labia, its coarseness adding to the tickle in my sex. His nose pressed my clitoris, and fingers circled my entrance, pushing in, penetrating.

I was still blind, with no light; I could make no sense of where he was. I just lay back, my legs apart, and let his nose, tongue and fingers do their magic. I could not contemplate chastising Jacob for shagging his daughter when here I was, shagging my son. There is a certain intensity when you lose your sense of sight. It is as if your sense of feeling and touch were increased in sensitivity, as if to make up for the shortfall.

Mik pulled back, and his fingers left me, a feeling of emptiness, and then I felt the mattress move by my head and side and guessed that he was covering me. I reached down and found his dick; gripping it, I lined it up with my entrance, and Mik pushed, penetrating me completely with one push. Such was my arousal.

I no longer felt empty, his dick filling me, my fanny stretching, walls now touching his dick, not each other. I hadn't noticed his foreskin move within me when he penetrated me, but now, as he shagged slowly, I could feel its movement within me, a really sensual movement; the rim of his head was scraping me, but just behind it, his skin rolled along my fanny walls, odd, yet utterly erotic.

As Mik shagged me, I realised that this only happened here; we never shagged at home. It was as if here we were different people, and I loved that. My electrics were building and my pressures growing. My fingers were on his back, my fingernails pressing in deeply; it must have hurt him, yet I could not relax and withdraw them. I could feel my groin fizzing, and my back was tightening, arching, moving away from the mattress, and then Mik went from slow and steady to a massive press and thrust, faster and faster, the slaps echoing around the dark black room, my grunts accompanying the orchestral sounds of sex.

Faster he went, his own grunts and gasps accompanying mine, and then he pressed in hard, his belly pressing hard against mine, and he grunted loudly, his ejaculation deep inside me triggering my orgasm. I screamed as breath shot from my body and electricity coursed around my fingers and toes, nipples and ears tingling as my eruption exploded through my body.

I relaxed down onto the mattress; Mik briefly lay on top of me and then slid to the side. He pulled the quilt up and covered us. "I love you, Mum," he said softly into my ear. I guessed he was staying with me tonight. I relaxed back, feeling his emission dribbling from my fanny as I closed my unseeing eyes and relaxed back into sleep.

When I awoke in the morning, I was alone. I got up and stretched, and then got out of bed, leaving the quilt rolled back to let the bed air. I used the loo and then showered, douching to remove any residue. As I stood there dripping, I recalled the night and how almost overwhelming having intimacy in the pitch darkness of the dales really was.

I dressed in a mid-length dress that covered my shoulders and went downstairs. I guessed Mik was in the hut; he was nowhere to be seen in the cottage. Penny was sprawled on the sofa, her legs apart and fanny on view for all to see.

"Kettle's on, Pen," I said. "I'm making coffee."

"Mmm, yes, right, what?" I left her to it.

I put the kettle on and put some Weetabix in a bowl and poured milk on it. That would do me for breakfast this morning. After clearing the bowl, I went outside and tapped on the hut door. "Kettle's on, Mik, if you want a hot drink," I called, getting an 'ok' in response. I wondered how long he had been in the hut.

Back in the kitchen, the kettle had boiled; I made myself a tea and sat at the kitchen table, cradling the cup. Penny came in looking very much like she had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

"Morning," I said. "How are you this morning?"

"Okay."

"Really?" I asked.

"No. Wow, what a headache I had earlier; it's gone...