“So … I talked to my mother today.”

Nikki was leaning in Stone’s bedroom doorway. She bit her lower lip and studied the top of the doorframe while he let her statement settle in his mind. But she didn’t make statements. She dropped soft grenades. He couldn’t say he was getting used to it, but he couldn’t say he disliked it, either.

She was wearing a thin, white tank that didn’t reach the bottom of her ribs. It had spaghetti straps and gave her breasts an impudent look, making them seem bigger than they were. Her panties were white, too. They were tiny, but didn’t ride her body as snugly as they must have when she first put them on in the morning. One bare foot was crossed in front of the other, and the wash of moonlight in the windows was sliding up her smooth legs.

He flashed back to a month ago, that night she snuck into the center in the middle of a freak, late season blizzard. Now, already, the windows were open and she was padding around the house in panties. The world had changed three or four times in three or four different ways, yet he still kept her off in her own bedroom.

Biding his time.

Biding his mind.

Biding … just biding.

“Okay.”

He kept watching her and let a half smile show. She might have been an expert at tossing grenades, but he would always know how to outwait her. He was sprawled across rumpled sheets, wearing dark boxer briefs with his head and shoulders propped halfway up on a wedge of pillows. He had a splayed open paperback in his hands called The Girl with Curious Hair.

Since the blizzard, the house had felt cloaked in a shroud of unspoken awareness of the other’s constant presence, even if one of them wasn’t entirely present physically while the other was an innately physical creature she’d barely begun to understand. It wasn’t as if there had been a sudden, definable change, but a few hundred tiny ones, as if everything was the same but deeper, somehow.

Blue curtains were a little bluer now. White panties were just a little whiter.

“I think she’s getting tired of Dogface already,” she said. “She was hinting around about coming back.”

Her eyes were darting everywhere but his face, and the more she avoided his face, the more he realized how much she wanted to be able to look at him.

“Stop talking to the ceiling,” he said. “I’m over here. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

She sighed but still didn’t look him straight in the eye. She took a few slow, toe-dragging steps into the room and then spun and jumped backward onto the mattress, making everything bounce. She settled herself sideways across the bed and lay back, using the book on Stone’s lap as a pillow. He reached to brush a spray of hair behind her ear and rested his hand against her neck. She sighed again. Maybe a little calmer this time.

He felt the pulse in her neck against his fingers and outwaited her. The weight of her head and soft texture of her hair felt good against his thigh.

“I don’t want her coming back,” she finally said.

“What makes you think she is?”

“Just ‘cuz of stuff she said. Her wanting to come back and be with you again. Stuff like that. She practically came out and said it. She asked those kinds of questions she does. The sneaky kind when she’s after something.”

“Such as?”

Stone’s hand slid down her neck, over her collarbone and inside her tank. He cupped the soft warmth of her breast in his hand and worried her nipple between his fingertips until it started to thicken. Her chest rose and fell with deeper breath.

“Stuff about you and me,” she said.

“Like if we’re fucking?”

“Not in so many words, but that’s what she really wanted to know.”

He outwaited her again, patiently massaging her breast. She finally blew an impatient sigh.

“I told her the truth. That you’re not fucking me. I didn’t say ‘yet’, but she knows damn well I was thinking it.”

“Just because someone says something like that doesn’t mean it’s about to happen,” he said. “If she were serious she would’ve had that conversation with me.”

Nikki chuckled. “You don’t know her as well as you think,” she said. “She knows there’s a reason I stayed here with you.”

Stone inhaled deeply. The scent of Nikki’s new bodywash curled faintly around his head. Her nipple was fully distended in his rolling fingertips now, and his cock would not be far behind.

“I’m a little misty on the reason for that myself,” he said.

“Pfft, that’s ‘cuz you think like a whore.”

He didn’t admonish her for the name calling. His usual urge to correct her coarse declarations had relaxed significantly since the blizzard. It was better she call him a whore than someone else, and something about the way she’d finger fucked his ass while he was cumming in Rena had a way of changing things. But everything was changing everything, and they were in the middle of a detour on a journey he hadn’t known they were on until they were too far gone.

“You don’t like her very much, do you?” he asked.

“Of course I do. She’s my mother. I love her. No one has sacrificed so much for me as she has, but I know her enough not to trust her on certain things.”

“You don’t have to worry. She’s not coming back.”

She went silent a moment, the way she did when she was too happy about something to let it show with anything more than the impudent smirk she could never suppress. Her nipple loomed hot under his fingers while his cock began to prickle with pinpoints of heat. He pulled the book out from under her head and put it on the stand by his bed. Nikki turned her head and licked his thigh. The wet swipe of her tongue sent deeper shivers of heat through his cock and he gave her nipple a tight squeeze. She uttered a sound Stone couldn’t think of a name for.

“That’s getting me wet,” she said, licking him again.

“Show me.”

She snickered and raised her legs, sliding off her panties all in the same motion. She tossed the panties at his face and shifted her position on the bed until she was lying with her head toward the foot and her pussy toward him. She scrabbled closer until she was able to plant one foot on his chest and the other on the mattress. She slid her hands down her thighs and framed her pouting slit with her hands, pressing into the meat of her thighs and parting herself open.

“See? You should know I would never joke about getting wet.” She was wet enough to glisten, and when she trailed her finger along her slit her finger started to glisten, too.

Stone’s cock swelled until the tip was seeping with ooze. He covered the bulge in his briefs with his hand and rubbed his length as he watched Nikki’s fingers stroke and play in the nest of her flushed sex lips.

“And I shaved,” she added. “Hardly an hour ago. My juicy little peach is just as smooth and wet as it gets.”

She pressed and rolled her hand against her slit, but then forked her left index and middle fingers over the V of her pussy, spreading herself while the middle finger of her right drew circles around her swollen nub. Stone pushed the waist of his briefs below his balls. He gripped his shaft and stroked as he watched Nikki lacquer her fingers with honey from her heated slash.

“Fuck,” she muttered softly, breath turning to sighs.

“What?” He watched as she slipped two of her fingers inside herself and let them glide while his shaft twitched in his fist.

“I like your balls,” she said. “I love the way they look from down here, especially when you’re hard. Makes me wanna lick ‘em so bad.”

“Then stop talking about it and do it,” he said.

She made a purring sound that was both arousing and annoying all at the same time. Classic Nikki.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m already getting used to this. And then if my mother comes back … I’m fucked. Before I even get fucked.”

Stone sighed. “Suit yourself. If you really think there’s any possibility I’d get back with her now then don’t touch me. Go away.”

She snickered briefly, but instead of leaning over to lick Stone’s balls, she pulled her fingers out of her sheath and reached over to caress them with her hand. Her fingers were slick with syrup and it felt almost like being licked. He reached for her bare thigh with his free hand while she began massaging her slit with her left. Then she leaned in and licked the smear of her own juices off his balls.

“Oh god, they taste like my pussy now,” she whispered. “There’s something I’ve kinda been wanting to do,” she added, half haltingly. “Kinda dying to, actually.”

Stone waited for her to keep going despite her expecting a response. His view of her fingers playing with her pussy made it easy. The caress of her slick fingers on his balls while he stroked his cock made it even easier. He knew the time would soon come that she would understand how to spin his brain like a top, but for now, he enjoyed leading her down the same path toward her own sensual strength. She didn’t even need guiding. The best Stone could hope to do was save her a little time and a few detours. She was his protégé now, not just academically, like Rena, but in every other way he could imagine. And something else.

He loved her.

He loved her in a way he knew he would never have been able to love her mother or Rena or anyone else. She was a whole different force of nature slowly unraveling before his eyes. He was patiently waiting to be drenched by the deluge when it finally arrived.

“Remember that day you shaved me?” she asked.

“Of course.” He was close to being sure he knew where she was leading, and the idea sent shudders of both apprehension and eagerness through his cock.

“I always feel a little sad doing it myself now.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel good?” he asked, digging his thumb into her inner thigh.

“Yeah, it does,” she replied, “but when you did it for me it made me feel special. Pampered. And then you made me cum like a little whore.” She punctuated the statement with a giggle.

He thought about telling her not to call herself a whore for the umpteenth time, but finally just sighed. He thought about what she was trying to offer now, wondering if she’d figured out he already knew what she had yet to come out and say. He finally decided she hadn’t.

“Don’t you know how much I’d love to shave you again?” he asked.

“Mmm, I’d love that,” she sighed, pressing her fingers hard into her dripping pussy. “But there’s something else I’d love, too.”

Stone lifted her foot off his chest and got up. She giggled behind him as he walked into the bathroom and switched on the light. She giggled again when she came in because his cock and nutsac were still hanging over the lowered waistband of his boxer briefs. Without a word, she knelt and pulled them down so he could step out of them. She caught his stiff shaft in her hand and kissed the syrupy dome, then closed her eyes and rubbed him against her cheek. He reached to brush the other cheek with the backs of his fingers.

“You’re a beautiful girl, Nikki,” he said. “Much more than you realize.”

When she smiled, he could feel her cheek muscle bunch up against his cock. She opened her eyes and licked the whole length of his shaft one time slowly before standing back up.

“Then how come you haven’t even really kissed me? I mean really kissed me,” she frowned.

“I have,” he said.

“I mean like you mean it,” she said. “And constantly.”

He lifted her top over her head and she raised her arms to let him pull it off. With their height differential, the head of his cock was touching her sternum, just between the bottom curves of her slightly upturned breasts. He touched her face on both sides with both hands. Then his palms slid down the sides of her neck and shoulders, until he was cupping the modest scoops of her breasts in his hands.

“Kissing is really personal,” he said. “It’s about the most personal thing two people can do.”

The part he left out was how he was afraid to go falling head first into a deep well filled with pure Nikki.

“Like more personal than when you shaved my cunt and made me cum all over your mouth?”

“Yeah,” he said. “More personal than that. And you shouldn’t say cunt. It’s…”

“Yeah, Stone, I heard it before. It’s one of those words people use to hurt women. Ya know, sometimes I wish you’d just quit being so fucking polite all the time and just bang my cunt fulla spunk like a whore.”

Stone was quiet a moment, but then broke out laughing. Nikki took hold of his cock and watched him laugh while she stroked him. He pinched her nipples firmly and then touched her face again.

“I swear,” he said, “sometimes you have the nastiest fucking mouth.”

“That’s why you love shoving your cock in it. Who wants to fuck a good-girl mouth?”

Stone sneered at her and wrapped his hand around her throat, squeezing ever so lightly.

“Sucking cocks is not what makes a woman good or bad.”

“That’s not what most everybody says.” Her eyes burst into dark fire.

“Most everybody is full of shit about pretty much everything.”

“Maybe. But I wanna know if you’re trying to mold me into a good girl or bad one cuz honestly I really don’t know but I know you want me to be something.”

Stone laughed. “Molding you would be like trying to mold a water spout.”

Nikki beamed with dubious glee and Stone leaned down and kissed her as hard and personal as he’d ever kissed anyone. She gulped for air, but all she got in her mouth was his tongue. She squeezed his hard shaft and pushed her tongue against his. He rolled her thick nipples hard and then released them, wrapping his arms around her body and pulling her tightly into a mesh of naked longing. Her body undulated against his trapped cock and he drove even harder into her mouth, as if he were trying to disappear into it.

He dropped one hand onto her ass cheek and squeezed hard enough to spread her cleft open. The other hand followed closely behind and he pressed the tip of a finger to the taut bud of her rim. She emptied a low, feline growl from her throat into his mouth and gripped his ass as if she were holding onto the backseat of someone’s motorcycle.

Then he released her mouth with a mutual gasp. His attempt to rattle her cage only seemed to have rattled his own as much or more. Now she would see the naked look in his eye and know far more than he wanted her to. She was gazing up at him, eyes wide open and sparkling with moisture. He wanted to open his mouth and speak in a language of vows, but the room barely felt able to contain the sound of their breathing.

“Yeah, Daddy Stone, that’s what I’m talkin’ about. That’s what you mean about personal, right?”

“Yeah, well…anything to prove a point,” he said, not even convincing himself.

His cock was pulsing conspicuously against the smooth warmth of her body. He touched her face again and watched it change slowly, until the devil’s grin came back to her mouth. Her hand slipped in between them and curled around his shaft.

“C’mon, Daddy,” she said. “We’ve got some work to do.”

“I swear, Nikki, if you don’t stop calling me that I’m gonna spank you so hard you won’t even be able to wear panties for a week.”

Nikki just laughed and stepped into the tub. She gave Stone her ass as she bent down to turn on the water. She was still adjusting the temperature when he stepped in. His cock bobbed against one of her cheeks and he couldn’t resist pushing his hand between her thighs. She hadn’t exaggerated about being wet. Her lips felt thick and slippery while his fingers dug along the furrow between them.

She was every bit as smooth as she’d threatened, and Stone didn’t think he could last much longer under the weight of his unforgiving desire to fuck her. Every day felt twice as impossible as the one before to resist her, but he knew it would never be a simple, physical experience between them. He also had the strong suspicion that for all her audacity she was technically a virgin, and that seemed to turn everything on its side.

Nikki mewled heatedly and rolled her hips while Stone lathered his fingers in her pussy, but she finally came back upright and turned to face him. Her eyes were trained on his face, but somehow a little distant at the same time. She was aiming the nozzle at his cock, and reached to cup his balls in the other hand. As she caressed his heavy sac and softened his skin with the tepid spray, her eyes gradually focused, closing in the distance he felt.

He put his hand around Nikki’s neck, resting his thumb against the hollow at the base of her throat while he pushed his wet fingers into her mouth, giving her a strong taste of her own nectar. Her eyes narrowed and she sucked defiantly on his pungent fingers. Her aim with the nozzle only wavered slightly, and the hand cupping his balls barely halted in its jostling caress.

When he pulled his fingers out of her mouth, she knelt down in the tub and laid the nozzle by her ankle. She scanned the soaps and bottles crammed into the corner edge of the tub and finally grabbed a bottle of shampoo. She filled the palm of her right hand and then began to lather Stone’s cock and balls with both hands, rubbing and stroking him until he was throbbing and completely covered with foam.

Stone leaned against the enclosure wall with a sigh and gave into the slick stroking of Nikki’s hands. She had a way of touching him that felt as if her hands were searching beyond the touch and stroke. As if they were searching beyond his skin. She stroked his heated shaft until a heavy ooze of precum was mixing with the lather of the shampoo, and she finally broke off in her fondling to pick up a razor.

She had to push his strutting shaft downward to drag the razor through the curls of hair above the base. Not having cropped him down short first, she had to pause and rinse the razor often. It caused her to let go of his cock but then grab it again to hold it in a position to allow room to keep dragging the razor around the area until the skin was as smooth and hairless as her pussy.

“You like this, I can tell,” she said quietly. “You’re really fuckin’ hard right now.”

Stone wondered if she’d felt the same way when he had shaved her. Heart beating like a fist inside his chest. Breath forcing itself in and out of his body as if on its own power. Momentary powerlessness. An uneasy feeling of total trust. Deep pulses of hot need at the controlling touch of her hands and the delicious drag of the razor across his most sensitive skin.

She rinsed the razor thoroughly and then took the leaking dome of his cock into the grip of her left hand. She dragged the razor around the base of his shaft and shaved him all the way around. After another good rinse, she carefully shaved his sac, pulling his skin taut as she pulled the razor across in light strokes. When she went for the patch of flesh beneath his balls, he propped his leg up to give her more freedom.

She finally set the razor aside and explored him thoroughly with both hands, as if she were searching for anything that didn’t feel perfectly smooth. Stone was panting for breath as he watched her, savoring the slick search of her careful hands. Her search became a slippery massage until she picked up the nozzle again and rinsed him.

“Fuck,” she said, as much to herself as him. “You’re as bald as me now.”

Then she dropped the nozzle again and grabbed his cock, licking down the length of his shaft and rolling her tongue all around the freshly shaved areas of skin. She lapped at his smooth balls, and then cupped them in her hand and flicked her tongue at the smooth skin underneath.

Stone felt as if he were only truly feeling the wet scrape of a tongue on his flesh for the first time. He knew it was just his senses playing tricks on him, but he swore it nearly felt like Nikki had three tongues moving everywhere at once.

Ironically, it was Nikki’s apparent eagerness and expertise that gave Stone the feeling she was still a virgin at nineteen. She licked and sucked his pulsating cock with a drive like he’d never seen. She was fearless in her oral and manual pursuit of his ass. Even now she teased his rim with her digging finger while she stroked his dripping shaft with her wet lips, exploring the rest of his shaft and balls with the other hand. It didn’t necessarily make sense, being little more than a persistent instinct, but Stone trusted his instincts more than very much else.

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall while Nikki devoured a huge portion of his cock. Her finger dug deeper in his ass and he reached blindly for her head, lacing his fingers into her silky, wet hair as the waves of throbbing emanated from his cock into the nasty, wet swirl of her mouth. The touch of her finger against his rim sent him back momentarily to the night of the blizzard, to that abandoned classroom cast in shadows where she made him cum like a bursting fountain into another girl’s pussy, and then called him the biggest whore of them all.

Then he opened his eyes and lowered his head to watch her suck. He wanted to see her and only her. He wanted to take her flying somewhere extraordinary. He wanted to fuck her grinding ass in a public mudpit. He wanted to blast her throat with such a hot, hard rush of streaming spunk his name would be written inside her for the rest of her life and beyond. He wanted to love her always just as powerfully as he did at that very moment.

His body was nearly heaving with his gasps for breath, and he barely realized his hands were balling into fists filled with her hair. She made gurgling sounds around his cock with her mouth, straining to suck and breathe at the same time.

Stone finally uttered a long, guttural snarl as the hard pulse of his spurting cum flooded Nikki’s hungry mouth.

Everything felt like it changed, but then everything else didn’t. There was the sound of a shower nozzle running somewhere off in the distance. There was the rush and heave of Stone’s breath as his body worked to catch up with itself. There was Nikki, reluctantly letting his spent cock out of her mouth with a soft smack. He looked at her, and she was the same beautiful girl, but somehow not at all the same. He noticed all the freshly exposed skin around his cock and wondered how he could possibly be the same man.

Without realizing what he was doing, he pulled Nikki upward by the two fistfuls of her hair. She seemed to float to her feet, and he leaned down and kissed her like a delicacy he needed to devour before it was taken away. Then he wrapped her in his arms and held her to his body. Her cheek felt soft and warm against his pounding heart. It felt as if their skin was the same temperature, and they were turning into one body.

Breathing. Skin he’d never felt before. He couldn’t tell if it was his or hers.

“I understand now,” she breathed against his chest.

“What?”

“That thing about it being personal. The kissing, I mean. Well, at least some kissing. That kissing.”

“Yeah. That kissing.”

There was only the hiss of running water for a while. He held her tight against him, one hand on the back of her head like he was afraid it would fall off if he let go.

“Funny,” she said. He outwaited her. “That time with Rena, watching you fuck her. I mean. It was okay. But I knew you didn’t love her cuz you didn’t kiss her like that. If you did it woulda busted up my heart.”

The spray began to run cold against their feet. Stone shut off the water and grabbed a fresh towel. He started patting the girl’s body dry. Hair. Face. Around her breasts and between her thighs. She stood there and let him without a word. Then she stood and waited for him to dry himself.

He took her by the wrist and led her back to his room, lying down together with her in his bed for the first time. He watched her fall asleep. It felt personal as kissing.

The longer he watched her sleep the more restless he became until he got out of bed and paced for a while. The little smile she never wanted him to see was all over her face. He would have traded the next day of his life to know what she was dreaming.

After a while he sat at his desk and watched her breath lift and lower the sheet. Something lay down on his mind and he felt an irrational urge to write it down, but it had been years since he’d kept anything to write on anywhere in his house. He had a better chance of staying sane that way. He got up and went into the bathroom and found one of Nikki’s eyeliner pencils. Back in his room, he grabbed The Girl with Curious Hair and brought it to his desk, opening it to the inside of the back cover where he wrote a couple of lines. Then he looked at Nikki a while and wrote a couple more. Back and forth. Back and forth again.

Now, just as the city is beginning to burn,

the shape of what we become, leaning together,

shadow and haunted angel

slow dancing at the end of the world,

I slip into the skin of this feral darkness and join the war

between hunger and the crystalline delicacy of your skin

I should have been something more

than the sum total of the ruination of your kisses

I should have been fire dripping off the moon

onto the swollen teardrops of your breasts

I surge like something lost on a river of impossible longing

drifting home on a blossom of fire.