Good Boy, Daddy - Chapter 18

Can Daddy pass Kila's test?

Kila fed me lunch from the end of her fork the way you’d feed grapes to a palace eunuch, one piece at a time, making sure each bite was small and manageable. She sat close enough that I could sense the warmth radiating off her bare thigh. Not that she ever let me forget it, at every lull she’d reach over and stroke her palm up the inside of my knee, not like a lover but like a scientist watching for measurable response. I tried to focus on the meal, but the plug in my ass made it impossible to sit still for more than a minute; every time I shifted in the chair, I pictured her removing it, replacing it, pushing my limits one notch further. I chewed slowly. I finished the last of my sandwich, the crusts torn off and set aside for Kila to eat if the mood struck her. It was humiliating, the way even a basic bodily function became a test of my obedience.

She finished first, by design, resting her chin in her hand as she stared at me across the table. There was no pretense of parental concern, only the slow, bright shimmer of a cat waiting for the canary to notice it had nowhere left to fly.

“Did you practice your oral skills like I told you?” Kila whispered, the words just a shade too loud for comfort.

I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Prove it.”

My mouth went dry. I set my napkin down and waited for instruction; a tiny part of me always hoped she’d let the order slide, let some part of the day be normal. She didn’t. She pulled a banana from the fruit bowl and rolled it between her palms, then peeled it with three quick tears. She broke the fruit cleanly in half and rolled the thicker end to me across the table.

“Show me,” she said, tapping the table with a single, lacquered nail.

I hesitated only a moment before picking up the banana and opening my jaw wide enough to accept it. My tongue shivered; the memory of her dildos flooded back, the feel of the black silicone as it forced me open last night. I set the tip of the banana against my lips and slid it in, slow and smooth, trying to keep my teeth concealed while I worked the length inside.

Kila was not impressed. She shook her head. “Cute, Daddy, but you’re doing it like a man who wants to survive the experience, not one who wants to impress me. Pout your lips, cup it like it’s precious. Use your tongue. Again.”

I opened my lips and tried to make my mouth look kissable. I moaned around the fruit, rolled my tongue under the length, and forced the banana until it bent against the back of my throat. The urge to gag, which had become more reflex than sensation, hit anyway. A burning flooded my nose and my eyes watered, but I held for a five-count the way she’d taught me.

When I withdrew it, the banana was shiny and clean, the tip glistening. Kila gave the world’s shittiest golf clap.

“Adequate,” she said. “Eat the rest.” She stood and walked away. “Don’t go anywhere, Daddy. I can see we need the real thing to get you in the mood.”

Kila’s absence was not merely physical. It carved a shape in the air, a hungry, alert shadow even when her footsteps trailed upstairs. I gagged down the remaining half of my banana, washed the sweet paste from my teeth with a slug of water, and waited. I thought about running. Pretending to need a bathroom. Bolting, even just for the thrill of resisting her inevitability. But inertia had become its own kind of gravity; by the time the sounds of her upending drawers and zipping cases bled through the ceiling, I was as rooted as if she’d bolted me to the vinyl wood grain.

She returned in less than two minutes, a gym bag slung over one shoulder, the familiar hard case of dildos dangling from her hand. She didn’t speak as she plunked the case between the saltshaker and the fruit bowl. Without flourish, she unzipped the case and arranged the four tools of my humiliation in a neat, ascending row.

“It’s time to face the final exam,” Kila announced, her eyes narrowing, pupils wide and wet as a cat’s. “Put your hands behind your back.”

Cords of dread wound up my arms. I obeyed, feeling the absurdity of formality as I sat with my wrists locked behind the oak. Kila circled behind, moving with a weighted confidence. She could have been a surgeon prepping the patient, or the hangman double-checking the knot. She must have guessed my every move, because the moment I tried to look over my shoulder she gripped my neck and held me steady.

First, a blindfold, probably one of the sleep masks from a cross-country red-eye, it reeked faintly of drugstore deodorant and the ghost of Kila’s strawberry shampoo. The world went slick and black. Next, a band of duct tape around my wrists, rough and adhesive, pulled just this side of numbness. My glasses clattered onto a book. She looped an arm around my chest and yanked me back, until the chair dug into my pecs and left me breathless.

“Relax. The key to performing well on a test is to be calm and prepared.” Her whisper was so close I felt warmth at the shell of my ear. “It’s also to recognize when getting it wrong means making me angry.” She said it with the same tone she used for explaining algebra to the neighborhood kids, so measured I almost forgot I was old enough to be her parent.

A hand petted the crown of my head, flattening stray hairs. “Today’s test is simple.” She patted my cheek. “Will Daddy choke, or will he succeed?” Her knuckles tapped a rhythm at my chin. “Let’s start with number three.” I heard a snap of lube bottle, the wet slap of silicone on her palm, then the cold, slick tip prodding my lips. “Open up,” Kila sang.

I did. She pushed the dildo in fast, then held it steady with one hand behind my head. I wrapped my lips around the shaft, tasting nothing but chemical and the memory of her approval. She rocked it in and out, slow and rhythmic. Kila took her time, letting the shaft linger at the back of my throat, withdrawing, then driving it in until I felt the soft, formless panic that always crested just before I lost control. I counted to five, then to seven, and held. My airway clamped, but behind the blindfold, nothing existed except the pressure, the invasion, the chugging pulse of her hands at the base of my skull. My senses reduced to taste, texture, the frictionless slide of spit and shame.

“That’s good, Daddy. Better than last time.” Her voice was so close it could have been coming from inside me. “Number four is next.” She clicked the dildos against each other, a crude polymer chime, but even the rhythm of her contempt made me want to please her. “Find your inner cocksucker, Daddy. Be the cocksucker you always feared. Embrace the cocksucker. Live the life of a cocksucker.”

The fourth one, god help me, was so thick it practically blocked the world. Kila smothered the shaft with enough lube to grease a car engine, then levered my jaw wide with her thumb. It tasted of latex and something darker, some memory of last night’s failure. I gagged, instantly, hard enough my stomach spasmed and my shoulders jerked at the tape. She didn’t rebuke me; she didn’t rush. A palm pressed gently at the crown of my head and she cooed, “Breathe through your nose. Deep, Daddy. In. Out. Good.”

All I could do was obey. My body shivered, but the blackness behind the blindfold let me focus on the work of surrender. A new tactic: instead of resisting, I tried to swallow. The sheath slipped deeper, past the tongue, down the same corridor where I’d once learned to deflect cough syrup by force of will. Kila’s grip steadied, then loosened. I felt a tremble at my neck as she pressed the base of the toy flush to my lips and held it there, not as a threat but a lesson.

“Do you feel that?” she whispered. “Your throat is open. It’s ready.” She held it for a decade, or maybe it was only six seconds. Then, slowly, inch by inch, the monster retreated. My jaw hung slack, drool leaking down my chin.

“There’s my pretty cocksucker,” she sighed, almost lovingly.
The blindfold whipped off, and the world flooded pink and raw and viscous. Kila ran a thumb beneath my wet lips and painted it in a circle around my mouth. “You did it,” she said, and I felt the pride in my chest, rare and radioactive. She kissed my forehead with a fast, dry peck, then wiped her hand on my shoulder.

“Now, for the real world application.” Kila set the dildo aside, then produced a harness from her bag, black and elaborate as a piece of military gear. She threaded the fourth cock through it and buckled herself in, the force of her certainty making me feel like a kid on the first day of school, desperate not to mess up the uniform. She stood over me, legs spread, hips thrust forward, her hands at her waist. The cock bobbed at eye-level even as I sat, wrists trussed behind my back.

Kila pressed the silicon head to my lips and said, “How’s my good boy?” The tenderness in her tone was almost more devastating than the cruelty. “Ready to get a real treat?”

I nodded, the tip of the toy poking my nostril. “Yes, ma’am.”

She rocked it in, gentle at first. Then more. Her hands knitted into my hair, not yanking, just anchoring me to her, making sure there was nowhere else to look. I moaned around the shaft, louder when she flexed her thighs and drove the cock home. It bottomed at the hinge in my throat, and this time, I didn’t gag. I let the pressure flatten me; I let Kila’s rhythm transform me into a wind instrument she played for her own delight.

“That’s perfect practice,” Kila said, her voice syrupy with giddy pride. “Let’s see how deep you can go.” The world melted to flashes of pink and blonde; her thighs boxed my line of sight and the lamp over the table glared white-hot and cinematic in shadow. Each time the shaft bottomed in my throat, the humiliation burned less, replaced by this ballooning certainty that if Kila trained me hard enough, I could become anything she required.

She started slow and easy, rotating her hips, letting my lips work the length of the silicone with soft, wet suction. Then tension overtook her, the force of her need urging a new cadence. I could tell when she stopped thinking about what she was doing to me and just did it: the way her hands abandoned my hair and braced themselves on the table, knuckles blanching, body weight bearing down. Every time she punched the cock forward, I felt the plug in my ass shift in counterpoint, a metronome for my own filth.

“God, look at you,” Kila panted, steady now, the words clipped off by shallow breaths. “You were so fucking hopeless the first time, Daddy. Now look at you. You want it.” She brought a hand to my cheek and ran her thumb over the line of spit and snot webbing my chin. “You love this. Don’t you?”

I let the cock nestle at the back of my tongue and nodded, eyes flooding as the bitchy urge to impress her overrode anything like fear. I could see her arch above me, the power rippling out from her center, and I realized that maybe the only thing that scared me now was how simple it was to want this with everything I had. Kila smiled down, the expression half-feral, half-awe.

Little legs trembled to keep her upright. “Fuck yes,” she hissed, “suck it, Daddy. Suck my girlcock like a whore. Hollow your cheeks. Make it beautiful.” I did, wrapping my lips artfully, twisting my tongue so the head of the cock would drag against the ridged roof of my mouth and slide out sleek as a piston. Kila matched my zig-zag rhythm, pumping the harness with increasing force. Her voice collapsed from words to a thin, keening groan, and she clung to my hair like the only way she could stay standing was to keep me glued to her. “Don’t swallow your spit. Drool down your chin like a filthy cocksucker. You can’t afford to have pride or self-respect, Daddy. Not when you’re sucking a cock like your life depends on it.”

I gagged once, then twice, but both times she overran the spasm by sheer insistence. My nostrils filled with the salt-sweat tang of her thighs. My mind buzzed in a weird, sex-drunk alpha state. I wanted only to match her force, to whirl around this new sun she’d made of herself.

“Suck that dick, bitch. You filthy cocksucking whore,” Kila gasped, the words sharp as pins. She let go of the table with one hand and palmed the back of my skull, flattening my nose to the base of the harness until I couldn’t see or feel anything but the pressure. I expected her to make a show of the violence, but instead she stroked at the crown of my head, slow and almost apologetic, as if to comfort the abused tissue she’d remade for her own entertainment.

The rhythm accelerated. I felt time dilate and collapse, each downstroke a hammer blow of humiliation and shaky pride. My jaw buzzed pure ache; the plug in my ass may as well have been a fire alarm. I could see only the knot of Kila’s belly, the hard-perfect muscle bracketed by the harness, and the dark flash of her tattoo as she bucked forward.

Her hands clamped my skull as she slammed the last four inches home, vibrating with the force of it, and held me there, the tip of the cock punched past any part of my anatomy that was supposed to resist. I couldn’t breathe for a moment. My throat rippled and seized, but underneath it all, God help me, I felt a kind of peace, an animal certainty that this was the purpose I’d been trained for.

“Look at you, Daddy,” Kila moaned, and the only way I could look at her was straight up the slipstream of her body, dizzying and unyielding, her face flushed and big-eyed above me. I watched her savor it, watched the power roll through her, and in the roaring tunnel of my brain I finally, truly admitted that I could live and die just to keep that glow alive in her. “What a good boy, Daddy. Good little cocksucker.”

The world telescoped and snapped. She let the cock rest in the depths of my mouth, not moving, not daring to finish it. Then, with one hand, she petted my cheek and let her voice drop to the softest thrum, “Now show me how grateful you are to be owned.”

I whimpered around the length, sucked hard, squeezing my tongue flat and moving my lips in a slow, worshipful caress. Kila’s breathing was a shredded mess above me. She loosened her grip on my hair and let the shaft slide free, inch by inch, until it popped out and bounced against my wet lips. She licked her own teeth, eyes hollowed with want, and knelt in my lap.

“Tell me what you are,” she whispered.

A string of spit webbed from my mouth; I coughed and sucked air. “Yours,” I said, voice shredded.

“What did you call yourself before? Your favorite word, the one that makes you tingle?”

I closed my eyes. My ears rang. “Cocksucker.”

She straddled my thigh and pressed close, the harness catching my limp, drool-soggy chin. “Prove it,” she said, feeding the cock back to my lips. I sucked it without hesitation. The cycle completed itself, a piston, a feedback loop I could not break.

Kila’s nails ran down the flesh of my neck and into the collar of my shirt, digging in hard. She watched me suck with the hungry pride of a parent filming their kid at a school talent show. “You’re perfect,” she said, voice thick. “You’re fucking perfect, Daddy. I’ll never let anyone take this from you.”

She kissed me, shoving her tongue into my mouth, mixing the faux-come chemical taste with the red salt of blood from where I’d bitten my own lip. Kila rocked against me and I lost all sense of where I ended and she began. There was only the slick-wet hum of her muscles, the violent electric thrill in the roof of my mouth, and the barbed-wire ache locked in my jaw. Her mouth plundered mine, the taste of latex and spit and my own secret need spinning into a whipcord that lashed every cell in my body.

Kila’s breath scorched my neck as she mashed her mouth to the underside of my jaw, biting a shallow crescent into the tender skin. “More,” she groaned. “You can take more. You can always take more, Daddy. Don’t you dare stop. If you gag, swallow. If you choke, hold it. I want you to learn the difference between pain and obedience.”

She smothered my lips with her palm for a second, maybe to keep the noises in, maybe just to feel me struggle. Then she gripped my hair and forced the cock back in, half the shaft slick with the last round of spit and salt. I sucked, frenzied, desperate for another fix of her approval, feeling the pressure of her body ratchet up as she bounced in my lap. Her thigh, hot against my crotch, moved in sharp staccato. It didn’t matter to Kila that my own dick was caged and leaking, straining at the borrowed panties; if I came, if I pissed myself, if I sobbed, it would only be more data for her to file away. I realized she was right. Pleasure wasn’t for me, it was only a side effect. I existed to be her lab rat, her toy, the cocksucker she could teach to perform any fuck-trick her mind could devise.

My stepdaughter broke the kiss just as I gasped for air, then fed the rubber cock back to my lips until it mashed down my throat and I felt myself slipping to the edge of blackout. A high, sweet note in her moan told me this time she was riding the pleasure of it, for herself. She shuddered, grit her teeth, and forced my head against her pelvis, holding me there for a nine-count - her numbers, not mine. She wiped the length of silicone across my bruised lips, then patted my hair, like a dog returned to its best owner.

“You did it,” she sighed, in a voice gentle and iron-thick all at once. “You passed.”

I slumped in the chair, the tape biting red grooves in my wrists, and let my head loll back. Kila’s face was inches from mine, her skin dewed with sweat, her eyes flat as storm glass. She slid her finger into my mouth, pinned my tongue with the tip, and waited for me to suck. I did.

“That’s my good boy. Do you know how proud I am of you?”
I grinned like a shell-shocked fool. “So fucking proud, Daddy,” she whispered. “You’re honestly the best cocksucker I ever face-fucked.” She pressed her forehead to mine; in that instant, her breath slowed to match my pulse. “I’m never going to let you go back,” she murmured. “You don’t want it anyway. From nowon, you serve my pleasure. That means Mom’s, too. You’re here to obey.” She slid her hand behind my head and cradled it, not like a lover, not like a parent, but like something that would rather kill me than let me forget my place.

She took her time, unwinding the tape from my wrists with slow, surgical delicacy, massaging the leaking blood back into my fingers. She licked the line of spit and sweat from the corner of my mouth, tasting herself in the aftermath, then she wiped my chin with a corner of her tank top, as if restoring me for the next round.

“You’re not done,” she said, voice rolling over me like a new kind of gravity. “Not by a long shot. But you earned a reward.” She leaned back with the harness still strapped and braced her foot on the arm of my chair, splaying her thighs wide. “Get on your knees. I want to see you work for what you get.”

I tumbled from the chair, boneless and desperate to please. My knees slapped the laminate hard, but I didn’t care. Kila pulled the panties off my face, then yanked my shirt over my head and tossed it across the room. She unbuckled the harness just enough to let it hang with the cock bobbing eye-height. Kila’s eyes drilled into mine, reminding me there were no secrets left between us. She had mapped out the territory of my shame so thoroughly she could have painted the floor plan without stopping to check the blueprints.

“Kiss it,” she commanded, voice a radiant throb down my spine. “Thank it for teaching you what you needed to learn.” I did as she asked, kissing the silicon tip with reverence. I laid my lips around the head and sucked softly, worshipfully. Kila’s hands landed in my hair, holding my skull steady, and she pushed my face into the fleshy V between her thighs, bringing my mouth flush to her pelvis, cock mashed and pinned beneath my nose.

“You earned this,” she sighed, voice all smoke and heat. “You’re not getting to taste my pussy again until you learn to make me come from sucking my girlcock, Daddy. But for now…” She didn’t finish the sentence; instead, she pressed me harder into her, and the smell of her sweat, her sex, the latex of the harness, formed a dizzying archipelago in my head. “Show me how much you love it,” she said. “Show me how you’ll never want anything else.”

I sucked, a living vacuum, tongue and lips and jaw moving like they’d been engineered for this single purpose. When she threw her head back and moaned, low and true, I could feel the sound vibrate through the harness and into the root of my teeth. My hands found her calves, clinging for support, but she kicked them away with a soft, final, “No hands. Cocksuckers use their mouths.”

I flicked, spun, bobbed, cleaved my mouth to her as though it was a feeding. The pulse between my legs could have burst a dam. I wasn’t even sure if I was erect anymore, only that my whole anatomy was rewired in the service of her. I felt her core tense and flex, all her strength compacted into the vise of her thighs, and my face bent to her until my nostrils filled with the tang of latex polish and the clean, dark sweat that trickled down her leg.

The world went soft-focused and religious. This was the intimacy that replaced all protest, a sacred geometry of girlcock and mouth, of her hands guiding my head side to side so I traced the arc of the slick shaft with my lips and tongue, up and down, around the flare, then home again. Kila made a sound, part purr, part muffled sob, as my mouth danced at her pelvic bone. She didn’t want bravado, didn’t want me to show off, only a helpless, shameless need to please. I gave her all I had, and when I was sure there was no way to deepen the kiss, no way to make my devotion any more humiliating than it already was, Kila jerked my hair back with both hands. My gaze collided head-on with her eyes.

“That’s it,” she breathed, “Now say thank you.”

“Thank you,” I croaked, lips raw, tongue limp and salty-sweet with the lube and sweat and taste of her. “Thank you for using me, for training me, for making me your girlcock whore.” The words tumbled out, raw and unfiltered.

Kila’s hands shook as she hugged my head between her forearms. “First Principle?” she whispered.

“All life begins as female. Only a defective chromosome distorts the development to create men.” My mouth babbled, my brain hollowed out and eager for her orders. “Men are biologically inferior to women in all ways.”

Kila shuddered. I could see her chest heave, the quick, shallow draws of breath that meant she was close, maybe as close as I’d ever seen her. She pressed the tip to my lips and demanded a slow, torturous suck.

“Second Principle?” she said.

“We exist for female pleasure. Not our own.” My heart pounded so hard I could hear it as faint thunder in my ears. “Our sex is to give pleasure or to help create the next generation. We are nothing without someone stronger to command us.”

“Good, Daddy,” Kila moaned, and she rocked the weight of her hips into my cheek, her thigh squishing my ear until I could hear nothing but the heartbeat in her and the failure in me. “You want to try the Third Principle?”

I closed my eyes, imagination a blown fuse. “What’s the third?” I mumbled against the rubber, feeling the giddy, mortified spin of whatever new humiliation she had minted for me.

Kila took her time, riding the moment like a cresting wave. The air between us thickened, a soup of old musk and raw want and afterburn from her open window. “Repeat after me, Daddy,” she hissed, the words cut from steel, “A well-trained man is happiest when he does nothing but obey. It is a woman’s duty to ensure the men in her life understand what they are, and the place they serve in her world.”

I repeated it, the way a child repeats a curse word it knows is both decadent and damning. Kila held my gaze and pushed the cock past my lips again until my vision dotted out at the corners with black, my tongue moving on muscle memory, brain short-circuiting to the perfect repetition of her truths. My mouth was raw, ruined, but I kept absorbing the pounding of her words: I was happiest serving, it was her right to make me learn, everything that followed from here was only proof of my own readiness to obey.

She kissed my forehead. “That’s three, Daddy. Three sacred Principles.” Her voice was tremulous, off-key, adrenaline coiling through every syllable. “Never forget a single one, because they define your existence.”

I lost track of how long I sucked her, how many times she fed me the taste of her hunger, how many cycles of spit and humiliation I endured on my knees in that world reduced to knees and wet and latex and the ache of submitting so completely my bones might break from the relief of it. There was no other life; the old self had been mulched and composted, the carbon atoms exhaled in ragged whispers of thank you, ma’am and please use me. The world outside, even my own home and authority was gone, erased. Everything condensed to a hot inch of silicone bobbing against my lips, the taste of Kila’s sweat, and the thud of her hands in my hair.
At last, she drew the harness away, unstrapped it with a single, businesslike motion, then laid it in my open palms as a priest would place a chalice on the altar of a newly built church.

“You’ll clean it for me,” Kila said, but her words unspooled like thick honey, laced through with pleasure and something like sick pride. “You’ll clean every one, every day I tell you. And then you’ll get ready for the next lesson.”

I nodded, not trusting my tongue to form words. I cradled her fake cock as if it were the most precious thing in the world, which for that moment, it was. Kila ran her palms down the whole length of my skull, then bent and placed another kiss, softer than the rest, on the spot just behind my ear.

It was, I realized, an incredibly intimate gesture. For the first time in all of this, I did not feel fear or anticipation. Just a warm, stupid glow, like the animal aftershock of an orgasm twice denied and finally, graciously allowed. I reveled in her satisfaction, found glory in my ability to supply her with her demands.

Kila left me on the floor, clinging to the harness, her foot nudging my jaw one last time as she glided out. “There’s soup for dinner,” Kila said, her tone abruptly domestic. “Don’t get up until you hear me come down the stairs again.”

I didn’t. When I finally did rise, my knees were purpled with bruises and my throat threatened to close every time I swallowed. I staggered to the bathroom and washed the harness, careful and delicate, as if afraid to bruise the fake skin with the wrong kind of touch. The face in the mirror was red, sticky, raw. I ran cool water over my lips until the numbness started to fade, and dabbed my cheeks with a towel until, at least cosmetically, I could pass for the version of myself that still resided in the world. I put the harness, now spotless and humming with the ghost of her approval, back in its velvet slot. I dusted off my hands and returned, a little uneven, to the regular business of life.

Except there was nothing regular about it anymore. Every element of my old world seemed reconstructed around the bones of my new role; every action, every word, was a test of the principles Kila had poured into me. I found myself narrating chores as submission: make the bed so my wife has a smooth world to wake in, fold Kila’s towel with the reverence due a priestess’s robe. My own laundry I sorted last. Each time I encountered the borrowed panties, I stopped to inhale the faint residue before folding them neat and tight.

Dinner was soup, as promised—lentil and sausage, a staple from the old country. Kila and I ate in silence, though her eyes wandered often to my face. I knew, down to the cells, she was cataloging bruises and rawness. Bryn came home late, tired and glazed with commuter defeat, but she lit up when she saw the kitchen gleaming and her dinner hot, ready, and squared away. She even noticed the folded towels in the bath.

“You’re really throwing yourself at this, huh?” She smiled, tracing her finger down a page of her phone as if the list of updates there could possibly compare to the actual improvements in her evening. “I could get used to this version of you.”

I glanced at Kila. She sipped her soup like a nun at vespers but let her toes press at my ankles, a covert semaphore.

“I want you to be proud of me,” I said.

Bryn looked up, slightly startled. Then her smile went gentle and she touched my wrist. “I am. Thank you.”

Kila’s foot pressed harder, a benediction.

After dinner, Bryn curled up in her chair with her book, exhaling the noise of the day. The house was quiet for once, only the aria of the dishwasher in the background. I stole into the living room and knelt alongside her, hoping for a trace of the tenderness we’d sniffed around at breakfast. At first she didn’t notice; then she peeked up and smiled, running her palm down my head like I was the dog who’d learned not to bark at guests.

“Did you do everything on my list?” she asked, a hush in the question. Outside the window, the streetlights dappled the sidewalk with the late-winter glow of pending leaf-out.

I nodded. “And more. Kila taught me the art of the breakdown.”
I caught the gentle flinch in her cheeks, the way her eyebrows twitched at the mention of her daughter’s name. She closed the paperback softly on a finger, keeping her place.

“I can’t pretend to understand what’s happening there,” she said. “But if she’s able to snap you out of six months of apathy, I… I guess I’m grateful.” She hesitated; the space between us stiffened quiet. “Do you want to tell me about it?” she asked. “Or should I just trust that you’re… okay?”

“I’m okay,” I lied, or maybe I didn’t. I rested my head against my wife’s thigh. “I guess I’m just realizing what I really want in life.”

Bryn’s fingers twirled in my hair as she picked up her book again. As happy as I was to obey Kila, the guilt that hammered on my soul was just as heavy. I sat there, accepting my wife’s affection, hungering for my stepdaughter’s direction, and hating myself.