My breasts are naturally big for my body type and I’m constantly catching younger men looking. Whether I’m buying chilis and gelato at FoodWorld, browsing physiology texts at the library, or shopping for a new skirt downtown, if I’m mid-stride, their pupils are magnets and my nipples are the North Pole.

Fridays, I wear a tight shirt with thin material and a transparent bra to make sure the boys have a clear view of my girls. I’m sure the older men are ogling, too, but they aren’t even on my radar.

Last year, my daughter Kirsten, a senior in high school, was dating a boy named Augustine, who was almost two years her junior. Auggie was refined and polite. He only had eyes for my baby girl. At the house, three sets of peepers—Kirsten’s, mine, and my husband Troy’s—could’ve caught him gawking at my rack. So it made sense that Auggie would be abundantly cautious. I assumed he might slip once. But he didn’t. It was like he was superhuman. Or very lucky.

The anticipation of catching him put a few miles on my heart and moistened more than one pair of undies. My body was begging me to let him in.

When my daughter and I jogged in the morning, shades in windows drew like eyelids opening. The mailman paused and waved his long, friendly wave. Cars were parked backwards in driveways, in the shade of RVs and sweet myrtle shrubs. All of this attention did two things: it gave Kirsten a ridiculous amount of confidence, and it planted Auggie in my thoughts. Saint Augustine, The Patient. His brown eyes were the only set my jugs couldn’t wrangle.

Kirsten broke things off with Auggie several months before she moved to Austin for college. She and Auggie remained friends, but the boy became lonely and lost and made a few bad decisions, which led to his devoutly religious parents finding drugs in his bedroom and making him move out.

On the day she was driving across the state to college, Kirsten called me and begged me to let Augustine stay at our house. He had nowhere to go, she said, and she felt bad for breaking his heart.

“I still love him,” Kirsten said. “He’s a great guy. He just needs some time to get his head right. And this is perfect timing with Dad being out of the country on business. Auggie can provide protection and companionship.”

“Ki Ki, your heart is just about as big as your mouth,” I said. “What’s your father going to say about all of this?”

Kirsten shifted out of cutesy-begging mode. “What would be the point of telling him?”

The kind of anxiety that springs up before a first date growled inside of me, making me feel young and stupid.

“I don’t know, honey,” I said. “What if he..."

“What if it’s too late?”

The doorbell rang. Jesus. I hung up the phone, went to the door, and put my eye to the peephole. Auggie stood there, holding his backpack and duffel, looking depressed and adorable. I pulled at the hem of my bedtime t-shirt. It was my husband’s and it covered me just enough, but also gave the impression that I might only be wearing a t-shirt, which wasn’t far off. I opened the door, and half-hid behind it. My phone vibrated with gushing, emoji-laden apologies from my bleeding-heart daughter.

“Come in,” I shouted, a thousand bugs flitting around the porch light. I hated it when flies got into the house.

Auggie came in and I slammed the door behind him, to keep the bugs out. Good Lord.

“My lovely intelligent wonderful daughter told you that you could stay here, which was crazy of her. I wasn’t expecting you, at all, hence the inappropriate attire and my frazzlement. Frazzledness.”

“Oh, OK. I can head out—” Auggie started for the door. I grabbed his arm. It was perfect, like the limb of a wild animal.

“Auggie,” I said. “If I’m being unclear, it’s my fault. You can definitely stay.” I took his bags and set them on the floor and guided him toward a chair. “Sit here and I’ll go put some actual clothes on.” Our phones were taking turns vibrating and dinging.

“Thank you so much, Mrs. C.,” Auggie said, and sat down. “I’ll let Ki know I’m here.”

Walking away, I realized I had put Auggie in a chair facing the stairs. There would be no way for me to know if he was watching me walk up. He had just turned seventeen. Of course he would look. Unless he was too busy texting Kirsten. I was wearing boyshorts under my nightshirt but they were quite cheeky. The summer prior, I had talked Troy out of installing a camera system in the house. Boy, was that backfiring.

Upstairs, I threw on a robe, crossed myself, and came back downstairs. Auggie was typing a long message on his phone. He sent it and shut his phone off, looking dazed.

“Are you OK?” I asked. “Do you want something to eat?”

“Yes. That would be amazing.”

I cheered, “Let’s go raid the fridge, then,” and realized I was trying to act like a boy his age. Well, a boy his age when I was his age.

I sat at the kitchen island and watched Auggie wrap a frozen burrito in a paper towel and set it on a plate. He knew where to throw away the wrapper and where the plates and silverware were, which calmed me, made me feel like he belonged in the house. He leaned back against the counter the way I’d seen him do a million times, waiting for Kirsten to fix her coffee.

“It’s weird being here,” Auggie said.

“Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”

Holding back tears, he swallowed hard and went and opened the microwave to flip the burrito.

“If you need to let it out, let it out,” I said, wanting to invite him to rest his head on my...

“I’m good,” he said, pressing Start on the microwave. “That’s not how I was raised.” He watched the plate turn on the glass disc, a corner of the paper towel fluttering. “There’s a time and a place...”

“Come here,” I said, and I sat up straight and swiveled to face him.

He came over, just out of reach. I opened my arms and he fell into hugging me. He held his left hand against my back and his right arm wrapped around me, his large palm cupping my shoulder. I rubbed his back in long sweeping motions. He buried his face in my loose hair and his breath warmed my neck. The microwave beeped and I pulled him in tighter, telling him it was all right, he could let it out.

“Thanks, Mrs. C.,” said Auggie, pulling away and looking into my eyes.

I softened my expression and felt ten years younger.

“Call me Paula.”

88888

It was a sunny morning and Auggie told me he liked a basic breakfast: eggs, toast, sausage, and milk. I drank my coffee and watched him eat.

“I could do chores to pull my weight,” Auggie said, biting into his toast.

“We have landscapers and housecleaners. I don’t know what there would be for you to do. Aren’t you still working at The Mean Bean?”

“I was fired.” Auggie wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Well... laid off.”

“That stinks,” I said. “What have you been doing for money?”

“My parents gave me a card so I can gas up my car, and I don’t really need anything more than that.”

“Wait,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “I can pay you to help me in the gym.”

“What would I be doing?”

“Filming me.”

He took a drink of milk, looking embarrassed.

“I’m making a video for my fitness channel about stretching. It’s usually just me and the tripod. It would be great to have some moving shots.”

“I could do that, I guess.”

“Of course, you can,” I said. “All you kids these days are little Truffauts.”

Augustine wrinkled his brow at my reference.

“He was a French filmmaker,” I said. “They don’t teach you anything good in school nowadays, do they?”

“Not really,” said Auggie.

88888            

When Auggie was finished eating, he came into the gym and started doing pull-ups.

“You have so much energy,” I said, adjusting the camera settings. “I miss being young.”

Auggie dropped down from the bar. “Vitality is vitality. It doesn’t matter what age you are. Some people lose it young. Or they never had it. You have it, Mrs.... I mean, Paula.”

“That’s nice of you to say.”

“It’s not a compliment. It’s the truth.”

“All right, here you go,” I handed him the camera. “I’m gonna start with some pre-workout stretches.”

“Can I use my phone to film? The quality’s just as good, and I’d feel more comfortable operating it.”

“Sure,” I said.

Auggie got his phone out. I turned on some lights to obliterate the shadows.

“I’ll do my intro and you can move in and film me from a few different spots.”

“What should I be focusing on?” Auggie asked.

I froze up. He was so young and my gym clothes were very form-fitting.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is embarrassing.”

You have nothing to be embarrassed about. You’re in amazing shape.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “My biggest demographic is men who aren’t exactly watching for fitness tips. As much as I hate it, I need their views. They built this gym.”

“Let me know if I’m stepping out of bounds,” Auggie said, “but doesn’t your husband make a shitload of money?”

“He makes a good living, for sure. But he says my fitness channel should be self-sustaining. He doesn’t mind that a bunch of men are staring at me and...” I looked down and adjusted my sports bra. “But he doesn’t want to pay for it.”

“I’ll do whatever you need to keep people watching.”

Blood rushed to my cheeks. “And what’s going to keep their attention?”

“Well, you don’t want to go too far and lose your real fitness viewers.”

“What do you mean?”

Auggie pulled up a video on his phone.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s a loose tank top.” The video was a few weeks old and had eight hundred thousand views.

“Do your stretches how you usually would, and I’ll find the angles. Forget the camera and just focus on what you’re doing.”

I started as usual. “Hey, y’all. Welcome to another episode of Fitness with Paula. Today we’re going to be doing some dynamic and static stretches. Dynamic stretches are important. Loosening up before a workout makes it less likely to sustain injuries.” I started with twenty-five jumping jacks, slowly rotating to get my bottom in the shot. When Auggie moved to film me in profile, I imagined all the men playing this part of the video in slow motion.

When I did high-knees, my gym shorts rode up my thighs. Shifting into hip circles, I performed them as fluidly as possible, as Auggie walked around me, 360 degrees. For the lunges, he brought the camera in a lot closer. Reviewing the footage later, I would find out this boy knew how to film me. His transitions were smooth. Every cleavage shot during my plank walk-outs seemed completely incidental. And my ass never looked better doing squats.

As Auggie circled me, pointing his phone at every inch of my body, I wondered if his snake was dangling free. Kirsten had once accidentally let it slip that Augustine was fairly well-endowed.

“All right, now that my muscles are loose and my blood is pumping, I’m ready to do my workout. I’ll see you afterward for some static stretches.” I put my hands on my hips and asked Auggie how it looked.

“Your followers are in for something special,” Auggie said, handing me my water bottle. “This is going to be vastly different from your other videos.”

“Really?” I said. “How would you know?”

“Um...” Auggie looked at the ceiling and then back at me. “I might’ve seen one or two, a couple years ago.”

“Before you and Kirsten were dating?”

“Yeah.”

“For fitness tips, right?”

“Of course.”

And to think, this entire time, he had been staring at me. All of me.

I asked him who turned him on to it.

“Are you joking?”

“No,” I laughed. “Was it one of your friends? Or your dad?” I widened my eyes mockingly.

Auggie glared. “It was you.”

I thought he was trying to be clever. “What do you mean?”

“You and Kirsten used to get your coffee at The Bean, before they opened that corporate one on Turner Street. The last time you two came into the Bean, you told me about your channel and said I should check it out and tell my friends.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember that at all.”

I could tell Auggie was irritated but was trying to hide it. The way he was brought up.

“Let’s sit down and talk about this,” I said.

“You sit down,” he said. He wasn’t playing.

I sat on the weight bench and looked up at him.

“You and Kirsten go breezing in and out of people’s lives like it’s nothing. And once we start caring about you—like, really loving you—"

Clearly, this wasn’t about me.

“Auggie,” I said. “You were our favorite barista. We would stand back and pretend we were looking at the menu until you were on the register.” This only seemed to make him more upset.

I wanted to make him feel better, but I didn’t know what to say or do.

“You and Kirsten have the same lips,” Auggie said, turning his emotions off. He pulled out his phone. “Do you work out before doing the static stretches?”

“No,” I said. “I just say I do. For the narrative.”

88888

After we finished filming, I made Auggie a quick lunch and he left to see some friends. I carried my vibrator to the gym and set up my camera. Sliding my gym shorts off, I planted my ass right where Auggie had commanded me to sit, on the weight bench.

I ran the tips and backs of my fingernails up and across the fabric of my sports bra, and my nipples stiffened. I pulled up my bra and my tits flopped out. I turned the vibrator on and rubbed it between the lips of my juicy peach, staring at the camera lens. If I had just reached out and tugged Auggie’s shorts down, he would have forgotten all of his problems. This wand was my brush, the vibrations the paint, and my pussy the canvas. We’d had all the time in the world and no one around to stop us, except ourselves. It’d been a while since I’d stuck a fat cock in my mouth. Nothing was better than a young man’s concern unloading onto the back of your tongue. You simply swallowed it and a problem was solved.

I did fifty naked jumping jacks to celebrate my orgasm, my breasts reminding me of their sheer heft. I filmed myself running naked on the treadmill, wondering if Auggie would walk in. Hoping he might.

All of this fantasizing was probably bad for me. A dumb dream. Auggie didn’t have feelings for me.

I told Inessa to skip cleaning the gym, and I went and took a long shower. My tits were sore from all the nipple play and bouncing. I put on jeans and a t-shirt, went downstairs to the den, and flipped on the TV. An old tennis match was on. Evert versus some European broad with a long-ass name. I sent Auggie a text, asking him what he wanted for dinner. He said he wasn’t picky. But what’s your favorite thing to eat, I asked. You mean for dinner? YES, I typed, and added a smiley emoji. Um, idk... curry pineapple fried rice from that little restaurant by the bean. OK, I said, be home by six.

Yes ma'am, he replied.

Oops, I didn’t mean to sound like your mom, I said. And I sat there, waiting for a reply that never came.

I put in a preorder for delivery from the Thai restaurant, and fell asleep on the couch.

The python in my dream slithered in the canopy above me. I kept my eye on it and was wiping sweat and bugs from my face. My arm caught a spider web, tearing it down, and I tried wiping it off my hand on a tree, and the tree must have had a defense system, because my palm began to burn. The snake had disappeared from the canopy, having either left to stalk something else, or descended through the branches to attack me on the ground.

I woke to someone gently nudging my leg.

“When did you get home?” I asked, and sat up. “Here, sit down. What time is it?” I felt my palm and it was fine.

“It’s a quarter after five. I saw you were asleep, so I talked to Inessa before she went home and then I sat in the kitchen and texted Ki for a minute, but she was distracted because she had a party to get ready for.”

“Oh,” I said. “Did you have fun with your friends?”

“I thought you said you were trying to not sound like a mom.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, still a little dreamy, but combative. “Do you want to get high before dinner? Troy bought some amazing shit when he was in Colorado.”

“Probably not,” said Auggie, laughing awkwardly. “Didn’t Ki tell you what I got in trouble for?”

“She said your parents found some drugs in your room. I assumed it was weed.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“How about I roll a super-thin joint and we smoke it in the kitchen and we can go have a sauna before we eat.”

“I’ll only have a puff or two. I don’t feel like getting stoned.”

“Trust me, you won’t,” I said. “This blend gives you a nice body high. Like you’re on a cloud. You could smoke the whole joint and still be able to do your math homework.”

We sat in the kitchen and puffed the little spliff and it mellowed us out.

“Phase one, complete,” I said and coughed gently. “You want a water?”

“Yeah. Totally.”

“Totally,” I said, laughing, and tossed the plastic bottle to him. “You’re gonna need to hydrate before we sauna.”

“Oh no,” Auggie said. “I don’t have anything to wear.”

“All you need is a towel. You can undress in the downstairs bathroom. There are a bunch of towels in the cabinet.” I got my phone out and turned the sauna on.

I went up to my room and put on my white babydoll swim dress that Troy said he hated because it was absurdly short. I asked him if he hated the nearly transparent bikinis that showed way more of my ass, and Troy said bikinis were different. They were acceptable. The swim dress, however, was like a peep show. I guess I knew what he meant (which is why I had bought it). There was something very sexy about it. You spend your whole life used to the fact that dresses hide butts, everywhere you go, dresses covering butts, and all of a sudden I walk by in this thing that looks like a dress you’ve seen a million times, but my cute little ass is hanging out, just cheeky enough to raise your blood pressure forty or fifty pips.

When I entered the sauna, Auggie was lying down on the higher bench, his back propped up on a 45-degree wood thing Troy had bought, that had a vinyl pillow.

I ladled water onto the rocks and made a big cloud of steam. I inhaled and pressed my hands into my lower back, arcing my spine, standing on tiptoes, clenching my glutes.

“I forgot to ask,” Auggie said. “What did you do after I left?”

“Filmed a little. Worked out. Took a shower. Then fell asleep watching tennis.”

Auggie put his arms behind his head.

God, I wanted to bury my nose in the dark hair of his armpits.

“Do you ever get tired of hiding your true self?” I asked.

“I don’t think I do that.”

“We all lie. We keep things from each other, trying to maintain a status quo, which makes us hurt inside.”

“What do you think I lie about?”

“I’m talking more about lies of omission.”

“So what am I omitting?” he said, mocking me.

“When you went and saw your friends, you had all the footage of me from today. How much of it did you show them?”

Auggie went silent.

“It’s OK if you did,” I said. “I’m just making...”

“I didn’t go to see friends. I sat in my car at school, where Ki and I used to park and talk during lunch.”

It was shitty of me to assume the worst. I struggled to find consoling words.

“Oh, and as long as we’re being truthful and disrupting the status quo,” Auggie said. “The reason I got kicked out of my house was because my mom walked in on me masturbating.”

“Oh, hon,” I said. “She went into your room without knocking?”

“No,” Auggie said. “I was in the laundry room, about to come on a gym shirt and throw it into the washer.”

I giggled, in spite of myself. “That’s pretty efficient.”

Auggie reached down and scratched himself through the towel. “I thought the cleanliness is godliness aspect would cancel out my big bad sin.”

“You’re funnier than I remember,” I said, and saw him glance at my thighs. “Are you hungry? The food’s probably sitting in the delivery box on the front porch.”

“I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

“OK, then. Let’s go rinse off.”

Stepping out of the sauna, I drew the house’s cold thin air deep into my lungs and followed Auggie into the downstairs bathroom. My nerves were buzzing. He tossed his towel onto the counter and went into the spacious walk-in shower, turning on the water. I got out of my swim dress and looked in the mirror, reading my body for clues, like it would tell me how far to take this. I rolled my eyes and went into the shower.

“I forgot how quick this water heats up,” said Auggie. “It’s nice.” He stood under the rainshower-style faucet, facing me, with nothing to be ashamed of.

I pumped some soap onto a loofah.

“Do you mind?” I asked.

He stood with his feet together and raised his arms, holding them straight out.

I worked the soap into a lather with the loofah, cleaning his chest, moving up to his neck and shoulders. I soaped his armpits, scrubbing the hair with my short nails. I reached around his body with a handful of suds, cleaning between his cheeks, gently burnishing his asshole with the pad of my middle finger.

I squatted and washed his quads with the loofah. He spread his legs and I handwashed his testicles, perineum, and crotch. I squeezed suds from the loofah, scrubbed his pubic hair with my fingers, and stood up. I grabbed his wrist and squeezed soap into his palm.

“Do you want to finish?” I asked.

Augustine spread the soap on his erect penis and put his hand to his side as soap suds plopped to the dark slate floor.

Massaging shampoo into his short hair, I planted my hand on his chest and pushed him back to rinse him, running my hands all over his body, from the crown of his head to the tip of his dick.

He stepped forward and grabbed my waist.

“Wipe the water from my eyes,” he said.

I told him to squeeze them shut; I ran my thumbs lightly across his eyelids.

Augustine was still holding me by the waist, his rigid cock pressed against my tummy.

“Go ahead,” I said.

He held the small of my back and pulled me close, his wet dick pointing to my chin.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked.

He put his lips against my ear, exhaled, and pulled himself tighter against me.

I started to shiver, against my will, and his erection softened.

“I’m gonna head upstairs,” he said, and his hand brushed across my abs as he left.

I stepped into the falling water, already wet.