“Knock, knock.”

I jumped at the sudden tapping on my bedroom door. Taking a moment to compose myself, I answered. “Come in, Kellie.” It had to be Kellie, she was the only other one home.

The door opened hesitantly, something out of character for my — ward, I guess is the best legal term. While I loved Kellie like she was my own daughter, the truth was she wasn’t and while she calls me ‘Mama K’, she stubbornly refuses to drop the ‘K’. I knew it makes some sort of separation, but I was not going to pressure her to just call me ‘Mom’ the way Sara did.

“Can I come in, Mama K?”

“Of course you can, Kel.” I patted the top of the sheet next to me and sat up, knowing she might not understand there was nothing on me under that sheet right now. Oh, she would understand what I was doing, after all, she is nineteen. But if she suspected why I was doing it — it might be a little weird for us and certainly embarrassing for me.

While she got on the bed I thought about the last eleven years, ever since my daughter, Sara, snuck a runaway into the house intending to hide her from her family for the rest of her life. When they got older I made sure Sara understood how proud I was of her actions back then and how proud I was of Kellie for taking such a stand. You see, Kellie was abused, not physically, but mentally by an unbelievable conservative religious family run by an absolute dictator of an Evangelical pastor.

Long story short, she rebelled when she was all of eight-years-old and ran to her best friend, my then seven-year-old daughter, who had once defended her from a school bully. Sara hid her in her room and smuggled food to her for three days before I caught on. I might have done the legal thing and turned her in, but on the second day of her hiding – before I knew she was even there, her father showed up at my house yelling fire and brimstone. It might have been laughable but the ass insisted on talking to my husband since a single Mom is an anathema to him and his beliefs. It went downhill from there, seriously downhill and brought out my temper in full display. I had never been so angry and ended up calling the cops to have him removed from my property. I would have pressed further charges, but shortly thereafter I discovered that Kellie was in my home.

The tipping point for me wasn’t how angry I was at her biological father, but how afraid she was of him. I wasn’t letting her go back to that family! No, I wasn’t the hero, Sara was! But after a couple of years of legal wrangling, complete with lots of threats mainly on his side -- I had legal and irrevocable custody of Kellie . . . or I did until she turned eighteen and came into her own. While Sara called her Kellie after a TV character she liked, Kel didn’t legally change her name until she turned legal age. She took my middle name as her new last name, that’s how much she hated her biological father. I would tell you her original name, but some of the battles made the news and you don’t need to connect those dots. So, for the past eleven years, I raised two incredible daughters, Kellie, the nineteen-year-old who'd just completed her first year of college and was home on summer break and eighteen-year-old Sara who was about to graduate high school near the top of her class.

Kel sat on my bed and seemed very indecisive about something, which is not Kellie-like at all. I waited patiently, knowing she wouldn’t back away, even if it took a while. She wasn’t shy, but once she started down a path, she took it all the way. There was no retreat in this girl!

“This afternoon, when I came in from the pool…”

My mind flashed back to a few hours ago, Kel had come in holding her bikini top, wearing only her bottoms. She did cause me to catch my breath because she is a very beautiful girl, and -- something I try and avoid thinking about -- incredibly sexy.

“Mama K, can you help me?”

“Kellie!”

“Oh, relax,” she said smiling, “you’ve seen me naked before.”

“The last time was . . . what, when you were 13?”

She grinned at the memory and paused and looked down at herself. “I guess I’ve changed a bit since then.”

Changed a bit was an understatement. The last time I saw her completely naked was in a fitting room where she was trying not to come unglued because nothing seemed to fit. Her bust hadn’t started coming in, but her hips had and she hated her thirteen-year-old pear-shape.

“I guess you have.” I took the top from her and checked it out – the top, not her! “Sorry, baby, but one of the straps is stretched and about to tear off completely. Go grab one of Sara’s if you want.”

“I might need one of yours, Sara and I aren’t the same size anymore,” she said grasping her breasts. Then, without a blink, she stripped off the bottoms and dropped both on the counter. Naked as a jaybird — although I have no idea how that phrase came about — she went down the hall to Sara’s room to find something appropriate. She was right, while both girls were the same height, she had about a two-cup size advantage and slightly wider hips.

While she headed toward the back of the house, I stood there a few steps away from her suit. Several minutes later she came back in, still naked, which made me turn away and hold one of my one-pieces. While I am in good shape, the spandex would stretch a bit more for me than her. It wouldn’t look nearly as good as her bikini, but she would pop-out of one of Sara’s tops.

“Mama K, Sara’s coming home tomorrow, right?”

“Yea, she’s on an overnight with the swim team. You want to pick her up?”

“I better since I am driving her car.”

I laughed, “There is that. She’s due back at the school about six, she said she would call when they were about an hour out.” Kel’s car was still at her college. It was a twelve-hour drive and while her car was good around campus, trusting it for such a long drive was a little shaky. Thinking ahead, August was going to be pretty rough on me. I nearly tried to talk them into going to school here, but Kellie’s heart was set on State and also on Sara joining her in the fall.

Okay, back to the present, and an indecisive Kellie sitting on my bed playing with the corner of my top sheet.

“…This afternoon, when I came out of your bedroom with one of your suits, I noticed my bathing suit had been moved.” She looked up at me as she said it. Before I could even respond she saw something in my face.

“I also know what you were doing in here.”

Now I was frozen, I realized that she not only knew I was masturbating, but that I...

As she went toward the back of the house, I couldn’t help myself. I stepped over to the counter and picked up her bottoms. While part of me was ashamed, the rest of me was excited. I held them up to my face and inhaled her scent! It was warm, very wet, and smelled sweet — it made me immediately wet!

“Kellie…” I struggled with words, while my heart sank.

“It’s okay. When I saw you had moved them, I got excited. I also know it wasn’t the first time.”

She looked at me again, showing me how serious she was. I felt horribly guilty and looked down. She touched my chin and lifted my face. “It’s okay. I was thrilled knowing I was turning you on. Sara and I have known for years that you masturbate. My room is right on the other side of that wall,” she indicated the adjoining wall. “Sometimes you’re kind of loud,” she said with a very kind smile.

“Oh my god!” I know my face was reddening, with my complexion it would be halfway down my chest in a second.

“Don’t feel bad about it, Kate. We didn’t understand until we were older, but we did eventually. Although we tried to be less noisy about it.” She grinned at me. I was getting a little confused, it was the first time she ever addressed me by name, let alone a nickname!

“I wanted to ask you if…” she paused before continuing… “You were thinking of me while you did it?”

I was stunned and didn’t know what to say or do. I couldn’t deny it, because I am one of the world’s worst liars, and I couldn’t admit it because it was so wrong, so very wrong. While I thought furiously she pulled the sheet down and uncovered my chest and pulled my hand out, my right hand — the hand I was masturbating with. She took it before I even realized it and brought it to her face, sniffing it, then tasting it. My ultimate fantasy was right in front of me and I couldn’t move.

She looked at me with an intensity I had never seen. “I’m gay, Katreana. I’ve known it for years and college confirmed it. I learned that I much prefer women of some experience, and I also realized that you were the one woman in the world I wanted more than anything.”

She took two of my fingers in her mouth, I was still frozen and couldn’t respond coherently. “But Sara…”

She pulled away from my fingers. “Sara is straight, believe me, absolutely straight. We played a little, but it was weird being sisters. I love her but as a sister. She’ll get married someday and punch out a bunch of babies — but I never saw that for myself.”

“But if we . . .”

“You’re worried about Sara? Don’t! The only thing she’ll say is that it took us long enough.”

“I don’t understand!”

“Sara knows exactly how I feel. She’s my best friend and my sister and I tell her everything. Actually…” she said with a small smile, “She’s the one who realized how I felt about you before I did.”

Kellie looked at me with that intensity I found so disconcerting. She leaned in close and touched our lips together. “I love you, both as my only mother and something much more. I know you love me as a daughter and I believe something more. I need to explore that something more and I think you do as well.”

Then she leaned in even closer and when our lips touched this time, she slipped her tongue out and touched mine. At the same time, she pushed the sheet further down and revealed I was naked. My mind still whirled, but my body responded. One of us moaned as I opened my mouth and took her tongue in. I realized my eyes had closed and I lost myself in that kiss. All the thoughts of about her I had tried to suppress over the last year or so flared, my worries faded into background noise.

The intensity of the moment consumed me as my arms rose and wrapped around her as the kiss deepened. I slid down on the bed and she rolled on top of me.

Her body against mine was an incredible feeling. I had hugged her before, but never with her on top of me. Our legs intertwined and she took some of her weight on her arms. She leaned away from me.

“I’ve dreamed of being in this position for a long time!”

“Kel, we can’t!” My last bit of sanity surfaced briefly. She sat up, straddling me and took off her top. She was spectacular.

“Yes, Kate, we can. I think we have to, but if you want to stop, all you have to do is tell me you didn’t sniff my bikini bottoms earlier or you weren’t in here thinking of me and wanting me. If you can tell me that, I’ll go back to my room.”

I tried, I really tried, but it was no use. She knew everything I had thought, everything I had done. She paused and waited patiently, then her hands came up, cupped her breasts, and my eyes couldn’t help but track them. She smiled again, this time sweetly. She had so many smiles I don’t think I ever realized how much she can convey with just a smile.

She leaned down very slowly, our breasts touched as her face came so close. She stopped and looked very seriously at me. My heart simply melted. I reached up and touched her face. A face I knew so well but had never seen like this. The young lady who featured in my fantasy life wasn’t here, the woman on top of me was so much more than I imagined. Her scent, vanilla, filled my head, every point of contact between us felt overwhelmingly hot. She touched my hand on her face and brought it to her lips. She was so gentle like she might break me.

What did break was any reserve left in me. I knew the girl so well, and I have loved the person she was growing into. I pulled her down and kissed her, she was kissing and smiling at the same time as our tongues wrestled. She laid on top of me again and slipped a leg in between mine, pushing her thigh up until I moaned into the kiss. She pushed her other leg between mine and I wrapped my legs around her. She pushed against me, rubbing her panties across me, I could feel the heat and also the wetness. She was as turned on as I was. I could feel my juices running down and onto my sheet. She rocked a second time and I gasped and inhaled her breath in our kiss. Time flew and suddenly my back arched and in the time between two heartbeats, I came! It crashed over me like never before and I think I screamed. I have no idea how long it lasted, my vision flared white and every muscle locked up. Then I must have passed out.

I came back to Earth and felt a warm presence against my back. I was on my side and she had spooned against me, her arm over me protectively. She must have felt me come back to life because she kissed the back of my neck and said, “Wow!”

“Wow, indeed! What happened?”

“I think you could call that an orgasm.”

“No, I think that should be called ‘The Orgasm!’” I turned and faced her, she pushed a leg between mine as we cuddled together. I put my head on her shoulder and we just held each other.

“Kate, I do have to ask you a question.”

“Okay,” I said with a little trepidation left over from my own insecurities.

“Have you ever...?”

“I do have a daughter, you know.”

She blushed. “I know that, but Sara and I were always speculating. You never dated, so I was wondering if you had ever made love with a woman.”

My turn to pause. “No, once Sara came along I discovered most single men had no interest in becoming a father, just scoring with the single mom, especially one as young as I was. I guess they figured we are easy targets. When she got older, she really took up so much of my time, then you came along and dating seemed really out of the question."

“Because of me?”

“Kellie, by the time you came along, I realized I found women much more attractive than men, but never acted on it, even all those evening college classes filled with some very pretty girls. It was the legal battles with your father which made acting on them impossible. He would have had yet another card to use to force me to give you up. Even after the legal stuff was signed and settled as far as I was concerned, he didn’t stop some level of harassment. I would run into him or some of his congregation and the comments often bordered on the slanderous. I refused to give him any ground to make any complaints against me, I was a mom to two wonderful girls.”

“So it is my fault?”

“No, baby, I made the choice for all the right reasons. I did it for both of you and for me too. I couldn’t think of anything more important than you guys.”

“How did you deal?”

“Well, I guess you heard some of it. Obviously, I masturbated, maybe more than I should. I have a laptop in the closet you guys never knew about — at least I don’t think you knew about it. Plus a few toys.”

“Toys?” she said excitedly.

At that point, I realized everything had changed and while I worried a little about Sara, I knew there was no going back and I also knew I never wanted to.