A floorboard creaked in the hallway but there was no footstep. And then he was there, standing in the doorway. With the hall light behind him he was just a big, naked silhouette in the frame, all edges and no detail, but she knew he was looking at her. She pulled the sheet up to her neck like it was getting cold.

“What are you doing here, Mina?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, knowing what he meant.

He sighed the way he did when he knew she was lying.

“I mean why are you here in this room? Why didn’t you come to bed? Like you have been.”

“Din’t wanna bother you.” Another lie to stack on top of the last one.

“I see.”

“Just for tonight, I guess. I’ll come back tomorrow. If you want.”

The pack of coyotes that occupied the gully in the overgrown, undeveloped center of the tract suddenly started howling in chorus. They listened a long time before it finally stopped.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No. It’s just, I thought, I dunno … “

“Mina, may I come in?”

It took her a moment to reboot from being cut off in another lie she still hadn’t finished inventing.

“S’yer house, Mister.”

He walked in and stood a moment by the bed, looking down at her. He leaned over and took hold of the edge of the sheet covering her, calmly pulling it down the length of her body to her ankles. She was as naked as he was. He barely looked at her and sat on the side of the small bed. She could see more of his face now while he leaned his elbows onto the tops of his thighs. He must have gone into his bedroom expecting her to be there and saw she wasn’t. She wondered if he looked for her anywhere else before coming here, but he probably hadn’t. It was like him to know where she’d be.

He should have looked at her. Why would a man pull the sheet off a naked girl and then not look at her like something carved out of a chunk of sky? But she knew sometimes men did certain things just because they could. They had all kinds of ways of telling you things without telling you, assuming the message was supposed to be obvious.

“I thought you might’ve started thinking of it as our house by now.”

“Kind of. I dunno.”

“Kind of?”

He turned to look at her and she nodded. He touched her face and she closed her eyes. It was like he was always studying her – like there was always something he wanted to remember later on except he must have memorized everything a hundred times over by now. When his hand pulled away from her face his arm brushed her nipple. She opened her eyes again. There was something different about him now. The eggshell of silence he was constantly standing in the middle of was spider-webbed with cracks.

“Are you thinking of leaving?” he asked.

She shook her head, afraid if she said no out loud he’d know she was lying again. One of the few useful things she learned from her mother was how it was harder to get caught in a lie if you didn’t say it out loud. But he must have been able to see her eyes enough to read the truth. He frowned, begging an explanation.

“It’s more like just wondering where I’d be if I wasn’t here.”

“Lotta places besides here.”

“Yeah. Lotta.”

“Did you talk to your mother yet?”

“Yeah.”

“She know you’re living here?”

“Yeah.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. Just laughed.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No. You?”

“No.”

He got up and walked to the window. He looked outside but kept his body halfway angled toward her.

“We could move, you know. Somewhere farther out. We wouldn’t have to go by her house every day.”

“I guess. But this place. I dunno. It’s got a feelin’ about it for me. It’s where you let me come home.”

“Without coming home.”

“Maybe.”

“And now you’re thinking about leaving again. Maybe back west again.”

He said it like he was talking to himself. Like he said a lot of things. It wasn’t as if he said things so much as announced them. She let it hang and waited to see if he was going to say anything else, but he didn’t. He just kept looking outside.

“Mister? You want me to call you daddy, or whatever?”

He looked at her like he was surprised to suddenly remember she was there.

"No, Mina, I do not. Whatever put an idea like that in your head?"

She didn't want to answer. Some days it felt like everything she said was wrong.

"I dunno," she finally replied. "Some folks like that. Wasn't sure if you were one of 'em. I kinda think people figure us that way when they see us anyhow. Thought maybe you’d wanna fuck me more that way.”

His forehead furrowed. "I'm hardly old enough to be your father."

"I know." She shrugged, although she wasn’t entirely sure.

"I'm younger than your mother, you know."

"Yeah, of course," she nodded.

"I'm barely fifteen years older than you."

"I know."

“Jesus Christ, Mina.”

“I just wondered, was all. It’s not like a daddy is always a daddy. Not like people say it sometimes.”

The coyotes started up again. Longer this time. It started to feel like they were part of the conversation.

"I never knew my father," she finally said.

His arms weren't thick like a bodybuilder's, but they were beefy and dense. Times he looped them around her body it stopped her feeling nervous about most things except him. An edge of moonlight was touching him all the way to his cock. He kept staring out the window like something else was going on. She almost wondered if he was going to howl back at the coyotes.

"Are you afraid you missed out on something, not knowing your father?" he asked.

"Hard not to think about it."

"Fair enough."

"I don't know if he ever even knew about me. You know my mother. It'd be like her not to say such a thing to a man."

"Maybe she doesn't know who he is."

"That'd be like her, too, but she always said she knew anyway. I'd ask her about him and she'd just say what difference does it make."

He turned toward her. She thought he looked irritated but it was hard to tell in all the shadows.

"So maybe you think if you had a daddy who came to all your dance recitals and softball games you'd be Miss Congeniality by now."

She snickered briefly, then blew a long sigh. "Maybe being Miss Congeniality wouldn't be so bad."

"Mina...don't believe the fairy tales you hear. Not even the ones from people who say they're living one. A lot of men stick to a misguided sense of responsibility that has very little to do with the people they’re supposed to be responsible for. Some find themselves in such dark places they only end up hating themselves so much they make the ones they're supposed to love miserable. Most of them were in dark places to begin with. They just didn't know it. Trust me, sometimes those men who can't hang and disappear are doing everyone a favor."

"Okay." She wasn't convinced. "If you say."

"I say."

It had been only a month since he'd held her naked body like a delicate, porcelain doll and fucked her ass while telling her she was precious and beautiful. In the moment, she'd believed him without a second thought. Things a man says when he’s got his cock your ass have a certain kind of emphasis. Since then, she'd taken to sleeping in his bed. Neither had said anything about it. She just started doing it like it was natural, as if the muscle memory of his cock inside her meant it was something she was supposed to do.

Night after night, he held her in his arms, spooning her from behind with his lips brushing her bare shoulder. He would slide his hand under the T-shirts of his she always took to sleep in and lay hands on her bare skin. Most nights he'd cup the weight of her breast in his palm, absently thumbing a nipple while his breathing deepened. His cock would grow impossibly hard against her ass.

He hadn't taken her ass again, nor anything else, and she still thought of herself as a virgin. At least in the important way. He’d said he would take the rest of her when she finally called him by his name, but she couldn’t get that far. Something kept blocking the path.

There were times she wondered if something was wrong with her, but the feeling never lasted beyond the next time he touched her. Yet still he held her like something important. Sometimes she’d wake up and catch him smelling her hair.

"I don't care," she finally said.

He looked at her curiously.

"About the thing before," she explained. "I don't care what anybody thinks if they see us. I don't care if my mom knows I'm living with you."

"Your relationship with her should have nothing to do with me. Or us."

"Except we wouldn't know each other if it weren't for her. I mean, you fucked and everything." That first time they’d met he came out of her mother’s room stinking of her cheap-shit perfume.

He nodded. “True enough, I suppose.”

"How many times?"

"I don't know. Not that many."

"Here I am living in your house and you only fucked me the one time. You musta fucked her what? Three times? Ten times? You didn't even fuck me the regular way."

"Mina." His voice got that rumbly thing it had whenever he was telling her how to do something. "Trust me, there's no useful point to this line of conversation. There’s nothing that ever happened in the past with your mother that has anything to do with us?”

“Easy for you to say.”

There was a stretch of silence that Mina wished the coyotes would interrupt. He walked over to the bed from the window and leaned down, grabbing hold of the footboard. Mina felt like squirming but resisted. She tried to read his face in the darkness but it was no use.

“Mina. Spread your legs.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Why?”

“Cuz we’re having a conversation.”

“We can talk to each other just as easily whether your legs are open or closed.”

“You sure ‘bout that?”

“Quite sure. Now go ahead. Spread your legs.”

Mina fanned her knees outward.

“Wider,” he said.

She pushed them further open. Between the moon in the window and the light in the hall, her pussy was well exposed while his face was nearly all in shade. But she knew where his attention was centered now. She noticed a flicker where his eyes were supposed to be and it made her skin feel slightly electrified. She started to wish she’d gotten into bed with him after all. If she were pressed up against him while he was falling asleep he wouldn’t be standing here now, gazing down at her like something carved out of a chunk of sky.

He let go of the footboard and spent a couple of minutes massaging her feet and ankles. Just long enough for her body to go slack, then he calmly let go and walked around to the side of the bed and sat down on the edge. His hipbone was touching her ribs He reached back, out of his field of view, and cupped his hand over her smoothly shaved pussy, palm over her mound while his fingers draped downward to cover her slit. He didn’t rub her. Just left his hand there, resting on the darkest half of her life.

“Are you listening, Mina?”

“Yes, Mister.”

He sighed with mild exasperation. She knew he was still waiting for her to use his name. He would never let himself go inside her until she did, and the thought of it still terrified her.

“Your mother,” he started and stopped. “She might as well be a foreign country. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

Body heat was building under his hand, the way it starts to broil where the skin of one body ends and the other begins. She wanted to feel his fingers move but they refused. It started to feel like a punishment. He sighed again. Impatiently.

“That house. Her house. Where I found you that time …”

Mina had the television volume up to cover the noise from her mother’s bedroom. She was in there with two men the girl had never met before. But then she’d usually never met her mother’s friends. They were like people you’d pass in the aisle at a supermarket: no one you needed to care about, no one that needed to care about you, someone you just pass and never remember because you never even knew they were there.

It wasn’t often her mother had two men in the room with her. It wasn’t unheard of but not especially common, either. Mina had known a long time her mother wasn’t so much a real person as a cluster of blind appetites. She had a laugh that always sounded like she was lording it over someone less fortunate, no matter the joke. But she laughed and moaned and cried out without a thought for whomever was there to hear, which was inevitably Mina and never anyone else.

She never wondered how her mother handled a situation like that, but she did have to wonder how she herself would. Or anyone, for that matter. What if the wrong one fell in love with her? What if the right one didn’t?

About an hour after the three of them had passed through the house into her mother’s room, Mina was sitting on one end of the couch with her feet on the cushion and her knees up to her chin. She was wearing flannel pajamas that covered everything and she kept to the arm of the couch like there was someone on the other side she was trying to keep her distance from.

Then he was standing there, a couple paces off from the other side of the couch looking at the TV. He said something and she turned down the volume.

“S’cuse me?”

“I said I’ve seen this one.”

“Oh.”

His clothes looked rumpled compared to when she saw him come in earlier with her mother and the other guy. It looked like he could’ve had them off but ended up putting them back on in a hurry. He sat on the other end of the couch like he was invited and watched that movie he’d seen before. Mina squeezed tighter against her arm of the couch and kept her eyes on the screen, but whatever attention she had for the television was broken now. She didn’t want to be curious about her mother or her male friends or any of the things they did when they closed her bedroom door, but this one had walked out on the middle of something and invaded her bubble.

She finally muted the volume.

“This one’s boring,” she said without looking at him.

“Yeah. I thought so the first time.”

“Then how come you sat down to watch?”

“Not sure, really. Guess cuz I saw you here.”

“Oh.” She nodded as if it made perfect sense. “Ain’t much to it.”

“Just thought you look like I feel.”

“How’s that?”

“Alone.”

“’Spose you could still be in there. Having fun or whatever.” She nodded her head toward her mother’s bedroom door. They were in there laughing. Then someone grunted. “Probably more fun than this.”

He looked like he was thinking. “There are some kinds of fun that turn a corner and you know it’s all just headed for nightmares.”

She snickered a little contemptuously. “You come to the right place for a nightmare,” she said.

He looked at her for too long without saying anything. It felt like he was only noticing her for the first time.

“You live here all the time?” he asked. “I’ve been here a few times and never saw you before.”

“I stay at my friend’s a lot,” she said.

He took his eyes off her and nodded. Looked back again. “Because of people like me, I suppose.”

She shrugged. “More cuz of people like her.”

“Like her? Or her?”

“Little of both, maybe.”

She watched him thinking as he turned his face back toward the silent yet flickering television. It was the longest she’d allowed herself to look at him so far. He looked back at her and there was something serious in his eyes. He wasn’t just looking. He was “regarding” her. It made her nervous in a way that didn’t entirely bother her.

“Who is she to you?” he asked after a long while.

“Mother.”

“She never said there was anyone else here.”

“She wouldn’t. ‘Sides, there usually isn’t. Ain’t my house anyway.”

He frowned at her. “Isn’t.”

“Huh?”

“Isn’t my house.”

“Oh. Right.” Asshole, she thought.

“Never mind. It doesn’t even matter.”

They watched another fifteen minutes of the movie on TV without turning the volume back up. The sounds from her mother’s bedroom gradually increased until a long, throaty orgasm brought everything back to silence. It was her mother, not the other guy who was still inside with her. Mina clawed nervously at the arm of the couch, wondering if this one was sitting there with her just because he’d already got his own and didn’t need any more of what her mother was giving away.

Then there was laughter from the bedroom. After that there was the sudden blast of speed metal at a high enough volume to cover whatever was happening next. This went on for a couple of minutes before he turned to Mina again asked her if she liked ice cream.

She couldn’t hear what he said over the music.

“Do you like ice cream?” he repeated, louder.

She nodded.

“Good. Come with me.”

He got up and held out his hand. She took it, and in her bare feet and flannel pajamas, let him lead her out of the house. It was nice outside, and the further away from Mina’s mother’s house they got the quieter it became until they couldn’t hear the music anymore.

The cement under her feet was still warm. He kept holding her hand as they walked. Or maybe she was holding on to his because feeling on her own right then wasn’t anything she needed.

“What should I call you?” he asked.

“Mina.” She didn’t ask his name, and that was when she started calling him Mister.

He kept going for about five blocks, maybe six, to another house he had the key to. The inside was familiar. All the houses in the area were variations on the same theme. The kitchen was bright and clean. He told her to sit at the table and got a box of ice cream out of the freezer. Strawberry.

Then he got a pair of spoons out of drawer and handed one to her. He opened the box, which was already partly gone, and dug his spoon straight into the box for a scoop. He nodded for her to go ahead have some.

“You want a dish?” he asked.

She let him see her smile. She didn’t know she was doing it until after it was too late, and by then she didn’t care.

“Nah. It tastes better outta the box.”

“Yes, Mina, it does.”

He was smiling back. He had a nice enough smile but it looked like his face wasn’t used to it. Like wearing a nice pair of shoes that belonged to someone else. Underneath he looked tired, but after a couple more minutes the ice cream got softer and their spoons started to clack against each other when they both went in for a scoop at the same time.

They didn’t say very much, but they watched each other suck their spoons clean of scoop after scoop.

“I like this, Mister,” she said as they were nearing the bottom of the ice cream box.

“Me, too, Mina. I like it a lot.”

It wasn’t long before they finished the box, and then sat a few minutes.

“I don’t wanna go home,” she said. It was what was in her head and she hadn’t meant to say it out loud. But there it was, too late to pull back in.

“You don’t have to. You like chocolate, too?”

Mina grinned and nodded.

He got another half full box of ice cream out of the freezer and they did the same thing all over again, each of them scooping into the box with their spoons. When they were done, he threw his spoon into the box and Mina followed suit. Then he tossed the box into the kitchen sink without getting out of his chair.

“You’re good company, Mina.”

“Thanks. You seem like you are, too.”

He laughed. Then he stood up and took her hand again. He led her out of the kitchen and through another room to a set of stairs, leading her up and down a hallway to where there were bedroom doors on either side.

“This one’s mine,” he told her, nodding toward the room with the open door. “It’s okay if you want the other one to yourself, but I’d like if you decide to come in here with me.”

Sleeping by herself in a strange room in the house of a man who was nearly a stranger felt like a raw kind of sad. The only thing worse would’ve been going back to her mother’s house so she followed him into his bedroom.

He stood behind her by the bed and she felt his hands come around to the front and begin unbuttoning the top of her pajamas.

“It’s too warm to sleep in these, Mina,” he told her. “But don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything to you. We’re just going to sleep.”

“Okay, sir,” she said quietly. Then he gently slid the top off her shoulders and down her slender arms, rendering her topless. She hoped he wasn’t looking at her. She expected to feel his hands push down her bottoms, but he sat on the bed, looking at her.

“Take them off, Mina.”

“Um, okay, Mister.” She leaned over and pushed down her bottoms, standing back up naked. He sat there looking at her while he unbuttoned his shirt.

“You’re a beautiful girl,” he said.

“Kinda skinny, they say.”

“Yeah. But that’s just you.” She started to move toward the bed but he asked her to stop. “Just let me look at you a moment. If that’s alright with you.”

“Could be worse, I guess.”

She thought of how he must have seen her mother naked earlier that night. Now here he was looking at her too. She wished he didn’t know her mother, except how else would she have met him?

He finished undressing and pulled her into bed with him by the hand. She lay down on her side, facing the far wall, and he spooned up to her from behind.

“Don’t worry, Mina. This is the first time I’ve had my pants off tonight,” he said.

She felt relieved, imagining what it would have been like if the cock that now touched her ass had been inside her mother just a while before.

“I wasn’t worried about that,” she said.

“Yes, you were. But it’s okay.”

“Okay.”

“I’m gonna reach around you and cup your tit in my hand now. If you don’t want me to do that just say so.”

His hand came around her body and cupped the flesh of her breast. His fingers barely moved. All he did was hold her. His face came right up against the back of her head. She thought about whether to tell him not to hold her like that, but her nipple grew thick against his palm and she decided she liked it fine just the way they were. When she felt him go hard against her ass she expected him to try to fuck her but he didn’t. He just lay there holding her. Pressing ever so slightly.

“Mina? You ever fuck any of your mother’s boyfriends?”

“I never fucked nobody.”

“Kind of thought so. That’s why I’m not going to do anything other than what we’re doing right now.”

“I don’t think I’d mind if you did.”

“I know, but if you have to say you don’t think so then it’s something we shouldn’t do. Besides, this is just as good. Maybe better. Try to sleep.”

It wasn’t easy falling asleep with the hard cock of man who wasn’t going to fuck her pulsing against her ass, but she did. And when she woke up, he was asleep and it was still dark out. She lifted his arm off her and got carefully out of the bed, not wanting to wake him, and not wanting to be there in the morning when he could see her in the light of day.

Now, in the room across the hall, he let his finger move against the warming lips of her pussy. The movement was nearly imperceptible, but it was enough to make her look at his face, still half in shadow.

“Remember the first time you came here? In those flannel pajamas?”

“Them blue ones?”

“With white polka dots.”

She nodded and his finger moved in a longer swath, stroking her furrow. She started to moisten gradually at first, but as the track of his finger grew slicker, her pussy flushed against the slow stroke and probe. He brought the other hand to her face to stroke her hair and brush the backs of his fingers along her cheek.

“I woke up that day and you were gone,” he said. Silence followed while he stroked her hair and pussy at the same time. She sighed and arched her hips ever so slightly, inviting his finger to explore.

“I actually looked around to see if you stole something,” he added. “But you left everything behind like you’d never been here. You even washed the spoons we used for the ice cream. The only thing you left in your wake was the scent of your hair on the pillow, but I suppose that was no small thing.”

“I probaby shouldn’t a come that time.”

“Is that what you really think?” he asked, letting his finger sink between her damp pussy lips.

“No.”

He slipped the tip of his finger between her sodden lips and drew a ring around the opening of her hole. She arched her hips more deeply this time and he slipped his finger further inside.

“If you were to leave again would you try to leave no trace? Like the last time?”

Then he pushed his finger all the way inside her, as if to punctuate the question. Mina heaved a small grunt.

“I dunno. Dunno,” she said, shaking her head from side to side against the pillow.

As he leaned down closer to her face, he pushed another finger into her wet channel along with the first. He pressed the pad of his thumb against her clit, using it as a pivot point while he began sawing the pair of fingers in and out of her core.

“You could clean every surface in this house,” he told her, fingers gliding slick and steady, “and the footprint you leave in your wake would be immense. You could never make anything feel like you were never there, Mina.”

He fingered her pussy in silence a while, his face hovering close to hers. The hand he’d been stroking her hair with moved to her neck, just resting against her throat. No pressure. No grip. Just the suggestion of a deeper touch. The fingers inside her curled into her sweet spot and teased at the patch.

“Why,” she started, then sighed, gasped a little and sighed again, “you don’t … fuck me … the right way …?”

“You know why.”

His voice dropped half an octave. He kissed her neck but didn’t move his hand off her throat. The fingers stroking her hot spot were pushing her out beyond the veil of their voices. He was still talking but she couldn’t make out what he said. She knew it was all just more of his lofty excuses for not fucking her. And maybe somewhere in that soothing drone of baritone nonsense he could have told her she was beautiful. He could have said she mattered the way rain matters and yet she was no more aware of herself than rain was aware of itself. He could have said it wasn’t the specter of her mother standing between them.

Mina arched up hard into the zealous dig of his fingers and moaned. She wished the last part hadn’t been a lie, and that the first two parts were true. But whatever he was really saying was more than she could process. With a huffing series of muffled grunts, she ground herself onto his searching fingers and let her mind spin off into a spiral of pure sensation. She felt reduced to nothing but the skin and muscle clenching around the climax that shot through her core all too soon.

When she floated back into herself, she felt his fingers withdraw and then press against her lips, smearing them with her own nectar.

“Open your mouth, Mina.”

She looked toward him and did as he said. The fingers slipped in across her tongue, filling her mouth with her own taste.

“Now suck,” he said.

And she did. He pulled them free of her mouth and she sensed he wasn’t finished with her. Her pussy was still seeping. When he stood up she could see the fully swollen cock shaft swaggering just above her. Still feeling dazed, she reached for it and stroked him. He stood watching her, no, watching over her as if he might’ve put her to work planting flowers in his backyard garden and he was checking to make sure she didn’t set them too deep or shallow.

She let go when he moved. He got up on the bed with her, his knees planted on either side of his head. His rigid shaft and balls were suspended just above her face.

“It’s not gonna be what you’re waiting for, Mina,” he said. “I’ll just leave the room if you say so.”

She brought her hand underneath him and cupped his balls in her hand while she licked the length of his cock. It had to be answer enough. He sighed and gripped his shaft to keep it still as she explored the hot flesh with her tongue. His sighs deepened and then turned to soft moans. When he angled his cock downward to enter her mouth she automatically parted her lips and took him inside.

He spent the next few minutes sliding his shank in and out between her moist lips, but when he leaned over to bring his face toward her open pussy he lost the rhythm of his strokes. Not wanting him to pull back, Mina sucked the flesh filling her mouth.

There were fingers stroking the lips of her pussy again, then the other hand pulling at her legs, guiding them up and apart. She moaned around his cock when his tongue slid across her pussy. A finger filled her again as she lapped at her clit, but it soon pulled away and pressed against the taut ring of her starbud, now smeared with her flow.

Mina lost the ability to keep sucking the shaft in her mouth as his finger pushed into her ass, his tongue laving her clit at the same time. Just weeks before he had pushed his cock in her ass. Now, merely his finger, yet she felt full to the point of bursting.

His cock remained in her mouth despite the fact she couldn’t suck, only moan and pull for air around the long, thick plug of his shaft. It would have been just as well if he’d rocked himself into her mouth, but his full attention was now on her ass and pussy as he pumped his dew-slick finger in and out of her channel and battered her clit with his tongue.

She felt trapped beneath his body, but when the sensations of his stroking and licking all started to blend it felt like she was taking flight. Somewhere in the middle of her climax his hips started moving. His cock stroked in and out of her mouth and left her tongue awash with cum by the time they both pulled off and sucked in a bodyful of air.

Afterward, he lay down beside her. He spent a long time looking at her face and absently toying with her nipples. At least he stopped talking. She didn’t mind most of what he said, but if he wasn’t talking, he wasn’t asking questions she didn’t have answers to.

“I’m going back across the hall to bed,” he finally told her. “I’d much rather wake up beside you than open my eyes to an empty house all over again.”

Then he kissed her like someone he must’ve loved for years. After the kiss he looked away awkwardly. Mina started to understand everything he didn’t say more than the things he said. She’d already decided to follow him into the other room by the time he got up and walked out. But she lay there and looked at the ceiling a good hour or so. When she finally got up and went across the hall, she found him still awake, staring at the ceiling as she slipped into bed.