The Open Sash

Step Family Taboo Matteo still knocked, which was either manners or a joke. Ingrid opened the door with paint on her wrist. Forty-four.

Bare feet. The hallway smelled of white spirit and the coffee she had forgotten on the stairs. He was twenty-eight, taller than his father, and holding a toolbox he did not need, because the house was not actually falling down.

His father had been gone for fourteen months. The toolbox was an excuse they had both agreed not to name.

"You said the sash was stuck," he said.

"It is stuck. Come in." He had been twenty-five when she married his father. Living in Leeds.

A man already, with a job and a girlfriend Ingrid had met twice and liked. The girlfriend was gone now too. None of that made the wanting less stupid.

It did make it adult, which was the only version of it she was willing to touch. They looked at the window. He worked the cord.

She watched his hands. The silence got thick in the way silence does when two people are not talking about the thing in the room.

"Dad called," Matteo said, not looking at her.

"Did he." "He wanted to know if you were selling. I said I didn't know." "I'm not selling. Not this year." He nodded.

The cord gave. The sash lifted, and cool air came in off the street. Ingrid should have thanked him and put the kettle on.

She put her hand on the frame beside his instead.

"You've been finding jobs," she said.

"You've been letting me." "Yes." He turned. Close. Paint on her wrist.

A nick on his knuckle from some other house.

"If I kiss you," he said, "it isn't an accident. I'm not drunk. I'm not confused about who you are." "Say who I am, then." "My father's wife.

Not my mother. You met me when I was twenty-five. I still shouldn't." "And you're going to." "If you tell me to." "I'm telling you." The kiss was clumsy for three seconds and then not.

He made a sound into her mouth that she felt in her knees. Ingrid pulled him in by the shirt. Fourteen months of polite distances went over like a chair.

The house had been his father's before it was theirs. Ingrid had never pretended otherwise. She had moved in with two suitcases and a plant that died.

Matteo had visited at Christmas and slept in the small room and been polite to her in a way that already had an edge. She had felt it then and put it in a box. The box had not survived the divorce, or whatever you called a man leaving without the paperwork being finished.

"I used to hear you in the kitchen," Matteo said, against her mouth, before they reached the landing.

"Christmas. You laughed at something on the radio. I went upstairs and dealt with myself like a disgrace." "You were twenty-six." "I was old enough to know better." "You were old enough to want it.

That's the part we're in now." They did not make it upstairs cleanly. The landing did. His back against the wall, her hands under his shirt, the ridiculous toolbox still at the top of the stairs like a witness.

"We can stop," he said, against her throat.

"I don't want to stop. I want you to fuck me in the bed he doesn't sleep in anymore. I want it said out loud so we don't pretend later it was a stumble." "Say it again." "Fuck me.

In his bed. You know what that makes us. Do it anyway." He groaned.

"Christ, Ingrid." The bedroom was bright and half packed, because she had started sorting a wardrobe and then stopped. Matteo looked at the bed once, some last scruple, and then she was pulling her dress off and the scruple lost. She was not wearing a bra.

He stared like he had not let himself imagine the details.

"You're sure." "Matteo. I'm forty-four. You're twenty-eight.

The sure part already happened in the hallway." He got his clothes off. His cock was hard, flushed, and the sight of it in this room did something mean and hot to her. She lay back and opened her legs.

He knelt between them and put his mouth on her before she asked, which was either revenge or devotion. His tongue was eager. She held his hair and did not think about the wedding, except that not thinking about it was a lie, and the lie made her wetter.

"Enough," she said.

"In me." He pushed in slow, watching her face. The stretch was perfect and wrong in the way she had wanted since the third invented job. Ingrid hooked her ankles behind him.

"Don't be gentle now." He wasn't. The headboard tapped the wall. She took it and pulled him deeper and told him, in a voice she did not use for anyone else, that he could come in her, that she wanted the mess of it, that he should look at her while he did.

He swore and fucked her harder. One of his hands caught her wrist and pinned it, not rough for show, just to have her. She let him.

"Say what I am," she said.

"His wife." "And what are you doing." "Fucking his wife. In his bed. Because she told me to." The sentence undid her.

She came with her hand between them, rubbing her clit, his name in her mouth and the old name of the house nowhere. Matteo lasted until she clenched around him and then not long after. He spilled deep, shaking, face in her neck, a laugh that was almost a sob.

They lay in the wreck of the duvet. A bus went past. The open sash clicked.

"We're going to be terrible at pretending this didn't happen," he said.

"Then we won't pretend in here. Out there you are still the man who fixed the window. In here you can be the man who just came in his father's wife." He was quiet.

His hand stayed on her stomach.

"Again?" he said.

"Not in the next ten minutes. Then yes. I want you in my mouth first.

I want to know what you sound like when you try not to call me the wrong thing." Matteo huffed a laugh against her shoulder.

"I won't call you that." "Good." She kissed his wrist, paint and all.

"Lock the front door on your way back from the toolbox. The neighbours already think you're helpful. Let's not give them the rest." Between the two times, they did not get dressed.

Ingrid smoked half a cigarette at the open sash and put it out when she remembered she had quit. Matteo sat on the floor with his back to the bed and talked about the job in town as if the job were a rope. She listened.

Then she told him the truth she had not put in the hallway.

"I wanted this before he left," she said.

"Not the first year. Later. When you came down for the boiler and stayed for dinner and didn't look at me until you thought I wasn't looking." "I was looking." "I know.

That's why I didn't ask you to stay the night. I would have." He closed his eyes.

"We're still doing a stupid thing." "Yes. A stupid thing between two adults who can both leave. You're not trapped here.

If you want the train, take it." "I don't want the train." He went and came back. The lock clicked. Ingrid was sitting on the edge of the bed when he returned, dress still on the floor, thighs wet with him.

She crooked a finger. He crossed the room like the landing had not happened and the hallway had.

"On your back," she said. He lay down. She took his cock in her mouth before it had fully gone soft, tasting herself and him, and felt him thicken again against her tongue.

Matteo's hand hovered, then settled in her hair when she put it there.

"Don't call me anything sweet," she said, pulling off.

"Not while you're in my mouth." "I won't." She sucked him until he was hard and restless, then climbed up and sank onto him a second time, slower, watching his face. The room was too bright. That was the point.

He could see exactly whose bed it was, and exactly who was using him in it. Ingrid rode him until his hands bruised her hips and he came again with his teeth in his lip, a smaller, wrecked spill. She stayed seated on him until the shaking stopped.

Downstairs, the coffee would be cold. The window would still be open. None of that felt urgent.

"You'll come on Thursday," she said.

"I've got a job in town." "After it." Matteo nodded against the pillow.

"After it."