Changed Locks · Part 2: Thursday

Previously: your late father left the lake house to you and Molly, the widow who made your life hard for ten years. She changed the locks to sell by Thursday, but a stalled boat softened her, and now she's at your boathouse door in the rain.

She steps inside and closes the door behind her with a click, and the rain gets louder and quieter at the same time.

"I don't ask for things," she says. Her voice shakes, just barely, and she hates that you can hear it. "I have never once asked a man for anything. I'm asking."

She's still dripping. So you cross the boathouse and kiss her.

Her mouth is hot from the cold. She makes a sound against you — surprised, then furious at being surprised, then her hands are in your beard and your glasses are off somewhere on the bench and she kisses you back like she's been holding it for ten years.

"Ten years," she says into your mouth, as if she heard the thought. "Ten years of that house and you never once looked at me like —"

"Like what?"

"Like that. Do it again."

The oars rattle on the wall when she pushes you against it. Rain drums the tin roof above you, lantern light on the wet red silk, and she reaches for your flannel and pulls it open, button by button, her eyes on yours the whole way.

"His shirt," she says. "I burned half his closet. I left you this one."

She pushes it off your shoulders. Then she takes your hand and puts it on her breast herself, over the soaked silk, and her breath goes ragged. "There. That's what you've been pretending not to look at since you were twenty-four."

She peels the wet red dress off one shoulder, then the other, letting it fall to her waist — her massive F-cup breasts bare in the lantern light, heavy, her brown nipples hard from the cold and from you watching. She steps out of the dress entirely and stands in nothing but gold — the gold chain at her throat, the gold hoops in her ears, the gold ring she never took off.

"Say something," she says.

"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"I know," she says. But her voice cracks on it.

She pulls you down onto the folded sail canvas, its canvas smell of salt and old summers around you both, and takes your cock in her hand, stroking you hard and slow, watching your face.

"Ten years of men who bought me," she says, guiding you onto your back and straddling you, her wet pussy sliding along your length, teasing you both. "You're the first one I climbed on myself."

She sinks down onto you — and you're inside her, and her eyes fly open, and she stays dead still, her mouth open, your cock buried in her to the hilt.

"Oh," she says. "Oh, you — right there. Don't move. Don't you dare move." Her nails dig into your chest. "Ten years and it's the boy in the flannel. Right there."

Then she moves, rolling her hips, taking what she wants, her breasts swaying above you, and the words pour out of her — "There. There. Harder, grip my hips, I said harder" — and the rain on the tin roof gets faster with her.

You sit up and she wraps her legs around you, riding you upright, your face between her breasts, and she holds your head there like she's keeping you.

"I'm going to come," she says, amazed at herself. "I'm — I never — with them I never —" and then she does, her whole body clamping around your cock, crying out against your shoulder, and you follow her over, coming deep inside her while she holds you and says your name once, just your name, like it's new in her mouth.

Morning. She swims off the dock naked in the gray light, a long brown line cutting the still water, and comes up shaking her hair out like something wild. She finds your father's recipe card in the boathouse drawer — his eggs, his burnt toast, the way he made it every Sunday — and she burns it, exactly the way he did, and sets the plate in front of you.

You eat every bite. She watches you do it, arms crossed, and doesn't say a word, and doesn't look away.

Thursday afternoon. Gravel crunches up the drive — a car, then a second. A man in a fleece vest steps out with a folder, his wife behind him in white sunglasses, already measuring the porch with her eyes.

Molly comes out of the kitchen and stops dead. She never cancelled.

She looks at the buyers. Then at you. And her face closes, slams shut like the front door two nights ago.

"Molly," you say.

"Mrs. Desai," the man in the vest says, extending a hand.

"I have forty dollars," she says to you, low, on the porch while the buyers walk the yard. "That's what's left. That's what you were pitying. What did you think this was — a weekend? I have forty dollars and a red dress, and Thursday is Thursday."

"You could have told me."

"I don't tell people things."

You go inside. You sign the sale papers — your half, all of it — and leave them on the kitchen table with the house key on top, your father's key, the one that no longer fits. Then you get in your car and drive toward the ferry without looking back at the big house, or at her standing in the yard with her arms wrapped around herself.

The ferry ramp is loud with chains and diesel, the last boat of the night, rain coming in off the water. You're halfway up the ramp when a car swings across the lane and blocks it — her car, the one that's technically yours.

Molly gets out. Heels on the wet steel, hair loose, the papers in her fist.