She smiled as she looked down into my agonized face.
"Put your tongue out," she said. I obeyed, hoping somehow that I would be allowed to taste her sweet juices.
Instead, she put three fingers into my mouth, shoving them deep into my throat until I felt myself gag, and even then she held them in place, watching my eyes water helplessly as I choked on her fingers and began to panic that she was going to force me to vomit.
But finally she withdrew the fingers, and showed them to me: they were covered in a thick, mucusy saliva. Still looking in my eyes, she reached out her hand past my head, where I could feel Adriana's presence, and seemed to be wiping her fingers on something. I dared not try to turn my head to look away from her gaze to see what it was.
"That's all the lube you get," she said to me, with a wide smile that told me she was looking forward to my painful humiliation. My lips quivered and I wanted to weep, to beg her for mercy, to promise her anything if she would only say that I wouldn't have to suffer this violation. But her eyes were hard, and I knew it would be useless. For some reason, she respected and even liked Adriana more than me, and I felt crushed.
In the space of half an hour that morning, Miss Kennedy had rewritten my brain to place her, not my marriage, my household or my identity as a good Christian woman, at the center of my life, and it was heartrending to be reminded that she did not care about my desires a tenth as much as I desperately, hungrily, quiveringly, cared about hers.
I felt another hand lay over mine as I held my ass cheeks open, trembling. The hand's plump softness, and the long acrylic nails, told me it was Adriana. And then I felt a pressure on my asshole, something hard and thick and inhuman, pushing gently but inexorably forward.
I squeezed my eyes shut in terrified anticipation of pain, and I felt a sharp yank on my hair as Miss Kennedy snapped,
"Keep looking at me!"
I opened my eyes again, whispering "Yes, Miss Kennedy" automatically. But I couldn't stop tears from springing to my eyes and beginning to stream down my face.
The pressure on my sphincter grew more insistent, and I could feel my muscles twitch involuntarily, tightening so as to repel the intruder. Adriana chuckled softly.
"Oh, she wants to make it hard," she said. "That's okay. We can do hard."
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
After Miss Kennedy had left for school the morning she made me hers, I had spent a good deal of time in the bathroom. I felt I had to shower, because I had been turned into a rutting animal and made a mess of both her bed and myself, but I felt a pang of loss when washing my hair, because it meant I would no longer be smelling her dried juices in it. Similarly, as I scrubbed the sweat and worn makeup from my face, I couldn't help wishing that I could still lick my lips and taste her there.
After the shower, I spent a long time staring at my reflection in the mirror, trying to decide how my teenage mistress would want me to wear my hair, whether I should reapply the makeup that I had put on that morning for Craig's benefit, and most of all who the stranger that stared back at me even was, now that her whole world had come crashing down. Craig had driven off to the airport less than two hours ago. He would be back in four days. I was not allowed to wear clothes in Miss Kennedy's presence -- or, today, at all. Craig and I had agreed that she would continue to live with us until graduation. How could I even begin to explain to him the revolution that had taken place in her bedroom while he was still on his way to the airport? And how could he, if I ever did manage to make him understand, do anything but have me committed to a mental institution? Unless, that is, he decided that it was necessary to enact a more biblical form of judgment. He had never raised his hand to me in twenty years of marriage, but then I had never broken the laws of both God and man so thoroughly before.
"I should be stoned to death," I said to the reflection, and nodded solemnly as I saw the woman in the mirror mouth the same words. And I wondered if the women in the Bible who had been stoned for adultery or perversion had felt as certain as I did that it was worth it.
Because although taking a shower and giving myself time to think should have been a surefire way to allow my habitual personality to reassert itself, and begin to chip away at Miss Kennedy's psychological hold on me now that I was out of her terrifying, insistent, unambiguous presence, I could not bring myself to regret agreeing to be hers. Even now, I was longing to taste her again on my tongue, and I could feel my loins moisten at the sheerest glancing thought of pressing my lips to her delectable brown body.
I shook myself. I couldn't let myself go down this train of thought, or I would be tempted to touch myself, and no minister's sermon, no fervent belief in the sinfulness of masturbation, had ever had as much power to make me want to refrain from touching myself as her command. But then, there had so rarely ever been anything in my life that made me want to touch myself before she made me hers. She was both the prohibition and the temptation, God and the Devil wrapped into one slim, scrumptious body.
Finally, I pulled my hair back into a ponytail so it would be out of my face, and padded out into the house in order to get the chores done that she had said I must do naked.
Cleaning up the dishes after family breakfast, starting a load of laundry (including the comforter from her bed that I had soaked with my discharge), and running the vacuum perfunctorily over the carpeted areas took less time than usual, since I was not distracted by a million other thoughts and obligations. The church-centric social life which had hitherto occupied the majority of my waking thoughts seemed to have vanished from my mind, replaced only by thoughts of Miss Kennedy. On any other weekend with Craig off to the men's leadership conference, I would have already called, texted, emailed, or Facebooked a half-dozen of the ladies from the congregation to suggest some kind of holy pretext for meeting up for coffee or exercise or to do one of the innumerable tasks that always needed doing around the church property, saying nothing about the real purpose of the gathering: to gossip among ourselves, to pass judgment on the less worthy members of our congregation, and to cast as much glory on our own households as word of mouth could convey. But now there was no one whose face I would welcome seeing this weekend except Miss Kennedy's. All my previous social life felt shallow, dim and hollow compared to the horrible, ecstatic truths she had forced me to accept.
But there came a moment when the spin cycle and dishwasher were both humming and there was nothing left out of place in the house, and at last I felt I could put off her final order to me no longer. It would be an awful conversation, I was certain, all the worse for Adriana's artificial, punctilious professionalism. I tried to imagine what her reaction to my confession would be, and I couldn't even imagine myself making the confession. I had no idea how to put it into words.
But since it had to be done, I snatched up the receiver and began to dial the number before I could think too much about it and psych myself out. The Spirit would give me the words, I told myself automatically, and then blushed scarlet when I remembered that the Holy Spirit had nothing whatever to do with what I had to discuss.
"This is Adriana," came the voice over the phone. Efficient, neutral, the vowels just a little too crisply articulated to be a native English speaker's.
"Hi, Adriana, this is Karen Kolicki----" I began, and then the fatal pause came while I tried to gather enough wits and courage to say what I had to say next.
"Hello, Mrs. Kolicki," she said once I had paused long enough that something had to be said, with not a single degree of change in formality from her original greeting. The words saying she recognized me, the tone saying she did not consider me a friend. "Is everything all right?"
"Oh yes, it's fine," I answered reassuringly before I had even digested the question. A moment later I had the impulse to retract it, to say that no, everything was all wrong, my foster daughter was a demon from hell who had forced herself on me. But that wasn't entirely true either, or at least not how I felt about it anymore. I launched into a wind-up. "It was just that Rachel wanted me to call you to tell you ----" I lost my nerve at the last minute ---- "something."
"All right." There was no impatience in her voice, but I felt the hint of it anyway, the "get to the point, you batshit Jesus freak" that was always just under the surface of Adriana's carefully professional manner.
"This morning, Craig went off to a men's leadership retreat," I began to recount, feeling my heart begin to pound painfully strongly in my chest. "And I went up to Rachel's bedroom to -- to speak with her about some language she had used the night before."
"Mmm-hmm," she said, communicating nothing but that she was listening, and possibly wondering where this was going. No curiosity about the language I had felt it necessary to discipline, of course: I knew that she lacked sympathy with Craig's and my attempts to train Rachel -- that is, Miss Kennedy -- out of the vulgarity of her upbringing, but I felt I had to be complete in my telling so it wouldn't seem like I had barged in on my naked foster daughter out of nowhere.
"She was standing naked in the middle of her room, waiting for me, and laughed at my attempts to discipline her----"
"Oh?" That was the only word that escaped Adriana, but it told me that I had definitely gotten her attention now. I heard a vague sound of movement, then the closing of a door and the disappearance of some background noise I hadn't consciously registered over the phone line.
"Go on," she said, and it sounded a little like she was holding her breath. With excitement, I thought, at being able to bust Craig and I for inappropriate conduct with our foster daughter. But I had said too much to pull back now. All I could hope was that she would be as much disgusted with Miss Kennedy as with me and wash her hands of us both.
