Emma knew the Miltons never locked the back door. She let herself in with the casual familiarity of a regular visitor to the household, a familiarity tempered by the nasty shock of guilt she got when she saw Cindy's mom-Dorothy, she mentally corrected herself-washing dishes in the kitchen. She had hoped somehow that she would be able to get through this without ever seeing Cindy or Dorothy, but that particular bubble of wishful thinking had been punctured before she even got all the way past the threshold.
Dorothy gave her a cheerful wave, her rubber-gloved fingers trailing suds behind her. "Hi, Emma!" she said, beaming brightly at the younger woman with a radiant smile that made a sick pit of guilt open up in Emma's gut. "Cindy isn't home from work yet, but if you want to just go along upstairs, I'm sure she'll be back in a couple of hours. I'd offer you a chair at the kitchen table, but Cindy mentioned that you two have a lot of studying to do for that Art History midterm and I don't want to distract you from keeping your perfect GPA."
Emma was almost grateful that Dorothy mentioned the 4.0 average that her family had been bragging about her entire freshman year at college; it meant she had an excuse to blush and squirm awkwardly without raising any alarm bells in the older woman's head. "Um, well, to be honest," she said, trying to make her voice sound casual and certain she was failing miserably, "I was actually hoping to talk to Mister Milton."
Dorothy shot her a mock glare. "Um, I mean Tony," she stammered, blushing an even deeper shade of red. It had been over a year since Cindy's parents had insisted that she start using their first names, but she still couldn't entirely get used to the idea. 'You're eighteen now,' Tony had told her, giving Emma a pat on the back that didn't even remotely put her at her ease. 'You can't keep calling me 'Mr. Milton' your whole life like I'm your bank manager or something, it'll make me feel like an old man!' The words came out accompanied by a hearty laugh, but it only took a few weeks for Emma to realize that neither one of them was kidding.
Emma had to admit that Tony didn't look like an old man-he had a few gray hairs here and there among the black, and a few laugh lines around his deep brown eyes, but he was still very handsome. He was fifty-six, but Emma would have pegged him as barely pushing forty if she glanced at him on the street. He and Dorothy both kept themselves healthy; Emma knew from years of sleepovers that they steered clear of red meat and processed foods, and Tony was always down in the basement working out on his weight machine-
She tamped that thought down hard. Very hard. The last thing Emma wanted to think about right now was the Miltons' basement, and the last thing she wanted to think about the Miltons' basement was Tony working out on his weight machine.
Which made it all the worse when Dorothy burbled quite innocently, "Tony? Oh, he's downstairs getting in his afternoon workout. I'm sure he won't mind a little interruption, though." She turned back to her dishes, completely missing the way that Emma's face fell in response to her words. Emma almost broke down right there and told Dorothy everything, but she knew that it would be like a dagger through the older woman's heart. Emma had already betrayed her, and Cindy too; telling them about it would only make it worse. The best thing to do right now was to go downstairs, make amends, and make sure it never happened again. She walked past Dorothy like a condemned prisoner heading to the electric chair and headed down the steps to the basement.
Sure enough, Tony was down there doing bicep curls to the sounds of "We're Not Gonna Take It". He had on a thin white tank top that was so drenched in sweat that Emma could see his muscles right through the fabric, and a pair of orange gym shorts that looked like the family dog had been using them for a chew toy. Emma tried very hard not to notice the lack of underwear that the holes gave away. She just looked down at the floor and cleared her throat loudly to grab his attention.
Tony glanced over when he heard the cough and gave her a beaming smile. He lowered the stack of weights with a clang and got up, turning off the music and saying, "Hey, kiddo! What brings you down to visit with the old fogey? Got a question about your Econ paper? It's been a while since I took a test on it, but I'm happy to tell you everything I know." He sat back down at the weight machine as he spoke, resuming his workout.
Emma felt her cheeks burning with a blush that felt like it extended out past her skin. Her fingers crept up to play with her blonde pigtails, a nervous habit she thought she'd left behind years ago. "Um, it's... well, I..." Her throat seemed to close up, strangling the confession before it could even begin. She took a deep, shuddering breath and forced herself to walk over to the weight machine and look Tony right in the eyes.
"I'm sorry," she said, tears shining in her bright blue eyes. "What I did yesterday was wrong, it was absolutely inexcusable and I, I should never have..." Emma could tell she was lapsing into babble, guilt forcing out a torrent of words now that she had finally managed to make a hole in her wall of shame and self-reproach. "I know you love Dorothy, and I never intended to, to tempt you like that. I feel so awful. Like, like I'm just a terrible person. I just, I don't even know what came over me, I've never acted like that before, not with anyone and I, um. It won't happen again. I promise you it'll never ever ever happen again. Even if it means I have to stop coming over here, I'll find something to tell Cindy, I promise, I just... I'm so sorry." She sniffled, desperate now to keep herself from bawling like a little girl.
She trailed off into a silence that seemed to stretch on and on, the crushing weight of it filling the room. Tony looked at her, his expression unreadable, and Emma found herself picturing response after angry response until she was practically ready to beg him to say anything just to break the stifling tension. Even so, it came as a total surprise when he finally responded. "I'm sorry, sweetie, but... what are you talking about?"
Emma's eyes widened in surprise. "...yesterday!" she spluttered, confusion and frustration turning the word into a yelp of surprise. "I, I came downstairs to ask you when Cindy was getting home, and I... I mean you... I mean we..." She was stammering all over again, the words unable to get out from under the burden of her guilt. Finally, she forced herself to say it. "We had sex," she whispered, keeping her voice low in an almost superstitious fear of being overheard by Dorothy.
Emma winced in anticipation of Tony's response, but he seemed as unruffled as ever. "No we didn't, kiddo," he said, a touch of laughter in his voice as if he couldn't quite believe the absurdity of the notion. He let the racked weights drop again, but this time he simply allowed his hands to rest in the grips while he looked at her with a touch of bewildered concern. After a moment, seemingly as much to break the awkward silence as anything else, he added another, "We didn't." It hung in the air every bit as uncomfortably as the first.
For her part, Emma felt almost too stunned to speak. She looked over at the couch on the other side of the room, then back over at the exercise equipment. "N-no!" she finally blurted out, her vocabulary reduced to a simple, blatant refusal to believe Tony's words. She knew that it was a little strange to vehemently insist that she was actually the kind of terrible person who would sleep with her best friend's dad, but she couldn't just accept Tony's flippant denial, either.
"We, we did!" Emma insisted, as much to convince herself as Tony. "I was sitting over there on the couch, studying and keeping you company until Cindy and Dorothy got home, and I... I got distracted. Watching you work out. I kept looking up from my book and... seeing you. Your body, I mean." The memory seemed almost like a tangible thing in Emma's mind, like she could reach out and feel the solidity of it inside her head. "And I... I was just lying there, staring at you lift your weights, and I noticed a. A bulge. In your shorts." She didn't know why Tony was pretending that none of this happened, why he felt the need to force the whole humiliating confession out of her. But she couldn't back down now.
"And suddenly the room felt a lot warmer," Emma continued, her voice small and distant as she felt her way through the almost supernaturally vivid memory. "So warm that I couldn't really think of anything else. And I was still pretending to read, but the hand that wasn't holding my textbook snuck down between my legs and started rubbing my pussy through my jeans. I didn't even notice I was doing it at first, but once I did I couldn't make myself stop. I thought I was being... y'know, subtle about it, but..." Emma squirmed, wanting to look down at the floor or up at the ceiling or anywhere besides Tony's skeptical gaze. But at the same time, she felt like she had to prove she wasn't lying. The eyes were the windows of the soul, right? She was baring her soul. So she had to look him right in the eye while she told him what happened.
She could almost feel the remembered heat between her thighs as she told him what happened next. "I was wrong," she said, her stare becoming a little bit distant as she sank deeper into her memories. "After a little while, I noticed that you were... you were watching me watch you." She felt her body lurch forward dizzyingly as she recalled the intensity of his stare. "And then it was just like... like I knew what I had to do next." Emma's lips parted slightly, relaxing into an 'O' shape as though she was reliving the event instead of remembering it.
