Cara flopped down onto a stool and surveyed the chaos of the apartment with dismay. It had happened again. Bella had done half a job with the bathroom and Eloise appeared to have merely drifted by the kitchen before both heading out the door with all their stuff in boxes. Cara vowed to herself that she'd find someone else to share with next year. She didn't need this level of shit to deal with on top of finals.
There was a knock at the door and her mood lifted.
"Cara, hon, you home?"
Cara skipped over to the door and opened it. A middle-aged woman stood in the hallway in a coat. Cara noticed she had leggings on and gym shoes and she smiled in relief at that. The cavalry had arrived and was prepared, as she always was, for the onslaught of end-of-term moving out.
"Daughter."
"Mother."
Cara stepped out and gave her mother a warm hug.
"Hi Cara."
Cara turned towards the male voice and her buoyant mood evaporated.
"Hi Wade."
He was in a coat too, stretched across his massive shoulders, easily a head higher than Cara's mother. He was sporting his usual three-day stubble, regarding her with dark, intense eyes. Wade extended a hand.
Cara looked down at it, feeling that little gut wrench when she spotted the wedding ring. She disengaged from her mother and shook the man's hand. As always, Wade's handshake was firm, enveloping her hand in his meaty grip, but perfunctory. She nodded to him.
"The place is still a bombsite. The girls just bolted, again."
"It would have been better if you'd made them clean up first," Wade said.
"It would have been better if you'd have got here first, so I could leave them all to it."
Wade didn't reply, but he shrugged. "Rena, do you want to get started?"
Cara's mother nodded quickly, and then slipped past her daughter into the apartment. Cara turned to her step-father.
"You helping too?" she asked.
"Oh, your mother and I have an arrangement. She'll help you with this, I'm doing all the driving and the carrying. Division of labour."
Wade smiled amiably at her, but Cara felt the hairs rise on her neck. She bit off a response and went to find her mother.
Rena was in the bathroom, tutting. She took off her coat and folded it over her arm, then walked around to the kitchen, then inspected the bedrooms one by one.
"Darling, this might take a while."
She hung up her coat on the back of the door and found a pair of rubber gloves.
"I'll give the bathroom another go while you finish packing your boxes, okay?"
Cara exchanged a look with her mother and then stared pointedly at Wade's back. Rena's expression flickered.
"Sooner started, sooner finished," she announced brightly and disappeared into the bathroom.
Cara returned to the slog of packing, watching her stepfather as he took up position on the same stool that Cara had been mooching on just a few minutes beforehand. He was on his phone, thumbs tapping the screen.
"Got a lot on?" Cara enquired as she slid her shoes into a suitcase.
"I do," Wade murmured, his attention consumed by the screen.
"On the weekend?"
"Business never sleeps."
That was all he said, tapping away at the phone. It looked like a toy in his huge hands. Cara continued her work, fuming silently, listening to the sounds of her mother hard at work scrubbing and cleaning.
Cara could see what her mother saw in Wade, why she'd married him. After Cara's father, it would have been flattering to be paid attention to by someone like her new stepfather. He ran his own business, and made enough money to give her mother a good life and a nice house after having to sell the family home in the divorce. Physically, he towered over his wife and Cara understood that too. The bulk of the man was intimidating. His features were not unhandsome, the stubbled chin suited him, and when he smiled he showed neat white teeth. But there was something about his eyes, the way they saw you, the dark chocolate colour. Cara had looked into those eyes; her mother hadn't stood a chance.
Not that the divorce was acrimonious, not that her mother had found herself lost and reeling. Quite the opposite: they'd kept it civil, at least as far as Cara had been able to see, split the assets and made the arrangements. With Cara now past the age of consent, there weren't even any custody issues. She suspected that her parents had waited for that moment, sending Cara off to college, to arrange the split.
It had taken a year for Wade to appear, another six months for him to pop the question and then another six months for her mother to walk down the aisle with him. Cara had been through a couple of boyfriends in that time, and she'd found herself in the position of telling her mother to slow down. She'd felt strangely foolish, saying that, giving her mother dating advice like she was the parent and her mother was the eighteen-year-old innocent. Something about that, about the divorce, had flipped the tables between mother and daughter, putting them on an equal footing and watching out for each other. Cara had warned her mother against Wade but had been roundly ignored.
She taped up a carboard box, making a show of it in front of her stepfather, but he seemed oblivious. Sure, he was better than sleeping alone, but there was something about him, about the way he treated Cara's mother, that just didn't sit right. It didn't seem very equal.
"Bit of help?" she called out.
Wade looked up from his phone and slipped it into his jeans pocket. He stood up and came over to the packing box, taking off his coat to reveal a t-shirt underneath.
"Sure," he rumbled.
"Careful, it's...."
Wade hefted the box and turned for the front door.
"Heavy," she finished.
Cara skirted the big man to open the door for him. Her eyes settled on the way his biceps bulged with the strain, but he seemed to make light work of it. A strange thought flashed through her mind, of how he'd look carrying her mother like that, his wife pressed against his thick chest as she was transported lightly in his arms.
Wade stepped out into the hallway and headed towards the stairs. Cara found herself watching him go. She shook her head and darted back into the apartment.
That was the problem. He looked good in those jeans, stripped down to a t-shirt, probably even better naked. Her mother had settled for a man who could wrap her up in his arms, but in exchange for something else, something that made Cara uneasy.
Her mother had always been independent, running her life and her family, and it had been a formative part of Cara's life to see her mother in charge. Now, she was the opposite. Her mother was meekly scrubbing and cleaning while her new husband checked his emails. Cara snorted: the good little wife.
The worst part of it was that she'd be under the same roof until college started again. She was resigned to the fact that at some point or other in the next few weeks, she'd reach a tipping point and tell her mother what she really thought. It felt inevitable, but Cara was resolved to somehow prick the bubble and get her mother to see. Whatever Wade was giving her, he was also taking as well. Was it better to be with someone and under the thumb, or alone but free?
Her mother walked into the bedroom where Cara was just folding the last of her clothing into a suitcase. She'd stripped off the loose top, down to a t-shirt.
"Kitchen's done. Just need to vacuum," she announced breezily.
Cara didn't reply immediately, gawping at her mother, but Rena had already disappeared back into the lounge to fetch the vacuum cleaner. It wasn't her cheerful demeanour that had brought Cara to a sudden halt, it hadn't even been the fact that her mother was wearing a tight white t-shirt. No, it had been what was underneath the t-shirt.
Cara inherited her body shape from her mother: not overly tall, but slim, narrow hips, modest breasts. The image of her mother's cleavage pressed beneath the white t-shirt was burned into her memory. Cara was still standing in the middle of the floor unmoving when her mother returned and began to vacuum the floor.
She seemed oblivious to Cara's eyes on her as she tidied, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. The blonde colour wasn't a recent change; she'd gone blonde soon after meeting Wade, and had steadily grown out her hair from a neat bob to a lustrous ponytail that now sat between her shoulder blades. The hair had been the first trigger point for Cara. She'd noted it, and her mother had replied that Wade liked it that way. The woman she knew would never have just gone blonde because a man preferred her like that.
Now this; as Rena moved around, Cara found herself staring at her mother's front. She looked up, giving her daughter a smile, then stopped. She frowned, then clicked off the vacuum cleaner.
