The Trojan Horse Wore Hightops
Part 3 of 4
By Jess Faulks
Kim laid on her back, staring at the ceiling washed in the muted blue of the middle of the night. Light leaked through, around the edges of blinds that, according to the Builder's brochure, were "blackout." When the house was still being built, they spared no expense to have David's perfect home, only to find a long list of such annoyances and inadequacies. She never really liked the house, even while they were still married.
She couldn't lie on her back for long, with the weight of her chest resisting every inhale, so she rolled on her side, facing the door and away from Sunnie.
Kim had been staring at her for some time, after waking up in the middle of the night, her mind and body racing with excitement and confusion. Watching Sunnie sleep gave her time to reflect on just how crazy the events of the day had been after so many lonely months of monotony and creeping depression. How fortuitous for this gorgeous, amazing woman to have walked into her life.
Odd things Sunnie said bounced around in her head and made her pause, but how critical could she be? Sunnie was young and exciting! Of course, it wouldn't all make sense for someone who hadn't aged into boredom and reliability.
Inconsistencies were hard to mind while watching her so gracefully sleeping, those full lips parted with the duvet draped over her perfect curves as she slept on her side. Sunnie's body was what she wished she had, not just in youth but in her face, hair and breasts that were formidable yet short of the extremes of her own gigantomastia.
Kim wanted to wake her with kisses and embrace her again, but the scene was too peaceful to disturb. She realized her hand was already halfway down her pajama bottoms and she pushed it the rest of the way with a naughty smile and shifty eyes no one else could see. She kept quiet as her breathing changed so it wouldn't be her fault if Sunnie woke up but she'd be there to take advantage of it, if she did.
The younger woman slept soundly the entire time, from the lip-biting tension and restrained squirming to the tingling aftermath. It left her breathing deep and steady as she marveled again at how exciting and disarming the younger woman was, even when entirely inert.
She'd said "I love you!" Could she have meant it? How insane, for the moment, to not seem totally insane. She'd loved David well enough and John she'd adored, but she couldn't recall if that storm of teenage hormones had been like this: the instant, absurd twitterpation of cheesy, romance films, where the music swells and everything else but one person fades into the background.
It wasn't only lust, but she was boiling over with it in a way she never had before. An attraction she hadn't imagined being capable of, powerful enough to douse logical thought and reason. Maybe even loyalty. If Sunnie arrived two years ago when she was still with David, would she have had the strength to resist?
Both of her previous lovers had wanted to try anal sex, and she'd turned them down repeatedly. Then a gorgeous, young stranger shows up at her door and suddenly she was more excited than afraid about the idea, eager to please and experiment, to some previously unknown extreme. Even now, she felt the soreness of the aftermath, but it came with the shiver of excitement of such an erotic taboo. She would do it again.
It was hard to imagine what Sunnie could ask that she wouldn't consider.
She was so connected to her and only when she looked away, could she think about anything else.
How crazy would it be for Sunnie to stay with her? The girl was obviously troubled and lacking any kind of parental guidance. Moving to California was her plan for the future? The Entertainment Industry? Did she mean acting or was she betting on getting straight into porn? Did they even still make porn in California?
Things were difficult to keep in perspective. Sunnie was still a stranger, even after the eventful day. Did she have a foster family? Was soliciting her full time job? Where would she sleep tonight, if not here? These thoughts came and went all day, but she was well aware of being drunk on the young woman.
Young indeed! "Old enough to drink in Mexico?" What did that mean, besides she was under 21? What's the drinking age in Mexico? Was Sunnie even a legal adult? What did Kim know about guessing ages? Were some parents awake somewhere, wondering where their daughter was? Without rolling over, she looked back to her, brow furrowed with concern.
It was fine. She was so beautiful. She had the kind of face that should be famous.
Kim brought her hands to her cheeks, not tired at all. If she wasn't going to wake Sunnie up for cuddles and sex, she needed to clear her head before she could go back to sleep.
A cup of tea would be nice. A little reading? Tea and some trash television? Maybe a session with her vibrator? She'd left it in her office, in a drawer under her desk. It was half-hidden beneath a box of envelopes in hopes of saving the embarrassment of being outed as someone who masturbates, should the house she lived alone in ever be searched or burglarized.
"When did you turn into such a horn ball?" she muttered, looking back at Sunnie again. What made her so crazy about this girl? Is this what love was really like and everything before had been a lie? Or had all the time in isolation since divorce and the pandemic just broken her mind? Was she that starved for attention and intimacy that she was acting like a fool?
She pried herself free of the mattress, cradling her chest in her Buc-ee's tee shirt with one arm and pushing off with the other. Finding her balance, she turned back. If the movement had been enough to wake her, she could jump right back in bed. Sunnie hadn't moved and with a frown, Kim slipped out of the bedroom.
Holding the banister for support on her way down, she was careful to find each step with her heel before shifting her weight. She'd fallen down stairs she hadn't seen more than once when she was younger, but she was experienced after all her years of carrying her breasts around.
Kim descended slowly enough to notice the scene changed in her living room and her pulse spiked until her eyes adjusted. Everything was as she'd left it, but for the addition of a pair of Chuck Taylor's next to Sunnie's backpack, jacket and fanny pack.
Questions returned. Nobody went door-to-door in these kinds of planned neighborhoods without a car. Long stretches of no sidewalks discouraged too much access between the castes of home models and each sub-community's various amenities. Security would stop anyone who shouldn't be here, wouldn't they? Of course, Sunnie wasn't very suspicious. If anything, the college-aged guards would have hit on her.
Make-A-Wish but for Orphans? That made no sense at all. Sunnie went straight to some pretty personal questions but that hadn't seemed so strange for a girl her age. Kim didn't know any young people, but GenZ's gender-bending, TikTok teenagers must have different boundaries than those she'd learned as a late-to-the-internet, rural Texas Millennial. She'd barely questioned how she had a penis at all! That was unexpected from the way the rest of her looked, but she'd heard so much about how a huge portion of her generation was non-binary or trans. She hadn't considered the biology of it much.
Tik-tok teenagers. Had she heard that somewhere? Was Sunnie a teenager? The thought returned except now she was looking at her personal possessions. The answer would be in there.
Going through her things would be the epitome of 'not cool', or at least it would have been when she was Sunnie's age. Privacy mattered and she'd had so little herself growing up. Violating it was such a "parent" thing to do and Kim didn't want Sunnie to see her like that, a role so old and unattractive. She must've thought Kim was a lot younger and she had no intention of correcting her, unless asked.
"You want to invite her to LIVE with you."
The adult in her mind was winning. Kim was a grown-up and needed to act like one. Half of the Lifetime movies she'd ever hate-watched over ice cream and chardonnay warned her about trusting a gorgeous seducer. She had no reason to think Sunnie was a threat, but if she was going to live here, she deserved some answers.
She took the last couple of steps with some urgency, landing with a stomp, but she'd already tested how well the younger woman slept. Walking over to her things, she first looked over the hanging jacket and the laminated badge she wore. The text was small and unclear in the darkness, so she lifted it near her face:
"Strength in Solitude Foundation"
"Sunnie Bono."
"What the fuck?" she squinted and pulled it closer still, but the printing itself was blurry under the cheap laminate. She'd read it right. Sunnie Bono.
Kim couldn't help but chuckle as she tossed the jacket back down. "Oooooohkay. This ought to be good."
She picked up Sunnie's things, slinging them over her shoulder before walking to her office, where she could close the door and the lights wouldn't bleed out into the living room and upstairs. She'd learned that from her ex-husband's easily interrupted sleep and how much of a jerk he was when she'd accidentally woken him.
With the bags set on her desk, she paused then went back to the kitchen. "Might as well get comfortable." The room was moonlit enough to leave dark. She eyed the kettle for a moment but passed it up to pour herself a glass of red wine from a bottle she'd opened a few days ago.
Back to the office, she leaned in the doorway and took a sip, staring at Sunnie's things. "Please don't let this be too good to be true," she said with a shrug before pushing off and closing the door behind her.