The Old Man and Alexis

Steph and I met through one of those dating sites for middle-aged singles. I remember being skeptical about the process but it had been five years since my divorce and I was lonely, tired of the treadmill of fuck buddies and call girls. Steph told me later that she had felt exactly the same although in her case, the period of separation was twice the duration of mine.

I liked her from the off. She was a tall, leathery blonde of forty-seven, the HR manager of a Tesco's in Surrey. We met for the first time in a bar off Aldgate High Street. Steph was classy. Dry but not cynical, smart but understated. It usually takes me a couple of dates before I'm sure about a woman but in her case, it was there from the start. She sent me home with a hard-on. I couldn't wait to see her again.

Six months later, we were engaged. Like everything else we did, it was spontaneous. Steph and I didn't do consequences. No matter how many times you fall in love, you stick to the same MO. Again, I had found 'the one'. Steph was everything I loved in a woman – heart, common sense, femininity. The sex was phenomenal. Any worries I had about the dwindling potency of a forty-nine year old man vanished between her thighs and in her mouth. The engagement was brief. We were married a week before Christmas and honeymooned in Barbados until the new year. I call it the idyllic P.A phase. Pre-Alexis. Because when we got back, it all came undone.

Alexis was Steph's daughter from her first marriage. She was nineteen when her mother and I married. Although she was making good money in her job in the city, she was reluctant to leave home and Steph didn't want to let her go. I saw it as a temporary arrangement when I sold my apartment and moved into their house in Guildford. Soon Steph and I would have a place of our own. Given Alexis' temperament, that couldn't come soon enough.

She was a typical spoiled child of seperated parents, well versed in the art of playing one off against the other. She partied incessantly. Steph allowed her to have her boyfriends over. Steph allowed her to do whatever she wanted and got nothing but shit by way of thanks. With me, she was pleasant, but surly. I cramped her style somewhat. She tended to clam up when I was around. I made an effort for Steph's sake, but it was hard going.

Alexis looked nothing like her mother. A heavily freckled brunette, she was short and thick-bodied where Steph was slender or at least had been until she hit her forties. When Steph and I fucked, I was astonished by the thought that Alexis had come out of the very uterus whose neck I was cresting. I used to catch myself staring at her. She played with her hair, ate the ends of it. She stubbed out cigarettes in plant pots. When she talked on her phone she smirked like her mother did. That was the only similarity I could see.

Jon, her Dad, had waited until he was forty and married for eleven years before coming out as gay. I didn't understand how a woman as intelligent as Steph hadn't seen it. 'I'm afraid,' he had told her, 'I can't accommodate you in my new lifestyle.' The divorce had been emotional. He played the victim card like a pro in an attempt to make Steph reveal an intolerance that she in no way possesses. But the acrimony had petered out over the years and they learned how to be civil. Alexis had taken her Mum's side but occasionally dropped a snide remark about beards. I had only met him once, at the funeral of an Aunt of his whom Steph had loved. It was civil.

It must have been the end of February, because there was snow on the tracks. The blizzard had followed a temperate January and had come out of nowhere, dumping nine inches of snow on the Home Counties in the space of a few hours. I rang the office at 6.30 and told them I was working at home. Steph, on the other hand, was full of Blitz spirit.

'Don't tell me you're going in,' I said.

'Of course I am.' She sat down at the kitchen table, in full work warpaint.

'You're driving in.'

'Since when did we become such scaredy cats?'

'The AA said...'

'I don't care what they said.' She picked up her phone and dialled. 'Lexi?'

I shook my head. The girl was upstairs. Why not just go up to her?

'Snow on the lines my arse. Get them to pay for a taxi.' She shook her head and threw her phone into her bag. 'I know she's bloody hungover again and God knows what else.'

'Call if you need me.' I helped her on with her mac.

'Keep your phone on.' She kissed my cheek. 'And make sure she gets up.'

The kraken awoke at 11.30. I heard her coming down the stairs. I saved a file and wandered into the kitchen.

'Chaos out there,' I said.

She looked back at me, reaching for a box of cereal. She was wearing a pink tracksuit and the make-up she had worn the previous night.

'I was due a day off anyway,' she said.

I walked over and put on some coffee.

'How are you?' I said.

'I've had better weeks.' Her black lined eyes were very light glacial blue, almost grey. They should have looked off given her colouration but it worked. I noticed again the jungle cat markings suggested by the pattern of her freckles.

'I don't know where you get the energy.'

'I bet you used to cane it.'

When she looked at me, I felt the change in the energy of the room. Steph and I had fucked the previous night and I could still taste her pussy. I wondered if a mother and a daughter tasted the same...

'I bet you was a proper tearaway.' She leaned forward, her chair creaking.

'I've had my moments. What you get up to last night?'

'I'm not telling you.' She wiped her nose. 'Snitch.'

'Snatch?'

'I'm glad Mum met someone like you. You're a good bloke.'

Now where had that come from?

'Your Mum's a special lady.' I didn't like the look that passed over her face when I said that. Banter was one thing but she always took the piss. She couldn't help herself.

'It's funny, I could never think of you as my Dad.'

'So what do you think?'

'We could be good mates.' I watched her become tense as I walked towards her. 'God, I need to sober up.'

'Say it. For the laugh. Call me Dad.'

'You know the kind of stuff my Dad used to get up to?'

'Are they your Dad's eyes?' She became still as I touched her chin. 'You look like a cat.'

'It's so bad.' Her lips were sticky under my figertips

'Is it so hard to say? Such a sweet girl...'

'Oh, Dad...'

I pushed her mouth onto mine and unzipped her top. She was hesitant at first, her opened eyes uncertain.

'I hear you sometimes,' she gasped at my lips. 'You and her. I try to stop listening and I can't.'

'Does it get you off?'

'It's sick.'

'Does it gets you off?' I peeled a bra cup away from her breast. 'You know what else is hard?' She gasped as I tugged at the sleeper through her nipple. 'You a bad girl Lexi?

'I can be.' She didn't object as I guided her towards my crotch. She unzipped me, cool fingers feeling for my cock. I bent down to kiss her then brought her mouth towards it.

'Show me the bad girl.' I gathered her hair into an upstyle. 'Show me how you make it come.'

Her eyes widened above my shaft. I think she was taken aback by how hard I was. She put out her tongue like I told her to and I rubbed my glans against it. When she took it in her mouth again, I slipped a hand inside the waistband of her tracksuit.

'Sucking my dick makes you wet? Taste it.' I pushed my fingers into her mouth. Her soft reaction to the hint of brutality made my cock twitch. I found her cunt again.

'You like me to touch it? To kiss me when I touch you?'

'You're so good to me...' The words vanished beneath my lips. She gave me all of her tongue, jerking me off against her breasts.

'I want to fuck your pussy.'

'Fucking do me on the floor.'

'Want to be my lover?' I pulled her to her feet. 'Want to see how good your man fucks you?'

Her thong and tracksuit bottoms came down together. There was a tribal tattoo on the small of her back and the initials DX just above her labia. I took her shoulders and we sank to the floor kissing.

'Open your cunt.' We both exhaled simultaneously as I felt the kiss of her pussy against the head of my cock. 'Look how good we fit, babe...'

The tiles were warm beneath us. I lay her down on her back, gazing down in wonder as my cock stretched the velvet of her slit. I mauled her rippling breasts which were even more explosively freckled than her face. Her belly was smooth, taut beneath my raking fingers. I slid my hands under her arse, and sat up, lifting her into my lap.

'You're such a good fuck,' she said and bit my lip.

'Are you going to come?'

I redoubled my slick, deep thrusting up into her, gouging at the cheeks of her arse. She pressed her open mouth against my neck in a soundless scream. I felt the muscles of her vagina contract, her spine, her ribs standing out, making as if to burst through her skin. She was still coming when I put her on her knees.

'Back on to me like that.' I reached down for her breasts. 'Oh Jesus, sweetheart...can I come inside you?'

'It's okay, yeah.'

I dropped the tempo of my fucking to a crawl, wanting to draw out every sweet second I spent inside of her. She craned her body back to kiss me.

'Turn around,' I said. 'I want to see your eyes.'

She lay back down on the floor, pulling her thighs back, spreading her cunt for me to enter. It didn't take much longer. I couldn't remember the last time I'd come so intensely. Alexis stroked my balls as I emptied them into her, gnawing at her lower lip. I brushed the hair away from her face. She was so fucking beautiful. But somewhere in the background of that tender moment was a shadow, an indefinable sense that I'd just done something much worse than betraying my wife. Worse than the fact that I'd betrayed her with her own daughter, my step-daughter. Alexis seemed to know the feeling.

'We're going to hell,' she said.

'She can never know.'

'No. God, no.' Alexis rose unsteadily to her feet. Her buttocks left two shining imprints upon the floor tiles.

'I should get back to work.'

We dressed in silence. There was plenty to say but neither of us knew where to begin.

*

I rented a flat in a new anonymous block in Shoreditch, one of those inhabited by young professionals, call-girls and fellow adulterers. It was far enough from our respective places of work to minimize the risk of unwanted encounters with colleagues but still only less than half an hour away for both of us. We had to make the most of the scraps of time we persisted on. A couple of sandwiches grabbed from Pret A Manger at lunchtime, a taxi hailed, arriving in a fluster only to find she was there already, cool as I was stressed, unbuttoning her blouse as she walked towards me in the hallway. Bogus late working and drinking sessions invented for Steph's benefit, our naked flesh weird in the light of a lengthening spring evening, one eye on our phones, reaching for each other as we decided we could risk another half an hour.

'She's going to catch us.' Alexis was prone to paranoia, the more far-fetched the scenario the better. 'You think you've been so careful but it's that one little thing you overlook.'

'Steph is blind when it comes to stuff like this,' I said. 'Look at her and Jon. She's got too big a heart to be suspicious.'

It was strange how both Alexis and I used to discuss Steph in only the most positive terms when we were together, as if this somehow compensated for our betrayal of her. At home we attempted to maintain a pretence of normality and this included Alexis being a bitch to Steph and me trying to be a diplomat. Her snottiness and my timidity were what Steph expected from us. But there were moments...

'I think she's seeing somebody.' We had just got into bed one evening when Steph casually threw her grenade into my lap.

'She's with that Jeremy,' I said. I cleaned my glasses just to be doing something with my hands.

'Jeremy was strictly for Christmas. A seasonal fuck buddy. God, what a thing to call a person.' She was wearing an old combat singlet, one of the straps of which had fallen from her shoulder as she arranged her pillows. 'She's different when she's got someone steady. Not so bitter.'

'You worry about her too much. She's a clever girl. Her mum's daughter.'

'She's a selfish girl.' It was barely a whisper. Steph stared into space, her hand feeling for my stiffening cock beneath the sheets. I felt it snake inside the vent of my shorts. Was my hard-on for her or for the girl we were talking about, who, a little earlier that day, had sucked it until it had exploded in her mouth?

'Frisky bugger, aren't we?' Her breath was hot against my ear. I unmoored the other strap of her top, relieved we were done with that conversation, and enjoying an instant of intense sexual vanity. There is, after all, a perverse pleasure in deceit.

*

One morning at breakfast, Steph said to me, 'What the hell were you dreaming about last night?'

'Fuck.' Standing behind us, Alexis fumbled the milk she was adding to her coffee and reached for a J-cloth.

'Did I wake you?' I said. 'Sorry. Some nightmare. I don't remember it.'

"Don't go in there." Steph giggled. 'You sounded like a loon. You're taking a Xanax tonight.'

I affected sheepishness while Steph and Alexis commenced arguing about a pair of shoes the latter had borrowed and failed to return. Another potential crisis averted. But as I drove to work, the details started to come back to me.

The incident the dream was based on had happened back in the early nineties. My friend Jack and I had been out on the pull. We'd met some Irish student nurses in Archway and they'd invited us back to their place for a smoke. It was a home for trainee nurses on the grounds of a North London hospital or a dream-distorted version of it. I ended up with Fiona, a hefty girl with an impenetrable Ulster accent that was made even harder to understand by her brain-damage degree of intoxication. I'd had some sulphate, which used to make me reckless. It was hard to tell, as I struggled to remove her jeans, whether she was conscious of what was happening or not. I honestly didn't care. What with her comatose state and my speed dick, it wasn't the most memorable of fucks. She passed out halfway through and was still unconscious as I slipped out the door.

This was the point at which the dream began. I was outside her door, in a hallway that was both the nurse's home and Steph's house at the same time. Steph was in a room two doors along doing bong hits with an American couple we'd met on our honeymoon. Close by, a door opened and shut continually, disgorging house music each time.

'You're dead, you shouldn't be here,' I said to Steph. She didn't hear me and though she was talking, I couldn't hear her either.

Now here was Fiona again, and although this had taken place in summer, I had the sense that it was Christmas. 'You put no thought into your presents,' she said even though, being unconscious, she couldn't have said anything.

'I never forget an occasion,' I said. I became annoyed. 'She mustn't go in there,' I thought although I didn't know to whom I was referring, the place she wasn't supposed to enter or why the event would be such a catastrophe. I ran past the graffiti scarred doors punctuating the corridor, eager not to miss the one I knew I had to stop her going through. 'Don't go in there,' I shouted. The doors became more infrequent until finally there was no more. There was nothing but the somehow horrifying green painted plaster of the walls on either side of me, sprouting horse-hair through a thousand fissures. I turned around but had woken up before I got to see what was happening behind me. Given the way the dream had been headed and the mind-reeling sense of disquiet I had on awakening, perhaps that was no bad thing...

'It's your unconscious telling you you've been a bad boy.'

Alexis, to whom I had just recounted the bare bones of the dream, was crawling along the bed towards me. It was lunchtime. I'd just eaten out her pussy and the taste of her on my lips and the way her writhing hair obscured her face as she came closer made me desperate for her. 'You're scared she'll find out.'

'I suppose,' I said. 'I don't know.'

'Do you dream about me?' She sat astride my chest, reaching back to stroke the glans of my cock. My tongue curled over her pierced nipple, its tip passing through the hole of its ring.

'You are a dream,' I said. Her body slipped back a few inches where she guided herself on to me.

'You liar...' Her pubis ground against mine as if in anger at my having deceived her. Impaled, she drew herself upright, showing me the soft meat of her throat as her head snapped back diabolically. I felt myself beginning to come and I let it happen, the bliss of the orgasm smothering the unease I was beginning to feel...'Liar.' It was my ex's favourite word, although Cindy hadn't been averse to the occasional untruth herself...

'Oh fuck it, I was nearly there...' Alexis' exasperation was that of the child she had been only a few years before. I pulled her down to me, entrapping her hips with my legs, kissing her messily. Though her breath was fading mouthwash over resurgent halitosis, it was hers, and I sucked it in like a drowner.

'You came already. When I kissed you down there.'

'What's "down there"?' She squinted in amusement, her eyelashes entangled in mine.

'Your...little Alexis.'

'You know the thing about little Alexis, don't you?'

'What's that?'

'She can be a right cunt.'

My deflating cock oozed out of her, bathed in the the honey of her vulva.

'One of these days, I'm going to die up inside you,' I said.

'You say the most fucked-up things.' She wriggled free and walked across the room, naked except for the stockings she had left on, picking up her clothes as she went before sitting down in an armchair by the door.

'You never answered my question.' She stuck out her leg to pull on a boot. 'Where was I in this dream?'

'You were...' This was the part I hadn't told her, partly because I didn't know how to and partly because I didn't like thinking about it, as it was the chief source of the upset I had felt when I woke up. Alexis hadn't been in the dream but somehow it was about her. The mood, the landscape – it was all her, like a map of some unexplored portion of her where I wasn't sure I cared to venture. Which made no sense. Even though she had yet to leave, for instance, I already felt her impending absence like a hole through the centre of me. I couldn't remember ever having been in such helpless need of another. Why, then, the squeamishness?

'I don't want to dream about you.' I climbed down from the bed and walked towards her as I had on that first morning. 'I need you to be real for me.'

'I'm scared of real,' she said. She pressed her cheek against my stomach. 'Sometimes I don't want to feel it. How much I love you. It's like I'm losing my mind.'

She had never used the word before.

'I thought we were...'

'Mates?' She finished the sentence for me. 'Tell me that's what it feels like. You can't, can you?'

I wanted to hold her but a despicable something made me let her go.

'It's okay,' she said. 'I'm sorry. I can't keep my mouth shut.'

'What are you apologizing for? For what you said? Or because you said it?'

'Less of the mind-fuck, please,' she said. 'Oh God. This situation we're in is how unhealthy?'

She started to laugh and so did I and the moment passed. But Jesus, sweetheart – why'd you have to go and say that?

*

It was Sunday afternoon and Steph and I were in the local Harvester for our weekly carvery. The talk was of holidays – Steph had booked us in for two weeks in Portugal for the end of June. I feigned enthusiasm but the thought of two weeks without Alexis nearby was unbearable. She was going to Turkey in August with the girls, a prospect that filled me with a mysterious dread. As we waited for our food, Steph didn't make me feel any better by filling me in on Alexis' various mishaps overseas. There'd been quite a few.