Punishment With Kisses Part 9

"Ooo, me likey" I trailed off. Could this be considered spying? When she had insisted upon tagging along with me and I was enjoying myself this much?

After a few shopping trips turned into lunch, I started thinking of Tabitha not as my stepmonster or even a relative, but more like my friend. Okay, maybe not that close, but maybe the intimacy one would have with a sister's ex-girlfriend.

Tabitha was charming and sophisticated, but she could also be really goofy and sweet. When she would pull her hair off her neck, sweeping the long blond strands to the side and t.i.tling her head just so to the right, I would think about kissing that beautiful smooth neck. The more I got to know Tabitha, the more I couldn't hate her, and the more I couldn't imagine her as my sister's killer.

Still, in these afternoon get-togethers, which had become an almost daily thing, Tabitha never explained nor did I ask about her curious romps in Portland's s.e.xual underworld. Strip clubs? p.o.r.n stores? How could this lovely, soft-spoken woman even venture into places like that, places I was so comfortable with because of my experiences, when she had been saddled with Bradford and the 'burbs since she was nineteen?

Had Ash taken her to these places? Was she revisiting their past? Or were there just...hidden depths?

"Megan, would you like to meet me for brunch tomorrow?" Tabitha was hoping to expand our get-togethers to a weekend apparently. "Bradford's out of town." She instinctively answered my unspoken question.

"Sure, but if Father's out of town, would you like to do something tonight instead? You could stay in the city with me and we can do brunch at Old Wives Tales tomorrow." I wasn't sure why, but suddenly it was crucial that Tabitha stay the night at my apartment. The thought of an all night gab session was more than appealing. I could truly get to know this lovely woman I had never given the time of day before.

Tabitha paused so long I had to ask if she was still on the line.

"Yes, of course, I'm still here. I'd love to get together tonight. I'll be there around seven. How's that?"

"Perfect."

The rest of the day I primped like a prom queen, first plucking, tweaking, and shaving like I had a big date, and later scouring the apartment for anything that would be off-putting to Tabitha. I wasn't wholly sure why I was so concerned with making this evening perfect, but a little part of me was honest enough to admit that during the last week I had thought at least a dozen times about kissing Tabitha. That's it, not f.u.c.king her, not capturing her, just kissing her and holding her. I didn't know what to do about those feelings. Did I dare risk this new friends.h.i.+p and my months of investigation just to be honest about feelings I probably would never act on?

Tabitha was ravis.h.i.+ng in a winter white mock turtleneck and white wrap skirt. She managed to always look chic enough to have been plucked from the set of a 1940s Hollywood movie. Even better, she came bearing food. I loved that in a woman.

"I hope you still like Thai food. I brought enough to feed us for a week." It was a casual comment, but something about it foretold how Tabitha felt about me too. We were a "we" at least in the recesses of her mind. How did this all happen? "I mean, it's enough for us tonight and to feed you all week."

Her backpedaling did nothing to dissuade me, and I did something I had thought about all week and never in my life imagined I would do. I pulled her close and kissed her, first tentatively, to make sure she didn't scream and run to Father, and then more a.s.sertively because it had been months in the making. I didn't care who she was married to. I wanted this woman badly.

I started pulling her clothes off, the wrap skirt the first casualty of my l.u.s.t. Each other piece, a s.h.i.+rt, a bra, French cut panties-of course-all taking me only seconds to shed. I never stopped kissing her for more than a second, and when everything except her perfect gray pumps had been tossed aside like rubbish, I launched us onto the sofa, still never moving my mouth from hers. She protested only once. She was mine.

I stopped thinking about Father or Ash or Shane or Ca.s.sandra or the Honeysuckle Lounge. All I could think about was her perfect creamy skin, the pink just inside her lips, the perfect apricot pucker of hers. I started licking and kissing and nibbling every neglected inch of her: the neck, the spot under her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the crook of her elbow, behind her knees, between her pink little toes. By the time my mouth was back up to her thighs, ready to part what was no doubt a perfectly pink little p.u.s.s.y, she was writhing so much I could hardly hold her down. With her back arched, her belly in the air, Tabitha looked like she was doing a yoga pose. Only I was her yogi and the moaning was more than meditative.

I buried my face in her c.u.n.t, lapping and licking and even fingering her with the ferocity of a woman unhinged. As much as I wanted her, she needed me. I could tell at that moment that she had been waiting a long time to be fulfilled again. And I wanted to fill her up. She tasted as sweet as she looked and here, in my apartment, naked and oblivious of the world, we were just two women who needed each other.

Her toes curled a little when she came. I know because her feet were up near my face at that point. Flexible girl. I guess that's what it means to f.u.c.k a former cheerleader. Just as I finished she tugged my hair a bit pulling my mouth up toward hers. She had stroked my face while I was going down on her, a simple gesture that spoke words for the level of intimacy we were sharing. This wasn't just a f.u.c.k. She wouldn't be someone I could kick out when I was done.

The scariest part was that I didn't think I would want to. But what would that mean for all of us?

Chapter Seventeen.

The next morning I awoke before Tabitha and sat next to the window wondering what to make of this sudden change in our relations.h.i.+p. We f.u.c.ked long and hard last night and talked very little, but as I was falling asleep I felt Tabitha gently stroking my face and staring at me. I wasn't sure exactly where to go from there, but the realization that I had f.u.c.ked my stepmother was dawning on me.

"Morning." Tabitha's whisper roused me from my musings. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," I lied. "I'm good."

"We should talk." Her challenge hung there, unanswered for a moment.

"Was this a one time thing?" I sounded needy, but I honestly needed to know. Was I another experiment or simply a convenient replacement for Ash?

"G.o.d, I hope not." Tabitha laughed, a good throaty, flirty chortle that loosened me up again.

I crawled back in bed with her, gathering her up in my arms and inhaling the scent of her hair.

"I have to tell you something," she said quietly after we lay there for a long time just holding each other. "I was still a teenager when I married your father. I knew there was something there, but I didn't know I was gay. I didn't know really until Ashley told me, and then all the pieces fell into place."

"Did you love him?" It was an honest query.

"I'm not sure. He flattered me. n.o.body had wanted me so badly before, and he courted me like Prince Charming. And I thought he was sort of grieving your mother's death and had two girls to raise. So I felt compa.s.sion and flattered. He's rich and powerful and he wanted me."

"So you decided to marry him, even though you weren't sure?"

"I rebuffed his advances for quite some time. But, yeah, when someone is flying you to Europe and sending you dozens and dozens of roses and throwing money and jewelry your way, it's hard not to start to look at them differently. I didn't really know who Bradford was until after we were married."

"Do you think he loved you?"

"No. He was cruel in bed, always mocking me for being naive or unimaginative or frigid. And the verbal threats started early. Once Ash opened my eyes, all I could see was how horrible Bradford was to me. By then, I couldn't stand to have him touch me. Maybe that made me frigid with him. I don't know."

I knew that Father didn't want Tabitha to attend school or have a job, and she was embarra.s.sed about being in that situation in this day and age.

"I was worried about not having the skills to get a job when he did get tired of me," Tabitha continued flatly.

"But if you divorced him, you'd get half his a.s.sets, right?"

"No, we had a pre-nup, Oregon isn't a community property state, and Bradford always told me that he could hide his a.s.sets because he'd rather see me in my grave before I got a penny of his money."

I didn't know if he could get away with that, but I did know Father had some very expensive, high-powered attorneys on retainer. Sometimes you didn't need to be right, you just had to convince your opponent that it would cost them too much to prove you're wrong. I think that was something Father used to say.

"And then there was Ash and you. All of our friends are your father's friends, so I didn't have anyone to confide in. And my parents just wanted me to make things work out. My parents don't believe in divorce."

Just when I thought I was starting to understand everything, Tabitha announced, "There's something I want to show you." She ran off, disappearing into the front room, and returned with a small crimson tote bag. It made me think of Santa's magic red bag, and when I reached in I imagined it was full of all the things I'd ever asked for but didn't get. When I pulled out some lined sheets of paper, I could immediately tell that the scribbled notes were in Ash's handwriting, and all I wanted to do was drop it back in the bag.

I didn't want to read or even think about Ash right now. Instead of being tied up in knots the way it had been for over a year, my belly was feeling all warm and calm and satiated. But I felt compelled to look. When it came to Ash, I'd never been able to turn away. Sometimes it seemed almost like we were conjoined twins, Ash and I. Maybe we were actually born in a body that was literally connected. Maybe we shared some organs. A heart, a kidney. Then they separated us and because I was so much smaller, they pretended we weren't twins but just regular siblings, born years apart. But I'd never gotten over the separation, being torn away from part of myself, and now I was trying to fill that emptiness, that void where Ash had been.

I knew that wasn't what really happened. But I couldn't always make sense of reality. Sometimes the truth was stranger than fiction. Sometimes what was real was too hard to believe and you needed distance, the kind of perspective you could only get in fictionalized versions of the truth. Like Boys Don't Cry.

Not realizing my epiphany might be a lazy G.o.d's attempt at foreshadowing, I examined the papers I'd pulled from the ruby bag. These torn pages, I could see, were the ones missing from Ash's final diary. They really were something I'd asked for.

I started to read, but for some reason I couldn't seem to focus on what it said. I could read the vowels and consonants and form words, and it was in a language and vocabulary I understood, but somehow, when these particular words were strung together to form sentences they stopped making sense.

s.e.x Diary of Ashley Caulfield, August 27 There's a growing tension around me. I'm not safe now and I know it. I can feel the danger in everything I do, I told my therapist and Tabitha and a couple of girls at my play group about what Daddy-O did to me, that first night, so long ago, when he came into my room, drunk on his own power and reeking of that dreadful f.u.c.king Armani. No wonder the stuff still makes me sick when I smell it. I could never f.u.c.k someone who wore that now. I'll spread my legs for almost anyone these days but not for anyone who thinks Armani smells good. How long did you want me, DDO? Was it from that first time you saw me in a frilly skirt, running around with my top off, knee-hi socks and pigtails still? Was I a way for you to f.u.c.k away your demons, to put the screws, so to speak, to Mother one last time? I look like her, don't I? That night you first took her, as a teenager. Maybe that's what you saw in me? Maybe I'll thank you some day for showing me how cruel people can be, how much a girl can be used if she's not always watching.

You called me Daddy's Little Girl. "Right here, baby, yeah, right here," you said, pus.h.i.+ng my hand where a little girl's hand should never have to go. When you rolled off me, you took with me everything I had-my innocence, my trust, my soul. You f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

Some day, Daddy's Little Girl is going to make you pay. For all those times you sent me away, because I didn't want to do that anymore, all the times you chased away my friends for all the same reasons. Some day I'll make you pay.

I'm taking your wife with me, too. You don't control my c.u.n.t anymore. And you don't own hers.

You'll pay in a way that cuts you to the bone.

Some day. Maybe today, or tomorrow, when your lovely wife slips my ring on her finger and runs off with me. The only c.o.c.k she'll be taking from now on is mine.

How do you like that, Daddy-O?

There was more to the entries, more than I could handle at the moment. It was proof of what had happened. I realized that my sister's murder was indeed a crime of pa.s.sion. But the murderer has always been someone with a real motive. Tabitha didn't kill my sister. She loved my sister.

I must have looked as shocked as I felt because Tabitha pulled me close and began to explain. "Bradford found out. The first time, in the beginning, Ashley told him that she seduced me. I don't know why but he believed her, and G.o.d help me, I didn't tell him the truth...that I wanted her so badly I could hardly breathe when she was near me. I just, I just didn't know when I married him that any of this would happen." Tabitha paused long enough that I thought maybe she was done talking.

"You don't have to..." I began.

"Megan, I do have to. I have to finally just tell you everything so you know what you're getting yourself into.

"The first time, Bradford sent Ashley to the Monroe Academy and then he thought it was over. And it was, mostly, for years. Well, it never was. We'd be together once and Ashley would plead and I would cry and she would threaten and I would deny her. But I tried hard not to love her and not to cross that line with her again and again, and after a while she wouldn't put up the fight anymore."

I couldn't help but imagine my sister so powerless in the face of love. She was always so jaded, so hard edged, I was such a selfish kid when she was alive, I never even saw through all that to her pain. "But in her diaries, she says you're going to be together."

Tabitha looked pained. "We were. She came to me when she turned twenty-six, when she could finally access the rest of her trust fund. She proposed."

"Wait." I sat in shock. "Wait." I kept repeating it because I needed this all to slow down. I couldn't imagine my sister, ring in hand, down on one knee, offering her hand in marriage. Was she serious? "She proposed?"

Tabitha nodded. "She gave me a ring, asked me to run away with her, to divorce Bradford and move far away from here. And I told her we would. She just needed to keep up the charade until the end of the summer."

"But you didn't."

"No, I didn't realize Bradford had been monitoring my e-mail and my calls, but he clearly was, somehow he knew we were back together. He had Ashley followed by the same PI he hired to follow you and to ransack your apartment. He always had you girls monitored-I just didn't realize the scope of it until that moment that he found out about us. He confronted us that weekend you were away with Shane. It was that Friday night and he was supposed to be in town for the board meeting. Maria was gone so we were in her room making love and Bradford just threw the door open and started yelling."

The image of Father catching Tabitha and Ash together in flagrante would be funny under any other circ.u.mstance. I nodded for her to continue. Tabitha was clearly relieved to be able to tell her story.

"He called us deviants and wh.o.r.es, and even though I was pleading with him to understand I did care about him, I just didn't know I was gay when we got married, he wouldn't listen. He just kept yelling over me."

Father was notorious for talking over people. I once tried to win an argument as a little girl, before I realized what a powerful orator he was, and left the room in tears. I tried explaining my chagrin to Ash that night, but all she did was nod in agreement.

"Why didn't you just leave that night, that moment?" It seemed so irrational that they'd stay.

"Bradford said he'd kill us. He was completely enraged. I was terrified. I never thought he'd go through with it. I thought that me calling it off with her would be enough to calm him down. But it wasn't. And I didn't realize until after her murder that it wasn't that he was jealous because I had fallen in love with his daughter."

Oh my G.o.d, I realized it as soon as Tabitha said it out loud. Father killed Ash. But not because he had molested her. Because he didn't want anyone else to have her. His warped sense of love meant that Ash was all his, even all these years later.

"He was jealous of me for being able to love Ash in this way." The sick irony of it was that I had this all pegged wrong in my mind.

Ash never planned to tell anyone about Father's abuse. She was savvy enough to realize that, nearly two decades after the fact, and with no physical evidence, it would come down to a "he said/she said" situation, and who would believe a crazy, s.l.u.tty, society girl raving about some "punishment with kisses" game? Especially when the person she was accusing of these awful things was none other than the highly respected Bradford Caulfield?

"Megan? Are you okay?" Tabitha woke me from my horrible reverie.

"Sorry, it's a lot to take in." I didn't reach out to touch her. I was stunned. "He molested her." I said it like a statement but it was a question.

Tabitha looked down. "Yes. I didn't know until years after I married him. She told me that she let it go on so long, so that you were protected from him. She didn't feel guilt about it. She felt like she saved you from it."

"She saved me..." I trailed off and teared up again. Thinking something and having it confirmed, especially something so heartbreaking as s.e.xual violence, were different demons. Ash had replicated her punishment with dozens of strangers in an effort to exorcise those demons, but that didn't threaten Father until she found true love in the arms of another woman, his woman. Tabitha was my sister's one s.h.i.+ning beacon of light, and loving her was the ultimate act of betrayal to Father. He would never let the two women in his life usurp him like that. No doubt in Father's mind he owned Tabitha and Ash and even me.

"Do you regret not running off with Ash while you had the chance?"

"Yes. Since she died, I've played out every what-if scenario possible, over and over. I've thought about taking my own life just to get away from all this."

So where did I fit into this whole equation?

"He never would have let her go, Megan. He would have chased us to the ends of the earth. Your father sealed Ash's fate decades ago when he stole her innocence. Since then, she's always belonged to him."

"And me?" I looked her straight in the eyes. "Am I just a cheap replacement for my sister?"

She grabbed me, pulled me close. "G.o.d no! Megan, if anything good came out of Ashley's death, it was us, this, that I got a chance to fall in love with you."

"You're in love with me?"

"Yes."

I was silent, studying her eyes, then kissing her lips, then moving down her shoulders to her decolletage. I kissed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s one at a time, gently and slowly. She threw her head back and moaned softly, parting her legs as she did, and I made love to her right then and there. Sweet, soft, earnest love. It was surprising how easy it came to us in the face of such horrible tragedy. I didn't need to say the words. I could make her feel, under her skin, down to her bones, how much I loved her, too.

Tabitha wanted me to know everything. She didn't want me to think that she was keeping any secrets about her time with Ash or about Ash's murder.

"We were leaving that night, the night Ashley was killed," Tabitha continued, steeling herself to relive it. "We had packed up a bunch of stuff into a rental car that we had stored in Portland. n.o.body knew about it. We were going to take the car and just drive north, since Vancouver was only a few hours away. I'd be out of Bradford's reach, and after my divorce we could get married. We didn't even apply for visas or anything for fear that Bradford would find out. But we figured, once there, it would all work out."

"How were you going to get to the rental car, then? I don't understand."

"Ashley had a motorcycle, actually." Ah, so I wasn't crazy. I hadn't imagined it. "Ashley thought maybe Bradford would chase us down or have the police chase us down. She wanted us to have a motorcycle to get away on. It was maneuverable. We had it down the drive, but when I went out to get it and bring it up, I saw that someone was in the pool house with Ashley so I killed the engine and hid the bike behind the O'Malleys' broken back gate."

Ash must have told her about the O'Malleys' gate. It had been broken the entire time we lived at the estate. The O'Malleys never went back there, and as teens Ash and I would hide behind it to smoke joints with our friends when we didn't want to get caught.

"That was Father you saw?" I knew the answer. I just needed to hear her say it.

"Yes. I heard a scream and I sprinted to the pool, but Ashley was already dead, on the floor at his feet, and Bradford had a knife in his hand. He wiped the knife on his jacket and dropped it on the floor."

Tabitha cried as she recounted falling to her knees and cradling Ash's lifeless body while Father casually stripped off his b.l.o.o.d.y jacket and s.h.i.+rt, stuffed them in a black garbage bag from under the sink, and slid on a men's s.h.i.+rt from Ash's closet.

"I didn't even think about what he was doing at the time. I was so intent on trying to save Ashley. I couldn't." She was sobbing now.

Tabitha hadn't meant to screw up the forensics of the murder scene. She was honestly in shock that the love of her life had been so brutally killed and that Father was able to be so calm and detached.

"It sounds so awful. I can't imagine." I wanted to offer her some condolence, but what could I say?

"It was so surreal, it was like I wasn't really there in the room, but outside it somehow, watching myself as though I were part of a movie. If it were a film though, Bradford would never have acted the way he did, barely bothering to cover his tracks at all."

Apparently Father was confident in his ability to smooth talk and distract the police or explain away any forensic evidence that remained. There was probably blood on Father's pants, but that was easily explained after he knelt in the growing pool seeping from his daughter's body.