Taboo The Collection (17 page)

His cock blasted off like a rocket. If he hadn’t let go of her hair and grabbed onto her hips, he probably would have shot himself across the room with the force of it. Christa rubbed herself off beneath him, but he was too far gone to think about it, except every sweet pulse of her cunt forced another blaze of white hot cum out of his dick, milking him until he thought he might pass out from the pleasure.

He collapsed onto the bed with a grunt, utterly shattered, and his stepdaughter mewed and practically purred as she curled up on his chest, like a kitten, not an inch of her body touching the bed. His thoughts, when they finally returned, wandered to his wife, somewhere in Florida, likely hooked up again with her ex, who might have a taste for other women, but at least he, apparently, wasn’t a pervert about it.

Unlike me.

He thought about his marriage to Rachel, how it had cinched progressively tighter like a noose around his neck until he couldn’t breathe. He’d tried—god knows he’d tried—but could never bring her around to a place where sex with the lights on was a good idea, let alone entertaining things like dirty talk or oral sex. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about her, he did. But things had drifted, in such a short time, and he had to admit, it wasn’t long after their wedding the little sprite sighing happily on his chest had begun to catch his interest in a myriad of ways.

Maybe it was perverted, but Christa made him happy. Perverted but happy. He could live with that.

She lifted her head, smiling dreamily at him. “Ha, this is just like your play.”

“Happy ever after.”

And that,
he thought, tightening his hold around the delightful girl in his arms,
was just how life imitated art.

Clara (Daddy’s Favorites)

Clara wasn't as naive as they thought she was, but she let them all believe what they wanted. What did it matter? All the boys were either dumb, redneck boys whose idea of a good time involved beer and shotguns, or they were the kind of boys who drove muscle cars and dated cheerleaders from the town side of Otterville. She wasn't interested in any of them, so what did she care if they made fun of her for wearing overalls and muck boots to school?

She didn
't care.

N
ot until they taped a sign to her back that said “Cunning Linguist”—she’d had to look that up online in the urban dictionary—because it just wasn't true. She liked boys—she just didn't like any of
those
silly, little
boys. Still, they persisted. She went to retrieve an assignment from her backpack for a teacher and pulled out panties someone had stuffed inside like scarves from a magician's canister.

Then
just today they somehow got into her locker—she suspected her locker partner, a chubby, unpopular girl who just might go along with a popular kids' prank just to be liked—and filled it with what had to be at least fifty dildos of all shapes and sizes. They spilled out onto the floor when she opened it to get her trig book after lunch, a well-timed stunt, because the halls were filled with kids, sluggish and lingering after lunch.

They all laughed of course. C
lara heard Casey Kotter, head cheerleader, screech, “What's she going to do with one of
those
?”

The sight of Mr. Rosen tossing all of those fake dicks into a trash bag while she got escorted to the principal’s office was probably the most surreal moment of her life, aside from
the day she watched her mother carry a suitcase down their gravel driveway while the chickens bickered and pecked around her feet and their goat, Harold, tugged at the hem of her sundress. Clara and her stepfather had stood on the porch watching the procession. That, of course, hadn't stopped her. Clara’s mother had thrown her suitcase into the back of a BMW while her young boyfriend—even younger than Grover, her stepfather and her mother's second husband—held the door like a chauffeur.

They
called her stepfather into school, interrupting his deliveries—she could tell he'd been out on the truck and not out in the field because he was wearing good jeans and a clean shirt—and the sight of him sitting there in the little chair outside the principal's office, hat in his hand, head down, hangdog, like he was the one in trouble, made her heart lurch in her chest.

"Hey Grove—er, Dad." She tried to call him Dad in school or whenever an adult was present, but Grover was only ten years older than she was, and since her mother had married him four years ago, adjusting to thinking about him as her "father" had been weird. Not that he had ever insisted.

He looked up at her, nonplussed. "What happened, Clara?"

They hadn't told him? She sighed, taking the chair beside him and glancing at the principal's red-headed secretary, fingers clacking away over her keyboard. Mrs. Martin was nice enough and seemed sympathetic every time Clara ended up in the principal's office, and she probably knew what had happened anyway—the whole school knew—but she still didn't want to broadcast the latest event.

"Someone put a bunch of… stuff… in my locker."

Grover frowned. "What kind of stuff?"

She felt her face getting hot as she leaned in toward him. He smelled like the farm—they both did, all the time—but he was nice and clean for a change, and there was something else, a more fragrant, masculine scent. She felt him holding his breath as she whispered the words into his ear, "Sex stuff."

Then he sighed, letting out his pent-up breath, but they didn't have time to talk about it before Principal Brody was opening his door and waving them into his office. He'd called in the big guns, getting Mrs. D'Angelo, the school counselor, involved, and Clara sat in the corner, red-faced, and listened while they talked about "normal sexual development" and "homosexual curiosity" and “school bullies” and “suicide contracts” and when she looked over at Grover, she didn't know which one of them was redder.

But when Mrs. D'Angelo started asking Grover questions about Clara's mother, he stood up,  jaw set and mouth drawn tight, still holding his hat, and said, "I'm going to take my daughter home now."

No one objected.

The ride back to the farm was quiet, even with the windows of Grover's Ford F-150 rolled down, the spring-almost-summer air cooling Clara's flushed cheeks.

"Do you want me to help you finish?" Clara glanced back at the boxes full of fruits and vegetables still stacked in the back of the pickup.

"No." He shifted into a lower gear as he turned down their dirt road. It was their road completely—there were no other houses or farms for a mile in any direction. "But I've got a family from the CSA weeding out back. Would you mind checking on them?"

"Sure." Clara didn't mind helping him. In fact, she loved it. She'd been the one to develop the website for Grover's Farm. She'd even suggested the name. The CSA—community supported agriculture—had been booming ever since, and Grover's delivery area just kept growing. "Listen, Grove, about the, uh… the…"

He pulled into their driveway and cut the engine, cutting her off too. "Are you planning on killing yourself?"

"No!" She looked at him, horrified.

"Clara, to me…" He put his hat on the seat beside him and ran a hand through his hair. "To me, you seem like a very well-adjusted girl. Maybe I'm blind?"

"No,” she protested, struggling to explain. She wasn’t depressed or gay or suicidal or anything the school counselors—or her peers for that matter—thought she was. Everyone made assumptions, but no one ever really asked her. "I mean, you're not blind. I am. Fine, I mean. I'm none of the things they said.
None
of them. I swear it."

He nodded. "You've only got a few more months until graduation."

Her stomach dropped at the thought, even though she knew he was trying to reassure her. They hadn't talked about what would happen after graduation. Her mother had abandoned them both, and Grover had kept Clara on, even though he didn't have to, not legally. He’d never officially adopted her, and technically, she was eighteen, and could be out on her own right now. She'd made herself as useful as she could, but what happened when she wasn’t in school anymore?

He put his hat back on, starting the truck up. "There's fresh chicken for dinner."

She knew that meant he'd butchered one just that morning. Sometimes she hated that part, but he’d long ago promised her one animal to “keep” and she’d picked Harold the goat. Everything else was being raised for food, and some chickens were for eggs, and some for meat. She just tried hard not to get too attached to the ones they were raising for meat. Besides, her roast chicken was melt-in-your-mouth divinely delicious.

"I'll roast it." She opened the door, snagging her backpack and sliding down out of the truck.

"Good girl." He gave her that sweet, shy smile that seemed reserved only for her and she wondered, not for the first time, if he was even aware of it. "I'll be back in two hours."

She watched him back out, guiding the truck down the driveway with practiced ease. It was weird—she knew she was weird—but there was nothing sexier than a man in a cowboy hat behind the wheel of his truck, backing it out the driveway. And she knew very well she shouldn’t be thinking about that, especially in relation to Grover, as the heat filling in her face proved.

She found the chicken on a plate in the fridge and set about preparing it. Grover had missed a few feathers on the wings and she plucked them out by hand, rubbing the skin all over with butter and cutting up some apples and onions to stuff inside before putting it into the oven.

Then she washed her hands and headed out to the fields, taking a moment on the front porch to pet one of the barn cats. They were flea-bitten and some of them were mean, but this black and white one liked to laze on the porch on warm days, lazy-lidded, tail twitching, waiting for the sun to go down so he could begin his hunt for mice.

Out back, the family was coming in, the guys carrying crates full of weeds out of the field, and Clara felt something tighten in her chest as she watched the mother and father and two kids—a girl a little younger than her, and a boy a few years younger than that—laughing and walking together. The mother reached out and took the girl’s hand, swinging it as they walked, and that tender gesture made Clara’s throat tighten without warning.

“We put in a good hour,” the father told her as they drew closer. “Where do you want these?”

Clara just nodded and pointed to the stack of crates, finding herself unable to speak. The families that joined the CSA had the option of buying a yearly share of the vegetables and fruit they grew, but they could also reduce the fee by offering to work on the farm. It was called a work-share. Some of their clients did a full work-share, helping Grover year-round, and some did a partial work-share, like this family.

A sound from the barn—the high-pitched squeal of a piglet in pain—rescued her from having to attempt a conversation. Clara headed for the barn at a jog, waving to the family. “Thanks,” she managed to croak, turning before they could see the tears. She wiped at them angrily as she rounded the corner and the sound of the piglet grew louder. Now the lower, gruntier sound of a larger pig had been added to the mix. 

“Soooo-weeee,” Clara called, looking through the wooden slats for the injured piglet. There were five of them rooting around in the mud by their mother, whose teats were stretched and raw from her nurslings, and none of them were paying attention to their missing sibling. But mama-pig knew—her head lifted and she called to her charge.

“There you are.” Clara spotted the piglet wedged under one of the wooden slats in the corner, its bottom stuck fast in the mud. “How did you manage that?”

It was wiggling and writhing, but couldn’t manage to get itself free. Clara sighed, grateful she was wearing her muck boots, as she deftly climbed over the fence and dropped into the mud on the other side. The piglets surrounded her immediately, nosing her and grunting noisily—they weren’t exclusively on mama’s milk anymore and they knew their food handler when they smelled her—but Clara ignored them, giving Mama a wide berth as she headed for the stuck piglet. If Grover saw her, he’d have a fit. Stepping into a pigpen was highly dangerous at any time, let alone with a protective mama pig around.

“Okay, little one, I’ve got you.” She grasped the pig under the front legs, right around the middle, and pulled, but it just squealed louder in pain, surprising both her and the mama pig. Clara heard Mama grunt loudly as she got to her feet and knew she had to hurry.

“What are you stuck on?” she whispered, talking aloud to herself as she rooted around in the mud behind the piglet with her hand, searching for his back legs. She found the problem immediately—his hoof was caught in a loop of twine buried in the mud. The piglet squealed and flopped when she let him go, using both hands to try to loosen the string. It wasn’t easy, not being able to see what she was doing, and the piglet made it harder, pulling and tugging the twine tight.

That’s when she felt the mama pig’s breath on her neck. Clara stiffened, working faster, her heart beating hard in her chest. She knew what it looked like, with the piglet squalling in pain and her hands on him, and she didn’t blame Mama for being concerned. Clara had to move faster. She managed to work her finger between the twine and the piglet’s leg, sliding it downward, and he fell free with a grunt, scrambling to his feet and squealing, probably in relief.

“See, it’s okay, Mama,” Clara soothed as the piglet sought his mother for comfort, already suckling at one of her swinging teats as Clara rose to her feet. The sow grunted, nosing her roughly, and Clara realized with a sinking feeling in her stomach that Mama was between her and the fence.

She moved slowly, edging around the sow and her surrounding piglets, ignoring the way her heart hammered in her chest. She’d never heard a pig growl before, but that was the sound growing in the mama pig’s throat, and she wished Grover was here. He would have been over the fence in an instant to save her, she was sure. How many times had he told her going into the pigpen was dangerous?

“Easy, Mama, easy,” she murmured, edging slowly closer to the fence, glancing sideways and trying to judge how fast she could scramble over the top. If the sow charged—six hundred pounds of angry pig—she just might be dead. Literally.