they try

Her head lay against my shoulder, but I could feel the tension coiled inside her, every muscle taut, every shiver betraying what she was trying to deny. She smelled like her shampoo, her sweat, her grief—and I realized how cruel it was, that she would always carry that scent against this skin that was not mine, this body that was her mother’s.

“Andrea,” I rasped. My voice was husky, foreign, but it still made her tremble. “Tell me what you’re afraid of.”

She stiffened. Then, after a long silence: “That if I give in… it means I’ve lost you. That I’m just clinging to her. That I don’t know who I am anymore.”

Her words sliced me. “You haven’t lost me.” I pulled her chin up, forcing her eyes on mine. They were wide, terrified—but there was heat there too. The heat she didn’t want to name.

“Steve,” she whispered, “I can’t separate you from her. You’re in her skin. Her mouth. Her… everything.”

I leaned in, close enough that my breath stirred her hair. “Then stop separating. Pretend if you have to. Pretend I’m both. Husband and mother. Does it matter whose body this is if it’s still me inside?”

Her breath caught. She searched my face, **** for something familiar in the wrinkles, the ash-blonde hair, the sagging flesh. For a heartbeat, I thought she might shove me away. Instead, she kissed me again—harder this time, ****, almost angry.

It was brutal, clashing. Her teeth cut into my lip, and I tasted copper. She groaned against me, not with pleasure, but with fury and need knotted together. My chest pressed against hers, breasts squashing into a grotesque parody of intimacy, and still I couldn’t stop. I clutched her face in my wrinkled hands, nails digging into her cheeks, and kissed her like drowning.

She tore her mouth free, gasping, staring at me like she hated herself. “This is wrong,” she spat. But her hand slid down, gripping my wrist, holding it against her chest where her heart thudded violently.

“Then why aren’t you letting go?” I croaked, throat raw.

Tears spilled down her face. “Because I miss you so much it’s killing me.”

My body betrayed me again—the ache low in my belly, the strange wetness pooling where nothing should be. I hated it, hated how alive it made me feel in a body I wanted to reject. But Andrea’s hands were roaming now, sliding over the satin, fingers trembling.

“I don’t want this,” she murmured, “but I need it. I need you.”

Her confession cracked something open. I dragged her closer, until she was in my lap, straddling me awkwardly over hips that were too wide, joints that ached. My breasts crushed up between us, obscene, yet I couldn’t deny the heat rising from her body against mine.

“Andrea,” I whispered, my voice breaking. “You’re the only thing that makes me still me.”

Her lips crashed onto mine again. She kissed me like she wanted to erase the face she saw, erase the memory of her mother, erase her own guilt. Her hands fisted in my hair, tugging, ****. And I let her, moaning into her mouth, though the sound was husky, alien.

She pulled back just long enough to look at me, eyes blazing with grief and lust. “Don’t make me call you Steve,” she said. “Don’t make me call you Mom. Just… let me forget for a while.”

And then she was kissing me again, harder, hungrier, sliding her tongue into my mouth as if to swallow me whole