I Let My Stepmother Meet New Men, and Watch

She was never the type to sit quietly at dinner and smile. My father’s wife had this restless energy, always crossing and uncrossing her legs under the table, always laughing a half-second too loud at things that weren’t that funny. My father never noticed. I did.

It started with a look she gave me one evening when he was out of town. Not a long look, just a flicker, but it was enough. We talked for hours that night, wine on the counter, the kitchen light too warm, and somewhere in that conversation the real subject surfaced without either of us naming it.

She wanted more. Not just from me, but from the world. She was bored and beautiful and completely wasted on a man who was asleep by ten.

So I became her curator, of sorts. I knew people. I made introductions. I’d watch her get dressed for an evening out, that particular tension in her shoulders melting away as she stepped into something that wasn’t her married life, and I felt something I still can’t quite name. Pride, maybe. Power, definitely.

Seeing her come alive for someone new, knowing I was the reason she was smiling like that, was its own kind of intimacy.

My father never knew. She always came home.

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