Page 6 of Off Limits

I give the door a knock before I push it open, but I know the sound will be muted by the heavy Bubinga wood of the doors, custom designed by the home’s original architect. When I walk into the dark room, Dani is fast asleep. I open the thick curtains and she protests cutely as the sunlight blasts into the room, burrowing under the covers.

I walk over to her dresser and open the top drawer, rifling through it. To one side are several balled-up pairs of socks. To the other, several more pairs of Melanie’s panties.

What the fuck.

“Sweetheart, where are your underpants?”

“What?” she groans plaintively.

“Your underpants. Are you wearing your mother’s?”

She pulls the covers down to her chin and squints at me. “Why are you looking at my underwear?”

“I saw them in the laundry room. Where are yours?”

She shrugs. “Those are mine. Melanie threw my old ones out and gave me those.” I blink at her. It doesn’t make any sense yet it’s perfectly Melanie. “She said they were more grown-up and she was getting new ones anyway.”

Tension pulls at my shoulders and my jaw. Everything about this is fucked up, but if I speak I’m afraid I’ll say something I regret. I close the drawer without further comment and manage to say, “Get up and get dressed, and then come down for breakfast.”

Then I grit my teeth as I leave the room, biting back the confusing tide of both anger and arousal that’s rising up in me.

Later that week, I decide to work from home to take care of a few things around the house. I’ve been working from home more since Dani arrived—leaving the office shortly after three o’clock every day to pick her up at school, and then working in my home office until nine or ten at night after dinner. But today I want to put aside some time to make sure Danica has everything she needs to feel settled.

I drive Dani to school and then return home, picking up extra groceries on the way. When I get back, I respond to a few emails and then go up to Dani’s room, checking through her closets and drawers, and making a list of things she needs. By the looks of it, Melanie hasn’t purchased a single thing for Danica in a year and she needs new everything.

I open the underwear drawer and look disdainfully at the three or four pairs of Melanie’s g-strings Dani still has in there. Only Melanie would prioritize getting new panties for herself over whatever her daughter needs—not to mention feel that it’s in any way normal to give her used panties to her teenage daughter. I lift a pair with my index finger, a deep purple silk, only a scrap of fabric really, with a troublesome and forbidden longing.

It shouldn’t turn me on to remember my wife’s ass in this scrap of silk. It shouldn’t turn me on to think about her daughter wearing it, either. But it does.

I stand there for a while, grappling with my complex feelings and staring, mesmerized, at the soft fabric. The silk itself is erotic. I imagine it caressing Melanie’s and Danica’s skin, swishing softly between legs, rushing smoothly back and forth with every step and every action.

A forbidden idea comes to me, a terrible idea, and I try to talk myself out of it to no avail. Once it has a hold of me, I can’t let it go.

Eventually, with equal parts guilt and anticipation, I unzip my pants and push down my boxers, laying out on Danica’s bed on my back. I’m hard—I’m so inappropriately hard—and I circle the soft silk of the purple panties around my shaft and then use my hand to stroke it up and down, the fabric so smooth and soft it’s almost like a mouth.

I shouldn’t be doing this. Not in Danica’s room. But it feels so good stroking my cock with her mother’s panties, moving the silk up over the head of my dick, squeezing my shaft harder and moving faster until I’m moaning with pleasure.

When I come, I cup the panties around the head of my cock, coming into them like it’s a willing mouth, gasping for breath on my stepdaughter’s bed.

Once the ecstasy wears off, it’s shame.

Purchasing new underpants for Danica is a top priority, I decide.

Jean-Luc

“DO YOU HAVE any plain cotton underpants?”

The cashier, overly made-up, with long, straight hair and equally long nails, gives me a blank look. “Like, for women?”

“Yes, for women.” It’s a women’s lingerie store, but suddenly I realize she thinks I’m shopping for myself. “They’re for my daughter,” I add.

I regret the words as soon as they leave my mouth. Curiosity sparks in the cashier’s eyes, but I simply arch an eyebrow in a way I’ve learned often gets me my way.

“Maybe in the back. With the bathrobes and pyjamas.” She looks past me to the next customer, but I catch another furtive glance in my direction as I turn towards the back of the store.

I need to watch the language I use about Danica. What kind of a man buys panties in a store like this for his daughter?

But is she my daughter, though? It certainly felt that way for years when I was with her mother. But now Dani seems like a different person to me.