Pantied Stepsis Paradise

The alarm goes off at six forty-five and I'm already hard. Has nothing to do with the alarm. It's the smell coming from the kitchen, bacon and coffee and underneath that, the particular sweetness of her skin when she's been up for a while, moving around, heating up.

I don't get out of bed right away. I lie there in my boxer briefs, not that they're doing much containing, and I listen. Her bare feet on the tile. The fridge opening. The little hum she makes when she's deciding something. She's decided. She always decides before I'm even awake.

"Jesse." Through the door, not loud. She knows I'm up. "You want eggs or you want me to eat yours too?"

I pull on the briefs properly and open the door. She's at the stove with her back to me, and her back is a lot. The pink cotton of her underwear rides up a little on the left side, and her hair, dark and heavy, is twisted up off her neck with a clip that's about to give out. She's got the spatula in one hand and a mug in the other and she's swaying a little, not dancing, just happy in her body.

"Eggs," I say.

"Boring." She turns her head enough to look at me and there's that grin, the one that says she's already won something. "I made you three."

She slides the plate across the counter and I take the stool on the other side. The house is small. Two bedrooms and a kitchen that opens onto everything, and in the morning the light comes through the one big window like it's being poured. She's got a mark on her shoulder from where her bra strap sat yesterday. She's not wearing a bra now. She's not wearing much.

We eat. She stands, I sit. She steals a piece of my bacon and I let her. That's the whole arrangement, basically, and it's been the arrangement for eight months now, since the summer we both ended up with nowhere else to be.

"Class at ten," she says, mouth full.

"Me too."

"Then we've got time." She says it like a fact. She puts her plate in the sink and doesn't rinse it, which she never does, and comes around the counter and leans on it next to me, close enough that her hip is against my arm. Warm. She smells like coffee and shea butter and something underneath that I've stopped trying to name because naming it makes it worse.

I keep eating. That's the thing I've gotten good at. Keeping my eyes on the plate.

"You're doing the thing," she says.

"What thing."

"The thing where you look at your eggs like they've got the answers." She takes my fork out of my hand. Just takes it. Uses it to spear a bite of my eggs and eats it, and then she puts the fork back and pats my shoulder twice like I'm a good dog and walks off toward the bathroom.

The bathroom door stays open. It always stays open. I hear the water run, hear her brush her teeth, hear her hum something I don't recognize. I sit there with my half-eaten eggs and the morning light and the fact of her, and I think about how this is fine. This is fine. We're steps. We're not blood. Her mom married my dad for two years and then they both moved on and we both stayed, because neither of us had anywhere better, and now it's just us and the lease and the one bathroom.

She comes out with her hair down and her toothbrush in her mouth and leans in the doorway. "Shower's free if you want it. I'm not going in again."

"I know."

"You know." She smiles around the toothbrush. "You always know."

I take the shower. Cold for the first thirty seconds, then I give up and let it be warm. I think about her in the kitchen. I think about the mark on her shoulder. I think about the way she took my fork, which shouldn't mean anything, which doesn't mean anything, except that she does it every day and every day it lands in me somewhere I can't reach.

When I get out she's on the couch with her laptop, legs folded under her, and she's wearing a different pair of underwear, pale yellow now, and nothing else. The laptop's on her knees. She's typing something and frowning at it.

"Help me with this," she says.

"With what."

"Bio. I can't make the diagram make sense." She turns the laptop toward me and I sit down on the other end of the couch, which is a foot and a half of space that feels like a wall and also like nothing at all. I look at the screen. It's a cell diagram. I know this stuff. I'm good at this stuff.

"Mitochondria," I say. "Start there."

She leans over and looks at it with me, and her shoulder touches mine, and she stays there, reading, and I stay there, not reading, and the diagram glows on the screen and neither of us moves for a while.

"Okay," she says finally. "Okay, that helps."

"Good."

She doesn't move back. She's still leaning, and I can feel her breathing, and the laptop screen goes dark from no input and now it's just us and the room and the light. She turns her head and looks at me from about six inches away.

"You're tense," she says.

"I'm fine."

"You're always fine." She says it like an accusation, which is new. She's never accused me of anything before. She reaches up and puts her hand flat on my chest, over my heart, which is going too fast, and she holds it there like she's checking something. "See. Not fine."

I don't say anything. There's nothing to say that doesn't open a door I can't close.

She takes her hand back and stands up and stretches, arms over her head, and her body does the thing bodies do when they stretch, and I look at the wall. The wall's got a picture of us on it from last Christmas, her in a sweater, me in a sweater, both of us grinning at the camera like we're normal.

"I'm going to get dressed," she says. "You should too. We'll be late."

She walks toward her room. Halfway there she stops. Doesn't turn around.

"Jesse."

"Yeah."

"Tonight." A pause. "Tonight let's not do the eggs thing."

Then she's gone into her room and the door clicks shut and I'm alone on the couch with the dark laptop and the picture of us on the wall, and I sit there for a long time, longer than I should, trying to figure out what the eggs thing is and whether I've been doing it and whether I can stop.