A Tarnished Trophy Ch 01

Marisol stood in the doorway holding two plates, an apron around her waist, looking like a model housewife. When I say model, I mean Victoria's Secret. No shirt, no pants, just a bra, stockings, and apron.

"Breakfast? I decided to make it myself since the cook is on vacation."

"Uh, yeah," I stammered, my throat going dry.

She looked as if she had just come back from those photo shoots she talked about doing before she had married my father. Okay, so when I said model, I actually meant Sears Catalog. That was the big achievement of the last decade of her life. Her other small-time modeling jobs became no-time modeling jobs when she met Dad.

The unnecessarily long table forced her to trek across the room to reach the end I was sitting at. I picked up my glass and drank to make it less obvious that my gaze was not eye-level. She leaned over to put the plate on the table, effectively serving up her cleavage along with a side of eggs and bacon. I sputtered into my water.

"Something wrong?" she asked, still leaning over, looking slightly concerned.

I would have said, "No, but something's very right," if she weren't my stepmother. I should have said, "Yes, you're half-naked," if I weren't mesmerized by the sight in front of me.

"No," I whispered. She took her hand off the plate and turned to walk to her seat. I was actually a little disappointed to find that she had panties on underneath that apron. She untied it and draped it over her seat.

"Sure? You look a little funny or pale or something." She took a bite of her eggs, twirling her fork in her mouth, almost fellating it. Was this how she ate breakfast? Maybe so. In the two years and change she lived here, we rarely ate a meal together.

"Yeah, I'm fine, Mari, it's just...." I trailed off as her tongue gently fondled a strip of bacon she was pushing into her mouth. To my embarrassment, I felt a little swelling in my pants.

"Oh, silly me. I forgot about this," she snapped her bra straps and traced her hands down her half-nude body to indicate what she was talking about. "I'm modeling this for a shoot today, and I like to wear what I'm modeling beforehand. It's like practice, you know."

I nodded and took a bite of the eggs. I suspected her cooking would be rancid considering that she wasn't expected to do anything here, much less operate a stove, but it was just the opposite.

"That's good, I guess. Trying to get back into work again," I said, a token offering of praise. I started shoveling down the eggs and hash browns, trying to distract myself from what was across the table.

"I hope so. But I dunno about these. Do you think the bra makes my boobs look funny?" Typical Mari, fishing for compliments. She knew damn well she'd make the photographer cream his pants looking like that. She was a trophy wife, after all. If her life had a job description, it would read "Stand around and look pretty."

I looked up from my plate to reassure her that she was as sexy as she knew she was, but when the words failed to make it from brain to tongue. She was making a spectacle of herself across the table from me, caressing her breasts through the black lace of her bra.

"It just feels like something's off, like it doesn't fit right." She held her hands beneath the cups and jiggled, making them bounce inside the fabric. I just continued to stare as she reached around her back. Her chest sunk as the clasp opened and she hooked her thumbs through the straps. My erection now pressed into the bottom of the table.

"Maybe if I just readjust this –" The bra was hanging from her outstretched arms, just barely covering the parts it was supposed to hide. She stopped and gave a faint grin. "Oh, how rude of me. You probably don't wanna see your stepmother undressing while you're eating breakfast."

Maybe if she didn't look like you, Mari. She pulled the undergarment back on and closed the clasp. I cursed silently even though my shame had grown along with the bulge in my pants.

"You think it looks okay, though?" Still fishing.

"Yes, Mari, you and your boobs look fine." Why had I taken the bait?

---

Honestly, I never cared about Mari before that incident, not as a stepmother, not as a member of the household, not even as an object of lust. Okay, so there were a few exceptions. I had made love to her a number of times in my dreams. But that didn't mean anything – just last week I dreamed about Mrs. Grundy, that old crone of a third grade teacher. Well, dreams can't all be good.

Then there was the end of sophomore year. My friend-with-benefits had gone back across the country for the summer and I was getting restless without her. I sat in my room clicking through pages upon pages of porn, but I had gotten too used to the real thing. Sliding back from my desk and looking out the window, I saw Mari sunbathing by the pool. I slipped on my trunks and headed out to the pool, just so desperate at that moment to see some skin.

There she was, her top undone, her sunglasses perched on her head, and her hair splashed across her pillow. Dad's trophy glittered in the sunlight. Her caramel skin had a natural sheen. Her rear, covered only by a skimpy thong, invited lengthy stares. Leaning on the edge of the pool, stroking myself, I realized what power feminine beauty held. I devoured every inch of her body, distraught by the fact that concentrating on one inch meant I had to ignore all the others. I shot off into the water. My sudden lust for her seemed to leave my body as quickly as my seed had. She had served her purpose. She was back to being a non-entity.

That's what Mari was. That's what all of my family was. My biological mother had divorced my father when I was two and went on some kind of humanitarian mission in Africa, never to be heard from again. The subsequent marriage lasted all of my middle school years. Then there was Mari. I was spending most of my time in college by the time she married Dad and she was spending most of her time God knows where.

Dad was no different. We spent a lot of time together when I was little, but it seemed as if he had grown bored with having a son after a while. Especially when he opened his first restaurant. That's where the money came from. It took off and there were "Kruppke's" in every county worth driving to in this end of the state. After the crash, he was forced to close some of them, but the chain was still nothing to sneeze at.

College widened the rift. He was a businessman through and through. He laughed when I declared an English major. "Didn't you learn that in elementary?" Neither of us cared about it, though. I could tell he was disappointed, but he never pressured me into his business. I just wanted to get through school. Getting to read some decent books and bullshit about them for four years seemed like a pretty good deal.

Then he had been diagnosed with some terminal illness whose name I likely couldn't pronounce. Pulmonary something or other. The doctors told him to quit smoking but he didn't care. Both of us made some attempts to spend more time together, purely out of guilt. I can't imagine that time was very enjoyable for either of us. We had nothing in common anymore and we implicitly decided not to impose too much on each other. Last summer he had asked me to go yachting with him for a few weeks. I didn't relish the idea of sitting around on a boat while he screwed Mari senseless, so I skipped out. I was nothing but happy, though, that he dedicated what would be his last few weeks to making merry.

---

Mari, that's what all this was about in the first place. She was showing me a side of her that was meant for my father, not me. That modeling agency seemed to take to her rather quickly. And they must have been desperate for a lingerie model – she rarely wore an outer layer around the house anymore. Lacy underwear, teddies, corsets, flimsy negligees. Did wearing suggestive clothing take this much "practice"?

Every night brought the same fantasy in different clothing. This morning she came out of the kitchen wearing some gossamer camisole that flirted with complete indecency. I could just make out the silhouettes of her areolae through the fabric. The panties that went with the top revealed that she kept herself well-trimmed.

Like all her other outfits, this one wouldn't survive my little fantasy. It was a simple one, very simple. I would wolf down her breakfast while she harangued me about what I thought of her outfit. Okay, that part was real. But then I would stand up and make sure my tented pants were unavoidably visible. And she would say, "Oh, I didn't realize I was turning you on, Denny. If there's anything I can do to help you out..."

I'd reply by tearing her camisole from her body. I wanted to taste that caramel skin, but I didn't give a damn about savoring it. I would fling the dishes off the table and put Mari in their place, ripping off her panties so I could penetrate her. She'd make that expression of faux shock, as if she hadn't any idea what effects she was having on me. I'd just press on, too aroused for anything resembling foreplay. Completely animalistic rutting. I'd drive into her, harder and harder until I burst. Then I'd remind her to call me Dennis.

I sighed and got up to wipe off my stomach. Unlike the pool incident, my thoughts still centered on her even after I had relieved myself. I couldn't deny any longer the fact that I was lusting after Mari. That week in middle school when I had discovered how to masturbate was probably the last time I had gotten myself off so frequently. I tried to supplant my fantasy with copious amounts of pornography, but I found thinking of her far more satisfying.

No, all I had really admitted to myself was that I was lusting after the idea, the concept of Mari, not Mari herself. Mari didn't matter – what did was that there was a beautiful woman parading herself around the house. My situation would be no different had it been any other woman doing this, even one that looked a tenth as good as she did. Do you recall that famous experiment on the news a while back? They took a bunch of kids and locked them in a room with a marshmallow that they weren't allowed to eat. It was inconceivable that not one of them wasn't imagining how it tasted.

---

Mari was making herself more visible around the house beyond just a change in attire. She was cooking meals, going out less, taking an interest in me. We had done a commendable job ignoring each other since we met. There was that short period after the wedding where she was struck by the novelty of having a stepson and tried to play mother. "It's okay to call me 'mom,' or 'Mami,' like I call my mother," she had said, seemingly unaware she was talking to an eighteen-year-old. Thankfully, that phase ended rather quickly for her. I had no reason to help her insinuate herself into our lives – this was merely a financial arrangement.

Had she become bored without Dad? After two years of avoiding me, she was claiming to make up for lost time, interrogating me about frivolities like my favorite flavor of ice cream. I thought it was rather harmless until this next incident.

I sat in one of the living rooms reading Ham on Rye for the second time. I had already finished it a few years ago, but my 20th century lit professor assigned it and I had no qualms about a second time through.

"Lilly bent over and ran her tongue along Pete's cock." For a moment, I thought I had gone crazy when a feminine voice had simultaneously spoken the line I was reading. Then a pair of hands grabbed my shoulders. I looked up and saw Mari standing right over me, right behind the couch.

"Ooh, reading smutty books, Denny?"

"No, it's Bukowski. It's for a class."

She walked around the couch and sat next to me. "Suuure it is." She smiled and winked at me. However, I felt no compulsion to defend myself. With an excited look in her eyes, she grabbed my shoulder and said: "Hey, wanna watch a movie?"

"Fine," I sighed. Resistance to her efforts to bond at this point would have been even more painful. She was a natural attention-seeker, which made her all the worse when she actually made an effort at being one.

She flicked through the choices on pay-per-view, trying to figure out what I liked. There was nothing particularly interesting, so I told her to just pick something. As the opening credits rolled, she asked, "Your twenty-first birthday is in a few months, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I replied, impressed that she knew almost as much about me as my driver's license did.

"Well, you're old enough, I think. I'm making a drink, want one?"

I accepted the offer – anything that would make two hours of a terrible movie and Mari's buddying up easier to bear. She got up and walked out, affording me a few minutes to read my book. When I heard footsteps I threw the book back on the table. She put my rum and coke next to it. The opening credits had flown by and I hadn't even caught the name of the movie.

Before long, comets were raining down everywhere on earth and blowing the hell out of landmarks. Mari was quiet, but she leaned her head against my shoulder, occasionally caressing my arm. Whenever something exploded, she started and squeezed my arm tight, pressing her breasts into my side. I took a gulp of my drink. Strong, but all the better for that.

Halfway through, the focus seemed to shift from the protagonists surviving Armageddon to surviving contrived romantic sub-plots. Well, actually, it was probably the most realistic disaster movie I had seen. Fuck like rabbits, it's the end of the goddamn world.

That's when Mari started her probing. On screen, the lead actress disrobed in preparation for her first sex scene. Mari asked: "Wow, isn't she hot?"

I grunted yes. However, as I drank more, my answers to her questions became more detailed. She interrogated me further – Which one do you like best? What's their best feature? Tits or ass?

I was growing a bit uncomfortable, but she finally moved on to something slightly less sexual. "Say, are you going out with someone now?"

"Yeah, Dina. I go to school with her." All right, I lied about the marshmallow thing – there were really two of them, and Dina was the second. Mari hadn't just replaced porn as my jerking material, she had also replaced Dina in my fantasies. I felt guilty about that on top of everything else.

"So, have you..." Mari paused and leaned closer to whisper, "fucked her yet?"

"No, we just started going out." At least now she couldn't ask for details. But it was the truth. Dina and I had gone out once a weekend since the semester started a little over a month ago. She wanted to take it slow and I was fine with that. It felt pleasant, a fresh start.

Going steady was almost nostalgic. In high school, I thought I was in love but had my heart torn to pieces and unceremoniously stomped on. Freshman year of college is when all the girls break up with their high school boyfriends and start "experimenting," making it a breeding ground for easy one-night stands. I took full advantage of that environment. That was the year Mari moved in, too. It took a little while to get used to having a wet dream walking around the house. But she was a rather unsubtle gold digger. That coupled with the fact that I had easy pickings at college made me indifferent to her, even on the level of pure physical attraction.

"You know, you can talk to me about these things, Denny. I'm a girl too – in fact, it's not so long ago that I was old enough to go to college. I didn't grow up fifty years ago."

It was impossible to argue that point, however suggestive she made it sound. But I was becoming even more perturbed. She was now cuddling up closer, one arm wrapped around mine, a breast pressing into my side. Her other arm was stroking my hair and the side of my face.

"I know I haven't been there much for you, baby, that's why I'm trying to get to know you better." She reclined a bit more, seemingly getting a little tired, nuzzling her head against my neck. Her weight forced me to slouch down, allowing her to put her legs on the couch and wrap an arm around my back to hug my waist.

I stared at her laid out half on top of me and thanked god that she was in a tank top and shorts, instead of provocative lingerie. "Instead of" was literally correct in this case – I glanced down at the breast that was not pressed into me – she wasn't wearing a bra. Her nipple pushed against the thin red material of her shirt. The way that she leaned against me pulled the material back against her chest so that it clung completely to the curvature of her breast. It begged for me to play with it. Her hands unclasped, one still holding on to my waist and the other finding its way down my hip to my thigh. The one on my thigh drifted up and down. A lump formed in my throat.

The alcohol had kept me down through Mari's stroking and pillow talk, but now it turned on me. Wrapped around me, Mari looked absolutely mouthwatering. Pressure built in my pants while her hand moved ever closer to my crotch. I struggled against my urges. Staying soft was becoming a battle of attrition as lewd thoughts coursed through my head. I had already been enjoying the feeling of one breast against me – why not enjoy the second one? Would that be so wrong? Maybe if we just started by kissing? Or if I make her hand "accidentally" slip onto my growing hardness?

"I just wanted to tell you I was sorry," she said. Her eyelids seemed to grow heavier and the smell of booze wafted from her mouth.

That fortunately managed to derail my train of thought. I felt shamed. This all looked rather sexual from my perspective, but maybe it was just an innocent embrace from Mari's. It was the principle of in vino veritas. Perhaps she did have some remorse and the alcohol had brought that out, but she just had a little too much and got touchy-feely without realizing it. And here I was, getting sexually aroused and devising plans to feel her up while she was trying to make an honest apology.

"It's okay, Mari," I broke the long silence I had maintained since she asked about Dina. I felt relieved. She had probably been waiting to hear that since she had started sucking up to me. Now she had been absolved and all this could end. No, not all of it. Mari still had me captive.

The tension in my pants caused by my now full erection created little creases to run along the crotch and thighs. Her fingertips had caught against one and began to explore it, threatening to cross the boundary from my thigh to the base of my cock. Her head began to lift from my chest. She would no doubt see my arousal if I didn't act fast.

I sat her straight up so that I could hug her, her chin resting on my shoulder. "It's okay, Mari!" I repeated breathlessly.

"I'm so glad, baby," she replied, rubbing my back. Just in time, I thought, but this solution was only temporary. Her breasts were squished right into my chest. On top of that, her tiny shorts had ridden down enough so that I could see the tops of her cheeks, which were free of cover from panties. I had to get to the bathroom.

"Hate to end the touching moment, but I really have to take a piss," I said, patting her head and tousling her hair so that it fell into her eyes. I jumped up from the couch, hoping my plan had worked.

Bursting into the nearest bathroom, I shucked my pants and boxers. The second I started stroking, Fantasy Mari returned and I was back on the couch with her. "Oh, Denny! I told you I love you, but not in that way!" she screamed as I made ribbons of her clothes. Her protests were mixed with moans of pleasure as I thrust into her. It hadn't even been a minute, but I was ready to release. "No, Denny, not inside!" yelled Mari. That pushed me over the edge. I lost control and my hips bucked wildly, causing me to miss the bowl and squirt all over the toilet tank. As I wiped the tank down, a little voice inside kept telling me I was an asshole.