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"Kids! Breakfast is ready!"

What the hell happened to cereal? Franken Berry? Count Chocula? Boo Berry? And yet if I asked either of my today to relate Bram Stoker or Mary Shelly to me, I'd get blank stares for my troubles. I can't stand it when companies commercialize good fiction. What's wild is that John told me that General Mills had been hawking these corporate crunchies since the `70's. For the life of me I don't remember eating this shit when I was a child. Then again, I was a weird little child. While other girls were dressing their dolls and staging slumber parties, I was either nose deep in a novel or masturbating myself to my step-sister's yearbook picture. Daddy sort of flitted between wives after he divorced my mom, and as far I can recall I had no less than six step-siblings; four brothers, two sisters, and it was one of the latter who first made me suspect that I liked girls.

You never forget your first crush.

Angela came down first, her school clothes in ruffled disarray and her curls all knotted up into the bristles of a pink comb. Kyle came down in a neater condition than Angela, though admittedly he made his appearance a full two minutes later than his sister.

I got my two "good morning" kisses, prompt as usual since my kids hadn't entered that "screw the world" stage yet -- and I was beginning to suspect they never would. They were such good kids. They never got detention, never forgot to take out the trash, never had fights. If they got their looks from me then they got their temperament from John.

While I poured milk for their cereal and admired the scent of my own French toast, Kyle casually asked me if I believed in ghosts. "Not particularly. Why do you ask?"

"'Cause Angela thinks we're living in a haunted house!"

She sneered. "I never said that!"

What are they talking about?

"What are you talking about?" I ask.

Kyle pulled that smirk he does when he thinks he's about to say something clever. Now that he gets from me. "Well she thinks she heard someone using the bathroom this morning when everybody was sleeping."

A shiver runs down my spine and not because I left the garden door open. "W-what do you mean, honey? What did you hear?"

She pauses to comb the comb out of her locks, irritating me briefly, but Angela went on to tell me what she heard, namely footsteps, running water, and a toilet's flush. There was a kind of swelling inside myself that was too physical to be dismissed as guilt, rather the prescient flux of two polar elements of myself, Elizabeth and Eliza, colliding with a couple of my child's words.

Shit!

"You're just hearing things." I say this swallowing back my nervousness, chuckling a little. "Sweetie, this is an old house and old houses sometimes make noises at night. Besides, a ghost wouldn't have anything to flush."

Kyle giggles a bit by getting one of his sister, and I see Angela curl up into herself out of the embarrassment. "A ghost wouldn't have anything to flush". Tch. A frightening image of the two of them busting out a Ouija board and summoning up my gorgeous fuck toy, flickered over my encephalic IMAX. A good mother might've dragged herself out of her own head long enough to feel guilty about making one of her kids look silly in front of the other, but a smart mother would've done what I did and simply thank her lucky stars it was Angela who overheard that ruckus and not John.

I had no idea what we talked about over breakfast. I was barely aware of myself nibbling down my French toast. I only waited for Angela and Kyle to finish up before sending them back upstairs for their books while I washed their bowls in thoughtful silence, still shaken. I barely heard the doorbell over the blood pounding in my ears. But before I knew it, Kyle and Angela were tumbling back downstairs with their logo-emblazoned backpacks, one of Iron Man and the other of The Princess and the Frog, to answer the door. It was Sean.

He shot me an unreadable glance before offering the kids his warm smile. "Hey, guys! Ready for school?"

With profuse nods they clamoured past him and climbed into the back seat of his car. When I had just about gotten my senses in order, Sean came into the kitchen. He'd shut the front door slightly, knowing that while the kids couldn't hear us speak, I didn't like taking chances.

"Where's John?" He asked.

I heard myself sigh. "He's working on the Baxter account at Asclepius."

Asclepius was his ad agency. Whenever he had a big advertisement to pull off he churned out a few extra hours every morning `till it was done. He was a hard worker. If I could hardly force myself to sleep with him then respecting his finer qualities was a short stack.

Sean ran a hand through his dusky blonde forelock, readjusting his cap. "Were you serious last night? Did you really mean that?"

"You said you could do it."

"Well, yeah, but-"

"Look, we can't talk about this now. Come back when you've dropped the kids off and then we'll all talk."

I was practically pushing him out the door. It wasn't because I was in any great hurry for him to drop off the kids or come back, I just needed a moment alone to think straight. As soon as he turned on his heels, stomped over to his car and drove off down my street, I slammed the door behind me and gathered myself.

It still choked me. Angela almost caught Nikki here. How would I have explained it if she did? With all my lust for planning I never even concocted a lie for the possibility. I slipped my hand underneath my bathrobe and caressed my beating chest. For a moment I was stunned by it, that feeling of two worlds, the mother I wished I was and the woman I wished I wasn't; colliding headfirst.

It terrified me.

But it didn't terrify me enough to make me forget being all alone in the house now... all alone except for Nikki.

My slipper-swathed feet were already carrying me up the stairs when I started thinking about her, about our "brief night" last night, about her nose stud and her adorable eyes.

I tugged on the dangling cord that lowered my attic steps from the ceiling and climbed them. As per usual it was appropriately dark and ever infested with the dusty relics of my Connecticut-style housewifery. The only guiding light up here, the only object of note and worth, was the nineteen-year-old beauty sleeping in the corner.

If there was a part of me that was mad at her for being stupid enough to pee while my kids were waking up, my irrepressible lust for the this girl just crushed the insistence to powder. Nikki's was an adorable slumber. She had a kitten's purr, cute as cotton, while her little lavender-painted toes peaked out the southern tip of her blankets. The top end was a puddle of chestnut tresses draped across a pillow. From time to time she would moan, not in any sexual way, just as you tend to do when you dream. It was darling.

I felt swells inside myself again, but in my heart and loins this time. I must've wasted ten or fifteen minutes just watching this angel sleep. And while I still wanted to "jump her bones", as the kids say, I had to admit, it was a languorous pleasure; admiring her while she slept. A conscious Nikki was someone I had to analyse and debate with while a snoozing Nikki was one whose beauty I could appreciate without pretence. Here I could admire her as lovingly as I would Botticelli's Primavera.

It choked me how unfair it was that I couldn't wake up with her at my side every morning.

Then I became conscious of Sean coming back in less than an hour -- and I reluctantly liberated myself from the grand trance this work of art slipped me into. I shook her shoulder to get her awake.

"Hey," I said. "Hey. Wake up, it's morning."

Nikki wiggled in her blankets a bit, scrubbed the crust out of her eyes, then leaned over and mumbled my name before asking me the time. I told her we were just twenty minutes shy of 9 am.

She yawned. "Should you be up here?"

"My husband and kids are out. Work and school, as it goes. We're alone here now."

She threw me a smile, small and discernibly false, then glanced away. My lips moved to question her until she asked rather frankly, "I guess you want me outta here then, huh?"

That statement was so wrong and so right in so many ways it boggled my goddamn mind. I wanted to think but the skein of everything about her, her circumstances and my feelings for her were so tangled and complicated that I didn't dare move to unravel it. Honestly, I didn't know what I wanted right now.

"..."

I wanted her, obviously. My nipples weren't stiffening up for that old stereo collecting dust in the corner, that's for sure. But I wanted my kids too, and, believe it or not, I wanted a husband. I didn't embarrass Daddy with a husband and three whole waves of feminism couldn't convince me that my kids didn't need a father. I'm not raising bastards. And therein lies the problem; you can't have your cake and eat it too... or so the idiom goes.

I was sitting there caught between so many needs and wants, mistaking one for the other and betraying my better judgements at every turn. Even now, the only thing keeping me from ripping open her bra and plunging my teeth at those ripe little breasts was my naked human willpower. I imagined myself a pit bull, hungry as hell, with some asshole dangling a juicy-looking pork chop in front of me. Always in sight but never in range thanks to that lovely chain called "willpower". You could starve to death but thank God for willpower!

"...Are you okay?" Nikki peered at me. "You've gone quiet."

When you weigh things, you ought not let what's around you affect the decision making process, right? I thought back to how anxious Sean was over the phone last night when I asked him this "favour", and I remembered how very doubtful he seemed. He had every right to feel that way. But then I looked at Nikki, and thought over how she made me feel, and how alive I'd been since I met her. I wasn't anywhere near ready to let those sensations end. I didn't have the strength to let her go.

With a calming breath swallowed and a cautionary tingle ignored, I gave myself over to Eliza's urges once more. "You don't have to leave."

"Huh?"

"I have a friend. Sean. He's agreed to give you a room at his place. You don't have to go to Greenwich anymore."

We both paused.

I watched a blanket-wrapped Nikki sway to her side, stunned by my offer, my heart in my throat. This must have been how John felt when he proposed to me; putting himself out there and tearing himself up inside from all the dead air between us. But he got his `yes'. I wanted mine.

"How about it?" I asked.

Nikki returned my gaze. I watched her doe eyes tick from left to right in analysis of my sincerity. And I wouldn't blame her if she thought I was full of shit. Realistically she had more to gain from this than I did -- it would've struck any sensible person as illogical. Yet... somehow, as I look in her eyes, I know that she knows I mean it. There's a careful twinkle of recognition in those orbs too. She knows why I'm doing this. If spilling my orgasmic fluid into her throat didn't explain it then giving her a place to stay certainly did.

At first I found that odd. In the short couple of days we've been in physical contact I would've thought the sex might clue her in on how badly I was burning for her (rather than a room for rent) but then I recalled her profession. She was a hooker. As much as I hated to think of our lovemaking as her meal ticket, that's what sex was to her. Work. Just like my writing had become to me. Work. Sex meant nothing to Nikki beyond its physical pleasures, but a place to stay, well, that was actually worth something, wasn't it?. She had to know that it meant something, coming from me.

"...Who is he?" She asked me, still weary.

I smiled then, like a fisherwoman feeling a tug at the end of her line. "Do you remember the man who drove us to the Iscariot a couple of days ago? That's Sean. He's a decent guy, I'd trust him with my life. He wouldn't take advantage of you."

Nikki's eyes sharpened. "I don't have any money, Elizabeth."

"I'll pay for the room."

I watched her pause again and made quick note of her failure to ask me what I might want in return. But Nikki already knew. I wouldn't insult her by laying out my terms.

She bit her lip indecisively. "...Look, do you really mean this? Because so many times people have said they'd come through for me and they just... they blow it."

My eager hand found its way into the softness of hers.

From the look she gave me, that look of quiet relief, Nikki knew my offer was genuine. Her thankful smile set my heart off like a locomotive but nothing was sweeter when Nikki leaned across the blankets and pressed our lips together.

Sweet, sweet nectar.

I can't ever remember losing myself in a person this completely. Nikki turned my mind so gooey that I didn't realized she'd stopped kissing me until I heard her say, "So where does he live?"

"W-where does who live?"

She smiled. "This 'Sean' guy?"

And I here I was forgetting that he'd be back any minute now. So with that miserable remembrance I hauled myself up to my feet, mentioned his apartment building, and offered her some breakfast. I didn't want her going hungry under my roof. She told me "yes". When she (furthermore) asked me for a few moments alone to get dressed I made for the catch door. In hindsight perhaps I shouldn't have stole a greedy peak of that sylphlike body on my way out, but lets be real. Who could blame me?

I had some eggs sizzling on a skillet less than a few minutes later. They were free range and I could only hope that Nikki wasn't a vegan, but it didn't occur to me that a prostitute might have hang-ups about animal derived sustenance. Maybe I was still in a haze, still drunk on the little victory of keeping my Nikki near me.

The eggs had sweltered into a beautiful brown when a thin pair of arms snaked around my waist. Two tender-flesh hands ignored my startled gasp and took themselves across my quivering skin. One hand traced a smooth glide down my stomach and circled around to my thigh. Despite how numbing Nikki's touch was, I managed to hang onto enough of my better senses and stopped her other hand before it seized my breast.

Okay. Deep breath.

"I-I-I," I swallowed. "I have to make your breakfast before Sean gets back."

Her plump lips cushioned my nape in kisses as I spoke every word. For a second I fell into a pause, shutting my eyes and whimpering. Then she stopped kissing my neck just long enough for her to whisper "I never said thank you" in my ear, and then I felt her entire torso (tits, stomach and hips all) slip down the length of my back and my ass until her knees hit the kitchen tiles beneath us.

I cracked open my eyes and gazed over my shoulder long enough to witness the crown of her head disappear into beneath my gown`s long folds, then what I no longer saw I quickly felt; Nikki's chunky fingers prising open my pussy-lips and her hot, wet, thick tongue launching into me. Outrageous gusts of pleasure spread across my body. I steadied myself against the marble kitchen counter as Nikki sent me into a moaning delirium.

...The eggs were a little burnt when Sean arrived.

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* You're playing with fire, Elizabeth! (Heh, heh, heh, heh...).