The Lodger

Last week, the outrageously-talented Kate Lessons posted a new story on her blog, called ‘The Lodger‘. Like most of her work, it’s hot, transgressive, and deliberately disgusting in places, in a way that really works. It says a lot for Kate as an author that the style of the piece, and the protagonist’s voice, are both unmistakably hers, and it came as no surprise that I really enjoyed reading it.

What did take me by surprise was the urge I had, hours later, to go back and rewrite it. Or rather, to tell the same story from the perspective of the man her main character, Chloe, is lodging with. And blowing. And fucking. Something about the dynamic between them really got under my skin, and I wanted to explore that whole scenario using the platform she’d so skilfully built. I asked Kate whether that would be OK and she graciously said yes, so here we are!

Her story is ~1,300 words long, and I intended to write something of similar length in response…so of course mine tops out at just over 2,000 words. I’ve kept Kate’s title, and attempted to avoid any factual/logical inconsistencies between her piece and mine. Her voice though is hers and hers alone, so I haven’t tried to mimic it.

If you haven’t done so already, please do read Kate’s story before you check out this one – and make sure you let her know how great it is in the comments underneath.

And as ever, thanks for reading!

~

The Lodger

Six years. That’s how long we’ve been taking in girls from the university, ever since our Jacqui got married and moved across town. It made no sense to leave her room empty, but Sandra didn’t want boys in there, not with Peter still so young. “I’ve heard what those student lads get up to,” she said, and that was the end of the conversation. Besides, we’d have had to change the curtains.

So each September a new lass arrives, suitcase in one hand and the first four weeks’ rent in the other. Fresh off the train, mostly, and already miserable from homesickness, but that soon fades. Eventually they come out of their room in the evenings, then it’s the odd night in the pub with classmates, and before we know it they’ve got a boyfriend in town and we only see them at weekends. It’s why we get a different girl each year – we’re a halfway house, I suppose, between childhood and the adult world they long to inhabit.

You won’t believe me, I know, but I don’t generally pay them much attention. 18 is too young for me these days. Most of them haven’t figured out who they are yet; or at least they can’t articulate it in the way they carry themselves. There’s no real artifice to them. Any edge, any spikiness, feels performative to me, like it’s working hard to paper over a sense of self that’s still shifting and formless.

22 though? 22 is different. Chloe is different.

She doesn’t look it, mind. Not at first glance. Her dark hair is routinely pulled back from her face into a messy ponytail, making it easy to spot the remaining clusters of teenage acne on her forehead and cheeks. She wears cheap NHS frame with thick lenses, and when she screws up her face to try and see something more clearly, the faint hint of a moustache on her upper lip comes into focus. Most of her clothes are baggy and frayed – she seems to care little for the latest fashions – but as she moves around the house it’s possible to make out the remnants of teenage puppy fat around her stomach, and heavy breasts that rarely seem to be kept in a bra.

In that walk though, it becomes rapidly clear that Chloe is not 18. There’s a purpose to it. A quiet, comfortable arrogance, as if she knows by now that men will look at her bouncing tits and soft belly, and want her. She has already seen the world beyond her school gate, and she knows her place in it; knows where and how she belongs.

Sandra picks up on none of that; she doesn’t realise the danger that’s about to enter her life. “Maybe this one will actually clean up after herself,” she sniffs, as Chloe leaves the kitchen on her first day with us. “Maybe,” I say, and think about the knowing smile that crept across her face when she caught me staring at the front of her t-shirt.

And that’s the thing about 22. They can still get away with it, especially if they’re just starting uni a few years late and lodging with a nice family on the edge of town. In them exists a sort of dichotomy between adulthood and adolescence – they’re afforded the privileges of the former, but in many ways are indulged and forgiven as the latter, in the same way they were at 18. Most deadly of all, they’ve learned to weaponize that peculiar form of trust.

So when Chloe walks into the living room on day three with nipples pressed petulantly through the gossamer fabric of an old t-shirt, Sandra barely glances up from her crossword. When she bends down to retrieve a coffee mug from the low table next to the sofa, and sways her hips as the t-shirt rides up to expose her bare cunt, I know that only I have registered anything out of place. She is a living, breathing Rorschach Test for our expectations of how someone in her position will behave, and I’m not ashamed of what I see when I look at her.

That night I wait till Sandra’s asleep, then fish that same t-shirt out of the laundry pile in the bathroom and press it against my face while I sit on the loo seat and pump my cock. It smells of bergamot and lavender – strongly enough that I wonder whether she sprayed it with perfume before tossing it in the basket – and when I pull the fabric away from my face to look down at my bulging erection, I see the translucent patch that my mouth has blotted with saliva.

The next morning I’m halfway across the landing – jacket in one hand, slice of cold toast in the other – when Chloe’s bedroom door cracks open just far enough to give me a clear view of her standing next to the window in only a pair of pale pink knickers. Without looking over her shoulder, she hooks a thumb under the waistband on each hip, then pulls them down far enough for gravity to kick in and do the rest. Her arse is almost obscenely round: I want to knead it with the heel of my hand, or punch the soft flesh at the centre of each cheek, just to see how quickly it springs back into place.

I hesitate, unsure whether to risk discovery by taking another step towards the staircase. Of course if she turns round she’ll see me anyway, toast still half-raised to my mouth and dick stretching out the tight fabric of my suit trousers. There’s no easy answer.

When Sandra turns off the bedside lamp that night, I roll on top of her and pull the hem of her nightdress high enough to expose her cunt. “What are you doing?” she says, as I lean back far enough to follow the criss-cross map of stretch marks down her belly to the shock of ash-blonde hair between her legs. “Remembering,” I say, and fuck her harder than I have done for years.

It’s not enough though. I know it, and Chloe knows it too. I come home early one afternoon to find steam billowing out of the open bathroom doorway, the shower curtain pulled back to reveal her tits glistening through the clouds. At dinner, she waits till Sandra’s back is turned, then dips two fingers in the cream sauce and pushes them all the way to the back of her throat.  

I think about asking her to leave. About ringing the university and telling them that it’s just not working out, that they’ll just have to find somewhere else for her. I think about it – but I think about fucking her eager young cunt more.

At the weekend, we take Chloe and Peter to the local baths. As they dive and shriek and thrash around in the water, they seem disconcertingly close in age, despite the 8-year gap, and I feel nausea creep up from my stomach, but I swallow hard before the taste can reach my tongue. Chloe’s bathing suit is sleek and form-fitting; each time she ducks beneath the surface, it’s like watching a seal break through frozen Arctic waters in search of prey. Except it’s not fish she’s looking for.

When she swings away from Peter and cuts straight in front of me, I look down in time to see her hand move in slow, shimmering motion across the front of my shorts. Her fingers close around my cock, just for a moment, and it leaps in her hand. Before she’s even emerged, hair flying, a few feet behind me, I’m wading towards the changing room. It takes me less than a minute to come all over my hand in one of the cubicles.

I tiptoe out of our bedroom again that night, only this time I don’t go to the bathroom. She’s waiting for me, eyes wide open and one hand already pulling back the sheet as I step over the cheerfully-striped rug Jacqui picked out over a decade earlier. “I’m on the pill,” she says, staring at my dick, but it doesn’t matter, I’d have fucked her anyway, if only to release whatever hold the idea has on me.

She pulls me into her. Not just my dick – she wraps arms and legs around my torso, my waist, till my face is buried in her neck and it feels like each thrust is being given extra force by her heels digging sharply into my arse. Her cunt is tight and I try not to think about her youth; try not to wonder whether this might be her first time. Instead I grit my teeth and hold back, hold back, till the pressure becomes too much to resist, and I moan into her hair as she laughs softly in triumph.

I soap her juices off my soft dick before returning to bed. It’s a ritual I’ll perform so many times in the weeks to come, but on this first night I stare resolutely down into the basin, avoiding eye contact in the mirror. It’s not that I feel guilty – more that I don’t yet want to acknowledge that this is the start of something, rather than a gloriously sordid one-off.

The next night I make her come with my fingers and this time there’s no triumphant smile, only a shocked silence and a quick roll to the wall, as if she wasn’t expecting a man to know how to do that and needs to create distance from it. I think about the boys I see strutting around town, and it makes sense.

Still, she adjusts quickly enough. Within a week, she’s sucking me dry any time Sandra leaves the room for more than five minutes, and bouncing up and down on my dick at night like it’s the Space Hopper gathering dust in Peter’s wardrobe.

“You’re so good at this,” I murmur for the hundredth time, as she looks up at me from the bathroom floor, her cheeks sucked in around my erection. “I don’t know how you’re so good at this. You’re just…better.” She blinks slowly, then swallows when I shudder and spurt all over her tongue. “I know,” she says, wiping the back of her hand over her mouth. “I’ll always be better at this than her.”

One evening, a week before Christmas, Sandra takes Peter shopping while I stay behind to wrap presents. Kneeling on the living room carpet, I hear footsteps on the stairs, and look up to see Chloe in the doorway, wearing what I quickly realise is my wife’s nightgown. “Come on,” she says, and I follow dumbly till we’re in the main bedroom and she’s bending over the low footboard and planting her hands on the duvet. She looks back over her shoulder, and only then do I register the lipstick smeared crudely around her mouth. Sandra’s lipstick. “You’re going to fuck me now,” she says, and I fumble at my belt, just managing to free my cock and shove it into her before cum starts spilling from the tip. Without a word, she pulls away from it and crawls up onto the mattress and rolls onto her back. Spreading her legs, she pulls open her cunt and slides a finger inside.

I don’t dare to change the bedding, but before Sandra goes to bed I scrub and scrub and scrub at the saucer-sized stain left by her juices and mine. Even after it’s long gone, I feel like I can smell what we did there.

Spring comes, and I wonder for the first time whether Chloe will move out and find her own place, like the others. On the first warm day of the year, I sit at the breakfast table and count the days in my head till the end of the university term. Peter leaves for school. Sandra gets up to fry bacon and eggs in a rust-flecked pan on the hob. I bring my gaze back from the dreamy middle-distance, and catch Chloe looking at me, fork in hand. She’s wearing a nasty smirk that tells me she’s not thinking about food. Slowly she opens her hand, and I flinch as the fork clatters to the floor.

“Oops,” she says, and drops silently to her knees.