Page 19 of Yearn

I turned on my heel and even with the trash behind me, I couldn’t shake the vision—his knuckles shiny, his cock’s head leaking, obscene and gorgeous in the porch light.

Looked like his fingers were wet and sticky. Semen was dripping out the tip.

I cleared my throat.

God help me, the flash came back clear as sunlight.

Dominic’s hand wrapped around that big, thick shaft, his knuckles tight, his cock’s head swollen and slick.

I saw the way his muscular chest heaved, the way his jaw clenched like he was fighting himself, the raw hunger in his eyes when they locked on me.

It hit me in the belly—heat, sharp and low—like a match flicked too close to kindling.

My breath hitched, shallow and fast, like the memory alone had fingers on my throat.

I checked my left.

Next door, Mrs. Patterson’s window glowed the way it always did at night.The woman never slept. She sat there like a retired lighthouse keeper, watching the neighborhood waves for shipwrecks.

She’d been a pastor’s wife once—First Baptist over on Monroe Street. Her husband, Reverend Calvin Patterson, had dropped dead one Sunday afternoon after biting into one of her chocolate-chip cookies.

The coroner—her first cousin—said it was a heart attack.

However, the congregation whispered other things—about the arsenic rumors, about the way the Reverend’s young mistress fainted at the funeral, and about how three different female choir members cried a little too long over his coffin.

After that, Mrs. Patterson stopped going to church but never stopped watching. Her blinds became her pew, her window her pulpit. Once when I spoke to her, she’d confessed that she had insomnia, so she spent many nights reading and watching re-runs of games shows.

She kept on baking cookies, too.

When I got home, I always smelled the scent of them in the air.

Sometimes she brought over a plate of cookies, smiling with her lipstick just slightly crooked, insisting they were her husband’s favorite.

I always politely took them. . .and when she left. . .I threw them away.

Tonight she sat down by the window in a floral robe and waved at me with a warm smile.

Did you see Dominic’s cock too? Or did you just miss it?

I doubted it. If she had, she would have been on the phone with the police.

Whatever peace she’d lost in that kitchen years ago, she hunted for it in everyone else’s sins.

Alright get back in the kitchen.

I had to move.

If I stood there another second, I would combust.

Back in the house, I shut the door because I needed a wall between me and the night, between me and what I had just seen.

Wow. Now this is a Mother’s Day that will go down in the history books as the hottest one yet.

The lock slid into place with a click that sounded calmer than I felt.

I pressed my back to the door, trying to breathe. And then the absurdity of it all crashed over me.

Again and again the memory circled back: his hand, that cock, those eyes.