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Last night I took Elodie from behind. Her juicy ass shook with each thrust, tits swaying in the same rhythm. Her pink pussy stretched tantalizingly around my cock. Both of us mesmerized at the sight of me railing her in the full-length mirror.

I woke up jacking myself like a madman. Soiled my sheets because a pervy guy like me couldn’t have stopped if I wanted to. Hated myself afterward.

Today, Elodie shows up in dark jeans and a white button-down, sleeves rolled to her elbows and enough buttons open to expose the shallow valley between her breasts and the scalloped edge of a pink-lace bralette. Her hair is loose, soft waves brush her shoulders.

God damn, I want to tear her shirt open, drag the lace beneath her breasts, and suck one nipple into my mouth until she’s arching against me and begging for more.

Blood starts heading south. I angle my hips away before my jeans betray me. At my size, there’s no discreet version of hard, and she’s standing close enough to count every inch.

Elodie smiles up at me, oblivious to the fight happening below my belt.

It pisses me the fuck off.

“Beau.” She turns a slow circle in the foyer, taking it all in. “This is a hotel. You live in a hotel.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” I growl.

Elodie tilts her head. “Um, it has a wing.”

She stops completely when she sees the pictures of Yolanda. Billie. Theo.

The wall up the staircase is nothing but framed photos of us over the years. Yolanda and I as a couple, many more with our kids. Professional family portraits I used to dread posing for but now am grateful to have.

Twenty-five years of our whole life in frames. Elodie stops at one of my favorites, Yolanda on her fortieth birthday. We went to Ibiza. She’s in a white dress, laughing, gold and glowing and so alive it still takes the wind out of me some mornings when I remember she’s truly gone.

At least, I had this reaction until the past few weeks.

Now I can barely look at my wife, even in pictures. She’d be so disappointed in me and my lustful thoughts about a girl younger than our daughter. This is why I didn’t want Elodie to come to my house.

It’s unnerving observing the subject of my sexual fantasies scrutinize the most important woman in my life.

It takes me a minute to realize she’s sizing herself up. It’s subtle, how she glances from the photo to the mirror. Elodie is comparing herself to a dead woman.

I’d give anything to tell her how stunning, kind, and insightful she is. Someone, someday, will proudly display her pictures on her own family wall and she’ll be as beloved to them as Yolanda is to me.

Besides, there’s no comparison between her and Yolanda, she shouldn’t ever feel like she’s losing anything to anybody.

“You kept everything up.” Her voice is careful. Not a question.

“Yeah. For the kids.” It comes out automatic. Then, because she has a way of eliciting true things out of me, “Except the kids don’t live here. Billie moved out the second she trusted me not to go off the deep end. Theo’s holed up in Pasadena getting his master’s degree. It’s only me and these photos now.” I look at the wall. “I’ve tried to take them down, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”

Elodie doesn’t say anything, which is exactly the right approach. I don’t need advice.

Sexual tension aside, it’s one of the reasons I gravitate toward her. She’s become a safe place to share my valid truth journey. Without judgment.

She presses her palm between my shoulder blades. The way you touch a horse to let it know where you are. It works. I’m able to shake off the blues and refocus.

We end up on the living room floor with a stack of photo albums between us, because the assignment wants the good, bad, and the sad, and all of it is in these books.

Elodie sits closer than she needs to. Every time she reaches across to turn a page she brushes her hand somewhere on me. My arm. Knee. Flat on my chest to, ostensibly, stop me flipping past a picture she likes. She hovers it there. A second longer than anyone reasonably occupies your space by accident.

Look, I’m no fool. I realize exactly what it means when a woman repeatedly invents reasons to touch you. Sweet, inexperienced Elodie is tentatively testing the waters. One touch at a time.

She must know my resistance can only last for so long.

“Oooh. Here’s one from the early days.” Elodie’s arm drags across my thigh as she points to a picture of me at twenty-five, all bleached hair and snarl.

Her breasts lightly rest against my upper arm as I flip through Limelight’s early years. There’s a few of the band in our old, beat-up van. Tons of live shots. One of Carter in the back of RKCNDY, with his son Zane in a stroller.