the mother that stepped up

The door got caught on a loose converse shoe when your daughter tried to slam it behind her, and it swings halfway open as you peek your head through the opening. Ellen threw herself face first onto her sex-messy bed, still barely clothed in striped panties and a baggy t-shirt, and you have to admit it's cute how she's kicking her feet while she groans into her pillow with emphatic frustration. Her door is always open while she's awake, and most of the time when she's asleep, so you sidle in through the open door, and knock against the thick white frame.

Ellen turns and looks at you with one eye, then she turns back and digs her face into the grey case lining her plush pillow to suppress a scream. It makes you cringe a little, but not back out of the room - when she's actually mad at you, it's not this. It's too many words and not-quite-yelling and she just has to tire herself out before she passes out on the couch with red eyes and rumpled hair, ready for an emotional reset when she wakes up with a crick in her back and repentance in her posture.

This is different. She's been sneaking around more, staying out late, evading your questions about where she's been, leaving her window open with the screen removed, like you wouldn't notice. You've noticed marks on her skin, dancing under the necklines of shirts dramatically lower cut than her usual choices during the summer. She always just blows up at you when you ask her about something she did wrong… So hiding? It had to be something.

And it was. The woman who just rushed out the front door could be a member of your wine-and-book club; if they let clones attend the same meetings. You watched from the porch as your barely dressed daughter rushed out behind her to insist in an indiscrete volume that her sexual tryst hit her up again once she 'figured out all this' while she gestured at you. From the dirty look Ellen ricocheted at you off the concrete of the porch when she huffed her way back into the house, you got the impression that her request was turned down.

It might be prompting her to throw a one-sided argument at you to say "Um, Ellen, what, was that?" but she just flips over and throws her pillow across the room into the overstuffed closet instead. "Ugh" is all you get in response as she stares at the ceiling and sporadically huffs. Another mom might have stepped away and transitioned the awkward conversation to text messages, or at least asked her to pull one of her mussed sheets over herself for this conversation, but Ellen's always worn so little around the house that this is honestly above par. Body freedom and sexual freedom are human rights, so you've let her do what she wants. Lord knows she didn't have nearly enough freedom before she moved in with you.

She's got plenty of space on her california king mattress, so you move inside her room, step over a pair of recently evacuated jeans, and take a tentative seat on the edge of her bed. Your daughter rolls toward the far edge of the bed and crosses her arms across her chest and tightens up into in a ball, but then she immediately sticks her legs out straight a few seconds later. "What."

Your daughter has been as blunt as a hammer with you, so you might as well be a good mom and do her the favor in reverse. "She looked just like me."

"Uh-huh."

"And?"

Ellen flips back over and deliberately matches your gaze before she rolls her eyes with an affectation of Sisyphian exhaustion. "And what?"

"Is she the one you've been seeing?"

She laughs. "Seeing?"

You lift a hand in the air. "Seeing? Is there… another word for that?"

"Fucking. Fucking, mom, she's the woman I've been fucking. One of them."

Your head bounces back an inch. One of them? You make a kindergarten-educated guess: "Are they all older women?"

"Yeah."

"Wwww… why? Why not girls your age?"

She says it like it's obvious: "It doesn't work."

Your eyes narrow. She has a MILF fetish? At her age? "Is it because they're older?"

"Sort of."

This is a much weirder '20 questions' than the games you played when you were breaking the ice with her after she came into your care. You cut through another five circuitous queries with the one that most directly addresses your curiosity. "Do they… all look like me?"

Something stills your daughter, and her eyes lock on your face, green in all the ways yours have never been. Uncharacteristically, she just nods instead of speaking.

Some… strange, elusive energy seems to hitch a ride with the sound of crickets to sneak through the window and into the room. "Wwwww… whyyyyy… are you seeing older women that look like me?"

She rolls her eyes again. Ever the teenager. "I'm not seeing them, mom."

"Okay… fucking then. Do you want to tell me why you're fucking women that look like me?"

You didn't expect her to say yes, but she sits up and scoots back against the wall with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eyes evade yours in that way that they never have before this… whatever it is started, and the vulnerability in her energy makes you scoot forward a few feet, nearly within arm's reach.

A few moments pass, and you know her well enough that she wants your maternal touch right now, so you move a little closer and put a hand gently on her knee. She leans her head down and rests her forehead against the back of your hand, and then murmurs something that you can't quite catch, so you ask "Come again?"

Her head flicks up in a manner that might convey spite, but instead she looks timid when she makes eye contact and clarifies: "Because the first time someone ever made me cum she looked like you."

Oh. You start to lean away from her, but she catches your hand before you make any distance, and there's fear in her eyes at the admittance, so you stay close, against your natural reflex. It's all you can do to try to process the moment to repeat "The first… girl who made you cum looked like me?" She nods, and you continue "So, you're finding women that look like her?"

Ellen's cheeks instantly bloom so red that you'd be worried she had a fever if she sat down for breakfast wearing that kind of blush on her face, and that's answer enough. You can't put the exact realization to words, but you've found your way to the fulcrum of the conversation. Something else finds its way out of your jaw, something that's ready to implode and make the confidence as a mother deep in your core collapse. "You're trying to find affection from another woman who looks like me because I don't care enough?"

Her eyes instantly spark in denial. "No! No no no no no!" Her legs tighten to her chest and she yanks your hand with them, pulling you inches closer. You can't help the incipient volume of your fears forcing you to say "You need something from me that I'm not giving you."

Your daughter tucks your hand all the way against her lips and kisses the back of your fingers. "No, mom! I love you, you're good, you're great, you're my real mom, I love you so much!"

The softness of her lips against your skin is the point in reality that tethers you to still believing that you're a good mother, and as you flex your fingers slightly, she kisses them again, and… again, and again and again and-

There's a hunger in her eyes, a need, she's staring at your fingers and her kisses are drifting toward frantic, not with mania but with a… desire.

Your heart burns with a beat of adrenaline and you try to pull it away, but her grip stays tight enough to demand custody of the tips of your fingers, and they brush between her lips. Her breath on them is hot, and it makes something tingle in someplace strange, someplace you've never felt. Ellen's eyes flick to you and lock as you try to pull away, and there's a… fixation on you that goes deeper than this moment in her expression.

Less emphatic than even the first partial attempt to free yourself, you lean back again, but your daughter follows your fingers with her lips and kisses their tips with an open mouth. The moisture on your skin seems matched by the sweat on hers, but an order of magnitude more blooms from your pores when she asks "Please" with a face clearly as mortified to have said it as enthralled to have made the attempt.

"Elle, what are you-" Your question is cut off when your daughter closes her eyes and moves her head forward to slip three of your fingertips into your mouth and suck. Your bones seem to be made of fire, all smoking coals on a briquet of burning disbelief at the moment. Your eyes are locked on her pink lips, moist and moving gently with her motions, and you can't tell if it's been seconds or minutes when she releases and looks at you with vulnerable eyes to say "I just need this, mom."

It's your baby girl right in front of you, the one that took you as her mother even faster than she truly became a daughter to you. She's been looking for sexual gratification from strangers, ones who don't even really care about her like you do, and…

And you can't! You can't be that to her, you can't do that to her, you're her mother.

She can see something in your face, reading how you react even better than you can feel your face emoting, and that sugar-sweet smoothie of fear and vulnerability pours over her features again. Something inside you wordlessly resists the prospect of making her feel that way, and in a sense of surreality, you press your fingertips further into her mouth.

Ellen's eyes spark with surprise, then she sucks with emphasis and moans on your fingers. The sin of a moment that would have made you never sign her custody papers drapes a heat over your eyes, and you pull your fingertips back a mote and then push them in further. You can immediately sense from her salivation just what it's doing for her, and there's a peculiar haze starting to creep over the emotional foliage in the back of your mind. A spirit not entirely your own asks "Just this? Elle? Just… this?" At your last word you push your fingers further, and she moves her head toward you, taking you up to your second knuckle with a soaking wet mouth.

She sucks hard and deep on you, and then the abscess of suction smacks her lips open for her to say "Please, mom, just this?" while she gives you the most heart-wrenchingly torturous puppy-dog eyes you've ever seen.

Your breath burns hot and heavy out of a mouth wordlessly breathing a cooperation that hasn't caught up with your cognitive faculties yet, and Ellen sees your agreement before you feel it. She laps her tongue out to trace along your fingerprints, and then leaves her tongue extended for you to start to stroke with your fingers. She's so smooth and soft, and warm, and little unconscious sounds are finding their way out of her exposed throat while the wet texture of her tongue leeches a sexuality into the moment that some level of your brain still wants to try to shut itself away from.

Her reverence for the erotic touch is complete, and your fingers find a tender dance with her tongue, gentle pressure, moderate brushes, little taps, a vague squeeze, and within a few tantalizingly unceasing minutes, you're running your fingertips in broad strokes along the full length of her tongue, and her hands have drifted down to her clothes. At first she just starts to grope her breasts through the fabric, but her patience fails her faster than your faculties can adjust to the first stimulation, and the motions of your hand become clumsy as your eyes lock on her exposed chest when she frees it to pinch at her own nipples.

"Ellen, you can't, I'm-"

Clumsy, through a mouth half full of fingers she hastily replies "You don't have to look! Don't look, just this." She flicks her head up to indicate your fingers, and then moves her head forward to suck on them with deep emphasis.

Against all reason, you adjust closer to her to accomplish an easier angle for blood flow to your soaked fingers, and when you do, your thighs call to fierce attention just how much arousal has saturated you while you fingered your daughter's mouth. Shame tries to boil off all the skin on your face, but your blood is pumping elsewhere with too much ferocity for it to manifest as more than a cloud of dissociated guilt behind your mind. After all, it's just… this. You're not fucking her, you're not doing what that woman was when you walked past the open door, you're just…

This.

You can feel yourself start to pant as your daughter's pace on your fingers picks up, and one of her hands drifts down between her legs, just out of your sight. The image you had of those striped panties burns in your mind, given fundamentally different context in this moment than the chaste nothing you felt when you came into the room and sat down. You can picture the fabric becoming moist, her fingers tracing across them, gently pushing at sensitive places, pressing flat from bottom to top-

Ellen moans on your fingers with a clumsy sound, and it makes you realize that you'd started to press in and out of her with even more emphasis. That thread of apprehension at the moment manages to snake out a tendril and start to pull your hand away from your daughter's face, but her lower hand darts up to grab your wrist as she demands "More."

You try to say something, no, or yes, or anything, but all you do is give a startled little moan of your own. At the sound, Ellen quickly slides down the wall and yanks at your wrist to force your fingers back into her mouth, and you clumsily adjust onto the bed with one free hand, ending up with one leg between your daughter's. You can feel her fingers moving inside her now, bumping against your thigh at an irregular pace, not quite matching yours as you fingerfuck her mouth, but trying, clumsy as her body is in her arousal.

Your own arousal is becoming nearly painful, vicious pressure between your legs restrained behind a barrier that even in this warped moment you know you won't cross to try to satisfy. The pulsing in your sex becomes a pulsing in your head, which in turn becomes a pulsing in your fingers, and the gasps and little gags your daughter is giving at your increasing pace and depth are drowning things in your brain that aren't ever supposed to get wet. You can feel noises coming from your own mouth, ones that add more wood to the already burning moment, and within moments you're already panting just as hard as your daughter is, braced above her on knees and one hand while she fellates your fingers with such emphasis that she might never have looked at another part of a woman's body before.

Something starts to burn, and a part of you that isn't inside Ellen's mouth realizes that it's the part of your thigh contacting your daughter's sex as she grinds against you, jerky and irregular while her attention continues to stay focused on your invasion of her mouth. A devil in one part of your body twitches your leg forward to push against her, but some shell of motherhood locks it back in its previous place when you hear the perverse moan under you at the friction.

Stopping your motion did the opposite for your daughter, and she starts to jerk her crotch against you harder and harder, her mouth's movements on your fingers turning long and slow, sucking hard and deep as she bucks against you, breath spastic and short while she grinds herself up and over the threshold of climax and onto a plane of dazed euphoria that glazes her half-open eyes when she collapses limp onto the bed under you.

All of your skin bristles with the change of the moment, and you slowly slide your fingers back out of her mouth, a trail of saliva connecting your skin to her lips for a long, tense second, but then the spell is broken, and the catastrophe of what you'd just done collapses onto the immovable foundations of your home around you. You're in your daughter's room, while she lies under you with her shirt pulled up over her chest and her panties pulled away from her sex, exhausted like she'd finished what she'd started with a woman that looked just like you, but instead it was her mother that just fingerfucked her mouth to completion. Sweat and shame saturate your skin in equal measure, and a voice with more fear than a daughter should hear from her mom asks "Was that enough, Elle? Was that what you wanted?"

Something kicks in your stomach when she clumsily nods with heavy eyelids, and you purse your lips as you pull back and stand up, careful to keep your wet fingers from touching her bed, unwilling to imbue them with more profanity than what just took place. You try to close the door behind you when you leave, only for it to hitch on the same shoe, and it swings open while you find the kitchen sink, slower in body than your mind as it searches to try to find a way to get clean. Your clean hand pushes the lever on the sink to run the water, and that same feeling that made you do such a filthy thing to your daughter tries to press your face into an image of taking those spit-wet fingers into your own mouth to suck at your dear Ellen's saliva with just as much desperate emphasis as she showed your skin.