Step erotica- where in-laws, step relatives, and parental/filial lovers have forbidden incest-adjacent sex- is one of the most popular tropes in erotica and porn. To see for yourself, just take a quick detour to PornHub, where the first result on the homepage today is “Sis Loves Me - Horny Stepbro Turned His New Stepsister His Personal Sex Doll,” or Medium, where the first search result for “erotica” today is “My Dad’s Girlfriend Caught Me Watching Porn.” But while I’ve written a lot of taboo-facing erotica- leaving my second wife to sleep with men, an Ash Wednesday threesome, and gay vampire sex in the French Quarter- I’ve studiously avoided that red-hot trope.
There’s a simple reason for that: it actually happened to me as a child. That’s right: when I was a teenager in the deep South, already a font of incest jokes and horror stories, my barely legal stepmother hit on me. And it wasn’t hot at all.
My father was a maritime attorney based in Baton Rouge; he no longer practices, because he was disbarred for stealing money from his clients. Long before he divorced my mother, I knew he slept with his staff. When I was around twelve years old, I walked in on him kissing his secretary. This led to an excruciating conversation wherein he told me that sometimes good friends kiss each other and it doesn’t mean anything else, but I nevertheless shouldn’t tell his secretary’s husband.
When he moved out of my mother’s house and pressured me into going with him, he already had a girlfriend. “Charlotte” was a divorce client of his; he eventually handed her case over to one of his law partners to keep his boning technically ethical. She had two kids of her own, who took the same bus to school with me from my mother’s house.
I remember Charlotte saying I was “incredibly mature” for my age (fifteen). We were in New Orleans, going to brunch at the Court of Two Sisters, one of those antebellum throwback eateries in the French Quarter featuring black wait staff in white tuxedos. My feelings were not mutual. I kept quiet about it, but it wasn't like I could miss that my father was an alcoholic womanizer and she was sleeping with her onetime attorney. And I had experienced the worst parts of his dark side a year earlier, when he molested me on an overseas trip. In short order, their drunken sex romps with me in the next room would contribute to my traumatic meltdown in front of his psychiatrist, which led to me spending Thanksgiving of 1996 in a mental hospital.
I Heard My Dad Fucking His Girlfriend
(I Had A Meltdown About It And He Locked Me Up)
Not exactly a thrilling smut prompt, is it?
When I got out of the hospital, I didn't speak to my father for several months. But I eventually moved back in with him. My mother was almost as abusive as he was, she lived in the middle of nowhere, and most importantly, I didn't want him to do to my siblings what he had done to me. As I approached seventeen, I was now bigger than he was, fitter, and taking martial arts classes. So during his visitation time, I made sure he was never alone with them. I never said anything about it; I didn't have to. Silently towering over him did most of the work for me.
Years later, my sister revealed that after I left for college, he abused her similarly to how he had me. But that's a different sad story.
When I moved back in with my father, he was sleeping with his latest secretary again. “Stella” was just three years older than me. She was also a single mother, who had her son when she was my age. My father had not separated from Charlotte during this time. I'm not sure when he did exactly, but shortly after I went back to living with him, Charlotte papered cars up and down our block with flyers calling him a cheating bastard. She also came to his back door one night screaming up at his window. Stella went to the window instead and screamed she would come out and kick Charlotte’s ass, and that was the last I heard of Charlotte.
Stella quickly moved in with my father, and it became an issue in my parents’ ongoing divorce. One day, my father informed me that he was leaving the house for “a few days.” My mother had filed an emergency court order prohibiting Stella from staying the night while my siblings were over. I would thus be my siblings’ custodian while he “sorted all this out.” I called my mother and asked her to please reconsider, and she smugly informed me that “your brothers and sister have a right to see their father” and she would be dropping them off at my father’s house even if no one was there at all.
Thus, for the next week I took care of my siblings, cooking for them, driving them to school, and putting them to bed at night. I took up chain smoking from the stress, and my insomnia became near-total. When my father came back with Stella, he revealed that they had gone to Mexico and gotten married. He also had gotten a tattoo of her name across his chest.
The court order was nullified, and I had my first step-mother. Our family excursions expanded to include Stella’s family, who hailed from north Louisiana, which is like south Louisiana without all of the refined culture and class. Stella’s father was the same age as my father; during her family potlucks they both would sit on the front porch, smoking cigars and grumbling about women.
Stella veered between seeing me as a confidante and a rival. On her twenty-first birthday she stumbled into the house and confided in me that she had gotten pulled over after cracking her first legally purchased beer in the car, and narrowly escaped a DUI. Once I came home to find an envelope on my bed with a strip of condoms and a poorly spelled note in her handwriting about the need for safe sex practices.
She also attempted to assert herself as a parent, with comical results. I continued to do the bulk of domestic work in my father’s house after he returned from Mexico, especially cooking. Stella would occasionally insist that she cook instead, and she was incredibly bad at it. My siblings once chimed in a chorus of complaints at her Shake-N-Bake creation, until both she and my father exploded that we all had to respect her as a head of household. While I was folding laundry one day, she swooped in to micromanage my technique, demanding I change the way I folded the towels and saying “you don’t have to like me, but you do have to respect me.”
The domestic status quo lasted about six months. Then I received yet another update from my father: Stella had boundary issues, and he had decided to “put her up in her own apartment.” Stella was not happy about this, to put it mildly. She retaliated by inserting herself in my life whenever she could, mostly by buying me cigarettes and beer.
And that was when she started flirting with me. The first time it happened, she was driving me home after dark, and more than a little drunk. After grumbling about what an asshole my father was, she suddenly laid a hand on my leg.
“You know, if you ever want to, you know, hang out,” she said in a slurred voice. “I’m always down for it. Just let me know, you have my number…”
“Got it,” I said after she trailed off into an awkward pause. She kept it up for the rest of my childhood, making suggestive comments, especially after she had fights with my father. I kept up noncommittal responses, and took the free cigarettes for what they were worth. By that time I was taking Benadryl to get a few ragged hours of sleep at night, or drinking until I passed out.
Shortly before I left for college, Stella threw a going away party for me at my father’s house. That was the first time I got blackout drunk. Stella played the role of party mom to me and my friends, guiding me to the bathroom to throw up and putting me to bed with a glass of Coke. The next morning I woke up with my first Never Again hangover, regardless that Never Again turned into Again for the next sixteen years.
The marriage didn’t even survive my freshman year in undergrad. The next time I visited my father on break, he was living with another woman, a court reporter in New Orleans. He’s now on his fourth, or possibly fifth wife; I stopped keeping track after a while. Stella went on to make money by being a surrogate mother; I saw her advertising her services on Facebook for several years. I’m not sure what became of her son.
My childhood has left many obvious marks. Without any notion of what a healthy relationship looked like, I ping-ponged between toxic relationships in undergrad before marrying a woman who hit and sexually assaulted me for fourteen years. My second attempt wasn’t much better: just like I had at my father’s house, I took on all the domestic work and all the emotional labor, while my second wife took more and more away from me. One of my divorce flings last year was with a woman over a decade younger than me, which arguably recapitulated my father’s second marriage. I still have severe insomnia; without a heavy dose of sleeping medication, I basically catnap for half an hour at a time at night, and spend my days as a zombie. Without several anti-depressants, I daydream about suicide several times a day. I’m a recovering alcoholic, and I can’t use cannabis responsibly either.
Some people with experiences like mine process it by writing step erotica, dubious consent/non-con, and other taboos. There’s nothing wrong with that; I can’t speak to what fixes other people. But it doesn’t work like that for me. The idea of step smut takes me back to those years in south Louisiana, where I had no power, the responsibility of a parent, nothing made sense, the rules didn’t matter, and I just wanted to get away.
My Barely Legal Stepmother Hit On Me
(And I’m Still Fucked Up From It At 43)
Sometimes, there’s just no sexy reclamation of your past. Sometimes all you can do is write it out of your life.
Such honest writing is sad, upsetting, heart-rending, but you told it well. Thought provoking. I'd never even thought that victims of trauma could use the 'kink' for want of a better word to explain it, as a writing prompt. I'd always assumed they would use teh opposite, so thank you for making me question things in a deeper sense. All I can say in response to your brilliant writing is I'm so glad you found writing as a 'therapy.'