Lily had come to New Zealand at age two. She’d begun working for my family a year before my mother’s disappearance and had been let go about eight and a half months into working there.
The maid and the scion of a rich family.
It sounded so simple and so sordid, but I’d never been the one in control in that relationship. I’d been a—barely—sixteen-year-old boy in awe of her sensuality, far too awed to even speak to her properly. That I’d get to see her naked one day hadn’t been a possibility I’d ever considered.
I also hadn’t been the only Rai to notice Lily.
My father used to stand in the doorway of his study and watch Lily as she swept and vacuumed and dusted. She’d never worn revealing clothes, not even anything particularly tight, but she’d been as sensual as a ripe peach bursting with juice.
My editor would immediately strike out that metaphor if I put it in a book, writing “cliché” next to it, but this cliché fit who Lily had once been. The quintessential young woman on the cusp of erotic discovery.
So when, one week after my sixteenth birthday, while my parents were out, she’d walked into my room and shut the door behind her, I hadn’t even thought of saying no. She’d stripped slow and easy, dropping her clothes to the floor one by one while I sat frozen in bed. Naked, she’d walked across the room to undo my pants, take out my cock. Her fingers on the turgid flesh had been the first time any hands but mine had touched that part of me since childhood’s end. Then she’d put her mouth on me.
The results had been inevitable. But she hadn’t laughed.
She’d just worked me up again, then taken my virginity, riding me to oblivion.
All of it in absolute silence, not a word spoken. She’d returned to my room five more times. My mother had fired her before the sixth, and I hadn’t seen her again until I returned home a month ago.
As always when I looked at her lovely oval face, I remembered both the pleasure she’d given me, and the nausea I’d felt the day after my mother fired her, when I’d overheard my parents fighting.
“You slept with her! You’re going to be screwing schoolgirls next.”
“I did not sleep with our maid.”
“So her panties appeared under your desk by magic?”
Since then, part of me had wondered. Had Lily been having sex with both father and son? Maybe I’d ask her. Not today, with Trixi and Lexi listening to every word—no doubt to mentally record for later broadcast.
I still liked them. Unlike most people, the two women didn’t hide who they were or pretend for an audience.
“Coffee please, Lily,” I said. “Usual.”
She moved jerkily to the gleaming machine and I wondered not for the first time how she’d afforded this place—and how she kept it going. Yes, it had the local traffic but that was hardly bustling. When Calvin originally set up the café, it had been as a “hobby” shop designed to occupy Diana. They’d sold it off to a similar couple after the birth of their first child, and that couple had later on sold to Lily.
Lily certainly didn’t seem to be hurting. Her black sweater and jeans weren’t from the budget shop, and the sparks in her ears were diamonds. Nothing ostentatious, but obvious to a man who’d grown up with a mother who’d hoarded jewels and a father who’d thought he could buy anything if he offered enough carats in exchange. I’d wondered more than once if Lily had a rich lover in the background, one who wanted to keep his mistress close.
The Cul-de-Sac had plenty of possibilities: my father, Calvin, and let’s not forget Hemi Henare. The school principal and recipient of generational wealth via his wife was the model “outstanding” citizen, but those were often the people with the biggest secrets.
Then there was Isaac, owner of an ad agency and an inveterate gamer. He was also a player in another sense; in his late forties, he was already on wife number four. According to Trixi, said wife—the plump and voluptuous Mellie—had been his side-piece while he’d been married to wife number three.
Last but not least was Adrian. Much younger than the others, but owner of his own gym in the local town center—and often in the Cul-de-Sac for personal training sessions with a clientele that seemed to skew almost fully female.