Punishing the Brats

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17

Shared at the Beach

By Saffron Daughter

Chastity lay in bed, grinning. The very next day her step-father Matt would be taking her down to the coast for a weekend with him and his best friend. They were going to teach her how to surf! It was super exciting, and something she’d always said she was going to learn, but never quite got around to actually doing it.

Like so many other people, she had told herself she was going to do this, going to do that, and yet somehow never ended up doing any of it. She had wanted to write a book, try being a bartender, attempt to river raft, learn to surf, learn to play the drums, learn to play the clarinet, sign up for yoga classes, learn to make a crumble, go rock climbing, teach a parrot how to speak… the list went on, and at the age of twenty, none of it was on her life resume yet.

And to an ambitious girl like Chastity, headstrong and confident, this was simply unacceptable. Luckily, that was about to change. Matt was taking her down to the coast, to a beautiful, unknown beach that was apparently always empty (since nobody knew about it), where the sand was white and fine, and the water was clear, stained only by the dancing sunrays that played on its surface.

And best of all? Her Mum wasn’t coming! Chastity grinned in bed, hugging her spare pillow close and squeezing it in between her legs. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her Mum… no, nothing like that. It was just, she was a bit of a nag, was one of those kinds of mothers that always made her wear a layer more than she needed in winter; that always had her take medicine if she so much as coughed or felt just a tad under the weather. She was the kind of mother who was overprotective, thought the world was out to get her, thought everything could hurt her, and who though she was careless and stupid.

But Chastity knew she wasn’t stupid, and she knew she wasn’t timid. She wasn’t clumsy or careless. She wasn’t incapable or inept. She wasn’t afraid of nature or the world. If she had a cold, she fought through it. If she went out in winter with one layer too little, then so what? She’d brave the wind and rub her hands and clench her jaw and just get on with it.

And smile the entire time, too! Because that was Chastity. If she had to describe the way she approached life, she would say she takes the bull by the horns.

“Life?” she would ask, tilting her head to the side. “I don’t approach life. Life approaches me!”

She liked to think of her and her Mum as existing on opposite ends of the same spectrum, and that was only normal, she supposed. In some cases, the apple doesn’t fall far. In other cases, the apple rolls, keeps rolling, and doesn’t look back until its half a world away, laughing with incredulity at its Indiana Jones-esque escape.

Eventually, Chastity knew, when she graduated from university and when she got her first job, she would be out of the house… forever. The birds always leave the nest, and she couldn’t wait to fly.

But, for now, simply going on a weekend holiday with her step-father was enough. Somehow, against all odds, her Mum had actually suggested they go alone. Chastity reckoned that she probably just didn’t want to sit on the beach and watch her daughter learn to surf. She’d probably die of fear and anxiety.

“Are there rocks under the sand?”

“Don’t fall too hard against the waves!”

“Don’t swallow the sea water!”

“Why aren’t you wearing knee pads?”

Chastity rolled her eyes, imagining her mother on the beach shouting such useless, and sometimes weird, warnings at her while she repeatedly fell off a surf board, laughing, Matt’s strong hands helping her up…

She slowed her thoughts, coming around to a realization that she had perhaps been dragging her feet through the surf to reach. It wasn’t just the constant nagging and caution that made her glad her mother wouldn’t be coming. No, it was also that it gave her an opportunity to spend time with Matt alone. Despite her mother marrying him when she was just entering her teenage years, she felt she had never gotten to know her step-father.

At least, not as well as she would have liked to know him.

Correction. As she would still like to know him.

Sure, he took care of her, helped her with her homework, picked her up from school and was there for her, and listened to her spout poison when her friends were acting like bitches, but there had always been a barrier between them, something invisible and yet so palpable. It was an awkwardness born of attraction… she didn’t’ know if the attraction was mutual, but she certainly knew that on her end it was there.

Ever since she’d first seen Matt she’d fallen head over heels in love with him. Not that, at the tender age of twelve when she had first met him, that she had any inkling at all as to what love really was. Nor did she even have any notion of it now. That was something she suspected. After all, to a twenty year old, what is love?

But the true meaning of love aside, she knew she was attracted to him. At first, in a shy and unknowing way. She had felt awkward around Matt, couldn’t keep her eyes off him, and every time she was caught staring by him, she was mortified; horrified; embarrassed to death.

And when he didn’t catch her, she loved that she could look at him. She would do so endlessly in secret, grinning for no reason whatsoever, while she looked at his handsome, warm face. He had a chiseled jaw, a great smile, and lips that seemed somehow so inviting, even to her young self.

For ages when he had come over for dinner, before he and her mother got married, she would spend the entire supper blushing at the table, red as a tomato on a good day, purple as a beetroot on a bad day. Her mother thought she had been sneaking sips of wine, and that she was just getting tipsy, the silly woman. She had no idea that it was the man she had brought over that was driving Chastity nuts with confusion, with new and worrying feelings.

With feelings that she couldn’t quite understand, and sensations in her body she didn’t know what to make of.

But, as Chastity had gotten older, she had begun to understand her feelings better. Of course, when she started to develop, not just physically but mentally, too, her attraction or Matt turned sexual. By the time she was eighteen she was an expert at pleasuring herself to the image of him, to the idea of him.

And why? Why had Matt stolen her heart the first time she’d seen him? She had often asked herself that question, though the answer wasn’t difficult to find. Chastity didn’t consider herself a shallow person – she understood that there was more to people than simply the way they looked – but Matt was simply fucking gorgeous. Handsome and pretty at the same time, with narrow eyes that seemed to look right into you, seemed to read you from the inside out. He had a smile that could weaken knees, and when he was impassioned, whether angry or simply fervent, he was a hurricane of emotions, and wreaked similar havoc to anybody else who happened to be in his path. He was infectious. He sucked you up into him, was compelling and commanding, and all without being overly-authoritative or unapproachable.