Free One Step Ahead by B. N. Lee

 

     
    “Your mother married well,” a teacher told her with a smirk. “Of course, to support all those kids, she’d have to. She’s lucky she’s so pretty…”
     
    Amy blushed bright red, and the other students tittered.
     
    Her small town high school was totally abuzz with the news that the poor Lee widow with five kids had married Jesse Johnson, the richest man in town, after a few months of dating.
     
    “When it’s love, it’s love,” Amy’s mother and new stepfather said to the world.
     
    Privately, Jesse Johnson made it politely clear that even if their mother had married him for his money, too bad, it wasn’t hers.
     
    He described the prenup as “iron-clad” protection: everything went to the kids. His kids. The ones from his first marriage.
     
    Amy had wanted to ask her mother why she’d marry a man who was with her in spite of her kids instead of one who loved them all and wanted to be part of the whole family.
     
    She didn’t bother.
     
    Her mother hadn’t always been inscrutable... Ever since Amy’s father died ten years before, though, leaving her mother with five small kids and a mountain of debt, it had felt like her mother got more distant every day.
     
    Besides. Jesse wasn’t locking them outside with bread and gruel. He was making the kids share bedrooms by age and gender, not by birth parents (so Amy and Jessica, as the oldest girls, got the first choice of bedrooms). He took the Lee kids on shopping trips for the same swanky clothing his own kids got, and he got them their own top-of-the-line phones and computers.
     
    They were invited on every trip, got every souvenir.
     
    The Johnsons just made it clear that they may get the baubles, the fancy little trappings of wealth, but the Lee kids wouldn’t be getting a Johnson inheritance.
     
    They certainly weren’t getting the Johnson name.
     
    Hell, it had been six months that they’d all lived together in the mansion, and Amy hadn’t even met the oldest Johnson kid - a guy named Josh, maybe a year older than her.
     
    Amy didn’t think she would any time soon. She was alone in the big house, finally.
     
    She’d been arguing for months that she didn’t need to go on every weekend trip, she had a lot of homework.
     
    Finally, her new stepfather, laughing, agreed with her. Her mother shrugged, and said that if Jesse thought it was okay, then Amy could stay home alone for the weekend.
     
    So, finally, there she was.
     
    She was barely eighteen, legally an adult, but with a house full of siblings, she'd never really had time alone to explore her body. She knew that she craved it. She'd touched herself through her clothing in stolen minutes, hiding in closets or the attic, but always with the fear of getting caught keeping her from finding out what she really wanted to know: What it felt like to have something inside her.
     
    She locked the room and climbed onto her bed. She was wearing a t-shirt, bra, and a skirt, and she'd gotten a pair of items to try from her bathroom. There was a thick toothbrush and a hairbrush with an even thicker handle.
     
    She knew that she should strip, but even with the door locked and her new stepsister gone for the weekend, she was afraid to get naked and have that much freedom to explore herself.
     
    'Why not?' she finally thought, 'This is my room and I am an adult, why can't I be naked?'
     
    She giggled and stepped off the bed, stripping out of her clothing and blushing at her own daring.
     
    She sat cross-legged on her bed again and, shivering a little with nerves, began to touch her breasts.
     
    Carefully, she cupped them and then stroked the nipples, shutting her eyes and pretending that it was a handsome man with his hands on her, teasing her own nipples to hard little nubs and gasping at the pleasure it brought her.
     
    She pinched them a little, she'd read that that was fun, and winced at the pain... but she felt a tingling between her legs as her body responded to the