Unholy Vices
Sunday morning arrives with the indifferent cruelty of a deadline.
Baxter stands in the kitchen's centre island, scrolling through his phone with the intensity of a man watching his empire dissolve in real time.
The distributors have spoken. Forty-seven messages, all variations of the same theme: Unreal artsy greenhouse footage. Go smuttier. We want the Dutchman and the cook. We want them watching. We want them knowing. We want them hard and wet and hating themselves for it.
He pockets the phone and rolls an unlit cigar between his fingers, surveying the kitchen with a producer's cold calculation. The space is perfect for this—exposed brick, copper pots hanging from wrought-iron racks, a farmhouse sink deep enough to drown in.
Morning light cuts through lace curtains in geometric patterns, illuminating dust motes that dance like stage fog.
Minnie stands at the counter, her orthopaedic shoes squeaking against the tile as she measures flour into a volcano of semolina. Her hands move with the mechanical precision of ritual, building the dough that will become tagliatelle.
She does not look up. She has not looked up since Baxter entered, though her fingers find the miraculous medal at her throat with the frequency of a nervous tic.
"Minnie." Baxter's voice carries without rising, that baritone that fills rooms. "You'll be making pasta this morning. Fresh. From scratch. The long way."
Her hands still over the flour. "I always make it fresh, Mr. Baxter."
"You'll make it slower." He moves to the refrigerator, extracts a paper bag of crayfish that Harold sourced from the fishmonger before the road closed.
"Harold will be joining you. Shelling these. At the counter. Beside you."
Minnie's jaw tightens. She does not ask why. She has worked in this house long enough to recognize the architecture of Baxter's productions—the way he arranges bodies like furniture, the way he stages domesticity as backdrop to depravity. Her thumb rubs the medal until the metal warms against her skin.
"And the young miss?" she asks, finally.
"Lily will be down shortly." Baxter sets the crayfish on the counter with a wet thud. "With Simone."
The medal catches light as Minnie's hand drops. She resumes her flour measurement, but the scoop trembles now, sending white clouds across her apron's embroidered crosses.
Harold arrives precisely seven minutes later, as if summoned by some internal clockwork. His secateurs hang at his belt, incongruous against the kitchen's domestic theater.
He carries himself with the upright grace of a man who has learned to move through spaces without disturbing them, his leather boots making no sound on the tile.
"Crayfish," Baxter says, gesturing to the bag. "At the counter. Beside Minnie."
Harold's eyes move from the bag to Minnie to the space between them where the counter provides just enough room for two bodies working in parallel.
He understands. He has always understood more than he lets on—that Dutch tolerance that Baxter exploits, that deliberate blindness that has kept him employed and complicit for eight years.
He removes his pocket watch, sets it face-up on the counter where he can monitor the hour. Then he rolls his sleeves higher, revealing forearms mapped with veins and sun damage, and begins the methodical work of cracking shells.
The sound is obscene. Wet snaps. The tearing of chitin. Harold's fingers work with the same gentleness he applies to his orchids, extracting meat from armor, but the acoustics of the kitchen amplify every rupture.
Minnie's wooden spoon scrapes against her mixing bowl in counter-rhythm, a desperate percussion against the wet sounds of Harold's labor.
They do not speak. They have not spoken of consequence in months, perhaps years—their conversations limited to household logistics, to the exchange of ingredients and tools, to the weather and the garden's needs. Now they stand shoulder to shoulder in the morning light, and Baxter watches from the doorway like a director pleased with his blocking.
Lily descends the stairs at 9:47, according to Harold's watch. She wears cream-colored pajama pants with a small floral print, an oversized cardigan slipping off one shoulder, her honey-blonde hair still tangled from sleep.
She moves with the unselfconscious softness of a girl who has never been hungry, never been watched with predatory intent, never learned that innocence is a currency that devalues with age.
"Dad?" she calls, though Baxter is not her father, has never been her father, has only ever been the man who pays for her comfort.
"You wanted me?"
Baxter turns from his position at the kitchen's edge. "In here, Lily. I've arranged something for your allowance. The increase we discussed."
She enters with the eagerness of a nineteen-year-old who still believes that money comes from effort, from merit, from being pleasing. Her bare feet pad against the tile, and she stops when she sees Minnie and Harold at the counter, their parallel labors, the strange tension that hums between them like a note held too long.
"Mr. and Mrs.—I mean, Minnie and Harold." She corrects herself with the politeness of a girl raised by teachers. "Good morning."
Minnie's spoon falters. Harold's fingers, his bare fingers now, pause inside a crayfish shell. Neither responds. They have been instructed not to, Baxter realizes. They have learned their roles without a script.
"Simone will be joining you," Baxter says. "You'll be working together this morning. A project."
Lily's forehead creases. She tucks hair behind her ear, that gesture of nervous thought. "What kind of project?"
The answer arrives in the form of Simone herself, entering from the servants' corridor in her absurd French maid uniform. The skirt is shorter than regulation, Baxter notices with distant approval.
The lace headpiece sits crooked, applied in haste. Her chestnut hair, usually pinned in its neat twist, escapes in strands that cling to her neck where she has already begun to sweat.
She stops when she sees Lily. Stops when she sees the kitchen, the counter, Harold and Minnie frozen in their domestic pantomime. Her hands find her apron's hem and smooth it, smooth it, that nervous tic that betrays her composure.
"Mr. Baxter." Her voice carries the Italian lilt that distributors find exotic, marketable. "You wished to see me?"
"I wished to film you." He gestures to the kitchen's expanse, the copper pots, the lace curtains, the dumbwaiter in the corner that connects to the upper floors like a throat.
"You and Lily. Together. While Minnie prepares lunch and Harold extracts our protein."
Simone's olive skin pales. She looks at Lily—really looks at her—and sees a nubile, a privileged girl, a young woman who has never had to wear ridiculous uniforms or send money home to grandmothers in coastal towns.
She sees her own nineteen-year-old self, before the city, before Baxter, before the slow erosion of dignity that led her to this kitchen on this Sunday morning.
"I don't—" Simone begins.
"Ten thousand dollars." Baxter names the figure that has silenced her before. "Each of you. Transferred before noon."
Lily's eyes widen. The amount means something to her—means possibility, means validation, means her stepfather finally seeing her as worthy of investment. She does not understand the context. She has never understood the context, wandering through this house like a character in a novel she hasn't finished reading.
"Simone," she says, and her voice is kind, eager, devastatingly sincere. "We could split it. For the project. If that would help?"
Simone's composure cracks along a fault line Baxter has been mining for months. She looks at Lily's outstretched hand, the class ring on her right finger, the gold chain at her throat that speaks of dead mothers and inherited grief.
She looks at Harold, who has resumed his crayfish cracking with renewed intensity, and at Minnie, whose wooden spoon scrapes the bowl in a rhythm that might be prayer.
"Where?" Simone asks Baxter, but she is already moving toward Lily, already accepting the hand that waits for hers.
"The counter," Baxter says. "The floor. Against the refrigerator. Wherever the light falls best."
He does not mention Noel, stationed at the kitchen door in his unzipped coveralls, his grown-out crew cut catching morning light. He does not need to mention Noel. The mechanic's presence is atmospheric, decorative—Baxter's insurance against genuine resistance, his witness to the transaction.
Noel leans against the doorframe with the deliberate slouch that undermines his military bearing. His arms cross. His half-lidded eyes take in the kitchen, the women, the domestic scene arranged for destruction. He does not speak. He has been paid to watch, and watching is what he will do.
Simone leads Lily to the counter's edge, her hand still clasped in the younger woman's fingers. The height differential is slight—Simone's heels against Lily's bare feet—but it creates a dynamic of guidance, of initiation, that Baxter recognizes from a thousand productions.
The experienced leading the innocent. The corruptible corrupting.
"Have you ever—" Simone begins, then stops. She cannot ask what she wants to ask. Cannot ask if Lily has ever touched another woman, ever wanted to, ever lain awake in dormitory beds imagining hands that were not her own.
"I had a roommate," Lily says, and her voice carries the particular intimacy of confession. "Sophomore year. We would practice kissing. For when we had real boyfriends."
Simone's laugh escapes unbidden, a sound that startles Minnie's spoon into stillness. "Practice," she repeats. "For boys."
"She said I was too eager." Lily's flush spreads from her cheeks to her throat, disappearing beneath the cardigan's edge. "That I used too much tongue."
Simone's free hand rises to Lily's face, tilting her chin. The gesture is instructional, maternal, erotic in its restraint. "Show me," she says. "What you learned."
The kiss begins with the hesitation of genuine inexperience—Lily's lips pressing too firmly, her tongue indeed too eager, seeking entrance before invitation. Simone allows it, permits the clumsiness, then guides with her own mouth: softer, slower, a language of pressure and retreat that Lily learns with the adaptability of youth.
Baxter films with his phone, but his attention divides between the viewfinder and the counter behind them, where Harold has cracked seven crayfish in the time it takes for the kiss to deepen. The Dutchman's fingers work with mechanical precision, extracting meat from shell, but his pocket watch has turned face-down. He will not time this. He will not measure what he cannot acknowledge.
Minnie's dough has reached the kneading stage. She turns it onto the floured counter with a sound like a sigh, her hands pressing and folding, pressing and folding. The motion is sensual despite her intention, the dough yielding beneath her palms in ways that mirror what happens behind her.
She does not turn. She has been instructed not to turn. But her shoulders tighten with each wet sound from the women's mouths, each soft moan that escapes Lily's throat as Simone's hand finds the cardigan's buttons.
The garment opens to reveal a fitted tank top beneath, pale pink against Lily's fair skin. Simone's fingers trace the neckline, following the cotton's edge, and Lily arches into the touch with the unconscious responsiveness of someone who has never learned to hide wanting.
"May I?" Simone asks, and the formality is absurd, is heartbreaking, is exactly what Baxter needs for the footage.
"Please," Lily whispers.
The tank top lifts over her head, revealing breasts that are small and high with nipples already tightened in the kitchen's morning chill. Simone's hands cup them with the reverence of first contact, thumbs brushing across the sensitive peaks, and Lily's gasp is loud enough to still Harold's fingers inside a crayfish shell.
"Beautiful," Simone says, and the word is Italian in its intonation, a caress that transcends language.
She bends to take a nipple into her mouth, and Lily's hands find Simone's headpiece, dislodging it so that chestnut hair spills across her shoulder. The lace falls to the tile, forgotten, as Simone's tongue circles and sucks, as her teeth graze with controlled pressure that makes Lily's knees buckle.
"Oh," Lily breathes, a prayer without deity. "Oh, I didn't—no one ever—"
Simone lifts her head, lips swollen, and smiles with the warmth of genuine pleasure. "Men are impatient," she says. "They do not understand waiting."
She returns to her work, moving to the other breast, and Lily's hands find purchase on the counter's edge, her knuckles white against the marble. Behind them, Minnie has begun to roll her dough, the wooden pin creating a rhythm of expansion and compression, the pasta thinning beneath her hands as Lily's resistance thins beneath Simone's mouth.
Baxter moves to capture the angle from behind, the way Simone's maid uniform frames her ass as she bends, the contrast of professional servitude and intimate service. He notes Noel's position at the door, unchanged, the mechanic's face betraying nothing though his arms have uncrossed, though one hand has found the doorframe's edge and grips with visible tension.
"Simone," Baxter says, and his voice is direction now, production. "The floor. Show her how you like to be touched."
They descend together, Simone guiding Lily's descent with hands at her waist, until they kneel on the tile between the counter and the refrigerator. The position places them beside Minnie's feet, close enough that the cook could reach down and touch them if she chose, if she were permitted, if her hands were not occupied with dough that has reached the cutting stage.
Simone lies back, pulling Lily with her, and the younger woman follows with the eagerness of discovery. They arrange themselves in the sixty-nine position with the grace of mutual desire—Simone's skirt bunched around her waist, Lily's pajama pants pushed to her knees, their mouths finding each other's most secret places with an urgency that transcends performance.
The sounds that fill the kitchen are no longer domestic. Wet, rhythmic, desperate—Simone's tongue probing Lily's inexperienced folds, Lily's tentative licks becoming bolder as she learns the landscape of another woman's desire. They moan against each other, vibrations traveling through flesh, and Minnie's knife falters over the pasta strips she has begun to cut.
Harold has stopped entirely. His hands rest among crayfish shells and extracted meat, motionless, his eyes fixed on the pocket watch that faces away from him. He does not turn. He has never turned. But his breathing has changed, has deepened, has become audible in the spaces between Lily's gasps.
"Good girl," Simone murmurs against Lily's thigh, the words vibrating through sensitive tissue. "Just there. Yes. Like that."
Lily's response is wordless, her mouth too occupied, her hands gripping Simone's hips with the desperation of someone finally understanding what she has been missing. She licks with increasing confidence, finding the rhythm that makes Simone's thighs clench around her head, that draws from the older woman sounds that are unmistakably genuine.
Baxter circles them, capturing every angle, the way Lily's fair skin flushes pink against Simone's olive tones, the way their bodies move in opposition and harmony.
He notes the moment when Simone's composure breaks completely—when her hips lift off the tile, when her fingers find Lily's hair and guide her deeper, when the Italian lilt in her voice becomes a cry that echoes against copper pots.
"Come here," Simone gasps, pulling at Lily's shoulders, reversing their positions.
She rises above the younger woman, straddling her face with the authority of experience, and lowers herself with controlled slowness that makes Lily whimper with anticipation. The first contact of Simone's cunt against Lily's mouth is electric—Simone's thighs tremble, Lily's hands grip the tile, and the sound that emerges is wet and desperate and real.
"That's it," Simone breathes, beginning to move. "That's it, darling. Taste me. Take it."
She grinds against Lily's face with increasing pressure, her hips rolling in circles that smear her arousal across the younger woman's cheeks and chin. Lily's eyes are closed, her mouth open and accepting, her tongue working with the enthusiasm of someone who has discovered purpose.
She cannot breathe properly, cannot speak, can only receive what Simone gives her—and she gives with abandon, her own orgasm building from the friction of Lily's mouth against her most sensitive places.
Minnie has abandoned her pasta entirely. She stands at the counter with her knife in hand, staring at the dough strips that curl like pale ribbons across the marble. Her other hand grips the counter's edge, and Baxter notices—he always notices—that her wedding band has turned inward, pressing against her palm in a way that must leave marks.
"Minnie," he says softly. "The sauce. You'll need to start the sauce."
She moves with the mechanical obedience of someone underwater, reaching for tomatoes, for garlic, for the olive oil that Simone's family might have pressed. Her hands shake as she chops, the rhythm irregular, and Harold finally turns his pocket watch face-up again though he does not look at it.
Simone's grinding has reached desperation. She rides Lily's face with abandon now, her French maid uniform disheveled beyond repair, her hair a wild curtain that hides her expression. Lily's hands have found Simone's thighs, gripping hard enough to bruise, pulling her down harder, wanting more, wanting everything.
"Please," Lily manages between pressures, the word muffled against flesh. "Please, I want—"
Simone understands. She lifts slightly, allowing breath, then descends again with purpose. Her fingers find her own clit, rubbing in tight circles as she uses Lily's mouth for deeper penetration, and the combination—tongue and fingers and the pressure of grinding—sends her over the edge with a cry that shatters the kitchen's domestic pretense.
She comes hard, soaking Lily's face, her thighs clamping around the younger woman's head in involuntary spasms. Lily moans into the flood, the vibration extending Simone's orgasm, her own hands moving between her legs to find the release she has been denied.
She fingers herself frantically, two fingers plunging into her soaked cunt, and comes seconds after Simone with a sound that is half-sob, half-laughter.
They fall together on the tiles, Simone rolling to the side, her hand finding Lily's face and wiping at the mess she has made with something like tenderness. They kiss again, sharing the taste of Simone's release, and Lily's fingers are still inside herself, moving slowly now, drawing out the aftershocks.
Baxter lowers his phone. He looks at Noel, still at the door, and sees what he expected to see—the mechanic's jaw tight, his hand still gripping the doorframe, his coveralls tented at the groin where he has not been permitted to touch himself. The watching has become its own torture, its own performance.
"Harold," Baxter says. "The crayfish. Minnie needs them for the sauce."
The Dutchman's hands move again, mechanical, extracting meat from shells that have begun to dry in the morning air. Minnie stirs her tomatoes with a wooden spoon that scrapes the pot's bottom in a rhythm that might be counting, might be praying, might be simply enduring.
Simone and Lily rise together, helping each other to stand, adjusting clothing that cannot be made decent. They lean against the refrigerator, thighs touching, and Simone tucks a strand of hair behind Lily's ear with a gesture that mirrors the younger woman's own nervous habit.
"Your allowance," Baxter reminds them, though the reminder is unnecessary. The transfer has already been initiated, the money moving between accounts while the women still taste each other on their tongues.
Lily looks at him with eyes that have changed, that have seen something she cannot name. "Thank you, Dad," she says, and the word is wrong, is right, is everything that makes this footage valuable.
Simone says nothing. She retrieves her lace headpiece from the floor, sets it crooked on her head, and moves to help Minnie at the stove. The cook flinches at her approach, then accepts the assistance with the resignation of someone who has learned that boundaries are temporary, that dignity is performance, that Sunday mornings are never sacred.
Harold finishes the crayfish. He sets the bowl of extracted meat beside Minnie's sauce pot, and their hands brush in the transfer—his calloused fingers, her soft palms, the gold band that has turned outward again, catching light.
Noel remains at the door. He has not moved, has not spoken, has not touched himself despite the evidence of his arousal. He watches Simone work at the stove, her uniform still disheveled, her movements still carrying the looseness of recent orgasm, and something in his half-lidded eyes has sharpened to something that might, in another man, be called longing.
Baxter pockets his phone and his unlit cigar. The kitchen smells of tomatoes and sex and crayfish and flour, a combination that will forever associate in his mind with this Sunday, this deadline, this particular desperation.
He has what the distributors want. He has Harold and Minnie as witnesses, as participants in their own exclusion. He has Lily's innocence converted to content. He has Simone's composure shattered and rebuilt in new configurations.
What he does not have—what he finds himself reaching for in the silence after the women's breathing has steadied—is the sense that this is sustainable. That there will always be new boundaries to push, new degradations to film, new combinations of bodies and shame that will satisfy an appetite that grows with every feeding.
Minnie's sauce begins to simmer. Harold's pocket watch ticks audibly in the quiet. And somewhere above them, in the mansion's labyrinthine upper floors, a phone buzzes with forty-eight messages, with new demands, with the future pressing against the present like a wave that has not yet broken.