SUMMER
“Oh, fuck. Just like that…”
The sound came through my stepfather’s studio door just as my hand was about to knock.
I knew that voice. I ate breakfast across from it. I heard it tell my mother he was working late. Most nights, I heard it say, "Goodnight, kid," from the hallway, easy and warm, like I was something he was careful with.
It did not sound careful now.
I should have turned around. I had only driven over because Mom and I had torn into each other after dinner, and I needed the version of my stepdaddy who listened.
That was the pattern. She would tell me I needed to try harder, do better, be more responsible—always holding me to standards I felt I could never meet. I would tell her that her expectations were suffocating me, that I couldn’t keep living my life according to everything she thought I should be. And eventually, I would say something I couldn’t take back.
Then I would end up here, in the alley behind the shop, because my stepfather was the one person in that house who did not raise his voice at me.
He made coffee in the back room. He asked if I had eaten. He let me sit on the work stool and talk until my hands stopped shaking. I told myself that was all I had come for tonight.
The spare key was still under the receipt paper. His truck was in the alley. The front of the shop was dark.
I used the key the way I always did and slipped inside, moving quietly through the shop. Blank faces stared back at me from the shelves. Boxed wigs were stacked along the walls, and the faint smell of solvent mingled with the soap he used at the slop sink. I made my way toward the back, stopping at the studio door when I noticed the low lamp glowing beneath it—
I pushed the door a finger's width.
Hayes had his back to me. Broad through the shoulders. His work shirt shoved up his forearms. His pants were… open. He was standing behind a doll on the posing bench, one hand locked on its hip, the other fisted in brown hair.
The doll was face-down, wrists in padded cuffs, ankles strapped, cheek flat to the vinyl. He drove into it with a wet, heavy slap that made the bench knock against the wall.
“That’s it,” he grunted. “Take it. You don’t get to go stiff on me now.”
For a second, I just couldn’t put the pieces together. This was the man who had handed me a mug an hour after a fight last month and told me I did not have to go back inside until I was ready.
This was the man my mother still looked at like he had hung the lights. And he was… fucking a doll in the locked room, after he had told her not to wait up for him??
Shit, I saw all of him.
All.
His cock was thick, darker at the head, a vein standing out along the underside every time he pulled back. It shone. He was not gentle. He held the doll in the pose he wanted and used it like he had been starving in a house where my mother still reached for him in her sleep.
The doll’s hair was the same dull brown as mine. That was the first thing that caught my attention. Then the line of the shoulder. Then, the very familiar shape of a jaw.
I told myself custom-made dolls all looked a little like someone. I told myself I was tired and angry, and just seeing things. After all, they were dolls. They all came out of the factory looking more or less the same.
He drove in hard, and the bench knocked the wall.
“Summer,” he said into the doll’s neck. “Fuck, Summer.”
My brows shot up.
What…?
That… wasn't a slip. It didn't sound like one. Not like he had meant to say my…mother’s name. He said it into the doll’s neck while he was buried in it, and the floor under me seemed to tip.
I looked again. Carefully.
The mouth was a little too hard. The skin was a little too matte. There was a seam at the shoulder, if you knew where to look. It was my face. My mole. The birthmark almost no one knew I had. The scar on my right knee from the summer I wrecked my bike.
The doll looked so much like me.
My head was spinning….
He’s thinking about you, Summer
He’s fucking a fake you.
He's literally FUCKING a doll that looked like you!!