Coming Through Moonlight (Pt. 1: The Farmhouse)
Coming Through Moonlight (Pt. 1: The Farmhouse)
Sometimes Fantasy Wins - paranormal erotica
This is a work of fiction that contains explicit sex scenes and strong language. It is intended for mature, adult readers aged 18 and older. Issues such as STD's and other risks of sexual conduct are, for the most part, ignored, which means this story is fantasy in that it takes place in a world where such complications do not exist. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Copyright © 2024 by Ema Stonig. All rights reserved. Published by Avenue Oh ™
Coming Through Moonlight - Pt. 1: The Farmhouse
(This is the 1st of two parts. Part 2 will post on October 29.)
Gracelyn’s assistant is halfway down the hall before she remembers the phone call. It has been another of those days. Too much to do in too few hours, and a lunchtime walk down to Georgetown wasn’t nearly enough time outdoors to compensate for the fact that while fall can be pleasant enough, soon it will be another DC winter of snow and ice, although if the last few years are any indication, it will be mostly ice.
Beth does a hard pivot in her Tory Burch pumps and returns to her boss’ office, opening the solid wood door after a quick warning knock but without waiting for permission.
Gracelyn is on a call, handsfree, titled back in her ergonomic chair, eyes closed, shaking her head as if warming up to reject whatever her caller is saying as soon as he pauses for breath, but sooner if she can’t hold back any longer.
Beth leans across the threshold, hand resting on the beautiful doorframe moulding which, originally installed before World War I, was meticulously restored when Gracelyn’s group bought the Dupont Circle townhouse five years ago. Statistical analysis money—what the Brits refer to as psephology.
“One second, Tom,” Gracelyn cuts off her caller, taps him on hold and makes eye contact with Beth, asking, “What’s up?”
“Forgot to tell you before: the funny lawyer handling your Aunt Millison’s estate called.” By funny, Beth does not mean comedic, but odd.
The lawyer is an older man who never sets foot in a city of any size unless absolutely necessary.
Beth, on the other hand, born 23 years ago in Brooklyn, considers DC as suburban or southern as she cares to go. “He said to tell you the trapper didn’t find any feral cats in the barn, but the real estate agent insists they’re there. Sorry I forgot to mention it before.”
“More pressing matters,” Gracelyn appreciates, adding, “Guess I’m going to have to go up there. Ever been to Pennsylvania Dutch country, Beth?”
It’s not that Beth wouldn’t like to spend time with Gracelyn away from work, but that’s probably not a good idea. And Pennsylvania Dutch Country? Isn’t the tagline, Where a Weekend Feels Like Eternity? Why couldn’t Gracelyn need to go to Manhattan or Boston?
Gracelyn interprets her assistant’s hesitation as disinterest—and, besides, why tempt what has for two years now been an avoided temptation—so, Gracelyn doesn’t push the invitation, and instead says: “Rent me a car, would you? A convertible.”
Forty-eight hours later, early Friday afternoon, Gracelyn is on I-95 north toward Baltimore heading for Pennsylvania, the top down to a black C-Class Mercedes, which isn’t exactly a bat-out-of-hell driving experience but will do.
The sun is shining, and the temperature is mild, so she has no complaints, weatherwise. However, this estate of her recently deceased godmother (who she always referred to as Aunt even though there is no blood relation) is becoming a bit of a pain in the ass.
Millison Kulp was the last surviving of four sisters, the rest of whom scattered across the country and married, while Millison remained single and never left rural Pennsylvania.
Exactly how Millison passed her days/years on that 35-acre farm has always been the subject of conjecture, and whenever Gracelyn was drawn into the discussion—people saying she must have some idea what went on up there—Gracelyn replied she did not.
Gracelyn may have been stretching the truth with that remark, but figures Aunt Millison’s business was Aunt Millison’s business. She always liked her godmother and can’t help thinking she is part of the reason Gracelyn, now 43, never married and has little interest in children other than spoiling her nieces and nephews with generous Christmas presents.
Millison, likewise it seems, liked Gracelyn, and trusted her, as Gracelyn is who Millison named in her Will as executor of her estate. Or maybe it was Gracelyn’s proximity, as she is Millison’s geographically closest relative. Or maybe it was Gracelyn’s annual visits, although she never stayed more than a night or two.
During some of those overnight stays, Gracelyn, in the small upstairs bedroom, would hear cats in the barn. Sometimes it was a single plaintive meow. Other times she’d be roused out of sleep by the sharp screeches of a nasty fight. Never, however, did Gracelyn ever see any cats. Aunt Millison didn’t own any and claimed she was allergic, but never minded cats in the barn because she said it kept down the mouse population.
That favorable point of view as to the cats, however, is not shared by the realtor Millison designated in her Will to sell the farm. That woman is insistent the cats be removed as their presence will negatively impact the sales price (and, thus, her commission).
The estate lawyer, who Garcelyn’s assistant refers to as “funny”, likewise wants the cats gone, although Gracelyn can’t help but think Aunt Millison wouldn’t have wanted that. Gracelyn isn’t sure she wants that.
Yesterday on the phone, Gracelyn’s idea that another trapper be brought in was met with a brief silence by the lawyer, whose eventual response was that they could discuss the matter when she got there. Apparently while he doesn’t want to find himself dispatched to any large city, he has no qualms requiring others to spend time in the middle of nowhere.
Then again, Gracelyn doesn’t mind this break from DC, where her work hours are long, her romantic life has turned non-existent, and the days since she last had an orgasm worth noting have become too numerous to count. Not to mention, something about that upstairs bedroom in Aunt Millison’s house always makes her feel like she’s 22 again.
The plain little room holds a certain sexual energy for Gracelyn, who when she was a lost soul just out of college, unsure what path to take in life, spent a summer with Aunt Millison. Often, in bed at night, when it was so quiet and peaceful, and moonlight shone through the window like a voyeur, Gracelyn would make herself come, and that pleasurable experience always left her feeling as if everything was going to work out just fine.
It also spoiled her a little, because for most of her adult life, many of her more fulfilling sexual moments have been experienced solo. She finds it efficient, free of emotional entanglements, and rarely disappointing. Men, on the other hand, tend to be none of the above … although she has had some excellent sex with men.
Lots of DC men, however, have an agenda, which feels like fucking the party line. Everything is so political. Of course, politics is how Gracelyn makes her money, so she takes the good with the bad.
Once she’s driven around Baltimore, Gracelyn picks up I-83, and the landscape soon feels as if allowing in more blue sky and views of rolling hills lined with trees turning colors of autumn.
Air blowing through the open car cools a few degrees as she passes modest housing developments built with the promise of affordable commuting, along with small independent farms and picturesque little towns.
Just beyond York, Gracelyn exits the interstate and takes the series of turns that always feels as if leading her farther from all that is real to her but was Aunt Millison’s life.
The funny lawyer isn’t expecting her until tomorrow morning.
Tonight, Gracelyn will settle into Aunt Millison’s house. Maybe she’ll get a fire going if there’s wood. And start sorting through Millison’s personal effects the realtor has been nagging her to clear out before the property is listed for sale. She will also listen for the feral cats. And she’ll do that other thing … get in bed … let moonlight into the room … and make herself come … at least twice … and if history is as predictive as her profession asserts, she will do so with some nasty thoughts.
It's been a few years now, but whenever Gracelyn used to hear cats fighting in the barn, she’d fantasize that the fighters weren’t feline, but men. And that they were fighting over her. More particularly, fighting over who got to fuck her.
Gracelyn would lie in bed under the thin sheet, wearing an ordinary nightgown like a Pennsylvania Dutch girl. And as the screeching sounded as if the air was being shredded, she would think, He’s coming for me. Whoever wins is coming for me.
When the noise from the barn ended, Gracelyn would wait to hear the quiet footfall on the old wooden stairs, the hard creak of the doorknob turning, the squeak of dry hinges as the door opened.
The man would come in. He would always be large, muscled. Naked. His hair sometimes long and wild, other times shaved short. His cock would always be hard. And he would say, “I won.”
Which Gracelyn knew meant he’d won her. She would push down the sheet and lift her nightgown, and open her legs, and reach her hands above her head and grasp the bed posts, and whisper, “And now you get to fuck me.”
But first he would lick her. He’d position his broad shoulders between her spread legs and softly kiss her pussy, pressing his tongue slowly along her folds, opening her.
His tongue would always be long and wide, and he would have a way of making it curve so he could stick in inside her, fuck her with it, each penetration sliding over her clit, making her twitch with excitement. Making her come.
She would claw her hands through his hair as he licked her off. Then she’d regrip the bedposts and keep her legs open, and take his weight on top of her, take his cock inside her. She’d cross her legs behind his and let the strength of his thrusts push her down into the old mattress.
His hands would take hold of her ass, and he’d kiss her while he fucked her, his big tongue, tasting of her, going into her mouth.
He would fuck her long and steady and slow. In and out. In and out. Each push of cock going deeply inside her. Going right over her clit. Right over it. Over and over. Steady. Slow. Hard cock. All that nice hard cock. Fucking her until she came, when he’d put his hand over her mouth to keep her screams from waking Aunt Millison, and she’d bite his palm, the ecstasy of orgasm whirling through her as his cock kept pumping and he came inside her.
Left breathless, she’d ask him, “Was I worth fighting for?”
He would smile and pull his spent cock from her pussy. And while she was worth fighting for, he would never say the words. He would simply get out of bed and walk naked to the door, and as he crossed the threshold, he would suddenly be gone, as if the air consumed him, and the footfall going back down the stairs wouldn’t be from two legs but four, the swish of a tail brushing the banister rails.
Or so she would pretend. No matter how real it felt.
Gracelyn wonders now, if the cats are still there, will she hear them fight tonight?
Gracelyn turns the Mercedes off the country road.
A rutted dirt and gravel driveway leads to Aunt Millison’s small farmhouse, which sits inside a break of cypress trees that have grown large and unwieldy with large chunks of dead or missing branches leaving openings the prevailing wind whistles through when it blows across hills from the west.
The view is sublime. Rolling fields and forests. Farmhouses, red barns, and silos. In the distance, a residential development of thirty or so homes is nestled along an elliptical road. The nearest neighbor is a mile away.
The exterior of Millison’ two-story house is a buff-yellow brick Gracelyn has never seen anywhere else. The material favored by early Swedish settlers gained its unusual color from a high calcium content and has proven adept at withstanding the beating rains of multiple centuries.
Each course of bricks runs workmanlike, straight and true, without a trace of embellishment, forming walls meant to secure the structure without necessarily appealing to the eye. The idea back then it seems was to keep out Mother Nature, not inspire envy.
Three single-pane windows on the second floor are positioned symmetrically above the two windows and single solid wooden front door which are likewise in visual balance at ground level. Holly bushes flourish after a summer of good rains but will be decimated by deer before spring—"nature’s pruning,” Aunt Millison called it.
When Gracelyn was here last month, shortly after Millison’s death, it had been over a year since her last visit, and just about twenty years since her first. The emotion she experienced turning onto the driveway that last time had been the same as the first, and the same she finds herself thinking now, which is: I could live here. Although surely, she couldn’t—or wouldn’t. That’s just fantasy. That sort of “what if” it’s fun to think about. Like the way she thinks about the cats.
Gracelyn pulls the rented Mercedes alongside the house and gets her small suitcase from the trunk. Her approach flushes a mockingbird from the largest of the holly bushes by the front door.
Unlocking the door and letting herself in, she calls, “Hello, Auntie,” as if Millison is still alive.
But there is no yeasty smell of baking bread or a roast in the oven. No beeswax candles flickering on the forbidding stone mantle. Aunt Millison is not peeling potatoes or capping strawberries. The house is tidy and quiet and cool, and smells of the outdoors because the old window frames leak air.
Gracelyn sets her bag on the hardwood floor in the living room and goes down narrow plank steps to the stone-walled basement. Ducking beneath low rafters, she turns on the aged water pump and furnace, both of which kick to life with familiar gurgling, whoosing sounds.
She used to be afraid of the basement, especially after she saw that huge blacksnake slithering through a gap left by fallen stone mortar, but she no longer fears the functional space, and has come to accept Aunt Millison’s opinion that blacksnakes, like cats, keep down the mouse population.
As the oil burner begins warming water that will push through the cast-iron radiators, Gracelyn goes back upstairs, confirms the aged Frigidaire is still keeping cool, then proceeds up the staircase to the bedrooms.
She runs her hand along the smooth wide bannister as she always does and caresses the globe-shaped newel cap at the tight landing where the staircase makes a slight curve, the purpose of which Gracelyn has never understood, as if perhaps the steps needed to avoid an obstacle.
There are two identically sized bedrooms, separated by a shared bath. Gracelyn peers fondly into Millison’s room, which, like the rest of the house, is simple and unadorned with the décor (or “froufrou” as Millison referred to it) of so many grandmothers. The wooden dresser looks homemade. A four-post bed is covered with a white duvet. The closet is so shallow and narrow it seems better suited for brooms, not clothes—as if it was still the 1700’s.
In the spare bedroom, what Gracelyn thinks of as her bedroom, she sets her bag on the bed and peers out the window toward the red barn.
There really isn’t any need to wait, is there? she considers. It’s not as if she made herself come right now, she couldn’t do it again after dark. She doesn’t need to wait for moonlight to come in through the window. She could always start a little … see how it feels …
Her fingertips begin to pull open her belt when her phone alerts to a text. It’s from Beth, and Gracelyn considers, Well there’s a nice thought… But she doesn’t let her mind go that way, although she very well might later.
Beth texts to let her know: You left your laptop.
Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, Gracelyn thinks, then quickly calculates and responds: NBD. No wifi here anyway. But take it home with you. Might need some info from it over weekend.
No prob, Beth replies. You there yet?
Just arrived.
Traffic not too bad?
Fine. Plans this weekend? Gracelyn texts her 15-years-younger assistant.
Dinner tonight. Jake. Jake, a congressional aide, is either Beth’s boyfriend or just friend, depending on Beth’s mood. Not looking forward. Some new oyster bar. You?
Carry-out chicken box.
OMG!!! I don’t want to know.
See you Monday. Sometimes Beth is too easy to get a city-girl response out of. If a Northwest food truck offered something called a Chicken Box, Beth would post it on social, but the same food served from wherever Beth imagines Gracelyn is referring to out here in farmland makes her shiver.
Gracelyn, meanwhile, is very much looking forward to the carry-out chicken. It’s cooked up in a little diner at a single-lane crossroads where the only other commerce for miles is an auto repair shop. The meal will come with perfectly crispy French fries, string beans cooked in bacon, and a buttermilk biscuit accompanied by local honey butter.
But that’s later. For now, Gracelyn mutes her phone and looks out the window … toward the red barn … and slides her hand inside her pants, thinking, Just a little one. Just a quick one. She sighs when her clit seems to be right there for her fingertips, as if the two-hour drive from DC has primed her. Okay, okay, just like this … right there…
She slides her touch along her seam as the radiator begins to make expanding noises with warming water flowing through its iron pipes.
She starts to lie back on the bed, but instead puts a hand against the plaster wall and keeps herself upright at the window, as if to make sure the cats can see her and know she’s here. She presses her fingertips in tight motions over her clit, feeling herself getting wet. Just a quick one. Just let this feel good. A couple minutes. Then later tonight, later tonight you’ll come for me, she fantasizes telling the cats. Come up the stairs and fuck me. Oh, yeah, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!
Gracelyn climaxes standing up – just a little one, but a nice one.
As the sun sets, a warm russet-orange glow enters Aunt Millison’s house that entices Gracelyn from her organizing tasks out onto the back patio.
The ten-by-ten square of bricks by the kitchen door, set in the ground decades ago atop gravel, has since settled and heaved countless times, so the once flat surface now waves like a pond into which a rock was just dropped. Gaps between bricks allow weeds and grass to sprout. A slanted overhang provides shade from midday sun and shelter from the rain.
Aunt Millison spent years of her life enjoying the view from this patio in a variety of chairs, some of which were handcrafted, others hand-me-down from who knew where. She would sit here, hands in her lap or resting on a chair arm, and look. If asked what she was doing, she would reply, “Thinking,” or sometimes say, “Nothing.” She once described herself as a flaneur, a French word she’d picked up in a crossword puzzle that she said meant, “loafer”.
Gracelyn believed if Aunt Millison had been more new age, she would have said she was meditating.
Gracelyn sits in a rocking chair she’s never seen before and, as with all the chairs before it, has no idea of its origin. It is old and worn. Maybe something Montgomery Ward would have sold 60 years ago from one of its catalogue stores.
The seat’s wood frame is weathered and has suffered numerous splits. The cane arms have tears and creak under the presence of Gracelyn’s body. The seat and back cushions Gracelyn found inside the kitchen door are much newer and look home sewn and make her wonder if they were gifted from a helpful neighbor.
Most importantly, however, the chair is extremely comfortable, and Gracelyn ends up surprised to find half an hour pass during which she not once checks her phone.
By the time the sun sets, the radiators have warmed the house. Gracelyn sets aside the paperwork she will discuss tomorrow with the estate lawyer and drives to the diner, where the Chicken Box is every morsal as excellent as she remembers.
She eats in her car, parked in the gravel lot alongside the cinderblock diner, and counts six vehicles that drive by: an old Buick sedan, a loud Camaro, and four pick-up trucks, one fitted with a snowplow even though the first measurable accumulation is likely six weeks away.
Driving twenty minutes back to Aunt Millison’s, her fingers still a little slippery from two pieces of fried chicken, Gracelyn experiences a familiar disorientation in the rural darkness.
Living and working in a place as crowded and hectic as DC, it’s easy to forget how much of the world exists beyond that illuminated density, which at first makes it seem as though there is not enough air or energy to sustain life out here. But then Gracelyn’s feelings turn opposite and make her wonder how it is possible a place as congested as DC hasn’t drained its allotment of life-sustaining forces.
This sense of solitude embraces her as she slows to watch for the turn to Aunt Millison’s house, her progress observed by a sequence of deer, a racoon, and a prowling fox, none of which Gracelyn spies other than a single pair of glowing orange eyes low to the road that vanish as quickly as they appear.
From the eastern sky, a full moon casts silver light over the hillside that silhouettes Aunt Millison’s house, where first floor windows glow from lamps Gracelyn left on inside. Behind the house, the rusted tin roof of the old barn catches the same moonlight which will come through the panes of Gracelyn’s bedroom window by midnight.
Once inside, Gracelyn considers starting a fire, but instead goes upstairs to take a shower in the home’s only bathroom.
Water spits and coughs from the showerhead as air pockets push through the system, which has been turned off for weeks. It takes a few minutes for the water, pumped from the tank in the cellar, to become hot, then Gracelyn gets in.
She showers and lets her thoughts drift … away from the demands of projects at work … away from the personalities and conflicts—human and political—which control her life in DC.
Fantasies that are shoved aside at home and rarely stand a chance unless it’s the middle of the night, are free to roam here. She considers perhaps it was no accident she left her laptop at the office this morning. And that she’s kept her phone muted, and not looked at it once in the past couple hours. She can ignore her real life here.
Out of the shower, when her thoughts drift to work and she pictures Beth, instead of considering what duties she should next delegate to her younger assistant, she thinks about Beth in that way she often suppresses.
Gracelyn thinks about seducing Beth, about confessing to Beth how she can’t stop thinking about her, and knows she should, knows it’s not appropriate, but there is something about Beth that makes Gracelyn want to pull her close and tell Beth how magnetic she is, how her presence in Gracelyn’s office has been arousing her since the day she first interviewed, an afternoon when Gracelyn told herself there was no way they should hire that young woman no matter how qualified, because all Gracelyn could think about was wanting to go down on her. And it had been a long time since Gracelyn had felt that way about another woman, so long in fact she’d come to consider she’d “outgrown” the urge.
Now, Gracelyn towel dries her shoulder-length hair and leaves it uncombed as she slips into the white sleeping gown with the imitation pearl buttons she’s kept at Aunt Millison’s for years. She doesn’t know where the gown came from, but it is much older than her memory of it. The cotton fabric has gone soft from wear, some of the stitching beginning to fray.
How many times has she had an orgasm wearing this gown? she wonders. How many times has she lifted it when the cat comes for her? Will she be lifting it tonight? Although maybe not for the cat. Maybe for Beth.
Gracelyn thinks about Beth as she gets into bed … and looks out the window … and waits for moonlight to come through the glass … and finds herself drifting off to sleep with those thoughts … only to be awakened by light through the windowpanes. But it is not moonlight…
This story concludes in the next post, which will post on October 29th. Hope to see you then.
My collection of stories and novellas is available at Amazon.
