Chapter 1
Jean Clayton had never had a consciously salacious sexual thought about her son Stephan until her friend Adele put the idea into her head.
The two next-door neighbors were lounging in the lawn chairs in Adele's backyard. The afternoon California sun burned gently over their tanned, bikini-clad bodies. Adele, a voluptuous but not yet plump blonde of thirty-two, had lowered the straps off her shoulders and folded her bikini top downward so it lay thin and flimsy as a scarf just over the nipple-peaked tips of her full and high-thrust breasts. Jean, a willowy brunette who could have passed for twenty-eight though she was nearly thirty-five, had turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes. Almost asleep, she looked serene as a slumbering princess. Her tanned, softly exposed flesh shone with a glistening coating of feminine perspiration. A gentle breeze made it comfortable even in the burning sun.
"There comes your son," Adele murmured, snapping the young widowed mother from a wistful reverie. "I don't know if you've noticed, but little Stevie is turning into a man this summer."
Jean opened her eyes and sat up straight. Her son Stephan had come out of the back door of their house and was walking across the yard toward the fence. And as he walked toward them, she reflected how astute her friend's remark had been. Steve was fourteen and a half, but he was already almost as tall as Jean. And though he still wore an expression of childish innocence, his face had lost its baby fat to reveal an almost mature and handsome structure. Youthful muscles rippled beneath the tight-fitting white T-shirt he wore. Manhood had descended upon him in the last few months, it seemed as though in a twinkling. And he was almost a replica of his father.
"Hello Mom. Adele," Stephan said brightly as he reached the picket fence that separated the two yards.
Almost in one voice, the two women greeted the boy. He looked at his mother, then at Adele, then turned back to his mother again. The smile that had adorned his lips faded momentarily to seriousness and in his clear blue eyes Jean detected a look of concentration, of awareness, intense, somehow stark and raw. Then he blushed and the smile came back.
"I'm going down to the pool with Bill," Steve said. "On his bike. If it's all right with you I'll just grab a hamburger or something for supper."
Low and far away at first, growing steadily closer and louder, a motor-bike was heard.
"All right, Steve. Have a good time," Jean said, not bothering to ask herself if she really meant it. "You have money?" It was a half-question.
"A couple of bucks. I'm all right."
Now Jean heard the bike turning onto their street. The roar of the motor would build to a pitch, almost break off as the gears were changed, and build again to a pitch.
"I've got to get going," Steve said. "That's Bill there."
The bike was pulling to a stop in front of the house. Steve was looking at Adele. Out of the corner of her eye' Jean noted that the flimsy bikini halter hung even more precariously than before just on the tips of her full, swollen breasts which were arched into evident prominence by the upraised position of her arms, jutting up over her head so that her hands were clasped behind her neck as though she were intentionally flaunting herself.
Steve looked back briefly, again with loving innocence, at his mother. Then he turned and started toward the house.
"Tell Bill not to drive fast," she said. "And don't stay out late. I'll expect you by eleven."
"Eleven or twelve," Steve called back. Then he was gone inside the house.
For a moment Jean stared thoughtfully and silently at the door through which he'd disappeared. Then she reclined back in the lawn chair and sighed, her eyes narrowing as she gazed down at the ripely revealed swells of her own richly tanned breasts, straining out against the constricting little bikini halter.
"I think I'm going to start laying down the law. He's spending too much time out at night with those older kids."
"They're not that much older," said Adele. "Bill's only sixteen."
"But he's too wild on that bike ... for one thing."
"Jean."
Jean turned to peer over at her sexy blonde friend, now looking at her pensively and intently, as though she could see through her. "Yes?"
"I saw the way you were looking at him."
Jean sat up, color rushing to her face. "What are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about. How long has it been since you've had a man?"
"I broke off with Ed last October. So ... eight months. What's that got to do with anything?"
"You're a woman. You need love and you need sex. You're living under the same roof with a man. Even if he is your own son."
The wave of anger passed like a wind through her body, and left her trembling and flushed. "Are you out of your mind? I love Steve, but I wasn't looking at him like that."
"It's nothing to be ashamed of. I was reading about it-what's the name for that syndrome?-just the other day."
"Syndrome?" Jean stood up suddenly, glaring down at the other woman. "I saw the way you were looking at him. And showing off your tits like..."
She couldn't think of the simile that fit. Flustered angry, slightly confused, she turned and walked to the gate, and, crossing her yard, stalked into the house, all without so much as a backward glance. Her tall sensuous body still trembling, she strode hurriedly down the hall past the door to Steve's bedroom and through the doorway to her own. Slamming the door, she flopped face down on the bed. After a moment she rolled onto her back, her breasts rising and falling vividly with her hoarsely strained breathing. She glanced toward the nightstand for the clock and met instead the framed photograph of her husband in his blue Air
Force uniform, a haunting, slightly cocky smile on his face, a glint in his eyes that looked so real and bright she almost dreamed for a moment that he would jump out of the frame and be standing there alive again before her.
Then she shook her head, stifling a little sob. For a minute, she was twenty-five again. It was June 13, 1965. She had seen Tom for the last time on that day. When she had seen the handsome Air Force captain at the door and looked into his eyes, she had a terrible premonition.
It was only Tom's second mission. He got hit just above the DMZ, she would later learn. Now all these years later the war was finally over. Tom was just a statistic, a number insignificant if you looked at the whole. And the whole now seemed so pointless, so terribly disastrous, futile as the empty affairs she'd had with the other men she'd known since her husband's death. The loss to mankind seemed as great, but no greater, than the loss to her of Tom.
Her thoughts turned to the memory of Stephan standing at the fence looking at her and Adele. The thing that had bothered her, during that instant before his face had reddened and his almost bashful smile came back, was that she'd had the disturbing feeling he was comparing them, comparing their two nearly naked bodies. And he'd done so, she thought, out of something more than innocent curiosity.
And he looked so much, now, like Tom. And Adele had had an affair, years ago, with Tom.