Chapter 2
Stephan's cute young face materialized gradually out of the fog. He walked or floated toward her, smiling cockily as his father always smiled, his father's hat sitting just slightly sideways on his head the way Tom always wore it, that familiar daring glint in his eyes. She lay naked against a wall. She was trying to get up but for some reason she couldn't move, and though he was moving toward her almost at a run, it seemed he was getting no closer. Then she heard the voice: "Stephan.
Come here Stephan. I want to show you something." The voice was Adele's, low and seductive. "Look Stevie. Look at my breasts. Look at my breasts. Look at my..." Her voice echoed, fading slowly away. Stephan had disappeared from her sight.
Jean awoke and sat up blinking. The light blanket that had covered her slid to the floor. She looked around, confused. It took a moment to orient herself in time.
She had fallen asleep on her bed, still dressed in her skimpy bikini. It was not the morning of another day, as she would at first have expected it to be, but late in the night. She looked toward the nightstand, first at her husband's picture, then at the clock. It was five minutes till one. She remembered the dream, almost a nightmare, in hazy little sketches. Then she remembered that Stephan wasn't at home.
Beset by a sudden overwhelming anxiety, the sensuous brunette widow dropped her feet off the bed to the floor and stood up. Her eyes found her reflection in the three-quarter-length mirror on the dresser against the opposite wall, and she let her gaze descend slowly down the soft curves of her tall shapely body. Then her eyes returned to their own reflection. She stared into them staring back at her from the mirror, wild and vengeful, almost hysterical.
At last she turned away. She walked to the door and went out, down the hall to the den. The house was silent, almost dark. Its emptiness seemed oppressive and though it was a warm summer night she folded her arms protectively over her barely covered full breasts as though she had a chill.
Reaching the den, she crossed over to the window and peered out past the curtain onto the dark, deserted street. Through her mind raced a series of jumbled images, blending and blurring together. There was a cracked-up motor-bike, an ambulance with a screaming siren. When she forced that picture from her mind it was replaced by another she found almost equally disturbing. Stephan was in an old house some place with a bunch of older kids who had sick-looking faces and hollow eyes. Someone melted something in a spoon. Another of them drew it up into a syringe. She shook her head and blinked. She wondered if Stephan might be with a girl, a girl friend, a secret love whom he'd never mentioned to his mother-or just with any girl, some girl who hung around with the crowd of bikers he'd recently made his friends, a young runaway who gave herself to anyone who wanted her....
"Mom?"
Jean started, a gasp rising vocally in her throat. Turning, she saw her young son standing sleepy-eyed in his pajamas in the doorway.
"Stevie!" Jean almost sobbed, feeling a flood of relief and gratitude welling in her breast. "When did you get home? I didn't hear you come in."
"Eleven-thirty."
"But you must have slipped in?"
"You were asleep. I put the blanket over you."
Of course, she thought. The blanket. She should have realized that when she'd awakened, because she hadn't remembered covering herself with it. Then, overcome with her love and tenderness for her young son, Jean rushed forward.
Slightly surprised by his mother's show of affection, Stephan felt her long soft arms go around his face and neck, felt his body being pulled to her bosom. His face was engulfed in her caress, his nose buried forcibly in the voluptuous deep valley between her full soft breasts, and in spite of his slight feeling of embarrassment, he couldn't deny his awareness of his mother's physical sexual beauty. Her breasts crushed against his face through the thin material of her bikini halter, and he was equally conscious of the soft invitation of her firm, naked thighs pressed against his own.
Jean had almost forgotten herself in her joy to find that Stephan was home, and she whispered his name over and over in abandon as she held him in her caressing embrace. The light shivers of delight that darted spontaneously up her spine, the tingling she felt in the sensitive tips of her nipples, caught her by surprise. The sound of her strained breathing only gradually pervaded her hyped consciousness. Adele's remark, which had so angered her earlier in the day, came back to her like a prophecy. Then starkly the realization came over her, it's impact like a blow to the head;
She was deriving a sexual stimulation from physical contact with her own son!
Her face flushed suddenly red as Jean dropped her arms, and releasing Stephan from her embrace, he took a quick step backward.
"I'm ... I'm sorry, Stephan. I'd had a bad dream and when I woke up, not knowing you were home, I had the most awful feeling that something had happened to you, and I was so glad to find you home I just ... forgot what I was doing." She bit her lip. "I guess you're getting a little too old for that sort of ... contact."
As if in confirmation of what she'd said, the bulging little erection that tented up the crotch of his pajamas caught her attention and impressed itself with shocking significance on her state of disturbed awareness. But the evidence was there before her eyes. Stephan had also derived a sexual excitement from their embrace!
That realization was almost more than the sex-starved young mother could cope with and as she jerked her gaze forcibly away from the shocking sight, her face turned an even deeper crimson.
"You'd ... you'd better run on back to bed," Jean said as authoritatively as she could. Mustering her courage, she forced herself to look back at her son and noted that he'd made no move to do her bidding. He stood where he was, looking with embarrassed awareness back at her. He held his hands clasped together before his lower abdomen, as though to hide the tell-tale little erection from her gaze. "Now go on," she added more softly.
Steve turned abruptly away. "Good night, Mom," he said nervously over his shoulder, as he walked out the door and down the hall.
Jean watched him all the way to his bedroom door. As he entered he glanced sheepishly and momentarily back in her direction. Then she turned away, reaching up with both her hands to push her long dark hair back from the sides of her face, sighing deeply as she did so. Her heart was still pounding frantically in her breast, her breathing, still slightly strained. There was a nervous fluttering in her stomach, and it seemed she was more conscious now than she had been for months of the gnawing unfulfillment of her life and of her womanly needs.
Adele had been right. She did need a man. She was a woman and she needed a man, to love and make love to. She didn't have one, and though gone along pretending that it didn't matter, it was apparent to her now that her need showed to others. She'd revealed it to Adele this afternoon. Tonight she'd revealed it to herself. And worse, she feared, she'd revealed it to her innocent young son.
"Damn it," Jean muttered uncharacteristically under her breath, staring gloomily around the room.
But there was no escaping the knowledge the events of this afternoon and tonight had brought her. Something very horrifying had happened a few moments ago when she'd taken Stephan in her arms. Looking back, she was forced to admit that almost the same thing had happened on more than one occasion before. Since she'd broken up with Ed Barton, the last man she'd dated regularly and had been to bed with, she had unconsciously allowed her son to become a substitute for a masculine companion in her life. It was a role he had filled during other periods during the last ten years, most notably during that first unbearable year of misery just after Tom had been killed. But when she had lost Tom, Stephan was only four years old. It was normal, even wholesome, that she should bestow on him the love that she would ordinarily have reserved for her husband, that she would let him fill the gap her husband's loss had left in her life. Now the situation was different ... and more dangerous.
"I'll just have to do something," Jean vowed in a whisper. Then she walked quickly across the den and through to the kitchen. She retrieved the whiskey bottle she kept in the cabinet for occasions just such as this, and poured herself a stiff shot of Scotch. Adding a single cube of ice, she drank it down quickly. She resisted the urge to have another, and resolutely replaced the bottle in the cabinet. As she walked back down the hall to her bedroom, Jean told herself that tomorrow she would give Ed Barton a call, just to see how he was doing. It had been her decision, against his wishes, to break off their affair. Maybe he would be interested in seeing her again.
By the time she stepped into her bedroom and closed the door, Jean was feeling the full effects of the strong shot of alcohol. She experienced a light-headedness, a perceptible rush of energy, a stimulated alertness that defied the fact that it was almost two o'clock in the morning. But the drink had done nothing to dull her nerves, and as she faced herself in the dresser mirror and reached up behind her back to loosen the snap of her bikini halter, she was acutely aware of the gnawing tingle of need coursing through her breasts and loins. It seemed that, having faced the very un-naturalness of her response to the motherly embrace she's bestowed on her young son, she had only intensified its effect on her instead of lessening it.
Still watching her reflection, Jean quickly shed the skimpy bikini halter, leaving exposed, her full rounded breasts jutting out jauntily, in the dim light. A sultry look came over her face, and she lifted her hands to run them through her silken-dark hair, seductively arching the voluptuous swells of her breasts.
She reached down, giving a subtle wriggle of her hips, to let her bikini panties drop slowly down her slender thighs to her ankles, leaving her voluptuous body completely naked before her appraising eyes.
Jean stared silently at herself in the mirror, her eyes roving slowly over her naked torso and the proudly upstanding mounds of her breasts peaked by the swollen, almost mauve-colored buds of her tingling little nipples. She made a brief mental comparison of her own body with Adele's, her warped and unwanted excitement only increasing as she remembered the way her son Stephan had compared the two of them in the afternoon when he'd seen them sunbathing together in their skimpy little bikinis. Then her expression clouded as that thought reminded her of another comparison that inevitably had been made, long ago, by the man her son so strongly resembled. That time, she told herself with dizzy conviction, she had won. Tom had had his little fling with her friend. He had come back to her and proposed marriage. She had graciously forgiven Adele for doing something that should have ended their friendship. Over the years, her bitterness had almost disappeared. Adele had married Pete. And as if to vindicate her own integrity, Jean had refused him decisively the one time he'd gotten drunk at a party and made a pass at her.
But what had happened between Adele and Tom would probably never be completely erased from her consciousness, Jean told herself as she sighed and let her gaze descend lower down the sensuously inviting curves of her naked flesh. Her dark eyes seemed to burn over the smooth sleek plane of her belly and the dark little hole of her navel, down to the shadowy triangle of her soft pubic hair nestled so invitingly between her thighs. She wondered absently, almost unconsciously, what would happen inside her son's pajamas if he could see her like this. Then, grasping the obscene implication of that thought, she turned abruptly away.
Stark naked, Jean walked to the bed and pulled back the covers. She slipped between the sheets and flicked off the light, lying almost panting on her back, her kindled desire raging now almost completely out of control. She was breathing deeply and audibly. Her eyes were open and she was wide awake; sleep would be a long time in coming tonight.
She lay like that, staring up into the darkness, for what seemed almost an eternity. Then at last she sat up, letting the covers fall from her naked torso, and flicked on the light. To her surprise not more than fifteen minutes had passed since she'd gotten into bed.
Frustrated by the troubling thoughts that nagged at her mind, Jean slid out of bed and walked to the closet. She pulled a silk housecoat over her shoulders and tied the sash loosely at the waist. Hoping a hot bath might relax her sufficiently that she could sleep, the still sensuously aroused young mother stepped out the door and started toward the next door along the hall. Just before going in she paused, looking at the crack of darkness before the closed door to Stephan's room. At least he's asleep, she told herself. Then she stepped into the bathroom, closing and latching the door behind her.
Jean started the hot water running full blast into the tub, adding just a trickle of cold, and waited for it to fill. After a few moments she undid the sash at her waist and shed the housecoat from her shoulders, her nipples instantly tingling to rigidity from their teasing contact with the air. Then she ran her hands sensuously down over the ripe half-moons of her buttocks, her fingertips barely brushing the forbidden vee of soft black hair between her thighs. She lowered first one foot and then the other into the caressing warmth of the water.
The contrast of temperature caused Jean's richly tanned flesh to prickle with goose bumps and her nipples swelled even more rigidly erect as she settled down into the tub. She sucked in her breath audibly as she felt the hot water laving the tingling tips of her breasts. Then she reclined back until all but her face was submerged, and she lay still, prone beneath the water in a posture of relaxation and surrender, staring silently at the ceiling.
But in fact she was anything but relaxed. The tension in her naked body was almost unbearable and the sensation of the warm caress of the water over the curves of her quivering flesh only seemed to heighten her awareness of her unwanted sexual need. Adele's remark about the way she was looking at her son seemed to have started a chain reaction in her consciousness leading uncontrollably to this physical, burning need which she now felt in her love-starved loins.
Barely even aware of what she was doing, Jean trailed her hands lightly up her belly beneath the water, cupping her palms gently over the firm round mounds of her submerged breasts. She squeezed and caressed them gently, the splashing of the water over the soft buds of her nipples only intensifying the delight she derived from her own illicit touch. Then, leaving one hand on her breasts, the naked brunette let her other hand trail back downward, her fingers dancing over her naked belly beneath the warm water. The contact of her own hand on her satiny sensitive flesh was like an electric-shock of unfulfilled desire, and as she traced around the outline of her navel, letting her fingers linger there on that tiny but sensitive aperture, she felt the desire and longing in her unsatisfied loins growing swiftly even more intense.
Then at last she dared reach lower, her hand venturing straight down into the soft dark curls of her silken black pubic hair, down, down, between her sensuously wide-parted thighs.
Jean drew in a deep quivering breath as her fingertips played along one of the straining tendons of her soft inner thighs before drawing back up toward the quivering lips of her yearning pussy. She didn't think she'd felt like this in months. It was as if her body had lain dormant since her break-up with Ed and now suddenly had come back to life. All her naked being was crying out with unfulfilled need, and as she slowly parted the blood-filled lips of her tingling vagina with her fingers, she felt as if she could scream from the sheer raw sensation of the warm bath water lapping up into the sensitive inner recesses of her welcoming cunt.
Now the wantonly aroused young widow was approaching a dream-like state of consciousness. Her thoughts fluttered back and forth, from memories of her husband to unbidden thoughts of her young son, and even her guilt over her sinful impulses seemed only to heighten her unbridled desire. Abandoning herself almost completely to her burning lust, the dark-haired young mother extended the middle finger of her right hand and directed it straight up between her thighs, brushing against the palpitating lips of her ravenous cunt. She still had no real conception what she expected to obtain from her salacious self-caress. What she was doing now just seemed to come naturally, as if completely out of her control, and she moaned as a scintillating stream of sensation coursed up her spine from the contact of her outstretched finger as it rubbed lightly over the lust-swollen bud of her tingling clitoris.
Then she let her probing finger slide lower, caressingly digging deep into the sparsely hair-lined furrow of her smoldering cunt. She moved her other hand quickly down from her breasts, spreading her glistening pussy-lips to let her extended finger work slowly up into the warmly lubricated depths of her inner sheath, the feminine sex-fluids of her aroused young body flowine freely to mix with the hot water in which she was immersed.
Jean grunted from the raw and quivering stab of sensation as her impaling finger burrowed relentlessly deeper up into her secret loins. Then she sighed as the tight elastic opening parted, and the walls of her welcoming pussy grasped eagerly as if to suck the plundering digit all the way up into her belly. Her soft inner flesh closed tightly around the smoothly penetrating intruder and she caught her breath as the fantastic sensations rippled insistently throughout her now gently writhing body. Her nerves were electrically charged, all her senses heightened, her flesh greedily demanding to be caressed more and more forcefully.
A stream of moans and whimpers issued from the bathing young woman's throat as she began to masturbate in earnest, drawing her hand up and down to pull her finger in an obscenely fucking motion in and out between her lust-tortured loins. The water splashed in a loud sucking rhythm, and her own whimpers sounded like sobs of despair. She forgot her secret reason for committing this obscene act, as she rose toward a peak of illicit excitement and desire, her naked body bouncing and tossing, as she arched her ass-cheeks almost completely out of the water when the first waves of release began to build deep up inside her frenziedly writhing loins.
Then her eyes opened wide and her face went white as she heard the hesitant tapping at the door.
"Mother?"
It was Stephan!
"Mother? Are you all right? Let me in!"
Jean felt a wave of terror surge over her, as her own sobs of obscene delight seemed to echo screamingly in her ears. She abruptly jerked her hand out from beneath the water, and her body sagged in shame and exhaustion down against the bottom of the tub. She heard her young son turn the knob of the door, banging harder against it when he found it locked.
"Mother!"
"It's all right, Steve," Jean gasped in a quavering voice. "It's all right. I'm ... taking a bath. I just couldn't sleep."
"I heard ... I heard you crying."
Thank God, she thought. He didn't know. He hadn't recognized her lustful sobs and moans for what they really were.
"Yes, honey. I was ... crying. Go back to bed now. I'm going to get out of the tub and go to bed too."
"But ... "
"Go on. Go to bed. It's all right."
After a moment she heard his footsteps shuffling away down the hall. She climbed from the tub, dried off hastily and pulled the robe back on. As she tiptoed back to her own room, she saw that now his door was open.
She had not really been crying before, not in the ordinary sense of the word. But now she was.