Chapter 1
If Sugar Kane had to pick one particular day that was the darkest of all the other heartbreaking days she knew in her life, she unquestionably would have pointed to the afternoon when she was fifteen and came home from school to learn that her mother and father had separated, were planning a divorce.
For a long time, Sugar had been aware that her parents were not compatible, that they fought often and violently. She knew, too, that her mother had been fucking with other men. Her father was a salesman and spent a great deal of time on the road, away from home. Any number of times, on these occasions, Sugar had been awakened at odd hours of the night by the sound of a car stopping in front of their one-bedroom apartment. Getting out of bed and hurrying to the window, she would often watch as her mother climbed out of a strange car, paused a moment to pull down her skirt or adjust the neckline of her dress, before continuing on into the building where they lived. It never failed that when her mother got into bed, beside her, Sugar could tell by the reek of alcohol on her mother's breath that she had been drinking heavily. There was another smell, too, that Sugar, in her inexperience and innocence, failed to recognize as the odor of sex.
Sugar had heard her mother accuse her father of fucking other women, too. But in spite of all these accusations and all these things happening, Sugar, in her naiveté, never dreamed that the whole mess would end in divorce and change her entire way of life. It might not have been such a shocking experience for Sugar if the divorce proceedings had been conducted more discreetly.
As it happened, Sugar's father went all out to nail her mother, hiring private detectives to get the evidence he needed to sue for divorce. They got the required proof all right, when they burst into a shabby, second-rate hotel in the downtown section of Los Angeles, where Sugar had been born. They caught Ella Kane, Sugar's mother, in bed with one of her Johns. Both she and the man were stark naked and among the pictures taken was one that showed the man pulling his dripping whang out from between her splayed legs.
However, Ella Kane was not the type to take this sort of thing from her husband lying down. She immediately began a counter-suit and came up with as much evidence against him as he had presented against her-even if she could show no pictures.
It was a sordid case that dragged through the courts for weeks, receiving far more publicity than the usual run of divorce proceedings, since Sugar's father had at one time run for a minor political office in the city. Before the case was over, even Sugar appeared on the stand, which proved a traumatic experience for a fifteen-year-old girl.
The upshot of the case was that her mother was awarded custody of Sugar, since her father wanted no part of her, and they continued to live in the same one-bedroom apartment in Westwood, hard by Wilshire Boulevard. Also, as soon as the divorce was final, Sugar's father remarried and with his new wife moved away from the city of Los Angeles and out of Sugar's life.
Sugar continued going to high school while her mother took a job as a waitress in a Sunset Boulevard cocktail lounge. For a long time, Sugar had no idea that, aside from hustling drinks, her mother's job called for certain extracurricular activities. These activities included allowing male customers to run a hand up her abbreviated skirt when she leaned across their dimly lighted table, or feel one of her generously endowed tits that Sugar envied so much and wished one day, not too far off, she would inherit. Another extra was accompanying same male customers out into the big lot behind the lounge and accommodating them on the back seat of their parked cars.
Then one night, her mother, drunker than usual, brought one of her gentlemen friends' home with her. Sugar was asleep in the bedroom when they came in. It wasn't until strange sounds began emanating from the living room that Sugar awakened, got out of bed, put on a negligee and hurried into the adjoining room to see what was happening.
She got as far as the doorway, where she halted with a hand at her throat, stifling a shocked cry. For there before her on the divan, in the dim light from the floor lamp, was her mother and the man she had brought home with her, both of them nude and engaged in the act of fucking.
At the sound of Sugar's gasp, the man turned his head and stared at her in open-mouthed amazement. "Who the hell's that?" he demanded.
Ella Kane opened her violet eyes and looked up from beneath him at the girl frozen on the threshold. "That's my daughter...Sugar."
"You didn't tell me you had a daughter," the man rumbled.
"You didn't ask me, honey," Ella retorted, then to her daughter, "You go back to bed, Sugar baby."
Then the two of them went back to their humping, completely ignoring Sugar's presence.
Sugar just stood there, transfixed, watching the man's fat, glistening, red cock slide in and out of the fur-trimmed, red slot between her mother's widespread legs. She kept telling herself it couldn't be. In spite of all the things she'd heard about those photographs at the trial, without actually seeing them, in spite of all the many cars she'd seen her mother slip out of in the wee hours of the morning, Sugar couldn't believe that her mother was capable of such a thing-not with a strange man.
She kept watching, as if she were paralyzed, telling herself that it wasn't really happening, that it was all part of some terrible nightmare-until her mother began to moan and squirm beneath the man in the throes of orgasm. Then it was as if the sickness in the pit of her stomach reached into her brain, and everything exploded.
With a scream like a banshee, Sugar hurled herself forward and began beating on the man's bare back and ass with her girlish fists, her nails scratching and clawing at him.
"What the fuck?" the man blurted out, and with one swipe of his hand he caught Sugar alongside the face and sent her sprawling onto the floor. He had been on the verge of spilling his load when Sugar attacked him and now that he had finished with Sugar he continued to pummel Ella's eager cunt.
Ella was either too drunk, or too engrossed in what she was doing, but she made no attempt to find out whether or not her daughter, sprawled out on the floor across the room from them, had been hurt. Ella just lay there on the couch, eyes closed tightly, matching the man above her, thrust for thrust, until with a groan his cock exploded inside her belly and they clung to each other in the throes of ecstasy.
Sugar had pulled herself to a sitting position on the floor as the man withdrew his wilted cock, a long strand of his sperm connecting it to her mother's snatch. He got to his feet, his prick slapping against his right thigh as he started to gather together his clothes.
"You're a damn good screw," he said to Ella. "But I'll be fucked if I want it again, long as you got a crazy, goddamned daughter hanging around."
Ella said nothing; she just continued to lie there on the couch, wiping his residue from between her shapely legs with a handful of tissue she had grabbed from a box on the floor.
Sugar said nothing, either. She simply picked herself up from the floor and hurried into the bedroom, waiting until she got there to let go of the bottled-up tears of humiliation and disgust and heartbreak that she'd kept locked up inside her. She got into bed and lay there curled up in a fetal position in the darkness, until finally she heard the man bid her mother good night and go out through the front door. A moment later her mother came stalking into the bedroom. She snapped on the light, and Sugar turned in bed to face her, standing there stark naked before her.
Sugar had always thought her mother was the most beautiful woman alive. Slender with big, firm, white breasts without even a hint of sag to them in spite of their weightiness, and an abundance of curly black hair that covered the lower part of her flat belly and seemed thicker and blacker as it ran down between her shapely thighs. The hair atop her head was black, too, her eyes violet. When her mother was sober and properly made up, Sugar thought she looked a lot like Liz Taylor. But she didn't look a damn bit like Liz Taylor now.
Sugar had never seen her mother look angrier, as she stood there at the side of the bed, glaring down at her fiercely.
"And suppose you tell me just what the hell you thought you were doing out there in the next room tonight?" the woman demanded fiercely.
Sugar met her mother's gaze reprovingly. "I think you should be the one to answer that question. My own mother doing such a thing. I'm thoroughly ashamed."
"Ashamed?" Ella shrieked, her face a mask of fury. "Ashamed of what? Me keeping a roof over your head...putting food in your belly...helping you to live in the kind of neighborhood and attend the kind of school I want for you? I'd like to know just how the hell you think I could afford such things? You think I get any support from your father? I haven't got one red cent from the son of a bitch since he remarried. You think maybe the money comes from waiting on tables in a cruddy damn cocktail lounge? You've got a hell of a lot to learn, my innocent, little high-ass daughter! One thing you're going to find out before you get very much older is that if you want something bad enough, you've sometimes got to do a hell of a lot of things you don't want to do to get it. So before you start being ashamed, you ask yourself how badly you want the things I'm peddling my ass to give you!"
Then without another word Sugar's mother turned and swept through the bedroom into the John, slamming the door shut behind her. Sugar sat there in bed, staring at the closed door, sobbing as tears streamed down her cheeks, until she heard the door start to open. Then she quickly turned and buried her face under the covers so that her mother couldn't tell she'd been crying.
She heard her mother turn out the light, pad barefooted toward the bed and get into it. She could feel the warmth of her mother's nearly naked body through her flimsy nightie as she lay close beside her. She waited a long time, trying to find words to say to her mother that would make everything right between them again. Then finally she turned, threw an arm around her mother and cuddled close to her and whispered the only words that would come to her.
"I love you, Mother," she said with all the feeling inside her. "I think you're the most wonderful mother a girl ever had."
Her mother made no reply. But by the way her mother kissed her, Sugar knew that all was forgiven-even though she could never condone what she'd seen her mother do with that strange man.