Chapter 2
Elena Chapman lifted her glass. "Hell with 'em; here's to us, then."
"Bottoms up," Charlotte said, and giggled. She was feeling no pain, but her head was perfectly clear, and everything that Elena said made perfect sense.
like getting that big house bus of her cousin's and putting both boys in it and just moving on out across the country for awhile; maybe they'd move on out across the whole silly world, if it came to that. Elena sure had a lot of very good ideas.
"See," Elena said, "since my last ex-husband is bugging me, and his lawyers want to put a stop to. the alimony, this will get them all out of my hair for awhile. Not that they could stop the alimony unless I signed for it, but they might use Blair for leverage. I mean, Jerry's spies no doubt have a whole potful of evidence, if he wants to go to the trouble of proving that unfit mother stuff. That way, he can get Blair taken away from me and I'd have to sign away the alimony in order to get him back."
"Dirty," Charlotte said. "Dirty, dirty."
"So, let's duck out on 'em all," Elena said. "Take a trip, see the world. The boys will enjoy it, I know."
The boys; Blair-Blair and Duncan, in close quarters, day and night together, traveling, always close. Somehow, something would happen; for good or bad, in proximity like that, something would happen. There'd be no more wonder, no more guess, only yes or no.
Only love or hate.
Elena was still talking: "It gives you the out you've been asking for, too. Your problem with Mark Travers-although for the life of me, I don't know why you keep him dangling. If he looked at me the way he looks at you, I'd have him in my bed before he could get his shoes off."
"Oh, Elena," Charlotte said. "You're only kid-ding."
"like hell, I'm kidding," Elena said, and got up to freshen both their drinks. "Look-you and me we're not exactly getting any younger, right? I don't say we're old bags, not by a damned sight, but at our ages-and I'm only two years older'n you, Charlotte-at our ages, we don't have a hell of a lot of time to waste. Forty is coming up, right? Forty, baby, then forty-five, fifty. Bam! Dead before we know it, and you know what?"
Charlotte stared at her hands on the glass. Was that an age spot on the back of her left one? Did women get age spots at thirty-five? They would at forty, she was sure. "What?" she asked.
Elena wagged a finger at her. "We'll look back and kick ourselves in the ass because we didn't do a bunch of things. Not for what we did, but for what we didn't do. like buy a dress or change a hairdo or screw somebody's husband or spit in some bastard's eye. Me-I don't want to get old and wrinkled and sorry for myself on account of I screwed myself out of something I really, truly wanted to do."
Charlotte sipped on her drink. She felt good, all warm and floaty. "You're right, Elena; you're perfectly right."
"Damned right, I'm right. So what do you say we have a little fun before we curl up and turn brown?"
"Sure; here's to fun and here's to staying green and pretty."
Elena held out her glass and Charlotte took her turn at being barmaid. Charlotte said, "Mark may try to find us-me, if I just leave without telling him where I'm going."
"And my ex will try to find me, just to give me a bad time, and try to save his lousy money. You know, if Jerry and I hadn't fought so much, it would have been a pretty good thing, our marriage. That guy is a real stud, in bed. I can't remember any guy I enjoyed screwing more than Jerry. He'd do all these tricks..."
"Please," Charlotte said.
Elena stared. "There, dammit! That's what I mean, Charlotte. I know you're not all that square, down deep inside. You're a warm, passionate woman, and you've got one hell of a fine body going to waste. But you act as if your ass is made out of cake and you're afraid you're going to crack the icing. What the hell do you do, when you need a man, masturbate?"
Charlotte turned quickly to the bar, fiddled with the ice chest, feeling the flush that reddened her face and hoping that Elena couldn't see it. "Don't be silly," she murmured.
"Silly? What could be sillier than playing with yourself, when there's so much man meat around? Look, I've done it to myself, from the time I was a scared kid until I decided I didn't have to, that it was easier and far, far better, to get screwed."
Gulping a shot of bourbon straight, Charlotte flared at her friend: "Don't you think I haven't told myself that for the past five lonely years? Dammit, Elena, I've ached for sex. But there's something in me, a block, a barricade of some kind-I don't know what or why; I just know it's there and that the wall is very strong; impregnable, so far. I've never even let Mark get beyond ... fondling me, my breasts, my ... my mound. I want it; sure, I want it. But I can't make myself do it, except with ... with, well a kind of dream somebody. I think I could, with him. I know I could."
"Don't cry," Elena said. "Dammit, Charlotte, don't start crying. I have a big mouth and a loose tongue and when I'm half snockered like I am now, I'm liable to say just about anything. You know that."
The liquor was brave in Charlotte's stomach now, and there was a delicious numbness in her limbs, but her head was straight. "So, since I can't have my ... dream guy, I don't seem to be able to settle for good old Mark."
Elena stopped being sorry and went to the attack again. "How come you can't have your dream guy? He a movie star or something?"
"No," Charlotte said. "But he..."
"No damned buts," Elena cut in. "If he isn't here in town, let's drive that big old bus over and see him. That is, if he's not a childhood crush. Is he a childhood crush?"
Wordlessly, Charlotte shook her head. Maybe the trip wasn't such a good idea, after all. It would be altogether too easy to lose Elena as a friend, if she made a pass at her-son-her handsome, sensuously moving son.
"Then you can put the make on him. He's a man, isn't he? And if he's got a pecker, you can turn it stiff. Dammit, Charlotte, take an honest look at yourself. Hell, you're a beautiful woman, with those fine boobs and legs and an ass shaped like yours-any guy will be glad to take a jump at that."
Biting her Up, Charlotte said, "Please, Elena ... please!"
And Elena spilled some of her drink when she leaned forward. "Please, bullshit! You can turn him on, if you just try, and that's a whole lot better than sticking your finger into your own..."
"I can't!" Charlotte cried. "I can't, can't! He's a . . .not a man, but only a-a boy and I'm so much older and ... and ... "
Elena Chapman carefully reached over for the bar towel, found it, and mopped up the little mess she had made. She looked at Charlotte's flaming face, and after a long, terrible moment, nodded.
"How about that," Elena said softly, and all the liquor was gone from her voice. "That's a kind of crazy one, but the more I think about it, the more I can see it. Why not? I mean, why the hell not?"
"I ... I feel woozy," Charlotte said. "Maybe we'd better call this off, so I can go to bed and sleep it off. And I'll try to think over that bus travel idea, see if it fits in with ... with my plans."
"Oh come on," Elena said. "For maybe the first time in your life, you've gotten pretty close to the truth, and now you're doing your best to back way from it."
"I don't know what ... what you're talking about."
"Don't you? This dream guy-the boy, not the man, that you're so sure you could turn on with. It's Blair, right?"
Charlotte tried to slide away from the bar, to run off somewhere and hide. "Let me go, Elena. I'll be sick. I just know I'm going to throw up."
"Don't you dare! There's nothing wrong with you having big eyes for my son. I could name you a dozen girls who turn on when he just walks by."
"Girls," Charlotte said bitterly. "Girls-not a woman old enough to be his..."
"His mother? And who says there's got to be an age limit? Look, I have to admit that I've looked Duncan up and down a few times, myself-and I never felt like some lecherous old bag for doing it. In fact ... "
Elena fell quiet, and Charlotte felt all sorts of strange thoughts tumbling over inside her feverish head. Elena looking at Duncan the same waysurely not the same ideas?-the way that Charlotte looked at Elena's son. Two older women; not old, dammit; ripe, mature, but not old.
Carefully, bravely, Charlotte whispered, "In fact, what?"
Elena blinked, rolled her nearly empty glass between her palms. "Okay. In fact, I think it's a great idea-you and my son. You're my best friend and you're sweet and lovable and clean, and there won't ever be any trouble, and you're beautiful, too. You'll be good for him. In fact, you'll probably be the best thing that could ever happen to him."
Staring, Charlotte asked, "You ... he ... I mean, Blair and me, and you don't m-mind?"
"Not if he doesn't mind-and any kid of mine sure better have better sense than to turn you down. We can fix it up real easy-he's a hot-to-trot lad, and with all this young, maybe diseased stuff running around loose, it's really past time he got tied into something really good, someone safe and loving and fine. Oh, Charlotte-what a wonderful, wonderful idea!"
"I ... I think I'm going to cry," Charlotte said.
"Pour us another drink, instead," Elena suggested. "How are you going to set it up? Anything in mind on seducing him?"
"I hadn't thought about that, except kind of dreaming. It was always just going to ... to happen, somehow."
Elena laughed. "How about this, two sneaky women plotting the seduction of a kid? My own kid, at that. And who should know better how to trap him into something? A young stud like him, strong and horny. ... " She stopped talking and her eyes took on a faraway look.
Charlotte said, the words drawn from some unsuspected fount of wisdom, "How about Duncan, for you?"
Elena jumped. "I wasn't ... I mean, I really didn't ... oh hell. I sure was. He's cute and sexy and I can teach him all the things he ought to know, to be one of the world's great lovers, when he gets older. And if we're going to be together on that bus, going around the country, just the four of us..."
"My thoughts exactly," Charlotte said, and found she could laugh-really laugh. She was high and crazy, and she was able to laugh at how easy it was, how very simple and logical and terrific. Blair; she was actually going to get a chance to make love with Blair.
Elena was laughing with her, roaring and slapping the bar top and making goofy, choking sounds in between. They laughed so hard and so long that it hurt their rummies and the tears rolled achingly down their cheeks.
Then they had a couple of more drinks and considered how best to approach the proposition. Charlotte said they could hardly just walk right up to their respective sons and tell them straight out that there was a son-swap in the offering. Or mother-swap?
"How do the swingers go about it?" Charlotte asked. "The wife-swappers, I mean. Do they just say to their husbands or wives or whoever hasn't been brought up to date: hey, baby, I have this great idea; I want you to go screw good old Joe, so I can fuck his wife."
"Probably a little more subtle," Elena said. "Probably the wife has to start the whole thing, since women are so much more sensible about sex than men can ever hope to be. Let's say the wife gets the hots for good old Joe, so she kind of hints around to her own husband that he maybe ought to look into Joe's wife, who's been saying all these nice things about him. That is, if she's already talked to Joe's wife, first. Then the guys think it's all their own sneaky idea and everybody gets to fuck everybody else happily ever after."
"Fuck," Charlotte said.
Elena looked over her glass rim. "I beg your pardon?"
"I said fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Just a minute ago, I don't think I ever said fuck within anybody else's hearing."
"What did you and your husband call it?" Elena asked.
"Doing it," Charlotte giggled. "We always said-doing it."
"Oh shit," Elena said, and they went off into another laughing jag.
After awhile, Elena said, "We have to get this settled. Smashed or not, you and I simply have to straighten out all the petty details of this here now fucking situation."
Which set them off once more, of course. This time, Charlotte came out of it first. Wiping her eyes with the damp bar rag, she said, "Blair and Duncan; or Duncan and Blair. First, we don't even know if they'll go for us; the idea might frighten them silly. Second, one or both of them could feel pretty strongly about the other boy putting it to his mother. I mean, it's not as if we were two strange ladies in their passionate thirties; but we're their mothers, Elena."
"I won't say it," Elena said. "I just won't say that the philosophy of their generation is that they love all us mothers, because it'll set us off again."
And it did.
When Charlotte stopped, it was because she had an image of Blair close to her, of Blair Chapman in her arms and between her hungry legs, of Blair's boyishly rigid prick in her hand, in her pussy.
She opened her eyes and looked into Elena's eyes, which had also suddenly turned serious.
"Yeah," Elena said. "I think I can just speak right out with my boy. I mean, he knows that I play around sometimes, because if he doesn't, he's dumb. So I may be able to put it, as the kids say, up front to him. I'll tell him that I think he ought to get his sex education from you, and be damned glad you're offering him the chance. And if that doesn't shake him up too badly, then I'll ask him to check over the same idea with Duncan, to see how Duncan feels about me, and about him sticking it to Duncan's mother."
Charlotte sighed. "They're very close friends. And I've hoped ... there are times when Blair has looked at me as if he had ideas..."
"I know what you mean. Duncan has peeped at me, every chance he gets, and I'll admit that I've given him a lot of chances. He's a very sexy lad, your son."
"Yes," Charlotte said, then swiftly, "so is Blair. He ... I look at him and dream how it would be n
. . .
"Will be, baby," Elena said, and patted her hand. "Hey, what time is it?"
"Not very late. Oh; I see what you have in mind. But ... tonight? They'll just be getting out of the movies, and if they have girls with them, it'll be later and ... "
Elena stood up, wobbled and stared owlishly at Charlotte. She said, "Don't try backin' out, now; never be a better old time, on account of you n me are both smashed and got a lot of nerve. We sober up, we both might try to forget it and that'd be a damned old shame, account of when we're sixty, like, we're gonna' be sorry as all hell we didn't ... didn't ... "
"Fuck 'em," Charlotte said, valiantly.
Elena nodded, picked up her purse. "Damn' right; fuck 'em all-startin' with Duncan 'n Blair."
"Blair and Duncan," Charlotte agreed.
"Whichever. Call me a taxi, kid; I'm too snookered to drive home, and I better get there about time they raid the fridge. Gonna' chase your kid upstairs for somethin' and talk to mine, and ... don't slop up any more juice, baby. You wanna' be wide awake when Blair gets here. Passed out won't be any fun. You leave the door unlocked and get in bed and ... however you wanna' work it."
And when Elena was gone, the night air brushed Charlotte's cheek as she stared after the tail lights of the taxi and cooled her forehead. However she wanted to work it. Hurrying, she gulped one last drink and took the bottle upstairs to put on the nightstand. She stripped and got under the covers, and left only the hall light on, so he could see his way into the bedroom; into the bed.
If he got there. If Blair didn't think his mother was crazy ...