Homesick For Mom Ch. 02

"Well, I'm definitely increasing my intake of protein," she giggled, giving him a quick peck on the lips. "Thank you, baby! That was a dynamite fuck, and you tasted yummy, as always!"

At length, they left the shower, dried each other and dressed, and returned to the kitchen. Eric refilled their coffee mugs while Sue set about making them a late breakfast of eggs, bacon, and toast.

"Eric, we really need to talk about this situation," Sue finally broached the subject that both of them knew had been hanging over their heads throughout the morning.

"What about it, Mom?" Eric asked. To his younger mind, there weren't really any major questions. He loved Sue, and she loved him, and that was all they needed to know in order to be comfortable with the situation.

"Well, what we've done is something that is illegal, just about everywhere except for France," she explained. "We have to figure out where we're going to let this lead. What we did yesterday, and this morning -- all of it was absolutely wonderful, and I loved every second of it, but we have to face the facts. Do we keep on, as lovers, and risk getting caught, or stop now and for good?

"I don't want to change a thing Mom, I want us to be together, forever."

"There's a little more to it than that son, we have to be very careful and make sure that nobody else finds out about this. Let's be certain that we can live with what we're doing. If anyone finds out, we'll be outcasts in this town. I don't want to stop, but I don't want our names in the paper, either. Just be sure nobody finds out."

"Don't worry Mom, no one will find out, because I'll never tell anyone. I could never live without you, now. I have to be with you, Mom!"

"You're sure you want this to go on?" she asked him again.

"Definitely," he replied. "Why? Are you sorry that you started this, between us?"

"Oh, God, no!" she exclaimed. "At first, I was worried about whether or not you'd even be interested in me -- that is, until I overheard you and Ken talking about what you'd like to do to me, given the chance. And I have to admit that, when I woke up, this morning, I was worried about you, about what your opinion of me would be. Would you still love and respect a woman who'd go to bed with her own son? Once I found out that nothing between us had changed -- other than that we had become lovers as well as friends -- I was the happiest woman on Earth. I still am. I just need to be sure that you want this as much as I do."

"I do," Eric reassured her, taking her hand in his across the small breakfast table. "I know that you had some 'female problems', a few years ago, and the doctor told you that you can't get pregnant any longer. If you could, though -- and if we could figure out a way to get away with it -- I'd marry you, and want you to have my babies!"

"Then, I guess it's settled," Sue sighed with a smile. "We'll let this go on, and see where it leads us."

Though she sounded confident with the decision, Sue was really still a bit uncertain. Though Eric couldn't see any down-side to their new relationship, Sue foresaw a few pitfalls. For one thing, Eric would be headed back to college in the fall, and she would be left at home, and alone again. After having a close male companion and lover for most of the summer, she wasn't sure that she could bear that return to virtual isolation.

Plus, there was the distant future to consider. Ever since she had given birth to Eric, Sue had looked forward to more children. When she'd been told that, due to a problem with her reproductive system, it was doubtful that there would be any siblings for Eric, she had eventually accepted the fact and then set her sights on one day being able to play with her grandchildren. If she and Eric remained a couple for the rest of their lives, that dream would never come to pass, because there would never be a wife for Eric who could give him the children he so richly deserved.

She pondered the situation for a day or so, and then came to the conclusion that she would just go with the flow. She would enjoy loving her handsome son for as long as she could, and slowly prepare herself for the day when he would set her aside in favor of having a legal wife and starting a family. Maybe -- just maybe -- he would find a woman who was just naughty enough not to mind occasionally sharing her love for Eric with his mother, though she truly doubted that such women existed.

Having put the worry out of her mind, Sue enjoyed the remainder of the week. She rationed out her few remaining cigarettes for times when she could share smoky kisses with Eric and, when the pack was empty, she tossed it in the wastebasket without a second thought. They kept house together, played and made love, and went for the occasional drive in Eric's Mustang.

But there were down-side aspects to the relationship that neither of them had foreseen, and those began to raise their ugly heads about three weeks into their new lives.

Eric got a job as a carpenter's helper, working for the father of one of his friends. He didn't need the money, really, as both his college expenses and spending money were covered by the trust-fund he'd been left. Still, he had inherited his father's work-ethic and couldn't stand to hang around the house all day and not be accomplishing something, despite the delights his mother offered in practically every room in the house. His time at work was time in which Sue was alone, again.

And there were the evenings, as well. In order to maintain appearances, Eric had to at least occasionally spend a night out with his friends, cruising the streets and looking for babes. Occasionally, the guys would score, and Eric would find himself saddled with having to appear to be interested in some reasonably attractive girl who was more than interested in hopping into bed with him -- all without doing anything which he thought would be 'betraying' his new-found position as his mother's partner and lover. He was constantly having to find or make excuses for why he wasn't spending practically all of his free time out with the guys, cruising for chicks in his new babe-magnet -- and why he was spending so much of his time at home with his 'Mama'.

Sue had problems, as well, and some of them she shared with her son. The two of them went to the nearby shopping mall, one Saturday, and were made constantly aware of their plight as incestuous lovers by the actions of the people around them. The mall was packed with shoppers, many of which were couples who were holding hands and looking lovingly into each other's eyes -- and occasionally kissing passionately. Sue and Eric, of course, were forbidden to display their love for each other by engaging in similar actions, for fear that they might be observed by friends and neighbors who knew their true status as mother and son.

The stress began to take its toll on Sue, first. By the end of the third week, she was an emotional wreck from having to keep her feelings under wraps. She had gone to the store and come home with a carton -- not just a pack -- of Winston 100's, and a stack of cheap plastic ashtrays so that she wouldn't have to carry one around the house with her, all the time. And, by the end of the fourth week, she had finally admitted to herself that her old smoking habit had fully re-asserted itself.

Eric had begun to suffer immensely, too, but he had found a way to de-fuse the tension he felt, and it apparently involved spending a lot of time in his room, behind closed doors. It was, altogether, a situation that Sue could no longer cope with and, one night, it exploded inside her and she stormed down the hallway to Eric's room and opened the door.

"Eric," she began, her voice a little more loud and harsh than she had intended, "We have to talk. Please come out to the kitchen, now!"

She turned, then, and stomped back to the kitchen, and Eric heard the grate-and-scrape of a chair on the ceramic floor tiles, as she sat down.

He took a deep breath, then reached into a drawer of his desk and pulled out a thick file folder he'd been working on for the last couple weeks. Tucking it under his arm, he grabbed his bottle of soda and followed in his mother's wake.

"Eric, this isn't working, I'm going insane keeping all this inside." Sue began the conversation as soon as Eric was seated across the table from her. "I see all those happy couples around us, so in love with each other, and I'm not allowed to show how happy I am, whenever I'm out somewhere with you! It's just killing me!"

"I know Mom," he nodded. "It isn't as easy as I thought it would be, either, but we can't stop now."

Across the table, Sue slipped a cigarette from the ornate metal case that Eric had bought for her, just a week ago, when he'd come to understand that she'd gone back to being a full-time smoker. As she raised it to her lips, he picked up the lighter and gave her a light, then actually grabbed a cigarette for himself. While he still didn't consider himself a real smoker, he had discovered that Sue enjoyed receiving those smoky kisses as much as giving them, and so he had learned the rudiments of smoking in order to be able to pleasure her in that fashion. In the process, he'd come to appreciate the calming power of nicotine, and he wanted a bit of that, just then.

"I don't want to stop," Sue sighed through a puff of smoke. "I love being your lover, and I really don't want to give that up. What I want is to be able to walk down a street, or at the mall, holding your hand like the other couples do. I want to show other people how full of joy I am, to have you as my man. But the only way I see, that we can do that, is for us to move to somewhere far enough away that nobody knows we're really mother and son. How can we explain moving away, to all of our friends? And, even if we move, do you really think we could pull off such a deception? I mean, won't people notice the age-difference between us?"

"I've been thinking about all of that, for the last week or so, Mom," he told her. "In fact, that's why I've been spending so much time in my room, in the evenings. I've been doing some research on the Internet. Here's what I've come up with."

He opened the file-folder and looked up at her again.

"First things first," he began, taking a small puff and exhaling quickly. "Moving. You know that I want to be an architect, right? Well, the University of Miami has a really good architecture program, and the tuition costs there are actually less than where I'm going to college now. Between the money that Dad left, and what you inherited from your dad, we have far too much money to say that I got some sort of full scholarship to the university, but we can say that we're moving in order to cut expenses. Also, neither one of us has made any secret of how much we hate the cold and snow of the winters, up here. Miami is far enough away from here, don't you think?"

She nodded, showing some interest, and Eric continued.

"It's also nice and warm, all year 'round. Sure, there's the rare occasional hurricane to deal with, but folks have been living there for ages. If it was that bad, the place would still be swamps and jungle. Also, the cost of living is less, there, because you really don't have to worry about heating costs in the winter, and a lot of produce is locally-grown and therefore costs less to get from the field to the store. And there's no state income tax, there, either. The state makes enough revenue from the tourist industry."

He paused, taking a quick puff and following it with a gulp of his soda, and then turned over the top page in the file.

"Here's some photos I found in our albums, and scanned into the computer so that I could get them all on one page," he told her. "The first is a photo of you at age twenty, next to one of you, now. You can hardly tell the difference, even though you're some eighteen years older in the second photo."

Sue looked at the photos, and was actually amazed by how little the difference in her appearance was, between the two photos. Only the hairstyles, and the clothing, gave any hint at the fact that one photo was taken nearly twenty years earlier.

"If you take note, the third photo is one of Grandma, at age forty, and one of her now, at age sixty. See much difference?"

He gave her a courtesy three-second count, then went on with his presentation.

"I didn't think you would. And see how much the two of you look alike? Your family has some amazingly good genetics, for maintaining a youthful appearance. That ought to solve the age-difference problem, between you and me, unless someone demands to look at your driver's license or your birth certificate -- and that doesn't happen too often.

"Now," he continued before she could comment, "do you remember -- a couple weeks ago -- when my Mustang had to go in the shop for inspection? You had to take me to work and pick me up, that day. You had your hair up in a pony-tail, and you wore one of those camisole skimpy-tops and a pair of short-shorts and sandals. And you gave me a hell of a good-bye kiss before you let me get out of the car."

Sue remembered. She remembered all too well, because a number of the men on the construction site had wolf-whistled and cat-called when she'd kissed him.

"After you left, one of the guys asked me if you had a sister, and none of them seemed at all suspicious that you were too old for me to be dating. I think that, if you dress the part of a girl in her twenties, instead of a woman in her late thirties or early forties, nobody will give us a second glance. And, given your genetics, it ought to last that way for a couple decades, at least!"

"I'm beginning to see where you're going, with this," Sue told him, "and I have to admit that you make a persuasive case. What else do you have, in that file?"

"Lots, Mom," Eric grinned at her, mentally fighting the urge to let things get sidetracked. She was taking another drag from her cigarette, and looking so sexy...

"Like what?" Sue asked him, then, blowing her smoke at him in a teasing way.

"Don't get me started, yet, honey? Please?" he begged. "Let me finish, first?"

"I thought you said that nice guys finish last?" she giggled.

"That's in the bedroom, not at the kitchen table," he groaned.

"Really?" she cocked her head to one side as if contemplating an issue. "You've fucked me on this table, already..."

"Mom!"

"Alright, baby," she laughed. "Continue. You're already lightening my mood in a big way. What else do you have?"

"Well, we've covered dealing with the age-difference, and a reason for moving south. After all, if I'm going that far away, to college, does it make sense for you to be that far away from me, and all alone? No. So we both move south to Miami. The logical next question is, of course, where we would live."

He turned over a couple more pages and spread them out in front of her.

"The Miami area is filled with a lot of really nice homes that were actually purchased as investment properties, by people from out-of-state. They're looking to retire in Florida, to get away from northern winters, so they find a really nice house somewhere near the water, and buy it. Then, they make arrangements to rent it out to folks who want to do a Florida vacation, but who don't want to stay in a cramped motel room. Maybe they have large families, or something. The rent-money is supposed to be enough to pay the taxes and the mortgage payments.

"With the economy in its current state, some of the home-owners have lost their jobs and can't afford the payments on their primary house, let alone a vacation home. Add to that the fact that lots of other people -- who used to be able to afford to rent these houses for a week or two -- have lost their jobs, and can't afford vacations at all. A lot of posh real estate is ending up in foreclosure."

"I see that on the evening news," Sue agreed. "How does that get us anywhere?"

"Well, when the bank forecloses on a house, they have to list exactly how much is owed on the principle of the mortgage, and that's the selling price. Federal law on foreclosure won't allow banks to make a profit. So, say you have a house that's worth half a million dollars, but the unpaid mortgage balance is only a hundred and fifty thousand. That's what the bank has to sell the house for.

"Now, Dad saw to it that you would own our house, free and clear, if he ever died. So we don't have anything but property taxes and utilities to pay, on this house -- and that means that we can afford to take our time in selling it, if nobody gobbles it up right away at your asking price. And I've been browsing Florida real estate. I found this gorgeous house in an area called 'Seven Isles', in Fort Lauderdale. It was originally worth almost a million dollars, but is being sold on foreclosure for a little over three hundred thousand, and I know we have much more than that, in the bank. I snooped in your papers, to make sure of that."

Sue stared at the sheets of paper he'd laid out for her, as he pointed out all the features. The house was truly gorgeous, the sort that the location folks for CSI: Miami always seemed to select to represent the really high-class Miami lifestyle. It was four stories tall, with the bottom floor being garage, storage, and laundry, and the rooms were expansive, done in a modern architectural style. The kitchen was nearly three times the size of the one that Sue was used to managing, and filled with every built-in appliance one could want. Best of all, it was built out on a small, narrow island just off the big Intracoastal Waterway, and came complete with a beautiful yard and pool, plus its own boat-dock.

"We don't have a boat," she teased him.

"We can find one," he grinned back. "There are plenty of really nice sailboats and power boats, also on foreclosure."

"What makes you think that we can get this house?" she asked. "What if someone else grabs it, before we can put an offer together?"

"I raided my college money, and offered the realtor who's handling it a thousand dollar deposit for giving us first-option for the next month," Eric told her proudly. 'We have thirty days from yesterday, in which nobody but us can make an offer on the place."

Eric stopped talking, then, because he had no more to say. The ball was in her court, now, and she had to come to a decision. He sat patiently while she lit a cigarette and shuffled through the paperwork. At length, she stubbed out the butt, laid the last of the papers back on the table, and looked up at him, her answer plainly written in the smile that lit her face.

"Do you really want to do this?" she asked him, one last time. "Not the move-to-Miami part, but the other..."

"What you really mean is, do I want us to live together like we were husband and wife, as far as all of our new neighbors and friends are concerned? Absolutely! There's nothing on Earth that I want, more! I want to grow old and gray, with you, and enjoy every day between now and then with you as my wife!"

"Then, let's do it, darling," she nodded, and her voice was nearly breathless with her joy and anticipation. She stood and came around the table, and he rose and took her in his arms.

"Forever, together, my love," he told her, his lips barely brushing hers.

"Forever, together, darling," she whispered back. "I still hate to leave all our friends behind, but I can't live without you. I can't go back to you just being my son, now that I've had the pleasure of having you as my lover, as well. And, if we tell the truth, in just about every way but the sex, you've take over the 'husband' role, here, ever since we lost your dad. You did just fine, there -- in fact, with all of what you've just shown me, you've exceeded him -- both in bed, and out of it."

"Thanks, Mom," he replied blushing slightly.