Between a Mother and Son Pt. 03

"And fuck me in public!" I quipped to her amusement.

"Yes!" She laughed. "I'll fuck you in public, in the center of the mall!" Leaning up on her elbow, she turned to me,"I'm serious. It's a turn on, yes, but I'm not ashamed of our love. I want to tell the world; I'm yours, you're mine. I claim you. I'll kill anyone who ever tries to come between us.

Looking in her eyes, I reassured her, "You won't have to." And then, somewhere inside me, I found words that were more to the point;

"You're all I want, all I've ever wanted, all I'll ever need. I love your eyes, I love your smile, your laugh, your thoughts; I want your body, I want your tits, your pussy and your ass. I've only ever wanted to be with you, to see you happy, to hold your hand, to stroke your hair. Every moment of the day is about you and only you, and it's been that way since the day I was born. I never want to know a day that is not about you, only you, now and forever."

Her eyes were moist with tears, and she kissed me. Our arms entwined, and we came together, our bodies joining in our marriage bed, in a union so complete, I felt her consciousnesses within mine, her thoughts overlapping with mine. We spoke not a word, yet said everything, and in that moment of bliss, our singular selves died as the caterpillar dies, to be reborn in our love as "we"; completely, entirely, forever.

In our joined mind, I heard her say to me; "Our love is a pure love. You came from within me, only to return to me, fulfilling me, completing me as I complete you. We are a perfect circle, with no end, no beginning; of one another, for one another."

The remainder of our honeymoon was spent there in our room. And when we left on Sunday morning, we walked out into the light of a brand new day.

Epilogue:

Following our honeymoon, our life settled into a routine not unlike that of any married couple. We went to work, paid the bills, took care of the kids, went to bed, made love, slept and got up and did it again. If it sounds mundane, well, in many ways it was, but we were blissfully happy.

I had no wants or ambitions other than to make Jean, and the girls, happy. All of the conflicts of my childhood, whatever problems that might have arisen due to any unresolved feelings for my mother( had our sexual relationship never developed), were made moot. I was young, horny, and fucking the woman of my deepest dreams, my greatest desire. I loved her and she loved me.

I had no reason to wish for more, and neither did she.

My father had faded out of our lives; initially because of his second wife's antipathy towards his first family, but then more and more because of alcoholism. It was not without a struggle; too many AA meetings and rehab clinics, too many regrets and drunken phone calls. The girls had long since stopped thinking of him as "father", he had proven incapable of fulfilling that role, and they had been calling me "Dad" for some time.

Admittedly, I doted on them as though they were my own.

Eventually, my father lost his battle with drink; it was left to his second wife to put him to rest.

I don't mean to be dismissive of him or my feelings for him, but my father's sad story is for another time, another venue. I have my qualms of conscience regarding my role in the sorry trajectory of his life, and I have carried that burden with me through my life; but I know, too, there is no one person more responsible for an alcoholic's fate than they.

If we had any worries, it was that the girls would inadvertently talk openly about the nature of the relationship between Jean and I, and at some point our illicit marriage would be discovered by the authorities.

At first we didn't do anything drastic, but it was less than a year following our marriage Jean found a similar job several hours away and we decided to move. Our eldest was just entering middle school, and so we felt it was better for her that if we were going to move, we do so before she entered high school.

I admit, we were able to breathe easier in a new location; introducing ourselves to neighbors and parents as husband and wife. We got the occasional eye-roll, but Jean seemed to be forever young, looking at least five -seven years younger than she was and I, alas, looking older as my hairline receded and I turned prematurely gray.

The girls never referred to a "brother", it was as though he'd never existed. When they introduced us to their friends or their friends' parents, it was as "...my mom and dad".

I have no doubt that somewhere in the recesses of their minds, they had placed the truth under lock and key; shoving the overstuffed quilt of family conflicts into a trunk already jammed with material of their own; a method of coping with my father's alcoholism, but also an acknowledgement of the role I'd played for them with much greater diligence than their biological father ever had. Of course, my openly physical closeness to their mother made it that much more real.

More than forty years on, they and their husbands call me "Dad"; and their children call me "Grandad."

The cops never came to take us away; nor did the IRS (our greatest fear). We had covered our tracks well enough, the name changes were enough of a deflection in a time before every little detail about one's life was online, that we were lost in the shuffle of 200 million lives. There was once or twice, when we indulged our predilection for making love in a public place, we came close to being arrested (yes, the proclivity we'd discovered on our honeymoon was a turn-on we could not entirely forsake; but that is another story). For twenty-plus years, we lived as happily as any family could wish.

It's been almost that long now since we lost Jean to ovarian cancer.

As I write those words, I find them hard to believe, and impossible to read aloud without a crack in my voice. To say I miss her, or the girls miss their mother, is to state something so obvious as to be absurd. There is a hole in my life and in me that cannot be filled. Only my grandchildren can come close to salving that wound.

You need to know that Jean had a wonderful life. She raised two beautiful daughters, and she had a husband and son who adored her (and both of whom fucked her silly). She lived out many of her fantasies, and had a successful career. She didn't travel the world, or become rich and famous, but she left this world with a sense of life well-lived and deeply fulfilled . It was only in the amount of time she spent on this mortal coil in which she felt shortchanged; time with her daughters and grandchildren (whom she never got to meet), time with me.

I had told you that after we'd first consummated our marriage as husband and wife, I'd realized my reason for living, the reason I'd been born at all, the reason she'd brought me into this world.

In the years since she left us, I've sought meaning in all variety of tasks; I've done charity work, I've tried hobbies and exercise, I've taken classes and birdwatching; and while I've found enjoyment in all of them (except exercise), I've drifted through them like a rowboat unmoored, without direction. None compare with making her a cup of coffee in the morning, brushing her hair, walking around the block together, hand-in-hand.

These past few months, I've missed her most keenly, and I'm not sure why. There is no anniversary on the horizon, that I'm aware of. Thoughts of her fill my mind, and have literally driven me to distraction, at one point forcing me to pull off the road until I could pull myself together. I hear her voice, I can smell her sex, but I cannot feel her touch upon me; her hand in mine, her fingers through what's left of my hair, her soft, warm lips on mine. Why has she come back to me so viscerally now, so many years later, if only to stay out of reach and bring me to the verge of despair?

This is the circumstance which has driven me to put our story into words. Perhaps she's appeared now in order to urge me to write. I don't know. Perhaps as we get older, each of us realizes we have a story to tell, and we have to find a way to make it heard; if only to say "I was here, I existed. My loves and I, we existed." Perhaps writing has made it possible for me to reach her on the other side, to open the door to her, to let her in and talk with her again. Were it not for my daughters and grandchildren, I would happily follow her across the threshold.

I had the best of loves, the best friendship, the best sex one could ever have wished for with Jean. Tonight, as I write this, the words she spoke to me, on an evening she made my adolescent fantasies a reality, echo in my ears;

"...We've always been together, I know that now. In this life, and the last, the one before that and the one yet to come...we have always been lovers. Our souls are entwined together, forever. you and I are as eternal as the sun and the moon. It's only an accident of fate that we are mother and son in this life..."

An accident? Perhaps.

I've thought about it a lot in the years since I lost her, the how's and why's inevitability leading me through a labyrinth from which there is no exit. No, I've come to believe it took no accident to bring us to this place; the answer was much simpler, as Jean suggested on another night so very long ago;

We are as we were meant to be.

"...of one another, for one another...." always.