Cat Got My Tongue Pt. 01

"Not today, you miserable whore." Shelly said. "In your life. Total."

Cat glared at them. "When did the two of you become such... potty mouthed brats?'

Erin smiled. "Good one, mother. It was about the same moment that your precious Donald shoved the tip of his rancid cock through your labia. Close enough? By the way, did you get tested after that?

Cat hung her head. "Yes."

"Dad drove a hundred miles away to sit in a waiting room in a clinic to get tested. He was too ashamed to go to your regular guy and admit that his wife had fucked around on him. He tried to protect your reputation! Can you believe that?"

Shelly put her hand under her mother's chin and lifted it. "Do we need to get a DNA test? Do we need to find out if we are really Dad's children?"

Their mother staggered as if she had been punched. "How could you even --. No. No. Look at the two of you. You are his spitting image. How could you even say such a thing?"

"Because you are a cheating slut, mother. That's an established fact. Now answer the question. How many cocks have been inside your slit?"

Cat glanced nervously at the street. "Out here?"

"Yes."

"Well.... I lost my virginity to my high school boyfriend. Then I had two relationships before I met your father. Then your father, so four."

Shelly laughed. "Old minute man dinky dick Donald -- and we have video evidence of that -- was such an awesome fuck that he doesn't make the list?"

Cat turned red and opened her mouth but nothing came out.

Erin turned to her sister. "Mother is going to say that she didn't love him. It was a mistake. He meant nothing... womp womp womp."

"That is even fucking worse, mother." Shelly said sadly. "You trashed a happy home and broke up two families for someone you didn't give a shit for. If he had been your soulmate or if you had fallen insanely in love, that we could at least try to understand."

"Two?"

"What?"

"You said two families," Cat said.

Erin waved a hand. "Oh, that. It turned out that Mrs. Dr. Wilson had no idea her husband, who had sworn to forsake all others, was getting trim on the side. Some alert citizen sent her all of your greatest hits."

Shelly snickered. "Lots of trim. Did you know he was banging or had banged some of your coworkers?"

Cat's stricken look told them she had not.

"Shitload of radioactive fallout when you go a-whoring, eh, mother? At least your children have learned a valuable lesson from all of this."

Their mother, crestfallen, turned to go inside.

"Where do you think you are off to?" Shelly demanded.

"I was--."

"Tell us, mother, if Lenny had turned out to be a halfway decent human, and he smelled good, and he told you all the right things and whispered sweet promises in your ear, would you have let him fuck you?

Cat glared at Erin.

"Because if you had any intention to do that," Erin continued, "or if you do in the future, then you will be one penis beyond repair."

"Repair?"

"Mother," Shelly said sternly. "We still hate your guts for what you did to our father, who never did anything to deserve it. But -- and it is a big but--"

Erin could not contain her snort and Shelly shot her a look of shut up.

Shelly finished. "We have some things to talk to you about. But before that, and with no laughing from the lurkers, we want you to know that if you ever, ever, ever look at or touch another man who is not our dad--"

"We will consider you dead." Erin broke in. "You will not be invited to or welcome at our weddings. You will never see or hold your grandchildren. Is that clear?"

Cat stared at them. Her mouth was slack. She started to hyperventilate.

"Agree, mother," said Erin. "You will do everything we tell you to do and keep your fucking nose clean."

"Especially your fucking nose," Shelly said. "Agree?"

Cat slowly nodded. "Touch... your dad?" She started to cry.

**********

The twins determined that their boyfriends actually had some intelligent thoughts about the dynamics of couples. This in spite of the fact that their IQs dropped 50 points once the nearest bra was removed.

The four conspirators gathered in their headquarters, Noah's basement, cleared by of his siblings by bribery and threats.

"Here's the deal," Erin began. "Mother now owns the house but won't move back into it. She is with Gran for the moment."

"Wait a minute," Tommy said. "It sounds like you want to help her now. What happened to the hate?"

"Oh, we still hate her," Shelly said. "But we are really worried about Dad. He is not himself."

"Maybe he needs to get laid," Noah ventured.

"Maybe I need to get--" Tommy broke off as he saw Erin's face. "Never mind."

"The problem is that I don't think he is a good judge of horseflesh right now. We don't want him to hook up with some gold-digging skank."

"Same goes for our sainted mother," Shelly added. "The ugly truth is that we don't want to end up with some inferior stepparents."

"So" Noah said, "you are telling us... better the skank you know than...?"

"Exactly," Shelly agreed. "We have this summer to get our idiot parents back together. But mother is at Gran's and Dad has rented a condo."

Tommy held up an index finger. "I have," he said carefully, "a cunning plan which cannot fail,"

**********

Dr. Sara Ravani stopped writing. "What did you say?"

"I said," the first patient replied. "Did you know about the sexual misconduct in your office?"

"I don't know what you are talking about."

The other patient did not look convinced. This unnerved Dr. Ravani, as the patients were identical twins. Normally, she would see twin children separately, but these two insisted on being seen together. And though they were 18, they were still technically pediatric patients, though these particular patients towered over her and probably each outweighed her by several stone.

"You are going to seriously claim," the second patient said, "that you had no knowledge of your colleague Dr. Donald Wilson's affairs over the past several years?"

Dr. Ravani took another look at the sheet before her and noted the last name. "Is your mother--"

"That's right. One of the victims."

Dr. Ravani waved her pen. "I was told she was a consenting participant."

"So you did know."

"Only gossip. I do not have time for gossip."

"Do you have time to defend a lawsuit? Do you have the time to speak to reporters who will be camped out in their satellite vans in front of this place when the news breaks?"

The other patient -- Dr. Ravani's eyes were beginning to get sore trying to keep the two twins separate in her mind -- said, "You know, one of the questions they will be asking is if you were sleeping with Dr. Wilson."

"That is slander!" Dr. Ravani fumed.

"Maybe, but you might be the only thing with a pussy around here that bastard didn't put his dick in. You married?"

Dr. Ravani sighed. "What do you want from me? Are you actually here to be seen?

"You bet. We have the rockin' pneumonia."

"What is that?"

"Never you mind. We have a diagnosis and a treatment plan already drawn up. Just sign a few lines for us and we will be off."

Dr. Ravani accepted the forms, glanced at them, signed, and handed them back.

The patients rose to leave.

"One more thing, doc. If we ever come to find out that you knew that asshole was banging our mother and you didn't try to warn our dad, you will be screwed, blued, and tattooed."

"I don't even know what that means," Dr. Ravani protested.

**********

"Holy hell, Gran. Is that the new iPhone?"

"Yes it is. Now get your hands off of it and be quiet.... Hello? David? I'm afraid I have some bad news. No, it's about the twins. They have been having anxiety attacks. Really bad.... No, they didn't want to burden you. I took them to a pediatrician who diagnosed them.... No, they are not here right now. I made them some herbal tea and put them to bed. The poor dears were shaking with stress."

The poor dears were shaking all right. They fell into each other's arms shaking with suppressed laughter.

"The doctor was very concerned that this would impact their ability to function at college, David. I am very worried."

"Yes, come and see them first thing in the morning.... The treatment? The doctor heard their current situation and recommended that they be returned to their former environment as soon as possible.... Yes, the house they grew up in with both parents in residence.... What? Don't curse at me David. Please think about the girls.... I am sure you could tolerate her for the summer.... Yes, I will call her."

Gran disconnected and handed her phone to Erin. "Now you can look at it. Hurry up, I have to go home and sell the same bullshit to my daughter."

"Gran, really? Bullshit?"

Gran cupped her breasts. "Who was photographed naked at Woodstock? Was it you?"

**********

Cat

The fucker wasn't even very good at fucking. He was only good at promising to be good at fucking. Well, that and he was good at studying a woman and finding her buttons so he could push them. Unfortunately, the clitoris wasn't one of the buttons he knew how to push. How do you go through medical school without learning about the clitoris? Was it because all they had were cadavers? God knew he had treated me like a slab of dead meat.

Why the hell had I fucked him?

I let him fuck me because I had been in a stretch of doubt. I had begun to doubt my looks, my sexual appeal. And the bastard had picked up on it. Passing close by me in the office, he had whispered so that only I could hear. How beautiful I looked that day. My dress was very sexy. He would bend down when we were alone in the break room and sniff my hair and tell me I smelled like flowers. I started to look forward to his stupid transparent words. I was thrilled, like some junior high girl, to be noticed. My body responded sexually to the repeated thrill. I started to get wet for these stolen intimacies. It made no sense.

He was nothing to look at. It was just buttons.

The first time, I had actually stayed late to organize some insurance paperwork. I had been there alone, when Donald came back in and sat next to me. He rolled his chair close and began to tell me that I was the loveliest woman he had ever worked with. He was honored to have such a capable person. Kind, warm, caring, intelligent -- it was somewhere in this barrage of compliments that our faces came near and he kissed me.

He led me to an exam room and lifted me onto the crinkly paper. He slid off my pants. He removed my panties and lowered his trousers. I was gushing wet, and he entered me with no foreplay. I had needed none, that time. He pumped furiously, and I came in a minute. He came about a second later, which was sadly a personal best for him.

This was so forbidden that I was panting with excitement. It wasn't him at all. It was me.

I did not care that he had propped his phone up on the counter and adjusted the camera so it was pointed at us.

That was one of the two times I had climaxed with him. Total.

Two days later, he asked me to stay late. I knew what was going to happen, but I could not stop myself. Making him hard made me feel desired.

He was a terrible lover. My husband is a terrific lover, generous and attentive. My husband is gentle when I need to be loved and rough when I need to be fucked. He knows my body after all our years together, all our nights touching flesh. Fuck, I am such an idiot.

Donald never once put his mouth on my vagina. He didn't caress it. He used it. He didn't care that as our affair went on I stopped getting wet. He just grabbed a tube of medical lubricant, squirted some carelessly on my bush while pumping himself hard, and rammed into me.

I should have ended it, but something stupid and broken inside me got validation from seeing another man's erection caused by my nakedness.

I honestly don't know what I thought would happen when David found out. I knew he would find out eventually. Donald sent me the videos. What an arrogant idiot. He thought I would treasure them forever or something. And like an idiot myself, I didn't delete them. I must have wanted to be caught.

I guess I was hoping that David finding out would give me a shove back to normal, a reason to stop having to lie on my back for Donald. I thought that David would yell at me, be mad at me for a day or so, and then we could go back to our old lives.

After 20 years of loyalty, don't I deserve a second chance?

I did not expect that he would literally never talk to me again.

It has been months since I dropped that damn phone, and he has not said one word to me since. I crave to hear his voice. All of our marriage those deep tones comforted me, made me feel safe and loved. Made my pussy throb.

I feel incomplete. Something has been hacked off of me.

I am ashamed to say I had not thought about what it would do to my kids. To see the hatred in their eyes that day and hear the horrible way they addressed me was devastating. The way they immediately rallied around their father made me feel some perverted pride in them. It also smacked me in the face with the realization that I had broken my family in half.

**********

Gran tapped her teacup on the table to get everyone's attention. They were in the formal dining room, Gran at the head, David to her right, Cat to her left, and the twins at the foot, seated close together, arms around one another.

She passed a set of stapled pages to each of them. "Here are the house rules for the summer. Catherine will be staying in the master bedroom. David, you will be in the guest room. There is a schedule for who will be preparing meals. I have scheduled a cleaner to come in once a week to reduce the load on you. Oh, and I am having a meal delivered twice a week for the same reason. Okay so far?"

Nods all around. She glanced at her daughter, who had been trying but failing to keep her distressed gaze off of David. He, on the other hand, had not looked at his ex-wife once since she came in.

"This," she tapped her copy, "is all to get Erin and Shelly back on solid mental ground. Are we all on board? David?"

"Yes, Lucille," he said.

"Catherine?"

Her daughter nodded slowly, her eyes now unabashedly on her ex-husband.

"Girls?"

The twins looked horrible. Distracted as their mother and father were with their own problems, each had not failed to be shocked at how the girls were seemingly deteriorating. They were pale, their eyes were red and hollow with dark pouches underneath. They sat at the table entwined, shaking with suppressed sobs from time to time.

Gran knew that the twins were actually disguising giggles as sorrow. She hoped they would not come right out and start laughing. That would blow the whole scheme.

Of course they looked horrible. They had spent a couple of hours watching YouTube Halloween makeup videos and experimenting until they looked barely alive.

"Your job this summer," Gran said to David and Cat, "is to replicate a happy home, as much as you can, as it was before... well, before. One more thing. There will be no visitors of the opposite sex in the house --"

Erin coughed and hacked as if a cup of phlegm had decided to come up.

"-- except for Tommy and Noah. If there are any questions or conflicts, you all agree to bring them to me and accept that I am the final arbiter?"

David nodded. Cat nodded.

**********

David

A couple of weeks after I had moved back into what was now legally Cat's house, I was taking my lunch break on a job site in a neighborhood about a mile away. I sat in the first truck I ever bought for my then-new business, an ancient GMC truck with a bucket to get you up in the tree and a covered back to haul chips. In my numbering system to identify equipment, the old girl was Truck 1. The cabin was dusty and full of spare engine parts and hydraulic hoses, but it felt like home.

As I now had no home, this would do nicely.

The passenger door opened. I thought it was one of the crew, so I was surprised to see Lucille making the long climb up into the cab. She's a small woman, like her daughter. Busty and petite. Her hair is still mostly blonde with some grey that she does not try to conceal, and as she hiked her leg up to slide into the seat beside me, I had a glimpse of a thigh, pale and smooth.

I recalled Ben Franklin's remark that an older woman's lower parts continue to the last as plump as ever.

I had always thought Lucille was a beautiful woman for any age, and I looked forward to growing old with my version of her. Now.... shot to shit.

She settled herself and handed me a brown paper bag. "All the usuals," she smiled. "I know you don't eat well when you are stressed."

She was right. Chicken salad on wheat, her potato salad with egg, and an icy cold can of Dr. Brown Black Cherry Soda.

"Thanks, Lucille," I said, diving in.

"How are you holding up?"

I was making progress on the sandwich and had to swallow first. "At first I thought the whole thing was a farce. I mean, where did you find this doctor, anyway"

"The girls sought her out. They realized they needed help and didn't think the fellow they usually see could understand. So they found a woman who had a unique insight into their situation."

"Yeah," I said. "I thought they liked their regular pediatrician, but they are almost adults. Whoever this new woman is, well, her therapy or whatever it is must be working. Surely you've noticed the girls are looking better already."

"I have," she agreed. "At this rate they will be back to their old selves by the time you ship them off to college."

"Yeah, then I can get the hell out of there."

"Is it really that bad being in the same house as Catherine?"

I stuck a fork into the potato salad. "It's really hard for me, Lucille. I loved her so hard for so long, and those good memories are still in here." I pointed to my chest. "Then I see her and all I can think of are those movies...."

"I can only imagine what that was like."

My eyes rested on Lucille's pert little nose. It was Cat's nose. Lucille had always been frank with me, sometimes oversharing to the point of embarrassment.

"I dream about her," I said. "I dream that we are in bed, having sex. Making love. In those dreams, I have no knowledge of the present. I just feel the most intense happiness. Then I wake up and it all smashes to the floor. My love for her twists on itself until it breaks and my mind is filled with hate. I feel betrayed, abandoned. Then I have to go down to breakfast and pretend to be civil for the sake of the twins. So, yes, it is bad."

We sat in silence for a while as I ate, then I said, "Lucille, I'm sorry. I have to ask. The girls accused Cat of having a genetic flaw, something in her DNA that made her more likely to --"

"And you want to know if my husband had ever cheated on me?"

She saw that I was uncomfortable. "And if I ever cheated on him?"

"Yeah."

She shook her head. "David, I love you like a son. I wish to God I had more insight into why a person cheats, but I don't. Yes, Howard and I were hippies. Free love, swinging 60's, all those things, and quite a bit of it was true. But our marriage was just about the two of us. Look, David, people are human. We are stupid and make stupid decisions. The best we can do is try not to hurt the ones we love."