Folie a Deux, Episode 01

From offscreen, a female voice asks, "What sort of things?"

"My senses," Emily says. "Everything seemed astonishingly vivid. The colors were sharper than I'd ever noticed them before or since. The smells, the cat urine and the roasting pork, the gasoline and the wood smoke from the fire, engine grease, unwashed bikers -- all of that burned itself into my memory. I can smell it all still in my mind, as though I was still there. My hearing, though...I suppose that's the exception. I know there was talking around us, an excited buzz from our intended audience, laughing, swearing, but I don't think any of it registered. I could only really hear my son's voice and my own."

"I can't tell you how I felt," Mike says with a shrug. "It's too complicated, too mixed up. I was angry a lot more than I was scared, and I wasn't scared of the bikers anymore. I was scared of actually doing it. The actual sex. Not being watched, not even being forced to do it. I was scared of doing it with my mom. I didn't want to hurt her. I didn't want to...mess her up. I mean, I knew it was going to mess both of us up, but I wanted to protect her. And...I...didn't want to disappoint her. It's stupid to think about it at a time like that, but it was going to be traumatic enough her that I didn't want bad sex to be piled on top of it. But then that's fucked up because it's like, I want to be a good fuck FOR MY MOM. And so I immediately started thinking I was a pervert for even thinking that, like, putting a qualitative thing on what we had to do. Like, shouldn't it have been something I just put my head down and got through? Was it fucked up that I wanted to make it good for her? Should she know her son is a good fuck? Should I know what it takes to be a good fuck for her? So there's all these crazy questions just crashing through my mind. I told you it was complicated."

"Did you have a girlfriend at the time?" the interviewer asks.

"No," Mike says. "But there was a girl I liked a lot."

Another picture appears: a petite redhead with freckles, sparkling green eyes, and an enormous smile. Her name is given as Hannah Williamson.

Mike relates in voiceover, "Hannah. We'd never really done anything, but we were really attracted to each other. She was this awesome, amazing girl, super smart, funny, sweet, hot. Everything, the whole deal. We'd been kinda dancing with each other for a long time, like this mutual attraction that never worked out. She was free when I was going out with somebody, and when I was free she was dating somebody else. She broke up with her boyfriend at the end of senior year and she and I had talked a few times since then. I was planning to ask her out as soon as I got back from the wedding."

"I knew Mike wasn't a virgin," Emily says with a shrug. "I suppose that mostly I tried not to think too much about it."

The offscreen woman asks, "When you realized that there was no choice, that you two would have to have sex, did you want it to be good for him? Right in the first moment you realized, I mean."

Emily considers this for a few seconds, then says, "No. Honestly it wasn't a thought that I was capable of formulating in that moment. I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't want to scar him emotionally any more than was absolutely necessary. But right then, right when we decided that we had to do it, no, it didn't occur to me to want to be good for him."

The offscreen interviewer again: "What was that moment like for you?"

"Horrific," Emily says without hesitation. "Mike is my son, and I was about to have sex with him. I was about to share something with him that parents are never supposed to share with their children. Society and nature have always said that. It sickened me that we were being forced to transgress perhaps the single most fundamental law in human relations."

"Everybody started forming this big circle around us," Mike says. "It was like it was a clown show or something for them. They were laughing and smiling and shouting stuff. Like, 'Show your mamma how much you love her' and 'Make a man outta that boy,' stuff like that. Like it was a game. And there we were, we had to fuck right there in the dirt, me and my mom. I didn't even know how to start, so I told her I loved her."

"Mike put his lips against my ear and whispered," Emily says, her voice tightening with emotion. "I'll always remember his exact words. He said, 'Mom, I love you. I'll always love you. Nothing that happens here today will change that. Nothing these people could do can touch that. Just hold onto that and we'll be fine."

"How did that make you feel?" the interviewer asks.

"Proud!" Emily says emphatically. "It was so mature, so strong. I think he was stronger in that moment than I was, and I felt like I was going to explode with pride that he had become such a...a powerful young man. He wasn't a boy anymore, he was a man, and I just felt myself swell with love for him. It's strange, certainly, but those words, and the complete confidence with which he said them, actually made me feel safe."

"I made the first move," says Mike. "There was no way I was going for boobs or between her legs right off, that would have been way too much for me, and for her too. I had my lips right there, so I nibbled her ear. I took her earlobe between my lip sand just suckled on it, sort of teased it with my tongue. And instantly I felt her pull in this deep breath, this sort of gasp."

"My ears are my most sensitive spot," Emily says, pulling back her hair to reveal her left ear, decorated by a tasteful silver stud. "At least, my most sensitive spot not usually covered by clothing. He didn't know that about me, of course. How could he? But he went right there and...and his lips were so clever, so certain, so direct. I was shocked by it, shocked by the act, shocked by how right the move was on his part...shocked at how good he was at it. Right from the very first, he was...exquisite."

"Where were your hands?" the interviewer asks.

"One was on his shoulder, just resting there, and the other was on his hip, just above his waistline. I was very stiff. If he hadn't made the first move, I don't know if I could have. But he took the initiative...the...command. I needed that."

"I was surprised by her reaction," Mike says with a trace of a cocky smile. "It was the first time I'd touched her sexually, and it wasn't even really that sexual, but she loved it."

"How did that make you feel?" the offscreen interviewer asks.

His smile gets a little bigger as he said, "Good. I wanted it to be good for her. I wanted her to be able to...lose herself in it. It was like, if she could shut out all these other people, if we could do that, I mean -- if it was just us, just her and me doing this, then it would be as bad for either of us."

"The way his arms were around me, I could really feel his strength," Emily says. Something in her voice suggests that this is not an unpleasant memory. "He was an athlete and very, very fitness-conscious. Bob was too, of course, but there's a difference between the body of a high-school athlete and a 38-year-old man with a desk job who runs and goes to the gym. I couldn't deny it was a pleasant difference. Mike's arms were strong and absolutely certain. He had one hand on my lower back, above my waist, and it was very chaste and proper but I could feel it there, so big, so steady. I think I felt his hand even more than I did the lips on my ear because it made me feel so supported. His other arm was around my upper back, holding me up, hold me to him. And his lips on me..." She finishes with a small, slightly awkward and ashamed smile.

"She tilted her head," Mike says. "Just a little, but it made her hair drop out of the way so I could kiss her ear better. It was obvious she liked it, so I kept doing it to relax her...maybe start her thinking that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world."

"I don't think I was getting turned on yet," Emily muses, "but it did feel very good. It wasn't erotic (at least not yet) but it was very sensual and soft and intimate. The intimacy was the thing I needed most in that situation. I just closed my eyes and let it happen."

"I worked her earlobe for a little while, then I took my mouth off it," Mike says. "She tensed a little at first, but when she realized that I was just moving to the other ear she tilted her head and brushed her hair back to make it easier for me to get it. When I got my lips on it she made a kind of a happy sound, almost like a little purr, and then a gasp. And then she told me I was really good at that."

"I told him that to encourage him," Emily says, "and because it was the truth. At that point I'd been married to his father for almost 15 years, and with him for over 19, and he still wasn't as good at that as Mike was from the first moment he put his lips on me. I wanted him to know he was doing it right."

"I wasn't in a hurry," Mike tells us. "The assholes wanted a show, but I didn't give a fuck about them. This was about me and my mom, and she was liking this. So I went from left to right and back again. She sort of cuddled up against me, just pressed herself against me real close, and I tightened my arms around her. She liked that too, and by the time I was back on her left ear she'd taken her hand from my shoulder and was running her fingers through my hair."

"It was strange, certainly, to be doing that with my son," Emily says. "Don't misunderstand that. It was painful and awkward and so incredibly sad that I can't put it into words. But that doesn't mean that my nerves stopped functioning. It doesn't mean that things that normally felt good somehow didn't feel good. And it doesn't matter how strong your soul is -- your body can still betray you."

"When I first kissed her on the lips was probably the most awkward part of the whole thing, start to finish," says Mike. "It was sexual in a way the ear thing wasn't. It was my lips on hers, my tongue on hers. That was when we had to pull each other across the line."

"To this day I'm grateful he kissed me," Emily says. "It's not just that he took the initiative, though I needed him to do that. But the kiss was so very intimate. When I felt his lips on mine and felt his tongue move across my lips, I found I could shut out all the awful things that were being said around me, the puerile lewdness those barbarians were shouting at us, and focus completely on him, and on me, and on that kiss. It was the perfect thing to do."

"It was just lips at first," Mike tells us. "I pressed my lips against her lips and just held them there for a few seconds, before I began to move them, and in a moment she responded. She started kissing me back. I think she needed the reassurance that a kiss gave her, the reassurance that I loved her and always would. And then, after about a minute of kissing with closed mouths, I ran my tongue across the crease where her lips met. She made a little sound when she felt it, just this little gasp that I could barely hear. It was almost more of an exhalation. She stiffened a bit and let my tongue move...and then she parted her lips and let our tongues meet."

"It was just the tips of our tongues at first," Emily recalls. "Just the very most nimble part of the end, touching tentatively and hesitantly. I recall my mind screaming at me that I was French kissing my son and it was wrong, but there was another part of me that realized it was still a kiss."

"What do you mean?" asks the interviewer.

"I mean that even though it was with my son, and I shouldn't have been doing it, it felt good to have my tongue against his, just as it would have with anyone else. Except...no, better than anyone else. Better than anyone else in the world. I was kissing Mike and it was all right because I loved him. I loved him more than any other man in the world."

"More than your husband?"

Emily shrugs and smiles, a simple and eloquent answer on its own. "My relationship with Bob was...interesting. Complex, certainly. We'll talk more about that later, but for now I will simply say that I never loved Bob nearly as much as I loved Mike. And when our tongues met and began to dance together, I realized that the love I felt for him was what was going to get me -- us -- through the ordeal."

"But it wasn't that kind of love, was it?" the interviewer asks.

"No," Emily admits, "but I discovered something then: that love, real love, is a very flexible thing. It becomes what it needs to be to survive, and to help you survive. We loved each other like mother and son, but in that moment we needed our love to carry us through, and it changed to be able to do that. When our tongues began to move together, I felt his love for me, and I knew he could feel my love as well."

"There was this weird phase right at first," Mike says with a slightly shy grin. "This awkward part, where we were both super-aware of who we were tongue-kissing. It was uncomfortable for...less than a minute, I suppose, and then I just got into it."

"I discovered that my son is an excellent kisser," Emily says, and the obvious embarrassment she feels is colored by pride and even excitement. "The oddness of it passed almost immediately, and once it was gone all I could feel was that it was a wonderful kiss that was getting better by the moment as we learned each other's motions. When he caressed my teeth with his tongue, I put the tip of my tongue against him and just felt him explore me. It was wrong, but it was also thrilling."

"In what way?" the interviewer asks.

"Because it had been almost 20 years since I'd kissed anyone but my husband," Emily replies. "And to be brutally honest, Bob was never a very good kisser. I'd forgotten how wonderful, how dizzying and breathtaking a simple kiss could be. And now, here I was with someone I loved as much as I could love, who was becoming a lover (although temporarily), and he was kissing me like I hadn't been kissed since before I'd met his father. No, I take that back -- I'd never felt that way while kissing, ever. My stomach was all in butterflies and I could feel myself relaxing all over and melting into him. It was the sort of kiss that could have seduced a stone, and I'm not made of stone. I had no chance before that kiss."

"My mom was hungry," Mike says. "That's the word I'd use. Once the awkwardness wore off she had her mouth so tight to mine that my lips got bruised. Seriously. She kissed me back, absolutely, and she did more, like when she sucked my tongue. She put her lips around it and suckled it deep into her mouth and then moved her tongue and her lips up and down it like she was giving it a blowjob. It felt amazing."

"Did that make you think of other things?" the interviewer inquires.

"Of course it did!" Mike nodded vigorously, a mischievous smile on his handsome face. "It made me think what that tongue and those lips could do on my cock. I couldn't help it, any guy would have thought the same thing in my place. From the way she was working my tongue, I knew she could give a blowjob that would make steam shoot out of my ears."

"That moment when I started to suck his tongue was the first time I felt his body...respond in an aroused fashion," Emily says delicately.

"What do you mean?" the interviewer asks.

"I felt his...penis...begin to harden against my stomach. Before then all I had felt was his muscles, and they were certainly hard, but now there was something else as well."

"How did that make you feel?"

Emily thinks seriously for a moment, then says, "It made me feel a very complex set of emotions, and I'm not positive that I can explain them. There was awkwardness first, because of the knowledge that I was arousing my own son and his erection was pressed between us. There was relief that I felt it begin to happen just from a kiss, because I had feared he might not be able to get aroused at all because of the fear and the unnaturalness of the situation, and that would undoubtedly have had very unpleasant consequences. Immediately after that reaction there came shame, for being glad I was giving my own son an erection, and indeed for giving him the erection in the first place. And then there was curiosity: I hadn't seen his penis since he was a little boy and I hadn't paid attention to it as he grew, and it was only natural that I wonder about it. How long it was, how thick, what it looked like, all of that was going through my head."

"Were you getting wet?" the interviewer asks.

Emily blushes, and it is apparent that she is genuinely uncomfortable with such frank and open discussions of sexuality. "Not yet, but I could feel myself relaxing to the point where I could become aroused. Again, I was surprised at that and relieved, because I hadn't thought I could with Mike -- which, of course, brought on the inevitable guilt that my son could arouse me in that way."

"The kiss was just getting hotter and hotter," Mike says. "We weren't just 'kissing' anymore, we were making out. Like, the kiss was something we were both getting into, something we were both enjoying and wanting more of. I was getting a hard-on, and I was like, do I pull back? Getting a hard-on from your mom is fucked up, right? But then I was like, no, why would I pull back from it? I had to get hard, and I had to put it into her when I was hard. I was going to be fucking her in a few minutes, so why be coy about having an erection?"

"Did she seem to enjoy it?" asks the interviewer.

"No, not at first," he says. "She didn't respond to it at all. And once I knew I wanted her to feel it, I was like, I want you to respond! I didn't want to be the only one out there on the limb of being turned on in this situation. So I let my hand drift down and I squeezed her ass. And my mom's a dancer -- she has an awesome ass, just as hard as a rock, muscular, full. Her cheek filled my hand perfectly and I squeezed it, then moved my hand down a little more so my fingers were underneath the cheek toward her crotch, and I pulled her into me."

Emily sighs in pleasant recollection. "When Mike touched my...bottom, and drew me in closer, I finally felt the first twinges of excitement. He's very strong, and he was very confident and certain in a way I hadn't expected him to be. It was a very possessive thing for him to do, and I enjoy being possessed during sex. In fact, I need to be possessed to enjoy it. I need to be dominated and controlled. I need to feel like the man is stronger and can overpower me, can make me do what he wants me to do, so that I'm free to be soft and feminine and yielding. I hadn't felt that with Bob in a very, very long time, so when Mike touched me in exactly that way and I could feel his strength and his assuredness and his command, my body simply reacted."

"Her nipples got hard," Mike says with a grin. "I felt them just pop right up where she was pressed against me, and she moaned a little into my mouth. I think it was then that I realized she was gonna be vocal during sex, but I had no idea how vocal! But she sort of wiggled against me and I got harder immediately, and she kind of whimpered. It was this sound of...it wasn't like she was begging me to fuck her yet or anything, but it was such a sexy goddamned sound, like this amazed little sound. And I felt like she was getting more turned on than she expected to."

"How did that make you feel?"

Mike opens his mouth to speak, reconsiders, and finally says, "Strong. Powerful. Good. Proud, I guess, most of all. I knew how painful and weird and traumatic this was going to be for us, and I knew she knew it too, so that when she made that turned-on little sound into my mouth and wiggled in closer, I knew I could make this good for her. I knew that it could be good sex."

"Mike has told me that I made a particular sound that excited him," Emily says, a twinkle in her eyes, "but of course I don't remember it. What I do remember instead is his...penis -- I have to get used to saying that. Penis. His penis. I felt his penis get bigger and harder and jump against me, against my stomach. I remember exactly how it felt against me in that moment, and the thrill I felt run through me when I realized that it was bigger than his father's."