Homelands Pt. 02 Ch. 01

At any rate, if Brianna looked best from the neck up, it was the exact opposite for my mother. Her waist was a few inches wider than my cousin's, yet her figure put the queen's to shame. Curves like that just weren't found on women that were otherwise so thin.

And, unlike the queen, she wore an outfit that made sure that you'd notice precisely that.

Her full thighs were mostly left exposed by her white opaque knee-high stockings. The stockings were attached to a red silk garter that perfectly matched both her lips and her panties. Her enormous breasts were brought to full prominence by her tight white bustier, a garment that had been patterned with red hearts to match the rest of her ensemble. Tying it all together, she wore a red choker and red patent leather heels.

"Hi, honey," my mother said as she draped herself in my lap, sitting sideways across my thighs. "I've missed you." She planted a soft kiss on my cheek. "I hope you're being careful over there."

"I missed you too, Mom," I said. Then added, "I am. As much as I can be. I promise."

"You better be," she said. "I won't forgive you if something happens to you."

Won't forgive me?

Of course, it wasn't like she could say that she'd blame Brianna. Not with the queen sitting right beside us. But her words had sounded more sincere than not.

Nonetheless, by way of response, I kissed her. Not the lustful kiss of foreplay, but the tender kiss of lovers reunited. It was intoxicating.

On the one hand, I very much wanted to fuck her brains out right then and there, without wasting any time on pleasantries.

But on the other hand, the simple little kiss felt perfectly appropriate, and I didn't want to do anything to cheapen the moment.

I heard the bed creak and felt it rise as Brianna's weight, such as it was, departed. I opened my eyes briefly and saw her come around to stand in front of me, looking down at the heartfelt reunion with a bemused grin. After a few moments, she gathered my mother's inky black hair up in her delicate fingers.

I took that for the signal it undoubtedly was and broke the kiss off.

"Now, you mustn't blame your mother for holding out on you so long," my cousin said. "It's going to take a lot of effort to open the vault back up. More than she could manage on her own. More than even I could, probably."

"I'm sorry, baby. I've wanted to give this back to you for so long. But without her majesty's gracious assistance, I simply couldn't." Mom's eyes were wide and vulnerable.

"It's okay," I said. In truth, I didn't really know how to respond, since I had no idea what memory they were going to return to me. But I couldn't bear that look in her eyes, her palpable fear at the thought that I might be mad at her. "I understand."

"Please don't hate me," she said, running her hands through the short tufts of my hair. "It was your father's idea to do this to you in the first place. As I guess you're about to see. If I could have convinced him to help me undo it, I would have. You have to know that. But you know how stubborn your father can be once he puts his foot down. Like he thinks it's an affront on his manhood to back down, even if he comes to accept that he was wrong."

I kissed her nose. "It's really okay."

She hesitated a moment, staring at me. At last, she said, "I hope you still think that after we're done."

"Oh, he can't possibly stay mad at you, Aunt Ellen. You know that," Brianna said.

I was pretty sure she was right.

I hoped so, at any rate.

"Shall we begin?" my cousin asked.

My mother sighed and bobbed her head in assent.

Four hands pressed their fingers against my scalp. I gasped as I felt them sink past the skin. It was like my skull offered no more resistance than the surface of a pool of water. Yet, though there were now twenty holes in my head, I felt no pain.

When the memory returned, vivid didn't begin to describe the experience. I relived it.

#

I sat in the living room with my computer in my lap and my headphones on. But no sound was coming through them. I'd had the movie I was watching on pause for a few minutes now, while I tried to overhear the conversation my parents were having in the kitchen.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Dad stood with his back against the kitchen counter, and Mom was pressed against him. His hands were wrapped around her tiny waist.

But that made no sense. My mother's waist was anything but tiny.

Two very different images of both my father and my mother seemed to be flickering in and out of view. Or, rather, the realistic images, the ones that were so familiar, were flickering in and out of view. The other images, the ones that looked like they had obviously been based on my parents but were still quite alien to me, seemed much more stable.

Both versions of my mother were short and had exceptionally fair skin and dark hair. But for one, that fair skin was completely unblemished and entirely too firm and youthful. Her lush, vibrant hair had only the faintest hints of gray, when it should have been limp, dull, and generously shot through with silver. Most strikingly, the fantasy version of my mother had to weigh half as much as the other one.

The two versions of my father were not quite as different. For one thing, even the idealized version of him still looked to be a good deal older than me, whereas the alternate version of my mother could have been in her twenties. For another, even the ordinary version of my father was in decent shape. Not nearly as fit as the other one, but the difference was still much smaller than between the two versions of my mother.

My mother had taken on a figure that no woman could ever have come by naturally. For starters, the aforementioned waist. Admittedly, even the sexy version's waist wasn't actually tiny. There were women with smaller waists, if not a great many of them. It just looked comically small because of her figure. Her breasts were the size of watermelons and her hips were probably twice as wide as her waist. Then there was her ass. Good lord, her ass. It was huge, smooth, and too well shaped not to have a good layer of serious muscle beneath, but looked like it still had to be nice and soft.

I was basing that on the fact that Dad had the hem of her negligee hiked up, and since she wasn't wearing anything but a thong beneath it, when he gave her glorious white orbs playful little slaps, the resulting jiggle was visible even from the living room.

Mom whimpered softly. "Honey, stop. Frank's just in the other room. What if he sees?"

"He's on his computer, and he's got his headphones on. The house could be burning down around him, and he might not even notice."

"Well, that's kinda true," she agreed. "But still. I'm sure he glances up every once in a while. And when he does, he doesn't need to see my fat ass hanging out in the open!"

I wasn't so sure about that last part, though they were more than a little right about the first bit. Ordinarily, anyway.

"Wait, you don't want him to see that?" Dad asked.

"Of course not! What are you talking about?"

He let the hem of her negligee fall back down, covering her gorgeous humps.

My breath caught. I knew I should feel terrible about thinking such thoughts. But that body was unreal. It was like I wasn't even lusting after her at all, in a way. A little pathetic, sure, in the same way beating off to erotic cartoons was pathetic. But the woman in the kitchen was so far removed from reality that it hardly felt like there was anything particularly immoral or incestuous about the thoughts I was having.

Except, of course, I knew better. That was just what I wanted to believe. Whatever she looked like, this was indeed my mother that I was drooling over.

"So you don't like the idea of your sons lusting after you?"

"We've talked about this," she said.

They had?

I almost dropped my laptop.

"Well, see, that's the funny thing," Dad said. "We did. And I thought we agreed that we were waiting until Nat comes of age."

Waiting...for what? What would change in three years, when Nat turned eighteen?

Mom spoke slowly, drawing each syllable out. "And. That's. Changed. How?"

"You tell me," Dad replied.

Mom pulled away from him, crossed her arms under her heavy breasts. One leg slipped back behind her, and she rested all her weight on it as she arched her back to glower up at my father. That did wonderful things to her taut ass cheek.

"Honey, if you're trying to say something, just go ahead and say it," she said.

Dad laughed. "Okay." He paused, gathering his breath. "I know that you've been fucking Dom for the past two weeks."

If this were the cartoon Mom's otherworldly figure almost made it seem to be, my jaw would have hit the floor and my eyes popped out like telescopes.

For a split second, I thought maybe I hadn't heard him right. But I was sure that I had. It wasn't impossible that I could have misheard the name. Don could easily be mistaken for Dom. But I didn't know anyone by that name, and even if Mom and Dad did, given the context, there was really only one thing that made sense.

My father had just accused my mother of having an affair with her oldest son.

After a minute or so, Mom sighed and said, "Actually, it's been more like five months, not two weeks. But then, we were being a lot more careful at first than we have been lately. I told him he was going to get us caught, but you know how well he listens."

Dad laughed. "Is that all you have to say for yourself?"

"Um," Mom said, looking down at her bare feet, "no, I guess not. I have to admit, it was a lot more fun doing in secret than it would have been if I'd asked your permission first."

My father just shook his head, a bemused smirk on his face.

What. The. Fuck.

When Dad had said they were going to wait until Nat came of age, he must have meant precisely what I thought he meant. Nothing else made sense, given the rest of their comments.

Nothing else explained why his reaction was the same it would have been if Mom had decided to buy a bigger television than they'd agreed to get.

"I tried to stick to our agreement. I really did. You don't know how many times I've been tempted to seduce him over the past couple years. How badly I wanted to make his eighteenth birthday special. Or his twenty-first. I didn't do any of those things. But then, when he was home for Christmas this past year, he started pursuing me," she said.

Because, of course, that made it okay.

And wasn't that just like Dom. It wasn't enough that he got everything he wanted from Mom, and got every girl he wanted besides. No, he had to have that from Mom too.

Realizing what I'd just thought to myself, I winced. What was wrong with me? I should be on the brink of vomiting, not adding "Fucked Mom before me" to the list of reasons why I resented Dom. How did that compare to the fact that he hadn't had to pay for his first car but I did, or how Mom hadn't seemed to notice that if things kept going as they were, I just might graduate from college before him, even though he was two years older than me?

"Now, admittedly," Mom said, "I might have encouraged him more than I should have. But, really, dear, you had to know when you asked me to wait until Nat turned eighteen before taking any of our sons into my bed that I'd never make it, right?"

The fact that she'd said "any" of her sons did not escape my notice.

Dad leaned down, ran his hands through Mom's gorgeous hair, and planted a kiss on her forehead. "I suppose so. I wanted to believe that you'd wait, but yeah, I guess I knew you'd slip up sooner or later." He chuckled to himself. "The real question is what to do now."

Mom looked down at her feet, one of which was nervously trying to bore a hole into the tiles beneath her. Her teeth dug into her full lower lip. Slowly, she looked up at Dad through her lashes, head still bowed. "Well, now that the cat's out of the bag-"

Dad frowned.

The words all but tumbled out of her mouth, she spoke so quickly. "I mean, can you imagine how he'll react when I tell him that we have to stop now, that we have to wait three more years before we can do it again? He'll have none of it. And when you tell Dom, 'Not now,' he doesn't hear, 'No.' He hears, 'Keep pushing. I'll give in soon.'"

Ain't that the truth.

"So we'll just have to seal his memories in a vault," Dad said. "Unless of course you've changed your mind about letting my mother come live with us? Maybe I wouldn't mind if I didn't have to make do with only seeing her and my sister a few times a year."

Mom's lips tightened. "It's not that I'm trying to keep you from-"

Dad sighed, cutting her off with a dismissive wave of his hand. "No, I know, I know. Of course you don't want her living with us. For lots of reasons, none of which have anything to do with what we're talking about now. I get it. Probably even agree. Would be nice if she lived closer to us instead of down in Jersey, but I'm not sure even I want her under the same roof as us. But in less than a year, we'll have three sons who are of age, and I'm supposed to just sit back and watch you have all the fun you want, while all I get is a few quick tumbles at the holidays?"

"Well," Mom said, rubbing Dad's upper arm, "maybe just Dom. I mean, I haven't even touched Frank yet. And you know he won't make himself impossible to resist."

"Does that just mean that you've already fucked him, but you haven't let him talk you into being careless enough to get caught?" Dad asked with a hint of amusement.

"No, I really haven't. I mean, you're right, if I had, you probably wouldn't know. Frank's...different."

I really wish she hadn't said that in the same tone of voice as she'd use to describe someone with a learning disability. Which, come to think of it, she'd once thought I had.

It seemed to me that if your first son was so possessed by the devil that it never occurred to you that maybe, just maybe, it was possible for a child to sit still for a few hours without crying or throwing a tantrum or setting anything on fire without said child being autistic or something, perhaps it wasn't strictly necessary to later tell him that you'd had him tested. Not that I was bitter or anything.

Mom covered her face with her hands. "I don't know. God, this is sick. I can't believe I'm trying to explain why I haven't had sex with my son."

"We're not back to playing that game then, are we?" Dad asked.

Mom lowered her hands slowly. They came to rest on Dad's chest. "It's just that Dom is so relentless. And I knew he wouldn't tell anyone. I can see that Frank wants to. But I really did want to behave myself, and as long as I don't let myself have too many drinks when Frank's around, that's possible. It's not easy. At all. But it's possible."

My heart accelerated at that.

But at the same time, it was almost more depressing to know that she was attracted to me. If I'd just been a bit more proactive. Story of my fucking life. I wasn't entirely passive when it came to women, but I was far more so than I'd have liked to be.

Dom, on the other hand, not only struck up a conversation with every halfway attractive woman he met, he did so whether or not she was, at that very moment, with a guy who was very obviously her boyfriend. It had gotten him into more than a few fights, sure. But he'd come out of most of those in better shape than the poor would-be knight in shining armor. And, more importantly, though his obnoxious ways had earned him a few bruises, they'd also gone the other way more often than I wanted to believe was possible.

On top of that, he'd even slept with one of my girlfriends.

Not to mention a few of Todd's. Who were entirely too young for him.

When I took intro psych last semester, I'd thought to myself more than once that Dom was a man with an id but no ego or supergo. He wanted, he took. Consequences be damned.

Even though he was exceptionally smart, it was still very much an open question whether he'd ever graduate college, because it was completely beyond his ability to choose studying or writing a paper over going out and getting drunk and laid. He couldn't live within a certain distance of high schools anymore, because one of Todd's girlfriends decided that the only way to convince Todd not to dump her was to bring charges against his older brother. Sure, what they'd done wouldn't have been a crime if she'd been born a mere month later than she had been, but still. Call the law arbitrary if you want, it wasn't like he didn't know she was underage, and what that could mean.

Yet none of that seemed to prevent him from impressing most women. Sure, there were some who saw the same jackass I did when they looked him. But far fewer than made any sense to me. I just couldn't understand what was so sexy about my brother, the convicted sex offender and small time drug dealer, a guy who seemed to be well on his way to racking up an impressive amount of debt from student loans without a degree to show for it. He wasn't ugly, sure, but he wasn't the best looking guy alive either, so that couldn't be it.

Nevermind the stupid sorority girls at his stupid party school though. How could our mother look at him and see the same charming ne'er-do-well?

Granted, Mom only knew half the trouble Dom had gotten himself into since he'd gone away to school, because half the time, he'd call me to come bail him out just to avoid her disappointment. But that didn't really matter. Even if Mom knew every single thing I'd helped him cover up, it wouldn't matter. She knew enough of the worst of what he'd done.

Thinking back to intro psych, I guess it was no wonder I'd been attracted to my mother even before I'd seen this fantasy version of her. Which I realized now that I had been. It wasn't exactly Oedipal, since I wasn't jealous of my father. But Mom had always treated Dom differently, and even before I'd known they were having an incestuous affair, there was still a sense in which she'd acknowledged him as a sexual being in a way that she didn't seem capable of doing with me. We never had a conversation about being safe or anything. Which maybe was because she knew I was responsible, or because there was less reason to worry about the son that was always in a committed relationship rather than bringing a different girl home every night. But I couldn't help feeling, on some level, like it was because my mother just wasn't capable of putting the words "sex" and "Frank" in the same sentence.

After all, if the reason Mom never talked to me about practicing safe sex was because she trusted that I was responsible, why was it that when I first went away to school, she'd told Dom that she expected him to call me at least once a week to check in on me? As if Dom was some kind of role model. If she knew that I now called him every week to make sure he wasn't in financial or legal trouble, how would she react to that?

I pushed those thoughts away.

Mom had said all I needed to hear. So what if she didn't realize what a fuck-up Dom was. So what if I felt compelled to help him out whenever he needed it, because I knew that whatever else I could say about him, if I ever had needed him the way Mom seemed to expect me to, he'd do the same. Or do his best to, until some girl came along and distracted him. I couldn't really blame him for that, and I couldn't hold it against Mom that she was attracted to him instead of me, because it wasn't instead of me. It was in addition to. All I had to do was stop being so timid.

I forced myself to tune back in to the conversation taking place in the other room.

"--then we're going to lock both their memories away in vaults and we're really going to try to behave ourselves until Nat comes of age, okay?" Dad was saying.