Snowed In Ch. 03

Vanessa made another face; she was blushing deep crimson. Sherry went on.

“What happens when there’s real problems in your lives, and there will be. How are you going to feel if he fools around on you? You’re so prepared to do it to him, how will that be -- having the shoe on the other foot?”

“I hadn’t really thought that far ahead, Mom,” she said.

“Vanessa, I love you. But your problem is that you never think that far ahead. Marriage is big, serious stuff, honey -- not something you rush into hoping it will all work out.” Her eyes met Neal’s, briefly, as she said it, and he felt his throat swelling. “You have to mean it, you have to make it work. This thing with you and Brad won’t work. A family is one thing, that’s trouble enough. A family with a guy you don’t love is quite another. That’s just making things worse.”

“Right,” said his daughter, wiping tears away. “I know that.”

“You know your father and I both love you. We love both of you. We’ll help you all we can, we’ll work things out. But Brad has to be told. It’s not fair to him, to the baby or to you if you let it go on.”

“Okay.” It was barely a whisper.

Sherry rose and crossed to them, falling on her knees before them, hugging them. She kissed their foreheads and rocked with them, as if they were three years old.

Neal sat amazed, dumbfounded, mute. There were no kisses for him, no hugs. No signs of reconciliation to reassure him, save one.

You knowyour father and I love you, she had said.Your father and I . . .

“Okay,” said Sherry, resuming her seat and drying her own eyes. “That was the easy part.”

***

Hours later, when there was no more talk, she and Neal gathered in the kitchen to recover. The kids had fallen asleep, Josh in Neal’s recliner, Vanessa on the couch.

Actually, there had been “no more talk” rather quickly. As Sherry came to realize, and as Neal seemed already to surmise, there was almost no way to talk adequately about What Had Happened. In fact, the phrase had acquired capital letters for her during their attempt to talk, simply because no one was sure what to call it, how to refer to it. Some things Neal had said seemed to indicate he thought of it as a rape, but Sherry was prepared to argue with that definition. She did not feel like a “victim” in any sense.

It would have been far less complicated to talk about if she could fix on some definite response. She certainly could not condone what her husband and children had done to/with her --Hey, let’s all fuck each other on a regular basis! -- nor could she, with her hand on her heart, honestly condemn it --That was vile and disgusting and I hate you all. Neither attitude fit her feelings. She would never be able to bring their sex (it was after all “their” sex -- she had participated) into their normal, everyday lives together; she wasn’t sure any civilized human being could do that. But she also could not genuinely feel the revulsion, the dismay and disgust she thought sheshouldfeel. The sex had just felt too damned good.

What she needed -- she wasn’t sure about the others -- was a way to think about it that kept them safe, that kept them together. Admittedly, her remarkable burst of clarity in the past few hours had a lot to do with all the puking she’d done upstairs, the natural response of a body after days of physical abuse. But it also had to do with the fact that she now knew the worst, and had an objective: keeping her family. It seemed to Sherry that she must acknowledge the fact that they had all had sex together, not merely in the same room, but actively participating, and that she had enjoyed it. Yes, the fact that she had been on a week-long drug and booze buzz had made it possible for her to enjoy it, had softened the hard lines of reality enough to get lost in it. If they had all shown up at her door and said “Can we all come in and make love to you?” she would certainly have refused them. Hell, six hours ago she would have refused Neal this request, and he was her husband.

Sherry finished her glass of wine, her second glass, and looked across the table to Neal. His eyes were smoky, and still, not a little afraid. A while ago, when the kids had begun to doze and they lowered the lights and made for the kitchen, she had kissed him -- their first kiss in almost a week. It had to be a tender kiss, what with his busted lip: that blow she’d landed with the candlestick. But their first in a week, and the first they had really meant in much, much longer. Despite all the craziness, the elements that made their sex so hard to understand, the fact remained that Neal had made love to her again. Slowly and carefully, with all his attention upon her, he had brought her his hard, throbbing, naked desire and had buried it, had lost it, in her. In her pussy, her womb. It was not rape, nor was it just complacent, dutiful sex, which might have been worse than rape. It was an almost unthinkable set of circumstances for reconciliation, but it had happened. Somehow, she felt like she possessed him again.

“What’s going on?” he asked her, peering anxiously into her face.

“What do you mean?”

He tapped her forehead gently. “In there. You’ve been so quiet.”

“Oh. Well . . .”

“I know,” he said. “I understand. Well, I . . . at least, I think . . . I’d like to think I do. But no, I guess I don’t.”

She smiled at him. It was just Neal, bumbling through a conversation. Certainly no great help. But it was sincere.

“Sure you don’t want some coffee?”

“Oh no. Have a little more wine though. No, I’m not going on a binge or anything.”

“I wasn’t saying anything. Hang on, I’ll get it.”

He got up, cheerfully enough. No accusing looks. The fact was, coffee was a reality drink, something that woke you up. She didn’t feel like being wakeful was what she needed at the moment. Better to sort things out in a relaxed frame of mind.

While she watched her husband uncork the bottle and pour the dark red liquid, she pondered for the hundredth time two remarks made by her kids during the long, frustrating discussion.

One: Josh, who had often seemed too dazed to contribute anything useful to the conversation, had brought said conversation to a burnt-rubber halt when he asked, “How come family members can fart around each other but they can’t fuck?”

The question, which produced its share of giggles, seemed at first to be totally incongruous, if not deranged. And to be sure, the poor boy was a bit distracted from the shock of what had happened. But the more Sherry thought about it, the more she extrapolated from the specifics of the question, the greater validity it seemed to have.

Family members -- that is, people in an immediate family, living under the same roof -- acknowledged certain basic aspects of being human more or less without question. They showered and left hairs in the tub. They got sick sometimes and threw up, right in front of each other. They took pisses and got the toilet seat wet -- well, men did. And yes, they cut the cheese in each other’s presence (mostly men again). Everybody got to smell everybody else’s dirty feet. All these things, all perfectly natural and understandable, are tolerated daily, by virtually every family. They all had to do with typical human drives and functions.

Nowsex is a typical human drive and function, too, but it is not shared in a family. It is not acknowledged. In other words, what her dear son was asking (in his own shallow way) was why this had to be the case. Why was it okay to wipe your son’s piss off the toilet seat but not okay to let him pleasure you, sexually? Why was it normal to wash his cum-stained bedsheets but not to let him cum in your mouth?

Of course, it was a ridiculous comparison. But that did not mean the question was invalid.

Two: Vanessa had interrupted at one point to say, perhaps a little petulantly, “You know, Mom, you’re wrong when you say I never think far ahead. I think far ahead about you and Dad. I want you two to stay together.”

That remark really got Sherry thinking. What the hell did that mean? Was Vanessa saying she’d intended all this, that she’d engineered it somehow? Surely that was impossible. She could never have stage directed such a catastrophe, nor could she have known everything would come out (reasonably) okay.

Well, no, but there was plenty of evidence to suggest that she was mindful of the sexuality in the house, or lack thereof. Her remarks about overhearing Sherry and Neal through the wall, and her gift of the dildo (a dildo! for Christmas! for her mother!) made that obvious. It seemed to Sherry that her daughter, for all her nuttiness and lack of restraint, for all her impulsiveness, had been trying to heal them. She recognized a need and tried to provide it. It was strange, it was extreme -- it was insane, her solution. But to some degree, it seemed, it had worked. Sherry was calmer than she had been, less afraid, less desperate. She had just taken part in the craziest sex scene of her life -- and without becoming a swinger, without risking disease, without betraying Neal. Saying that she “kept it in the family” sounded a bit lurid, but in effect, she had. All that release and none of the consequences -- well, none of the conventional consequences, anyway. Just some guilt and bewilderment. Now if Sherry could find a way to contain that guilt, to clear up that bewilderment, why couldn’t they all get on with their lives, intact?

“Hey,” Neal said.

“Hmm -- what?”

“I love you.”

Sherry looked at him. He was across the table but leaning towards her, as though hanging onto her every expression, her every sigh. She hadn’t seen him so . . . so into her, since they were newlyweds. She smiled and touched his hand.

“That sounded like you meant it.”

“I did. You’re beautiful.”

“I love you too.”

He held one hand, the other she ran through her hair, then, absently, let roam across the front of her robe, over her breasts, to her stomach. How fantastic it had felt. Neal filling her up, making her gasp with every stroke, so hard and so big inside her she could feel him in her throat. Her son, at least as big as his daddy, crying out while she sucked him -- his burning skin against her lips, the broad head at the back of her throat, the powerful spurts of his cum. Her daughter, kissing and nuzzling her tits, sucking her nipples raw. Her tongue dancing over her clit, expertly, like she ate pussy every day.That girl, Sherry thought, shaking her head,has got a lot of explaining to do, some time.

It was all so unreal, dirty pictures glimpsed through the haze, an obscene, guilty dream. That haze, she thought again, that ugly haze had made it possible. Under the influence of the three D’s -- drugs, drink and despair -- she had accidentally done something beautiful. Consciously she would have rejected it, as wrong, immoral, unthinkable, gross. In that patently irrational condition, though . . .

Maybe that was the answer. She and Neal had always been fairly rational people -- they could not have enjoyed many of their common interests otherwise. But sex, especially crazy, kinky, “improper” sex, was not rational: it was basic, instinctive, raw. It did not fit into the rational world, but it could not be suppressed either. Suppress it and shit happens. Suppress it, and you get desperate, depressed, self-destructive, as she had been for the past week. Suppress it, and you fall prey to infidelity and deceit, as Neal had done. Maybe the answer was to allow it, but contain it. Maybe sanctioning irrationality once in a while was completely rational. Everybody needed a chance to blow the lid off, to loose all that madness. It made sense to do that . . . as long as it was confined to the space of a few days.

Or even, she wondered, to the space of one’s own family?

Her eyes fell on the Christmas decorations at the kitchen window: the arcing garland, the electric candles. A Santa Claus decal, clinging to the frosty pane.

“Neal,” she said, “what was it you told me Christmas used to be?”

“Um,” he grunted, clearly surprised by the question, “well, there were no trees and stuff. Prince Albert brought a lot of that to England when --”

“No, no -- not what did it used to be like. What was it, before it was Christmas? You said something about it once . . .”

“Oh. You mean the Saturnalia.”

“Yeah.” She squeezed his hand -- her man, the bookworm. “How did that go again?”

“Well, in the old Roman calendar all the months were the same length. Like thirty days or something. And there was no leap year. So every year there were a few days at the end just sort of ‘left over.’”

“And those were party days?” Sherry said.

“Right -- very rowdy party days. Slaves got to be masters, masters were slaves. Sex, drunkenness, gluttony. That sort of thing.”

“So what happened,” Sherry asked, rubbing around her right breast in a lazy circle, “if you did something that had . . . I dunno . . . consequences? I mean, you couldn’t just shoot someone, could you?”

“Well, you couldn’tshoot anyone anyhow.”

“You know what I mean. You couldn’t, like, chop somebody’s head off, or get somebody pregnant, or something like that.”

“Chop their head, probably not. Get ‘em pregnant, yeah probably. I don’t really know. Far as I remember, unless it was really bad, you just did what you did and that was that. Sorta like a ‘Whatever happens in Vegas’ kinda thing.”

She nodded thoughtfully, taking a sip of her wine . . . wine, that would certainly have been part of it. Bacchus or whatever his name was. There was something intrinsically sexy about wine; she decided that long ago. Just lately, during all her depressed days, she’d been drinking to escape, to forget, or to pretend things weren’t happening. Now in her younger days, she remembered, she used to drink to have sex. Drink was a wonderful lubricant, so to speak. And wine had always been her favorite.

As she sat, feeling the tannins tugging at the back of her throat -- that place where her son’s big cockhead had been -- her mind conjured up the ancient days, the ancient people lost in the joys of their Saturnalia. Strong, fit husbands tugging up their togas to reveal their cocks, the kitchenmaids falling to service them (did they have kitchenmaids?). The mother of the house, allowed for a little while to fuck the brains out of that one slave she’d always fancied. The children, free to run naked, the older people chasing their warm young bodies. Surely in times like that, in cultures like that, brothers had sisters, fathers had daughters, sons had mothers . . .?

Damn those ancient fuckers. It made a lot of sense. It really made a lot of sense.

You blow off the god-damned lid, you blow the hell out of it. Then you get on with it, at least till next year. And if you screwed up, if one of your kids screwed up, or your husband, you dealt with it. You moved on.

You accepted it and you moved on.

Sherry’s wandering finger came to rest on her nipple. It was hard, poking against the yellow terrycloth. The one touch sent a thrill throughout her body.

She glanced at the clock atop the refrigerator. Three forty-five. In a few more hours the sun would be up. But only in a few more hours. Their own “Saturnalia” did not need to be over yet.

She tugged aside the hem of her robe, pulled her plump tit out with its yearning brown nipple. Neal’s eyes widened -- she took his hand and put his fingers on the hardened tip. He grasped it, twisted and stroked it automatically. A wave of pleasure doused her, nestling in her hips and stomach. His hand widened, cupping the front of her breast. His eyes were shocked but wakeful. She read desire there.

He crossed to her and knelt on the tile floor, taking her nipple into his mouth while she pulled her other tit free. She petted his hair while he fed and drained the rest of her wine. With nothing in her stomach, as tired as she was, that should give her a little buzz. Not a stupor; just enough to find the balls do this.

“Come on,” she ordered her husband. “Follow me . . .”

Neal stood and followed obediently as she led him down the hall, past the row of family pictures, beneath the mistletoe and streamers, and into the darkened den . . .

. . . her daughter had awakened slowly under her kisses, long kisses around her cheeks and along her neck. She had started awake, eyes full of panic, panic that had subsided, had drifted away, when Sherry touched her lips with her own.

She had been thinking that the only thing wrong, truly wrong, with their sex upstairs had been the beginning: the tears, the cries, the hysteria. She thought that if she started it, deliberately, if she could control it and monitor it, then maybe --

Eventually Vanessa started kissing back. Sherry noticed, as she felt the questing tongue in her mouth, that her daughter closed her eyes. Maybe that was why people closed their eyes during lovemaking, she thought -- festivals like Saturnalia. You closed yourself off from distractions, like who you were kissing, who was fucking you, and you focused on the pleasure. She moved her daughter’s hand to her breast thinking that again, it made sense.

A cold draft between her legs. Neal was raising her robe from behind her, his hand was cupping her snatch. She held one breast for her daughter to suck and soon felt hot hardness bump against her ass . . .

. . . her son did not understand, but he did not struggle. She kissed him twice, kisses that painted his face with his sister’s juice. All the while her hips were gyrating uncontrollably. Her knees burned from the rug but she ignored it. She also ignored Josh’s quizzical expression, barely visible in the darkness, choosing instead to hear his quickening breath as she reached down between her legs to find his fat dick -- so fat, so long and fat in her hand.

The recliner had proved too awkward a place for lovemaking -- they had dragged him onto the floor before it. Now he sat stupidly with his back against the chair, arms still at his sides, while she mounted him. He needed some encouragement, either too sleepy or too confused to participate. With long strokes she coaxed him into it, thinking while she did so that no, that could not be why people closed their eyes, not entirely. Because part of the pleasure, part of the savage joy that could not be contained, that you needed to let out or you would die, was the knowledge of who you were loving.That’s my son . . . my son, she thought, as she guided the tip between her lips.

Someone stumbled by her in the darkness, bumped into her shoulder, just as Josh began thrusting up into her a little. A few seconds more and an ass was in her face: a smooth ass, rounded. Vanessa’s. She cupped the cheeks with her hands, feeling the body lower in front of her. She heard the frantic licking noises before she realized what was happening.

My son is inside me, she thought, savoring the thought.My son is licking my daughter, his sister . . .

. . . on her hands and knees, like an animal, she crawled across the carpet to where the dark forms were writhing. She could hear Neal grunting, cursing, approving -- could just see the tip of his cock, peeping out, disappearing, between his daughter’s breasts. Vanessa was sighing, almost sobbing, calling him daddy. She moved down the prostrate form, behind where her husband’s straining back shone from the hall light. For a while she listened to the snuffling, liquid sounds, then reached her hand out to find their source in the shadows, to ruffle her son’s hair. She gritted her teeth and pushed his face further into his sister’s pussy, held him there while he gasped and sucked.

She was angry, she thought. She was vengeful, she was vicious. She was brutal, she was wicked, she was nasty.

She was incredibly horny.