The Neglected Son Ch. 04

The Neglected Son Ch. 04: Mindy/Dad

"So," Mindy said, her voice as stony as her silence of moments before had been. "You had sex with my mother. You lied to me."

I had just finished relating to her a somewhat edited version of the events that had taken place in Pinewood's library some days ago. Edited to make it seem that her mother had come on to me so hot and heavy that I, being a red-blooded male, could not possibly hope to resist.

At this point, however, any semblance of truth and I parted company completely. Yes, that was how it had started, but Paula had gotten much more than she bargained for. I'd opened up that satiny robe of hers and persisted in my lascivious attentions until she hardly knew what hit her. The image of her sprawled on the library couch, moaning in pleasure as I knelt between her legs, would stay with me for the rest of my life.

"There's more," I said.

Mindy flinched, and braced herself, as if she expected me to confess to having done her sister, too.

Which I had, some days ago in Renee's ballet studio. I'd caught her in a compromising situation with the butler's son, and blackmailed her into going along with my depraved desires. I'd been waiting ever since for Renee, who had recognized me an instant before I penetrated her helpless body, to tell. I had beenhoping she would, in a rather sick and demented way. It was the moment I was waiting for, the moment in which the rest of them found out who I was.

But Renee had kept the revelation to herself. She had barely ventured from her room at all, not even for today's festive Christmas dinner. Pleading migraine or some other ailment, she'd taken her meals in her room. I had only seen her once, and her face had drained of all color in the fleeting instant our eyes met.

She had been phenomenal, too. Spying on Renee in her studio, blackmailing her into it by threatening to expose her love affair with the butler's son, and then fucking her right there on the floor and then up against the mirror, had been incredible.

The best part, for me at least, was that by the time I was inside her and thrusting away, she knew who I was and what was happening to her. She knew that it was her own elder half-brother doing these sensationally wicked things. The horror she must have felt hadn't been able to counteract her body's instinctive response, and she had been wracked at least twice by galvanic orgasms.

Just thinking about it started getting me hard, but I pushed the memories away and concentrated on Mindy. I wasn't ready yet to let her know about Renee. I had something else in mind for my so-called girlfriend. I knew why she'd come to my room so grave and serious. I knew what she wanted to talk to me about. But I'd derailed her neatly by spilling the beans about myself and her mother.

"I asked her, after," I said, enjoying the way Mindy's lip curled, "how she could do this. Not only to her husband, but to you, her own daughter. She told me that I shouldn't make such a big deal out of it. She said it was hardly the first time."

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked Mindy, biting each word off short as if she could barely trust herself even to speak.

"That she's done this sort of thing before. Had lovers. Some of them were other guys you'd been seeing. She … she laughed about it."

"No," whispered Mindy. "No, thatcunt! I hate her!"

"I don't think she can help it," I said. "She's so jealous of you that she can't stand it. She had been for years. It … well, never mind."

"What? Tell me, Chet!"

"I really shouldn't. That part, I don't think she intended to tell me. And I'm sure she never meant for me to tell anyone else."

"You'll tell me," Mindy said, "or I'll rip those cheating balls right off you."

I cringed and covered myself. "Hey! All right, just calm down, would you?"

"Calm down?" She uttered a scary banshee's laugh. "My mother cheats on my dad, withmy boyfriends, and you want me to be calm? When I just found out that I'm –"

She halted, flicking her gaze warily to me, but I acted like I hadn't noticed her slip. As I said, I already knew. I'd seen the empty box in the trashcan of her bathroom. We'd been going out for about two months by that time, plenty long enough. And I'd taken some steps to sort of help things along.

"He's not your dad." I blurted it, like I had been trying to hold it back but couldn't.

A long pause, weighty and intense, filled the room. Mindy was still as a statue, except for her eyes. They got wider and wider, the pupils dilating, until I thought that they might become black holes to swallow up her entire face.

"Not my dad?" she finally echoed.

I put on a wretched expression. "Mindy, I'm sorry. I didn't want to tell you. But, well, that's all part of her problem. She sees the way he looks at you – hell, even I saw the way he looks at you – and she worries that you might steal him away from her."

"That can't be true." She looked like I'd slapped her.

"I don't think she meant to tell me. It just slipped out. I was shocked, Mindy. I told her that you had a right to know. It's not fair that they should keep something like that from you. But she begged me not to tell. She's afraid that if you ever found out, you might try to get back at her."

"Oh, God, that's so like her!" Mindy curled her fists and slammed them down on the mattress. We were sitting on the edge of my bed in the Red Suite, which was all heavy scarlet draperies and glossy wood furniture, like something out of a Gothic novel. "She's always been jealous of me, at least ever since I turned twelve and started getting tits! And she hates getting older. I know she does. The money she spends on spas and facials … it’s like she thinks that the second she shows a wrinkle or a grey hair, he'll throw her out."

"She said something about him being married before," I said cagily, knowing that something similar had happened all those years ago. When my mother was the esteemed Mrs. Hollister of Pinewood. Except that Dad hadn't even waited for her to get grey hair or wrinkles before trading her on a younger model. The younger model in question being her own sister, my Aunt Paula.

"I can't believe this. I just can't. If Dad's not my father, who is?"

I shook my head and shrugged. "She wouldn't say."

"And she thinks … she thinks that I'd … oh!" Mindy sprang up and stalked the room, fists rapidly clenching and unclenching. She was only wearing a sky-blue babydoll nightie with matching panties, and whenever she passed between me and the lamps, I could see every curve of her silhouette.

"Well, I can see her point," I said. "Didn't you notice how he checked you out when we got here? You were wearing that silky white top, with no bra, remember? And the little skirt. Sort of a slutty schoolgirl ensemble, and he couldn't stop looking."

"That's gross, Chet. He wouldn't. He couldn't!"

"It sure looked that way to me. I mean, think about it, here he is, knowing you're not his daughter, seeing you all the time … and face it, Mindy, you're hot. He'd have to be blind, gay, or dead not to appreciate it."

She pressed her forehead to the window. Beyond, a snowy expanse blanketed the grounds and glittered white under the moon. Moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, the spirit of the season and all that. This was, I was certain, the last happy holiday that Pinewood was going to see for a long, long time.

"Your mom knows it, too," I went on. "So she seduces your boyfriends, and tells herself that if she can do that, it proves she's the sexier one."

"She is not!" Mindy rounded on me furiously. "Just because she tricked some of you idiots into bed doesn't mean anything! I could beat her any day of the week and you know it. I bet I could havehim, if I wanted."

"Now, wait a minute," I said.

"Don't youdare get righteous on me, Chet Christopher. You're not very innocent in this either!"

Oh, and she only knew the half of it. I downcast my eyes humbly, but inside I was grinning like a fiend. Hook, line, and sinker. She believed every word I said. This just got better and better.

Mindy flung herself into a chair. I could see straight up the skirt of her nightie to the frilly panties underneath. I sat where I was, on the edge of the bed, a pillow on my lap to cover my erection. I was playing a dangerous game, one that could land me in jail if it didn't get me killed, but it was a thrill like none other.

A cunning, crafty look replaced Mindy's grimace of distress. I saw it as clearly as if I could read her mind. I knew exactly, in that instant, what she planned to do.

She wasn't going to tell me her news after all. Not yet. Not when it would be such a brilliant way of getting back at her mother, provided that the rest of the pieces fell into place.

Which, though she had no way of knowing, some of them already had.

Mindy was too careless about her medications. That was going to prove her ultimate downfall. She didn't just keep prescription and over-the-counter items in her purse, oh no. There was a little box at the bottom that had once held mints, but had been recycled into use as a Whitman's sampler of recreational chemicals.

And when it came to her birth-control pills, she was lax. Particularly around mid-cycle, when she was at her most fertile and hence her horniest. If she happened to slide open the container and see that day's pill missing, she simply assumed that she'd already taken it, and never dreamed that someone – like me – might have popped it out and flushed it down the toilet.

That was one factor. The pills in the mint box were another. Some could be crushed and dissolved in any strong-tasting liquid. Like, say, Scotch, for instance. And if some hapless individual were to consume the laced liquor …

"I'd better go," Mindy said in sudden decisiveness.

"What? But here we are, alone …" I let my voice trail off, and winked at her.

She gave me a scathing look. "After you fucked my mother?"

"I'm really sorry about that, I told you," I said. "You've got to forgive me."

"I need to think. About you, her, all of this, everything. You should, too. Maybe tomorrow we can talk about this some more. Right now, I need to be by myself."

Mindy left in a swirl of sky-blue nightie. I stayed where I was until I heard her bedroom door open and shut, then quickly arranged my bed to look like I was asleep in it, turned off the lights, and crept out.

I made my way downstairs, through the dark rooms that still smelled of cinnamon-scented candles, evergreen, and roast turkey. Aunt Paula had retired early, Renee had barely been seen, and the patriarch of the house, my father, had gone directly from dinner to his study.

The study with the wood paneling, and the peephole that connected to a narrow hall that led from the servants' quarters to the kitchen. It was amazing how well I remembered the layout, even after all these years.

I had that narrow space to myself, the servants having been given the rest of today and all of tomorrow off to celebrate their own Christmas a day delayed. I put my eye up to the peephole.

A fire glowed warm from the hearth, its light dancing on the spines of books and the glazed eyes of hunting trophies bagged by Hollisters in generations past. I could see my father exactly as I'd left him. He was slouched in a leather wingback chair, smiling vacantly into the leaping flames.

On the spindly round table beside him were a square-cut bottle of good Scotch, a small silver ice bucket with tongs, and a stout tumbler half-filled with amber liquid.

The other tumbler, mine, I had rinsed and set aside at the wet bar in the corner when I left after our man-to-man talk earlier that evening.

My drink, needless to say, had not been doctored.

With the house so otherwise quiet, I could hear the crackling fire and the snap of boiling sap in the wood. When Dad lifted his glass, I heard the crystalline rattle of ice cubes.

We had spent a pleasant hour there, he and I. When the ladies had gone their separate ways, Mindy claiming she wanted a nice long bath and the others to their own pursuits, he had invited me to join him in the study for a nightcap.

It was the moment I'd been waiting for. I had of course accepted, and offered to pour.

As I looked in on him now and waited to see if my plan came to pass, I thought back on our conversation. It had begun with trivialities about college and sports, but as Dad continued to put away the Scotch with the same gusto and capacity I remembered from when I was a kid, his attention began to wander, his mood to improve to a sort of daffy good fellowship.

And then, he had asked me about Mindy.

"She seems happy with you," he'd observed. "I'm glad. My daughter is a very special girl. It would take a special young man to be worthy of her."

"Well, sir," I'd said, "I like to think I'm someone special."

"It's hard to believe she's all grown up," he mused, sipping at his third drugged Scotch. "I still think of them as my little girls, you know."

"Mindy speaks very highly of you, sir," I said. I laughed, self-deprecatingly. "In fact, sometimes I wonder if I can measure up. You're her idol."

"Oh, I hardly think that," chortled our father.

"Honestly, sir." Seeing that his eyes had gone slightly glassy, I risked it. "She's always going on about how great you are. Handsome, too. If I didn't know better, I'd think she had a heck of a crush on you."

"What makes you say that?"

"I … I shouldn't," I said. "It's private, and a little embarrassing. Not the sort of thing I should be saying to her father."

"Now, Chet," he said, leaning over and clapping me on the arm. "We're all friends here. You can tell me anything you like."

"Well, sir," I said, "sometimes, she likes to … no, I can't."

He fixed me with as stern a look as he could manage. "What?"

"She likes to pretend I'm you," I said. "When we're, you know, together."

His eyebrows went up at that, and he pondered it for several seconds while I sweated and wondered if I'd blown it. Then he snorted, guffawed, drained the rest of his drink, and poured another.

"Pretends you're me? How so?"

"It's silly. She calls me 'daddy,' and wants me to spank her. Stuff like that. I mean, it's fun and all, turning her over my knee, but it's still a little weird."

Scotch gurgled from the bottle into the glass, overflowing it to make a puddle before Dad realized what was happening. "You … you spank her?"

"It really turns her on."

"Does it?"

"She told me once that she used to wish you'd do it. She said that she even misbehaved on purpose, hoping for a spanking. It's the whole Oedipus thing, I guess, except I think they call it something different when it's a girl."

He blinked several times. I could see him turning this over and around in his head, grappling with it in his befuddled way. "I say. That's … odd."

"Oh, come on, sir," I said. "Can you blame her? Good-looking, sophisticated older man like you? I bet there's lots of girls her age who'd go for you. But please don't tell her what I said. She'd be mad at me."

"Of course not," he said. "Your secret's safe with me, Chip."

"Chet."

"Right." He smiled and raised his glass to me, sloshing more over the side.

I finished mine. "Thanks for the drink, sir. I should really be going."

"What, you've only had one. And here we were getting along so well." His smile turned into a rake's leer. "Stay, have another, tell me more of Mindy's deep dark secrets."

"I couldn't do that." But I winked. "Maybe another night."

He'd grumbled a little, but a few more swigs of Scotch mollified him enough for me to excuse myself and depart the study. Leaving him to it, I had gone up to my room and had the aforementioned conversation with Mindy.

Now, waiting in the dark passageway, I detected stealthy motion and craned my eye to see the study door easing open. There stood Mindy. She was puffy around the eyes, as if she'd had a quick but serious cry, but as she stepped softly into the room, her jaw was set in the determined look I had come to know and dread. This time, the sight of it filled me with a vicious glee.

She had changed from the baby-doll nightie into the short pleated skirt and silky white blouse she'd been wearing the day we had arrived. The day, cold and brisk, that I'd noticed Dad taking a furtive peek at the way her hard nipples pricked at the cloth.

"Hi, Daddy," she said, with such an edge that I was sure even in his current state, he was bound to detect something amiss.

Instead, he looked around, saw her, and beamed broadly. "Mindy-bear!"

I had to cover my mouth to stifle a laugh. Mindy-bear, indeed!

"Come in, come in, and keep your old dad company," he said. His voice was slurred, but there was energy, almost mania, lurking behind the appearances of drunkenness.

Mindy crossed the room, walking with a bouncy strut that flipped the hem of her skirt up her thighs and made her breasts bobble unrestrained within her blouse. She reached his chair, paused for a moment as if steeling her nerve, and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. When she did, her neckline gaped. I got a good view even from the peephole, and Dad had the full 3-D experience.

After planting the smooch on his cheek, she sat down on the ottoman between the two chairs. Her skirt rode up as she did, and Dad's gaze traced the bare line of her legs.

They talked for a while about nothing in particular. Mindy was seething with a witch's brew of emotions, and her questions seemed designed to probe for confirmation of what I'd told her upstairs. Dad, meanwhile, couldn't disguise the new contemplation with which he was surveying her. I'm sure that as far as Mindy was concerned, that was proof in itself right there.

"So," Dad said. "Tell me about school. Have you been a good student, Mindy, or a naughty girl?"

"Naughty? Me?" She curved her lips in a smile that couldn't be anything but naughty. "Not as much assome people, maybe."

"Well, I do hope you're behaving yourself. Otherwise …"

"Otherwise, what?"

Dad finished his latest drink and smacked his lips. "Otherwise, I might have to give you a spanking."

Mindy regarded him with a hint of scorn, but more than a hint of piqued interest. "Oh, is that what you'd do?"

"It's my parental duty, isn't it, to discipline my girl."

"Parental duty," she muttered.

"What's that?"

"Nothing. So, is that what you think? You think I need a spanking?"

"I imagine you might," he said. "You're a little minx, just like your mother."

"I am not just like her!" snapped Mindy.

"Temper, temper," Dad chided. "Or I may have to turn you over my knee."

"What, like this?" She slid from the ottoman and bent herself over his lap, with her bottom poking saucily into the air. "Have I been such a bad girl, then,Daddy?"

He froze for an instant, and I had time to worry that maybe the drugs weren't as strong as I'd anticipated. That he would come to his senses.

But as he looked down at his lapful of Mindy, her skirt now up so high that it was quite obviously apparent that she wore no panties, his eyes lit up with a sort of foggy delight. He pushed the hem higher, fully exposing her smoothly taut ass, and smacked his palm against it in a sharp report.

Mindy squeaked in surprise. Encouraged by this, Dad paddled her with a will. Her bottom reddened under the stinging slaps and she continued squeaking and wiggling in protest.

I watched, amazed but pleased. I couldn't believe this was taking place before my very eyes. That I had engineered such a scene, my father vigorously spanking Mindy, while she writhed and squealed. His face grew red, beads of perspiration along his hairline, either from exertion or passion or both. Mindy, too, was getting a kinky charge out of it. I saw it in her eyes, the heated look with which I was so familiar.