Thirty-six exposures

This is a work of fiction.

Thirty-six exposures

It was just a simple manila envelope, my name and address labeled dead center—the words “photographs, do not bend” stenciled across the bottom. I’d grabbed it out of the mailbox with a thick handful of other letters and was halfway across the porch before I realized what it was.

I absently jiggled it for a second and then dropped myself into one of the old rockers we had out there,the other bills and junk left scattered across my lap as I ripped at the top edge and zipped it open with my thumb. It was all wedged in there pretty tight, two sheets of thick cardboard sandwiching the pictures—another second and I had them out, lifting the top cover away and… …it was a woman…a girl really, eighteen or nineteen maybe, slim and posed slightly to the side, a soft roundness to her hips, a fullness in the deep curve of her partially covered breast, longish chestnut hair mantled across the gently freckled flesh of her shoulders…

Aware of the sudden hammering in my chest as I stared at her, my breathing shallow, almost labored, dizzy with a rush of pure adrenalin as I stared at her. My hands trembled as I shuffled to the next image, the girl squaring a bit more to the lens, a hesitant smile tinged with embarrassment, her right hand blurred as if she were trying to mask her nakedness as the shutter clicked.

A groaning creak as the screen door opened off to my right, “…Hi honey, how was work?”

I looked up blankly, my Mom smiling as she leaned outward, one foot on the porch, one still inside the house.

“…Good,” I managed to mutter, discretely slipping the cardboard sheet back over the pictures.

“Just good?” she teased brightly.

“No, it was good,” I stammered, my mind fluxed.

She rolled her eyes and let the smile come again. “…Clean up and we’ll have dinner, okay? Dad’s going to be running late again.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, watching as she disappeared back into the house. I lifted the cardboard and slid down to the second photograph again, that same smile, the finely wrought features. I shook my head numbly, tracing down the girl’s visage, down from her chin with the edge of my thumb, along the breasts with their small dark nipples, downward to that darkly rich thatch of pubic hair, along the slender rounded edge of her thigh…

“Mom!” I whispered, swaying my head yet again.

It was mid October of last year, the 14th or 15th I think. I remember how the leaves of the sugar maple were still that fiery yellow-orange, how they looked almost hot to the touch in the mangled gash the huge tree had torn through the roof of my grandmother’s house. The rain had poured in hard that night, soaking the boxes of Christmas decorations and the old clothes she’d kept neatly hung on a long steel pipe. The place was dead air, even with that six foot hole to the sky, stale and old. I bent to pick up another waterlogged box, the bottom coming apart in my hands as I lifted it up and carried it across to the undamaged portion of the attic.

There were stacks of various sized boxes already piled on this side—“taxes, 71’ to 80’” on scrawled on one of the them, “pay stubs, 1978-83” in magic-marker on the one immediately beneath it. I sat down thinking that all this shit should get tossed, knowing that my grandmother would shake her head and say that it wasn’t doing any harm sitting up here. I spied an old banana box stashed in the corner—“Anne’s school papers”.

I got up and shoved some of the other junk out of the way and pulled the box into the clear, pulling the string cord to a single exposed light bulb overhead as I crouched and lifted the cover. Pictures mainly, 8×10” blowups of landscapes and artsy angles on things around the house, black and white shots in a little montage of pots simmering atop a stove, a deer with a whole apple in its mouth—and then there she was, my Mom framed in an old fashioned mirror, a bulky 35mm camera held at her waist as she clicked the nifty self portrait of herself. I smiled at it; at how effortlessly pretty she was even then. I went down through the stack, a group of high school kids kicked back against a counter in a darkroom, all of them with their camera’s dangling ‘round their necks, my mom second from the right, jeans and platform heels, a blouse buttoned high to her throat, a guy with thick curly hair casually draping his arm across her shoulders. I picked it out and studied it, looking at her, at the hand over her, that air of possession. I wondered if he was a boyfriend or just some guy buddy. My Mom was always very circumspect on her own youth, always bright about it, never really talking about any particulars really as concerned adolescent romances or boyfriends. I’d never been able to picture her in any type of sexual situation, which I guess you’d say is a pretty normal thing for a young kid. I just kept staring at that picture, trying to imagine her making out with this guy in some beat-up Chevy Nova or some other old 70’s Detroit clunker. Letting him unbutton her blouse maybe, stiffening as he bent to suck on her untouched nipples…a flinching gasp as he bit down on it, this kid rocking his head as he tugged at it with his teeth…

“Man, you are one jacked pervert,” I muttered to myself and finally dropped it back into the stack, stirring through the rest of the pictures with my hand—and then, there it was. One of those plastic film canisters from back when cameras actually used film, the weight telling there was a roll inside. I leaned away from the light and peeked up the lid, sure enough the spool of film was in there. There was no way of telling if it was exposed or just some unused castoff that my Mom had stuffed in the back of a drawer. If it was exposed, I wondered if it was still good or not—hell, I wondered if you could even still get 35mm film developed anywhere. I just figured it would be a nice touch if I did get it done and if the prints were any good at all, I could give it to her for Christmas or her birthday which was in late November.

And so I pocketed the film without any more thought—an internet search told me that under the right conditions exposed film could stay viable for years, though whether or not a blistering hot attic was a “proper” condition was up in the air. That and the fact that I couldn’t get the film developed anywhere local kept it tucked in my nightstand drawer through her birthday, and then through Christmas, right up until I came home for Easter break and finally searched out a company in Illinois who ran 35mm color prints off. I mailed it out before I left for school, a money order for the developing costs and two sets of prints enclosed—the girl I’d spoken with told me that they gave no guarantees on old film and that I might get nothing at all back.

Mother’s day came and went with no pictures, and then the first couple weeks of June when I moved back to work with a friend’s landscaping company for the summer. I’d almost forgotten the whole deal before that hot afternoon.

Nope, it probably wouldn’t have really panned out for a Christmas or Mother’s day gift after all I thought wryly—a print from the center of my pile, my Mom straight and erect as a ballerina, up on her toes, those bared breasts as perfect as a young girl’s breasts could ever be.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered again, tucking my head to fan through the whole stack. She was stripped completely for some of them, some with those obligatory Playboy poses of the unbuttoned cardigan, one with…

I clamped a hand over the stack, knowing that I had to get out of there, an ache in my head as if my mind was going to hemorrhage. I stood up and quietly slinked into the house, seeing my mother in the kitchen as I edged up the stairs, in my room, closing the door and locking it, setting the pictures on my unmade bed, tossing the cardboard aside and just fanning the pictures out across the mattress. They were all there, or most of them at least, the extra set of prints tucked below the first. I knelt along the bed and started to rifle through them, one after the other, seeing a bit of the tension seem to ease from her features as she went from one shot into the next—the tenth or eleventh shot in and a grin of pure carnal mischief creased her face, leaning against an old wooden desk, her back arched beautifully, hair hanging free behind her, nipples hardened.

I was hard too, ragingly hard, constricted uncomfortably in my grimy jeans. I reached down and unfastened my belt, popping the button and working the zipper blindly, my cock springing free as I tugged my jockeys down an inch or two. Looking back at it now, I guess I’m surprised that I just did it like that, no thought as to the rightness or wrongness of it—actually it was probably the absolute “wrongness” of it that had me engorged like I’d never been before. I touched it and felt the heat, found my grip without looking really and just got a frantic rhythm on it, furiously stroking myself off as my free hand milled through the photos, a picture of her balanced against the footboard of a large bed, legs spaced wide, hands gripped onto the dark wood, the tip of her tongue pressed carelessly against her upper lip, as wantonly innocent as…

It exploded out of nowhere, grunting powerfully as thick ropes of semen spat out of my cock, spasms in my gut as I came so fucking hard, feeling it rippling through my brain as I forced my eyes closed to the room’s light, chewing savagely into the edge of the mattress to stifle a shriek…

I sagged against the bed, utterly spent, aware of myself panting. I carefully opened my eyes and saw what seemed a copious amount of cum plastered against my box spring, dripping downward in crawly rivulets. The photograph was clenched in my hand, crumpled, a balled-up ruin.

And surprisingly there was none of that after-the-fuck guilt I would’ve expected, none at all. I was messed up, I’ll freely admit that. Confused—you better believe it. Shocked that in the course of ten or so minutes I’d got to see my heretofore modest and refined mother stripped bare-assed naked and that within less than a minute had jerked myself into the most wickedly delightful orgasm I’d ever experienced—sure I was fucking shocked, who wouldn’t be. But I’ll tell you square that I was not disappointed—hell, I couldn’t wait to get myself hard and do it again.

I slowly stood up, my erection flagging. Get hard and do it again. And I knew in that exact instant that somehow she was going to know that I’d seen her like this, that she had to know—that I wanted my Mom lying awake in bed at night, eyes wide in the darkness as she wondered whether her only son was jacking off over her old nudie pictures down the hall.

“I need to give this to you,” was how I started two days later, my Mom folding laundry atop the dryer on a Saturday morning, Dad off to an early golf game. I’d already scanned each of the pictures into my laptop, backing up the images on two memory sticks—negatives taped under a shelf in my closet, the second set of prints squirreled away in the bottom drawer of my dresser.

I extended the ripped envelope the photos came in to her, averting my eyes as a sudden wave of embarrassment came over me.

“What is it?”

“I think…I did something I shouldn’t have…I’m sorry I…”

The stammer was genuine, so was the unexpected blush I could feel rising on my cheeks. I pressed the envelope into her hands and forced myself to watch her reaction.

She took it with a worried expression—worried for me. Hesitant as she slid the shortened stack of photographs free.

“I found the roll of film with some old pictures you had up in grandma’s attic. …I thought I’d get ‘em developed and surprise you with them.”

Her hand froze and a minute shudder wracked her body. She lifted the cardboard a speck, closing her eyes and biting down on her lower lip.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I just wanted to…”

“Excuse me,” she rasped, clutching the photos in her hand as she squeezed past me—I watched her stagger back through the kitchen, listening to the clutter of her footfalls as she went up the stairs, her bedroom door slamming shut.

I went up a few minutes later, pausing to listen at her door but hearing nothing, wondering if she was in there looking at them. I tried to imagine how humiliated she must feel about me having seen them. I went to my room and clicked on the laptop, a password protected document where I had the images stashed, a slideshow all my own. I played around with them for a bit and then clicked off. I was agitated, pacing back and forth like a caged zoo animal. Ten minutes passed, then another twenty. I looked out the window, a beautiful summer day. She knocked softly, once, then again.

“Mom,” I said as I opened the door. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy, arms wrapped tight about her waist.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, staring at the floor, her voice breaking.

“I’m sorry, I just didn’t know…”

“I was so stupid,” she stammered on, stepping past me, looking around my room, still clutching herself.

“I shouldn’t have gone through your things.”

“It’s not your fault. I should’ve thrown that, that filth out myself. I’m so ashamed of…”

“It’s not so bad, Mom, it’s not”

“Oh God, don’t ever tell your father about these, please, promise me!”

“I won’t, I won’t ever tell anybody. It’s our secret, don’t worry.”

She paced up to the window and leaned forward against the sill. I found myself unconsciously studying her ass, the curve of her hips. She was 43—a good 43, but still 43, her face attractive and softly lined, the long auburn hair of her youth cut stylishly short now, a rich grayness that had come upon her while she was still in her early thirties, peppered now with an occasional strand of darkness. I noted that she was thicker in the torso now than when she posed for her little teenage pictorial, her butt ample but not fat, maybe a bit heavier in the thighs—I caught myself doing the appraisal and stopped it.

“You looked at them?” she intoned after a moment, voice husky.
“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“All of ‘em,” I answered, nodding.

She straightened herself, wiping her eyes, trying to clear her throat a bit as she got steadied.

“They’re not bad pictures, Mom.”

“Please…

“They aren’t. They’re just like what you’d see in Playboy. Hell, all the stars pose in there ‘cause it’s so classy and all.”

“In Playboy,” she muttered blackly. “…That’s just what he said too…”

“Who’s ‘he’?” I wanted to know who got her clothes off…the fact pretty much evident in my brain that if this mystery guy got her to shuck her clothes for the camera, he pretty much had to have royally fucked her brains out. I’d been playing with the thought for the last two days, every time I was whacking off over her pics, thinking about the guy behind the lens jamming his big cock down her teenaged throat till she gagged, giving her a ferocious, hair-pulling bang on that bed she was posed against, driving her into wrenching orgasms again and again, voice wrecked with shrieks of utter abandon.

“He was such a liar,” she sobbed bitterly, dabbing her eyes as she at last turned to face me. “I’m ashamed that you saw them, and I’m sorry. I hope you’ll be able to…”

“You were beautiful in the pictures and I’m glad I saw them,” I blurted—which wasn’t in any way part of what I’d been planning to say.

“God!” she whispered, covering her face with her palms.

“No one else will ever know about them,” I spoke up. “It’ll just be between us, our secret; and I meant what I said about being glad I got to see them. You were beautiful in them. Most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh, God,” she groaned, still hiding her expression from me, though I thought I heard a smile of sorts in there, a smile of sheer exasperation. “Now I’m even more embarrassed, if that’s even possible,”

“Don’t be embarrassed about anything, okay,” I said and then on impulse went over to my dresser and took out the other photos. “Second set of prints,” I chuckled uncomfortably. “It was gonna be my secret stash.”

“You were going to keep looking at them?” she said in genuine horror as she grabbed them from my hand.

“Probably,” I answered.

“Just don’t think about this anymore, okay? Please.”

“Unless you decide to give me them back?”

“I am so mortified,” she said and stepped for the door, pausing to lean her forehead to the wood, eyes closed. “You must think I’m such a slut.”

“I don’t think that,” I lied—actually not a lie really, because I didn’t think she was a slut, just a racy little babe with a really terrific body, one with a little more mileage on it than I’d ever imagined just two days prior.

“I feel literally sick over this.”

“I always thought you were the most beautiful mother anybody ever had. Now I know how beautiful you were when you were younger. …I meant it about hoping you let me see them again.”

She walked out without another word and softly shut the door. I sat against my bed and for the first time realized what it was I wanted, what I really wanted.

Nothing like a nasty secret to build a bond of trust between two people, and this deal with my Mom and me was at least to her, about as nasty and dirty as you could get. And I treated it as being off the map, not alluding to it, no thinly veiled comments about it, just a smooth lake without so much as a ripple as I’d have dinner across from her and my dad.

Time was in play, and time had its own pace.

Two weeks passed before she brought it up while we sat alone in the kitchen over dinner, just the two of us.

“How are you doing, honey?”

“Good.”

“I mean about, you know, about that with…”

“Your Playboy spread,” I teased, watching as she stared a hole into her plate.

“Please don’t call it that, you have no idea how humiliating this has all been for me.”

“You ever wonder about all the women who’ve posed for Playboy over the years, Mom. Think of them all; the one from the old Charlie’s Angels, the one who died…”

“Farrah,” she grinned.

“Yeah, her and Cindy Crawford, all those actresses and models.”

“Just stupid naked girls in a dirty magazine.”

“And some of them have sons, right, and you know that sooner or later they’re going to see those pictures,” I winked. “You know, probably hide ‘em under the old mattress.”

“That is such a creepy, creepy image.”

“Look, like I told you that day, I’m glad I got to see them. You’re stunning, amazing.”

“Were stunning.” She arched an eyebrow wryly. “Past tense.”

“You’d still be stunning, Mom, to anybody.”

“Thanks for the compliment, phony as I know it is,” she said, standing up, rubbing my shoulder as she took the plate from in front of me.

“So, what are my chances on getting that second set of prints back? I really do want to see them again.”

“Stop,” she laughed, “you look at some girl your own age, not me. And you shouldn’t be looking at that junk anyway. It’s…it is so goddamned demeaning.”

“It helps if you call it art and I really do want to see ‘em again. We can look at them together if you want.”

She turned and gave me “the look”—no not that “look”, but the one that I’d gotten when I was fourteen and announced that I was going to built a diving suit from a design in Popular Mechanics and try it out in the local lake.

“I’m serious. I’ve looked at them already so I don’t really see the harm. Have you looked at them?”

“Just enough to want to crawl off under a rock and die.”

“Come on, did you look at ‘em or not? …I’m betting you did look at them, and that if you were being honest, you’d say they were beautiful. So?”

“Let’s change the subject, okay.”

“Can you imagine some boy in Florence looking up one day at The Birth of Venus and seeing his mom up there on the canvas? That Botticelli, man. I found that painting in the encyclopedia at the library when I was like six and I ripped it out and took it home with me.”

Mom turned and smiled at me, as if against her will. “Vandal.”

“I got a thirst for art, what can I say.”

“Then go to the Met,” she said, playful now, waving me out of the room.

I went upstairs and changed, deciding to take a run before it got to hot out, disappointed that I hadn’t gotten her to talk more. I’d be cagey about it though, determined to be patient with this, to play it out right.

“Here,” came my mom’s voice as I went past my parent’s bedroom. The second stack of prints in her hand. I snatched them so fast that she flinched.

“Thank you?” she chided playfully.

“Thanks!”

“Please, just make sure daddy never sees them. You’re actually going to look at them?” she said, blushing now.

“Sure I am,” I stammered excitedly. “Thanks. Thank you so much.”

“You’re just going to look at them, right?”

I didn’t even try for an answer—and then I did it, I looked at one of them right there while she stood watching me, then the next. I glanced up and smiled. “…Thanks,” I repeated for the umpteenth time and went back to my room, dropping the pictures on my bed and turning to go out and finish my walk, letting the door open more than a crack—carefully gauged the gap.

When I got home, sweaty, keyed up, my run fucked by having better than half a hard-on for most every stride I made, the door was off, closed a little tighter than I’d left it. She’d been in here. She’d seen her pictures strewn atop my sheets. She knew exactly what I was going to be doing in here with them, which, stripping off my perspiration soaked tee shirt and shorts, I proceeded to do with added vigor.

“Do you have any appointments today?” I asked. I’d already spied through my Mom’s scheduling book for the week. It had been a little less than a week since she’d surrendered her pictures to me and neither of us had spoken about any of it since.

“No.”

“Want to hike up the tubs with me?”

“You have work,” she said glancing up from her checkbook.

“I’ll call off. I haven’t missed a day yet.”

“It is nice out.”

“We can do the whole loop, up through the bolder field. Then have lunch down by small waterfall.”

“Buy sandwiches at Cellastino’s?”

“Hot peppers and provolone.”

“Okay, call up and see if you can get it off.”

“I’m feeling pretty sick,” I said, feigning a cough.

“Ask for the day off. Don’t leave Mike in a lurch.”

“Get changed,” I said happily as I snatched up my cell phone.

The tubs were a string of huge potholes supposedly gnashed out of the earth by a glacier. Now a sparkling creek ran through them, cascading down through a series of higher and higher waterfalls, a trail maintained by private hiking groups. I’d been hiking it since I was a kid, my Mom often taking me up there, always angling off through the dark woods to a small isolated waterfall bounded by a deep pond of icily clear water.

She’d taught me how to swim there when I was five, the water so cold that I remember her lips turning blue.

It was a great place to be alone, to just sit and feel the stillness—to talk with someone, to say things that you couldn’t say.

We hiked for just over two hours, a hard climb up over a prehistoric bolder field, Mom in a pair of green cargo shorts and tall leather hiking boots, the outline of a sports-bra underneath her plain white tee.

We ate our lunch there by the base of that waterfall, her eyes rolling when I pulled the bottle of pinot noir out of my pack. A corkscrew—“see mom, just like the boy scouts.”

“That wine is very good,” she whispered after we’d finished, lips stained red, a bit tipsy maybe.

“It was.” I’d had only a plastic tumbler of it.

“You’re only twenty. That probably makes me a corruptor of minors.”

“Hey, I brought the wine, not you.”

“True, but… I guess I’ve already corrupted you, huh?”

I chuckled, gave her a shrug.

“What do you do with them?”

“Look at them. You know, once in a while.”

“What’s once in a while?”

“Every goddamned day,” I laughed.

“Don’t swear, honey. And that is so mortifying.”

I took my boots off and splashed my feet in the water.

“Do you do…do you do anything when you look at them?”

“Yep.”

“Yep, what?”

“You know,” I answered, wanting to just scream out what I’d been doing and what I’d been thinking.

“So totally mortifying,” she shot back, laying back on the rock where she sat and draping a hand across her eyes. “Doesn’t it bother you looking at your mother like that?”

“How old were you in them?”

“My senior year of high school. In the spring, my last semester.”

“Who took them?”

“That isn’t…”

“Come on, you can tell me. I know you can’t tell dad.”

“His name was Eric.”

“He was your boyfriend?”

“He was… never mind, let’s not talk about this, okay?”

I sat there in silence for a long while, kicking water with my tired feet, Mom just vacantly staring up through the canopy of leaves.

“He was my teacher,” came her voice finally, a distant echoed tone. “He taught English, but he ran the photography club too.”

I looked over at her, another shocker of shockers from her. I have to admit that it really turned me on, the exact Freudian babble as to why it did an unanswered question to this day. I just let her words hang there, knowing that the silence would let her speak.

“I was seventeen when I signed up for the club, and he was…God he was handsome. He was only thirty-six years old, but to me that seemed so old. He joked with me, always complimented me with the photos I took…’you have some real talent’ he’d say. Always nice to me, talking about things, but never creepy like you’d imagine an older guy talking to a young girl would be. …God, I had such a huge crush on him.”

She sighed and closed her eyes, rays of sun cutting down to her reclined figure.

“Then I turned eighteen. I was so inexperienced, so naïve.” She opened her eyes and looked over at me, meeting my gaze. “I was a virgin. I wanted to save myself for marriage. I mean I was really into it. I never did anything with the boys I’d date, though they tried hard enough. I never even let them touch my breasts. I’m sorry. I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

“It’s okay,” I whispered.

“I never told anybody about it with him. I was just so shy.”

Again I let the silence leech after her words, for some reason finding delight in the fact that she’d been a virgin like that.

“He kissed me in the darkroom one day after everyone else was gone. Just a soft kiss, so soft, and I didn’t even close my eyes. …It was so wonderful.

“A week or so later we were there alone again and I…I went up to him and just stood there waiting. He didn’t say a word, just came up and kissed me again, harder this time. I felt his tongue in my mouth and his hands were touching me. He looked at me and cupped my breast, just outside the blouse, really tender. He asked me if I had ever done anything; that’s how he phrased it, ‘done anything’ and I shook my head. Does it bother you to hear this?”

I shook my head, never breaking our gaze. She smiled hesitantly.

“I stepped back from him and I unbuttoned my blouse for him. I remember the brassiere I was wearing snapped at the front and I…I unsnapped it and held it out for him. He had very rough hands and I can still remember how they felt on me.”

“So, did he…”

“He kissed me again. He kissed down to my breasts. We there in that darkroom and it was just the red light on. He kissed down my stomach and knelt and lifted my skirt. It was…he lifted it and he slowly pulled my panties all the way down, lifting my feet to slip them off. They were pink striped and had a little red bow embroidered on the front, I can still remember that. Then he, you know…”

“What?”

“He…he kissed me down there. I was standing there, leaning back against the counter with all the developing trays and the sheets of film hanging down from the wires. He…I’d never had one before that. I mean never. He…it was so fabulous, my legs just collapsed and he was holding all my weight and he just kept doing what he was doing and I had to put a hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t…”

I watched her laying back on that flat rock, lost in the memory, her voice fading and far away, a smile that made her look so many years younger.

“Everything looked so new when I walked home that day. The next day he asked if I could get over to his apartment that weekend. I took a bus there Saturday afternoon. I was so scared, so worried someone would find out or see me going there.

“And?”

“He just took me into his bedroom and undressed me without a word, took off everything and I was standing there naked and he took off his clothes. …I’d never seen one before, and I actually got scared with how big it looked. …I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“I wanna hear.”

“You’re not supposed to think of your mom like this.”

“Tell me, please.”

“He made love to me, he told me a lot of what to do. I had to put the rubber…the condom on him and you know, unroll it down him. And…I loved when he put all his weight down on me, I was just like mashed under him and it hurt so bad that first time, probably ‘cause I was so scared. …After he came he showed me it, all his stuff under the rubber and I was just squishing it around like it was silly putty. I came when he did it to me again a little while later and I now I could be loud. God was I loud.”

“And that’s what you did with him.”

“I did everything with him,” she mused, as if to herself, a sated aspect in her voice, as if she were still that girl curled up next to her older lover.

“Can I take your picture?” I asked.

“Shoot away, kiddo.”

“Not like that.”

“Like…”

“Just here with the water.”

She rolled on to her side and gave me a blurry look.

“Like he did.” I went on.

“Like…”

I stood up and slipped the Sony digital camera from my belt, the zippy buzz as I pressed the power button and the lens adjusted.

“Come on, trust me.”

She sat up slowly, blinking herself out of the fog. “You’re my son, and there’s no way…”

“Trust me. Let me do this for you.”

“We should go back, it’s getting late.”

I snapped a picture of her sitting there, then another.

“If I ever did it you’d probably feint.”

“Try me.”

“I should, I should, get you to break off this…”

I snapped another picture.

Her expression changed and she glanced around nervously. “Somebody could walk past.”

“We’ve never seen anybody down here, ever, and not on a weekday.”

I snapped another shot.

“Wait,” she blurted, agitated now, her palm jacked out at me.

“You are so beautiful.”

“Yeah, right,” she muttered, looking around again and then turning her back to me. “…I don’t believe I’m even considering this.”

I clicked a photo.

“Big mistake,” she muttered and quickly lifted her tee shirt up over her head, dropping it on the rock, squatting to undo her boots, peeling down the tall gray hiking socks, undoing her baggy shorts, slipping them down and stepping out of them. Another glance around, apprehensive, breathing hard as she stood there in her white panties and Nike sports bra, a sidelong glance back over her left shoulder.

She lifted the bra over her head and dropped it, a moment’s hesitation before she peeled the panties down her legs. Bared, her back to me—a soft whirl as I took a picture.

“Don’t take one like that. Not with my big butt.”

Her body was definitely older, a bit of crepe high on her thighs, still with a long lovely back.

“You have a great ass, Mom. Turn around for me?”

She pirouetted about, her arms lifting outward. I bit my lip, felt the camera flutter in my grip. A bit of roundness to her belly, her breasts heavier and still firm, slung probably an inch or so lower, the nipples dark and more pronounced. Her pubic thatch was thick, the silver gray unsettling to me even though it was a spot on match for the drapes.

“The quiet ravages of age,” she said in a quavering tone.

“I think you’re gorgeous. You are.”

I snapped through a fast row of pictures as she nervously shifted from foot to foot. “Go over by the water.”

She looked about again and then stepped towards the waterfall. “There,” I said, clicking off half a dozen shots, zooming in closer, framing her as she stretched her hands into the water.

“You know that I’m enjoying this, don’t you,” she whispered.

“Turn to the side…just a little, just like that,” I said, coming closer, placing my feet carefully as I lined up a profile pose. “…Here,” I said, and I reached in and touched her shoulder, a flinch as I angled her for a better view.

“We’d been lovers for only a month or so when he got me to pose for those stupid photos,” she whispered distantly, cupping water in her palm and absently spilling it down over her tits. “…How’s that?”

“Great,” I said in a strained tone, actually light in my head with the lust rising at the sight.

“I was so afraid of someone ever seeing them that I made him use my camera and then when he was done I wouldn’t give him the film. He was so mad.”

“What he’d do?”

“He called me a stupid little prude. He stopped… he made me beg for it…just pulled back a little bit and I was so…”

There was a flash of anger in her eyes, her cheeks mottled with color. I shot a close up of her face like that, clicked another one her eyes so hard for a second that I had to look away.

“After a couple days of him being all cold with me, I went into the dark room with him and I undid my blouse and my bra and I knelt down and I…I unbuckled his belt and pulled his pants down and…”

Her face was fiery now, voice quivering with an unearthed resentment.

“I sucked his cock, right there, right down on my knees. Let him cum in my mouth and…I opened my mouth and I showed it to him on my tongue and…I swallowed it, swallowed it all. Then I just put my clothes back on without saying a word and I left. I did that every day after class for two weeks straight…but I never gave him his damn pictures.”

“Christ.”

“Now you definitely think I’m a slut, right?”

“No.”

“Back then girls didn’t do that, weren’t supposed to do it. Not good girls anyway. You suck on a man’s thing and you were…he used to tell me ‘get to work, Annie’. Just like that, me down on my knees for him. Get to work and swallow his fucking sperm for him.”

“Are you okay?” I asked, seeing the anger suddenly drain away like rain off glass.

“I’m sorry I spoke like that in front of you, I really am.”

I reached out and touched her inner thigh, a caress along the back of her knee.

“Don’t do that,” she whispered, but didn’t step away.

I slid my hand up along the back of her leg, a featherlike touch, gooseflesh rising on her skin.

“Please don’t…”

My mother shivered—I leaned forward and kissed her just above the knee, an inch or so higher, another soft kiss, my fingertips brushing across the smoothness of her ass, my thumb tracing out the deep cleft there. I kissed higher, dropped my weight onto one knee, palm wide on backside as I brushed my mouth through the coarse tangle of gray pubic hair.

“Please, baby…” she whispered, shaking her head, her eyes brimming a bit as if she were going to start weeping. “We can’t, we…”

I dipped my head and softly kissed her vulva, the thick folds of labial flesh reddish pink, bright beads of moisture standing out like dew in the curly coils hair. I swiped my tongue into her turgid crevice, tasting the salt, she was absolutely slick now. I licked deeper, my mom stiffened, a single deep gasp as she rose up almost on her toes. I found her clitoris, flicked the bud one time, her hands grasping my head but not pushing me away. I trolled my tongue deeper, the entire length of her slit, twirling it into her, flicking her clit again, fast, pressing onto it.

Mom throttled down on my head, another ragged gasp, a wheezing cry breaking off her lips as she came, that fast, I licked faster, circling it, sucking it, she smothered my face into her crotch, manic as she hit another orgasm, a moaning shriek, her throat puffing as she gritted her teeth through another, nails plowing into my scalp, I sucked on it, side to side on it with the tip of my tongue, she tried to push me off, but I had my hands anchored into the softness of her ass cheeks, wrestling her hips onto me as we scrunched against the cold rock wall. Sucking it—sucking it.

She stiffened out bodily, convulsing through that final climax like a clubbed fish, a low rushing sound from deep within her vagina as her legs wrapped into my ribcage till I couldn’t breathe.

“Ma,” I whispered a few minutes later, looking around at the empty glade, the sound of birds in the trees and the drum of the water soft after the frenzied riot of her orgasms.

She was weeping quietly, hiding her face from me, balled up as if in shock or shame.

“Hey,” I went on, touching her calf. She pulled away as if touched by fire.

“Oh my god, what have I…”

“Mom…”

“Oh god, oh my god!” She was standing, covering her breasts, her crotch as best she could, staggering back to the pile of clothes. Pulling the shorts and shirt on, stuffing the bra and panties and socks into her small day sack.

“It’s okay,” I muttered stupidly.

She struggled with the boots, not lacing them, a glance back at me through tear swollen eyes as she started to walk back to the car. I picked up my camera and stepped down from the rocks, putting my own boots back on, an effort to get my wet feet into them, starting to run after her, seeing her move through the trees like a shadow, keeping pace with her till she got to the car, slamming the passenger door.

I expected to hear her crying when I opened my door, but instead found her staring blankly at the dash.

“Don’t say anything, okay?” she asked hollowly.

I sat there and didn’t say a word.

“Just please drive us home.”

She didn’t say a word on the long drive back, her body pressed to the door as if wanting to hold a certain distance from me. I sat behind the wheel while she gathered her things and went up the stairs to the empty house. I waited a long while before I pulled the car into the garage and went inside, up the stairs, agitated, wanting to talk to her, to—

“Baby, you stay up in your room tonight, okay?” she said softly from inside her darkening bedroom.

“Mom…”

“Just do that for me please, okay? Your father’s going to be home in another hour and I can’t have you down there with us tonight.”

“You’re not going to tell him?” I fairly yelped in dread.

“Of course I’m not!” she shot back—I could make out her silhouette sitting on the edge of her bed, arms hugged about her waist, rocking slightly, back and forth, back and forth. “…It’s just that I know how to lie…I’m just not too sure about you.”

“I can…”

“You stay up here. You’re sick, stomach thing probably. You missed work today and all. Understood?”

“Yeah.”

“Go get yourself a sandwich or something and a coke. Just don’t come down at all. If he peeks in on you moan and groan about feeling like hell.”

“Okay.”

“I love you, you know that don’t you. Love you more than anything or anyone.”

“I love you too.”

“Go get your sandwich, baby. I’ll take care of everything.”

“How’d you sleep?”

I lifted my head off the pillow, my brain fogged. Mom was seated at my desk, a cup of coffee in her hand—a glance at the clock. Six a.m.

“Dad gone to work?”

She nodded and sipped at her cup. I sat up, light in the head. I’d been in a really deep sleep, fucking comatose from like ten the night before.

She leaned over and switched on the floor lamp. She looked tired, weary. She sipped the coffee again and set it down.

“I was watching you sleep for awhile.”

She was wearing a pair of pink pajamas, her glasses catching the glare of the lamp.

“I tossed free of the tangled sheets and swung my legs over the mattress. I was wearing a ratty pair of blue boxers, a white tee shirt that was frayed at the collar. I picked up loose piece of Dentyne from my nightstand and popped it in my mouth.

“Planning on kissing anybody?”

“I, uh…”

“I guess I should tell you that that was the best orgasm I’ve had in years.”

I shook my head to clear my thoughts, shrugged in answer to her, a feeling of keen embarrassment sweeping over me.

“My god, it was fucking fabulous…is this confession of mine embarrassing you, honey?”

“It’s a little…”

“Take off your clothes?”

“Mom, I…”

“Tit for tat, sweetie” she smiled, leaning back in my chair till it creaked.

I stood up, feeling out of balance. I lifted my tee shirt up over my head and dropped it. Hooked my thumbs in the boxers and paused—I met her gaze as I slid them down, my cock popping up to attention.

“That’s a nice one,” she smiled, the voice barely audible.

“This is…”

“A big fucking mistake, probably,” she cut in, shaking her head as she stood tall. She unbuttoned the pajama top and let it drape back down her arms, her breasts heaving as she took in a deep breath. She watched me and slipped the knot on the baggy PJ bottoms, letting them drop freely about her ankles. She stepped out of them and stood in place.

“Did it bother you to see me gray down there, like that?”

“No,” I quavered.

“Well it bothers the hell out of me. But what the heck, right!”

“I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever…”

“I’ve seen some of your girlfriends, buddy. This”—a hand sweeping in front of her torso—“this ain’t even in their eighteen and nineteen year old bouncy-tit league.”

“Well you are.”

She sighed and came up to me, her tits to my chest, hands restless as if neither of us knew what to really do. She touched my cock so lightly that I wasn’t even sure it was a real touch, inched closer till our lips brushed.

“I called Mike and said you were still sick. Called my office and said I had to stay home and take care of you. …You gonna let me take care of you?”

Our lips brushed, opened to each other, pressing harder as we pushed our bodies together, her tongue just toying with my own, a heat beneath my hands.

“In me, baby, I want you…”

I turned her, lowered her onto my bed, hiking her up into the center of the mattress, her hands rising as she grappled for a hold on the brass headboard. I started to kiss down her chest, trembling with the kick of pure adrenalin.

“No, in me…in me now,” she whispered at my ear, her breath hot, her tongue probing into its recesses, as she spread her legs wide.

I lifted up, reached down to guide it—slipping in an inch or so, she was wet. Another inch, she gasped, let her breath out in desperate a whimper, a quick downward thrust of her pelvis sucked me inside her whole, that slick warmth.

I started thrusting, grinding it into her depths, trying to take my rhythm, trying not to think of any right or wrong, no consequence, no fucking tomorrow or yesterday.

“Go hard, baby, as hard as you can,” she said loudly now. “Put all your weight on me. …That’s it, that’s it, harder, fuck me as hard as you…oh, god, oh god…”

I anchored my hands onto the bones of her pelvis, holding her in place to catch the full weight of each thrust, pounding it inside her, crushing my body weight down onto her, mashing her breasts flat as I felt it coming, grabbing onto her collar bone for more purchase, harder, harder—

“Go, go, go!”

Her spine snapped up, arching up off the mattress from ass to shoulders, a wordless cry as she came, the brass rails of my bed straining as she heaved against them …and I was coming, coming hard, a strangled grunt as the first spurt came, waves of pleasure coursing through my body as I fully emptied my sperm deep inside my own mother.

EPILOGUE

I woke up dreamily to the sound of Karen brushing her teeth. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and paddled across the floor barefoot. She was leaning against the sink clad in an oversized tee shirt, smiling at me as I came up behind her.

“Morning,” she said, her mouth foamy with crest.

I kissed the back of her neck, rubbed my naked crotch into the smooth globe of her butt. “You sleep okay?”

“I slept great…you snored.”

I turned her to me and kissed her toothpaste and all, felt my prick stiffen, trained dog that he is.

“Are you taking a shower?”

“Yeah,” she said, stepping back from me and lifting the tee up over her head. She was just twenty-one, her birthday only a week before. She was tom-boy pretty, very slim in an athletic way, smallish tits— those long-long legs—so lovely. “…Care to join me?”

“You wore me out last night. I’m going to go downstairs and see how my Mom’s doing.”

“Don’t know what you’re missing.”

I smiled at her with real pleasure, blew a kiss to her as she started the water.

I pulled on a pair of jeans and went down the stairs two at a time. It was just a few days past the third anniversary of those photos of my Mom arriving at our door—three years of being with her, of having had her so many times, literally in every frickin’ way—I was still half hard from Karen, harder now as I heard my mother humming in the kitchen.

“Hey,” I said, my mother sitting at the dinette table her robe parted as the baby suckled greedily at a nipple.

“He’s murder on ‘em,” she laughed. “Very arrogant.”

“He knows what he likes.”

I leaned against the counter for a minute or so till she pulled him away, unconsciously pulling the robe over her exposed tit. “Take him for me, please.”

I lifted the kid up. He was heavier now, five months old, his face alert. I watched as Mom went to the sink and parting her robe again and carefully washed herself.

“Karen taking a shower?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I responded taking Paul over to the basinet they kept in the kitchen and gently laying him atop the blanket. “…She takes long showers.”

“Really,” she said, turning to me as she dried her tit with a paper towel. My father had left for work about an hour before, I’d listened to him pull out of the driveway.

“Really,” I countered as she stepped up to me and let me undo the cinch of the robe—I cupped her breasts, so much heavier now since the baby. I could hear the water running upstairs. I dipped my head and took a nipple in my mouth, gentle, sucking it, the sweet wash of warm milk in my mouth still a shocking sensation. I switched to the other tit and suckled another mouthful of her milk from it.

“Gotta leave some for the baby,” she laughed and softly pushed me off her. “…He looks just like you at that age,” she suddenly mused, looking down as Paul tried to eat his little fist.

“Does it ever bother you that you don’t know for sure,” I said.

“Some things are better left a question, don’t you think,” she whispered. “Least I know there won’t be any uncomfortable surprises in how he looks as he gets older.”

“Are you doing okay, Mom?”

“Women should not have kids over forty years old. I’ll tell you that with no hesitation. …This little guy wrecked me.”

“You look great to me.”

“Wrecked me,” she said with emphasis. “…I really think I might get some work done after he’s done with the breastfeeding. I used to look down on women who’d do that, but now I’m thinking what the hell.”

I slid my hand in along the inside of her robe, her skin smooth and warm. I hadn’t had her since she was in her seventh month with the baby—she’d lain on her side for me then and I remember being so scared as I thrust into her, her belly seeming so huge and vulnerable as she cradled it with both hands.

“…Your father heard you and Karen last night. Or to be more apt he heard Karen.”

We’d fucked hard in my old bed last night—it was her first extended visit to the house since we’d gotten engaged last month. I’d fucked her from behind, her head lolling as she broke into climax after climax.

“What did he say?”

“I think it turned him on to be eavesdropping like that, got a very hard one while he listened.”

“What about you?’

“I always like a young girl being loud when she gets it. I got to suck his cock while he listened to your fiancé getting fucked.

“Very wicked is all I can say… very, very wicked.”

“Karen takes long showers you say?

“…Yep.”

Mom shucked the robe down over her shoulders, cinching it tight at her waist as she slipped down on her knees. I unzipped my fly and let my cock spring free. She leaned forward and kissed away a bright bead of semen from the tip.

“Do you think your Karen has any naughty pictures floating around,” she mused, looking up at me with a lustful glint in her blue eyes, her fingers coming up to cup and feather my tightened balls.

“Never know.”

“I hope she does, for her sake. …Will you show them to me if she does?”

“…Anything for my best girl,” I whispered as my mom pressed my penis to her lips and slowly drew the entire shaft into mouth, drawing back with a slight scrape of teeth.

“I’m glad you’re home, honey.”

“Me too, Mom,” I chuckled, grabbing a shank of her hair and impaled her cute face onto my straining cock. “…Now get to fucking work!”

The end

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