Authors note: This is a very long chapter, and because of that I have decided to split this chapter into two and will come on it's own as chapter 2a, or combined with chapter three.
The phone rang, I glanced up from my paperwork and over to the caller display, it was only then that I realized just how late it was. Before I picked up the phone I glanced outside through my office window, the sun started to set leaving streaks of reddish-gold light through the sky. I reached out and picked the phone up and closed my eyes.
"Hello, David." I greeted, trying to be as cheerful as possible, but the documents I had to go over and check with a fine tooth comb set me in a bad mood. Jerome handed them to me fifteen minutes before I was slated to go home. That was at five, now it was eight twenty-three.
"Mom? Why are you at work still?" He asked obviously on a cell phone, the line crackled and popped and rife with blasts of static.
"You don't want me to explain." I warned, and sighed. "I guess you missed dinner before your meeting."
"Yah, but that's okay." He said. "I can make myself something when I get home."
"How long do you expect to be?" I asked thinking about pizza.
"About forty-five minutes or so." He replied.
"I'll be home before you, so I'll stop off and get a pizza." I muttered, reached up and rubbed my face. I would stop off and buy some beer as well. "Sounds good?"
"Sounds good." David said.
We said our goodbyes and hung up, I packed the documents I had been reading into my bag and left the office. I was not done, but the weekend was here and I would virtually have the house to myself, David would spend most of his weekend with Ashley and his friends.
I stopped and closed my eyes as the thick feeling of regret slowly over took me, David and Ashley saw
a lot
of each other these days, more often than before…before I pretty well forced him to masturbate in front of me. After that night, three weeks and one day ago everything changed between us, our dynamic seemed to vanish and our relationship seemed on the brink of disaster. He would not talk to me often, not even a
fraction
of how we talked before, he was always out (though he was always back home on-time for his curfew) and when he was in the house he stayed down in the basement.
For the first few days I figured it was just because the incident was odd, even to me the whole 'connection' we made was truly unhinging. Those first few days went by, neither of us spoke of the incident and seemed to go about our lives normally, we talked about this and that, he went to school and I went to work. The world had yet to turn upside down, or so it seemed. It was after those first few days that everything started to run amok, he started to stay in his room for long periods of time, and then finally decided to stay away from the house as much as he could, some of the excuses at the start were plausible and maybe held a few ounces of truth and after that the excuses became flimsy and see-through, after that there were very few excuses. He just came and went.
I broke my thoughts for a moment, long enough to call the Pizza Hut by our house to order a pizza. I picked one for myself, one for David and one that we both could enjoy. Our tastes in pizza were as similar as they were dissimilar. After that, I left the office, went down to my car parked in the office buildings parkade and went towards home.
My thoughts came back like a black tide as they washed over my conscious thought blocking everything else out , even the radio talking about some world event I currently had little care about. I thought about that night, and the truth that I did enjoy masturbating in front of my son just as much as I enjoyed watching my son masturbate in front of me. I had known he was above me for longer than I cared to admit. Now I knew I should have stopped, maybe rolled over and feigned sleep until both of us calmed down, but the exhilaration of seeing my son with his hand in his pants stroking his hard-on that
I
gave him disallowed that choice. I knew it was wrong, but in the wrongness there was a certain
rightness
about it like some kind of ultimate prize set inside the middle of a mine field. I thought we skirted all of the mine fields, but I was wrong.
I asked myself on many occasions just how far I would have let that scenario go if either I or David had pushed it beyond what it had been, would I have allowed it to go further than that? No, I doubted that I would. To me, and only me it seemed, the act of masturbating in front of each other was wonderful, one that could have led to a deeper bond, but any further than that could have thrown us into some sort of depraved relationship less about mother and son and all about sex. That was not something I wanted, not at all.
I made two stops within five minutes of each other, the first was to the local neighborhood liquor store and picked up a fifteen pack of beer, I wanted to drink myself unconscious. I wanted these thoughts of my son and the damage that I caused to our relationship to leave me for at least a night. Just one night. The second stop was to the Pizza Hut, my pizza's were ready and waiting for my pickings. I paid, took the food out to the car and made my way down the final stretch to the house.
In essence I was afraid to return home, even in my anger I was more at peace at the office where I was not expecting anyone to talk to me, hoping that no one would. I used to expect David to talk to me, and definitely still wanted him to, but where there was conversation silence now reigned in almost utter and complete control.
I took the pizza in first, walked up to the house, unlocked the door and entered the darkening living room, without bothering to push off my shoes I went into the kitchen with the three white boxes and set them down on the table, after that I went back out to the car and brought in my documents and the beer.
I took the beer into the kitchen and stopped at the entrance, David stood dressed only in his black robe and hovering over the table checking out which pizza was what. The pause was instantaneous and just as short, giving him only enough time to turn away from the boxes spread out over the table to me. He gave me a nervous smile. I swallowed my dry spit and returned a smile hoping it was faked enough to pass as somewhat real, inside I was not smiling, not by a long shot.
"Hi mom." He said and his eyes trailed down my arm to the large box of beer, fifteen bottles. He raised his brow. "Drinking tonight?"